Alec Hansen Interview

Bob Brown: I'm interviewing Alec Hansen, a lobbyist for the Montana League of Cities and Towns and executive director of that organization in his office in Helena, MT on April 15, 2010. Good morning, Alec. When and where were you born?

Alec Hansen: I was born in Butte, MT on the 10th of March, 1941.

BB: And so you grew up in Butte during, since the fifties and sixties. What are your early recollections of Butte during that period of time? What are the memories that jump out, that stand out?

AH: Well when I was born, my dad ran a mine out in Phillipsburg. And it's kind 00:01:00of strange, when I was born, my father was 51 and my mother was 44. And that was probably, 1941 was probably the most dangerous time in the history of the modern world, and people of that age having a child seems kind of strange. I asked my mother many times how that happened, and she never gave me an explanation I understood. But my father died when I was four years old, and my mom and I moved to Butte. We moved into my grandmother's house on West Granite Street, about a block from the courthouse, which I've always thought that being the...Working for the League of Cities and Towns was a perfect job for me because I grew up in a real city.

BB: In the shadow of the courthouse.

AH: Yeah, and you know, we have a motto in our family that the Hansen's stop where the pavement ends, so I don't spend a lot of time out in the country. I'm 00:02:00a city guy and this has been a perfect job for me.

One of the things I remember most about, one of the first things I remember about Butte was when we moved to Butte. I had an older brother, and he was in the Navy, and this was WW2. And he saw some very heavy action off the coast of Okinawa in a carrier task force. And my mother was deeply worried about him, and she'd just lost her husband. And I can remember Christmas of 1945, my brother came home from the war. And I will never forget that as long as I live, when he walked through that door, how happy my mother was. That was just an amazing thing. That kind of just made us all feel like we had a new home and that was Butte. And this is where we were going to live, and we were going to make the best of it. And I'll never forget that.

My mother, those were the old days, and she was a widow, and I can remember she wore black for an entire year after my father died. So Butte was an amazing place, what an amazing place to grow up. There were, in our neighborhood which was called Hub Addition, the area just west of downtown Butte there, there were a lot of families that had a lot of kids. And it was kind of strange in that neighborhood is that a lot of those families, there were no men in the house. The guys had either been killed in the war or killed in the mines or some other reason. There were a lot of guys in our neighborhood that didn't have fathers. Some guys had fathers that just left or those kinds of problems.

But the kids in that neighborhood, the guys I grew up with, geez, what a resilient bunch of people. I go over there now, and I look down the street, and 00:04:00I remember where different guys lived that...My wife will be with me and I'll say, "Well, the guy there, that guy he died in the pen. Or this guy he became a doctor. This guy went to California and made a million dollars selling something." Most of the guys that came out of the neighborhood did pretty good, and they all had great stories.

It was a really good place to grow up. You grew up on your own. There wasn't Little League Baseball or any of that. When you went to school, they pretty much just turned you loose. And being right uptown, we spent a lot of time on the streets selling newspapers and doing things like that. That's a damn good education. I learned more on the streets of Butte than I ever did in college. I always tell people, when I left Butte to go to college, I was one of the smartest guys in Butte. Four years later when I came back...

BB: And when you say that I kind of take your point, but you're talking about 00:05:00sort of survival skills?

AH: No, you just learned how things worked. Survival skills, you learned how to get along with people. I was never a great big guy, and I have kind of a loud mouth. Avoiding getting' beaten up, that's a real talent.

BB: Now your mom was Irish.

AH: Yeah, my mother was Irish and my dad was Norwegian.

BB: But you didn't know your dad as much so...

AH: No.

BB: So I'm thinking that culturally you might have been brought up more on your mother's Irish culture.

AH: Oh yeah.

BB: Because Butte, when you were a kid, was a cultural mix. You had various kinds of people. Any thoughts or comments about that, maybe about the Irish as a group or that cultural mix in Butte?

AH: Well, we lived in the Saint Patrick's Parish, and not being Irish and having a name like Hansen.

BB: But you're half Irish.

AH: Yeah, but having a name like Hansen was kind of a liability. You know the 00:06:00Irish think they're the princes of the city over there. And I grew up in Saint Patrick's Parish, and just about every one of my friends was Irish: the Morans, the Hanleys, the O'Donnells, the Harringtons, the Lynchs-that was our neighborhood-the Garveys. A guy like Hansen...But we had a black family in our neighborhood, too. And you look at Butte, and there were kind of ethnic enclaves. The Hub Addition and Dublin Gulch and Corktown, that's were most of the Irish people lived.

BB: And they were what, uptown in Butte?

AH: Yeah.

BB: Up in the hill?

AH: Up on the hill below the mines, out in Meaderville.

BB: Say those again, Alec, kind of clearly.

AH: Corktown, Dublin Gulch, and the Hub Addition. Those were Irish neighborhoods, and then in East Butte was a lot of the Yugoslavian people.

BB: And what would a neighborhood be out there? Would it just be called East Butte?

AH: East Butte, yeah. And then there were, where the Berkeley Pit is now, there 00:07:00were a couple of neighborhoods called Meaderville and McQueen; those were the Italian neighborhoods. They had the great restaurants out there. And the Meaderville Mercantile which was an Italian grocery store. And the people out there Italian, some Yugoslavian and people like that.

BB: Was there a Serbian neighborhood?

AH: Yeah, that would be East Butte.

BB: Same thing.

AH: Yugoslavian. And then on East Granite Street was called Finn Town, and the Finns live over there. And they had a Finnish boarding house that we used to go over there and have dinner on Sunday. I don't know; it was a buck for all you can eat, making great food. And people just, they'd sit at these long tables and some of the greatest you'll ever eat. But there's a thing called a Molly Maguire's toast that says everything you'll ever want to know about the ethnic diversity of Butte. It goes: I work for an Englishman, and I room with the 00:08:00French Canuck; I live at a Swedish boardinghouse where a Finlander cooks my chuck; I buy my clothes from a German, and I get my shoes from a Pole; and I put my hope in an Italian pope to save my Irish soul. That's Butte. That's the story of Butte.

BB: (Laughs) That's great. That's great.

AH: A guy named Kevin Shannon who lives over there told me that one.

BB: And you know, there's no other city in Montana where that could be the case. There may be other cities in the country, but probably not actually that many.

AH: There aren't many cities in Montana where people would remember something like that.

BB: That's true too.

AH: There's one good thing about Butte is people are trying to keep the culture alive. I do the same things with my kids. Both of my kids were raised in Helena and went through high school in Helena, but I've told them, I said, "You might think you're from Helena but actually you're both Butte guys. You're from Butte. Don't ever forget that." And I drag them over there on Memorial Day and make 00:09:00them go out to the graves, and so they have that connection. I think that's really important.

BB: You bet. I think it is too. How would you describe the political culture of Butte during that period in the fifties and the sixties?

AH: Obviously Butte was one hundred percent Democratic. You know that's the big fortress of the Democratic Party in Montana. And you look at Montana now, there are more votes in Ravalli County today than there are in Deer Lodge and Silver Bow County combined. It was the Democratic Party, and that was the main thing in Butte. There were very few...There was always a joke: there was a place over town called the Success Cafe. It had four stools in it; people would go by there and say, "That's where they hold the Republican Convention in the Success Cafe."

But I think the big thing in Butte politically wasn't so much the Democratic 00:10:00Party because there was really no opposition. I mean in Butte, the election's over in June, the local election. You don't worry about the general election if you're running for office in Butte. But I think the big political issue in Butte was the management-labor issue, the unions and the Anaconda Company. That was where most of the friction was in the town. That's where most of the disagreement was.

And at the same time, that's where most of the really important decisions got made. The miner's union and all of the unions were a very important influence, political influence in Butte. And in my time and when I was a kid...I think almost every three years when I was growing up...there was a copper strike. And those things were devastating. You go on strike and some of those strikes lasted three, four, five, six, seven months. And when you're on strike you don't get unemployment, so most of the work force in the town is laid off. They're on 00:11:00strike; they're not making any money, and it gets pretty tense. I can remember when I was young you'd hear about people that were scabs, people that crossed picket lines. And that's probably the worst thing you could call somebody in Butte would be a scab. The unions were very strong. There was a lot of animosity between the company and the unions, but once the strikes got settled people went back to work, things were good.

And the thing that's interesting about Butte is that at the time, at that particular time and during the war and after, the Butte mines and the Anaconda smelter and the operations in Great Falls and East Helena paid the highest industrial wages in the West. I can remember I worked as a day's pay miner in the Mountain Con Mine and the Kelly Mine in Butte, but I think we were getting paid four dollars an hour.

And there was a strike, and a bunch of my friends and I went out to Seattle. And we ran into a guy who was in the personnel department at Boeing who happened to be from Butte. He got us the best jobs you could get at the Renton plant, and we got paid a dollar seventy-seven an hour. And this friend of mine says, "I can't work for those kind of wages." And this guy says, "Well, if you can't work for those kind of wages, you're not going to work in this town because there's no unions." So the union got the wages up, but the company paid those wages.

