[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 117 (Thursday, August 18, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 18, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
              THE SENIOR SENATOR FROM ALASKA, TED STEVENS

  Mr. COCHRAN. Mr. President, the Anchorage Daily News has published a 
series of articles on our good friend from Alaska, the senior Senator.
  The first article was entitled ``Senior Senator, Big Voice for 
Alaska.'' It has a fine, flattering photograph of Ted Stevens on the 
front page.
  I hope that Senators will have an opportunity to read the entire 
series. The articles talk about the life and career of our good friend, 
the senior Senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens. There are seven in all, 
beginning on Sunday, August 7, and continuing through August 13.
  They confirm for all of us what we all have known, and that is that 
Ted Stevens is a very effective, influential Member of the U.S. Senate 
and makes sure that the interests of Alaska are always taken into 
account whenever legislation is pending here.
  All of us who know Ted Stevens respect him. Most of us who know him, 
including this Senator, have a great feeling of affection for him and 
consider him a valuable friend.
  I personally congratulate him on the flattering content of these 
articles and invite the attention of all Senators to the series.
  These articles add to our knowledge of his early years and confirm 
that our respect and affection for him are well placed.
  Senator Stevens is one of the most influential Members of this body, 
and he has been for many years. His tireless and effective efforts to 
insure that the interest of Alaska are taken into account by the 
Congress are well known by all of us in the Senate, and these articles 
remind us of some of the most important legislative battles he has won 
for his State over the years.
  I urge all Senators to read this series on our good friend and 
colleagues, knowing that when you do you will understand more fully why 
he is so deeply appreciated by the citizens of his State.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all of the articles in 
the series entitled ``Senior Senator'' be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

             [From the Anchorage Daily News, Aug. 7, 1994]

                          Big Voice for Alaska

                           (By David Whitney)

       (The milestone in Sen. Ted Stevens' career this season is 
     his 25th year in the U.S. Senate, but his impact on Alaska 
     extends much further. From his earliest days of public 
     service, he's demonstrated a remarkably single-minded vision: 
     Get more for Alaska. Though sometimes criticized for pork 
     barrel politics, for a famous temper and for his atypical 
     stands on traditional party issues, he has more often been 
     celebrated as an effective champion for his vision of the 
     state. Repeatedly, he emerges an overwhelming victor at 
     election time. By nearly any yardstick, Ted Stevens belongs 
     in the front rank of Alaska statesmen. From his little-known 
     private history through his role shaping state history, this 
     is the story of Alaska's senior senator.)

       Washington.--When Ted Stevens rose earlier this year to 
     oppose a balanced-budget amendment on the floor of the U.S. 
     Senate, he was also standing against the main political 
     currents of his party and his state.
       The Alaska Legislature has supported such an amendment. So 
     have Rep. Don Young and Sen. Frank Murkowski, Stevens' 
     partners in the state's all-Republican congressional 
     delegation. So did virtually all other Republicans in 
     Washington.
       But not Stevens. Stevens was doing the same thing he has 
     done for more than two decades in Washington: ignoring party 
     pressure and political currents to fight anything that might 
     threaten the flow of federal dollars to Alaska.
       It's a drive that dates back to the 1950's, when the battle 
     for Alaska statehood was being fought and Stevens was a 
     junior bureaucrat in the U.S. Interior Department. There, he 
     helped write the federal law that let Alaska become a state, 
     and he helped overcome President Dwight D. Eisenhower's fears 
     that Alaska was too large in size and too small in population 
     to sustain itself as a state.
       Nearly 40 years later, Stevens' 70th birthday is behind him 
     and his body is aging, but the fight hasn't left him.
       ``We have worked and worked and worked to get out from 
     under the yoke of Uncle Sam and we cannot do it,'' Stevens 
     said during the debate on the balanced-budget amendment. ``We 
     are economically dependent on the federal government.''
       Only three other Republicans joined Democrats in Congress 
     to kill the amendment.
       ``How will I ever get a waiver of the balanced budget 
     amendment to try and get special money to meet special 
     problems in Alaska?'' Stevens asked plaintively.
       In the Senate, seniority is power and only seven senators 
     have served longer than Stevens. During 25 years in 
     Washington, his clout has shaped legislation on a series of 
     defining Alaska issues, from North Slope oil to Native land 
     claims to preservation-vs.-development battles.
       That clout has also brought home everything from defense 
     installations and logging subsidies to tax favors for Native 
     corporations--billions of dollars in federal largesse.
       This has made him a favorite target of congressional 
     watchdogs, such as Citizens Against Government Waste. The 
     group regularly criticizes him in its annual ``pig book'' for 
     slipping Alaska projects into the federal budget.
       ``He certainly stands high in the pantheon of pork,'' said 
     the group's spokesman, Sean Paige.
       Stevens bristles at these criticisms.
       ``If I leave in what the president has requested, it's not 
     controversial,'' Stevens said. ``But if I take that money out 
     and put another item, of higher priority for Alaskans, in, 
     then it's very controversial. Everyone says Stevens is 
     increasing the deficit. It's not true.''


                           the state builder

       When Stevens joined the Senate in 1968, the State of Alaska 
     was only a decade old. Over the next few years, his hand was 
     in a stack of major bills that determined the final shape of 
     the 49th member of the union:
       The 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which created 
     profit-making Native corporations and seeded them with 44 
     million acres and nearly $1 billion in cash. Stevens fought 
     for a provision requiring about half the money to come from 
     state funds.
       The 1973 Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, which 
     permitted the development of Prudhoe Bay, the state's cash 
     cow for nearly two decades. Stevens worked on a key amendment 
     to bar court review of environmental questions about the 
     project, but it took the tie-breaking vote of Vice President 
     Spiro Agnew to get the measure out of the Senate. Stevens 
     also voted for an amendment restricting oil exports. The 
     amendment was considered crucial to win passage of the act, 
     but it since has come to be viewed in Alaska as an unfair 
     abridgement of the state's rights.
       The 1976 Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act, 
     which gave the state a majority voice in managing the $1 
     billion annual fishery in federal waters off the Alaska 
     coast. Stevens was a leading architect of the bill and 
     lobbied a reluctant President Ford to sign it.
       The 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, 
     which set aside more than 104 million acres of federal lands 
     as national parks and refuges. Though Stevens voted against 
     the final measure, he tried to negotiate the smallest 
     possible set-aside and he obtained an annual $40 million 
     federal subsidy for logging in the Tongass National Forest.
       ``Ted Stevens has been instrumental in shaping the state 
     with his seat in the Senate,'' said Claus-M. Naske, a history 
     professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and author of 
     several books on Alaska.
       In many of the battles to pass major acts affecting Alaska, 
     Stevens had to fight the state's business establishment, 
     ordinarily a Republican lawmaker's best friend.
       When he helped work out a compromise on the Native claims 
     bill with Sen. Mike Gravel--it was one of the few times they 
     worked together--the Alaska business community screamed.
       Many business leaders didn't think Natives should get any 
     land or property. Stevens argued that any legislation that 
     would take lands away from the federal government and give 
     them to Alaskans was good for the state.
       But what was most galling back home was that Stevens 
     endorsed a compromise giving Native corporations nearly $1 
     billion, half of which was to come out of state royalties 
     from Prudhoe Bay.
       The Anchorage Times, then the state's leading newspaper, 
     said Alaskans should not have to pay a dime for the 
     settlement and that any money for Natives should come out of 
     federal coffers.
       Stevens didn't blink.
       He believed the cash settlement was vital if the Native 
     corporations were to succeed. Besides, he said, the money 
     would stimulate the state's economy.
       ``Given the circumstances at the time, Stevens behaved 
     admirably and maybe even heroically,'' said Don Mitchell, an 
     Anchorage lawyer who has represented the Alaska Federation of 
     Natives.
       Later, as construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline geared 
     up in the early 1970s, Stevens was hung in effigy in downtown 
     Fairbanks for suggesting that pipeline contractors refurbish 
     Army property at Fort Wainwright to house their offices and 
     equipment rather than build new facilities in town.
       But Stevens prevailed. And, when the pipeline construction 
     crews left, the Army took over the modernized facilities and 
     they became a major draw for the 6th Infantry Division 
     (Light), which Stevens had helped steer to the state.


                        a legislative tactician

       Stevens' long tenure in the Senate has earned him 
     considerable clout.
       He is the leading Republican on defense spending and, when 
     Republicans were in charge of the Senate from 1980 to 1986, 
     Stevens helped engineer President Reagan's huge military 
     buildup, which added billions of dollars to the national 
     debt.
       ``I've certainly always thought of Stevens as quite strong 
     and solid on defense matters,'' said Baker Spring, senior 
     defense analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation.
       But Stevens also has been a potent force on other national 
     issues, some of which put him at odds with more conservative 
     members of his party.
       He is a strong supporter of federal funding for the 
     Corporation for Public Broadcasting, despite Republican 
     complaints that its news programming has a liberal slant.
       Stevens is a leading advocate of women's rights, including 
     the right to abortion. He also was an early supporter of 
     increased federal research into the AIDS virus.
       Stevens' position on these issues has contributed to an 
     impression that he is a social liberal. But, overall, his 
     record is that of a Republican moderate.
       For example, he voted against a bill to let teen-agers get 
     abortions without notifying their parents. And last year 
     Stevens voted against allowing people with the AIDS virus to 
     immigrate to the United States.
       On foreign policy, his views are in line with those of 
     Texas Republican Phil Gramm, one of the Senate's most 
     conservative members.
       In action on the Senate floor, Stevens uses parliamentary 
     procedures and rules to his advantage. He is not the Senate's 
     most gifted orator, but he is an effective advocate because 
     few have his institutional memory or detailed grasp of the 
     issues.
       Stevens works his way most effectively by tagging add-ons 
     to major bills. The bills are usually so long and complex 
     that Stevens' special Alaska provisions are difficult to spot 
     and harder still to decipher.
       One example is a huge financial break he arranged for 
     Alaska Native corporations in the mid-1980s. Despite the vast 
     sums of money conferred by the 1971 Native Claims Settlement 
     Act, some of the corporations were on the brink of bankruptcy 
     15 years later. In 1986, when Congress was working on a 
     sweeping tax-reform bill, Stevens came to their aid again.
       Since 1984, federal tax law had allowed unprofitable 
     corporations to ``sell'' their net operating losses (or NOLs) 
     to corporations that were making money. The money-losing 
     corporation would get a cash infusion to erase some of its 
     red ink, while the profitable corporation would get a 
     reduction in its tax bill. But now Congress was about to end 
     the transactions.
       When Stevens learned that the depressed steel industry was 
     trying to get an exemption from the cut-off, he quietly 
     attached a provision to the tax-reform bill giving the same 
     break to Alaska Native corporations. He argued that the 
     Natives had suffered huge losses because congressional 
     actions had delayed the conveyance of all 44 million acres 
     promised by the 1971 settlement act.
       The steel industry didn't get its exemption, but the 
     Natives did.
       Stevens estimated at the time that the Native exemption 
     would cost federal taxpayers maybe $50 million. But the 
     volume of transactions quickly swamped all projections, and 
     Congress shut down the exemption two years later.
       Then-House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan 
     Rostenkowski, D-Ill., said in April 1988 that the huge volume 
     of transactions was fueled by profitable corporations 
     approaching Natives with ``schemes'' to create paper losses 
     that the money-making firms could then buy.
       ``If Congress does not move to restrict this unintended tax 
     avoidance, it may cost $200 million or more in additional 
     lost revenue that very profitable companies would otherwise 
     pay in federal taxes,'' Rostenkowski said.
       Even Rostenkowski apparently underestimated the money at 
     stake.
       Steve Colt, an economist at the Institute of Social and 
     Economic Research at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, 
     said the Natives had sold more than $3 billion in operating 
     losses by the time the exemption was terminated in 1988. He 
     estimated the tax loss to the federal government exceeded $1 
     billion.
       The final cost could turn out to be lower because the 
     Internal Revenue Service is intensely auditing the sales. 
     Stevens has met with Treasury Department officials to promote 
     the best resolutions he can for the Natives.
       Stevens said he considered the provision social legislation 
     that helped restore the economic vitality of several Native 
     corporations while pumping hundreds of millions of federal 
     dollars into the state.
       ``It deserved to be in Alaska,'' he said.
       According to Wally Powers, vice president of finance for 
     Nome-based Bering Strait Native Corp., which sold $35 million 
     of its losses still under IRS audit, the transactions could 
     be a lifesaver.
       ``We were officially in bankruptcy when the NOLs went 
     through,'' Powers said. ``They give us a second chance to 
     achieve the promise of the Native Claims Settlement Act.''


