Month: March 2016

There’s been talk of putting a woman on the ten dollar bill, which I oppose.  Hamilton deserves that honor.  I’ve proposed putting Elizabeth Jackson on the twenty, which I still think is a good idea.  With the passing of Nancy Reagan, I have a new idea.  Put her on the fifty, in place of U. S. Grant.  I have nothing against Grant.  He was the greatest general in American history, and, despite what you’ve heard, an O. K. President.  But I think he’s on the fifty to put a cap on the Civil War.  The North won , the South lost, and if you don’t like U.S.Grant, don’t use a $50.  That’s rubbing it in, vengefulness.

So put Nancy on the fifty, and Elizabeth Jackson on the twenty.  Why are women only entitled to one?  They ought to have half.

I checked the WaPo, and it appears my faith in Semprevivo was warranted.  He knows what he’s talking about.  I wasn’t completely sure until now.

So I have a new plan.  I’m going to figure out a way to get a condo in Anchorage, and begin research for my book, “The Poison Chalice”.  It will roughly cover the same ground that Strohmeyer did in “Extreme Conditions.”  Except that I just happened to be in the middle of it all because of my connection to Hammond.  There are a lot of people still alive that I need to talk to, people that I’ve never discussed any of this with.

Part of my problem was that none of these people knew what to make of me.  Who the hell was I, anyway?   People like Dan Cuddy and Jay Hammond were happy to use me for their own purposes.  And in fact, I turned out to be pretty useful, especially when someone like Bill McConkey or Bob Clarke gave me a good idea of what they wanted done.  I was basically kind of a political hit man.  I wasn’t afraid of any thing or anybody.  I was trying to act like my Uncle Fritz, and I got pretty good at it.  People didn’t want to mess with me.

Add that to my naked ambition, and obvious desire to get out of Alaska and back to Washington, and no one trusted me unless they really knew me.  Bob Clarke was the only one of them that did, and I gradually gained the trust of Rick Halford as well.  So there’s a lot of things I don’t know, and have had to figure out for myself.  That takes a long time.  A lot of this stuff I’ve only figured out in the last couple days.  So I still have some things to learn.

I only had one private talk with Jay Hammond.   This was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  Hammond was living in Anchorage in the winters now.  Life at his and Bella’s cabin at Lake Clark was hard in the winter.  Babbie was going strong on the subrogation work which was generating an absolutely amazing amount of money, and I had to have a place to go to get out of the house, so I rented the cheapest place I could find, a small office on the second floor of a rundown building on International Airport Road.  It was bare bones, but that’s all I needed.  We only had one client, State Farm, and they had no reason to come and see me.  Babbie was on the phone with them all the time.

So when Hammond called and said he wanted to see me, he visited me in this office.  Babbie and I had a little secret.  The money machine she had created made me one of the most successful lawyers in Alaska, in terms of making money.  And, as far as lawyers go, that’s how they judge each other.  There was no sense in spending any of that money on an office, so I was a little embarrassed to have Jay Hammond see me in these apparently reduced circumstances.  Actually, I don’t even think he noticed.  Hammond didn’t care about any of that.

It turns out he had a story he wanted to tell me.  I was making progress.  He was starting to trust me.  Right after he was first elected, in 1974, he went to a National Governor’s Conference.  He didn’t know any one there, so he looked at the agenda for the meeting and saw a prayer breakfast, and decided to go.  There were two other Governors there, Carter and Clinton, and he met them both.  He told me he looked into those big blue eyes of Clinton, and actually believed him.  He was laughing at himself, and wanted me to join.

I wish I knew more about that side of the father of the Permanent Fund.

 

The nomination fight is now over.  Rubio has to leave the race.  There were four states up, and Cruz and Trump split them.  None for Rubio.  He came in third in three, and fourth in one.  Cruz has bested him for the right to deliver the final blow to Trump, and in the process, make himself an American hero.  He’s the next President of the United States.  The rest is mop up.

Damn.  If I could have made that bet, I would have caught the bottom, 66-1.  The guys that made that bet did it purely by chance.

A special congratulation to Rafael Cruz.  As far as I’m concerned, you’re a real American hero.

