In Memory of Sen. Ted Stevens: Stevens stood his ground for Alaska

One piece at a time over 40 years, politics aside, Sen. Ted Stevens helped his state build a thriving oil and gas industry

By Steve Quinn

For Petroleum News

Before Alaska could build an 800-mile long oil pipeline, sending Prudhoe Bay crude to market, there was a debt that needed repaying: land owed to Alaska Natives.

It was a century old obligation that would nearly cost freshman Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens his job.

Instead, he turned the nation’s liability into the foundation of a 40-year political career while helping launch resource development in the state.

He did it in signature style: a blunt demeanor equally reserved for friends and opponents; working with Democrats; acting without fear of failure.

Short-tempered, but hardly short-sighted, Stevens kept his eye on the prize when pushing for deal on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

The result so far: A thriving oil and gas industry that has seen 16 billion barrels of North Slope crude pass through the trans-Alaska pipeline; the repeal of state income tax, and a yearly dividend check for almost all Alaskans.

On Aug. 9, Theodore Fulton “Ted” Stevens died in a plane crash near Dillingham, Alaska, along with three other passengers and the pilot.

Already the survivor of a 1978 plane crash in Anchorage, the 86-year-old man’s legacy cannot be understated.

He also died vindicated.

Having been convicted on federal corruption charges days before narrowly losing to Mark Begich, Stevens eventually watched a judge overturn a jury’s ruling.

Even his political opponents, in this case Mike Gravel — a Democrat and a fellow senator from Alaska whose career didn’t last nearly as long as Stevens — saw this.

“As he became more senior on the committees, it was better for Alaskans,” Gravel said.

“Ted is remembered — and rightly so — for bringing probably more money from the federal treasury than anybody in Alaska’s history,” Gravel said.

“Which was a considerable amount, and I don’t want to demean that. Ted’s career is outstanding.

“But I sometimes wonder if someone would do a study and measure the amount of wealth the pipeline brought compared to the money.

“The Natives would not have the wealth and land that they gained from the settlement.

“All of this wealth that came to Alaska from the construction of the Alaska pipeline wouldn’t be there. That’s his legacy,” Gravel said.

Putting his political career at risk

On this day, he minced no words about the stakes of reaching a claims settlement with the Alaska Natives.

“I am here because I feel and I have felt for the last 10 days from the tone of my telephone calls and the letters and telegrams that there is a feeling developing that Mike (Gravel) and I are wrong, that we should be opposing Native claims. That’s serious to me. . . . because I think it’s unhealthy to have what I consider the non-Native community turning against the Native community at the very time after 102 years that we have the real clout to get this thing done.”

It was the second straight day he implored local business leaders understand the need to support a deal.

One day earlier, Stevens told a packed house attending a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, “If you want to assume the $50 million annual burden of education, welfare and health services, then be intractable.”

In office less than one year, Stevens had just put political career on the line by calling out his constituency.

It landed him squarely on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News, a place he would routinely find during his career as the longest serving Republican senator.

But more than a job was at stake. Construction on an 800-mile pipeline designed to deliver newly discovered North Slope oil to market hung in the balance — and with that, the prospects of saddling future generations “with the most staggering welfare burden any American bears,” Stevens said.

As an attorney, the last place Ted Stevens wanted the settlement claims resolved was the courtroom. He believed the job lay squarely on the shoulders of Congress, but with collaborative help from Nixon administration, the state and business leaders.

This called for bringing together his peers, his political foes who held key committee leadership posts, and the Alaskans who could get him re-elected, or not, in the next election. Perhaps in that order.

He had watched another Alaska Native dispute take nearly 30 years to reach closure in a courtroom; a settlement claims court battle would outlive him, he believed.

So it was up to Congress, the state and even the business leaders to work with Native groups toward a resolution. With that would come the right of way for a pipeline.

The claims had been unresolved during the more than 100 years since the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867. It was another 91 years before the U.S. granted Alaska statehood, affording the state about 104 million acres of public land.

