Thomas Foley, a courtly congressman from Washington state who as speaker of the House sought to still the chamber’s rising tide of partisan combat before it swept the Democratic majority, and Foley himself, out of office in 1994, died Friday at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 84.

His wife, Heather, said that the cause was complications from strokes. He had a stroke in December, was hospitalized with pneumonia in May and had been under hospice care at his home virtually since then, she said.

In a statement, President Barack Obama called Foley “a legend of the United States Congress” whose “straightforward approach helped him find common ground with members of both parties.”

Foley — well read, impeccably dressed and quite tall — had been the House majority leader when he took the speaker’s chair on June 6, 1989.

His rise came in the wake of a bitter, though successful, fight led by Rep. Newt Gingrich, a Republican from Georgia, to oust Speaker Jim Wright, a Democrat from Texas, over allegations of ethics violations; one was that he had improperly accepted gifts from a Fort Worth developer. Wright resigned before an ethics inquiry was completed.

Foley immediately appealed to “our friends on the Republican side to come together and put away bitterness and division and hostility.” He promised to treat “each and every member” fairly, regardless of party, and by most estimations he lived up to that promise to a degree unmatched by his successors.

But by 1994, Republicans had hardened, painting the Democratic-controlled House as out of touch and corrupt.

Their strategy worked.

That year, Republicans won their first majority in the House in 40 years, and Foley became the first speaker since the Civil War to be defeated for re-election in his own district.

Foley had gotten a taste of that partisanship a few days before becoming speaker, when the Republican National Committee and an aide to Gingrich had sought to portray him as homosexual. The committee put out a memo labeled “Tom Foley: Out of the Liberal Closet,” equating his voting record with that of Barney Frank, a gay representative from Massachusetts. The Gingrich aide even urged reporters to investigate Foley’s sexuality. Foley said he was not gay.

President George H.W. Bush said he was “disgusted at the memo,” but he also said he believed the RNC chairman, Lee Atwater, who had been Bush’s presidential campaign strategist, when Atwater said he did not know where the memo had originated. Because of Atwater’s own reputation for attack-dog politics, the president’s belief was not widely shared.

Foley’s five and a half years as speaker were marked by a successful effort to force Bush to accept tax increases as part of a 1990 deficit-reduction deal, and by unsuccessful opposition to the president’s plans to invade Iraq in 1991.

When Bush was succeeded by Bill Clinton, a Democrat, Foley played a central role in winning passage of Clinton’s 1993 budget plan, which also included tax increases.

Despite a long history of opposing gun control measures, Foley helped win House passage of a 1994 ban on assault weapons, which played a major role in the Republican victory that fall.

He had been shaken when a troubled Air Force enlisted man went on a shooting rampage at Fairchild Air Force Base outside Spokane, Wash., killing five people and wounding 22.

He also bucked a majority of House Democrats in supporting Clinton’s successful effort to win ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

But he did not cite any of those measures in reflecting on his record in his last news conference on Nov. 19, 1994.

“If I had one compelling concern in the time that I have been speaker, but previous to that as well,” he said, “it is that we not idly tamper with the Constitution of the United States.”

He had been a fierce opponent of proposed constitutional amendments that would have required a balanced federal budget, term limits for members of Congress and a ban on flag burning, all championed by Republicans.

Of the flag-burning measure, he said, “If it is not conservative to protect the Bill of Rights, then I don’t know what conservatism is today.”

Despite sharp differences on issues, he got along better with members of the other party than any of the speakers who followed him. In that final news conference, asked to offer advice to the next speaker, Gingrich, he urged him to remember, “You are the speaker of the whole House and not just one party.”

Robert Michel of Illinois, the minority leader whom Foley allowed to preside at the closing of the 103rd Congress, said Foley had attained that bipartisan goal himself.

Foley, he said, “just felt it was a significant step from being majority leader” and that as speaker, “you submerge” partisan impulses.