And really, it was kind of interesting in the early days, the copper price was probably (unintelligible) on the front page of the Butte paper, and that was just to set the wages. The big issue was the unions and the management, the company and the unions. That thing was always in the back of your mind.

BB: So a union leader might be more important in the Butte political culture than, say, the county clerk and recorder, the state representative, or somebody 00:13:00like that.

AH: Oh yeah, yeah. You bet.

BB: Now you know too, do you remember a couple of legislators from the 1950s: a guy by the name of Mervin Dempsey?

AH: Yeah.

BB: And guy by the name of John Cunningham? Do you member anything about them?

AH: I don't remember Cunningham.

BB: What about Dempsey?

AH: I remember Merv was a very interesting guy. He was a heavy-set guy, and he played golf. He loved to play golf, and he was a pretty good golfer. He didn't look like he might be. He's the first guy I ever saw who had a golf cart. And he started to develop glaucoma or something and he wore dark glasses. But Merv was a very sharp guy, and he was in the Legislature. I didn't follow that stuff very closely until I got directly involved when I work over here in Helena. But Merv, I remember Merv. He was a great guy and his wife Kitty(?). They owned the Butte Copper Shop and they sold these bracelets and things and silverwares. Yeah, Mervin was a really interesting guy.

BB: Well, what I'm fishing for here is there's obviously this division between labor and management in Butte. And since the great majority of people are on the labor side of that and the Democratic party is the party of labor, there's going to be the vast majority of people who would be on the labor side and on the Democratic side and not very many on the other side. And yet some Butte legislators over the years have had the reputation for closeness to the Anaconda Company. And I guess you'd think, as you just mentioned, you know, that there are these strikes that occur every so often, so it's a division that's really kind of an animosity thing. And yet there are legislators from Butte that, over the years at least, have had the reputation for generally being reliable allies of the Anaconda Company when it counted. And they continued to be re-elected there in that climate. How do you explain that?

AH: Well, what they did, I think, well in fact I know, is they would find people 00:15:00that were sympathetic to their interests and they would run them as Democrats. And I don't have any specific names, but there were certain people that-and the Montana Power Company did the same thing-so they would find a guy, maybe an employee or somebody that was sympathetic to their interests. They would run the guy as a Democrat, he'd get elected, and then he would vote with the company.

There's a great story about-I'm not going to name the guy-but he was a guy that had been put up for office in Butte by the Montana Power Company as a Democrat. And he served, and he was in the Senate. They got into a complicated issue one day, and there were several amendments on this bill, and this guy got screwed up and he voted the wrong way. And he came out in the hall. And Bob Caret(?) was there who was doing the lobbying for Montana Power and he called the guy over. And the guy says, "I made a mistake." And Bob Caret said, "You made a very big mistake." (Laughs.) And you could smoke up there in those days, and he had the 00:16:00cigar going. I thought, "Now there's one of their guys." But there was some of that.

BB: Is that guy still living?

AH: No.

BB: Can you tell us his name?

AH: Bob Quinn(?).

BB: Bob was the lobbyist?

AH: Yeah. No, Bob was the member.

BB: Oh the legislator. Oh, I see. Did he become a lobbyist?

AH: Yeah. BB: Because I knew Bob Quinn. I didn't know he'd ever been a legislator.

AH: But there were some of those guys. But generally, there were union people that got elected to the Legislature, working guys. And if you look at some of the laws that were passed in the fifties and sixties, you can see where the influence of the Anaconda Company completely evaporated. And you were involved in some of these bills, these personal property tax bills. When that all started, I think there were like ten classes of business equipment property, and the highest taxed item in that 00:17:00entire list was ore haulers, 18 percent. And that is a perfect example of the way that the Anaconda Company lost its influence in the Legislature: when these people can vote to tax ore haulers, which was the biggest part of the operation at the Berkeley Pit, at the highest rate of the entire state, 18 percent.

And so the Anaconda Company has a reputation for controlling Montana and being very aggressive and getting their own way. And I worked for the Anaconda Company in the seventies, and the simple thing was we're never on offense. We're over there to play defense.

BB: And because it had the reputation of being this dominating influence, probably legislators were inclined, when they thought they could, to stick it to them. They felt justified in doing so.

But the reality was, do you think those taxes were actually paid in full, either?

AH: Oh sure. Yeah, you could pay your taxes.

BB: Do you think some of those ore haulers were maybe lost off the tax rolls?

AH: Oh, I'm not so sure.

BB: Maybe that's part of the folklore of Montana.

AH: Yeah, I think it is part of the folklore. I can remember in the early seventies, had a gross proceeds, net proceeds tax on copper. So if you produce copper in Butte, you were able to deduct the transportation, the mining costs, the transportation, the smelting, the refining, the marketing and all that and then you paid the tax on essentially what you might have earned on the copper that you produced and sold. And one year, Anaconda, they had a very good year. The price of copper in about 1974-75 got up over a dollar and a quarter a pound which was pretty high. And they paid the Silver Bow County 14 million dollars in 00:19:00net proceeds tax. The next year they paid zero because Richard Nixon liquidated the strategic copper stockpile.

BB: I didn't know that's when that happened.

AH: So they immediately, there was a bill introduced in the Legislature by the Butte delegation to go to gross proceeds on copper, just like the severance tax, so that you're paying on the value of what you extract with no regard to what it cost to produce the final product. And the company fought that bitterly but lost.

BB: About when would that have been?

AH: That would have probably been in the '75, 1975 Legislature. And the company fought that bitterly and they lost. Because essentially what you're going to do, I think most people would be willing to pay tax on what they earn, a profit. It's pretty tough to pay a 3 million dollar tax on a 25 million dollar loss. At a time in the early seventies when things were 00:20:00pretty good, Anaconda in Butte in the Montana operations used to make 3 million dollars every two days. And when things went to hell after the copper price collapsed...God, it went down to 59 cents a pound is the lowest I can remember it...they were losing money at about the same rate.

So eventually the thing went, after they sold the thing to Atlantic Richfield, there was no way that they could maintain a viable operation. The environmental cleanup costs at the Anaconda Smelter were 90 million dollars. They had high labor costs, they had...And the ore body had been depleted. There's still a lot over there, but the good stuff was gone. And the ore grade in the Berkeley Pit 00:21:00was less than one percent copper, so that was a problem. They had huge extraction costs, lots of overburden had to be removed. And you put a pencil to the thing, and it doesn't work anymore. And so they closed the smelter first, and then they closed the Butte mines.

That was a tragic day in Montana I think because we lost part of our culture, we lost one of the big drivers in the economy and...

BB: Although it's come back in a different way.

AH: It's come back in a different way, but it concussed Butte and Anaconda and Great Falls. And those towns have never completely recovered. And you talk to people in Anaconda and Butte about economic development, they want the Anaconda Company back.

BB: Really?

AH: They don't want to be a tourist economy. They don't want to be a curio shops and things like that. They want the Anaconda Company back.

BB: And many of them fought desperately against the Anaconda Company.

AH: Fought the Anaconda Company every inch of the way.

BB: But now they've had these nostalgic reasons for thinking, "But really when they were prominent here, our lives were better."

AH: Yeah, well I had a big argument with Jim Murray.

BB: Leader of the Montana AFL-CIO.

AH: They testified in favor of the air quality standards at the Anaconda Smelter and the plan that was put together to control the emissions, the 90 million dollar debacle. And I told him, I said, "If this goes through, it's inevitable that the smelter will close." And he says, "I don't care. We just want the Anaconda Company, and we want the company to do what's right. And we want to protect the people that live in those towns." And we went around and round. You know how you talk of political-I've got my ideas; he's got his ideas. We go round and round on that, and I finally told him, I said, "Well, I don't know. You got a lot of members in Butte and Anaconda and that's the foundation 00:23:00of the labor movement in this state. And if this company doesn't get some relief from some of these costs, the next time you're over there you're not going to have any members. You're going to be representing ghosts." And every time I'd see him, I says, "How the ghosts doing, Murray?" And it was true.

BB: You're exactly right. And in fact, back during that period of time, Montana was the most safely Democratic state in the Rocky Mountain region, even including New Mexico. And that was when the mines and the mills were all functioning at more or less full capacity. And many of those blue collar workers were labor union members or Democrats, one or the other or both. And now we see fewer saw mills, we see fewer mines, we see fewer Democratic voters. And in the process, of course, the Republicans have won more elections. And I think you're right. Jim Murray and some of those guys probably inadvertently contributed to that.

AH: Well, Anaconda had 5,000 employees in Butte, Anaconda, Great Falls, East 00:24:00Helena, and Bonner. 5,000 and those people got paid well. The amazing thing about it is that I know families in Butte that the father would work in the mine, the mother stayed home. And they lived pretty good and they sent all their kids to college. A lot of people don't understand the economic contribution that the Anaconda made to Montana. It was enormous. You go back and read about the Fair Trial Practices Act and all of that when they shut the state down.

BB: Down in 1903.

AH: Yeah. Twenty percent of the people in the state were out of work. That's one of the things where they got the terrible reputation for manhandling the state of Montana, but that thing is still on the books.

