In Alaska, the former senator Ted Stevens – who has died in a plane crash aged 86 – was known as 'Uncle Ted' in tribute to his ferocious ability, even by the standards of US senators, to steer billions of dollars in federal funding to valuable projects within his home state.
Outside Alaska, however, Stevens's name and his works became bywords for the waste and corruption of pork barrel politics, which encourage state champions to divert taxpayers' money towards self-serving ends – most famously a grandiose 'bridge to nowhere' connecting a remote island with 50 inhabitants to the mainland for a $400m price tag.
When Republicans tried to scrap the bridge in 2005 and divert the money to New Orleans to repair damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, Stevens showed his worst side: his disdain for anything outside Alaska and his fierce temper. "If the Senate decides to discriminate against our state, to take money from our state," Stevens shouted at his colleagues, "I will resign from this body." Stevens won.
Alaskans rewarded the Republican with re-election six times to the US Senate, where he served from 1968, and by naming him 'Alaskan of the century' in 2000 – quite an achievement for someone who described himself as "a mean, miserable SOB". The Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage, the Ted and Catherine Stevens Centre for Space Science Technology in Kenai and the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute in Juneau all testify to his reach – from the sea to the stars – within the state of Alaska.
According to figures compiled by a congressional watchdog, between 1995 and 2008 Stevens helped push around 1,450 projects worth roughly $3.4bn in federal spending towards his state. Stevens derided such critics as "a bunch of psychopaths".
The Almanac of American Politics, the bible-like guide published by the National Journal, once dryly noted:
At some point, probably in the 1990s, Alaskans began referring matter-of-factly to funding for federal projects as "Mr Stevens money". It could be argued that Mr Stevens is less a legislator than he is a philanthropist in the mode of John D Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, although of course he is not spending his own money.
As a local journalist joked, Stevens even surpassed oil as Alaska's leading industry. But that stream of federal largess – made possible by Stevens's seniority on crucial Senate committees and his close friendships with other long-serving senators, such as Robert Byrd and Daniel Inouye – was not enough to save Stevens when attention turned to his own personal pork barrel.
Although a badly botched case by federal prosecutors eventually led to his 2008 conviction for ethics violations being overturned, Stevens will be remembered outside of Alaska for his unsettling explanations regarding gifts he received from supporters, especially an estimated $250,000 worth of goods and services to renovate his holiday home in Alaska, doubling its size.
And some of those pork barrel projects appeared to make Alaska a laughing stock. Aside from the 'bridge to nowhere', which became a favourite Democrat talking point, allegations arose in 2008 of $2.7m in federal funding that Stevens directed to be spent on building a new road to his favorite restaurant, owned by a friend and supporter.
But Stevens's indictment by the FBI and subsequent conviction in 2008, just a week before election day that year, and public calls from senior Republicans for him to step aside, saw the unthinkable happen. Despite all that, 'Uncle Ted' still only lost to Democratic challenger Mark Begich by fewer than 4,000 votes.
That ended Stevens's reign as the longest-serving Republican senator in the party's history, and capped a political life that had begun in 1952 when Stevens worked on the presidential election campaign of Dwight Eisenhower, before moving to Alaska to work as a lawyer. Later, at the department of the interior, Stevens was a strong lobbyist for Alaskan statehood, reluctantly granted by President Eisenhower in 1958. After serving in local politics, Stevens was appointed by Alaska's governor to fill a vacant US Senate seat in 1968.
Aside from his formidable career at the pork barrel, Stevens's legislative record was almost entirely focused on Alaska, especially its oil and fishing industries. He was thwarted, though, in his long-held desire to open up the 19m-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the northeast of Alaska to drilling, despite several attempts that came close. Generally a social moderate, he was a strong supporter of public radio – popular in Alaska – and for funding for Alaskan native villages.
During his heyday in the Senate he chaired the commerce committee's telecommunications sub-committee, and typically favoured deregulation that the industry supported. It was there, in 2006, while seeking to remove an amendment that backed strong network neutrality into a telecoms bill, that Stevens entered the annals of comedy with his bizarre attempt to explain the workings of the internet:
"The internet is not something you just dump something on, it's not a big truck, it's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material."
Stevens's phrasing became a cult hit and received a techno-remix.
Stevens had been a US Air Force pilot during the second world war, flying missions in China, but once told the Washington Post: "Plane crashes are the occupational hazard of Alaska politics."
So many Alaskans rely on flying in small planes to get around the huge, rugged terrain that crashes, such as the one that killed Stevens, are all too common. In 1978 Stevens was one of two survivors of a plane crash in Anchorage that killed his first wife, Ann, and four others when the private jet they were flying in was caught by a sudden gust of wind and slammed into the ground as it attempted to land.
The experience, according to contemporary accounts, was understandably traumatic. The Washington Post reported:
When Stevens came back to Washington, he seemed bitter and in terrible emotional pain... Most of his remarks in this vein were tactfully not printed by reporters, who saw them as the musings of a man half-crazy with grief.
In an odd twist of fate, in 1972 an Alaskan congressman, Nicholas Begich, was also killed in a plane crash in the state. He was the father of Mark Begich – the Democrat who ended Stevens's career in 2008.
Stevens is survived by his second wife, Catherine, and six children: three sons and two daughters with his first wife, and a daughter with his second.
Unusually for a US senator, Stevens was rarely interested in extolling his philosophy. But in his final speech on the floor of the Senate in 2008, shortly after his bitter defeat, Stevens defined his entire career in a sentence:
My motto has always been 'to hell with politics, just do what's right for Alaska.' And I've tried every day to live up to those words."
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