Susan Etheridge for the New York Times
Senator Arlen Specter, center, questioning Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in April 2007 during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about the firing of eight United States attorneys. More Photos »
WASHINGTON — Arlen Specter, the irascible senator from Pennsylvania who was at the center of many of the Senate's most divisive legal battles — from the Supreme Court nominations of Robert H. Bork and Clarence Thomas to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton — only to lose his seat in 2010 after quitting the Republican Party to become a Democrat, died Sunday morning at his home in Philadelphia. He was 82.
The cause was complications of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, his son Shanin said. Mr. Specter had previously fought Hodgkin's disease and survived a brain tumor and heart bypass surgery.
Hard-edged and tenacious yet ever the centrist, Mr. Specter was a part of American public life for more than four decades. As an ambitious young lawyer for the Warren Commission, he took credit for originating the theory that a single bullet, fired by a lone gunman, struck both President John F. Kennedy and Gov. John B. Connally of Texas. Seconds later, Kennedy was struck by a fatal shot to the head from the same gunman, the commission found.
In the Senate, where he was long regarded as its sharpest legal mind, he led the Judiciary Committee through a tumultuous period that included two Supreme Court confirmations, even while battling Hodgkin's disease in 2005 and losing his hair to chemotherapy.
Yet he may be remembered best for his quixotic party switch in 2009 and the subsequent campaign that cost him the Senate seat he had held for almost 30 years. After 44 years as a Republican, Mr. Specter, who began his career as a Democrat, changed sides because he feared a challenge from the right. He wound up losing in a Democratic primary; the seat stayed in Republican hands.
"Arlen Specter was always a fighter," President Obama said in a statement issued Sunday, calling Mr. Specter "fiercely independent" and citing his "toughness and determination" in dealing with his personal health struggles.
One of the few remaining Republican moderates on Capitol Hill at a time when the party had turned sharply to the right, Mr. Specter confounded fellow Republicans at every turn. He unabashedly supported Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal, and championed biomedical and embryonic stem cell research long before he received his cancer diagnosis.
When he made a bid for the White House in 1995, he denounced the Christian right as an extremist "fringe" — an unorthodox tactic for a candidate trying to win votes in a Republican primary. The campaign was short-lived; Mr. Specter ended it when he ran out of cash. Years later, he said wryly of the other candidates, "I was the only one of nine people in New Hampshire who wanted to keep the Department of Education."
He enjoyed a good martini and a fast game of squash, and he was famous for parsing his words to wiggle out of tight spots. During Mr. Clinton's impeachment on charges of perjury and obstruction, Mr. Specter, objecting to what he called a "sham trial" without witnesses, signaled that he would vote to acquit.
But a simple "not guilty" vote would have put him directly at odds with Republicans; instead, citing Scottish law, Mr. Specter voted "not proven," adding, "therefore not guilty."
He relished the decades he spent on the Judiciary Committee. He enraged conservatives in 1987 by helping to derail Judge Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court and then delighted them four years later by backing Justice Thomas. The Thomas confirmation nearly cost Mr. Specter his Senate seat; even now, millions of American women remain furious with him for his aggressive questioning of Anita F. Hill, a law professor who had accused Justice Thomas of sexual harassment when they worked together at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
If he had any regrets, Mr. Specter rarely admitted them.
"I've gone back and looked at every frame of the videos on Professor Hill, and I did not ask her one unprofessional question," he said in a 2004 interview with The New York Times. Of the Bork and Thomas confirmations, he said, "I may be wrong, but I'm satisfied with what I did in both those cases."
Brash confidence and outsize ego were characteristic of Mr. Specter, a man so feared by his own aides and so brusque with colleagues that he earned the nickname Snarlin' Arlen on Capitol Hill. In 1992, when Mr. Specter's Senate seat was in danger after the Thomas hearings, Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the modern conservative movement, campaigned for him. His rationale was expressed in a statement he made to fellow conservatives, as quoted by the conservative magazine National Review.
"Arlen Specter is a jerk," he was said to have remarked, "but he's our jerk."
Those close to Mr. Specter say there was a softer side to him, but no one denied that as a lawmaker he was all business, with little patience for the false pleasantries of politics.
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