Alaskans and impeachment: The case of Gov. Bill Sheffield

For 12 days at the end of July and in the first week of August 1985, tens of thousands of Alaskans were glued to their television screens, riveted by an intense drama taking place in Juneau — Alaska’s own, homegrown impeachment inquiry, full of major import for the young state and featuring several of the most illustrious attorneys in the nation. Gov. Bill Sheffield, a Democrat, had been called before a grand jury investigating favoritism and lack of due process in awarding a contract to lease space for state agency offices in a building in Fairbanks. After deliberation, the grand jury did not indict the governor. Grand jury reports are not public documents. But this one became public when someone, unrecorded to this day, notified members of the press that a copy of the report could be found in a wastebasket in the court building. In the report, the grand jury urged the Legislature to impeach the governor. Subsequently, the state Senate debated whether to remove Sheffield from office.

It was just more than a decade after the Watergate affair and the impeachment — but no conviction — of Richard Nixon. A young, talented Alaska attorney, Dan Hickey, had been functioning as a special prosecutor — without that title — in the Alaska Department of Law. Several years after Watergate, he had successfully prosecuted a sitting Alaska legislator, George Hohman, for bribery. Seeking expert help in taking his charges against the Alaska governor before a grand jury, Hickey hired the lawyer who had been the assistant prosecutor for the Watergate Senate committee, George Frampton.

A Sheffield friend and contributor, Lenny Arsenault, met with the governor in his office with Sheffield’s chief of staff, John Shively, present, on Oct. 4, 1984, to discuss the office building lease. The lease was worth $9.1 million, and the prosecutors charged that as a result of that meeting, the process for leasing the building had been changed from competitive bidding to a sole-source contract — an unusual method, but one which had been used previously. By the new procedure, only one building in Fairbanks qualified, one in which Arsenault had a small interest and whose other investors he was representing.

Sheffield hired as his personal attorney another Watergate veteran, Philip Lacovara, who had served as counsel to the Watergate prosecutors. In testimony before the grand jury, Sheffield said he could not recall the meeting, and that he had little interest in the building lease, as there were more important matters before him at the time. The grand jury did not believe the governor.

The grand jury’s report and recommendation went to the Alaska Senate rules committee for debate. Of the committee members, four were Republicans, one a Democrat. Committee chair Tim Kelly, a Republican, decided that their hearings would be televised, and he arranged night sessions so more people in the state would be able to view them. He invited the 15 other senators to attend the hearings.

Sheffield’s impeachment inquiry

By the Alaska Constitution, the Senate conducts the impeachment inquiry, and if they impeach, the trial is conducted by the House. To aid in its deliberations, the Senate hired still another Watergate veteran, Samuel Dash, who had served as chief counsel for the U.S. Senate committee investigating Nixon. Lacovara produced a brief in which he argued there had been no illegalities on Sheffield’s part. Conceding that abuse of process would be difficult to prove, Dash advised that the focus should be on perjury. Under his vigorous questioning, Sheffield again testified that he could not recall the October meeting or the details of the lease arrangement. Sheffield had been able to recall other meetings in some detail, but not this one.

Before Sheffield talked to the committee, Shively, the chief of staff, testified before the grand jury under a grant of immunity from prosecution. He said that he worked with some people in the Department of Administration on the lease process, and also with state officials in Fairbanks on what they saw as their needs. A dutiful aide-de-camp, he did what he thought the governor and the state people in Fairbanks wanted. When Hickey’s investigation got close, Shively disposed of documents; he threw them in the wastebasket and told no one about it at the time. But in his testimony to the grand jury, he volunteered that he had disposed of documents relative to the investigation. That was the first the grand jury learned that documents had been disposed of. Shively later said that what he did was “stupid;” he was trying to protect the governor from adverse press. On the matter of the governor’s memory, he said he had no idea what the governor did and did not remember. Shively might have been prosecuted for his actions, but Hickey granted the immunity in an attempt to learn what the governor did and didn’t do. Shively later told a reporter that he thought Hickey’s work was shoddy, that as a special prosecutor he had brought numerous charges but had secured very few convictions.

