Eldon Rudd

Eldon Dean Rudd (July 15, 1920 - February 8, 2002) was a U.S. Republican politician.

He was born in Camp Verde, Arizona. He was elected as a Republican to the United States House of Representatives from Arizona and served from January 3, 1977 to January 3, 1987. He died in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Rudd was a U.S. Marine fighter-pilot during World War II and the Korean War, and became a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation after graduating from the University of Arizona law school in Tucson. As the only FBI field agent in Washington, D.C. fluent in Spanish in 1953, when Puerto Rican nationalist terrorists got into the gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives and opened fire with guns, Rudd interrogated the captured terrorists. His report impressed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who personally offered Rudd his next choice of assignment, which he received as U.S. legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Mexico, where he served from 1960 to 1970. When assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, Rudd was ordered by FBI Director Hoover to collect from the Mexican government their law enforcement and intelligence files on Lee Harvey Oswald and Oswald's connections to the pro-Fidel Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Oswald's several trips to and from Cuba, and his arrest in Mexico City where he was photographed and fingerprinted. Rudd obtained Oswald's file from the Mexican government and personally flew a Cessna aircraft from Mexico City to Dallas, Texas, to provide the Oswald file to FBI officials in Dallas as Kennedy's body was on its way to Washington, D.C. with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and widow Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Rudd also was called to Bolivia to identify the body of Cuban terrorist Ché Guevara when he was killed in a fire-fight with the Bolivian army infantry there. Rudd's positive identification of Guevara's corpse prevented the Cuban commuist insurgency in Central and South America from successfully making Guevara a martyr for the communist cause. As a U.S. congressman, Rudd was a tireless supporter of U.S. anti-communist efforts in Central and Souyth America, and was the last American to visit with Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza before he was murdered by pro-communist Cuba Sandinista terrorists funded by Fidel Castro. Rudd, with help from FBI colleagues with access to security officials at the White House during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, obtained debate preparation documents prepared for President Carter for his election debates against Republican nominee Ronald Reagan, and provided the so-called "Carter debate papers" to the Reagan presidential campaign before the debates, which gave Reagan an important edge in his successful 1980 campaign for the presidency. Rudd was a fiscal conservative, an orthodox Catholic, and a member of the important Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives for five years who fervently opposed the expenditure of federal taxpayer dollars for abortion, and with his FBI and global diplomatic ties devoted most of his efforts in the U.S. Congress to help bring about dissolution of the Soviet communist empire and promote liberty and free enterprise in all countries throughout the world.

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