                             A FIERY TEMPER

       Stevens has a reputation as one of the Senate's most 
     incendiary members, and he's proud of it.
       He believes his angry outbursts are one of his most 
     effective tools.
       ``I don't lose my temper,'' he quips. ``I always know where 
     it is.''
       Shortly after Stevens was appointed to the Senate in 1966, 
     the Nixon White House got a taste of that temper.
       The Labor Department wanted to fill a position in Alaska 
     with a Californian. Stevens thought an Alaskan should get the 
     job, but had recently refused to support the White House on 
     one of its issues--he doesn't remember just which one.
       A Nixon bureaucrat named Fred Webber called Stevens' office 
     and asked why the administration should bend over backward 
     for Stevens if he wouldn't help the president.
       Stevens still remembers the showdown with Webber. So does 
     Ron Birch, who was Stevens' top aide at the time and 
     witnessed the blowup.
       Stevens summoned Webber to his office and politely inquired 
     about pending legislation important to the Labor Department. 
     Webber courteously ticked off a list of bills.
       ``You go back and tell your boss that I am putting a hold 
     on every one of those bills,'' Birch recalls Stevens telling 
     Webber. Because much of the Senate's routine business depends 
     on unanimous consent, even a rookie like Stevens then was, 
     can keep legislation off the floor. It is an especially 
     potent tool toward the end of a congressional session when a 
     last-minute ``hold'' can effectively spike a bill.
       ``Yeah, I got a little exercised,'' Stevens remembers. ``I 
     got up, opened my door, grabbed him by the seat of his pants 
     and his collar and threw him out on the god....d floor.''
       According to Birch, Stevens was willing to risk offending 
     the White House to make clear that he could not be bought.
       ``He said that the first time you sell your vote, you're a 
     whore,'' Birch said. ``And once you're marked as a whore, you 
     are marked forever.''
       Stevens instructed Birch that he would take no more calls 
     from the White House, even from Nixon, until there was an 
     apology for trying to pressure a vote out of him. It was 
     delivered by a delegation from the White House the next day, 
     Birch said.
       Neither Webber nor people in the White House delegation 
     could be located for comment.
       ``I've heard many stories about Ted Stevens' temper,'' said 
     Bill Van Ness, a former congressional lawyer and now the 
     senior partner in a Washington, D.C., law firm that lobbies 
     on Alaska issues.
       ``But I've always believed that he is in control, that he 
     always knows what he is doing,'' Van Ness said. ``And I think 
     it has had an intimidating effect. There aren't many in the 
     Congress who will take him on, head to head.''
       Stevens' prickly independence may have worked well for 
     Alaska, bringing billions of dollars in federal spending, but 
     it has not necessarily served him well personally.
       In 1984, Stevens narrowly lost a race against Kansas Sen. 
     Bob Dole for Republican majority leader. The majority leader 
     sets the agenda for the entire Senate and usually serves as 
     one of his party's leading policy-makers.
       Stevens believed he had enough votes to win the job. He had 
     worked his way up to the position by serving as the chairman 
     of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, which raises 
     money to elect Republicans to the chamber, and later as 
     Republican whip--the party's second-ranking leadership post.
       The defeat cost Stevens his job as whip. Among the perks 
     were a suite of offices in the Capitol and a chauffeured car.
       Press accounts at the time attributed Stevens' loss to the 
     desire among other senators for the committee chairmanships 
     that would be opened up by Dole's elevation.
       But press reports also cited Stevens' fabled temper. He 
     said in a recent interview that he believes he was hurt by 
     the fact that he had angered so many of his colleagues over 
     the years.
       ``I think I didn't get the votes I should have from some 
     people because I had offended them in some connection or 
     other, but it was something I had to do to get bills passed 
     for Alaska,'' Stevens said.
       Despite his long public career, Stevens' private life has 
     been marked by family hardship, tragedy and regrets.
       Stevens, born in Indianapolis, was the third of four 
     children in his family. His parents divorced in 1929 just as 
     the Great Depression was beginning. He lived with his 
     grandparents until he was a teen-ager, helping support a 
     blind father and a mentally retarded cousin by hawking 
     newspapers on the street and later by working at a soda 
     fountain.
       Stevens flew Army cargo planes in China during World War 
     II. After the war, he earned a law degree at Harvard 
     University, then worked for law firms in Washington, D.C., 
     and Fairbanks. But he abandoned the lure of big money to 
     enter public service and then politics.
       Roger Ernst, who worked with Stevens at the Interior 
     Department during the Eisenhower administration, recalled 
     Stevens working even on Sundays. It was a habit he kept up 
     when he entered the Senate.
       He came to regret those long hours away from his family.
       On Dec. 4, 1978, a Learjet carrying the Stevenses and 
     several others hit gusty crosswinds and crashed while 
     attempting to land at Anchorage. The senator was one of two 
     survivors. His wife was not.
       In the months of grieving that followed, Stevens seemed to 
     blame Alaska's other senator, Democrat Mike Gravel, for Ann's 
     death. At the time of the crash, the Stevenses were en route 
     to a fund-raiser for a lands act lobbying group. Stevens said 
     at a congressional hearing that the trip was necessary only 
     because Gravel had blocked a compromise on the Senate floor 
     that would have let the lands act pass two months earlier.
       It took months for Stevens to work through Ann's death. He 
     read a book by Arthur Freese called ``Help for Your Grief.'' 
     Though the book is now out of print, Stevens sends a 
     photocopy of it to friends when they have a death in the 
     family, inscribed with remarks about how it got him through 
     Ann's death.
       Two years later, Stevens married Catherine Bittner 
     Chandler. In 1981, when he was 57, Catherine gave birth to 
     his sixth child, Lily, upon whom he dotes. He reserves time 
     to go to movies with Lily now that she is a young teen-ager, 
     and he drives her and her friends to weekend soccer games. A 
     corner of Stevens' office is filled with Lily's artwork. When 
     Lily was younger, Stevens would hold hot-dog and ice-cream 
     parties for her in a Senate dining room.
       By 1980, his nemesis, Gravel, had been defeated and the 
     major pieces of law affecting Alaska had been enacted. 
     Stevens began what amounted to a second life. It was 
     comfortable until financial problems beset his new family.
       An untimely investment in a crab boat in 1979, named the 
     Lady Ann after his first wife, saddled him with more debt 
     than his Senate salary could absorb, and Catherine's 
     investment in an Arizona cattle ranch drew an Internal 
     Revenue Service tax claim in the mid-1980s.
       The Stevenses settled their debts by selling their Maryland 
     home in December 1986 and moving into a rented house in the 
     District of Columbia.
       Stevens' financial situation didn't completely turn around 
     for another three years.
       C.W. Snedden, the longtime publisher of the Fairbanks Daily 
     News-Miner who had helped give Stevens his political start 
     three decades earlier, died in August 1989. Snedden 
     bequeathed Stevens an expensive motor yacht. Stevens 
     immediately sold it to pay off his bills and buy the house he 
     and Catherine were renting.
       Stevens' failure to accumulate much wealth due to his 
     public service has at times left him sounding somewhat 
     bitter.
       In 1988, a year before the bequest from Snedden and when 
     his financial situation seemed bleak, Stevens was beginning 
     to think about his 1990 re-election campaign.
       He said in an interview that he could have made millions of 
     dollars as a lawyer and that voters needed to understand the 
     personal sacrifice he had made for a life of public service. 
     He said he viewed the 1990 election as a turning point in his 
     life and for the state.
       Stevens' remarks drew letters to the editor attacking him 
     for arrogance, but they didn't dent him at the polls. In the 
     1990 Republican primary, his conservative rival, Bob Bird, 
     ridiculed Stevens as ``his highness''--and got just 30 
     percent of the vote.
       At 70, Stevens' hair is graying and, despite a passion for 
     exercise and healthy foods, he has had serious medical 
     problems--including prostate cancer two years ago and back 
     problems requiring surgery in February. But Stevens has 
     already said he will run again in 1996.
       Anything can happen in an election, but at least for now 
     Stevens is looked upon even by many Democrats as the 
     workhorse who can get things done for Alaska.
       In May 1993, a group of Alaska Democrats fanned out over 
     Washington. They were trying to figure out if they had any 
     sway with the Clinton administration, coming as they did from 
     a state with a Republican-turned-independent governor and an 
     all-Republican congressional delegation.
       Just months before, Stevens had predicted that Clinton's 
     policies would bring economic ruin to Alaska. Now the 
     Democrats courted him as if he were the only person who could 
     hold their own president at bay.
       ``I remember being asked once what one thing we could do 
     that would be best for the state,'' said Anchorage lawyer 
     Tony Smith, who ran against Sen. Frank Murkowski in 1992. ``I 
     said that the best thing we could do would be to take $20 
     million out of the state's permanent fund to find a fountain 
     of youth to keep Stevens alive and in office.''
       Smith--who is now running for Republican Don Young's seat 
     in Congress--says he still stands by that statement.
                                  ____


             [From the Anchorage Daily News, Aug. 8, 1994]

 Stevens' Life Wasn't Easy Growing Up in the Depression With a Divided 
                                 Family

                           (By David Whitney)

       Washington.--A wooden surfboard stands amid the plaques and 
     letters of appreciation in Ted Stevens' office in the marble-
     walled Hart Senate Office Building.
       Polished to a gleam and parked in the corner nearest 
     Stevens' desk, the board is a memento of a rare mellow period 
     in the life of a politician not known for mellowness.
       Stevens paid $40 for it when he was a teen-ager in 
     Manhattan Beach, Calif. He lived there with an aunt and uncle 
     who took him in when he was 15.
       ``In 1940, I bought a surfboard and a gold 1931 Pontiac 
     convertible,'' he said. ``The surfboard cost almost as much 
     as my car.''
       With the board in the back of his car, Stevens and high 
     school friend Russell Green would head for San Onofre to ride 
     the waves.
       ``We were beach bums,'' Stevens said.
       Theodore Fulton Stevens was born Nov. 18, 1923, in a small 
     cottage behind his grandparents' home in Indianapolis. His 
     grandfather built the little house after Stevens' father, 
     George, married Gertrude Chancellor.
       The couple divorced when Stevens, the third of George and 
     Gertrude's four children, was 6, and the 1929 stock market 
     crash was plunging the nation into the Great Depression.
       At the time of their divorce, Stevens' parents lived in 
     Chicago. The Depression cost Stevens' father his job, and the 
     children went back to Indianapolis to live with their 
     grandparents.
       They were soon followed by Stevens' father, an accountant 
     who developed severe eye problems and went blind for several 
     years.
       Stevens' mother landed in California and, as she could 
     afford it, she moved Stevens' siblings out to be with her. 
     Stevens said he stayed behind to help care for his blind 
     father and a mentally retarded cousin who also lived with his 
     grandparents.
       Stevens helped raise money for the household as a newsboy 
     on the streets of Indianapolis.
       ``I remember selling lots of newspapers on the day of the 
     Lindbergh kidnapping,'' Stevens said. Charles Lindbergh Jr., 
     the son of the famous aviator, was kidnapped on March 1, 
     1932. Stevens was 8 years old.
       In 1934, Stevens' grandfather, the only one in the house 
     with a job, tumbled down a flight of stairs and punctured a 
     lung. He contracted pneumonia and died.
       Stevens stayed in the house until 1938, when his 
     grandmother could no longer afford the bills. Stevens, then 
     15, moved with his retarded cousin, Patricia Acker, to 
     Manhattan Beach to live with her mother, Gladys Swindells.
       Before and after classes at Redondo Union High School, he 
     still had to work. But there also was time for his growing 
     friendship with Russell Green, son of the president of Signal 
     Gas and Oil Co.
       For three years, Green and Stevens partied, surfed and 
     studied together. They're still close friends.
       Green recalled cutting classes with Stevens to hear Glenn 
     Miller's orchestra, Miller was making a movie at the time and 
     also doing nightly radio broadcasts from a nearby town.
       He said they approached Miller and told him they had cut 
     class to see him. ``Miller said, `Just tell your teacher you 
     were up seeing Glenn Miller and they will let you out,''' 
     Green said.
       ``Ted has a lot of fun in him and a great sense of humor,'' 
     Green said. ``But he was serious enough to get absolutely top 
     grades.''
       Except when the now-famous Stevens temper surfaced in an 
     English class, Green remembered.
       ``One of our classmates was an A student but he was always 
     talking,'' Green said. ``So the teacher gave the student a B. 
     Ted got into an argument with the teacher, saying that the 
     grade should be for the work he's done and not his 
     deportment. The teacher got so mad at Stevens that she 
     knocked his grade down to a B, too.''


