31 March 2014

Jeremiah Denton, Vietnam POW and ex-senator, dies | RallyPoint.com

Military News - Jeremiah Denton, Vietnam POW and ex-senator, dies

Image Copyright: Cherie Cullen / DoD

By Phillip Rawls
Copyright: The Associated Press

Former Alabama Sen. Jeremiah Denton, who survived 7½ years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam and alerted the U.S. military to conditions there when he blinked the word “torture” in Morse code during a television interview, died Friday. He was 89.

Denton’s grandson, Edward Denton, said he died about 8 a.m. at a hospice facility in Virginia Beach, Va., surrounded by family. Edward Denton said his grandfather had been in declining health for the past year and died from heart problems.

Denton, a retired Navy rear admiral, in 1980 became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Alabama since Reconstruction, but he narrowly lost a re-election bid six years later.

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