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Last Updated June 22, 2005
No other senator fills so central a place in his state's public and economic life as Ted Stevens of Alaska; quite possibly no other senator ever has. "They sent me here," Stevens said in one impassioned debate, "to stand up for the state of Alaska." Stevens is now President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and thus third in line for the presidency. He is the chairman of the Commerce Committee and in 2005 stepped down after 8 years as chairman of the Appropriations Committee; he has chaired or been ranking member on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee for 20 years. He has also been for a quarter century the leading public policymaker for and about Alaska. "We ask for special consideration," Stevens is not too shy to say, "because no one else is that far away, no one else has the problems that we have or the potential that we have, and no one else deals with the federal government day in and day out the way we do." Probably more than any other senator, Stevens has shaped the public institutions and private economy of his state--and he doesn't seem finished yet. Stevens grew up in Indiana and California in very modest surroundings, served in World War II flying C-46s and C-47s, graduated from UCLA and Harvard Law, then moved to Alaska in 1950, driving up the Alaska Highway with his new bride. He was U.S. attorney in Fairbanks and worked in the Interior Department in Washington. In 1962, he ran for the Senate and lost to Democrat Ernest Gruening by a 58-42% margin. He then served in the legislature in Juneau and was appointed to the Senate by Governor Walter Hickel in December 1968, at 45. He quickly gained a seat on Appropriations and worked on Alaska issues of all description. He has not been entirely successful. He could not stop the Alaska Lands Act in 1980 and has failed repeatedly to win approval of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, though prospects looked better in the 109th Congress. But he played a major role on the Native Claims Act in 1971 and got the oil pipeline through by one vote in 1973. In 1995, he and Frank Murkowski finally secured the repeal of the 1977 law forbidding exports of Alaskan oil, thus opening up the obvious East Asian markets. And in 2004 he secured approval of loan guarantees for a natural gas pipeline. On non-Alaska issues, Stevens has a moderate voting record. On defense, he worked for years with ranking Democrat Daniel Inouye--another decorated World War II veteran who has represented an offshore state since the 1960s--to support robust defense spending and has been a staunch advocate of missile defense. He has worked hard to fund the National Guard, to raise military salaries and to keep troops in readiness. He was one of the few senators to express concerns about whether the fall 2004 intelligence bill would impair military operations. On the Commerce committee, looking ahead to becoming chairman in 2005, he said he would work to revise the 1996 telecom act. He is concerned about providing a level playing field for companies that provide similar services over different mediums. He is particularly concerned about the Universal Service Fund which provides money for underserved communities and wants more companies to contribute to it. "My number one priority in the rewrite of the communications laws will be to preserve the universal service system and make it work in the 21st century." Public radio has a larger audience in Alaska than in any other state--commercial radio is unprofitable in the Bush--and Stevens has been a strong supporter of public radio and television. For years Stevens has been known for--and seems to want to be known for--his terrible temper. When he succeeded Mark Hatfield as Appropriations Committee chairman in 1997, he told his colleagues, "Senator Hatfield had the patience of Job and the disposition of a saint. I don't. The watch has changed. I'm a mean, miserable SOB." Some of this, at least, is an act: Stevens gets along with appropriators of all parties, at least if they do their homework and respect his prerogatives. He does not take kindly to those who vote against what he considers Alaska's interests for what he considers frivolous or bogus reasons. In the debate over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in March 2003, he said, "I have never broken a commitment in my life. I make this commitment: People who vote against this today are voting against me, and I will not forget it." But that may not mean direct retaliation; as Stevens put it on another occasion, "There are those people I am not going to go out of my way to help." For years John McCain has taken to the floor and bitterly attacked Stevens's Alaska projects as unjustified pork. But Stevens contributed to McCain's 2004 campaign. At some point, probably in the 1990s, Alaskans began referring matter-of-factly to funding for federal projects as "Stevens money." He argues that Alaska has special needs and special handicaps and therefore deserves special treatment. "Congress has not awakened to the fact that we've got a state with one-fifth the land in this country. My mission is to try to make Congress understand that the promise of statehood is that we should have the ability to establish a workable private-enterprise economy in the areas of Alaska that want it. And that's basically 90% of the state." His prowess is legendary. In 1998, Stevens sought a land trade for a seven-mile road through the Izembeck National Wildlife Refuge--which the Clinton Interior Department wanted to declare off-limits--so that the tiny Aleutian village of King Cove would have access to medical facilities. The administration offered three alternatives; Stevens took all three: $37.7 million for an airport road, medical clinic and doctor and nurse. In 1998, he set up the Denali Commission (Denali is the Native name of Mount McKinley), which funds infrastructure projects--water and sewer, electricity--in central Alaska, to the tune of $38 million in 2001, $45 million in 2002 and $48 million in 2003. When a Stevens aide showed Stevens an Anchorage Daily News article about a volunteer group that had raised $6,000 to promote a string of public-use huts linked by hiking trails, he thought it was a good idea and, without consulting the group, put in $500,000 for a backcountry hut network at Snow River near Seward. "That's crazy!" exulted the group's vice president. "There's, like, tears in my eyes." It could be argued that Stevens is less a legislator than he is a philanthropist in the mode of John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, although of course he is not spending his own money. In 2003 Stevens inserted into the appropriations bill provisions limiting judicial review of timber sales in the Tongass National Forest (in December 2003 the Bush administration opened up 3% of it to logging), $17 million for anti-alcohol funding (taking some away from the Alaska Federation of Natives and giving it to the Village Safety Public Officer programs), $5.5 million to the National Energy