Considered vital to building a state economy, it was essential to reconcile land selection between the state and Natives.

North Slope oil had been discovered in December 1967 (formally announced in 1968), and Ted Stevens was on the scene a year later when Gov. Wally Hickel appointed him to a seat vacated by the death of U.S. Sen. Bob Bartlett.

Stevens joined newly elected Democratic Sen. Mike Gravel in Washington. Gravel had won the 1968 election that Stevens lost in the primary.

The terms of Stevens’ appointment called for running in 1970 for the remaining years of Bartlett’s term before he could seek his own six-year term in 1972.

Non-Native Alaskans ‘up in arms’

In the spring of 1971, an anti-Native sentiment was mounting, even as the oil industry was aligning itself with Native groups.

Stevens heard about the discord from an attorney who wrote a letter to Stevens.

Berry reports the attorney writing:

“I think you should know that the people I talked to are up in arms over the native claims bill. No one whom I have spoken with favors these bills and most of them are dead set against them. . . .As you know.... I have long supported you and I think you have done a fine job in Washington but I feel that you are on shaky grounds on the native claims bill.”

Stevens wasn’t biting.

“I am quite aware that your letter . . . . accurately reflects the sentiment that exists among the Alaskan public. However, as a lawyer, I am certain you have seen the reactions of people to demands made in personal injury or property damage suits. “We are still in that situation. In order to get a bill that is fair to everyone in the end, I am sure realize I have the same position as an attorney in determining how much to put in the demand for damages.

“We’ve got to get that bill passed. It’s going to destroy us if we don’t do it. I know you hear the comments I heard. . . . but I’ve got to try to get a fair bill passed.”

Stevens never worried about keeping his job

Katz said Stevens never worried about his job; rather he believed he was continuing his work that essentially began for the Interior Department in 1956 when he helped push for Alaska statehood achieved three years later.

Stevens knew 1971 could be among his last few years in federal office, Katz said.

“He put his political future on the line during that time,” Katz said. “His early constituency was not supportive of a settlement. I can recall situations where he said to them, ‘this is the right thing to do; I’m going to do it. I hope you support me in the aftermath.’

“We think of him as unbeatable and indomitable. But in 1969, 1970 and 1971 his standing was a lot more tenuous. He made decisions that he felt were best for the state; the Claims Act was the embodiment of that. Politics were subordinated.”

Sometimes the messenger was as important as the message.

Exxon’s Ed Patton backs Stevens on Native claims

Patton, an engineer, would head the pipeline company formed in 1969, having already supervised the construction of Exxon’s massive oil refinery in Benicia, Calif.

He became a liaison, a lobbyist and a listener.

This called for working directly with federal lawmakers and agencies, state lawmakers and their bureaucrats and Native Alaskan leaders

Like Stevens, Patton’s words and actions were closely watched and heeded by Alaska business and civic leaders.

Even as Stevens stressed movement on the settlement claims, it seemed to take Patton’s 1970 fall speech to alert people of the pipeline realities.

In his book Crude Dreams, Jack Roderick wrote:

“This unequivocal statement from oil’s most visible spokesman in Alaska finally convinced state business leaders that the oil industry was in this thing together with the state and the Natives.

“Many businessmen thought the Natives weren’t entitled to any land, but now that Patton had spoken, they were willing, reluctantly, to back a Native claims settlement.”

Differences over how much land, money and royalties Alaska Natives would receive as well as Alaska’s contribution to the settlement ensued.

ANCSA product of compromise

ANCSA was the product of compromise between Stevens and Gravel — typically political opponents — hustle from Rep. Nick Begich, and backing from the state of Alaska through Democratic Gov. Bill Egan.

The land claims battle also helped Stevens and Washington Democratic Sen. Henry Martin “Scoop” Jackson form a lasting bond until Jackson died in 1983, taking promises to help Stevens with the state’s resource development to the grave.

In the end, Katz said Stevens also fulfilled a long-standing belief that Alaska Natives deserved the settlement.

