American Notes

Capitol Hill grieved last week when Senator Henry John Heinz III, 52, was killed in an airplane crash in Pennsylvania. A day later, Washington was once more stunned, when former four-term Texas Senator John Tower, 65, and his daughter Marian, 35, were among those who died in a commuter-plane crash near Brunswick, Ga.

One of the Senate's wealthiest members, Heinz had been an unlikely champion of unions, the aged and the disabled. After retiring from the Senate in 1984, Tower served as a U.S. arms negotiator and chaired the three-man presidential review board that probed the Iran-contra affair. In 1988, George Bush nominated him for Secretary of Defense, touching off a bruising fight between Congress and the White House. Amid rumors of hard drinking and womanizing, - Tower was voted down by the Senate, 53 to 47, the first time in 30 years that a President had been denied a Cabinet choice.