Sad Exit

Ailing and frequently depressed, North Carolina's Republican Senator John East served notice last September that he would not seek re-election to the seat he had won by a narrow margin in 1980. Just last month East decided that when his term ended this year, he would return as a professor to East Carolina University in Greenville, where he had taught political science for 16 years. But last week East's troubles apparently overwhelmed him. After driving with an aide from Washington to his home in Greenville, the archconservative champion of the right to life killed himself with automobile exhaust fumes. The suicide was the fourth by a U.S. Senator.*

East, 55, had suffered paralysis of his legs since 1955, when polio cut him down while he was serving as a Marine lieutenant at Camp Lejeune. In recent years, hypothyroidism and urinary problems plagued him, and he sought psychiatric help for depression. Even though his health problems were widely known, his death shocked friends and family alike. His wife Priscilla received the news by phone from North Carolina's senior U.S. Senator Jesse Helms. For Helms, East was not only a political protege but a philosophical double. East is remembered mainly for having sponsored a measure in the Senate that failed to pass, a bill that would have outlawed abortion by declaring a fetus a "person" from the moment of conception.

Two days after East's funeral, Republican Governor James G. Martin appointed Congressman James Broyhill to serve the last six months of the term. Broyhill, a 23-year House veteran, had just won a bitter primary campaign for the Senate nomination against former U.S. Ambassador to Rumania David Funderburk, a candidate of the ultra-right-wing National Congressional Club, which had previously backed East. North Carolina Republicans hope that Broyhill's incumbency, however brief, will boost him in his uphill campaign against the Democratic nominee, popular former Governor Terry Sanford, who retired in 1985 after 15 years as president of Duke University.

*The others: James Henry Lane of Kansas, 1866; Frank Brandegee of Connecticut, 1924; and Lester Hunt of Wyoming, 1954.