Technology Laboratory at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, $7.75 million for wildfire fighting and protection (including $2 million to Anchorage to combat the spruce bark beetle), $1 million to consider Alaskan claims to rights-of-way on federal lands under RS 2477, $350,000 for the Alaska Mountain and Wilderness Huts Association (the huts on hiking trails project), $74 million for safe water and sanitation in Bush villages, $35 million for Denali Commission rural health clinics, $10 million for the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board (created in a 2002 appropriation), $16.8 million for sea lion research at the Alaska SeaLife Center (a pollock fishery was closed because of a decline in number of sea lions). This is, of course, a partial list. Stevens was just as active in 2004. The defense appropriation in July included 200 seasonal visas for Japanese technicians to evaluate salmon eggs; the Japanese will only buy them if they are Japanese-inspected and without those sales some fisheries would be unprofitable. The agriculture appropriation in October contained $2 million for the Denali Commission plus a provision making eligible for 75% grants the Tri-Valley Community Center in Healy, the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks and the Fairbanks Allied Health Learning Center. A rider to the Interior appropriation in October included a provision allowing out-of-staters to exercise subsistence hunting and fishing rights for Natives physically unable to do so. The November 2004 omnibus spending bill included $150,000 for a botanical garden in Anchorage, $900,000 for an aquarium in Ketchikan and $525,000 to upgrade a quarry in Nome. Even Stevens's critics concede that he does not shovel money into projects willy-nilly. He shifts money around if he thinks it is not well spent and, past the age of 80, he is still prepared to defend every single project on the merits. Since the framing of the Native Claims Act--perhaps the most creative legislation concerning American aboriginal peoples--Stevens has continued to work tirelessly to help Alaska Natives, who vote heavily Democratic in most elections. They have voted overwhelmingly for Stevens in recent elections, but he could win without their support easily. He skillfully elicits consensus with Native leaders when opinion is divided, getting more health and sanitation aid to bush villages and funding for health research on fetal alcohol syndrome and cancers common among Natives, and to gain preference in federal contracting for Native corporations. At the same time, Stevens is not uncritical of Native leaders. In October 2002, he urged the Alaska Federation of Natives not to funnel their requests for federal money through the 229 individual village-based tribes granted official status by the Clinton administration, but to consolidate federal requests so that "the very, very poor communities that don't have that ability to hire consultants, to hire grantsmen, people to write applications," get assistance. In a January 2004 appropriation, he set up a commission to draw up a new legal and governmental system for rural Alaska and an economic development commission funded through the Denali Commission to "promote private sector investment to reduce poverty in economically distressed rural villages." He evidently wants to prevent the emergence of a separate Native legal system. As he said on the Alaska Public Radio Network, "The road they're on now is the road to the destruction of statehood, because the Native population is increasing at a much greater rate than the non-Native population. I don't know if you realize that. And they want to have total jurisdiction over anything that happens in a village without regard to state law and without regard to federal law." Stevens played a crucial role in the 1970s in getting the oil pipeline approved. Now in this decade he has played a similar role for the proposed natural gas pipeline. For years oil drillers in Prudhoe Bay have been pumping natural gas back into the ground; there are an estimated 30 trillion cubic feet there and another 70 trillion cubic feet elsewhere on the North Slope--all undeliverable to customers without a pipeline. Pipeline provisions had been included in the 2001 and 2003 energy bills--a loan guarantee of 80% of construction costs, a price floor for the producers, accelerated depreciation, limited judicial review--but the energy bill remained stalled for other reasons. In October 2004 Stevens decided to insert the pipeline provisions, except for the price floor, into the must-pass military construction appropriation; he also got accelerated depreciation into the corporate tax bill. The rider specified a route through central Alaska, not directly east into Canada, and provided for in-state use of gas. Governor Frank Murkowski quickly solicited contracts from two consortiums, one being the three North Slope oil companies, the other a pipeline company with Native corporation participation; Stevens endorsed Murkowski's proposal that the state have an equity share. There are still other barriers to overcome--federal and Canadian regulatory approval, private financing--but the gas pipeline, for the first time, seems likely to be built. Stevens's work has not gone unappreciated. In January 2000, he was named Alaskan of the Century. In July 2000, Anchorage Airport was named the Ted Stevens International Airport and the Challenger Center in Kenai became the Ted and Catherine Stevens Center for Space Science Technology. Stevens was criticized in a December 2003 Los Angeles Times story for investing in local Alaskan properties with his brother-in-law and for providing help to co-investors and a tenant (one of the Native corporations) in buildings he co-owned. Stevens insisted he was a "passive investor" and said, "I have never helped anyone to achieve financial gain for myself or anyone else." In fact Stevens has a long record of helping Alaskans of all kinds, especially the Native corporations, on many projects; as he said, "I have helped Alaskans without regard to race, religion, sex, party, financial circumstance--without qualification." Stevens has been re-elected easily. In the August 1996 Republican primary a banker and former legislator spent $1.3 million of his own money and charged that Stevens was insufficiently conservative. Stevens won 59%-27%. His Democratic opponent that year blamed Stevens for her husband's failure to pass the Alaska bar on 22 separate tries; even Democratic Governor Tony Knowles announced he was voting for Stevens, who won 77%-13%. In November 2002 his Democratic opponent, a denizen of the hip town of Homer, charged that Stevens was part of a government conspiracy to keep him under constant surveillance. Stevens was reelected 78%-11% margin, carrying all but three precincts. He campaigned actively for his 22-year colleague Frank Murkowski in the 2002 governor race and for his new colleague, Murkowski's daughter Lisa Murkowski, in the 2004 Senate race. No one doubts he can be reelected again in 2008.
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