Dan Rostenkowski , who mastered the craft of brokering and compromise to become one of the nation’s most influential congressmen but whose imprisonment on fraud charges came to symbolize the excesses of power, died Wednesday at his vacation home on Benedict Lake in Wisconsin. He was 82 and also lived in Chicago, in the house where he grew up.
His death was confirmed by the office of Alderman Richard F. Mell of Chicago. Mr. Rostenkowski had been treated for prostate cancer in the 1990s.
Mr. Rostenkowski, the son of a ward heeler and congressman from Chicago, was reared by the Cook County Democratic political machine under its longtime leader, Mayor Richard J. Daley, and won a seat in the Illinois legislature almost right out of college. First elected to the House of Representatives in 1958 at the age of 30, he was its youngest member for many years.
From the start, the plainspoken Mr. Rostenkowski showed a knack for deal-making, often with his Republican colleagues, and it helped him land a coveted seat on the House Ways and Means Committee, the powerful tax-writing panel, in 1961. He served on the committee for most of his 36 years in Congress, 13 of them as its chairman, from 1981 to 1994, and was a central figure in shaping congressional tax policy.
As a young lawmaker, Mr. Rostenkowski helped write the legislation that created Medicare in 1966. As the committee’s chairman, he helped fashion laws on taxes, trade and welfare. In 1983, he brokered the deal that led to the passage of a bill that kept the Social Security system solvent.
“During that period, my daughters said there’s not going to be a Social Security system for them — that it’s going to go belly up,” he said in an interview in 1990. “Congress was concerned, and legislators made the difficult decisions and enacted a balanced compromise of tax increases and benefit reductions that saved the system from going bankrupt.”
Mr. Rostenkowski also forged compromises that led to the 1986 tax reform act, a major rewriting of the federal tax code that sharply reduced nominal tax rates and eliminated vast numbers of loopholes, special preferences and tax-avoidance schemes.
The Social Security and tax laws were both passed when power in Washington was divided between a Democratic House and the Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan. Yet legislative achievements were almost a sidelight to Mr. Rostenkowski’s true passion: the cajoling, arm-twisting and posturing that are the stuff of Washington lawmaking. He was so good at the game that for a time in the 1970s he was under consideration to succeed the House speaker, Carl Albert of Oklahoma.
But his candidacy for the post was hurt by the violence in the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the post went to Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. of Massachusetts. Still, Mr. Rostenkowski had become a force in the House, gaining entry to a small circle of the most powerful figures on Capitol Hill.
Republicans came to rely on him as a bridge to the Democratic leadership, and presidents of both parties sought his support in advancing their legislative agendas. He was especially close with Presidents Reagan and Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush.
“Rostenkowski over the years has built a reputation on the Hill as likable, earnest, cautious and absolutely trustworthy,” Time magazine wrote in 1981. “Among the show horses of Congress, he is a workhorse.”
But Mr. Rostenkowski’s esteem and power on Capitol Hill eroded and then collapsed, starting in 1992, when a federal grand jury began investigating reports of wrongdoing in the House post office. Mr. Rostenkowski was pushed to the center of the scandal after investigators asserted that he had bought $22,000 in stamps from the House post office with public money and may have converted them to cash.
The federal inquiry lasted two years, during which Republicans, led by the Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich, accused Democrats of corruption and held up the accusations against Mr. Rostenkowski as symptomatic.
In 1994, Mr. Rostenkowski was formally charged with 17 counts of abusing his Congressional payroll by paying at least 14 people who did little or no official work; trading stamp vouchers for at least $50,000 in cash; misusing his office’s expense accounts to charge Congress for $40,000 in furniture and fine china and crystal; misusing personal vehicles and paying for them with $70,000 in House funds; and obstruction of justice.
Mr. Rostenkowski fought back. “I did not commit any crimes,” he told reporters. “My conscience is clear, and my 42-year record as an elected official is one I am proud to once again run on.”
Continuing his re-election campaign, he was beaten by a Republican, Michael P. Flanagan, in the watershed 1994 midterm elections in which Republicans won control of both the House and the Senate. The House post office scandal was widely viewed by political historians as a factor in that electoral triumph.
Rostenkowski's official Congress portrait in 1983
Former US Representative  died of  Wednesday at his vacation home in , Wisconsin. Rostenkowski, whose political career ended in the early 1990s after he was convicted on fraud charges, was 82.

Rostenkowski's death was confirmed by his spokesperson, Jim Jaffe, who said that the former congressman had been receiving treatment for lung cancer for a while. Rostenkowski had previously been treated for  in the 1990s.

Rostenkowski was born on January 2, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. He was an athlete and declined an invitation to try out for the  (now the Oakland Athletics) in order to pursue a career in politics. Rostenkowski attended  in Wisconsin, served with the  in , and graduated from  in 1951.

Rostenkowski's political career was supported by the  , and he became a member of the Illinois state legislature in 1952, one year after graduating from college. In 1958, when he was 30, Rostenkowski was elected to the US House of Representatives. In 1961, he began serving on the , the chief committee of the House for writing taxes. From 1981–1994, he served as the committee's chairman. Rostenkowski was involved in the creation of  in 1966 and he helped make amendments to the  system in 1983.

In 1992, a federal jury began an inquiry into the House post office, and Rostenkowski was accused of buying 22,000 in stamps with government funds and then turning them into cash. The investigation, which lasted two years, led to Republican allegations of corruption within the Democratic party. In 1994, Rostenkowski was charged with 17 felony counts, including the use of federal money to purchase furniture, and obstruction of justice. In order to avoid a trial, Rostenkowski made a deal with prosecutors, pleading guilty to two counts of mail fraud in exchange for fifteen months in prison, two months in a , and a US$100,000 fine.

Rostenkowski, who was not reelected for a nineteenth term in Congress in 1994, continued to maintain his innocence, and was pardoned by US President Bill Clinton in 2000.