On Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2008, Commonwealth North, an organization Wally Hickel co-founded, hosted a luncheon at the Anchorage Sheraton Hotel to enable the three or four hundred of us in attendance to watch Wally Hickel award John Katz, the longtime commissar of the Alaska Governor's Office in Washington, D.C., the Walter J. Hickel Award for Distinguished Public Policy Leadership.
For Wally-watchers (a group that has long included me), our man didn't disappoint. When it came time for the presentation, rather than lauding John Katz, who, after all, was the honoree, Wally devoted the majority of his remarks to reminding us what a visionary he, Wally, was when he invented Commonwealth North so that the "owner state" would have an institution based on the premises available to do all of its heavy lifting, big-picture, thinking.
But Wally aside, the luncheon was well worth the $40 price of admission both because John Katz was a worthy subject for recognition by the Alaska (actually Anchorage) political class and because it was wonderful fun to watch so many members of that class, particularly people who were in play during the 1970s and 1980s when John Katz made his bones, assemble for a lunch hour of self-congratulatory handshaking and gossip-trading.
By way of illustration, at my table were: former Alaska State Senator Arliss Sturgulewski, the grand dame of what passes in Anchorage as Republican sensibility who Wally Hickel hosed in 1990 when he found Arliss's ascendancy as the Republican Party's gubernatorial nominee that year too much for the "owner state" to stomach (an interesting story too convoluted to relive here). Lisa Parker, Walt Parker's daughter, who as a kid moved on the margins of the swirl in Washington, D.C., during the dust-up over H.R. 39, which Congress enacted in 1980 as the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), and who as an adult has for some years operated the public relations department at the now defunct fertilizer plant in Kenai. Peggy Hackett, one of my favorite people, who during the 1970s and 1980s office managed the Alaska Governor's office in Washington, D.C. Plus three of Sarah's people whose names I never learned.
But back to John Katz.
When lunch concluded and the celebratory remarks began, Jack Sedwick, the presiding judge of the U.S. District Court who was master of the ceremonies, asked everyone who was a friend of, or who had worked for or with, John Katz, to stand. Ninety percent of the folks in the room stood, a snapshot that nicely illustrated how entangled the Alaska economy has been, and continues to be, with the congressional and executive branches of the federal government in Washington, D.C., since 1979 when John Katz took over the Governor's Office there.
How that happened is a story probably worth telling.
Because it was almost thirty years ago, there are many members of the Alaska political class who came of age after it ended. So they may not know. But the fight in the 95th and 96th Congresses (1977 - 1980) over H.R. 39, which, as mentioned above, was enacted in 1980 as ANILCA, was a very big deal, both in Washington, D.C., and Alaska.
There was a grand bargain, negotiated behind closed doors, that almost closed the deal in October 1978 in the waning days of the 95th Congress. But Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, as nuts then as, if you watched him perform last year in the Democratic presidential debates, he is now, killed it by walking out the closed door after promising when he was invited in that he would not.
That meant that when the 96th Congress convened in January 1979 the process to enact H.R. 39 would have to start over.
At the time, I was the Alaska Federation of Natives' (AFN) boots-in-the-halls-of-the-congressional-office-buildings Washington, D.C., counsel. (Former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall was AFN's non-boots-in-the-halls Washington, D.C., counsel who was on retainer principally to get the rest of us into meetings with senators and other big-wigs to whom we did not have our own access, including, most particularly, Stewart's brother, Mo Udall, who chaired the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, which had jurisdiction over H.R. 39).
After Mike Gravel killed H.R. 39, the fall of 1978 I flew to Anchorage to meet with Byron Mallott, the president of AFN, and the other members of the AFN leadership cadre, which, in addition to Byron, in those days included folks like Sam Kito, Janie Leask, John Shively, John Schaeffer, and Willie Hensley.
AFN was committed to seeing H.R. 39 enacted because by then half the bill was loaded with bells and whistles for the Alaska Native community that ranged from a title dedicated to protecting subsistence hunting and fishing to amendments to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) to a long list of land exchanges that ANCSA corporations had negotiated with the federal government and the State of Alaska.
One of the things the AFN leadership cadre decided was that it was in AFN's interest for Alaska Governor Jay Hammond's operation on Capitol Hill to be rebuilt prior to January 1979 because throughout 1977 and 1978 it had been a disorganized shambles.
Jay Hammond was a wonderful guy, a good friend to me, and someone who looked on TV exactly what Alaska Magazine tells us Alaska's governor should look like. But people forget that as an administrator Jay was largely incompetent.
In Washington, D.C. that incompetence manifested itself repeatedly by Ron Skoog, Jay's Commissioner of Fish and Game, flying into town one week to tell Congress that the State's position on some H.R. 39-related issue was X. Then Bob LeResche, Jay's Commissioner of Natural Resources, would fly in the next week to say the State's position actually was Y. Then Jay would arrive to confirm that the State's position was Z.
To bring order to the chaos, the person the AFN leadership cadre picked was John Katz, the one guy that everyone could think of who had the skill-set that the situation required.
John was a Ted Stevens vassal, having served as Ted's principal staffer 1971-1972 during the dust-up over the 92d Congress's enactment of ANCSA. So he knew Capitol Hill culture, and he had easy access to the member of Alaska's congressional delegation who most mattered. An attorney by trade, for the previous several years John had been counsel to the Federal-State Land Use Planning Commission, an outfit, based in Anchorage, that Ted Stevens and others had created in ANCSA to supervise the implementation of ANCSA. So John knew the public lands issues and the ANCSA issues that were at the heart of the political controversy over H.R. 39. John was smart and highly analytically orderly (a personality trait Jay Hammond desperately needed). And most important of all, John was respected by the folks at AFN and everyone else who had worked with him as an honest broker. Someone whose word was good.
So the AFN leadership cadre settled on John Katz. Byron Mallott then drew the short straw job of flying to Juneau to explain to Jay Hammond that his Washington, D.C., operation had been a dysfunctional embarrassment. And, when Jay calmed down, to tell him that AFN had a solution to the problem: John Katz.
That was thirty years ago. So my recollection may be off. But that's how I remember that John Katz, who has been an iconic figure in Alaska political circles for a generation, was invented.
During 1979-1980 John was absolutely the right guy in the right place at the right time to salvage for the State of Alaska everything in ANILCA that (given how far behind the curve politically the Hammond administration had put itself by the time John was recruited to the work) could be salvaged. And over the ensuing decades since, John's done a journeyman job that fully merited the public recognition he received yesterday.
But as his eyesight has deteriorated and his deep talent for accommodation has allowed him, without missing a beat, to serve Governors from Democrats Bill Sheffield, Steve Cowper, and Tony Knowles to Republicans Wally Hickel, Frank Murowski, and Sarah Palin (whose political philosophies and policy views are impossible for any normal person to reconcile) has become legendary in the circles in which I still run, whether the qualities that got John Katz his job in 1979 have well-served the State post-ANILCA is a closer question.