Edward J. Gurney, the Florida Senator who became President Richard M. Nixon's staunchest supporter on the Watergate committee only to see his own incandescent political career turn to ashes over corruption charges of which he was later acquitted, died on May 14 in a hospital in Winter Park, Fla. He was 82.

Until he resigned from the Senate in 1974 to prepare his successful defense against charges that he had raised campaign money in exchange for political favors, Mr. Gurney appeared headed for a long, illustrious political career.

A conservative Republican with a distinct emphasis on the conservative, Mr. Gurney was not only Florida's first Republican senator since Reconstruction, in swamping his Democratic opponent, former Gov. LeRoy Collins (or Liberal LeRoy as Mr. Gurney tagged him), in 1968 but he also became the first candidate in the state's history to receive more than one million votes.

Mr. Gurney had an unbroken string of victories dating back to his election to the Winter Park City Commission in 1952.

What underscored his vote-getting appeal in a former Confederate state long suspicious of outsiders was that Mr. Gurney was not only a carpetbagger, he was as Yankee as they come: a native of Portland, Me., who had graduated from Edmund S. Muskies's alma mater, Colby College, earned a law degree from Harvard, and practiced law in New York City before moving to Winter Park in 1948.

He also spoke with such a pronounced New England accent that Tampa came out "Tamper."

But if he sounded like a Kennedy, Mr. Gurney, a tall, lean man with wavy blond hair, also had a Kennedy-esque handsomeness that helped attract scores of admiring "Gurney Girls" to his campaigns.

He was also a bona fide war hero, a tank commander who had been so severely wounded by German machine gun fire in the waning days of World War II that he spent two years recuperating at a veterans hospital.

Mr. Gurney was left with an exposed nerve that caused almost constant pain in his lower back, said his former Congressional chief of staff, James L. Martin, who said Mr. Gurney found it almost impossible to sit comfortably.

"We had a supply of two-inch foam rubber cushions stashed away all over Washington," Mr. Martin recalled yesterday.

When Mr. Gurney's doctors recommended he move to a warmer climate, he settled in the Orlando suburb of Winter Park, where he opened a law office and quickly began his political rise, winning the first of three terms in the House in 1962.

By the time he entered the Senate in 1969, he had established himself as a leading conservative, but it was his fierce defense of President Nixon on the Senate Watergate panel that brought him national attention.

But a month before President Nixon resigned in August 1974, Mr. Gurney was indicted on Federal charges accusing him of assembling a slush fund from Florida builders seeking favorable treatment from Federal agencies. He immediately withdrew from his re-election bid and resigned from the Senate that December, vowing to clear his name.

The next year, Mr. Gurney was found not guilty on the most serious charges. The jury was deadlocked on two of the charges, but after a second trial Mr. Gurney won full vindication, at least in the courts.

When he sought to regain his former House seat in 1978, he was soundly defeated, and Mr. Gurney, whose 22-year-old son committed suicide in 1968 and whose wife died after a long illness before the 1978 election, was left a broken man.

"When you get in politics," he later said, "there are people who believe if you're indicted for a crime, you're guilty. I was doing well before the ceiling fell in. My whole career was destroyed for nothing."

With no heart to resume his law practice, Mr. Gurney held a series of jobs selling investments and real estate. Degeneration caused by his war wounds forced him to use a wheel chair in recent years.

He remained a hero to many conservatives, and at a recent tribute, Mr. Gurney was so touched by the applause that he did something he had not been able to do for years, Mr. Martin said. He raised himself out of his wheel chair and stood on his own two feet.

Mr. Gurney is survived by his second wife, Leeds, a former Gurney Girl; two daughters, Jill Holt of Oviedo, Fla., and Sarah Stoner of Orlando, and several grandchildren.

Edward Gurney (1914)