This is very good news for me.  I’m going to get back to  my business, which is telling the story of Alaska.  One man already tried it, John Strohmeyer, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist hired by Bob Atwood, publisher of the Anchorage Times.  Nobody who knew anything would talk to him, because Atwood and Hickel were allies.  He called me, was very polite, and I left him hanging as gently as I could.  I feel badly about it now.  Actually, I should have spilled the beans, but I didn’t trust him.  He was an East coast journalist and I had no reason to assume his good faith.  He would have had a story to tell.  He sent me a copy of his book, Extreme Conditions in 1993, and was nice enough to inscribe it, “to Fritz Pettyjohn  –Best wishes to a fighter for justice and provocative commentator.”  I looked him up, and he’s passed away.  I would have liked to thank him.  He seemed like a good guy.

I’m going to remember this night for as long as I’ve got left.

On August 1st, 1977 the first tanker left Valdez loaded with crude from Prudhoe Bay.  It was a big day in Alaska history.  Until then Alaska was a poor state, almost completely supported by the federal government.  The United States had a major national security interest in Alaska.  If the Russians were going to use nuclear weapons against us, they’d come right  across the state.  So some of the economic activity which did take place was supported by the federal government.

Alaska was going to get rich, and quickly.  The reelection campaign of Republican Jay Hammond would determine how that money was spent.  Hammond wanted at least 25% of it to go into the Permanent Fund, where it would be protected from all the hungry wolves in the legislature.  Hammond had served in the State Senate and he knew these guys.  If they got the chance they’d piss it all away.

Hammond was portrayed as a moderate Republican, but that was untrue.  He was , by nature, a conservative Christian  man.  His father had been a Protestant minister in New England, and he took his faith seriously.  He just never talked about it.  Once.  Ever.  He was painted as a moderate in the Railbelt because he was unabashedly pro-Native.  He wanted the Native people to get as much of that oil money as possible.  They had more of a right to it than anyone.

Opposing him in the primary was ideological conservative Tom Fink.  He was considered inflexible, and he was.  He was a man of principle, and one of his principles was that the money didn’t belong to the government, it belonged to the people.  The idea of a Permanent Fund, with annual dividends going out, was socialism, as far as he was concerned.  He wanted the money spent on capital projects, infrastructure.  Tom was a devout Catholic with eleven children.  And Tom was a great guy.  He later served two terms as Mayor of Anchorage.  I wish I’d gotten to know Tom better than I did.

The third candidate was former Governor, former Secretary of the Interior Wally Hickel.  Hickel was a builder, and one of the richest men in the state.  He was a ruthless businessman, with an outsize ego.  A former amateur boxer, Hickel considered himself a complete bad ass.  I was young back then, and I could see Hickel and Hammond getting it on.  Hammond was a Marine Corps fighter pilot in WW II, and very powerful man.  I could dream.

Bill McConkey and I had become good friends, and he brought me aboard as an unpaid volunteer.  I didn’t know anything about Hammond, or the State of Alaska, for that matter.  I just wanted to get into the United States Senate so I could raise some hell. I’d been a sergeant for Reagan in 1976, and I wanted a promotion.

A lot of people thought Hickel was going to use the Governorship to launch a Presidential campaign, and Bill wanted to accuse him of it.  But the actual Hammond for Governor campaign couldn’t do it, because there would be a backlash.  So Bill made me the chairman of a volunteer group he called Hands for Hammond.  I was the only member of this group.  Almost everybody in Anchorage, except the Natives, didn’t like Hammond, because he wasn’t going to let them have all the money.  No one wanted to be associated with him.  In Anchorage, home of both Fink and the vengeful Hickel, being associated with Hammond was not a good thing, politically, at all.

I didn’t really think about any of that.  I’d only been in Alaska with Babbie for four years, and here I was in the middle of the most important election in the history of Alaska.  Talk about fun.  So I issued a press release accusing Hickel of quitting the job once, to go be Secretary of Interior, and here he was again, wanting to be Governor to use his position to run for President.  The Anchorage Daily News made a story out of the press release.  This had all been set up in advance.  The Daily News hated Hickel.

It worked like a charm.  Hickel was asked about it on the campaign trail, and he blew up.  He was so pissed off that his reaction was way over the top.  Hickel had a reputation for violent anger, and this reminder of that personality flaw cost him votes.  How many, nobody knows.  It’s certainly possible that it was 97, his margin of defeat.

This election, to a large extent, determined the future of Alaska, and its wealth. If Fink had won, everything would have been above board, and the wealth would be spent on massive infrastructure projects to develop the economy of the Railbelt.  Fink didn’t dislike Natives.  Far from it, like all real Alaskans, he loved the native people of Alaska.  We all do.  He just thought they should move to Anchorage and get a job.

