He is survived by his wife, Dianne, three children and nine grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are still being finalized.
» Share your condolences or view the online guestbook.
In Congress, Isakson helped craft the No Child Left Behind education law and, later, its replacement. He worked to reform the Department of Veterans Affairs, immigration policy and health care.
He was something of an anomaly in hyperpolarized Washington: a conservative willing to work with Democrats and disdainful of shrill rhetoric. He was so internally popular that his Republican colleagues handed him two committee chairmanships when the party took the Senate in 2015.
“If you had a vote in the Senate on who’s the most respected and well-liked member, Johnny would win probably 100 to nothing,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., an Isakson confidant, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2019. “His demeanor is quite different from what most people expect of politicians.”
At home, Isakson was fond of retail campaigning and small gestures of kindness. He was one of the only GOP officials who would regularly attend the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day ceremonies at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and was known to invite Democrats like Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms as his plus-ones to the State of the Union address.
“If all Republicans were like Johnny,” former Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, once said, “I would be a Republican.”
John Hardy Isakson was born Dec. 28, 1944, the oldest son of Julia and Edwin Andrew Isakson, who drove a Greyhound bus and fixed up houses. Growing up in south Fulton, he often heard tales of his grandfather, a stone mason named Anders who escaped from Sweden’s potato famine in the late 1860s and changed his name from Bengston to Isakson when he reached the U.S.
A teenaged Johnny spent his summers on his maternal grandparents’ farm in rural Ben Hill County, helping with corn and pecan harvests. He went on to the University of Georgia, where he was fixed up with Dianne and became close friends with Saxby Chambliss, who would later serve with Isakson in the Senate.
Credit: Alex Brandon
Isakson’s first taste of politics was in college when he volunteered for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Goldwater won Georgia that year amid a backlash to civil rights legislation, but Democrats still dominated at the state and local level.
Isakson joined the Georgia Air National Guard and returned to Cobb County to open up a branch of Northside Realty, then a small business run by his father. He climbed the ranks, helping build the company into a real estate empire in the…
Read More: Johnny Isakson, former U.S. senator from Georgia, dies at 76