                               off to war

       After graduating from high school in 1942, Stevens attended 
     classes at Oregon State University for a semester and then, 
     with World War II raging, tried to enlist in the Navy Air 
     Corps.
       He flunked the vision exam.
       ``I had strained my eyes considerably in an engineering 
     course I was in.'' Stevens said. Facing the prospect of being 
     drafted, he moved to Los Angeles and took eye exercises six 
     days a week.
       There, Stevens met a former military officer and member of 
     the Selective Service board who helped arrange another test 
     for flight training.
       This time, Stevens passed. The Army sent him off to study 
     at Montana State University. He said he scored at the top of 
     an aptitude test and immediately was transferred to preflight 
     training in Santa Ana, Calif.
       ``We went right down to join a group that already had 
     started in preflight,'' he said. ``We got our wings in the 
     early part of 1944. The other group at Montana State got its 
     wings just in time to be discharged. They never went 
     overseas.''
       From Santa Ana, Stevens went to Bergstrom Field in Texas, 
     where he trained to fly P-38s. Because of an incident during 
     graduation, Stevens never got the chance to fly the fighters 
     in combat.
       ``Someone in the class booed the godd--n colonel who gave 
     the speech to our graduating class,'' said Stevens, who 
     recalls that the colonel was supposedly the son of an Army 
     big shot. ``Suddenly we were copilots in a troop carrier 
     squad.''
       Stevens was dispatched to China to fly for the 14th Army 
     Air Corps Transport Section, which supported the Flying 
     Tigers.
       Leroy Parramore, who flew with Stevens in China, said they 
     piloted C-46 and C-47 cargo planes, often without escort, 
     throughout the China theater to resupply mostly Chinese units 
     fighting the Japanese.
       ``We transported everything from bombs to Chinese troops to 
     gasoline,'' said Parramore, a retired Internal Revenue 
     Service agent in Texas.
       Parramore said their worst enemy was the weather.
       ``I remember one occasion when we were flying and we were 
     running out of gas,'' Parramore said. ``Ted was in one C-46 
     and I was in another. We hit a strong headwind and we started 
     looking for an alternate landing field. I landed first. And 
     when Ted finally landed, he had run out of gas on the 
     approach.''
       ``If I had anyone I would have trusted my life to, it would 
     have been Ted,'' Parramore said.
       When Stevens left the Army Air Corps in March 1946, he had 
     collected a Distinguished Flying Cross for flying behind 
     enemy lines, an Air Medal and a Yun Hai Medal, awarded by the 
     Chinese Nationalist Government.
       After the war, Stevens returned to California, where he 
     received a bachelor's degree in political science at UCLA in 
     1947.
       By then, Stevens had decided to go to law school. He 
     applied at Stanford University and the University of 
     Michigan.
       But, when he told Green's father he planned to go to 
     Stanford, he said he was told to ``look East.''
       Stevens did, graduating from Harvard in 1950. He was able 
     to finance part of the cost with money from the GI Bill 
     because of his military service. But, he said, he also had to 
     sell his blood, work several jobs--including one as a Boston 
     bartender--and borrow money from an uncle.
       Alaska Supreme Court Justice Jay Rabinowitz praised 
     Stevens' scholarship at Harvard. Rabinowitz said the Alaska 
     Supreme Court issued an opinion recently that cited an 
     article on admiralty law Stevens wrote for the Harvard Law 
     Review 45 years earlier.
       After graduation, Stevens headed off to a Washington, D.C., 
     job that put him on the road to Alaska.
                                  ____


             [From the Anchorage Daily News, Aug. 9, 1994]

  The Road North--Needing Work, Stevens Borrows $600, Answers Call to 
                                 Alaska

                           (By David Whitney)

       Washington.--For Ted Stevens, the long, unexpected road to 
     Alaska began in the Washington, D.C., law office of Mike 
     ``Northcut'' Ely.
       Ely had been an assistant secretary in the Interior 
     Department during the Hoover administration. Twenty years 
     later, he had a high-profile law firm specializing in 
     natural-resources issues. He recruited Stevens out of Harvard 
     Law School in 1950.
       ``He was a vigorous chap, highly effective,'' Ely, now 90, 
     said in a telephone interview from Redlands, Calif., where he 
     still maintains a office, ``He was very personable, with a 
     good sense of humor.''
       Stevens was assigned to handle the legal affairs of Emil 
     Usibelli, an Ely client in Alaska who was trying to sell 
     Healy coal to the military.
       Stevens was interested in natural-resources law, but he 
     wanted to pursue that interest in government, not private 
     practice.
       So he volunteered for the 1952 presidential campaign of 
     Dwight D. Eisenhower, the World War II hero who would become 
     the first Republican to occupy the White House since the 
     defeat of Herbert Hoover in 1932. Stevens hoped an Eisenhower 
     victory would mean a federal job for him.
       Stevens said in an interview that campaign volunteers would 
     meet at a Washington, D.C., hotel to write position papers. 
     Stevens was assigned Western water law and the problems of 
     Western lands.
       Eisenhower's election in November 1952 looked like perfect 
     timing for Stevens.
       ``I had done several papers for them. I had met several 
     people by the time Eisenhower won. They said, ``We want you 
     to come over to Interior.'''
       Eight months earlier, Stevens had married the former Ann 
     Mary Cherrington, the adopted daughter of the chancellor of 
     the University of Denver. A graduate of Reed College in 
     Portland, Ore., Ann was a Democrat who worked for the State 
     Department in the Truman administration.
       Stevens told Ely he was quitting to look for work in the 
     Eisenhower administration.
       But the job didn't come through, and suddenly Stevens was 
     out of work, with a new wife and no place to go. About this 
     time, Stevens got a call from Charles Clasby inviting him to 
     join his law firm in Fairbanks. Stevens knew Clasby because 
     Clasby was the Alaska lawyer for Emil Usibelli, the coal 
     miner Stevens had represented in Washington.


                              alaska calls

       ``Ann and I were both from the West,'' Stevens said. ``We 
     liked Clasby and Usibelli. We had done some things together 
     when they were down here. And Clasby was in a hard spot. He 
     had told me he had lost one of his people.''
       Ely said he was sad to see Stevens go. But he recalls 
     Stevens offering another reason for leaving Washington.
       ``He said he'd like to settle in the West and get into 
     politics,'' Ely said. ``I told him he should stay in law.''
       Stevens recalls saying no such thing. According to Stevens, 
     the job in Fairbanks came along at a time when he needed work 
     and he had no idea that he would eventually get into 
     politics.
       The Stevenses packed their bags and began the long drive 
     north in the dead of winter, traveling on $600 borrowed from 
     Clasby. They hit Fairbanks in February 1953.
       Stevens said he kids Gov. Wally Hickel about the loan from 
     Clasby.
       ``He likes to say that he came to Alaska with 37 cents in 
     his pocket,'' Stevens said of Hickel. ``I came $600 in 
     debt.''
       Stevens quickly cultivated the city's Republican 
     establishment. One of his new friends was C.W. ``Bill'' 
     Snedden, who had recently bought the Fairbanks Daily News-
     Miner. Helen Snedden, Bill's widow, said her husband and 
     Stevens were ``like father and son.''
       ``The only problem Ted had was that he had a temper,'' 
     Helen Snedden said. ``My husband helped and guided him along 
     the way. He kind of steadied him, like you would do with your 
     children. My husband taught him the art of diplomacy.''
       Helen Snedden became especially close to Ann.
       ``I don't think you could have found a better person,'' she 
     said. ``She was very smart, very caring. She fit in very 
     easily. The children came along, year after year. It was 
     hard. It was a struggle. But she made a home and she didn't 
     complain.''
       Stevens lasted six months with Clasby. By September, 
     Fairbanks U.S. Attorney Bob McNealy, a Democrat, had resigned 
     and, Stevens said, U.S. District Judge Harry Pratt asked him 
     if he wanted the job.
       ``I said, `Sure, I'd like to do that,''' Stevens said. 
     ``Clasby said `It's not going to pay you as much money, but, 
     if you want to do it, that's your business.' He was very p---
     -d that I decided to go.''
       Stevens was confirmed for the position by the Senate on 
     March 30, 1954.
       ``He was a very active D.A.,'' said Mike Stepovich, a 
     Fairbanks lawyer at the time who a few years later would 
     become territorial governor. ``He was a prosecutor all the 
     way through.''
       Olga Steiger, a former court clerk in Fairbanks, said 
     Stevens, explosive temper often was fixed on Warren A. 
     Taylor, a criminal defense lawyer.
       ``They didn't get along,'' she said. ``Ted would get red in 
     the face, blow up and stalk out of the courtroom.''


                            gun totin' d.a.

       Jay Rabinowitz, now an Alaska Supreme Court Justice, 
     arrived in Fairbanks not long after Stevens left. He recalls 
     tales of Stevens packing pistols and accompanying U.S. 
     marshals on raids.
       In one particular vice raid, Rabinowitz recalled, ``U.S. 
     marshals went in with Tommy-guns and Ted led the charge, 
     smoking a stogie and with six guns on his hips.''
       ``It makes me sound like Eliott Ness,'' Stevens said. He 
     remembers only one such incident. It was in Big Delta, about 
     75 miles southwest of Fairbanks.
       ``We decided we'd take a combined force down there because 
     of information we'd received about a lot of different 
     violations of federal and territorial law. There was a 
     prostitution ring, and drugs and violations of liquor laws.
       ``They wanted to make sure everything was done right, that 
     the evidence would be admissible, the arrests would be legal, 
     so they asked me if I wanted to go along. I said, yeah.
       ``So one of them suggested I ought to take a gun,'' he 
     said. ``So he checked me out a gun. It was a holster with a 
     gun. It wasn't two guns. I never had two guns. I never walked 
     around town with it.
       ``But someone did see it,'' he said. ``Someone saw us 
     coming back in or going out of the federal building that day 
     and said, `Jesus Christ, there's the damn district attorney 
     carrying a gun.'''
       The report spread ``up and down Fourth Avenue in every 
     bar.''
       ``And, to this day, kids come in and tell me their dads 
     have told them about me and they think a lot about me when 
     they see stories about Eliott Ness and that it must have been 
     the same,'' he said.
       Stevens' most famous trial came at the end of his career as 
     federal prosecutor. The case managed to link tax evasion to 
     the cause of Alaska statehood--and Stevens lost.
       Jack Marler, a former Internal Revenue Service agent, had 
     been accused of failing to file tax returns and there were 
     concerns that other Fairbanks residents were beginning to 
     follow his example.
       In Marler's first trial, which Stevens did not handle, the 
     jury deadlocked and a mistrial was declared.
       Marler hired Edgar Paul Boyko, a flamboyant young lawyer 
     from Anchorage, to defend him in the second trial.
       Stevens and a local judge decided to clean up the mess, 
     Boyko recalls. ``They decided that Marler would be a good 
     start.
       ``Ted, who was young and full of piss and vinegar, decided 
     to take over the retrial,'' he said. ``He assembled an 
     entourage to help him.
       ``I built a defense around the theory that there should be 
     no taxation without representation,'' Boyko said.
       ``I gave a rabble-rousing closing argument to the jury,'' 
     he said. ``I said this man wanted to raise the issue that we 
     had no representation in Congress. I said this case was the 
     jury's chance to move Alaska toward statehood.''
       Newspapers around the country carried stories on the trial.
       In his closing argument to the jury, Boyko called the panel 
     ``twelve Alaskans with a rendezvous with destiny.''
       He appealed to the jury to ``strike a blow for Alaskan 
     freedom.''
       ``The shock of acquittal will be felt all the way to 
     Washington,'' he told the jury.
       ``Ted had done a hell of a job in the case,'' Boyko 
     recalled. ``The jury's announcement of not guilty dropped 
     like a bomb.''
       After the acquittal on April 3, 1956, Stevens issued a 
     statement.
       ``I don't believe the jury's verdict is an expression of 
     resistance to taxes or law enforcement or the start of a 
     Boston Tea Party,'' he said. ``I do believe, however, that 
     the decision will be a blow to the hopes for Alaska 
     statehood.''
       But it wasn't. The long battle for statehood had only two 
     more years to run. Within two months of the Marler trial, 
     Stevens was on his way back to Washington to help fight it.
                                  ____


