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Harold Simmons; gave millions to GOP groups

Harold Simmons helped finance the Swift Boat attacks against John Kerry.2007 file/AP

NEW YORK — Harold Simmons, a billionaire who helped finance the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack ads against Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election and donated substantially to other conservative causes, died Saturday in Dallas. He was 82.

His death was confirmed by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott in a statement.

Mr. Simmons, who started out in business with a single drugstore in Dallas, became a buyout investor and made his fortune by buying stakes in major companies. This year, Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $10 billion.

He was one of the largest donors in the 2012 presidential and congressional election, giving more than $26.9 million to conservative outside spending groups. Most of the donations went to American Crossroads, a super PAC cofounded by leading GOP fund-raiser Karl Rove.

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Mr. Simmons called President Obama “the most dangerous American alive” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, because, he said, the president wanted to “eliminate free enterprise in this country.”

In 2004, Mr. Simmons donated $2 million to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose advertisements against Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts who won the Democratic nomination for president, included one impugning his military service as a Swift boat captain during the Vietnam War. The allegations were later discredited.

Mr. Simmons gave heavily to other groups through the Dallas-based Harold Simmons Foundation.

Harold Clark Simmons was born in Golden, Texas. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and built a chain of 100 drugstores across the state.

He sold the stores and began to invest in companies. He made much of his fortune from running the Contran Corp., a holding company that owns stakes in companies that produce chemicals and computer support systems, among others.

In 2012, his company also contributed to the presidential campaign of Governor Rick Perry of Texas.

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“I’ve got the money, so I’m spending it for the good of the country,” Simmons told The Wall Street Journal.

His animosity for Obama was not new. In 2008, he gave nearly $2.9 million to a conservative group running advertisements highlighting Obama’s association with the 1960s radical William Ayers.

Mr. Simmons and his wife, Annette, have been among the largest donors to charities in Dallas, including the Children’s Medical Center of Dallas, the AT&T Performing Arts Center, the Dallas Zoo, and Southern Methodist University.

More recently, his foundation made contributions that were surprising for someone with his political views. It gave $600,000 to Planned Parenthood and its North Texas affiliate in 2011 and $600,000 this year to the Resource Center, a group that supports the gay community and those affected by HIV, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Information on his survivors was not immediately available.

In the late 1990s, Mr. Simmons endured a messy legal dispute with two daughters from previous marriages. After the daughters sued to challenge his control of trusts he had established, he struck back in unusually personal terms, saying one daughter had problems with drug addiction and both had trouble managing money.

He eventually agreed to give them $50 million each if they dropped all claims.

In an authorized biography in 2003, author John J. Nance said that the lawsuit — and Mr. Simmons’ two divorces — were among the most painful chapters in his life.

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“Still, he considers his life a blessing,” Nance wrote.