“I agree with President Bush that the taxpayers are better judges of how to spend their own money than we are,” Mr. Miller said. He was also one of only eight Democratic senators to support the confirmation of John Ashcroft, Mr. Bush’s choice for attorney general. Soon, he stopped going to weekly lunches with Democratic senators.
Mr. Miller most famously demonstrated his independence at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, where he delivered a blistering attack on the Democratic nominee, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, a man he had called “an American hero” only a few years before in tribute to Mr. Kerry’s service in Vietnam.
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Associated Press/MSNBC
By 2004, Mr. Miller had soured on Mr. Kerry, citing several votes in the Senate as evidence that he had gone soft on defense issues.
“This is the man who wants to be the commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces?” Mr. Miller told the crowd at Madison Square Garden. “U.S. forces armed with what? Spitballs?”
Immediately after the speech, Mr. Miller snapped at journalists who tried to pose questions. Then he was interviewed on MSNBC by Chris Matthews, who cited the about-face on Mr. Kerry and asked him to elaborate on the “spitballs” remark.
“Do you know what a metaphor is?” Mr. Miller said. Quickly becoming more annoyed, he shouted, “Get out of my face!”
Mr. Matthews was actually a safe distance away; the two were communicating by microphone.
“I wish we lived in the day when we could challenge someone to a duel,” Mr. Miller said. He later expressed regret for his outburst.
The 2004 speech was all the more remarkable in that Mr. Miller had delivered a keynote speech at the 1992 Democratic National Convention in which he excoriated President George H. W. Bush and praised the party’s nominee, Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, who would go on to defeat Mr. Bush. Mr. Miller attributed his own rise to the achievements of the Democratic Party.
“I made it because Franklin Delano Roosevelt energized this nation,” Mr. Miller told the convention, which was also being held at Madison Square Garden. “I made it because Harry Truman fought for working families like mine. I made it because John Kennedy’s rising tide lifted even our tiny boat. I made it because Lyndon Johnson showed America that people who were born poor didn’t have to die poor.”
Zell Bryan Miller was born in Young Harris on Feb. 24, 1932. His father, Stephen Grady Miller, a teacher, died 17 days later. The widowed mother, Birdie, built a home with rocks that she had hauled from a nearby stream, Zell Miller recounted later, and raised the boy and his sister, Jane.
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Joe Marquette/Associated Press
Mr. Miller attended Young Harris College before transferring to Emory University in Atlanta. Finding his life lacking in direction or purpose, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1953 and enrolled at the University of Georgia three years later, earning a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in history.
In 1954, he married Shirley Carver, who survives him, as do two sons, Murphy and Matthew; four grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
He taught history and political science at Young Harris College and was elected mayor of Young Harris, serving in 1959 and 1960. He was then elected to two two-year terms in the State Senate. Next, he was executive secretary for Gov. Lester Maddox of Georgia from 1968 to 1971. He was credited with exerting a moderating influence on Mr. Maddox, a segregationist, and spurring him to appoint blacks to his administration.
Beginning in 1975, Mr. Miller spent 16 years as lieutenant governor under George Busbee and Joe Frank Harris, serving in that post longer than anyone else in Georgia history. He ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate seat in 1980, was elected governor in 1990 and re-elected in 1994.
As governor, Mr. Miller fought to have the Confederate battle emblem removed from the state flag, supported tough sentences for repeat criminal offenders and pushed legislation providing more money for public schools and scholarships for high school students. By the time he stepped down, after his second term, he was one of the most popular politicians in Georgia history.
While in the Senate, Mr. Miller campaigned on behalf of Senator Max Cleland, a fellow Georgia Democrat, in Mr. Cleland’s unsuccessful bid for re-election in 2002.
Yet as a former senator in 2008, Mr. Miller supported Senator Saxby Chambliss, the Republican who had unseated Mr. Cleland, asserting that Mr. Chambliss “could well be the last man standing between a far, far left liberal agenda sailing through the Senate.” Mr. Chambliss won re-election.
Mr. Miller acquired the nickname “Zigzag Zell” among some Democratic Party leaders. As he crossed into his senior years, he often endorsed Republicans in Georgia races. Yet he always insisted that he would be a Democrat “until I die,” and that the party had abandoned him on some issues, not the other way around.
So why did he remain in the Democratic Party?
“I compare it to being in an old house,” he said just before he left the Senate. “It’s a house that I’ve lived in for years that’s getting kind of drafty and hard to heat. The plumbing won’t work, and some strangers have moved into the basement, and I don’t know who they are, and there’s no doubt I would be more comfortable in another house. But, you see, I was here first. I’ve lived in this house for years and years. It’s home, and I’m not going to leave.”
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