Anchorage Daily News

Washington -- Frank Murkowski is no stranger to success and good fortune.

The son of a Ketchikan banker, he grew up to become a banker himself and rose steadily through the executive ranks.

At 32, he became the youngest member of Gov. Wally Hickel's cabinet.

He has been married for 48 years, has six grown children and is, according to his annual financial disclosures, a very wealthy man.

He breezed through three re-elections.

But in the Senate, his road hasn't always been so smooth.

He is seen in Washington as an unyielding champion of Alaska resource extraction -- "ferociously pro-development," as Time magazine put it -- whose greatest political assets are persistence and force of will.

"Little comes easily for him, in part because he often is unwilling to change positions," reads part of the entry on him in the Politics in America almanac.

When asked about his Senate accomplishments, Murkowski turns to an aide who hands out a 12-page list.

"Won repeal of the North Slope oil export ban," reads one item.

"Won additional Medicaid health care aid for Alaska ($200 million over five years) by winning key formula change."

"Helped encourage Federal Express to locate and expand at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport."

Of course, it's Alaska's other senator for whom that airport is named. By virtue of his seniority and committee assignment, Stevens has been able to send billions of dollars back home. That has tended to overshadow Murkowski's Senate career.

Alaska Congressman Don Young says the federal money flowing to the state is testimony to Murkowski's greatness as a team member.

"Sen. Stevens gets great credit for it. And he should. But you can't do that without the cooperation and working with Sen. Murkowski." Young said. "That's something people don't quite understand."

Both Stevens, who has had his differences with Murkowski over the years, and Young want Murkowski elected governor so they can continue the struggle that has marked all of their tenures: beating back the environmentalists to further develop Alaska's economy.

"Frank is willing to take them on, as we have here," Stevens said. "We have taken them on. We need a governor who will take them on."

Murkowski said he feels an obligation to return to Alaska to, as he puts it, get the state's economy moving again.

Some of his critics say he can best help the state by staying put. But when he announced his candidacy last year, Murkowski revealed he doesn't see a bright future for himself in the Senate.

He was forced out of his chairmanship of the powerful Senate Energy Committee when the Democrats took the Senate last year. Even if Republicans win back the Senate, Murkowski said, he would have to wait at least eight years before he could take command of another committee.

"My point is, in my particular sequence of seniority, I have no other committee that I can look forward to the chairmanship (of) for some time," he said at the time.

LIKES A GOOD JOKE

Murkowski's record in recent years has earned him perfect scores from the National Right to Life Committee, the Christian Coalition, the American Conservative Union and the National Rifle Association.

He has earned perfect zeroes from Planned Parenthood, the League of Conservation Voters and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

Though he is best known for pushing for oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other state issues, he has also been one of the Senate's most prominent advocates of storing the nation's nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nev., making him a hero to the nuclear power industry.

"I think nuclear energy has a place in assisting the environment in air quality," he said in an interview.

He inherited the responsibility once he became chairman of the Senate Energy Committee.

"It just goes with the committee," he said. "I had no constituency in it."

He has amassed large campaign treasuries for his re-elections, thanks largely to contributions from the oil industry and other energy sectors.

On Capitol Hill, Murkowski is congenial, friendly with his colleagues and likely to include a little joke or self-effacing anecdote to lighten his oratories.

When he finds a line he likes, he sticks with it.

"You and I do not move in an out of Washington, D.C., on hot air, although occasionally there is quite a bit of it here," he often said in arguing for more oil development.

A search of the Congressional Record shows he has repeated the "hot air" quip 15 times from the floor of the Senate in the past year and many more times in press conferences and hearings.

Despite his generally affable presentation, he can become imperious when aggravated. He occasionally criticizes his staff in front of other people, though in a tone just light enough to suggest he might be joking.

"On a one-to-one basis he's highly personable," says former Alaska attorney general Charlie Cole, who has known Murkowski for 25 years.

JUMPING INTO POLITICS

Frank Hughes Murkowski was born in Seattle in 1933. Nine years later, he and his parents moved to Ketchikan, where his father became executive vice president of First National Bank of Ketchikan.

A tall boy, he played basketball in high school and then went off to college in California. There he became better acquainted with Nancy Gore, who was a year ahead of him in Ketchikan High School.

They married in 1954, while he was earning an economics degree from Seattle University, and soon started a family. They had six children: Carol, Lisa, Michael, Mary, Eileen and Brian.

