Question: Charles Percy, Former Illinois Senator, Is Dead at 91
Senator Charles H. Percy, center, with Senators Arlen Specter, left, and John Heinz at the White House in 1984. In 1973, Mr. Percy called for an independent prosecutor to investigate Watergate.

Charles H. Percy, a former United States senator from Illinois and a moderate Republican who clashed with President Richard M. Nixon over Watergate and whose own presidential ambitions were stymied by Nixon’s resignation, died Saturday in Washington. He was 91.

His death was announced by the office of his son-in-law, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia. Mr. Percy had been treated for Alzheimer’s disease for many years.

A three-term senator, Mr. Percy went to Washington in 1967 after a strikingly successful career as a businessman. In 1949, at the age of 29, he was named president of Bell & Howell and then oversaw its rapid growth.

He also arrived in the capital grief-stricken: one of his daughters had been murdered during his 1966 campaign.

Mr. Percy was talked about as presidential material almost from the time he entered politics in 1964, when he ran for governor of Illinois; he narrowly lost to Otto Kerner Jr. The notion gained even wider currency in 1966, when, in an upset, he gained a Senate seat by defeating Paul H. Douglas, a respected three-term Democratic incumbent.

For many Republicans, Mr. Percy’s business background, Midwestern roots and moderate views in the increasingly liberal political climate of the 1960s made him an attractive alternative to the hard-right conservatism that voters had rejected in 1964 in the landslide defeat of Senator Barry Goldwater.

His good looks and elegant manner enhanced his appeal; Republicans retained fresh memories of their narrow presidential loss to the handsome John F. Kennedy in 1960.

In 1967, only three months into his first Senate term, Chuck Percy, as he was familiarly known, drew attention when he proposed legislation to create a private foundation to finance low-cost housing and foster home ownership among low-income families. Though the measure did not pass, it drew strong support from Republicans in both the House and the Senate.

The New York Times columnist James B. Reston called him “the hottest political article in the Republican Party.”

By the end of the year, he was considered a possible contender for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination; a Louis Harris poll in late 1967 put him ahead of President Lyndon B. Johnson in a head-to-head contest. But he declined to run and instead endorsed Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, another moderate.

Mr. Percy became closely identified with the more liberal wing of the party known as Rockefeller Republicans, so much so that his name became attached to them as well — “decent Chuck Percy Republicans,” as the writer Richard Ford described them in “The Lay of the Land,” his novel of suburban New Jersey.

Mr. Percy’s national stature was underlined when the endorsement of Rockefeller was treated as front-page news nationwide. The Times, making the announcement its lead article on July 26, 1968, described it as “counterbalancing” former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s endorsement of Nixon.

Mr. Percy briefly considered a bid for the White House only once. In June 1973, he formed an exploratory committee to look into a 1976 candidacy. But he closed it down after Nixon resigned in August 1974 and Vice President Gerald R. Ford became president. Within a week, Mr. Percy said Ford had gotten off to an excellent start and was likely to be nominated in 1976, as he was.

Mr. Percy’s clash with Nixon came in the spring of 1973 as the president was trying to contain the Watergate scandal, set in motion by the break-in at the offices of the Democratic opposition by a White House team of burglars and aggravated by the administration’s efforts to cover up the crime.

On May 1, the day after Nixon announced a staff shakeup and authorized a new attorney general to “make all decisions” relating to Watergate prosecutions, Mr. Percy proposed a Senate resolution demanding an independent prosecutor “of the highest character and integrity from outside the executive branch.”

Mr. Percy told the Senate: “A simple and very basic question is at issue: Should the executive branch investigate itself? I do not think so.”
What is a short summary of the above article?
Answer: Mr. Percy was a moderate Republican who clashed with President Richard M. Nixon over the Watergate scandal.