John Paul Hammerschmidt, who defeated Bill Clinton in the future president’s first political campaign and was the first Republican congressman from Arkansas since Reconstruction, died on Wednesday in Springdale, Ark. He was 92.
The cause was heart and respiratory failure, said his son and only survivor, John Arthur Hammerschmidt.
Mr. Hammerschmidt defeated an 11-term incumbent, James William Trimble, in 1966, making him the first Republican in Arkansas to win a federal election in the 20th century. Winthrop Rockefeller, the brother of Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, topped the ticket that year to become the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction.
The 1974 campaign was considered Mr. Hammerschmidt’s closest. While personally free of scandal, he was assailed by Mr. Clinton, then a 28-year-old University of Arkansas law professor, as one of the few Republicans still supporting President Richard M. Nixon after the Watergate scandal.
Mr. Hammerschmidt won by a relatively narrow margin: 52 percent to 48 percent, or about 6,000 votes out of more than 170,000 cast.
Mr. Clinton was elected state attorney general two years later and successfully ran for governor in 1978.
Mr. Hammerschmidt served 13 terms, but did not seek another in 1992. His legislative record included protecting the Buffalo National River from overdevelopment.
Born in Harrison, Ark., on May 4, 1922, he was the son of Arthur Hammerschmidt, a lumberman, and the former Junie Taylor, a homemaker.
He attended the Citadel in Charleston, S.C., the University of Arkansas and Oklahoma State University, and later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Canbourne University in London.
He enlisted in the Army Air Corps and, commissioned as a second lieutenant, served as a combat pilot during World War II.
He flew 217 missions in the China-Burma-India theater. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and retired from the Air Force Reserve as a major.
In 1948, he married Virginia Sharp. She died in 2006.
He later recalled that he was raised in a Democratic family but began attending Republican gatherings because those groups were more accommodating to outsiders. He became the Republican state chairman.
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