BB: That law is still on the books.

AH: Yes, it is. My wife's maiden name is Clancy, and the judge that they were 00:25:00trying to get out from under in Butte was named Clancy. And I've always said, "I know you're Irish and you're proud of it, but nobody in my family was ever a crooked judge." Oh God, she gets mad.

BB: (Laughs.) Because a family relationship to him?

AH: Oh no, not at all.

BB: I see. (Laughs.)

AH: I don't think he ever had a family, old Clancy, but that's the guy. He was in Gus Heinze's pocket. Gus Heinze, geez, what an amazing story that guy. Come to Butte for a year, made 11 million dollars in 1900, went back to New York, tried to start his own stock exchange, lost all of that money, ended up out in Oregon almost destitute.

BB: Yeah, and died a short time later.

A couple of quick names that were key political leaders, I think well more or less during the time you were there. Just any thoughts that come to your mind 00:26:00when I say Frank Reardon.

AH: Oh, Frank. Frank was pretty influential guy. He was in the state Senate; he was an important guy in the town. He owned, I think he owned a hardware store and a plumbing and heating operation down on the flat. And he was somebody that people paid attention to. Another guy, I think is maybe the one guy from Butte that was speaker of the House is...

BB: Ray Wayrynen.

AH: Yeah, Ray Wayrynen. Say that twice. What an amazing guy.

BB: Was he a Finn?

AH: Yeah, oh God yeah. Big Finn. And he had a partial interest in some distillery here in Helena, and they made this Montana red eye whiskey. And when Wayrynen would be out campaigning, he'd come in the bar and he'd buy everybody a shot of that whiskey they made over here in Helena. Then he'd leave, and even in Butte some guys dumped that stuff out. If Wayrynen doesn't get elected, 00:27:00everybody's going to go blind from drinking. But Ray was a good guy, and he was a pretty imposing guy. And I think he was speaker of the House.

BB: He was. Now neither one of those fellas, though, would fit conveniently into the labor mold would they?

AH: No, no. Wayrynen was a funeral director, and I think Reardon was a plumbing contractor. The guys that were affiliated with labor were guys like Jerry Lombardi, some of those guys.

BB: And Jerry would have been from that period. I'm trying to think. Pat Williams?

AH: Pat Williams.

BB: He would have been in that more labor wing.

AH: Mike Cooney served in the Legislature in Butte at one time.

BB: Yeah, same thing.

AH: You know, to be perfectly honest I don't think people in Butte paid a whole lot of attention to the Legislature. They pretty much did what they wanted to do 00:28:00over there. I mean, Jesus, they had legalized gambling in Butte until 1951. I can remember being a kid going out to Meterville and going in the back room of the Rocky Mountain Cafe and watching my brother and his friends play roulette and craps and they had slot machines all over the place.

BB: Wide open.

AH: They had punch boards on the bar. And Arnold Olson, the guy from Butte who'd been county attorney over there...

BB: Was attorney general.

AH: Yeah, shut it down. There's a great, I'll tell you exactly, this'll give you an idea of how Butte thought about Helena. Arnold Olson, when he got out of the Navy after the war, wanted to be county attorney, Silver Bow county attorney. And he went to the people over there that could help him make that happen.

BB: Union leaders?

AH: Just different people: Al Wilkinson, some of those kinds of guys.

BB: And Al Wilkinson of course was the lead lobbyist for the Anaconda Company.

AH: Yeah, and they told him, "Arnold, you're not ready to be county attorney. We're going to put you up for attorney general." That's how they thought. Being county attorney in Butte was a hell of a lot more important than being attorney general of Montana. Well, they got fooled. (Laughs.)

BB: So Arnold was elected attorney general of the whole state.

AH: Yep.

BB: And then he came in and enforced the law in Silver Bow County and succeeded in shutting down the gambling there.

AH: They had wide-open gambling in West Yellowstone and that just vanished overnight. That was amazing.

BB: Probably better move on, although I just find this fascinating. But you're a young guy, you're growing up in Butte, and you're of modest means. But you got an opportunity to go to college. Where did you go and what did you major in?

AH: My father made my mother promise that she'd never let me work in the mine. 00:30:00And when we graduated from high school, some friends and I went on a little rampage. And so we all ended up in the mine. And I worked in the mine for about six months and then...

BB: What'd you do, get arrested for drinking?

AH: No, we never got arrested, just didn't show up for an extended period of time, spent a lot of money.

BB: So you ended up having to go to work in the mines.

AH: My mother essentially told me, "If your dad could see you, he'd take you down there himself." So I worked for awhile in the mine, and then my brother had gone to college and he was big on education. I was a terrible student. I can't sit still. I had a tough time in high school. Christ, in the spring of the year the class was on the first floor, we'd go out the window and go uptown. It was just hard sitting still in school, and I didn't care much about school.

But I knew that if I stay in those mines long, I get killed. It was dangerous. It was spooky. It was hard. The money was great, but I just knew that there really wasn't much of a future there. And I knew all those guys, and they're all friends of mine. And when you walk in a mine in Butte, you're 18 years old, they treat you like a man. And the guys I worked with where they're in their sixties and then retire, God they'd retire. They'd be off work for maybe a month and they'd drop dead. Just that kind of...and what happened to my dad.

So I decided, "Hell, I'll go to college." So my mother worked as a clerk in a furniture store over there. And we didn't have money, but we had a little bit. We did pretty good, I think. My mother was a very hard working woman. And I had money to go to school. And you could make enough money in the summer in Butte working in the mine or on the hill somewhere to pretty much cover the whole deal.

BB: Which is what you did? You got summer jobs associated with the mining industry?

AH: Yeah. And the tuition at the university when I started was sixty bucks a month. And you could go to Missoula. And if you can't live off the land, you're not a Butte guy. Jesus, we could live down there pretty cheap. And we got a bunch of guys, we'd rent a place, we'd cook our own stuff. We had guys in Butte that meat lockers, people would bring us down stuff to eat. The big expenses were the cigarettes and the beer. (Laughs.) And we found ways around that too. There's all kinds of different things you could do.

But when I was in high school, all through high school, I worked as a copy boy at the newspaper in Butte. And I got to know all those reporters, and they were all great guys. And I thought, "This is what I'd really like to do." And I liked to write. Although I wasn't very good in school, some of the teachers that I had recognized that I could write a little bit, and I always did well in English and essays and things like that. And I had some essays that I had written that won some awards and things like that, so I thought, "Well hell, I'm going to go down 00:33:00to Missoula and get a degree in journalism and become a reporter."

And I took journalism for one quarter, and I didn't like it because they had you keeping scrapbooks and it was kind of busy work. And my brother-and he was a bright guy-and he told me, he said, "If you want to be a newspaper reporter, what you got to understand is history, why things happen and political science, how they happen." So I majored in history and political science.

BB: I see. That's what your degree was in?

AH: Yeah, and took a lot of English classes, read a lot of books. And when I was 18, I tried to join the Marine Corps. But they wouldn't take me because I'd ruptured my kidney playing football. So the day I got out of college, my mother came down and she brought my mail which included my draft notice. So I joined the Navy rather than going into the Army, and I spent two years in the Navy during Vietnam.

And when I got out of the Navy, I didn't know what the hell I was going to do. I was thinking about going to law school, but this was in October so I would have 00:34:00had to wait around. And I was thinking about getting a job on the hill and going to law school in the fall. And I was walking over the street one day, and I ran into the editor of the newspaper, and he says, "Oh you're back. What are you doing?" And I said, "Nothing, I'm looking for a job." He said, "I've got a reporting job open." So I went to work for the paper there in Butte for a couple years. And then I had chance to be the sports editor in Missoula, but they wouldn't let me transfer and I got mad and quit. And then Neil Lynch told me...

BB: Neil Lynch, the Democrat senator from Butte.

AH: He told me that the governor was looking for a guy to write speeches and do stuff like that, so I came over and saw the governor.

BB: The governor was?

AH: Forrest Anderson.

BB: What was your first impression of him?

AH: Well, I went into see him, and he couldn't meet with me because he got stung by a bee and had to go to the hospital. And I was thinking, "My God, he can't be 00:35:00too tough of a guy." (Laughs.) So I went downtown and had a couple of beers. They told me to come back at three o'clock. So I had a friend of mine with me, went down and had a couple of beers, come back up and met the guy.

BB: In his office in the capitol building?

AH: Yeah, I showed them some of the stuff I'd written, and he made a few calls around over in Butte to some of the old reporters that he knew, and they gave the word that I could work. And so in the meantime I'd gone back and asked for my job back, and I got a call one night my mother says, "What the hell have you done now?" I says, "What do you mean?" She says, "You got a letter here from the governor." I says, "Open that up and read it to me." It says, "Sure nice to meet you the other day. If you want the job, you can start on Monday the ninth of September." So I went into the editor's office and says, "Guess what? I quit again." (Laughs.) So I came over here, and what a transition that was coming from-It's only 66 miles...

BB: From Butte to Helena.

