Cecil Andrus, 85, former Idaho governor
BOISE, Idaho — Cecil D. Andrus managed huge swaths of public land as a Cabinet member in President Jimmy Carter’s administration and was the longestserving governor in Idaho history, but the former lumberjack was known as an approachable everyman who listed his number in the local phone directory.
The 85-year-old Andrus died late Thursday, the Andrus Center for Public Policy said. His daughter, Tracy Andrus, said he died of complications from lung cancer.
Andrus resigned midway through his second term as Idaho governor in 1977 to become President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of the Interior Department and served until Carter’s term ended in 1981. He then was elected governor two more times, becoming the first four-term governor in Idaho history. He was also the last Democrat to hold the office in red-state Idaho.
Carter declared permanent national monuments on 56 million acres in Alaska in 1978. Despite criticism from many Alaskans, Andrus ordered protection of an additional 52 million acres of public lands in the state the same year.
The threat of additional federal protections by executive fiat forced Alaskan lawmakers to compromise on the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, signed by Carter just a month before he left office.
The Alaska law set aside an area the size of California as national parks, national forests and refuge areas such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
In a 2003 speech, Andrus criticized the much-debated proposal to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “It is a place that is so fragile it takes 100 square miles for a grizzly bear to forage,” he said. “It takes 50 years for a tree to grow.”
Historian T.H. Watkins once wrote that only three Interior secretaries — Harold Ickes, Andrus and Stuart Udall — understood the importance of wilderness preservation “to the spiritual and ecological well-being of the nation.”
Andrus was a state senator when he won the governor’s race in 1970. His popularity was cemented with a regular-guy governing style. Andrus listed his home phone number in the Boise directory, made breakfast for his children each morning before driving himself to his office at the statehouse and took three days off in the heat of his successful 1974 re-election campaign to bag an elk.
Even before it was evident Carter would not be re-elected in 1980, Andrus had publicly said he planned to return West in 1981. He said being governor of Idaho was “the best political job in the world.” After returning to Idaho to work as a consultant, Andrus mounted a comeback campaign and narrowly won election as governor again in 1986 with a scant 3,600 votes over Republican Lt. Gov. David Leroy. Voters then sent him back to an unprecedented fourth term in 1990 with 68 percent of the vote.
His biggest fight in the waning days of his political career came when he blocked the U.S. Department of Energy from shipping radioactive waste from a Colorado nuclear weapons site to the Idaho National Laboratory. After accepting the waste on a “temporary” basis for 17 years, Andrus said, Idaho would no longer be the nation’s radioactive garbage dump.
The standoff persisted through his Republican successor, Gov. Phil Batt, and the energy department ultimately signed a 1995 agreement to remove all the radioactive waste that had been dumped in Idaho since the Cold War.
When the federal government challenged the terms of that agreement in court in 2006, Andrus took the witness stand to help the state’s successful case to hold federal energy officials to the cleanup commitment.
Andrus would continue fighting the issue during his final years, pointing his criticism toward Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter when it became known in January that the state was looking at creating a waiver to allow shipments of spent fuel.
Andrus was born in 1931, in Hood River, Ore., and attended Oregon State University but did not graduate before he served in the Navy during the Korean War. He came back to Oregon to work as a logger and then moved with his family in 1955 to Orofino in northern Idaho to work at his father’s sawmill.
His 35-year political career began when he arrived late at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Orofino to discover his beerdrinking buddies had decided to nominate him to run for the Legislature. In 1960, at age 29, he defeated a Republican incumbent and was elected to the first of three two-year terms as a state senator.