Cecil Andrus, logger who rose to Idaho governor, dies at 85

The threat of additional federal protections by executive fiat forced Alaskan lawmakers to compromise on the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, signed by Carter just a month before he left office.

“Cece was the only person I considered for the cabinet post of secretary of the Interior, and together we made conservation history with the successful passage of the Alaska lands legislation,” Carter said in a statement on Friday.

The Alaska law set aside an area the size of California as national parks, national forests and refuge areas such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“In the Lower 48, we have to fight to save some single remnant of an area that’s already been ruined,” Andrus later said. “In Alaska, we have a chance to do it right the first time.”

Andrus’ conservation efforts earned him the praise of environmental groups but the rancour of many Alaskans who depended upon resources extracted from public lands for their livelihoods. A popular bumper sticker on Alaskan pickup trucks proclaimed, “Lock up Andrus, not Alaska.”

In a 2003 speech, Andrus criticized the much-debated proposal to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “It is a place that is so fragile it takes 100 square miles for a grizzly bear to forage,” he said. “It takes 50 years for a tree to grow.”

Historian T.H. Watkins once wrote that only three Interior secretaries — Harold Ickes, Andrus and Stuart Udall — understood the importance of wilderness preservation “to the spiritual and ecological well-being of the nation.”

The outdoors was Andrus’ passion and Beltway power-politics never suited him, even if he was considered adept at it. He liked to brag that after leaving the Interior post, he never spent more than one night in Washington, D.C., again.

“The reason so many people live back East is because they don’t know any better,” he once told The Salt Lake Tribune.

Andrus was a state senator when he won the governor’s race in 1970.

His popularity was cemented with a regular-guy governing style. Andrus listed his home phone number in the Boise directory, made breakfast for his children each morning before driving himself to his office at the statehouse and took three days off in the heat of his successful 1974 re-election campaign to bag an elk.

“A decaying highway infrastructure cannot be appreciated when you are travelling by helicopter or talking on the phone in the back of a limousine,” Andrus wrote in his 1998 autobiography. “A cook in the governor’s mansion means you have to learn food prices only when ambush interviews threaten at election time.”

Even before it was evident Carter would not be re-elected in 1980, Andrus had publicly said he planned to return West in 1981. He said being governor of Idaho was “the best political job in the world.”

After returning to Idaho to work as a consultant, Andrus mounted a comeback campaign and narrowly won election as governor again in 1986 with a scant 3,600 votes over Republican Lt. Gov. David Leroy. Voters then sent him back to an unprecedented fourth term in 1990 with 68 per cent of the vote.

His biggest fight in the waning days of his political career came when he blocked the U.S. Department of Energy from shipping radioactive waste from a Colorado nuclear weapons site to the Idaho National Laboratory. After accepting the waste on a “temporary” basis for 17 years, Andrus said, Idaho would no longer be the nation’s radioactive garbage dump.

The standoff persisted through his Republican successor, Gov. Phil Batt, and the energy department ultimately signed a 1995 agreement to remove all the radioactive rubbish that had been dumped in Idaho since the Cold War.

When the federal government challenged the terms of that agreement in court in 2006, Andrus took the witness stand to help the state’s successful case to hold federal energy officials to the cleanup commitment.

Andrus would continue fighting the issue during his final years, pointing his criticism toward Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter when it became known in January that the state was looking at creating a waiver to allow shipments of spent fuel.

Despite their conflict on INL, Otter said Friday he considered Andrus a mentor.

“(Andrus) combined stubborn idealism with common sense — a lunch-bucket liberal proudly reflecting his timber country upbringing and values,” Otter said in a prepared statement. “Whatever you thought of his politics, Cece was always true to what he believed, and he believed in Idaho. His voice will be missed in our public life, and I will miss his counsel and friendship.”

Andrus was born in 1931, in Hood River, Oregon, and attended Oregon State University but did not graduate before he served in the Navy during the Korean War. He came back to Oregon to work as a logger and then moved with his family in 1955 to Orofino in northern Idaho to work at his father’s sawmill.

His 35-year political career began when he arrived late at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Orofino to discover his beer-drinking buddies had decided to nominate him to run for the Legislature. In 1960, at age 29, he defeated a Republican incumbent and was elected to the first of three two-year terms as a state senator.

“A special memory Rosalynn and I cherish is the float trip with Carol and Cece down the Middle Fork of the Salmon, competing in catching the most trout,” Carter said. “Cece loved the outdoors and was a genuine conservationist. Americans are better off because of his service, and I am better because of his friendship.”

Kimberlee Kruesi And Keith Ridler, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

Cecil Andrus, logger who rose to Idaho governor, dies at 85

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