His first big break in politics came with a phone call in 1966. He had just climbed up a rung at the National Bank of Alaska, leaving a job as Wrangell branch manager to become a vice president in Anchorage. Wally Hickel, the new governor, asked him to be commissioner of economic development for the young state.

Hickel said he didn't know Murkowski well at the time but was predisposed to liking him.

As Hickel tells it, Hickel had gone to Ketchikan a dozen years earlier when he was campaigning for a spot on the Republican National Committee. The morning after a speech to the townsfolk, a grandfatherly gentleman came to his door.

"Young man, I liked what you had to say," the older fellow said. It was Lester Gore, a territorial judge and Murkowski's future father-in-law, come to lend a hand.

"We went up one side of town and down the other, and he introduced me to everybody," Hickel said, noting that he won Ketchikan in every election thereafter.

Hickel hadn't forgotten that kindness when he met Frank Murkowski during Hickel's first run for governor.

"He was a young, bright guy. I figured he was going places," Hickel said. "And the fact that he married a Gore girl, that really impressed me."

Hickel describes Murkowski as a straightforward fellow who shares Hickel's belief that the governor of Alaska is the "foreman of the ranch," the manager of the resource wealth.

After Hickel left to become President Nixon's Interior Secretary, Murkowski resigned from his state appointment and ran for the U.S. House. He won the Republican nomination but lost to Democrat Nick Begich in the general election.

It was a gut punch to a career that thus far had been studded with success and advancement.

Murkowski was 37. He had six kids. He wasn't certain he wanted to go back into banking, and with the holidays approaching, it wasn't a great time to be looking for a job.

He and Nancy piled all six kids into a Volkswagen bus and drove to Mexico.

"I remember we had a football and a hibachi and we just kept driving," he told a reporter years later.

If he was rudderless in that moment, it wasn't for long.

Within months he was named president of the Alaska National Bank of the North in Fairbanks.

BACK INTO POLITICS

Murkowski stayed with the bank for nine years before he tried politics again. In 1980, he took on U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel.

At least he thought that's whom he was taking on.

Gravel, as it happened, was knocked out in the Democratic primary.

So instead of confronting a 12-year incumbent, Murkowski faced Clark Gruening, grandson of former Alaska Sen. Ernest Gruening.

"Clark had tremendous name identification, but what I did have was an association having lived in many areas of Alaska, and that made a big difference," Murkowski said recently.

The race was described in the press as a contest between two nice guys who were slow to start slugging.

One day in late September, Murkowski was primed to take the gloves off. According to the press release he issued in advance, he intended to call Gruening a liberal and a die-hard environmentalist in a speech to the Eagle River Rotary Club.

He didn't quite get around to it.

"Did I purposely skip the part where I was going to call him an extreme environmentalist? " Murkowski pondered when a reporter approached him after the speech. "No, I don't think so. I just hate to read speeches, and I guess I just got away from the text in that part and forgot to get back to it."

Neither candidate seemed to be setting the electorate ablaze.

Gravel had been a showman, capturing the Senate spotlight with what his critics said were publicity stunts.

But Murkowski, wrote then-Daily News columnist John Greely, "seemed to be going after votes with all the vigor of a teller asking for I.D. at the night deposit window."

In the last weeks of the campaign, though, Murkowski got much tougher and managed to firmly affix the "no growther" label on Gruening.

Murkowski trounced the Democrat.

It was the first time the state sent an all-Republican team to Congress, and in 22 years the lineup hasn't changed.

RECURRING ACCUSATION

Starting with that 1980 campaign, Murkowski has been intermittently dogged by the claims of a Native corporation that its finances were ruined by the bank that Murkowski ran in Fairbanks.

"I'm kind of surprised that in all the elections we've had it comes up again and again, because it certainly doesn't represent any reflection on my career," he said recently.

The short version is that Bering Straits Native Corporation, the bank's largest client, lost millions of dollars in an array of bad investments in the 1970s. Some of that money was held in trust for one of the village corporations in its region, Sitnasauk Native Corp.

As Murkowski was campaigning in 1980, the Native groups alleged the bank had mismanaged their trust account and induced them to guarantee bad loans to another company so the bank could recover money that company already owed it.

"I'm tired of hearing about somebody having this or that about me," Murkowski said at the time. "If somebody has something, let's see it, instead of just perpetuating these rumors."