“It was lot more than that,” Katz said. “He truly believed there were aboriginal land claims,” Katz said. “I can vouch for that. He felt litigating it would hold up development.

“He believed that Congress was best positioned to address the matter and issues related to that: the pipeline; lifting the land freeze; planting the seeds for (the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.)”

On Dec. 18, 1971, Richard Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act into law, four days after Congress gave it final passage.

Before year’s end, Interior Secretary C.B. Rogers Morton laid out a 100-foot wide oil pipeline corridor running from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. This land would be off limits to the state and to Native groups, and the first significant step toward getting a pipeline built in two years.

Next task: pipeline legislation

Work on the pipeline had already been delayed two years by the time ANCSA was signed. It would be another two years before rusting pipelines and equipment would be moving along an 800-mile long corridor.

Less than one year after the predecessors to ARCO, Exxon and BP officially announced plans to build a pipeline from the North Slope to a terminal facility in Valdez, the consortium faced delays.

Pipe ordered from Japan had already arrived and would sit in Valdez, Deadhorse and Fairbanks for four years upon landing.

Rusting pipe was just a small problem emerging in Alaska.

Oil-related employment was plummeting. By mid-1970, oil-related jobs fell to 3,300, down from 8,400 shortly after the 1968 Prudhoe Bay discovery.

Roderick writes: “Local businessmen, expecting work on the pipeline to begin no later than 1971, had borrowed heavily and could not longer meet their financial obligations.

“Bankruptcies grew in number. Already concerned about the pipeline’s delay, BP Chairman Eric Drake suggested that crude oil from the North Slope might be taken by submarine.”

Meanwhile, Stevens easily won in 1970 to finish what he started with the claims settlement.

Stevens wins the election in 1972

Alaska’s pipeline drama was set against the backdrop of an emerging global energy crisis set off in the Middle East with an oil embargo in 1973.

Senate floor speeches discussed the prospects of a national oil shortage and Jackson warned the Nixon administration that gasoline rationing could be imminent.

The urgency pressed the Senate into action.

In his book and in an interview with Petroleum News, Roderick recounts the following:

Jackson’s Senate Interior Committee was considering a pipeline right of way act.

Stevens and Gravel, who had done well to set aside differences for ANCSA, selected different routes to get the act approved.

Stevens recommended an amendment that would prohibit filing environmental lawsuits against the pipeline.

He told Roderick, a former law partner of Stevens: “I had a group of people come out to my house in Maryland, and we spent several evenings going over what could be done. I was convinced from some of the work I had done when I was in law school that Congress had the power to close the courts to these demands. When I wrote the pipeline amendment, we did some pretty good background on the concept of closing the courts and leaving open only the question of the constitutionality of the amendment itself.”

Stevens said he and Gravel had originally planned to hold onto the amendment as an “ace in the hole.”

Gravel, however, introduced the amendment, pushing it through the Interior Committee.

Agnew breaks deadlock

Soon the bill was moving through the Senate, passing 77-21. On Nov. 16, 1973, Nixon signed the pipeline authorization act.

By then Stevens was completing his fifth year in office, arguably some of the most active five years in his tenure.

Those years remain the foundation of the state’s oil industry, currently beset by declining production plus regulatory and judicial hurdles to begin major offshore exploration.

Gravel’s version on the amendment differs slightly from Roderick’s account of those key votes.

He says it went from the Gravel-Stevens amendment to Stevens-Gravel and ultimately the Stevens amendment once Gravel was out of office in 1981.

By then, Stevens was embroiled in a new fight: opening the 1002 Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, to oil and gas exploration.

His next battle: ANWR

Stevens wanted to open up the 1002 area of ANWR — 2,000 acres in a 1.5-million-acre coastal plain in the vast Arctic refuge in the northeastern corner of Alaska, just east of North America’s largest oil field, Prudhoe Bay.

But he was willing to wait and let scientists study the prospective drilling in that area for nearly a decade.