AH: From Butte to Helena, from night to day. I had never had a day job before. 00:36:00All the time I worked at the paper, I worked nights. And when we'd get off-I shouldn't tell you this but this isn't any part of the history of Montana-but when we'd get off work we'd go downtown and we'd drink beer and whiskey and whatever else there was. And then we'd have something to eat and then we'd play cards all night. And then when the sun would come up in the summertime, we'd go play golf.

Well, I started over here. You'd get off work at five o'clock in the evening or five-thirty whatever it is, you go downtown and you start doing that same kind of stuff. By nine o'clock, you're a monster and nobody wants to have anything to do with you. So I had to change my lifestyle. And then I got married and my life really changed. I'm a typical Helena guy going straight home every night.

BB: This is a big question, and it probably is going to be developed in some of the other questions that we've talked about, but I just asked you how would describe Governor Anderson's personality. If you wanted to describe him in a few 00:37:00sentences, what would you say?

AH: Forrest Anderson is the smartest guy I ever met. I have never known anybody that had a better understanding of politics, a better understanding of people. He was a magician. He could make things happen, and he really knew how to get people to do what he needed to happen. He's also the funniest guy I ever knew, and he never tried to be funny. He wasn't warm and affable and goofy. He was a very serious guy, but he could cut you down like nobody in the history of the world. He had a very quick wit, and when he said something people listened. He was a very impressive guy.

He's five feet four inches tall. Very little tiny guy, and I was astonished when I first met him because you look at the pictures, the campaign pictures and things like that, Christ, he looks like a western movie star. And I walked in 00:38:00his office, I was kind of surprised how little he was. And I'll never forget one time this guy from Warner Brothers called, and they'd made that movie, Little Big Man, and they were having the world premiere down in Billings, and the guy asked me if the governor would be willing to proclaim Little Big Man Day in Montana. So I went and asked him, and he says, "Tell that phony Hollywood son of a bitch every day is Little Big Man Day in Montana." That's the way he was. He was funny.

Just the way he did things, he was clever. There's nobody ever was better prepared to be governor than Forrest Anderson. He'd been in the Legislature, he'd served a term in the Supreme Court, he had a successful law practice here in town, three terms as an attorney general, then he walks into the governor's office. He knew everything that was wrong with state government, and he knew how to fix it.

BB: So he was the force behind executive reorganization, right?

AH: Executive reorganization, he had some influence on the new constitution, did 00:39:00a lot of things to make the government work better and more effectively, got rid of a lot of things that were just wrong and didn't work right, put the investment program together, things that were just wrong and corrupt and had been going on and on for years. I think when he got elected in '68 and that time from '69 to '72 probably is the biggest period of change in the structure and function of government in the entire history of the state.

BB: I think most people would agree with that.

AH: And I would hold when it's all said and done that when people remember him, he will be remembered as one of the best governors Montana ever had. I'm very proud of the work I did for him.

BB: And I think most historians would agree the great and significant change that occurred while he was governor, how government was streamlined and brought into the 21st century. And you, anything to add? You've described him, I guess, 00:40:00pretty well personally.

AH: Executive reorganization is kind of an interesting thing. The whole idea is that it would make government more efficient. There were like a 150 boards, commissions, and they were all independent. And the governor had no control. It's like sometime the cities and the counties dealing with these library boards. You've got these independent boards, they pretty much do what they want to do, and then they just come and ask for more money.

So the whole idea, and he explained it to me and he had a knack for explaining complicated things in very simple terms, he said, "This isn't about efficiency and economy in government. What this is really about," he says, "is the next guy that's dumb enough to get himself elected governor will be able to go out and fire some people and get his own people in there and run it the way he wants to run it. It's all about management control." And that's what it was all about. They put it all into 20 agencies.

BB: All directly answerable to the governor.

AH: All of them directly answerable to the governor. And so the guys, like he told me, you got some guy in there that isn't doing his job, now you can get rid of him. And that's what that was all about.

BB: Who were the individuals that were most influential with the governor? Were there three key advisors?

AH: I think during the time that he was attorney general, he had a lot of good, sharp young attorneys working over there on the staff. A lot of the really good attorneys that I know in Montana have worked for the attorney general. That's a great experience. Some of the guys that have worked at the attorney general's office went back to Butte and practiced law. They really had, that's great training. Duke Crowley who taught a lot at the University of Montana for years there after he left Helena, the governor paid a lot of attention to what Duke had to say.

BB: Yeah, and he was an important advisor for the executive reorganization.

AH: Duke kind of did that part-time. He was head of the Executive 00:42:00Reorganization Commission, but the governor listened to Duke a lot. And Jim Sorti(?), who then had worked for Forrest in the attorney general's office, went to eastern Montana and became a judge. Forrest talked to him a lot. He had guys that he talked to on a regular basis, people that-attorneys, staff guys-that worked for him in the attorney general's office. Ron Richards was the executive assistant to the governor, had been the head of the Democratic Party. Ron was a very good political operator.

BB: He was a close advisor of the governor.

AH: He was the executive assistant when I was there. And then there were just other people like some business guys and...

BB: Can you name any names? George McGaffey(?).

AH: Well, George was more of a friend. They went fishing together. George was more of a friend than a political advisor. Although people like Noel Goff, 00:43:00attorneys here in town, people like that. He had decent relationship with Largey McDonald and some of the people from the Anaconda Company, Bob Corette and those people. They had some influence. We paid a lot of attention to what was going on with the labor unions. Jim Murray spent an awful lot of time in our office. The governor listened to what those guys had to say. He relied on their support.

BB: Clyde Jarvis?

AH: I didn't see Clyde around the office much. But Clyde was a guy that people, he had a following in Montana.

BB: The Montana Farmer's Union.

AH: He had his little radio show, and people paid attention to Clyde. But I don't think there was a close, personal relationship with the governor. The governor wasn't one of these, Forrest wasn't one of these guys that he didn't like to go out and campaign too much.

His idea of a good day was to figure out a way to make something work better and to deliver a service or a product to the people in a better way. In those days 00:44:00the liquor board and all of these things, they just didn't work well. His whole idea was, "We're getting these rats out of here. We're going to get this thing fixed. We're going to open it up, and people are going to get a better-they're paying taxes-they're going to get a better government."

But at the same time, he was really interested in trying to get some jobs. Those were tough times in Montana. Copper and things like that weren't real good. -Get some people in here and get some people put to work.- Colstrip and the plants down there, he wanted to see those built and things like that. That was important to him. But just this whole executive reorganization thing, that was a 00:45:00big thing.

BB: Now Alec, his working style might have been a little unorthodox because didn't he have a cabin up on the Missouri River?

AH: Yeah, he didn't spend a lot of time in the office. He was a guy, most of the great things he did, most of the good work he did was done over at the mansion on the telephone. He would call people. He had people all over the state, "What's going on? What are people saying?" He didn't need polls or anything like that. He had a way of feeling things out. Yeah, he'd spend some time up at Craig, and he spent a lot of time over at the mansion.

BB: Craig was where his cabin was up the Missouri River.

AH: Yeah, right in town. He loved to fish. He'd go up there, and George McGaffey(?) could go up with him. But he was a hard working guy. And the thing about it, a dumb guy could work all day and get nothing done. A smart guy could 00:46:00work for 15 minutes and change the world. And that's more the way he was.

BB: But I think I remember you telling me a story one time about delivering some documents or something up at Craig so that he functioned as the governor while he was up there as well as he did when he was in the mansion or the governor's office.

AH: Oh sure. All he needed was a telephone. They didn't have cell phones in those days. He called this guy-I mean when he hired me, I don't know if he looked at my resume or anything-he called a couple of guys in Butte that knew me and said, "This kid any good?" And they said, "Yeah," so I got the job. That's how he did it, and that's not a bad way to go.

BB: How would you describe his relationship with Senator Mansfield?

AH: Oh pretty good, I think. Mike at that time was a, Christ, he was a majority leader, one of the most influential people in the country. They worked together. But everybody's always been perplexed about Glasgow Air Force Base. I think that 00:47:00almost put Mansfield crazy (laughs). They worked on a lot of different deals.

Mike Mansfield and Forrest Anderson and a few other guys, they come up with this whole idea of impact aid, like when the federal government's going to put the facility in. They were going to put the ABM's in north-central Montana. And Forrest pretty much told them, "If you're going to put that in then you're going to have to build some roads, you're going to have to provide some housing, you're going to have to do all of these things." He worked with Senator Mansfield on that.

But they're different guys. I can remember going back there one time with him, and we went to Mansfield's office and Mansfield was busy. I don't know, had to be on the floor. And Forrest was an impatient guy. He's bouncing around the office drinking coffee. So then we go back in Mike's office, and he had kind of some Oriental furniture and stuff like that. And he turned to me and he says, "Geez this is going to be a seance or something?" And Mansfield came and he 00:48:00talked a little bit.

I mean, they got along. They had to get along, but they were different guys. Forrest Anderson-Mike Mansfield, he's a national figure, really an admirable guy and a college professor and a recognized expert in the Asiatic history. Forrest Anderson was a Montana street politician. There's a little difference. Of course Mike was good at that too. Mike never had to work as hard to get elected as some people did.