             [From the Anchorage Daily News, Aug. 10, 1994]

  Seeking Statehood--Stevens Bent Rules To Bring Alaska Into the Union

                           (By David Whitney)

       Washington.--When a brash young federal prosecutor named 
     Ted Stevens arrived in Washington in June 1956 to take a job 
     as assistant to Interior Secretary Douglas McKay, the 
     prospects for Alaska statehood seemed no brighter than they 
     had for at least a decade.
       The battle had been going on since 1943 and had at least 
     once seemed about to pay off. That was in 1950, when the U.S. 
     House passed a bill to bring Alaska into the United States. 
     President Harry Truman, a Democrat, supported the bill but it 
     died in the Senate.
       Two years later, Republicans captured Congress and the 
     White House. The Republican Party opposed statehood, partly 
     out of fears that Alaska would elect Democrats to Congress.
       The Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, saw Alaska 
     as too large and sparsely populated to be economically self-
     sufficient as a state. Eisenhower also worried that statehood 
     would hamstring the military's strategy for defending Alaska 
     against an invasion by the Soviet Union.
       The U.S. plan was to fight a delaying action in Alaska, 
     gradually abandoning the hinterlands of the territory, if 
     necessary, to an invading Soviet army. Eisenhower thought 
     that strategy would be harder to pull off if Alaska became a 
     state, because more people and politicians would have to be 
     dealt with as abandonment proceeded.
       The only idea that had much support in Washington was to 
     divide Alaska, carving out its most populated areas for 
     statehood and keeping the rest as a federal territory. That 
     idea had little support in Alaska, particularly among rural 
     Natives, who complained that they would be disenfranchised.
       Within a couple of weeks after Stevens' arrival, however, 
     the statehood movement got a considerable boost. McKay 
     resigned to run for the U.S. Senate in Oregon and his 
     replacement was Fred Seaton, a statehood advocate. McKay was 
     not personally opposed to statehood but had never pushed for 
     it, either, according to Claus M. Naske, a history professor 
     at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
       Seaton was a close friend of Fairbanks Daily News-Miner 
     publisher C.W. Snedden, one of the territory's leading 
     negotiators in that phase of the statehood battle.
       ``The day after Seaton took office, he asked Snedden if he 
     knew any Alaskan that could come to Washington to work on 
     statehood,'' Naske said.
       ``Snedden told him that person was already working for him 
     as his assistant,'' Naske said. ``That person was Ted 
     Stevens.''
       As a young federal staffer, Stevens was no power broker. 
     But he quickly became an aggressive soldier in the statehood 
     movement, earning the nickname of ``Mr. Statehood'' at the 
     Interior Department.
       ``Ted probably spent more time with Secretary Seaton than 
     any of us,'' said Roger Ernst, who was Seaton's assistant 
     secretary for public land management.
       ``He did all the work on statehood,'' Ernst said. ``He 
     wrote 90 percent of all the speeches. Statehood was his main 
     project.''


                           focus on statehood

       Stevens discussed his work on statehood in an interview 
     with a researcher at the Eisenhower library in October 1977, 
     He made clear that he was willing to bend the rules and 
     manipulate the press to keep Alaska statehood on the 
     administration's agenda.
       ``We set Ike up quite often at press conferences by 
     planting questions about Alaska statehood,'' Stevens said in 
     the interview. ``We never let a press conference go by 
     without getting someone to try to ask him about statehood.''
       Eisenhower's problem, Stevens said, was the he ``took the 
     position that land up there was very sparsely populated and 
     very much an open invitation to invasion.''
       ``I think he honestly believed that we had special 
     vulnerability and also special significance as far as 
     military strategy was concerned,'' Stevens said.
       The Soviet threat to Alaska drew the top echelons of the 
     Pentagon into the statehood debate.
    
    
       Jack Stempler, who was then a top lawyer at the Defense 
     Department, said Eisenhower relied heavily on the views of 
     Gen. Nathan Twining, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 
     Staff who had served in Alaska.
       ``Eisenhower wanted to make sure that there was adequate 
     military for Alaska to protect itself.'' said Stempler, who 
     is now retired, ``And also, he wanted to assure himself that 
     it would be economically viable. Without a military payroll, 
     he had questions about whether it could be economically 
     viable.''
       Two years earlier, in March 1954, Eisenhower had drawn a 
     line on a map where he thought the state should end, with the 
     areas north and west of the Porcupine, Yukon and Kuskokwim 
     river remaining in federal hands.
       ``He said, `Everything up there has got to be federal 
     because the state can't protect it,''' Stevens said. 
     ```There's a chance we're going to have terrorism; we've got 
     a potential invasion up there. We've got to have federal 
     powers up there.'''
       With Seaton actively pressing for statehood, a compromise 
     was fashioned to bring the entire territory into the union 
     but with special federal protections for the sparsely 
     populated northern and western regions that so worried 
     Eisenhower.
       Stempler said that he, Stevens and Twining then set about 
     to define where the final version of the line should be 
     drawn. Much of that work occurred in a room at Walter Reed 
     Army Hospital, where Seaton was being treated for back 
     problems.
       ``I remember sitting in Seaton's hospital room on Sunday 
     mornings with Twining and Stevens talking about this,'' said 
     Stempler. ``Maps were taped to the walls. We discussed what 
     wilderness areas would be hard for a young state to handle. 
     The line was negotiated and after that, statehood moved 
     forward.''
       The line became known as the PYK Line. From the northeast 
     corner of the territory, it followed the Porcupine, Yukon and 
     Kuskokwim rivers to the Bering Sea, then went south and east 
     to clip off the lower half of the Alaska Peninsula and the 
     Aleutian Islands.
       The PYK line became the basis for Section 10 of the 
     statehood act, which Stevens wrote. The land north and west 
     of the line was included in the new state, but Section 10 
     gave the president emergency powers to take direct federal 
     control of those areas, which include Prudhoe Bay and the 
     Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
       Section 10 was a key to statehood.
       ``It's still in the law but it's never been exercised,'' 
     Stevens said. ``Now that the problem with Russia is gone, 
     it's surplusage. But it is a special law that only applies to 
     Alaska.''
       With the PYK Line settled, Stevens worked with Snedden, 
     Anchorage Times publisher Bob Atwood and the Alaska Statehood 
     Committee to lobby for statehood.


                           bending the rules

       By 1956, Alaskans had held a convention in Fairbanks to 
     adopt a constitution for the state they hoped to become. And 
     they had elected three Democrats to go to Washington as 
     unofficial delegates to Congress. Ernest Gruening and William 
     Egan were Alaska's U.S. ``senators,'' and Ralph Rivers was 
     its U.S. ``representative.''
       Stevens hired Atwood's daughter, Marilyn Atwood, to help 
     him at the Interior Department. Together they drew up cards 
     on members of Congress.
       ``I had made a study on each member of the Senate and this 
     goes on now into '57, '58--whether they were Rotarians or 
     Kiwanians or Catholics or Baptists and veterans or loggers, 
     the whole thing,'' Stevens said in the 1977 interview.
       ``And we'd assigned these Alaskans to go talk to individual 
     members of the Senate and split them down on the basis of 
     people that had something in common with them,'' he said.
       ``We were violating the law . . . we were lobbying from the 
     executive branch, and there's been a statute against that for 
     a long time,'' Stevens said. ``We more or less, I would say, 
     masterminded the House and Senate attack from the executive 
     branch.''
       The lobbying campaign also targeted newspapers.
       ``We planted editorials in weeklies and dailies and 
     newspapers in the district of people we thought were opposed 
     to us or states where they were opposed to us so that 
     suddenly they were thinking twice about opposing us,'' 
     Stevens said.
       The long campaign for statehood paid off in 1958, when 
     Congress passed a bill admitting Alaska to the Union. 
     Eisenhower signed the act on July 7, 1958.
       The act authorized the new state to select 103.5 million 
     acres of ``vacant and unappropriated public domain'' to 
     develop an economy.
       Three years later, in the last days of the Eisenhower 
     administration, when Stevens was the Interior Department's 
     top lawyer, he wrote the public land order creating what is 
     now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The signing of that 
     order was Seaton's last official act.
       ANWR was created in an effort to end a much more sweeping 
     land order that had withdrawn the whole of Alaska's Arctic 
     during World War II, Stevens said.
       ``It was a great goal of people, particularly at Interior, 
     who were quite interested in a gas field (near Barrow) at the 
     time,'' Stevens said.
       The withdrawal was supported by the state, according to 
     Phil Holdsworth, Alaska's first commissioner of natural 
     resources.
       What Alaska got out of the deal was the lifting of the 
     federal ban on state land selections in a large middle 
     section of the North Slope bordered by the 9 million-acre 
     arctic refuge to the east and the Naval Petroleum Reserve to 
     the west.
       That midsection contained a then-obscure landmark called 
     Prudhoe Bay. Ten years later, it would become the site of the 
     biggest oil strike in North American history and the 
     foundation of Alaska's economy.
       Now, as Prudhoe Bay reserves decline, the oil industry 
     insists that the best hope for keeping up oil production in 
     Alaska is the coastal plain of the refuge that Stevens helped 
     create.
       The 1980 Alaska Lands Act requires a vote of Congress to 
     open it to oil drilling and, so far, environmental opposition 
     has prevented that from happening. But Stevens maintains the 
     creation of the refuge was--at the time, at least--a small 
     price to pay for opening Prudhoe Bay and much of the rest of 
     the North Slope to oil exploration. The land order he wrote 
     more than 30 years ago contained no legal barriers to 
     drilling, he insists.
       ``The order specifically allowed oil and gas exploration in 
     the arctic range subject to stipulations to protect fish and 
     wildlife,'' Stevens said. ``I think it was a very good 
     deal.''