For a while, it looked like a scandal was emerging that might explode on Murkowski's campaign.

The New York Times wrote a story. Mike Wallace and a team of "60 Minutes" researchers had come to investigate.

Then in October 1980, Bering Straits and Sitnasauk filed a lawsuit against the bank.

But nothing ever stuck on Murkowski, who was an ex-banker by the time the allegations unfolded.

"It's the bank's problem now. We suggest you go talk to the bank," a campaign spokesman said when the lawsuit was filed.

With the election a month away, all that was clear was that the case was complex and that it wouldn't be decided anytime soon.

In fact, it wasn't until seven years later that a judge finally ruled. Superior Court Judge Mark Rowland hit the bank with a $10 million judgment, saying the bank had engaged in conflicts of interest and violated federal regulations that allowed Sitnasauk's trust money to be squandered.

By then Murkowski had already been sworn in for a second term.

"The judgment occurred four (bank) presidents later and eight years after I left," Murkowski said recently.

He has always maintained that Bering Straits, which dropped out of the lawsuit, made its own investment decisions.

These days Murkowski refers questions about the case to Charlie Cole, the attorney who defended the bank at trial.

Cole said the judge's decision boiled down to a finding that the bank's trust department should not have allowed Bering Straits so much leeway with the village corporation's money.

"The trust department is in the same bank, but it's independent of the loan management," Cole said. "I suppose at the end of the day the buck stops with the president of all these financial institutions. But Frank Murkowski wasn't a lawyer. Would Frank Murkowski be expected to know the nuances of those legal obligations of the trust department?"

BATTLING THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS

The arena for Murkowski's battles with environmentalists has often been the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

"He had so many Alaska issues," said retired Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, a Louisiana Democrat who was the committee chairman until 1995. "I always knew there were a lot of Alaska issues, but I didn't know there were so many. He'd keep bringing them up and bringing them up."

Murkowski reached the height of his power in Washington when he succeeded Johnston as chairman in 1995. He led the committee until June 2001.

He went into the job with an ambitious agenda for Alaska, says Jim Waltman of The Wilderness Society.

"Izembek (road), helicopters in wilderness, snowmobiles at Denali and on and on and on, all at the same time and all full-throated," Waltman said. "He pushed so many bills, so many issues at us, and got relatively little accomplished."

About a quarter of the items on Murkowski's 12-page list of accomplishments cast Murkowski in a supporting role, some of them in massive Washington dramas.

"Helped craft the nation's first balanced budget in 30 years," the list reads.

"Helped craft welfare reform act."

"Helped craft comprehensive overhaul of IRS, creating taxpayer advocates."

The list also includes many measures he authored that became law -- a number of land exchanges, buy-backs and give-aways, construction projects, and generous financial assistance for Alaska communities.

"He was particularly involved in the area of the small explorers, small developers, small activities for our state in terms of minerals and metals and oil and gas," Stevens said, when asked about Murkowski's Senate achievements.

But Murkowski lost to the environmentalists on the most prominent battles.

He was unable to expand logging in the Tongass National Forest, which he saw as vital to the economy of the town he grew up in and other Southeast communities.

"All this is gone now," he said recently, showing a visitor to his office a framed painting of the Ketchikan Pulp Co. mill, with a log raft in the foreground and the plant's chimneys emitting white plumes.

The plant closed in 1997.

His most prominent loss may be the failure to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, an effort he led.

Congress may still pass a national energy bill if it returns after the election for a lame-duck session, but it looks highly unlikely that ANWR will be in it.

"We were one vote short," Murkowski laments.

He tried to show that a lot of constituencies unions, seniors, Jews, women business owners also wanted drilling. He held a series of press conferences in front of the Capitol to show that they stood with him.

He also went to the Senate floor dozens of times to make his case.

Waltman said he certainly tried hard, but he also tested the patience of his fellow senators, Waltman said.

"In the end I think it helped us that he had over the previous decade spent so much of Senate's time on this issue," Waltman said. "At some point senators get tired of hearing about it."

Murkowski and his supporters say that if President Clinton hadn't vetoed it in 1995 or if the Democrats hadn't taken over the Senate this year, ANWR would be open already.

The reason it's not is because of the strength of the opposition, they say, not because Murkowski's efforts were deficient.

"Nobody can ever fault Frank for not having tried on ANWR," Stevens said.

Reporter Liz Ruskin can be reached at 1-202-383-0007 or lruskin@adn.com