BB: Senator Metcalf.

AH: I think they had a pretty good relationship. And I think they admired each other. And they both were attorneys and both tough guys. They had a good relationship. And Senator Metcalf, the relationship between his staff and our staff and the things that we were able to get done, we worked real close with 00:49:00Senator Metcalf.

BB: Congressman Olsen?

AH: Pretty much the same thing. Arnold is a good guy. And when we needed things in Washington, we would rely on Arnold. Forrest quit drinking.

BB: Forrest quit drinking?

AH: The time I knew Forrest, he never had a drink. He had a reputation for being an awful drunk at one time. And during the time I worked for him when he was governor, never saw him take a drink. And Arnold was sort of living the life that Forrest used to live, and I think that bothered him a little bit.

BB: Bothered Forrest or bothered him?

AH: Well, if this guy could pay attention, we could get more work done. I think that was a problem. But then Arnold went to Butte and became judge and Jesus, he was a terrific judge over there. And he was a completely changed man once he got out of Washington. The best thing that ever happened to him was going back to 00:50:00Butte and becoming a judge.

BB: Now Forrest Anderson's lieutenant governor was Tom Judge, who later of course became governor. Your thoughts on that relationship?

AH: That wasn't so good apparently. They just didn't get along. They were different guys. And Forrest knew that Tom Judge wanted to be governor, he just didn't know when. And Forrest didn't particularly want it to happen right away. When they were inaugurated in '69-I wasn't working for him then but I heard this story-Tom Judge was there, and this was a big day in his life. He'd been elected lieutenant governor, he'd been inaugurated, and they were back in the governor's office, and Forrest says, "I'll see you in four years." (Laughs.)

BB: (Laughs.) "I don't want you to pester me," or...?

AH: "I don't want you around here." Just, "I'll see you in four years."

BB: And you didn't see much of him in the governor's office when you were there?

AH: No, no. And then Forrest was back in Washington one time, and there was some kind of a brush fire or something up around a place called Ithaca, west of Glasgow. And Tom Judge went up there and he got his picture in the Great Falls Tribune. Forrest came back and he saw that and he called Ron Richards' office and he says, "Hey, who let him out of the cage? He's not supposed to be doing this kind of stuff."

In those days, you didn't run as a team. Judge was elected on his own as lieutenant governor and so it was considered a natural stepping stone to be governor. And then when Forrest, his health kind of went to hell on him. Christ, he had trouble. They took out his spleen, and he had a hiatal hernia. He just didn't feel very well, so he just decided not to run again. And then Judge moved 00:52:00right in there and got himself elected twice.

BB: And did Forrest support Judge then enthusiastically?

AH: Oh yeah. He was a good Democrat. Not the typical Democrat, not the guy that goes to the dinners and does that stuff. I don't know if he ever knocked on a door in the whole time he was running for office.

BB: But you would describe him as a philosophical liberal? You mentioned Senator Metcalf would have probably been the classic example of the political liberal during that period in Montana politics. Close to him?

AH: Somewhere in between. Metcalf was a true progressive. I mean, he wanted to fight the mine. He fought the utilities. He's a guy I really respect. He fought the utilities and he did all of these things. He was ahead of everybody on environmental issues and things like that.

Forrest was more of a moderate. Forrest, I think, was more interested in results than philosophy. Forrest, there's a difference between a United States senator 00:53:00which is a forum, and governor which is a job and a tough job, one of the toughest you'll ever find. That's a big management, being governor is one of the biggest management challenges there is. Being senator is a little different.

BB: Yeah, you're one of a hundred, whereas the governor, especially in Anderson's case, was trying to reform state government at more of a hands-on...

AH: Yeah, and he told me one time, he says, "Every night I go to bed I hope those guys in Deer Lodge are all happy because," he says, "I went through one prison riot when I was attorney general, and I never want to see another one." So that's part of being governor. That's a huge responsibility.

BB: Ted Schwinden was a member of the governor's cabinet, a member of Anderson's cabinet. Did you remember anything about Schwinden in the Anderson administration?

AH: Yeah, they were pretty close. When Forrest got elected, there hadn't been a Democratic governor in 16 years. And so a lot of the guys that he brought into the cabinet had been in the Legislature, Democratic legislators. Schwinden had 00:54:00been a Democratic legislator from Roosevelt County: Fred Barrett, Gordon Bennett, people like that, people that were affiliated with the party, people that were well known, that Ron Richards had worked with when he was executive director of the party. Schwinden was, I guess it would be the Department of Natural Resources...

BB: Today?

AH: Yeah, he was land commissioner. And he, I think the governor had a lot of faith in him. And he was among those guys, the cabinet guys, that worked to get the executive reorganization thing done and really actually did a pretty good job.

BB: Do you remember him as an important player in the Anderson administration?

AH: Yeah, yeah. I do. I think the governor made his own decisions but he listened. Like most people, he wasn't some guy, he wasn't arrogant, he didn't 00:55:00pretend to know everything. If he had a question, he'd call around, he'd get an answer and then he'd act on it. I think Schwinden was, on some of those kinds of issues, was a trusted advisor.

BB: Now you weren't in the Schwinden administration, but would you think that Schwinden's approach to his job might have been influenced by his observations of Governor Anderson.

AH: Well I didn't see that. I can't remember anything Schwinden really did.

BB: Okay, you didn't notice any particular similarities between Schwinden's leadership style and Anderson's?

AH: No, no. I think maybe they built on what had happened earlier. Anderson changed the world and Judge tried. Judge went a million different ways a hundred miles an hour. I worked for him for a little bit. I didn't particularly like it because you work for one guy and that's the style you're used to and that's that 00:56:00kind of way you want to do business. And Judge was completely different. But, no, I didn't see a lot of...

Schwinden, I think, was pretty content to keep things kind of just running along nice and smooth, not to cause a lot of trouble. I don't think he liked to-He liked to fight, but he didn't like to take on the big challenges like Forrest did. We tried to get an investment plan put together, and in those days all of the state's money sat in banks around Montana drawing zero interest. And we tried to get an investment bill in the '69 Legislature, and it got killed. So then as part of the executive reorganization-and the banks didn't even know this I don't think-that was written into the law that went to the voters. And the day the thing was passed, he called a few of the banks up, and he says, "We expect you now to start paying interest."

"Well, we killed that bill."

And he says, "Hey, did you vote for executive reorganization?"

"Well, of course I did, Governor."

He says, "You should agree to what you vote for."

Investment program was in the executive reorganization initiative, and so look what that's done for Montana, those kinds of things. I think Forrest had a bigger problem when he came in. There was more that needed to be done, more things that needed to be changed. When Schwinden was governor, it was just leave things alone, they're going pretty good.

BB: And the state was in a terrible financial predicament too when Schwinden was governor, I think. Schwinden was probably trying to survive as much as anything.

AH: Well yeah. The state-I tell you a great Forrest Anderson story. We had a meeting over there one day, and the state was in real trouble financially. And there's something wrong with the fiscal system. It's just like the economy: it's 00:58:00boom or bust. Look at what's happened in the last ten years. In '83, they had a quarter of a billion dollar deficit. In '87, they had a billion dollar surplus. And those things go on all the time.

And we hit this really bad cycle in 1971, and so we had a meeting over there and the message was to the governor, "You're either going to have to drastically cut services,- right in the middle of the time when we're trying to reform everything, -or you're going have to raise taxes." And so they says, "You're in a real box." And I was talking to him and I says, "How you going to get out of the box?" And we used to call him the fox. He says, "They haven't built the box that'll hold a fox," and he says, "I'll figure a way out of this."

So we're down in Billings one time and he says, "You know, I'm out of the box I think." So he called up Jim Lucas and he told him...

BB: Jim Lucas was the Republican speaker of the House.

AH: Anointed next governor if you listened to the Republicans. And he said, "If you can get a sales tax bill through the Legislature, I'll sign it." This is 1971. In those days the Legislature lasted 60 days. In '71 it went 104 days, 44 days over the time limit. They covered the clocks. They'd come in; they'd meet in the morning. Anybody change their mind? No? They'd go somewhere and monkey around for the rest of the day.

They were tied up in the Senate. The Republicans had a one seat majority, but Big Ed Smith voted with the Democrats 50/50. So finally they worked out the deal, and the deal was-it's not legal anymore-"We'll put it on the ballot. You got an either/or. Do you want a two percent sales tax or a forty percent income 01:00:00tax surcharge?"

BB: A forty percent?

AH: An income tax surcharge. That was the question.

BB: Essentially an increase in the income tax by forty percent.

AH: That's the question that went to the voters. And I think it was a special election in '71 because this was right after the 1971 Legislature. And so I think the election was in the fall. I can remember going to county fairs and things like that talking about the sales tax. And when they counted the votes, two-thirds of the people voted to increase their income taxes by forty percent rather than have the sales tax. That was the end of Jim Lucas; it was the end of the Republican party in Montana for about five or six years.

