Former interior secretary was a ‘political accident’

Carter Cabinet member also 4-term governor of Idaho.

Cecil D. Andrus, a fourterm 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, Idaho. 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.

Hewas 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.

“Hemade 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.

Halfway into his second termas governor, 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 verywell,” 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.