             [From the Anchorage Daily News, Aug. 11, 1994]

Penchant for Politics--Rule Change Enabled Hickel to Appoint Stevens to 
                                 Senate

                           (By David Whitney)

       Washington.--Ted Stevens says he had no clue he would 
     become Alaska's next U.S. senator when E.L. ``Bob'' Bartlett 
     died in 1968.
       In fact, Stevens may have been the politician least likely 
     to replace the popular Democratic incumbent.
       After completing a four-year stint with the Eisenhower 
     administration, where he rose to be top lawyer at the 
     Interior Department, Stevens had packed up his wife, Ann, and 
     their five small children and headed for Anchorage in 1961.
       He opened a law practice representing, among other clients, 
     oil companies seeking to drill on state leases. He also did 
     legal work for the state's two largest newspapers--The 
     Anchorage Times and the Anchorage Daily News.
       And, less than a year after leaving Washington, Stevens got 
     into politics.
       In 1962, he ran against U.S. Sen. Ernest Gruening and lost 
     to the Democrat by a 3-2 margin.
       He ran for the state House in 1964, won, and won again in 
     1966, the same year Wally Hickel was elected to his first 
     term as governor. Stevens served as House majority leader in 
     1967 and 1968.
       Stevens ran again for Gruening's seat in 1968, just months 
     before Bartlett's death, but this time he didn't even make it 
     into the general election. He lost the primary to Anchorage 
     banker Elmer Rasmuson. On the Democratic side of the ballot, 
     Mike Gravel beat Gruening, then did the same thing to 
     Rasmuson in the general election.
       What seemed pretty well-established by the time Bartlett 
     died in December 1966 was that the cigar-smoking Stevens 
     didn't have much of a statewide following.
       In his book on Bartlett, University of Alaska history 
     professor Claus M, Naske said Bartlett had been having heart 
     trouble long before he was hospitalized in Cleveland in 
     November 1968. Until his heart surgery, however, it appears 
     that Bartlett's declining health was little-known in Alaska.
       Nonetheless, Republican leaders in the state legislature 
     were aware that both of the state's U.S. senators--Bartlett 
     and Gruening--were getting along in years and they wanted to 
     make sure Hickel could pick a fellow Republican as successor.
       At the time, state law required the governor to appoint 
     someone of the imcumbent's party. Republican lawmakers, who 
     for the first time since statehood held a majority in both 
     houses of the legislature and also had a Republican governor, 
     set out to change the law in early 1967.
       The sponsor of the legislation was Senate Majority Leader 
     John Butrovich. He said in a recent interview that he had no 
     idea that the change in the appointments law would be used so 
     soon.
       He said he was aware that Bartlett had health problems but 
     he never suspected how serious they were.
       ``When he passed away, it sure was a surprise to me,'' 
     Butrovich said.
       The legislation quickly moved to the House, where Stevens 
     was in charge of the agenda. But Stevens says he doesn't 
     remember much about it and certainly didn't expect to be its 
     first beneficiary. The new rule took effect in mid-1967.
       ``I had no inkling that I would be appointed should there 
     be a vacancy.'' Stevens said. ``I had no reason to believe we 
     would have a vacancy. I considered Bartlett's health to be 
     robust.''
       Anchorage lawyer Joe Josephson, who worked in Bartlett's 
     Senate offices between 1957 and 1960, said he can understand 
     how Alaskans could have been ignorant about Bartlett's 
     health.
       ``My general impression was that he had a lot of ailments 
     but it never affected his performance,'' Josephson said. 
     ``It's fair to say that I doubt he sent out bulletins on his 
     condition. He would not have been very forthcoming about 
     health problems.''
       Indeed, an Associated Press report of Bartlett's death at 
     the time made no mention of persistent health problems.
       Had the law not been changed, the most likely prospect to 
     fill Bartlett's seat would have been Edgar Paul Boyko, a 
     Democrat whom Hickel had appointed attorney general.
       Boyko still thinks about the Republicans' maneuvering.
       ``I don't think it was aimed at me personally,'' Boyko said 
     recently, ``It was aimed at heading the Democrats off at the 
     pass. But Stevens had no reason to think that he would have 
     been Hicken's first choice, either.''


                           hickel's quandary

       Bartlett's death on Dec. 11, 1968, set off an immediate 
     scramble for a replacement. Among the strongest contenders 
     were Elmer Rasmuson and Hickel's longtime friend Carl Brady. 
     Stevens' name, though mentioned, was not prominent on 
     anyone's list--except Hickel's.
       Hickel was in Washington at the Shoreham Hotel on Dec. 11, 
     awaiting President-elect Richard Nixon's announcement of a 
     slate of Cabinet nominations--including Hickel's for 
     Secretary of the Interior.
       ``I was handed a note that Bartlett had died,'' Hickel 
     recalls. ``I went over to (Nixon) and he mentioned that he 
     knew Ted.
       ``Nixon said `Wally, what are you going to do?''' Hickel 
     said, ``I told him the people I had in mind. There was 
     Rasmuson, Brady and Stevens.
       ``The president looked at me and said, `Wally, do you have 
     the courage to appoint Ted?''' Hickel said.
       ``And I said, `I want to do what is right,''' Hickel said. 
     ``Carl Brady was a close friend of mine. I had known Rasmuson 
     for many, many years. But Ted Stevens was a survivor, in my 
     opinion.''
       Once the tenacious Stevens was in office, Hickel was 
     convinced, no candidate would be able to unseat him.
       Stevens insists he was unaware any of this was going on.
       He said he and Ann were in Mazatlan, on the first real 
     vacation they had taken since they were married in 1952.
       ``We got a collect telegram,'' he said. ``It said `Call 
     Hickel.'''
       Stevens said he telephoned Juneau and learned of Bartlett's 
     death. ``Hickel told me that he wanted me to come back and 
     talk to him about taking Bartlett's place.''
       On the way back from Mexico, Stevens stopped in Seattle for 
     a meeting with Hickel about the Senate seat, setting off 
     speculation that he might be a candidate for the job. But 
     news reports at the time said Stevens was more likely to go 
     to Washington to work with Hickel at the Interior Department 
     than to join the U.S. Senate.
       Stevens put that speculation to rest when he flew into 
     Anchorage the next day. Stevens said the only way he would 
     return to Washington would be as U.S. senator.
       Stevens' oldest child, Susan Covich, remembers her father 
     and mother gathering the children in their Anchorage home 
     about this time to discuss the possibility of moving to the 
     capital. Covich was 15.
       ``It was definitely a family discussion as to whether we 
     would go,'' she said.
       Covich, now a computer tutor at a North Kenai elementary 
     school, said the discussion came as a surprise to her 
     because, after her father's primary defeat in August, ``there 
     was some talk of him stepping out of politics for a while.''
       Stevens seemed like a long shot for the Senate job. 
     Interior Republicans were supporting Butrovich for the 
     appointment. And, when Robert A. Davenny, chairman of the 
     state Republican Party, called a meeting of the state central 
     committee to recommend names for the seat, Stevens at first 
     didn't make the list.
       The central committee ultimately sent Hickel a more 
     expansive list of 10 people for the seat. Stevens' name had 
     been added, along with two members of the ultra-conservative 
     John Birch Society.
       Within a couple of days, Hickel had narrowed his choice to 
     Brady and Stevens. His problem, he said, was that sometime 
     before he had promised Brady to appoint him to any vacancy.
       Hickel summoned both men to his Anchorage home Dec. 23 to 
     talk about the seat. By the time they arrived, Brady had 
     already concluded that Hickel really wanted Stevens and that 
     he should bow out.
       ``My wife and I decided that, why would we want to be back 
     in Washington if the governor didn't want me there?'' Brady 
     said. ``I agreed to withdraw if Hickel would appoint 
     Stevens.''
       ``There's no question Hickel did the right thing,'' said 
     Brady, who went on to make a fortune as operator of Era 
     Aviation. ``Ted is more popular with Democrats and 
     Republicans. He is well-loved by everybody. I am more 
     conservative.''
       Stevens said he was stunned by Brady's decision.
       ``I was really very humbled,'' Stevens said. ``I told Carl 
     that he had a commitment from Hickel, that he could have held 
     Hickel to it, and I think Hickel would have stayed with it.''
       Sitting in Hickel's home Dec. 23, just minutes after the 
     governor announced Stevens' appointment, Stevens pulled a 
     dollar bill from his wallet.
       Stevens signed his name to one end and handed it to Brady 
     to sign the other. Stevens tore the bill in two, giving Brady 
     the half with Stevens' signature.
       ``I said, `If you ever need help, and you really want my 
     help from in or out of the Senate, send that to me.''' 
     Stevens said. ``I've never received the other half.''
       But, in 1978, when Hickel was running in the gubernatorial 
     primary against Republican incumbent Jay Hammond, Brady came 
     close to cashing in his half of the dollar bill.
       ``I wanted him to support Hickel in the primary,'' Brady 
     said. ``Ted refused. He said he couldn't oppose a Republican 
     incumbent.''
       By Senate tradition, members don't take sides in contested 
     state primary elections.
       ``I said that I'd never called in my half of the tab,'' 
     Brady said. ```What if I did that?' And he said, `My friend, 
     I'd have to resign from the Senate.'''
       Stevens doesn't remember the incident but, whether he was 
     serious or not about leaving the Senate, that was that. Brady 
     dropped the matter. Stevens didn't support anybody in the 
     primary, and Hickel lost.

             [From the Anchorage Daily News, Aug. 12, 1994]

          Bitter Battle--No Love Lost Between Stevens, Gravel

                           (By David Whitney)

       Washington.--One of the biggest influences on the Senate 
     career of Ted Stevens was Mike Gravel, and not a moment of 
     their 12-year relationship was pleasant.
       Years after Gravel, a maverick Democratic senator, was 
     unseated by Republican newcomer Frank Murkowski in 1980, 
     Stevens still seems haunted by the man.
       They fought over just about every Alaska issue that came up 
     before Congress.
       They disagreed over extending the U.S. territorial limit 
     200 miles out to sea--the catalyst for the Magnuson Fishery 
     Conservation and Management Act of 1976, which gave Alaskans 
     a dominant voice in the management of commercial fishing in 
     federal waters off the Alaska coast.
       They fought over the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement 
     Act. They feuded over the 1973 Trans-Alaska Pipeline 
     Authorization Act. And--most famously and bitterly--they 
     fought over the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation 
     Act of 1980.
       Gravel thinks the animosity resulted from the 1968 
     election, which he won by defeating incumbent Ernest Gruening 
     in the Democratic primary and then beating Anchorage banker 
     Elmer Rasmuson in the November general election.
       Stevens had lost to Rasmuson in the Republican primary. 
     Gravel, who now lives in California, thinks Stevens blamed 
     him for attracting Democrats who, Stevens felt, would 
     otherwise have crossed over and helped him beat Rasmuson in 
     the primary.
       Stevens saw Gravel as a grandstander and himself as the 
     pragmatic workhorse willing to cut the best deals he could 
     for the state--even when the best deal was not popular in 
     Alaska.
       Year by year, the feud worsened.
       It reached its pinnacle in the congressional battle over 
     ANILCA, finally enacted in August 1980.
       President Jimmy Carter had made the lands act his top 
     environmental priority. The final bill placed 104.3 million 
     acres of the state under federal protection, more than 
     doubling the size of the nation's park and refuge system and 
     nearly tripling the amount of land set aside as wilderness in 
     the country.
       Gravel wanted to prevent any bill from passing, while 
     Stevens believed stonewalling would only make things worse.


                           compromise battle

       In October 1978, with the Carter administration threatening 
     to use presidential authority to lock up Alaska lands from 
     state selection until a lands act was law, such a deal seemed 
     at hand. It involved turning about 96 million acres of 
     federal lands in the state into national parks, refuges and 
     preserves.
       With environmentalists arguing for protection of even more 
     lands, Stevens warned that the compromise was about as good a 
     deal as the state was likely to get. Under pressure from 
     state interests, Gravel indicated he would not block its 
     passage.
       But in the closing hours of the 1978 session, Gravel 
     suddenly made new demands. Among other things, he wanted 
     better access to oil drilling and mining sites and a ban on 
     any future taking of Alaska lands. Gravel's 11th-hour appeal 
     killed the compromise.
       ``You've got yourself in a big battle now, buddy,'' Stevens 
     screamed at Gravel on the Senate floor. Stevens said the 
     collapse would delay the transfer of 100 million acres of 
     federal lands still owed to the state and Natives under the 
     1958 Alaska Statehood Act and the 1971 Alaska Native Claims 
     Settlement Act.
       ``You carry that burden,'' Stevens told Gravel.
       Stevens wasn't alone in blasting Gravel.
       Sen. John Durkin, a New Hampshire Democrat who was one of 
     the Senate's leading environmentalists, attacked Gravel for 
     killing the compromise.
       ``The people of Alaska should know that this compromise 
     foundered on two words,'' Durkin said. ``Those two words are 
     Mike Gravel.''
       Later, when reporters asked him about Gravel's action, 
     Stevens said that ``my mistake was in trusting him.''
       Gravel responded by accusing Stevens of ``being prepared to 
     sell out too much.'' He returned to Alaska bent on convincing 
     voters that Stevens should not be returned to office in the 
     1978 elections.
       According to news accounts at the time, Gravel pumped 
     $24,000 of his own campaign money into the coffers of 
     Stevens' 1978 Democratic challenger, Anchorage electrical 
     contractor Don Hobbs. The money supported advertisements 
     telling Alaskans that a vote for Ted Stevens was a vote for 
     compromise. A vote for Hobbs was a vote to fight.
       The ads barely dented Stevens, who was easily re-elected.


