William Proxmire, American soldier, journalist, and politician (b. 1915)
Edward William Proxmire (November 11, 1915 – December 15, 2005) was an American politician. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a United States Senator from Wisconsin from 1957 to 1989. He holds longest-serving United States Senator in Wisconsin history.Proxmire was a member of the Senate Banking Committee, the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the Joint Economic Committee. In all of them he was an aggressive critic of wasteful government spending. On the Joint Economic Committee, he exposed numerous instances of wasteful spending on military programs such as the C-5 aircraft and the F-16 fighter, as well as other government programs such as the development of a supersonic transport airplane (SST).