This was the condition he helped work into the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act — or ANILCA — in 1980.

This act protected nearly 100 million acres of federal land under President Jimmy Carter and Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus.

As he did on the Native claims settlement, Stevens worked closely with his Democratic ally Scoop Jackson as well as Andrus.

Jackson was still in charge of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, which became the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

Working with both parties to do the job

Andrus said Stevens’ ability to back up what he says and keep his word gave him a distinction in Washington.

“His word was his bond,” Andrus said. “It was good. That sometimes gruff exterior was not indicative of the man inside the body.

“He ardently cared about Alaska. He understood who sent him to Washington. He said Alaska comes first and the other 49 states come close behind.

“Every time he ran for office, you’ll see I gave him a check. It was so published. There was a photo of the two of us in his office that a lot of people couldn’t understand.

“What they needed to know was that we were friends.”

Working with Andrus and Jackson meant keeping the Arctic coastal plain from being reclassified to wilderness.

“It was the forefront of Stevens thinking throughout the whole ANILCA process,” said Tony Motley, a lobbyist for Citizens for Management of Alaska Lands and the other survivor in the 1978 plane crash that spared Stevens but not his first wife Ann.

“It was scheduled for wilderness, complete wilderness, until Stevens convinced Scoop Jackson that if you did that you would never have a chance to see if there was any oil.

“At least it was left as a chance to see if perhaps someday we would be able to extract oil. The environmentalist had the votes to get it established as wilderness, but had he not made the move.

“If it had wilderness designation the only thing you could do is walk in there, and that’s it. He was able to convince Jackson and a couple of others that they should do a study.”

First deadly air crash

His plane crash-landed at the Anchorage airport and the two men were the only survivors out of seven passengers. Stevens lost his first wife, Ann Mary, in that crash, who was mother to their five children, Susan, Beth, Ben, Walter and Ted. (Stevens remarried in 1980; he and his second wife, Catherine, had a daughter, Lily.)

Each Dec. 4, Motley and Stevens would meet for lunch, sometimes talking about the crash, other times just getting caught up, Motley said.

“He didn’t lose any of his drive,” Motley said. “He may have been focused even more after that.

“He had a tremendous empathy for people who had tragedies. It made him a lot more sensitive.”

ANWR, unfinished business

That region is estimated to have more than 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil, but estimates such as those sometimes come under actual yields.

Stevens and supporters tried adding ANWR provisions to various bills, but couldn’t get enough Senate floor votes to fend off a filibuster.

Stevens even tried reprising the same argument used during the debate over the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

“We cannot afford to bury our heads in the snow and freeze, nor must we allow our economy and the jobs of thousands to be endangered while we idly stand by,” he said in 2001. “It was true then and it’s even more true now.”

Most of the heavy lifting with ANWR belonged to Republican colleague Frank Murkowski, who served in the Senate for 21 years with Stevens.

Murkowski held the stop spot in the Senate’s energy and natural resources committee for six years before becoming Alaska’s governor in 2002.

“The problem we have in that body, many of the things we were fighting was the realization was we were the new kid on the block,” he said.

“The rest of the states all established land patterns and resource development and their land wasn’t held by the federal government.

“The ability to control the destiny of those state is tied to the development of the resources.

“If you look at where we are, we are throttled, stymied by an administration that is not sympathetic to developing our resources.”

But the public fight was waged by Stevens, who vowed to stay in office until the job was done.

The two came close several times, most notably in 1987 and 1995.

In 1987, discussions of developing ANWR were moving through Congress but came to an abrupt end when the Exxon Valdez struck Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound. It sent 250,000 barrels of oil throughout this coastal fishing region, at the time the nation’s worst oil spill.

In 1995 Congress passed a budget reconciliation bill containing provisions to open up ANWR.

The bill was sent to President Bill Clinton, who vetoed the bill, citing, in part the ANWR items.

Each setback hurt Stevens, friends said.

“He carried a burden of criticism for Alaska,” Murkowski said. “He was willing to do that, and I think sometimes people forgot that.”

