Edward P. Boland, who rose from a working-class neighborhood to represent Massachusetts in Congress for more than three decades, has died. Known for authoring the amendments that barred U.S. aid to the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s, he chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 1977 to 1985. 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. Boland was remembered by Rep. Edward J. Markey, (D-Massachusetts): "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."
Passage, Edward P. Boland, 90
Edward P. Boland, who rose from a working-class neighborhood to represent Massachusetts in Congress for more than three decades, has died. Known for authoring the amendments that barred U.S. aid to the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s, he chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 1977 to 1985. 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. Boland was remembered by Rep. Edward J. Markey, (D-Massachusetts): "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."