If Hickel had won God knows what would have happened to that money.  Some of the most amazing boondoggles in American history would have occurred, and a lot of people would have made a lot of money. He had no intention of running for President.  He just wanted to get his hands on the money.

But Hammond pulled it off, by 97 votes.  I was only on the periphery of the campaign, but it was an experience I’ll never forget.  Because I was so ignorant about Alaska, I had no idea how significant it was.  I’d stumbled into history.   Hammond was able to complete his life’s work, the Permanent Fund.  A quarter of that wealth sits there today.  They really ought to call it the Hammond Fund.

I was making my way in Alaska politics.  In ’74, fresh off the plane, I’d pissed off Mike Gravel in a letter to the editor. That caught the attention of Bill McConkey.  In ’76, working for Reagan,  I’d pissed off Ted Stevens by disrespecting his secretary.  And here I was pissing off Wally Hickel, one of the most wealthy and powerful men in the state, and the patron of Ted Stevens.

I was making a name for myself.  If I kept this up, I had a future in politics.  What it was, was uncertain. But in Alaska, I was now a guy to keep an eye on..

My personal and political hero has always been Gov. Jay Hammond of Bristol Bay.  I never knew that he was but an agent of the real hero of the story, Dan H. Cuddy.  I just figured it all out last night.  It made sense of my whole life, and explains a lot of the odd things that kept happening to me.

What I never knew was that I was acting as Dan Cuddy’s instrument the whole time.  I met him once for two minutes when his son David introduced me to him.  He looked me over, but he really didn’t say anything to me.  He knew my crazy Uncle Fritz, and he knew all about him.  I looked just like Uncle Fritz, and I think he thought he was my father, not my uncle.  I never saw him again.  The full story, the one that only he knew, went to his grave with him last year.

My first taste of the corruption of Alaska, and the looting taking place under the lieutenants of one the most corrupt men in American history, Walter F. Hickel, was working for Hammond’s reelection in 1978.  He was opposed for the Republican nomination by two men, Tom Fink and Wally Hickel.  Gov. Hammond was the former Mayor of the Bristol Bay Borough, site of the richest salmon fishery in the world.  Fink sold life insurance in Anchorage.  A law school graduate, Fink had been denied entry into the Alaska Bar Association, based upon no grounds whatsoever.  Tom Fink was smarter than 95% of the lawyers in the state, but he was utterly incorruptible, and thus unsuited to the practice of law in Alaska.  His candidacy was necessary to stop Wally Hickel from reclaiming the Alaska governorship.

We wound up beating Hickel by 97 votes.  I wasn’t in the thick of it, but, unbeknownst to Hammond,  some of those votes may have been questionable.  Hammond would never do anything like that, but there were people around him who would.  I’m not making any accusations, because I don’t know.

The best way to think about Hickel is to look at Donald Trump.  Two peas in a pod.  Very similar, in so many ways.  When I have time I’ll draw out the comparison.

Hickel had resigned the governorship to become Nixon’s Secretary of the Interior in 1968.  But before he did he appointed his enforcer, Ted Stevens, to the U.S. Senate.  Stevens was a small and arrogant man, and could never have been elected on his own merits.  He lost to Democratic Senator Ernest Gruening in 1962.  In 1968 he lost the Republican nomination for Senate to Elmer E. Rasmusen, the Mayor of Anchorage, and the owner of the National Bank of Alaska.  So when Sen Bartlett died, Hickel did not appoint the Republican candidate, Rasmusen.  He put in the man Rasmusen had beaten to win the nomination, Stevens.  Alaska’s senior senator for all but ten days of his 40 year Senate career, Stevens was the most powerful man in Alaska politics, until he was indicted and convicted of fraud and corruption.  He’d already beaten David Cuddy, Dan’s son for the Republican nomination in 2008.  David had done all he could to pull back the veil of corruption hiding this loathsome man.  But the entire Alaska media was in Stevens’ pocket, and they covered for him until the end.  Even indicted and convicted, he almost beat Democrat Mark Begich.

One of the great traitors in Alaska history is former Governor and Senator Frank Murkowski.  When Bill McConkey and I got him elected in 1980, beating Democrat Clark Gruening (the grandson of Sen. Eernst Gruening) he was an honest man, or we all thought he was.  He turned out to be totally lacking in courage, and quickly became a Stevens henchman.  Stevens had him elected Governor in 2002, and Murkowski appointed his daughter Lisa to take his seat.  It’s the one she’ll be defending this year.