                            crash kills wife

       But Gravel's action in killing the compromise meant a 
     continued congressional battle over the lands act. And that 
     meant more money was needed for the lobbying activities of 
     Citizens for the Management of Alaska Lands, the state's 
     leading organization battling environmentalists over the 
     bill.
       The group scheduled a fund-raiser for Dec. 4, 1978, in 
     Anchorage.
       Stevens was in Juneau that day for the second inauguration 
     of Gov. Jay Hammond. To make the fund-raiser after the 
     inauguration, Stevens, his wife, Ann, and five others boarded 
     a private Learjet for the trip to Anchorage.
       The plane hit gusty crosswinds and flipped on approach to 
     Anchorage International Airport. Stevens and Tony Motley, the 
     head of the citizen group, were the only survivors of the 
     crash.
       Ann's death devastated Stevens.
       Testifying before a House panel on the lands act two months 
     later, at the beginning of the 1979 legislative debate, the 
     grieving senator made statements widely interpreted as 
     accusing Gravel of killing his wife.
       Stevens said the flight wouldn't have been necessary if 
     Gravel had kept his word and supported the compromise.
       ``As I am sure you realize,'' Stevens somberly told the 
     House Interior Committee, ``the solution of the issue means 
     more to me than it did before.''
       ``I don't want to get personal about it, but I think, if 
     that bill had passed, I might have a wife sitting at home 
     when I get home tonight, too,'' Stevens said.
       Those remarks appear in newspaper accounts but not in the 
     printed transcript of the House hearing. They were most 
     likely excised by Stevens' aides, although no one interviewed 
     for this story could recall who might have done so. Aides to 
     senators often rewrite parts of hearing transcripts to make 
     their bosses look better.
       Stevens now says his remarks were misinterpreted.
       ``People said I accused him of killing Ann,'' Stevens said. 
     ``I was just stating a fact. We would not have gone on that 
     plane if it were not the fact that we had to raise money. But 
     I don't think he killed her.''
       Gravel said he interpreted Stevens' remarks as accusing him 
     of Ann's death. He also said he now doesn't think Stevens 
     meant it to come out that way.
       ``I think when things didn't go well, he focused his anger 
     on me,'' Gravel said. ``It was a ridiculous accusation. It 
     was a product of the trauma of the accident. It had to be the 
     trauma. He is not an unstable person.''
       By this time, Alaskans were wondering if the intensifying 
     hostilities between Stevens and Gravel would undermine their 
     interests.
       Hammond and several other government officials convened a 
     ``unity meeting'' in 1979 to urge the two senators to present 
     a common front.
       The open hostilities subsided. But Gravel, facing re-
     election in 1980, continued to fight any lands act while 
     Stevens worked with Senate and House leaders to craft the 
     best deal he could.
       The final deal that cleared Congress, as Stevens predicted, 
     locked up more land than the 1978 compromise.
       The 1978 deal would have protected 96 million acres, 
     putting 50 million acres of that into wilderness off-limits 
     to any form of development. The final bill protected 104.3 
     million acres, of which nearly 58 million acres was 
     wilderness.
       According to Steve Silver, who worked on the lands act for 
     Stevens, the difference between the two versions was more 
     than just the additional 8 million acres of land.
       The 1978 compromise, said Silver, ``had smaller parks and 
     refuges, more carve-outs for mining and larger preserves 
     where hunting was allowed,'' he said.
       But Gravel said he also objected to the final version of 
     the lands act because it contained an automatic $40 million 
     annual appropriation for logging in the Tongass National 
     Forest. He opposed the subsidy on principle and predicted, 
     correctly as it turned out, that the provision would make 
     subsidized logging in the forest a continuing controversy.
       Gravel's objections made no difference, however. The lands 
     act was approved Nov. 12 in a lame-duck congressional session 
     just eight days after Murkowski defeated Gravel's bid for re-
     election.
       Gravel said he has no regrets about trying to stop the bill 
     in the hope that a less restrictive version would be approved 
     in 1981, when Ronald Reagan would be president and the Senate 
     would be controlled by Republicans.
       ``Had we delayed, I thought we could bring about a more 
     balanced bill,'' Gravel said.
       Stevens also voted no on the bill. Even though he had 
     helped work it into its final form, he thought it was still 
     too restrictive.
       Even today, Stevens winces at the mention of Gravel's name. 
     He began a series of interviews for this profile saying that 
     he didn't want to talk about Gravel. Although he reluctantly 
     answered a few questions, he did so in terse responses and 
     never spoke kindly of his old foe.
       But incidents recounted by friends and former aides of 
     Stevens indicate his feelings have slowly softened.
       Tim McKeever, Stevens' top aide in 1980, said he was at 
     Stevens' home that November watching election returns showing 
     Murkowski defeating Gravel.
       ``I remember Stevens saying, `I wonder how his kids must 
     feel,''' McKeever said, ``My impression is that Stevens felt 
     genuine concern about what Gravel's family must be feeling.''
       The second incident was in 1985, at a surprise birthday 
     party for Ron Birch, a former Stevens aide who now is a 
     Washington, D.C., lawyer and lobbyist.
       Birch said Gravel was at the party when Stevens arrived.
       ``Stevens came up to me and said that it is time to stop 
     this,'' Birch said, ``And then he went over and shook Mike's 
     hand.''
       Stevens remembers that event but said it didn't clear the 
     air.
       ``It was a gesture on my part that has never been repeated 
     by Gravel,'' Stevens said.
       Gravel is sorry now he didn't reciprocate.
       ``It's always been a personal regret to me'' Gravel said. 
     ``It's unfortunate because he is a very good person. We just 
     got off on the wrong foot.''

            [From the Anchorage Dailey News, Aug. 13, 1994]

      Stevens' Priorities Change After Marriage, Birth of Daughter

                           (By David Whitney)

       Washington.--The death of his first wife, in 1978, began a 
     difficult transition to a new life for Sen. Ted Stevens.
       As he grieved, he came to regret all the years he had 
     worked around the clock, leaving Ann at home to take care of 
     their five children.
       ``I was busy trying to earn a living, working hard no 
     matter where it was and what we did,'' Stevens said, ``And 
     the time when I came to the Senate--my God, what a period.
       ``We were constantly on the move, plus it was hard to 
     campaign. One year I was away from home 50 weekends * * * 
     going to Alaska, going to make speeches, raising money,'' he 
     said, ``I spent a lot of time away from my family.''
       In December 1980, Stevens married Catherine Bittner 
     Chandler, the lawyer daughter of a prominent Alaska family. 
     Catherine's roots, like Ann's, were solidly Democratic and 
     liberal. Lily, his sixth child, was born the following 
     summer.
       Lily's birth reinvigorated Stevens, who was then 57.
       ``It was wonderful,'' Stevens said. ``Not many people have 
     the privilege of being a father at that age.''
       ``I've talked to a lot of fathers who have children later 
     in life, who have had two families,'' Catherine said. ``I 
     think Ted is no different than almost any that I have talked 
     to.
       ``The first time, you really have to be busy going to the 
     office, and you don't really think about it when you're young 
     and making your career,'' she said. ``When they have a child 
     later, it's, `What's this precious little thing?' It's really 
     exciting for them. It's not that it wasn't exciting in the 
     beginning. It's just that they were dedicated to making a 
     living.''
       Stevens' children from his first marriage are adults now, 
     most with their own families.
       Susan Covich, his oldest daughter, is 40. She's married, 
     has children of her own and is a computer tutor for students 
     at North Star Elementary School in North Kenai. Elizabeth 
     Stevens, 39, works with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services 
     in Colorado. Walter Stevens is a multimedia management 
     specialist in Arizona. Ted Stevens, Jr., 37, just completed 
     law school in California, and is awaiting results of the July 
     bar examination. Ben Stevens, 35, is a fishing vessel captain 
     living in Anchorage.
       Susan and Ben said in interviews they remember their father 
     being gone a lot when they were children. Many weekends, a 
     baby sitter would move into their house while Stevens and his 
     wife were off in Alaska. But they said they don't have any 
     regrets.
       ``I remember Dad working hard during the week and playing 
     hard on the weekends,'' said Covich.
       She said her father was especially busy in 1971, her senior 
     year in high school. Stevens was working long hours on the 
     Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and on trans-Alaska 
     pipeline legislation.
       ``We didn't get much of a chance to see him,'' Covich said. 
     But still, she said, her father made time for important 
     family events, including her high school graduation.
       Ben was 9 when his parents moved the family to Washington. 
     He said he never felt neglected during his father's frequent 
     absences.
       ``He was dedicated to his job,'' Ben said. ``As we grow 
     older, we realize this.''
       He said his father has ``mellowed'' since Lily's birth, and 
     dotes on his youngest child.
       ``He is not as strict as he used to be,'' Ben said. ``He 
     ran a regimented family when we were younger.''
       ``It is fortunate that he gets a chance to do what he 
     thinks he should have done (with us).''
       Stevens' new family in 1981 came just as he reached the 
     pinnacle of his power in the Senate.


                             costly defeat

       In 1975, Stevens was elected chairman of the Republican 
     Senatorial Campaign Committee, which raised money to elect 
     Republicans to the chamber. Republicans were worried that 
     voters would savage the party in the 1976 elections because 
     of the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President 
     Richard Nixon in August 1974.
       But, when all the votes were tabulated, Senate Republicans 
     had held their ground with 38 seats. Two months later, 
     Stevens was unanimously elected Republican whip, or assistant 
     leader--the party's second-highest post in the Senate.
       In 1980, Republicans riding on the coattails of Ronald 
     Reagan won control of the Senate for the first time since 
     1954, and Stevens was elevated from minority whip to majority 
     whip. The job gave him considerable influence over the 
     Senate's agenda, a large office suite in the Capitol and a 
     chauffeured car.
       In 1984, Stevens ran for majority leader, the top job in 
     the Senate. He lost to Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., by three votes.
       Dole was seen as more likely to run the Senate 
     independently from the Reagan White House, according to 
     newspaper reports at the time.
       But Stevens thinks power politics was partly to blame for 
     his defeat. He said some Republicans on whom he had counted 
     instead voted for Dole because the Kansan's election meant 
     new committee positions for them.
       Stevens was devastated by the loss. He had had to give up 
     the job of whip to run, and the Dole victory ended his 10-
     year climb up the leadership ladder.
       But the defeat improved the personal side of Stevens' life. 
     For the eight years he was whip, he had arrived early to open 
     the Senate and stayed late to close it.
       ``Now I can take Lily (then 3) to school in the morning and 
     maybe even pick her up at night sometimes,'' Stevens said 
     after the vote. ``It's not all bad.''
       The aftermath of that defeat has led to some of the best 
     years in Stevens' public life, he said in a recent interview.
       In 1985, Dole appointed Stevens chairman of a Senate group 
     created to observe arms-control negotiations in Geneva. With 
     most of the pressing Alaska issues already resolved, the 
     appointment gave Stevens the chance to travel frequently with 
     Catherine and Lily.
       ``We flew Alaska salmon over to Geneva and had parties for 
     the Russians,'' he said. ``First they came alone, then they 
     came with their wives. Before we were through they were 
     walking around the lake with us and we were talking to them 
     on Sunday afternoon. Those were good days.''


