Profile · Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
Thomas Adolph Loftus
Former Wisconsin Assembly speaker and U.S. ambassador to Norway; longtime Sun Prairie resident
$22,632
Thomas Adolph Loftus spent most of a public life inside Sun Prairie city limits—Assembly speaker, losing gubernatorial candidate, and Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Norway. Local papers still call him a Sun Prairie native; the precise version is that he moved there at five and never really left. He was born April 24, 1945, in a small Stoughton hospital. After a good tobacco crop his father bought into Brooks Implement, a farm-machinery dealership on the Sun Prairie side of the county; the Loftus people had been Norwegian dairy farmers near Brooklyn, Wisconsin. Tom graduated from Sun Prairie High School in 1963, served two Army years in the Vietnam era, then earned a degree at UW–Whitewater and a master’s at Madison’s La Follette School. He sat in the Wisconsin State Assembly from 1977 to 1991, served as majority leader, and from 1983 to 1991 was the longest-serving Democratic speaker in state history. He lost the 1990 governor’s race to Tommy Thompson, 58 percent to 42 percent. After chairing Clinton’s Wisconsin campaign, he served as U.S. ambassador to Norway from November 1993 to December 1997—NATO expansion years, with the Oslo Accords negotiated nearby—and received a Grand Cross from King Harald. Later posts included WHO adviser and UW System regent. He still lives in Sun Prairie; his 2024 memoir is Mission to Oslo.