He is survived by his wife, Dianne, three children and nine grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are still being finalized.
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In Congress, Isakson helped craft the No Child Left Behind education law and, later, its replacement. He worked to reform the Department of Veterans Affairs, immigration policy and health care.
He was something of an anomaly in hyperpolarized Washington: a conservative willing to work with Democrats and disdainful of shrill rhetoric. He was so internally popular that his Republican colleagues handed him two committee chairmanships when the party took the Senate in 2015.
“If you had a vote in the Senate on who’s the most respected and well-liked member, Johnny would win probably 100 to nothing,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., an Isakson confidant, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2019. “His demeanor is quite different from what most people expect of politicians.”
At home, Isakson was fond of retail campaigning and small gestures of kindness. He was one of the only GOP officials who would regularly attend the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day ceremonies at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and was known to invite Democrats like Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms as his plus-ones to the State of the Union address.
“If all Republicans were like Johnny,” former Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, once said, “I would be a Republican.”