State of dependence: Ted Stevens's Alaska problem—and ours

Theodore Fulton Stevens was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1923, but he didn't stay there long. Divorce and the Great Depression dissolved his family when he was six, and Stevens spent his childhood bouncing between family members in Chicago, Indianapolis, and, eventually, Manhattan Beach, California. During World War II, he flew cargo planes over the Himalayas, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross. After the war, Stevens attended UCLA and Harvard Law School, where he developed an expertise in maritime law. In the early '50s, Stevens's ambitions centered on Washington, but when a job in the Eisenhower administration failed to materialize, Stevens accepted an offer from a law firm in Fairbanks and a $600 loan to help him and his wife, Ann, get there. In the winter of 1953, the Stevenses pulled into Fairbanks in a 1947 Buick.

Ted Stevens quickly came to love the territory. Before long, he had become an ardent advocate for statehood. When he finally landed a job in Eisenhower's Interior Department and returned to Washington in 1956, it was as an insurgent. Even as he was working as legislative counsel at Interior, he was lobbying in Congress for Alaskan statehood. (Years later, Stevens would admit in an interview that this was illegal.) Two years after Stevens arrived back in Washington, on July 7, 1958, Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Act into law.

In 1961, Stevens returned to Alaska, serving in the Alaska House of Representatives and mounting two failed U.S. Senate bids. (Any clairvoyant with a sense of irony would have been amused to hear Stevens attack the incumbent senator, Ernest Gruening, for being a "cantankerous old man.") In 1968, he made it to Washington anyway, when Senator Bob Bartlett suffered a fatal heart attack and, at the urging of President-elect Nixon, Alaska Governor Wally Hickel tapped Stevens to fill his seat.

Once in Washington, Stevens distinguished himself with a sense of pragmatism and an eye for the long game. One of his most lasting accomplishments came in his first elected term in the Senate, when he brokered a solution to a crucial problem that threatened to complicate Alaska's newfound oil windfall. Oil companies wanted to build a pipeline to bring North Slope crude to market, but they were wary of a Damodes' sword hanging over the project: Alaskan Natives had ancestral lands that lay along the pipeline route, and this created the potential for costly land claims lawsuits. Stevens, who had worked with the oil companies and (pro bono) with Native groups as a lawyer in Anchorage in the '60s, found a way to bridge the parties. The result was the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, a paradigm-shifting piece of legislation that ceded land and cash to newly created Native-owned corporations in exchange for their go-ahead on the pipeline.

The law made the large-scale development of the North Slope possible--Congress passed a pipeline act two years later--and created a class of wealthy and politically powerful Native leaders who remain some of Stevens's most dedicated allies. (Stevens subsequently tinkered with the law, loosening the requirements that the corporations' subsidiaries be Native managed, and entitling them to get lucrative nobid contracts with the federal government. [See Ben Wallace Wells, "Polar Fleeced," July/August 2005, Washington Monthly.] The result has been a boom in federally funded contracting jobs for white Alaskans in Anchorage.)