After much testimony and vigorous debate, by a 3-2 vote, the committee sent the full Senate its conclusion, viz., that the evidence against Sheffield was not convincing. Having heard all the proceedings, the full Senate quickly dispensed with the matter. Fourteen votes would have been needed for impeachment. But they did not vote on impeachment. Instead, by an 11-9 vote, they passed a resolution condemning favoritism in government administration, which before they amended it would have reproved the governor in quite stronger terms.

A slap on the wrist

Impeachment is a political rather than a technically legal proceeding. The question is always what abuse, malfeasance or other irregularities rise to the gravity of removal from office. Sheffield was a Democrat and Republicans had an 11-9 majority in the Senate. On that basis, a strictly partisan vote would have produced an impeachment. And the vote on the resolution was 11-9, basically along partisan lines. But perhaps unexpectedly, two Republicans voted with the Democrats, passing the weaker version of the resolution. They were Sen. John Sackett, co-leader of the Native caucus in the Legislature, and Sen. Dick Eliason from Sitka, who served as Senate president and had a reputation for working across party lines. The official result was that the senators determined that whatever Sheffield had done, it didn’t rise to removal, particularly given Shively’s testimony. The governor should have known what was being done in his name, and in any case, he was the man in charge; the responsibility for what was done in his name was his. Favoritism in steering a state office lease to a political contributor and friend was a form of corruption. But the governor’s culpability was clouded by Shively’s role in the matter. As Shively later testified, the governor didn’t know what he, Shively, had done. And inability to recall is a persuasive defense.

Thus, the governor escaped the affair with what amounted to a slap on the wrist. And because of the immunity granted him, Shively avoided possible prosecution. By the end of the affair, he had already resigned.

Voters would make the final judgment. A year later in the Democrat primary, Sheffield was removed from office by election, with Steve Cowper winning the voters’ approval. There were other factors in Sheffield’s loss, most notably a dramatic fall in oil prices in 1985 and a subsequent fiscal crisis for the state. But the memory of the impeachment inquiry cannot have helped his re-election chances. Sheffield went on to a long public career, serving as chairman of the board and CEO of the Alaska Railroad, and head of the Port of Anchorage, now the Port of Alaska. In 2018, he published a memoir.

Sheffield wasn’t the only casualty of the affair. Two weeks after the Senate vote, Alaska Attorney General Harold M. Brown, newly appointed the previous June, fired Dan Hickey. No one in the Department of Law picked up the role of effective special prosecutor that Hickey had performed.

The lesson of the inquiry

In explaining the past, historians must ask the question, “So what?” What is the relevance of the story they are reconstructing? In this case, one can observe that the Alaskans were not altogether careless with their impeachment process, despite the partisan nature of the vote in the Senate. The quality of the evidence seemed to weigh with the senators more heavily than party loyalty. Two Democrat senators in particular, Joe Josephson and Vic Fischer, spoke against impeachment. So did the majority leader, Bill Ray. “There was nothing there,” he said, agreeing with Lacovara. The governor was stupid in signing the sole-source contract, Ray said, “but stupidity is not a crime.”

The two Republicans who voted with the Democrats against an effective condemnation of the governor never explained their votes beyond saying they did not find that the evidence presented against the governor to be sufficiently convincing. This reminds one of the single vote that prevented President Andrew Johnson from being convicted by what was essentially a political impeachment campaign in 1868. Sackett and Eliason gave the rest of the Republicans political cover to vote for a more stringent resolution which wasn’t going to pass.

Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz argued that impeachment must be for truly grave malfeasance, and should not be partisan, a mistake the founders of the nation cautioned against explicitly. In the end, in opting not to impeach Sheffield, and instead passing a resolution stating that favoritism in government is unacceptable, it can be argued that the Alaskans adhered to this standard.

Steve Haycox is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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