Jeremiah Denton, 89, senator, Vietnam POW

JEREMIAH DENTON, a former U.S. senator who was held as a prisoner of war by North Vietnam for more than seven years and revealed his treatment by blinking the word "torture" in Morse code during a televised interview, died Friday at age 89.

Denton died from a heart ailment at a hospice facility in Virginia Beach, Va., his family said.

The retired Navy rear admiral was elected in 1980 as Alabama's first Republican senator in 112 years and earned a reputation as one of the Senate's most conservative members before being defeated in his 1986 re-election bid. President Ronald Reagan lauded him that year as "a national treasure."

Denton was most famous for spending seven years and seven months as a Vietnam War POW after his plane was shot down during a bombing mission in 1965.

American POWs were sometimes paraded in propaganda films and in 1966, the captive Denton was interviewed for such a film - it later aired on U.S. television - apparently in the hope that he would denounce the U.S. war policy.

"Well, I don't know what is happening," he told his interviewer. "But, whatever the position of my government is, I support it fully. . . . I'm a member of that government and it is my job to support it. And I will as long as I live."

During the interview, he pretended to have light sensitivity that caused him to blink his eyes. What he was actually doing was blinking in Morse code to spell out "t-o-r-t-u-r-e."

He spent four years in solitary confinement, including two years in a cell the size of a refrigerator. He was among the first released in February 1973 under the Paris Peace Accords.

He was elected to the U.S. Senate from his native Alabama, serving from 1981 until 1987.

"I'm not a right-wing nut," Denton said in a 1980 interview. "But politics is like a pendulum. We have a conservative swing in this country, and it is time to act. Citizens have their own self-respect and want this nation to regain hers."