Big supporter of rural, renewable energy

Visits to Alaska often featured talks about various alternative or renewable energy projects.

It reflected an ongoing curiosity about expanding the state’s resource development, said Lisa Sutherland.

Sutherland is a former longtime aide for Stevens who worked for him parts of 30 years while completing undergraduate school and her law degree.

“He was very creative and innovative and he was fascinated by science and technology,” she said.

“Anything that was new and different he was keenly interested in it. He was a very, very creative can do person.

“He was fascinated with coalbed methane and geothermal energy. He even talked about nuclear power plants in rural Alaska. He was a dreamer, a big thinker.”

Sutherland cited several examples including wind farms in St. Paul Islands and Kotzebue; retrofitting fuel tanks in rural communities and considering nuclear power for rural areas.

The state is still working to bring Stevens’ efforts to fruition. They are:

• Working with Scoop Jackson to turn oversight of the National Petroleum Reserve from the Navy to the Bureau of Land Management, which would offer lease sales. Current estimates by the United States Geological Society put about 10.5 billion barrels of recoverable oil there.

• The Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline Act of 2004. This authorizes federal backing of up to $18 billion for a successful natural gas line project. Currently there are two large diameter lines moving forward. The act also created the position of federal pipeline coordinator, to facilitate permitting.

• Getting a Jones Act waiver to bring a jack-up drilling rig up to Cook Inlet, possibly the state’s wild card for development in the nearest future. It may be Stevens final major piece of assistance to the state for resource development.

Jones Act exception for Cook Inlet

Stevens told a crowd that a sweeping federal maritime law called the Jones Act would be waived so Escopeta Oil and Gas Co. could have a rig delivered by a semi-submersible heavy-lift vessel flying a foreign flag. The waiver, granted by the Department of Homeland Security, applies to a provision of the Jones Act that prohibits the transport of freight between two U.S. ports using a foreign flagged ship.

This meant the prospects of bringing a rig from the Gulf of Mexico directly to Cook Inlet were enhanced significantly as vessels capable of hauling those structures are scarce.

State lawmakers and industry leaders are wrestling with high-profile projects like offshore drilling, a large-diameter natural gas pipeline from the North Slope.

Meanwhile, Cook Inlet could quietly emerge as the next significant development thanks to recently passed state laws and the Jones Act waiver.

Narrowly lost election to Begich

Stevens never got the chance to see some of his efforts pay off. He narrowly lost the 2008 election to Mark Begich, son of Nick Begich, about a week after being convicted on federal corruption charges.

Six months later the conviction was set aside on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct.

In doing so, Judge Emmett Sullivan said, “In nearly 25 years on the bench, I’ve never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I’ve seen in this case.”

The trial and conviction created space between Stevens and friends as well as longtime constituents.

Friends say Stevens felt let down by those he stood by for decades, but he refused to brood over the hurt.

“There were some in the Senate who didn’t stand by him; there was some pain there for him,” said U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

“He didn’t put the politics up front. He would do whatever it was that was best for the state of Alaska.

“Ted Stevens respected others’ positions and he hoped others would respect his. That meant building relationships who were not your best friend.

“He needed to have other colleagues who understood and appreciated what Alaska needed.

“He was tenacious in those. Sometimes he was bombastic. Sometimes he was intimidating, but they respected his advocacy.”

Murkowski was supposed to spend time with her mentor during the home stretch of a re-election campaign.

But on Aug. 9, a plane carrying Stevens and eight others crashed. Four survived including a 13-year-old who lost his father.

Stevens well-known premonition that he would die in a plane crash came true. Friends say they’ll miss him but are heartened for having known him, worked with him and watched him lead such a dynamic life for 86 years.

“I aspire to live the way he did,” Sutherland said. “It’s sad that he went. But he lived big. He played big. He worked big.

“He was very matter of fact about death that he was going to die in a plane crash.

We knew that Sen. Stevens would want the kids to survive."