Cecil D. Andrus, interior secretary under Carter and key to Alaska land protections, is dead at 85

Cecil D. Andrus, a four-term governor of Idaho who as interior secretary under President Jimmy Carter helped set aside vast expanses of Alaska for parks and reserves, died Thursday at his home in Boise. He was 85.

The cause was complications of lung cancer, his daughter Tracy Andrus said.

Andrus liked to portray himself as having stumbled into public life — he was a "political accident," in his words. It was a sophisticated bit of self-branding, positioning him as passionate rather than opportunistic in a state where the notion of Western authenticity had always played well.

He was 28 in 1960 when his tiny community of Orofino, Idaho, invited the area's aging Republican state senator to a town meeting to try to persuade him to fight for more financing for a public kindergarten.

"He made the statement, 'Well, this school system was good enough for me, it's good enough for your kids,'" Andrus, a Democrat, recalled in an interview for this obituary in 2012. "I couldn't help myself. I said, 'It's pretty obvious, Senator, that the school system wasn't even good enough for you.'"

That exchange prompted laughter, and it helped propel Andrus to run for the same state Senate seat. He won it that fall, and a decade later became governor, the first Democrat elected to that post in 24 years.

He also may have been the first governor of either party to win by running on an environmental issue. His opposition to a proposed molybdenum mine in the White Cloud Mountains of central Idaho was at the core of his campaign. The mine was never built, and Andrus cruised to re-election in 1974.

Halfway into his second term he received a call from another rural Democrat, Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia. They had become friends over the years while attending meetings of governors' groups.

"We got along very well," Andrus said, "because both of us understood the need for protection of the land that the dear lord has provided to us."

Carter had just been elected president and had Andrus in mind for interior secretary. "Cece was the only person I considered for the Cabinet post," Carter said in a statement Friday.

The call came in around 6 p.m. By the next morning, after hopping a short flight to Seattle, a red-eye to Atlanta and, finally, a tiny Cessna to an unpaved landing strip in Plains, Georgia, Andrus was shaking hands with his future boss.

"I come from the old school that says when the president of the United States asks you to do something, you do it," Andrus said.

Andrus never liked Washington, but he believed in his work. Over the next four years he helped reduce the impact of mining in Appalachia and protected rivers in California. But his most notable work happened in Alaska, which had been admitted to the union just 17 years before Carter was elected.

"We developed America by giving away resources," Andrus said in the interview. "When we got to the Pacific Ocean, we looked back over our shoulders and said, 'Oh, my God, look what we've done.' But in Alaska we had the opportunity to do it right the first time."

With Andrus leading the way, the Carter administration set aside more than 100 million acres in Alaska for federal protection, including what became the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The measure was completed in a lame-duck session of Congress in the final weeks of the Carter administration, after Ronald Reagan had won the 1980 election, denying the president a second term.

The plan drew intense criticism from many Alaskans and industries that wanted more freedom to develop the state's oil, mineral, timber and other resources. It also frustrated environmentalists, who wanted the protections to go further.

"After review of all the exceptions, some critics wondered that it was called a conservation act at all," the Alaska historian Stephen Haycox wrote in his book "Frigid Embrace: Politics, Economics and Environment in Alaska" (2002). "But most recognized that it did provide a framework for preservation in Alaska."

Andrus acknowledged the imperfections but said that environmentalists would have fared much worse if they had waited for Reagan to take office.

"Even though we were creating tomorrow's controversies, a 103-million-acre plan — amounting to more than 25 percent of Alaska — was a helluva lot better than nothing," he said in his 1998 memoir, "Cecil Andrus: Politics Western Style," which he wrote with Joel Connelly, a Seattle journalist.

Carter saw the Alaska legislation as one of his biggest accomplishments. "Together we made conservation history," he said in his statement about Andrus on Friday. "Americans are better off because of his service," he added, "and I am better because of his friendship."

Andrus returned to Idaho soon after Carter left office in 1981. Asked in interviews before he left whether he might stay in the nation's capital, he wore his Western pride openly.

"The only reason so many people live on the East Coast is that they don't know any better," he said.

Back in Boise, he caught some people off guard by becoming a spokesman for the aluminum industry, which relied on the region's hydroelectric dams for cheap power. Andrus had been a longtime critic of the dams' effect on migrating salmon, but he also believed a balance could be achieved that preserved the dams, industry and the fish.

Years later, however, that balance has proved elusive, as fish populations continue to suffer and advocates on various sides continue to fight in court.

Andrus also surprised people when he decided to run for governor again in 1986. He won by just 3,500 votes. His popularity would steadily rise, and he was re-elected with more than 70 percent of the vote in 1990.

In 1988, during a dispute with the federal government over the storage of nuclear waste in Idaho, he won new supporters when he ordered state troopers to block a railroad car filled with nuclear waste from entering a storage site. Two years later he confounded some supporters when he vetoed a bill that would have given Idaho one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the nation. Once again he appealed to his state's independent streak.

"We Idahoans are a fiercely independent group," Andrus said at the time. "We call them as we see them, and I have done that. I know there will be some fallout. I can't do anything about that."

The Legislature, which included an evenly divided Senate and a Republican-controlled House, upheld his veto of the anti-abortion bill. Of more than 100 vetoes he issued while in office, lawmakers overturned just one.

Andrus did not seek another term in 1994. Idaho has not had a Democratic governor since, and its Legislature has long since become dominated by Republicans.

Later in life, Andrus lamented what he described as increasing partisanship in the state and the nation.

"We used to be able to work in the middle," he said in 2012, "but there is no middle anymore."

Cecil Dale Andrus was born on Aug. 25, 1931 — he died a day before his 86th birthday — in Hood River, Oregon. He grew up fishing for salmon with his father, Hal, who worked in the timber industry, and he could recall watching Native Americans fish at Celilo Falls, the famous rapids on the Columbia River that were permanently submerged when dams were built in the 1950s. His mother, the former Dorothy Johnson, was a homemaker.

He graduated from high school in Eugene, Oregon, before enrolling in Oregon State College (now Oregon State University). He served in the Korean War, flying with a patrol bomber squadron.

Soon after returning, Andrus married his high school sweetheart, Carol May, who survives him. Looking for work, the family moved to Orofino, where his father helped him find a job in a timber mill.

In addition to his wife and his daughter Kelly, Andrus is survived by two other daughters, Tana Andrus-Watson and Kelly Andrus; a brother, Steve; a sister, Margaret Gardner; three grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.

Andrus avoided many of the trappings of being governor. He lived in his own house, mowed his lawn himself, and had limited security. But he was, by all accounts, a deft politician — and one who kept score.

When he ran for governor in 1986, the state's Republican senators signed a large advertisement in The Idaho Statesman saying they opposed his election. Andrus kept a copy of the ad in his desk at the Capitol, and he enjoyed pulling it out when a Republican lawmaker would come in trying to win his support for a bill.

"If you had legislation you wanted and you were on that list," recalled Bruce Newcomb, who was the Republican majority leader at the end of Andrus's final term and later became House speaker, "well, you had an uphill battle."

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.