OKLAHOMA CITY — Former Oklahoma Gov. David Boren, who became one of the nation’s youngest governors in the 1970s at age 33 and later helped shape national intelligence as a U.S. senator, has died. He was 83.
Boren, who went on to serve as president of the University of Oklahoma after retiring from politics, died early Thursday at his home near Newcastle, said Bob Burke, a longtime family friend. He said Boren’s death was the result of complications from diabetes.
The son of a Democratic congressman, Boren quickly followed in his father’s footsteps into elected office and oversaw a dramatic downsizing of government in Oklahoma, where over decades in legislative corridors and university offices he became one of the state’s most influential figures. His son, Dan Boren, also served four terms as an Oklahoma congressman.
In 2019, David Boren cut ties with the university he had led for 24 years amid a probe into allegations that he had sexually harassed male subordinates. Boren denied wrongdoing and the allegations never resulted in charges or civil litigation.
“He was the smartest person I ever knew,” Burke, an attorney and author who managed Boren’s first campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1978. “He was a Rhodes Scholar, yet he could communicate with a farmer in overalls on the Main Street of a small Oklahoma town.
“No Oklahoman had more influence on the state’s progress in its first century than David Boren,” he said.
Boren served in the U.S. Senate between 1979 and 1994 and was the longest-serving chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He became president of Oklahoma’s largest public university after leaving the Senate and held the position until stepping down in 2018.
“He saw public service as a noble calling and dedicated his life to it,” Boren’s son, Dan Boren, said in a statement. “The countless heartwarming stories I hear almost daily from people across this state who he helped are reminders of his remarkable life. We shall cherish the memory of his service and remarkable life.”
A year after leaving the University of Oklahoma, a former student alleged he was touched and kissed inappropriately by Boren on several occasions about a decade earlier, allegations that Boren repeatedly denied.
An investigation into Boren’s alleged misconduct by the Jones Day law firm, which ended when Boren severed ties to the university in 2019, was never publicly released. The allegations against Boren tarnished his reputation and led him to withdraw from public life.
Boren served four terms in the Oklahoma House before being elected governor at the age of 33 in 1974, which at the time made him the youngest governor in the country. He ran a reformist campaign that became known as the “Boren Broom Brigade” to demonstrate his pledge to “sweep out the old guard.”
As governor, Boren worked to eliminate the inheritance tax, cut the state income tax and reorganize a state government he described as “cluttered” with 214 boards, agencies and commissions.
“This excessive red tape in government is a constant drain on taxpayer dollars,” Boren once said, adding that the government needed to “get out of the horse and buggy era.”
While in the U.S. Senate, Boren forged close relationships with the leaders of the nation’s intelligence community, including former CIA Director George Tenet, whom Boren tapped as the Intelligence Committee’s chief of staff prior to Tenet’s appointment as CIA director.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Boren was having breakfast with Tenet at a Washington hotel when Tenet, then CIA director, learned that an aircraft had flown into the World Trade Center tower in New York City. Boren later recalled that neither he nor Tenet was “totally shocked” by the terrorist attack because the two men had spoken frequently about the possibility of international terrorists launching an attack in the U.S.
“I thought George was obsessed with Osama bin Laden and terrorism around the world,” Boren told The Oklahoman months after the attacks. “I don’t think everything changed Sept. 11; only our perception and understanding changed.”
In the Senate, Boren also helped build bipartisan support to oppose South Africa’s oppressive racial apartheid regime ahead of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990. Shortly after his release, Mandela traveled to the U.S. and appeared as a guest on an ABC News town hall moderated by Ted Koppel. Boren was in the audience and Mandela led a standing ovation after Boren summed up the evils of apartheid and called for its end.
“He has said all the things that are required to be said in regards to the problems of South Africa,” Mandela said.
During his tenure in the U.S. Senate, Boren also said he was heavily involved with helping influence U.S. policy in Central America, particularly in Nicaragua, during conflict in that country between the right-wing Contras and the leftist Sandinistas, working as an “informal emissary” for former President George H.W. Bush.
“The fact that I was in a different party — and the fact that we trusted each other — was a big benefit,” Boren told The Oklahoman in 1994.
In 2016, Boren spearheaded a campaign in Oklahoma to adopt a 1 percent sales tax increase that would have raised about $550 million annually for public education, including pay raises for school teachers who were at the time among the lowest paid in the nation. But it was defeated in a statewide referendum.
David Lyle Boren was born on April 21, 1941, in Washington, the son of U.S. Rep. Lyle Hagler Boren and the former Christine McKown. He was married twice, to the late Janna Little Robbins and then to Molly Shi Boren, a former judge, English teacher and president emeritus of the Oklahoma Arts Institute.
Boren suffered from a minor stroke at a statue dedication ceremony in April 2018 and was hospitalized for several days. Boren also underwent heart bypass surgery in March 2017.
Boren is survived by two children, including Dan Boren, the former Oklahoma congressman who is currently secretary of commerce for the Chickasaw Nation.
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Retired Associated Press journalist Tim Talley was the principal writer of this obituary.