                           financial problems

       But the private side of Stevens' life was anything but 
     comfortable. He was in deep money trouble.
       In 1979, three years after helping shepherd the Magnuson 
     Fishery Conservation and Management Act through Congress, 
     Stevens and nine partners invested in the industry the act 
     was intended to stimulate. They built a $2 million crab boat 
     and christened it the ``Lady Ann,'' in honor of Stevens' 
     first wife.
       Stevens said at the time that his work on the Magnuson Act 
     was no ethical bar to investing in the fishery, adding that 
     ``I'd like to be accused of being the only senator that owns 
     a fleet of fishing boats.''
       The investors included Catherine's brother, William 
     Bittner, and Ron Birch, a former Stevens aide who had formed 
     a law partnership with Bittner.
       Birch said in a recent interview that each investor put up 
     $20,000 to secure a bank note. Cash calls came later for 
     equipment and supplies, he said.
       By the time Lady Ann hit the water, the crab industry was 
     on the rocks, and investors in the vessel were facing 
     payments on a debt with interest rates soaring to 21 percent, 
     Birch said.
       Stevens' partners were lawyers and businessmen making more 
     money than he did as a senator. They could handle the strain, 
     but Stevens said he had trouble making his payments.
       But the bigger burden, Stevens said, was Catherine's 
     investment in an Arizona cattle ranch.
       Neither would go into much detail but Catherine said her 
     investment in the 39,000-acre ranch ran into problems with 
     the Internal Revenue Service.
       ``We had a big tax bill,'' Catherine said. ``We had been 
     hassling with them over depreciation schedules and various 
     things like that. The problem is that if you owe back taxes, 
     with the interest, it was enough money. I don't even remember 
     how much money it was.''
       In December 1986 the couple sold their suburban Maryland 
     house to pay off debts and rented a home in Washington, D.C.
       ``Those were bad days,'' Stevens said. ``Those were the 
     tough times.''
       Frustrated by his own financial predicament and facing 
     another re-election campaign in 1990, Stevens seemed 
     discouraged.
       In an interview in 1988, he complained about how much he 
     had given up for a public-service career. He said he 
     considered the 1990 election ``pivotal'' for him and the 
     state.
       ``Politics is a very fickle thing,'' he said. ``I see this 
     election as determining whether the state wants someone with 
     great seniority.
       ``I just want people to understand the commitment I'm 
     making if I stay on,'' he said. ``This is a period I could go 
     out and make $1 million a year without any question.''
       Then, in March 1989, it seemed Stevens might not be a 
     candidate for re-election.
       President George Bush's nomination of John Tower to be 
     secretary of Defense was rejected by the Senate, and the 
     White House went searching for a less-controversial candidate 
     who would be easy to confirm. Stevens' name was among those 
     floated for the job.
       Sean O'Keefe, then Stevens' top military aide, said he 
     thinks Stevens was seriously considered.
       According to O'Keefe; who later became Navy secretary under 
     Bush, the White House called the morning of March 10--the day 
     the nomination was to be announced--wondering where Stevens 
     could be reached, if needed.
       Less than an hour before the announcement, Stevens was in 
     his office anxiously contemplating his options.
       Alaskans had repeatedly elected him to be their senator, 
     Stevens told a reporter that morning. That was not something 
     that could be easily dismissed.
       ``I have a real feeling about the presidency,'' Stevens 
     later said. ``If the president asks you to do something, if 
     it's within your power, I think you should do it. I never 
     faced that problem.''
       In the end, he never had to. The Defense Department job 
     went to former Wyoming Rep. Dick Cheney, who had served in 
     the U.S. House with Bush.
       Stevens' reaction was to dismiss the episode as a flash in 
     the pan. He said he doesn't think Bush ever seriously 
     considered him because he had backed Bob Dole--not Bush--in 
     the 1988 Republican primary.
       ``Bush personally asked me for my support. I told him that 
     Dole has been very generous to me and that I intend to 
     support Dole,'' Stevens said. ``Presidents don't forget 
     things like that.''
       Bush wouldn't comment on how seriously he considered 
     Stevens for the job. The ex-president is writing a book and 
     ``he's keeping his powder dry on this one,'' figures aide Jim 
     McGrath. ``I don't think he wants to scoop himself.''


                          finding the balance

       Today, at 70, Stevens seems more at peace. He travels to 
     the state about 10 times a year, staying when time allows at 
     his Girdwood chalet--his official residence. Though he still 
     maintains a rigorous schedule in Washington, he takes time to 
     drive Lily and her schoolmates to soccer games.
       But he's as political as ever. He's already said he plans 
     to run for re-election in 1996. And, on the Senate floor, he 
     is as tenacious as ever, doing everything he can to keep 
     federal money flowing north.
       Thanks to the dying gift of one of his first friends in 
     Alaska, his own money problems seem to be behind him.
       That friend was former Fairbanks Daily News-Miner publisher 
     C.W. Snedden, who died in 1989.
       Snedden willed Stevens one of his most cherished 
     possessions--a 55-foot motor yacht called the Lorichuck. 
     Unable to afford the vessel's moorage fees in Seattle and in 
     need of cash himself, Stevens put the vessel up for sale at 
     an asking price of $650,000.
       It is not clear how much the vessel actually fetched. But a 
     Seattle boat broker said about the time the yacht was sold 
     that he knew of a pending $420,000 offer. Stevens said he and 
     Catherine used the proceeds to pay off bills and buy the 
     house they had been renting.
       Stevens described Snedden's bequest as ``one of those great 
     testimonials to friendship.''
       ``He had personal knowledge of my personal finances over 
     the years,'' Stevens said in a 1989 interview. ``It was a 
     gesture to help me stay in the Senate.''
  Mr. PACKWOOD. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                              rural health

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, New York State is best known for its 
large metropolitan areas; however, there are nearly 3.1 million rural 
residents in the State. The rural population in New York is larger than 
the population of 21 States. In many rural areas of New York, the 
existing health care delivery system is inadequate, inappropriate, or 
generally unavailable.
  Rural communities of New York State and the Nation are experiencing 
serious challenges in attracting and retaining health care providers 
and health care services. Hospitals and primary care facilities 
continue to close. Communities are concerned about the availability of 
emergency medical services [EMS]. Physicians are retiring and some are 
leaving the rural areas which only adds to the health professional 
shortage problem.
  In recognizing the needs of rural areas, the Federal Government has 
supported initiatives to assist States and local communities in meeting 
their health care needs. New York State is one of seven States that 
receive grants under the Essential Access Community Hospital [EACH] and 
the Rural Primary Care Hospital [RPCH] program. These grants help 
develop rural health networks by linking at least one full service 
hospital [EACH] and one or more limited service hospitals [RPCH's]. 
However, even before the Federal program was initiated in 1989, New 
York State supported the development of rural health networks.
  Currently, New York's rural health network initiative supports four 
rural health network demonstration sites--Upper Hudson (Adirondack 
Rural Health Network), Chenango Health Network, Northern New York Rural 
Health Care Alliance, Southern Tier Healthcare System--and has been 
working with a number of other rural provider groups to develop 
additional integrated networks of health care providers. Specifically, 
the State of New York is helping networks to coordinate and integrate 
services in three major service categories: (a) hospital services; (b) 
primary care services; and (c) emergency medical services. These 
services must be integrated both within each category and among the 
categories.
  The rural health amendments offered by Senator Daschle and other 
members of the rural coalition will certainly assist rural areas in New 
York. Providers in underserved rural Counties such as Jefferson, Essex, 
Yates, and Cortland would be eligible to apply for the following: 
Funding for the development of health care plans and networks; bonus 
payments under Medicare for primary care physicians and nonphysician 
practitioners practicing in rural areas; tax incentives for health care 
providers who locate in rural areas; more generous expensing for 
medical equipment used to provide primary care services in rural areas; 
additional funding for the National Health Service Corp.
  All rural areas, some 44 counties in New York State, would benefit 
from the following provision: Grants for the development of rural 
telemedicine; rural emergency medical services [EMS] program grants; 
higher payments for small rural Medicare dependent hospitals; Medicare 
rural health transition grants for rural hospitals to modify the extent 
and type of services they provide; the rural based managed care program 
to increase the number of rural managed care plans.
  Indeed, this is a significant step toward expanding our capacity to 
delivery health care services in rural communities.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                Amendment No. 2569 to Amendment No. 2560

(Purpose: To clarify the grounds for the nonrenewal or termination of a 
        health plan in the event of the nonpayment of premiums)

  Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask 
for its immediate consideration.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The bill clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Maine [Mr. Mitchell] *proposes an 
     amendment numbered 2569 to amendment No. 2560.

  Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of 
the amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:

       On page 1432, strike lines 21 through 24, and insert the 
     following:

     SEC. 10135. PROVISIONS REGARDING NONPAYMENT OF PREMIUMS.

       (a) In General.--A health plan may terminate coverage if 
     amounts owed to the plan for a month with respect to an 
     individual or an individual's family members have not been 
     fully paid for a time period established under State law, or 
     in the absence of such a law, a period of not less than 60 
     days, and the heath plan has made reasonable attempts to 
     collect such amounts.
       (b) Notice.--Notwithstanding any other provision of this 
     Act, a health plan may terminate coverage for nonpayment of 
     premiums under subsection (a) only after providing notice of 
     amounts overdue (in a form and manner and at such times as 
     prescribed by the appropriate certifying authority).

  Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. President, under the legislation which I 
introduced, a sponsor of a standard health plan has the authority to 
terminate an insurance policy for nonpayment of premiums. That is an 
authority which currently exists and is administered under State law 
with respect to insurance policies.
  Under the legislation, if 95 percent of coverage is obtained by the 
year 2000, then no employer requirement with respect to participation 
in the cost of insurance would be required, and the status as I have 
just described it would be permanent thereafter.
  So under the amendment, for at least a period of 7 years, and then 
depending upon what occurred thereafter, possibly permanently a company 
would retain existing legal rights to terminate a policy for nonpayment 
of premiums.
  However, under the legislation, in the event that 95 percent of 
coverage is not achieved by the year 2000, and in the further event 
that Congress does not act thereafter to remedy that situation, then 
beginning in the year 2002 an employer requirement is created under 
which employers having 25 or more employees would be required to 
participate in the cost of health insurance for employees on a 50-50 
cost-sharing basis. Employees of firms with fewer than 25 employees 
would be exempt from that requirement.
  In order to prevent a situation under those circumstances in which an 
employee of a covered firm paid his or her premium but the employer 
failed to make the contribution required by law, the legislation is 
intended to prohibit termination of a policy in that circumstance; that 
is to say, in the event the employee paid his share of the premium and 
thought he was covered, but the employer failed to make his required 
payment, under which circumstance the concern was that the employee's 
policy would be canceled even though the employee had paid his share 
and might not even be aware of the employer's lack of contribution.
  The language of the proposal which was intended to achieve this 
narrow result has been interpreted by some in a way which creates an 
ambiguity and which some have suggested prohibits in all circumstances, 
at all times, under the legislation, a circumstance in which a policy 
could never be canceled for nonpayment of premium.
  That is clearly not the intent of the legislation, and this amendment 
is intended to resolve any ambiguity in that regard.
  The amendment provides that a health plan may terminate coverage if 
the premiums are not paid for a time period as established under State 
law, and if there is no State law, then a period of 60 days.
  Now, I emphasize again, this applies only in the period after the 
year 2002 if the employer requirement is triggered and that employer 
does not meet the responsibility of the law even though the employee 
may have paid his premium or, of course, in the event the employee did 
not pay his premium.
  Almost all and perhaps all States have grace periods prior to the 
cancellation of policies. They generally are in the range of 30 days. 
They vary somewhat depending upon the type of policy and the State.
  So what this says is in that situation, if a premium is not paid 
either by the individual employee or by the employer, the termination 
of the policy could occur subject to State law with respect to the 
grace period.
  In the event that the nonpayment of premium by either the individual 
employee or the employer occurred and the State did not have a law 
containing a grace period, the grace period would be 60 days.
  So, Mr. President, this is an effort to clarify a possible ambiguity 
in the manner in which the underlying legislation is interpreted and to 
make clear again, first, that for the period between 1995 and 2002, and 
perhaps on a permanent basis, depending upon whether the employer 
requirement is triggered, insurance companies and other health plan 
providers retain their right to terminate policies for nonpayment of 
premiums consistent with applicable State law.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?
  Mr. MITCHELL. Yes, certainly.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. If I may, as the majority leader knows, this was a 
section that troubled me very greatly. I think it is title X, section 
10135. It is my understanding of what the majority leader is saying 
that this section, first of all, does not come in until after the year 
2000; and second, it applies only if the mandate is triggered and the 
employer does not pay his share. Am I correct in this?
  Mr. MITCHELL. If the employer does not pay his share or if the 
employee does not pay his share.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. My next question is what would happen after the 60 
days expired?
  Mr. MITCHELL. In the event that the premium remained unpaid and the 
plan had made a reasonable attempt to collect and had notified the 
employee, the policy would be terminated.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. The policy would terminate?
  Mr. MITCHELL. Yes.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. So there would be no need for someone to sue to gain 
payment; the policy would terminate?
  Mr. MITCHELL. That is right. The insurer, the insuring party has the 
power and authority to terminate the policy as under current law.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. I thank the majority leader very much. I think that 
is a substantial improvement, and I am very pleased to see it.
  So I thank the majority leader.
  Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. President, that completes my explanation of the 
amendment.
  I was earlier advised and announced that no recorded vote would be 
necessary.
  I will be pleased now to yield the floor and permit my colleague from 
Oregon to make such remarks as he may wish.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon is recognized.
  Mr. PACKWOOD. Mr. President, there will be no vote on this amendment, 
and we will be prepared to accept it.
  I think a few Members have some things they would like to say, and it 
is understandable. I appreciate the majority leader's reasonableness on 
this.
  All you have to do is stand here on the floor next to the majority 
leader, 5 feet away, and listen to the demands on his time: Please vote 
by 5 o'clock; I want to be home by 5 p.m.; Do not vote before 6 because 
I will not be back. And 100 voices, majority and minority Members, a 
cacophony of people talking to him. It is understandable that you 
cannot know everything that is in your own bill. You cannot go through 
1,400 pages and find every possible permutation.
  When he says the bill was intended not to cancel employees if the 
employer did not pay the premiums, I realize that in the hearts and 
minds of the drafters, that is what they hoped.
  It is simply, I think, not unlike the $10,000 penalty we had 
yesterday. It slipped into the bill somehow unnoticed.
  This slipped into the bill somehow unnoticed. And my hunch is there 
are other things in the bill unnoticed that will be unearthed before we 
are finished.
  I am delighted the majority leader caught the error and was willing 
at least to remedy this slight mistake in the bill.
  But I say again, I can perfectly understand how it is impossible to 
know everything in a bill even when it is your own bill.
  Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. President, I thank my colleague for his kind 
remarks.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.
  Mr. MITCHELL. I am sure the Senator has had the same experience. In 
1986, he managed the Tax Reform Act, which was even longer than the 
bill that is now before us and which had a lot of arcane provisions 
that were hard to understand, some deliberately so and some not.
  So I thank the Senator.
  Mr. PACKWOOD. I had the advantage that I discovered, in taxation, 
most people concede they do not know and do not bother you. In health, 
everyone knows what it is about.
  Therefore, the majority leader has to put up with a lot more than I 
had to put up with.
  Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. President, we are prepared to proceed to act on the 
amendment by voice vote at this point.
  Mr. D'AMATO. Mr. President, will the majority leader yield for an 
observation?
  Mr. MITCHELL. Yes.
  Mr. D'AMATO. Mr. President, first of all, let me say personally that 
there is no one I respect more than the majority leader, both as a 
leader and for the way he conducts himself personally. There is no 
fairer or finer advocate than the majority leader.
  I say that because I do not want my remarks to be misinterpreted, 
because they may be, and they are, somewhat critical of the process we 
have engaged in. But we do not pick the process. Events, time, and 
other circumstances have thrust it upon us.
  I could not help but pick up on the leader's remarks about 1986 and 
the tax bill. Probably in my mind the greatest single mistake that I 
made--and I have made lots of them in terms of legislation I have voted 
for or against--was my vote for that 1986 tax bill. I remember coming 
down on the floor with Senator Dodd, my colleague, who I see over here. 
We fought like the dickens to keep the IRA's from being knocked out. We 
actually had the votes. And then, because of subtle pressure, et 
cetera, we lost it.
  We should have kept those IRA's. We fought in a bipartisan way. Now, 
years later, I have seen some of the Senators who worked assiduously to 
defeat us on that became the sponsors and champions of IRA's, working 
to reclaim them, to bring them back. I remember that.
  I remember provision after provision being worked against. I remember 
it was fashionable to get the real estate buys. It was, ``Let's get 
`em.'' And, by the way, we did it in a retroactively manner. We talk 
about the disaster that we crated with the banks. We helped bring some 
of that about because people who had contracts all of the sudden found 
the tax rules had changed retroactively. It did not matter that they 
had invested their life's savings. It was, after all, these real estate 
guys.
  I have no problem with saying that prospectively, in the future, we 
will not longer allow people to get these shelters. Some of those 
shelters were nonproductive.
  Now, why do I say that? Because there were provisions after 
provisions that I worked to change, and we did not change them. And 
there were some redeeming features in that bill. If you want to knock 
out tax relief for wealthy people that is not productive, fine. Do it 
prospectively, but do not reach back. That was wrong. But we did it 
because we needed the revenue,
  And I have to tell you something, we are doing things here in this 
bill because we are trying to meet goals and revenue targets. We do not 
come close to understanding the import of what we are doing in this 
bill.
  And in 1986, I am telling you again, I went down in that  well, and I 
went along with the crowd. I was wrong. And I vowed that when I feel 
strongly on a subject from now on, I am not going to keep quiet and I 
am not just going to go with the flow.

  And, again, there were redeeming aspects to the bill. I remember tax 
credits for working people. That is the way that I rationalized it in 
my mind. I think that was a good part of the 1986 bill. That really was 
good for working poor people.
  To my amazement, the leader voted against that tax bill. And I say to 
him, it is to his credit. I always said to myself, ``Yeah, Senator 
Mitchell voted the other way, and I applaud him. He stood up and he 
voted that way. I wish I had.''
  Mr. MITCHELL. If the Senator would yield, I thank the Senator for 
giving me credit, but I think I better make clear that I voted for it.
  Mr. D'AMATO. I always thought you voted the other way. I always gave 
you credit for that.
  Mr. MITCHELL. I appreciate the fact that for the past 8 years I have 
gotten credit for something which I did not do.
  Mr. D'AMATO. In my mind, you did. I was always amazed.
  Mr. MITCHELL. I thought one thing we better do around here now is 
correct the Record as soon as we can.
  Mr. D'AMATO. I was upset with myself for not having gone down there 
and voted that way. I will not tell you why. I try to do it in my 
diary. I hope the diary does not lie.
  But, it is one of the two incidents that I have cited in terms of 
lack of courage. It was my lack of courage at that time.
  Why do I bring this up? Because, it bears upon the leader's amendment 
to clarify what was done on page 1432, section 10135, lines 21 through 
24. And I understand his clarification.
  But I must say, when it comes to an issue, that is as important to 
the health and welfare of every American and every family as health 
reform, we should not be thrust in a position, any of us, where we are 
reading through this voluminous document in this manner.
  I do not lay blame upon anyone in this Chamber for our finding 
ourselves in this circumstance. But I do think we do ourselves and the 
people great harm if we attempt to proceed and enact legislation in 
this manner.
  And I think the reasons come down to, we find that it is important 
politically. I think we do damage to the political process--the 
governmental process--if we insist on pursuing this course.
  I believe the whole health care issue has been moved forward in a 
manner which has already resulted in some substantial improvements, 
which has already focused attention on some important issues.
  I give the President credit for that. I give Mrs. Clinton credit for 
that. We have seen greater cost containment in certain areas. In the 
private sector, we have seen hospitals, drug manufacturers, and others 
undertake certain actions that probably never would have been taken 
were it not for the seriousness of purpose that has arisen around 
addressing this important national issue.
  But I implore my friends and colleagues in this body, Democrats and 
Republicans, to take a step back now and let us see if we cannot 
continue the process of narrowing our differences, and attempting to 
come up with a bill that will do the job and not one which is driven by 
time or by elections; one in which we come together and do the business 
of the people the right way.
  That is the nature of the calls which I am getting from my 
constituents--not lobbyists, but New Yorkers. And by an overwhelming 
margin, about 3.1 to 1, the calls that come in are saying, ``Yes, we 
know there is a need for health care. Please don't rush to judgment.''
  I think this is a rush to judgment.
  I yield the floor.
  And I thank my distinguished friend and colleague for setting me 
straight on his 1986 vote.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.
  Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. President, we are prepared to proceed to have the 
amendment adopted.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there further debate?
  If not, the question is on agreeing to the amendment offered by the 
majority leader.
  The amendment (No. 2569) was agreed to.
  Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote by which 
the amendment was agreed to.
  Mr. DASCHLE. I move to lay that motion on the table.
  The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.


                          position on vote 290

  Mr. COHEN. Mr. President, I regret that earlier today a medical 
appointment prevented me from voting on an amendment offered by Senator 
Daschle which sought to expand access to health care in rural areas. 
Representing a rural State like Maine, I am well aware of the special 
problems that rural areas face. In fact, the first comprehensive health 
care bill I introduced in 1990 included a number of provisions to 
address the health care needs of rural areas. My efforts with respect 
to health care have routinely included particular focus on the need to 
expand quality health care services in Maine and other rural States. 
Accordingly, had I been able to vote, I would have joined my other 
colleagues in unanimously supporting the Daschle amendment.


                 federal employees health benefit plan

  Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I rise today to speak to the importance 
of opening up the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan to all 
Americans and to explain what this decision will mean to Federal 
employees. I would also like to respond to comments made by the senior 
Senator from Alaska who said two things that concern me:
  First, that Federal employees get less in the standard benefit 
package; and
  Second, that they get a supplemental benefit package not available to 
others.
  Opening up FEHBP is a wise decision. It allows Americans to have 
access to the very same choice of health insurance plans that we have, 
that the President has, that Federal employees have.
  FEHBP enrolls over 9 million employees and their families. It is a 
structure that exists everywhere in the country. You can go to 
Frederick, MD and there are FEHBP enrollees or you can go to Fairbanks, 
AK and there will be FEHBP enrollees. It is a system which is in place 
and it works for its enrollees. I am an FEHBP enrollee. I am a Blue 
Cross/Blue Shield standard option single only. I like my coverage and I 
think that it is only right that Americans have access to the same 
health insurance plans.
  But while are are opening up FEHBP, I have worked hard to make sure 
that we are not taking anything away from the Federal employees. When 
concerns were raised during the Labor Committee markup, I worked with 
the Federal employee unions to meet those concerns. They said that the 
bill treated them differently from other Americans and from what I 
could see they were right.
  Why was that?
  First, coverage might be lost for some Federal employees.
  Second, unlike workers in the private sector, Federal employees could 
not get a supplemental benefit package to close the gap between what 
they get in the standard package. Because the Office of Personnel 
Management is not required to offer supplemental plans to Federal 
employees, they could end up with less than they have now.
  So, I worked with Senator Kennedy in the Labor Committee markup to 
resolve these issues. I offered an amendment that was accepted that 
achieved the following goals:
  First, the Federal employees health benefit program must offer a 
supplemental benefit package;
  Second, it allows Federal employee organizations to meet and confer 
with O.P.M. for these policies and agree upon a contribution toward the 
premiums; and
  Third, it allows any American covered by a health plan offered by 
FEHBP to buy the FEHBP supplemental plan.
  This provision leveled the playing field. Federal employees would 
have access to supplemental benefit packages that many private sector 
employees now have access to and would continue to have access to 
through negotiations with their employers.
  We needed to correct this situation and this amendment allowed that. 
This is the provision that Senator Mitchell agreed to include in his 
bill and this is the understanding of the Federal employee unions.
  It doesn't mean that the Federal Government will necessarily pay for 
the supplemental benefits package for Federal employees. Nor does it 
mean that there will be a Federal contribution to non-Federal FEHBP 
enrollees who want to purchase a supplemental package.
  It simply means that Federal employees, like workers in private 
industry, can negotiate with their employers to receive a contribution 
toward a supplemental benefit. Federal employees are just being treated 
fairly--just like many other Americans.
  I hope this clarifies the record. I believe that we should have a 
health care system for all Americans--that is accessible, affordable, 
rewards people who play by the rules, and lets people choose their own 
providers. That is what this provision does. That is why opening up 
FEHBP is a good idea.

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