John Jacob Rhodes
American politician (1916–2003)
John Jacob Rhodes Jr. (September 18, 1916 – August 24, 2003) was an American lawyer and politician. A member of the Republican Party, Rhodes served as a U.S. representative from Arizona for thirty years from 1953 to 1983. He was the minority leader in the House of Representatives from 1973 to 1981 and pressed a conservative agenda.
Early life
Rhodes was born in Council Grove, Kansas. He met Calvin Coolidge at the age of eleven and, after shaking hands with the president, reportedly refused to wash his hand for a week. He attended public schools and in 1938 graduated from Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, where he was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity and also earned his U.S. Army Reserve commission via the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). In 1941, he graduated from Harvard Law School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was called to active duty with the United States Army Air Corps, later redesignated the United States Army Air Forces.
Career
He served at Williams Field, Arizona, from 1941 to 1946. After the war, he chose to settle in Arizona with his wife, Elizabeth.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “John Jacob Rhodes” is american politician (1916–2003). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through John, Jacob and Rhodes, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q444678. VIAF identifies the subject as 50894970. The Library of Congress control number is n93028416. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1916, 2003, 1953 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Jacob Rhodes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.