Tim Johnson, Senator Who Came Back From an Aneurysm, Dies at 77

One of the last Democrats from the Great Plains to be elected to national office, he built his career on delivering benefits to his home state, South Dakota.

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Tim Johnson in 2013. A Democrat from South Dakota, he served three terms in the United States Senate.

Tim Johnson, a Democratic senator from South Dakota who suffered a brain aneurysm in 2006, throwing his party’s narrow majority into question for months, then not only returned to work but also won a third term, died on Tuesday in Sioux Falls, S.D. He was 77.

A spokesman for his family said the cause of his death, at a hospice facility, was complications of a stroke.

The descendant of Norwegian immigrants, Mr. Johnson was a quiet workhorse who found himself unwillingly pushed into the national political spotlight in December 2006, shortly after the Democrats gained a 51-49 majority in the Senate.

During a news conference in Washington, he began to slur his words and grew disoriented. He was rushed to a hospital, where doctors found that a rare birth defect had left the blood vessels in his brain weakened and tangled, resulting in sudden catastrophic bleeding.

He underwent surgery and remained in an induced coma for weeks. Capitol Hill waited anxiously; if he died or decided to resign, South Dakota’s Republican governor, Mike Rounds (now a senator), would most likely replace him with a Republican, which would have created an even split in the Senate, with Vice President Dick Cheney as the tiebreaker.

Defying many doctors’ expectations, Mr. Johnson not only survived but thrived. He returned to Capitol Hill in September 2007, using a scooter. He spoke more slowly and had lost some control of his right side, but he insisted that his mind was as good as ever.

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