Mark O. Hatfield - Salem Leadership Foundation

It was the 1965 Governor’s Conference. The highest executives of all fifty US states were gathered in Los Angeles for this important annual convening. This year an important topic was on the table: the Vietnam War. With the US nearing the peak of its involvement in Vietnam, the conference attendees were to vote on a resolution to support President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war policy. Attending this conference was Mark Odom Hatfield, Governor of the State of Oregon. A Willamette University professor of political science and former secretary of state, he was the youngest governor in Oregon’s history at just 36 years old. A man of aspiring ambition, few would be surprised when he announced his candidacy for US senator the following year.

But most importantly, Hatfield was a man of firm convictions. He held a steadfast commitment to his Christian faith in all that he did. To him, there was no separation between secular and sacred. As a child, his mother had always repeated the same admonition to him wherever he went: “When you’re out, if all the other kids are doing it and you know it’s wrong, stand alone, or come home.”

On that day in 1965, stand alone he did. Hatfield cast the lone vote against the war.

This was and is a defining moment in Mark O. Hatfield’s political career, and in his life in general. He wholly and unswervingly relied on what he knew was right, and stridently refused to back down. His faith in and commitment to the Kingdom superseded any and all political aspirations or hopes for personal gain. Reverently called “the conscience of the Senate,” Mark Hatfield was truly in a league of his own.

Mark Odom Hatfield was born to Charles Dolen and Dovie E. Odom Hatfield in Dallas, Oregon, on July 12, 1922. Mark greatly appreciated the relational atmosphere of his early days in a small community like Dallas. “From that experience of knowing neighborhood and neighbors came a real sense of community” he said in an interview with Christianity Today. When Mark was five years old, his mother enrolled at Oregon State University to continue her education, and so he and his father went to live with his grandmother. His father continued working in his job as a railroad blacksmith. Upon her graduation, Mark’s mother took a job as a middle school teacher in Salem, and so the family relocated to their new home.

The Hatfields also returned to their Baptist family roots, as they had attended the Methodist church in Dallas in the absence of a Baptist congregation. Mark was greatly influenced by his upbringing in the church, and it served as both a basis and a guide as he would wrestle with his faith throughout the rest of his life. In April of 1935, Mark committed his life to Christ. “It was a very serious thing. In my heart I knew what I was doing—that Jesus Christ was very real, and that he was my Savior,” he recalled. “I was baptized,” he added, “but I don’t recall that it made any major difference in my lifestyle or routine [at that time].”

Mark attended Salem High School (today North Salem High School), graduating in 1940 and then continuing on to Willamette University. Here, at a Methodist institution, he was further challenged in his faith by the environment and activities of Christian academia. These experiences both drew him towards and pushed him away from his growing faith.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Hatfield accelerated his university studies and graduated in just three years. He then enlisted in the US Navy and served from 1943 to 1946. Before he left, his parents gave him a small Bible to take with him. He began to read it regularly out of a sense of emotional and spiritual necessity. “I felt as close to the Lord as I had ever felt before,” he remembered, “and for the first time in my life also felt an intimacy with the Word. I needed it badly, and the Lord was there with his faithfulness to give himself to me.”

Hatfield served his term of duty in the Pacific, taking part in operations in Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In China he marched past the bodies of children, killed not by bullets but by starvation. He was deployed to ground zero at Hiroshima a month after the nuclear bomb had been dropped and saw first-hand the absolute and utter devastation left behind. Hatfield also served in Indochina, and would take from that place a deep-seated stance against colonialism and imperialism. All of these experiences would profoundly and fundamentally shape his personal convictions and political career in the years to come.

At the end of his service, Hatfield enrolled at Stanford University and received a master’s degree in political science. He then returned to Salem to accept an assistant professor position at his alma mater, Willamette University. Later he would be named dean of students. His time teaching at Willamette would prove to bring another milestone in his journey with God.

Hatfield’s students greatly challenged his faith as he interacted with them over the years. “Student after student then began coming into my office and saying, ‘I want to tell you about something. I have found Jesus Christ,’” Hatfield recalled. “I knew these students. They were some of the top leaders on campus. I observed their lives. Their statements to me were being lived out. This really hit me between the eyes.” A particular student posed an especially challenging question in response to Hatfield’s teachings. “One day Doug Coe put the question to me. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think you are absolutely right. I have been struggling with trying to find my political philosophy. Tell me, what is your personal philosophy of life?’”

Coe, later the leader of Washington, DC-based spiritual leadership group The Fellowship, had asked a simple question, but this really got his professor thinking. “I knew the track he had started me on. I had to confront the faith I had accepted and taken for granted. Although I had never questioned my conversion, I had never adopted it as a way of life.” Hatfield decided at that point that he must fully commit himself to a life after Christ, and he forever changed the path he would follow. To Coe, who had also recently encountered Christ, Hatfield’s leaning into Christ was an answer to prayer.

Hatfield began avidly studying theological writings, and would go on to help students bring such names as evangelist Carl Henry and YoungLife founder Jim Rayburn onto Willamette’s campus. Hatfield would continue teaching as he ran for and was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1950, and then the Oregon Senate in 1954. He would continue to serve Oregon as secretary of state in 1956, governor in 1958, and as a US senator from 1966 to 1997.

His career would be marked by his staunchly independent views in favor of racial equality, effective social services, stewardship of natural resources, and investment in social and economic improvement, and against war and military spending, the death penalty, and abortion. As a maverick Republican, he upset both liberals and conservatives in his refusal to conform to party lines and policies. He was truly pro-life, in that he sought to care for the needs of every human being from conception to death and everywhere in between. He advocated not just for unborn babies and prisoners but for the poor, hungry, sick, and oppressed. He refused to put reelection above moral conviction, and repeatedly faced the hard choice to remain or withdraw from political life. Mark Hatfield served his city, state, and nation prayerfully and faithfully throughout his nearly half-century of political life. A man who put God, family, and others first, he went to the Lord on August 7th, 2011.

Mark O. Hatfield knew his call was to serve in the government of our nation, and to seek justice for all of God’s creation both at home and abroad. “Whatever role I may have, it is all part of my goal of helping build the Kingdom,” he said in a 1982 interview. “I am striving to help trigger a spiritual revolution. As a senator, I am dealing with political, economic, social, military, and international problems. Fundamentally, these are spiritual problems. The attempt to find a political or economic answer to a spiritual problem will never work. Therefore, in whatever role I play in life, as a senator, as a husband, as a father; in my social life, in my economic life—whatever—I have a single objective: to help create spiritual understanding.” As one of the most influential figures to come from Salem’s faith community, Mark Hatfield did indeed help all of us to understand what it means to live a Spirit-filled life of leadership.

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