SPRINGFIELD, Massachusetts -- Edward P. Boland, who rose from a working class neighborhood to represent Massachusetts in Congress for more than three decades, has died. He was 90.
Boland had been hospitalized since Oct. 11 with a broken hip. He died Sunday night at Mercy Medical Center of cardiovascular complications, a hospital spokesman said.
Known for authoring the amendments that barred U.S. aid to the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s, Boland chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 1977 to 1985.
``He took the New Deal values of Roosevelt, fighting against poverty and ignorance and injustice and used those values in the Boland Amendment to help the Nicaraguan people,'' said Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass.
Boland was born in Springfield in 1911 to Irish immigrants. He enlisted as a private in the Army in 1941 and was discharged as a captain five years later.
Boland, who retired in 1988, never lost an election after winning a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1935 at age 22.
He went to Washington with the man who would become speaker of the House, Thomas P. ``Tip'' O'Neill, in 1952.
The two roomed together more than 20 years in an arrangement they described as a real-life ``Odd Couple,'' with Boland the tidy one of the two.
In 1963, Boland joined President Kennedy on a trip to Ireland a few months before Kennedy's assassination.
``I don't think you could find a stronger supporter of President Kennedy and the entire Kennedy family than Eddie Boland,'' Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., said Sunday night.
In 1965, Boland marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the landmark civil rights protest in Selma, Ala.