BB: Well, heck longer than that because all the way through the Judge and Schwinden administrations. But when Forrest was elected governor, Alec, his slogan was "Pay more. What for?" He was running against the sales tax that had 01:01:00been proposed by Republicans including Lucas in a previous legislative session. So then he calls up Lucas after he's been governor for three years and says, "Hey Jim, by the way, if you can get it passed I'll sign it." So this encourages Jim.

AH: To stick his neck out.

BB: To stick his neck out.

AH: Here's the guy, here's the rabbit walking into the trap.

BB: So Forrest obviously didn't help much in getting the sales tax measure passed, and when ultimately the people had the choice on the ballot, they discredited the Republicans, voted down their idea overwhelmingly. And Forrest got the income tax increase he needed to continue running state government.

AH: Yeah, pretty slick. He told me, he says, "I'm the only guy in the history of the world, the only political leader in the history of the world, increase taxes forty percent, walk down the street the next day and nobody yelled at me. That's pretty good."

BB: (Laughs) That's pretty good.

AH: But no, I'm not sure he made that call, but I think he did.

BB: He told you he did.

AH: Yeah, I'm pretty sure he did. And we didn't say anything there in the 01:02:00session. They were just locked up up there and nobody was going to change. But once that thing got on the ballot then we got pretty aggressive against the sales tax. And I'll tell you what killed the sales tax. That would have been a pretty close election, but they had a guy that was running the sales tax, pro-sales tax, campaign at an office there in Helena. And they tried to get a list of contributors. In those days the laws were different. They wouldn't provide it. Some guy just happened to go through his garbage can and find it. And the contributors were Anaconda, Montana Power, the railroads. And these are the people who want the sales tax. And the working people don't want it. And that's how the thing got carried.

BB: Briefly, Frank Murray, secretary of state during Anderson's administration.

AH: Well, Frank and Forrest didn't have too good of a relationship.

BB: Didn't have too good?

AH: There's a good story about that. The new constitution-that's a strange deal-was very controversial, and it passed by a very narrow margin. And there was a Senate election that year, and more people voted in the Senate election than voted on the question of adopting a new constitution. And so some of the people that didn't want a constitution argued that the constitution was not approved by a majority of those voting in the election: not the specific election on the constitution, but the general election. And Frank Murray wouldn't certify it. And so things are kind of held up.

And they had a Land Board meeting, and Forrest told me, "Get a camera, and get down there and make sure it works." And so they had a Land Board meeting, and Frank Murray would not sign the constitution. So as a typical-you were at many of those-there's a pile of documents. And Forrest said, "Here's the stuff from 01:04:00the last meeting." Frank starts signing, and he says, "Frank, what about the constitution?"

And Frank says, "I won't sign it."

And he says, "You just did."

Snap. That happened.

BB: (Laughs.) You took the picture?

AH: Yep. That happened. So after that there was not too good of a relationship.

BB: You told me a great story once about a legislator from Missoula by the name of Tom Haines. Tell that story.

AH: Well, Tom Haines was a state senator.

BB: State representative from Missoula County, Republican.

AH: Yeah, a Republican. And he was chairman of one of the subcommittees that looked at the general government budget. The governor told me, he says, "You know if you're going to work around here, you need to know how this stuff works." He says, "There's the budget for our office, take it up and talk to Tom Haines about it and let's see 01:05:00if we can get this thing out of the committee and passed. There's nothing here that's really controversial. In fact, you should explain to the guy that we found some guys that'll work cheaper, and you guys are making a lot less than Babcock's guys were. We'll go over and get some guys from Butte that'll work for nothing."

Tom Haines was also the president or the executive director of the Montana Food Distributors Association, and in that session of the Legislature they had a bill to allow grocery stores to sell wine which they really desperately wanted to have.

So I go up and I talk to Tom Haines. He says, "How old are you?"

I says, "I'm 26."

He says, "Geez, how about this other guy?"

I said, "He's 27."

"This other guy?"

"Oh, he's the old guy. He's 30."

BB: These are guys on Governor Anderson's staff?

AH: Yeah, guys on the staff. He says, "Goddamn, this is an awful lot of money to be paying a bunch of greenhorns." He says, "I don't think I can go for this."

So I went back downstairs, and I told the governor what he said, and the governor told me, he says, "You go up there. Now I'm going to show you how this works. You go up there and you tell him if he ever wants to sell a bottle of wine in a grocery store in the state of Montana, he'll take another look at that budget."

So I went up and delivered the message, and Tom Haines didn't even blink. He just said, "You know what's good about this?"

I says, "What's that, sir?"

He says, "Young people are interested in government." (Laughs.)

I called my mother. I said, "Mom, this is magic. I think I've learned the secret." That's how he could do things. He knew how to make things move. He knew how to make a guy, he knew where to put the lever to roll the rock. That's an important thing.

BB: What was his relationship with Attorney General Bob Woodahl?

AH: Not too good. They didn't get along at all.

BB: Of course Woodahl was a Republican.

AH: There's some strange things, and you can hear anything you want to hear, but there'd been a lot of goofy stuff going on in Butte that I had covered as a newspaper reporter about gambling and things like that and stuff that was going on in Great Falls. And Forrest had been attorney general and apparently the Republicans were going to use that against him in the '68 campaign, and for some reason they couldn't. And so they used it against Gene Daly. And Gene Daly got his clock cleaned and Woodahl got to be attorney general.

BB: Okay, Gene Daly was, I think, a county attorney in Cascade County in Great Falls. And he ran for attorney general against this obscure attorney general from Conrad, a Republican by the name of Bob Woodahl. And I remember vaguely something or other about the finger of suspicion pointed at some prostitution going on in Cascade County or something like that. Maybe the Butte Standard, was 01:08:00that it? Butte Standard wrote, The Great Falls Trib wrote a story about prostitution in Butte. And so the people in Butte thought, "Well, heck it's going on in Great Falls too." So the Standard wrote a story about what was going on in Great Falls, and that happened right when Gene Daly was trying to run for attorney general. And he was the guy that got hit with the stray bullet and Woodahl won this upset as attorney general. But Gene Daly was a pretty good friend of Forrest Anderson.

AH: Very good friend.

BB: Did Gene end up on the Supreme Court.

AH: Forrest appointed him to the Supreme Court.

BB: Okay, after that election, after defeat then Forrest appointed Gene Daly to the Supreme Court.

AH: Gene Daly's a great guy, one of the funniest people I ever met. Just a good guy. But what Gene Daly told me, he said, "They had that whole mud ball loaded up for Forrest, and he ducked and I got hit right in the puss with it." And so Woodahl beat him. Actually there wasn't a very good relationship.

BB: Because Forrest's buddy got beat by this guy.

AH: Well, not so much his buddy: the whole idea of running that type of 01:09:00campaign, which was effective, and taking out one of his friends. But they were just kind of natural, they were the two guys that you would never imagine could ever have gotten along. Woodahl was not a bad guy. I ended up being pretty good friends with him. But Woodahl was kind of, had kind of a preachy attitude.

BB: Kind of stiff?

AH: Yeah. He ran on this kind of reformer and we're going to clean things up and everybody's crooked and dishonest, Montana has this moral crisis. Forrest he didn't think that way. Woodahl's kind of the precursor a little bit of what's going on now, this preachy stuff that's gotten into politics. Instead of going 01:10:00in and getting yourself elected governor and looking at it as the job is what it really is. Obviously there's some leadership involved, but it's also a job. And no, they didn't get along good. They did not get along.

And there was just goofy stuff going on. Woodahl put out a press release, "Oh the governor, there's energy crisis. The governor's driving a big Lincoln." So I went out and I looked under the, he's driving a Rocket 88 Oldsmobile. And the engine in the Oldsmobile was bigger than the one in the Lincoln. I have another (unintelligible) out there one day. He thought I was putting a bomb in it.

BB: But you were just comparing the engine size of the attorney general's Oldsmobile to the engine size in the governor's Lincoln.

AH: The Lincoln got better gas mileage. He says, "We're putting out a press release." So then one time, he's just preachy, always moralizing about something. There's a movie, The Last Tango in Paris, and they had on it in Time 01:11:00magazine, so he canceled his subscription and things like that.

BB: Because it was a racy movie? And because the Time magazine did an article about that, he publicly canceled his subscription?

AH: He was always doing stuff like that, but actually a decent guy. Went up to Choteau, became a city attorney up there, and we run this liability insurance program that saved the cities and towns across the state millions of dollars. Choteau was one of the few cities that are not in the program because Bob Woodahl still doesn't trust me.

BB: Do you remember Bob Woodahl had the nickname Bingo Bob?

AH: Bingo Bob. Yeah.

BB: Where'd he get that?

AH: People like to play bingo in Montana. He's shutting down bingo games.

BB: As attorney general?

AH: Yeah.

BB: And they thought, "Look, he's against gambling, but this is taking too far."

AH: Yeah. Kind of.

BB: Church bingo or...? AH: Church bingo. And just Bingo Bob and it alliterates, and it goes well and it kind of fits in. And then some of his guys got caught 01:12:00playing in an illegal game one time. And then he really got it in '76 when he ran against Judge. Judge just buried him. So he left town and went up to Choteau and became county attorney. Or city attorney. He called me up, he says, "I got a ranch up here. Come on out, I'll cook you a steak."