The best thing about this story is the quality of the people involved.  Leading the white hats is Dan Cuddy, with literally thousands of Alaskans playing supporting roles.  I know many of them personally.  One story I can’t wait to tell is about George Ahmoagak, an Eskimo whaling captain, and friend of Jay Hammond, and therefor a friend of mine.  His election in 1984 as Mayor of the North Slope Borough, put an end to a big part of the looting.  Unwittingly, like so many others, George and I were all working for Dan Cuddy.

One of Stevens’ most loyal servants was Sen. Tim Kelly of Eagle River.  Kelly sold my mentor Sen. Jack Coghill down the river on the subsistence bill.  (Jack’s the father of Senate Majority Leader John Coghill, about whom much later).  This meant the end of his career in the legislature.  He didn’t care.  He was a coward and a traitor, and Ted Stevens took care of him for the rest of his life.  Always the boot licker, Kelly had Anchorage International Airport named for the bandit, Ted Stevens.  It always pisses me off whenever I fly into Anchorage.  When the dust settles next year, I’m going to work with John on that.  We’re going to rename the airport.  I want to name it the Dan H. Cuddy International Airport.  There will be a story behind that name.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this story. I don’t know all of it, and some of it will never be told.  Up until five minutes ago I had a picture of Frank Murkowski on my office wall.  It reads, “Fritz, Thanks for your strong hand — it’s been great, Frank.”  I’ve got to figure out what to do with it.

It’s important that it be told now, because the reason I was able to figure it all out was because I was working the Alaska precinct caucuses on behalf of Ted Cruz.  I left Alaska fifteen years ago feeling like a loser.  If I hadn’t come back for the caucuses, none of this would have been revealed, and Lisa Murkowski would be waltzing toward reelection.

And the impact of the Cruz win is only beginning to be felt.  It will have a major impact on the selection of delegates from Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Idaho and eastern Washington, Oregon, and even California.

And, oh, do I have a story to tell.  By way of coincidence, it’s also the story of Fritz and Babbie Pettyjohn.

 

 

There’s nothing that annoys people more than to have someone a hell of a lot smarter than they are demonstrate his superiority.  When you’re as smart as Cruz it can be a problem.  It’s one source of his unpopularity in the Senate.  Another is his absolute commitment to keeping his campaign commitments to the voters of Texas.  His colleagues have all made similar commitments, and forgotten them as soon as the election was over.  Add to that his refusal to play by the rules of the Senate Club, and you have a man who is roundly despised.

And a man the voters want.  This is the Ted Cruz story.  He needs to find a way to tell it.  For a small fee, I’ll lend a hand.

.The way Cruz handles himself verifies a story he tells in his book.  He’s been caught in some school prank and the principal is trying to have him name his accomplices.  Cruz had been accepted at Princeton, and he was threatened with losing it.  He didn’t cave.  He was one of the first kids ever accepted at an Ivy League school from this Christian academy, and it lent them prestige.  He figured they were bluffing, and they were.  That’s a stand up guy.

I didn’t watch the debate, so I’d better take a look at it.  I have Trump fatigue.  But if you’re part of his cult, the more the better.  These people are morons.  It’s amazing how many of them there are.  But when you think about it, there are a hell of a lot of people in this country, and a certain percentage of them are morons.  That’s a lot of people.  He gives excitement to their lives.  They’re part of a movement to make America great again.  How, exactly, isn’t really clear, but they’re not interested in details.   They’re all pissed off, and so is Trump, so he’s their guy.  Morons.

There were a lot of dumb bastards in the legislature, and they didn’t really bother me.  It’s the ones who thought they were smart.  When you’d prove them wrong they’d really get pissed off.

When I got to the Senate I was an Alaskan Ted Cruz.  I really pissed those guys off.  One of the rules of the Alaska Senate was no debate.  If a bill came to the floor, they had the votes, so there was nothing to debate.   Well, I didn’t see the sense of that, so when they brought a bill to the floor I’d get up and raise hell about it.  It didn’t matter what it was.  Man, that annoyed these guys.  None of them had the speaking skill of a jackrabbit.  They had one lawyer from Anchorage, a soft spoken Jewish guy named Joe Josephson.  I could tell you stories about him.  They made him get up and offer some lame defense.  I liked Joe, but he wasn’t much of an advocate.

But I did one smart thing.  Bill Ray was carrying a batch of appointments to the floor for ratification.  Except I spotted one guy in there that I was going to raise hell about.  And I gave him a heads up.  That’s how you avoid being completely hated.

And now for walk in the soft spring rain.