Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s youngest brother, Tony Rodham, died on Friday night.
Clinton announced the death on Saturday on Twitter.
She remembered her brother as a kind and generous person who could walk into a room and “light it up with laughter.”
She did not say how he died, but said he was survived by his wife, Megan, and three children, Zach, Simon and Fiona.
“It’s hard to find words, my mind is flooded with memories of him today,” Clinton wrote. “We’ll miss him very much.”
Tony Rodham was born in 1954 to parents Hugh and Dorothy Rodham. He was raised in the Chicago suburbs along with his older siblings, Hillary, who is now 71 years old, and Hugh, who is 69.
The youngest Rodham held a variety of jobs over the years, including stints as a prison guard, insurance salesman, repo man, private detective and business investor.
He attended, but never graduated from Iowa Wesleyan College and the University of Arkansas.
While his brother-in-law former US president Bill Clinton was in office, Rodham worked on the Democratic National Committee as an outreach coordinator.
He also became one of the few people to ever get married at the White House. He wed Nicole Boxer, the daughter of former US senator Barbara Boxer, in the Rose Garden in 1994.
The couple divorced in 2001. Rodham remarried in 2005.
CONTROVERSY
However, Tony and his brother, Hugh, were most notable for drawing unwelcome controversy to the Clinton administration.
The White House in 1999 had to publicly rebuke the brothers for a business venture in which they planned to export hazelnuts from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia with the help of Aslan Abashidze, the leading political rival of then-Georgian president and Clinton ally Eduard Shevardnadze.
“If in fact this project is still going forward, we don’t approve and will continue to make clear to Georgian officials that this venture has no connection with or sanction from the US government,” then-White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said at the time.
Rodham later helped on his sister’s 2008 presidential campaign.
However, she ultimately ended that bid for the Democratic Party nomination and threw her support to eventual US president Barack Obama.
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