I says, "No, I'm not coming out there because you'll get me out in the woods and I'll never get back to town." I says, "You don't trust me, and I don't trust you. We'll just keep it like that."

No, he's actually a decent guy. And I had a decent relationship-we joke. He had a guy working with him named Dick Dzivi from Great Falls. We had...

BB: And Dick Dzivi was a Democrat senator from Great Falls at one time.

AH: And we had some...I used to go in and talk to those guys. They were just different, and they always, "Where's the governor? Where's the governor? He ever come to work?"

I said, "He's working right now, and he's doing a hell of a lot more work than you two clowns are." I was a big...I used to talk to those guys all the time. I was always curious. I was always trying to figure out what they were doing over there. But Judge just annihilated him.

BB: Couple more legislators that were prominent during the administration of Governor Anderson: Bill Groff.

AH: That's something you'll never see again, a Democrat senator from Ravalli County. (Laughs.) You may never see one of those. You might, I don't know. Bill was a banker down there, and he was a very sharp guy. He really understood the budget, and he and Forrest were pretty close. In the Legislature you always get down to the last few days and there's never any money and, "How's this all going to come together?" Bill Groff and Jean Turnage pretty much could figure that out 01:14:00on the back of an envelope, and they'd work with the governor. And that would be the plan, and everybody'd all map.

BB: Now Alec, that next name I was going to mention to you was Jean Turnage, who was a prominent Republican in the state Senate during that same period of time. And I've just always been kind of curious to know whether Turnage had a working relationship with Anderson.

AH: Well, I think he did in '69 and '71. Things went completely to hell in '71 because of the 104 days of the special session of the Legislature. But that was all over in the House. And I think that the Governor and Jean Turnage got along together. I think they respected each other. Both of them were attorneys, both of them were pretty good attorneys. I think Forrest understood that Jean Turnage was a very effective political leader in the Senate. And I think Senator Turnage appreciated some of the work the governor was trying to do to reform state government and make it look more accountable.

So I think they had a pretty good working relationship, and I think you put the 01:15:00combination of Jean Turnage, Bill Groff, and the executive together then, things could happen. There wasn't all of this partisanship; there wasn't this party line vote on every issue. And if something was really good and it needed to be done, you could go to a guy like Groff and Turnage and it'd happen.

BB: Bardanouve? Francis Bardanouve?

AH: A legend, and one of the great legislators of all time. I think the governor got along very well with him. I think Francis was pretty much getting started when Forrest was governor. But there's nobody that understood the state budget as well as Francis Bardanouve and how the system worked. I don't think played as prominent a role in those days.

BB: Groff was more the big man with the budget. Groff and Nichols were associated with the budget. And Bardanouve came, oh I think, a decade or so later.

AH: Francis really came into his own, I think, when Schwinden was governor into 01:16:00the eighties.

BB: Just a couple more names that you might recollect with the Anderson administration: Neil Lynch. We've already mentioned him.

AH: Neil Lynch.

BB: A Democratic Senate leader from Butte.

AH: Yeah. I don't know. Neil had some higher aspirations. I think he ran for the Supreme Court one time and was defeated. He was a good solid Democrat, and he was a fairly progressive guy. He had some good ideas, and he could get things done. I don't think he's one of the guys that the governor relied on, but he obviously paid attention to what Neil had to say.

BB: Now didn't Neil replace Dick Dzivi as the Democrat leader in the state Senate? Wasn't Dick Dzivi the majority leader of the session (unintelligible)?

AH: He may have been. But I'm not sure if Neil was the leader or not.

BB: Yeah, Neil was the majority leader when I was in the House.

AH: In '71?

BB: I think so. Either '71 or '73. But I thought Dick Dzivi was the...

AH: Yeah Dick Dzivi.

BB: So I'm curious about how Dick Dzivi is the Democrat leader in the state Senate, ends up working for the attorney general who's a Republican.

AH: I don't know.

BB: There's got to be a story there.

AH: They must have been friends from a long ago or something.

BB: Yeah, maybe.

AH: Or some grudge that was getting settled. Might of had something to do with Daly. I'm not sure.

BB: I've asked you about a lot of the associates of the governor and lot about his friends and that sort of thing: lobbyists and legislators and members of his administration. Who were his enemies?

AH: The attorney general.

BB: Woodahl was really an enemy?

AH: Kind of an annoyance more than an enemy. Kind of a guy that wasn't-Woodahl wanted to be governor. He was out to make as much, make a name for himself any way that he could. At that particular time the word crime scandal came up, and Woodahl saw that as his ticket to move across the hall. Dzivi was brought down 01:18:00from Great Falls specifically to conduct that investigation.

BB: Get to the bottom of the worker's comp?

AH: And they blew that whole thing. I think one guy went to jail, and he probably didn't have to go except he got jumpy. And it was overblown and they didn't have any reliable...Apparently they didn't have the evidence they needed to do a credible prosecution to any of these people. And so that whole thing blew up on them.

And then some things happened that showed that the guys that he had working for him kind of liked to gamble and monkey around and do things like that. That's where all the Bingo Bob stuff came from. That whole thing just unraveled, and I wouldn't say that he was an enemy. Like I'd say, he was more of an annoyance. The thing on the sales tax with Lucas, I think Forrest Anderson and Jim Lucas probably respected each other.

BB: Yet Lucas had to feel double-crossed over that sales tax thing.

AH: Well, I wouldn't feel double-crossed. I'd just feel stupid because nobody double-crossed him. If they'd have passed the bill, he'd have signed it. He said he'd sign it, he'd have signed it. So I don't think he was double-crossed. I think he was just out-maneuvered. There's difference.

BB: Lucas should have said, "Well if you'll help me get the votes on your side, I'll get the votes on my side."

AH: Sort of what Obama was trying to do on healthcare. Give me one Republican. Is there one Republican that'll vote for this bill?

BB: Alec, you've been a close observer of Montana politics for at least a half a century, and you've had several decades representing the League of Montana Cities and Towns in the Legislature. So you've had a front-row seat on Montana politics for a long time, longer than most people. That's a unique perspective. What changes have you noticed in the politics of our state during that period of time?

AH: Initially in the early days, in the fifties and sixties going into the 01:20:00seventies, state government was just totally ineffective. Not totally but it was ineffective, and nobody really understood how it worked. The governor, essentially, was just a caretaker. And you had this madhouse with boards and commissions and things like that that nobody could control. And being governor was a bad job. If everything went wrong, you got blamed for it, but there was nothing you could do to make things go right. And so I think that when things started to change is in the late sixties and early seventies, and there was a very progressive time in Montana. And they adopted a new constitution.

BB: That would have been in the middle seventies.

AH: Yeah, beginning in '71, '72: executive reorganization and the new constitution, the environmental movement, the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate through those years, some really progressive legislation on the environment and things like that, labor relations and those kinds of laws, major facility siting, the Coal Service Acts, all of that kind of stuff. Very Progressive, liberal time. Some people said it was crazy, like ten years of Woodstock in Montana.

And in the eighties, really nothing kind of distinguished the eighties. But beginning in the early nineties, you began to see these new political issues 01:22:00begin to develop. More of this kind of moral, these value voters. The issues being abortion and things like that. Pretty strong, almost radical conservative-those terms don't work together-but very aggressive conservative philosophy, "Government is the enemy." And I think some of that comes from Reagan. And that changed a lot. Where it used to be guys like Bill Groff, Jean Turnage, and Jim Lucas and things like that, they understood each other, they appreciated each other. If something needed to be done, they'd figure out a way to do it. There wasn't this intractable partisan division that we've seen in recent years. So I think that's a big change.

I think the state has become more conservative, and I think the reason for that is like I explained earlier: there's more votes in Ravalli County today than there are in Deer Lodge and Silver Bow counties combined. I think a lot of the people that are voting in Montana elections now came here from someplace else. I don't think they have the traditions and the understanding that real Montanans have. They don't understand what it is that you really need to make an economy operate in this state, what's really important. So I think that that has really changed.

I'm really surprised that the Democratic Party elects as many people as they do because of the way that the culture of this state has changed. And what has been lost in Butte and Anaconda in terms of the Democratic Party has been recovered 01:24:00to some extent in Billings and Missoula. Billings was always famous for the straight eight, but half the legislators from Yellowstone County now are Democrats.

BB: But then they were straight eight Republicans.

AH: You used to see Democrats elected out in the rural areas. You don't see many of those anymore. So that's what it's changed. What that kind of leads to, and I don't think it's happened yet but there are people that are concerned about it, is this kind of urban/rural division which would really be dangerous for Montana.

In this job, we have every city in Montana is a member of the League, all the way from Billings to the smallest town, Bear Creek. And we've got some good mayors and some good people that have worked with me through the years. We've been able somehow to keep everything balanced so nobody feels like, "You're always favoring the big cities" or "You're always favoring the little towns." 01:25:00But that's tough, and if Montana gets split up along those kind of lines-And Jim Peterson, we're worried about this.

BB: State Senator Jim Peterson?

