Philip Hart

Philip Aloysius Hart (December 10, 1912 December 26, 1976) was an American lawyer and politician. A Democrat, he served as a United States Senator from Michigan from 1959 until his death from cancer in Washington, D.C. in 1976. He was known as the "Conscience of the Senate". He is the namesake of the Hart Senate Office Building. The grandson of Irish immigrants, Philip Hart was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, to Philip Aloysius and Ann (née Clyde) Hart. His father was a banker who served as president of the Bryn Mawr Trust Company. He received his early education at Waldron Academy, and then attended West Philadelphia Catholic High School. Hart studied at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he was the student body president and an award-winning debater. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude from Georgetown in 1934. In 1937, he received a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Michigan Law School at Ann Arbor. In June 1943, Hart married Jane "Janey" Briggs, the daughter of Walter and Jane Cameron Briggs. Her father was by then a philanthropist and had owned the Detroit Tigers. Jane was an aviator who was the first female helicopter pilot in Michigan. She later qualified in the 1960s as one of the Mercury 13 group. The couple met through her brother, who was Hart's roommate at Georgetown. They have four surviving sons and four daughters. Hart's namesake, Philip Jr., died as a toddler. He was buried in a family plot, followed decades later by his father nearby. Hart was admitted to the State Bar of Michigan in 1938 and became an associate in the Detroit firm of Beaumont, Smith & Harris. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army as a lieutenant colonel with the 4th Infantry Division (1941–1946). He was wounded during the D-Day invasion of Normandy on Utah Beach when shrapnel from an exploding artillery shell damaged the inside of his right arm. Following the war, he returned to Michigan and recovered at the Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan.