After weeks of rain and gloom, the sun smiled on Alaska's largest city Wednesday as people gathered from across the country to say their last goodbyes to former Sen. Ted Stevens. The rich, the famous and the politically powerful joined the everymen and everywomen who came to remember a man who fought for Alaska for nearly all his life. Among them was Vice President Joe Biden, who recalled first meeting Stevens after being elected to the Senate at age 29. Biden had just lost his wife and daughter in a car accident. Stevens asked him over to his house for dinner. The men would be colleagues and friends for decades. Biden most remembered Steven's undying energy in protecting Alaska.
"No state has ever had a more fierce defender of that state's way of life than Ted Stevens," Biden said.
Biden was joined at the memorial ceremony by at least a dozen other senators or former senators. Security for the event was heavy. The more than 60-name list of honorary pallbearers for Stevens read like a Who's Who of politics in Washington, D.C., and Alaska. Stevens' old friend Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, came to speak and praise Stevens. The two went way back, and Inouye was one of the few in the nation's Capitol who rallied to Stevens' side after he was charged with failing to report gifts on his senate disclosure forms in 2008. Stevens would end up convicted on the charges in late 2008, and then cleared when first the courts and then the Attorney General of the United States declared the Justice Department and the FBI had violated the rules of law in trying to convict him.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R- Utah, who was at the service, also stood up for Stevens in D.C. He testified on his behalf at his trial. When speaking outside of the Anchorage Baptist Temple with reporters, he said that the accusations and the mishandled case "was a travesty."
"It hurt him very deeply," Hatch said.
And it continued to hurt. There remained a black mark next to Stevens' name. He wanted to erase that, too. But he died in an Aug. 9 plane crash near Dillingham before he could do that. Inouye sought to do what Stevens was unable to do, declaring the former senator "vindicated" and "cleared of all charges." The comment drew enthusiastic applause from the audience. But there was also much applause throughout the service as Stevens' contributions to the state were recalled.
Some had to wonder if maybe God himself wasn't making a statement on Stevens' future with the changing of the weather Wednesday.
"We're having a senator's weather,'' said Barbara Mee, a longtime staffer who greeted many friends who had worked with her for Stevens.
It was the 15th anniversary of Mee's wedding. She remembered how Stevens had agreed to marry her on a golf course, though he hated golf.
"We have to laugh honey, or we continue to cry," she said.
It was hard for some to hold back tears when Jim Morhard, a visible reminder of the recent tragedy, was wheeled in at Anchorage Baptist Temple. A Washington, D.C., lobbyist and one-time Stevens chief of staff, he had his left arm in a splint and his right leg immobilized. He was one of four people who survived the plane crash that left Stevens dead midway through a fishing trip to a lodge owned by GCI, an Anchorage based telecommunications company. GCI founder Ron Duncan was an old Stevens friend and one of the honorary pallbearers. One of Duncan's top aides, executive Dana Tindall, died in the crash along with Stevens, her teenage daughter, Corey; lobbyist and lawyer Bill Phillips and pilot Terry Smith, the former chief pilot for Alaska Airlines. The four survivors were Phillips' 13-year-old son, Willy; former NASA head Sean O'Keefe, his son, Kevin, 19, and Morhard.
3,000 attend funeral
Some of those in attendance at the ceremony could be spotted discreetly taking photos of those they were unlikely to see elsewhere or possibly ever again. Some appeared to be recording the comments of Joe Biden on their I-phones.
Biden was in the same room with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for what was believed to be the first time since their "can I call you Joe" vice-presidential debate. Palin was there with husband Todd. She was joined by her replacement after resignation, Gov. Sean Parnell, and a gaggle of gubernatorial hopefuls chasing his seat in the upcoming election. Parnell was among the honorary pallbearers. Palin was not.
The honorary pallbearers made their way into the auditorium through a door held narrowly ajar by a trash can. "Stay nice and close to the person in front of you," a volunteer advised them.
They were an eclectic bunch: Barney Gottstein, who made his fortune as one of the founders of the Carr-Gottstein grocery empire; Dr. David McGuire, who from a base in Alaska pioneered arthroscopic knee surgery; Julie Kitka, an Alaska Native activist; and former Alaska Sen. Clem Tillion from Halibut Cove, a politician, businessman, raconteur, and Alaska character with a capital "C."
Baptist Temple preacher Jerry Prevo reviewed his open Bible in the hallway as these dignitaries and more moved toward the auditorium, and the Secret Service continued to worry over the security. Agents at one point checked to make sure both the Anchorage Police and Fire departments were standing by just in case. Firefighters at one point assured that if more support was needed other fire truckers were only minutes away. The worries proved unnecessary. Alaskans proved as obliging as the weather.
Up to 4,500 people had been expected for the memorial, but in the end it was estimated only about 3,000 turned up. Most of them fit into the 2,300-person auditorium. About 400 went into an overflow facility. The temple had prepared three such overflow facilities, but needed only one. Still, 3,000 people made Anchorage Baptist Temple for a time more populous than the city of Seward.