AH: Yeah. That's going to be bad for the whole state. People put up with Butte because Butte helped them raise a little money to fund things in other parts of Montana at one time. Without Butte, Montana would be North Dakota with streets. Butte kind of gives the place kind of little special meaning and a sense of humor. But people put up with Butte. And guys like J. D. Lynch, he knew how to get a bill passed.

BB: Longtime legislator from Butte.

AH: You want a library at Tech, you got to find something that some cowboy wants, you know, some water bill. You vote for that, he votes for the library, everybody goes home happy. You don't see a lot of that anymore. So that's a big change.

BB: We're close to the end of our tape and just a couple more questions. Who would you consider to be the two or three most significant leaders in the last fifty years in Montana.

AH: Well, obviously the guy I worked for because of the changes.

BB: Forrest Anderson.

AH: Kicking of the progressive era in Montana. Almost too short to be an era, that time didn't last too long.

Mansfield: recognized nationally for what a tremendous leader he was, what a gentleman he was. When people think about government and politics and what's good about it, when I have thoughts like that, that's the guy I think about. He's a real gentleman and a very prominent, one of the most prominent men in all of Montana. When my mother died-he knew my mom in 1972-he wrote me a letter. Not 01:27:00because he knew me, he just knew my ma and he wrote me a letter. And I cherish that. I will always keep that. And that's just the kind of guy he was. He was in touch with Montana, but he was up there on the national...Christ, he gave the eulogy at Jack Kennedy's funeral. That's how well respected the guy was. Just a good guy.

BB: Forrest Anderson and Mike Mansfield. Who would be third?

AH: I think Metcalf. Metcalf was a really very progressive senator. My own personal philosophy about some of the things that Lee was trying to do with the utilities and things like that, things that really needed to be done, never really got done. He was a very progressive guy, and I went to talk to him one 01:28:00time. And I'll never forget this and this really impressed me. When I was working for the Anaconda Company, there was a bill in the Senate back in Washington that the company was very concerned about, and so I went to talk to him. And he was at the Democratic Convention in Great Falls, and he said, "I don't want you coming over here. I don't want these guys knowing I'm hanging out with you Anaconda Company guys." He says, "You got a room?"

I says, "I'm staying across the street."

He says, "I'll come over." So he came over. We sat in this hotel room, and I told him what the problem was and he says, "What do the guys in Butte think?"

I says, "Which guys?"

He says, "The unions, the working guys."

I says, "They're with us a hundred percent."

He says, "You're sure?"

I says, "You bet," I says, "I've got a letter right here from Mihailovich and those guys."

He says, "Fine," he says, "you can count on me." He says, "You know, I don't represent the trout fishermen in Vermont. I represent the miners and smeltermen 01:29:00of Montana. Those are the guys that put me in Washington, and those are the guys that are going to keep me there. And if they want this, they got it," and he got up and walked out the door.

That really impressed me. It had nothing to do with money. Those were his friends, those were the guys he represented. And he understood that they were the reason he was a senator, not because of any special talent he had. They sent him back there to represent them and that's what he wanted to do. But that really impressed me.

BB: The three worst leaders in the last fifty years.

AH: And another guy I'd like to mention. I think this guy Tester's got real potential to be a very good senator.

BB: In the best category?

AH: Yes, obviously.

BB: Jon Tester?

AH: He pays attention. He listens, and he's a real Montana guy. Jesus, I never seen a guy like him. When he was president of the Senate here in the state Senate, he's a real cowboy. I called him twice. Once he was in the barn 01:30:00butchering a steer, and the other time he was out on the tractor and I talked to him on the cellphone.

BB: This was when he was state senator?

AH: They took a break, he went home and farmed.

BB: Oh when he was a U.S. senator?

AH: No, this was when he was a state senator. I talked to his guy. I says, "Is Jon going to be in next week?"

He said, "No, he's up farming."

He's supposed to be going out, beating the drum, but he's got to get his seeding done. I think in a way that whole election was a fraud, blaming Gene Daly for a lot of things that he wasn't responsible for. And they had some money. I mean, they had some things they had loaded up-I think they were going to use for the governor-and they turned it on Gene Daly, who just happened to be a very good friend of mine. Bob was a decent guy, pretty good at attorney general, but I guess I can't say he's one of the worst. He's one of the ones we fought the 01:31:00hardest. I just don't...naming individuals.

Really the worst thing that's happened, a lot of times how personal politics has gotten and how divided the Legislature's become on some of these issues that they really don't have the power to solve anyway, abortion and things like that. No matter what the Montana Legislature says about those issues, it's the federal courts that are control that issue. I think that's one of the things.

There's just some people that-obviously, whoever let utility deregulation, whoever promoted it, whoever let it happen should spend a night in hell with the devil I think. Because that's been a disaster for Montana, and that's just a perfect example when you take an enormously complex issue, introduce it late 01:32:00into a legislative session, and try to get 150 people. That really very few really understand the issue and try to get those people to make an informed decision on a question that's going to influence the history and the economy of the state for the next century. That's a total breakdown. Somebody needed to step in there at that time and say, "Now wait a second. Let's just analyze this thing a little more carefully." I mean, we had a pretty good setup. It was good for the consumers, pretty decent for the consumers although they bitched all the time, and it was pretty good for the employees. It was good for the stockholders, and it was good for the state of Montana. That whole thing is gone, and it's replaced by something that functions but it really doesn't work.

BB: Been a mistake, certainly has.

AH: Terrible mistake.

BB: You've got that right. What do you see as you look into Montana's future?

AH: Well, I'm concerned. I'm concerned that a lot of what is good about Montana 01:33:00is going to get lost. The ability for people with differing views to sit down and make a deal. I think the ability to negotiate a compromise is being lost. I think some of our traditions are being forgotten. I think we're getting-you have to think what it really is to live and work and grow up in Montana. People in this state, it's a lot of hard work and people, they either come off the farm or out of the mines or wherever they did. There's this whole tradition of hard work and things like that, and I think what we're seeing is people come here to retire. And they bring a political agenda from someplace else. Well my family 01:34:00came to Montana, they didn't come to retire, they came to find a job and I think that's a big difference.

I think we got to find people that want to build and develop and make this state a better place; instead of these people, "I'll cut 500 million dollars out of this state budget." People don't understand that. And I think this is the real problem is the government is nothing but the people. And in the United States, we've had a democratic government in this country for over two centuries, if we can't make government work in this country it's never going to work anyplace. And people got to get off this anti-government stuff, get involved and figure out a way to make it work.

I hear people complain all the time about the city council. Well, go to a meeting. They had a city council meeting in Missoula last night, or two nights ago, that went until two o'clock in the morning. They took on a very controversial issue. They heard everybody in the town that wanted to say 01:35:00something. A lot of people might not like the decision but by God, that's how it's supposed to work. Instead of complaining all the time, I think people got to get involved and they got to believe that it works. And it does work.

BB: Because if it's government by and for the people, then if it doesn't work it's because we're not making it work.

AH: If you're unhappy, run for the Legislature, go to a meeting. I think that's the big thing is this whole anti-government thing, I think, is very dangerous. And I don't know if this has a lot to do with Barack Obama or what it is, but it's almost a sudden-it's not a sudden but this new explosion in this Tea Party and all of this is directly related to the election of Barack Obama. And I think they ask a lot of questions, they don't have any answers. And I don't know what the hell is motivating these people. But by God, to balance the federal budget 01:36:00at a time when this country was that far away from tipping back into the Great Depression, those things had to be done, and there's no doubt about it. I wish people would understand that. I asked my mother one time, I grew up in the shadow of the Depression and I understand that stuff, I said, "When did the Depression end in Butte?"

She says, "It never did. It's still going on."

And two years ago-not two years ago, but in the fall of 2008-I was scared to death that this country was going to go into another depression, that my kids would all be at home living in my house, nobody would have a job. And I heard the stories of what happened in Montana in the thirties in Butte and different places, and it was awful. And by God it didn't happen, the economy's recovering, and people should be happy about that. And sure they bailed out those banks. They had to. And they're going to get that money back. And they put some laws in 01:37:00to make sure that doesn't happen again and they can't get that done.

And this healthcare thing got completely out of hand, and it became a one-way deal, and the Republicans wouldn't provide any help and so what they ended up with was a bad bill. But if you get sick in America-I have a disabled son, and I'm absolutely scared to death of what's going to happen to him when I'm gone. But at least now I know that they cannot deny him coverage because he has a pre-existing condition, so to me that's a bonus.

BB: Yeah, that's one positive aspect.

AH: Yeah, you bet. It's not a perfect bill, and it's a long way from being a perfect bill. And if politics worked the way it should've, the Democrats and Republicans could have sat down and they could've done a bill instead of playing fox-nose and that kind of stuff. That's what troubles me. That's the thing that troubles me the most and the thing that makes me most (unintelligible). It's like music; there's a rhythm to this stuff. These guys will be riding high 01:38:00today; there'll be a new wave of something different; in a couple of years it'll all change. And that's the genius of the whole deal-cause no matter what happens, over time it all comes out the same. (Laughs.)