Inside the church, the many former Stevens' staff members in attendance wore round buttons sporting his old campaign logo. Honorary pallbearers wore flag pins designating Stevens' two loves, Alaska and America.
Security was minimal, but guard dogs were in the hallway outside the main auditorium and nervous Secret Service agents in oxfords and dark suits kept watch. Shortly after a military procession marched in to start ceremonies, they pushed volunteers inside the auditorium. It was all a little unusual for Alaska where the state's politicians live close to the people. Indeed, Stevens could sometimes be met hiking on an Alyeska Resort trail not far from his cabin -- what the national press called a "chalet'' during his trial -- he called home in Girdwood. His legal troubles had stemmed from the efforts made by friends, who also happened to be political contributors, to upgrade his humble abode there into something at least suitable for a smalltown mayor.
Stevens never lived lavishly. It wasn't his passion. Alaska was. Politician and statesman by vocation; he was by avocation a warrior for the home he adopted before statehood.
Ted Stevens' Alaska
A brash young man of 30, Stevens came north in 1952 to work in the boondocks town of Fairbanks in the financially struggling territory of Alaska. He died Aug. 9 the way so many famous Alaskans have died -- in a plane crash in one of the many still wild and remote parts of a state. He was 86 years old.
Everything changed between the time Stevens arrived on the edge of the frontier, and nothing changed. Today, the state remains largely wild, undeveloped and a haven for young people looking for adventure. Almost 50 years ago, Stevens got a $600 loan from his new bosses to finance a February drive up the Alaska Highway from Washington, D.C. A winter trek on the primitive Alcan, as the highway was then called, was not for the faint of heart. It opened the Harvard-educated attorney's eyes to how far the development of Alaska lagged behind the rest of the country.
Most of the rest of his life would be spent trying to change that. As the legislative counsel for the U.S. Interior Department in the mid-1950s, he marshaled the forces for Alaska statehood. The sign on the office of his door read "Alaskan Headquarters,'' and behind the door he worked hard to create a state out of the cold, harsh, largely uninhabited land some still thought of as "Seward's folly.'' To those in Interior at the time, he became known as "Mr. Alaska."
And he would almost always be Mr. Alaska. He returned to Alaska after statehood to try to help get built the Rampart dam, a massive hydroelectric project proposed for the Yukon River that would die, in part, because of the opposition of a riverboat captain from Fort Yukon named Don Young, who was destined to become an Alaska congressman.
Colleagues in the Alaska State House in the early 1960s, Young and Stevens stood on opposite sides of the dam issue, but they were destined to become allies on most other things in the years ahead.
Young spent two terms in the state House and another in the state Senate before winning election to the U.S. House. Stevens spent two terms in the state House before his old friend Hickel, then the governor, tapped Stevens to fill the U.S. Senate seat of the late Sen. Bob Bartlett.
Hickel, who died earlier this year of natural causes at the age of 90, made that appointment in December 1968. Stevens would remain Alaska's senator for the next four decades as he climbed to a position of national power. The Senate President Pro Tempore from 2003 to 2007, Stevens stood third in the line of succession to the President of the United States.
Not bad for a guy who once joked that Hickel "likes to say that he came to Alaska with 37 cents in his pocket. (But) I came $600 in debt." The two men became lions of Alaska politics and history, making it more than a little ironic the Anchorage memorial for Stevens was being held in Anchorage on Hickel's birthday. The two men had a lot in common. Relatively small in stature, both were huge in personality.
Hickel was the one-time welterweight amateur champion of Kansas. Stevens was for long time a student of the Oriental martial art Tae-Kwon-Do. Hickel was the driving force in bringing Anchorage back from the brink after the Good Friday earthquake of 1964. Stevens was a motor for Alaska development from 1968 through 2008.
He was a key player in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which resolved aboriginal land claims to open the door for construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, which brought the oil money that changed everything in Alaska. And Stevens was the force, along with the late Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, behind the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation Act that booted foreign fishermen off the rich grounds within 200 miles of the Alaska coast and set the state for development of major domestic fisheries.
Jackson was a longtime, liberal Democrat. Stevens, a decorated aviator from World War II, was a longtime conservative Republican. It didn't stop them from working together, but then Stevens was always willing to work with anyone he thought could help move his state forward.
When the Alaska regional Native corporations he had helped create to avoid a sad American legacy of failing tribal reservations ran into financial problems in their early years, Stevens worked both sides of the political aisle to help fashion tax breaks that helped the companies immeasurably. Later came provisions for federal contracting to favor the same companies, a moneymaking opportunity that continues to this day.
A big chunk of Alaska's economy today owes a debt of thanks to Stevens, who lost a closely contested election to Mark Begich just after his 2008 conviction. A Democrat who has never spoken ill of Stevens, Begich was at the memorial service along with former Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles. Stevens might have been a diehard Republican, but he never shied from reaching over the political fence to anyone of any party he thought could help promote and build Alaska.
"It's hard to imagine that any one man ever meant more to any one state than Ted Stevens,'' said Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said at the service.