Theodore Fulton Stevens Sr. (November 18, 1923 – August 9, 2010) was an American politician and lawyer who served as a U.S. Senator from Alaska from 1968 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, he was the longest-serving Republican senator in history at the time he left office. He was the president pro tempore of the United States Senate in the 108th and 109th Congresses from 2003 to 2007, and was the third U.S. Senator to hold the title of president pro tempore emeritus. He was previously solicitor of the Interior Department from 1960 to 1961. Stevens has been described as one of the most powerful members of Congress and as the most powerful member of Congress from the Northwestern United States.
Stevens served for six decades in the American public sector, beginning with his service as a pilot in World War II. In 1952, his law career took him to Fairbanks, Alaska, where he was appointed U.S. Attorney the following year by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1956, he returned to Washington, D. C., to work in the Eisenhower Interior Department, eventually rising to become Senior Counsel and Solicitor of the Department of the Interior, where he played an important role as an executive official in bringing about and lobbying for statehood for Alaska, as well as forming the Arctic National Wildlife Range.
After unsuccessfully running to represent Alaska in the United States Senate, Stevens was elected to the Alaska House of Representatives in 1964 and became House majority leader in his second term. In 1968, Stevens again unsuccessfully ran for Senate, but he was appointed to Bob Bartlett's vacant seat after Bartlett's death later that year. As a senator, Stevens played key roles in legislation that shaped Alaska's economic and social development, with the Associated Press nicknaming the federal money he brought in "Stevens money". This legislation included the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, Title IX, gaining him the nickname "The Father of Title IX", the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, and the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. He was also known for his sponsorship of the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, which established the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee.
In 2008, Stevens was embroiled in a federal corruption trial as he ran for re-election to the Senate. He was initially found guilty, and, eight days later, he was narrowly defeated by Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich. Stevens was the longest-serving U.S. Senator to have ever lost a bid for re-election. However, when a Justice Department probe found evidence of gross prosecutorial misconduct, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asked the court to vacate the conviction and dismiss the underlying indictment, and Judge Emmet G. Sullivan granted the motion. Stevens died on August 9, 2010, near Dillingham, Alaska, when a de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter he and several others were flying in crashed en route to a private fishing lodge.
Early life and career
Childhood and youth
Stevens was born November 18, 1923, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the third of four children, in a small cottage built by his paternal grandfather after the marriage of his parents, Gertrude S. Chancellor and George A. Stevens. The family later lived in Chicago, where George was an accountant before losing his job during the Great Depression. Around this time, when Ted Stevens was six years old, his parents divorced, and Stevens and his three siblings moved back to Indianapolis so they could reside with their paternal grandparents, followed shortly thereafter by their father, who developed problems with his eyes which eventually blinded him. Stevens's mother moved to California and sent for Stevens's siblings as she could afford to, but Stevens stayed in Indianapolis helping to care for his father and a mentally disabled cousin, Patricia Acker, who also lived with the family. The only adult in the household with a job was Stevens's grandfather. Stevens helped to support the family by working as a newsboy, and would later remember selling many newspapers on March 1, 1932, when newspaper headlines blared the news of the Lindbergh kidnapping.
In 1934 Stevens's grandfather punctured a lung in a fall down a tall flight of stairs, contracted pneumonia, and died. Stevens's father, George, died in 1957 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, of lung cancer. Stevens and his cousin Patricia moved to Manhattan Beach, California in 1938, by which time both of Stevens's grandparents had died, to live with Patricia's mother, Gladys Swindells. Stevens attended Redondo Union High School, participating in extracurricular activities including working on the school newspaper and becoming a member of a student theater group affiliated with the YMCA, and, during his senior year, the Lettermen's Society. Stevens also worked at jobs before and after school.
Military service
After he graduated from Redondo Union High School in 1942, Stevens enrolled at Oregon State University to study engineering, attending for a semester. With World War II in progress, Stevens attempted to join the Navy and serve in naval aviation, but failed the vision exam. He improved his vision through a course of prescribed eye exercises, and in 1943 he was accepted into an Army Air Force Air Cadet program at Montana State College. Stevens said that, after scoring near the top of his class on an aptitude test for flight training, he was transferred from the program to preflight training in Santa Ana, California, and he received his wings early in 1944.
Stevens served in the China-Burma-India theater with the Fourteenth Air Force Transport Section, which supported the "Flying Tigers", from 1944 to 1945. He and other pilots in the transport section flew C-46 and C-47 transport planes, often without escort, mostly in support of Chinese units fighting the Japanese. Stevens received the Distinguished Flying Cross for flying behind enemy lines, the Air Medal, and the Yuan Hai Medal awarded by the Chinese Nationalist government. He was discharged from the Army Air Forces in March 1946.
Higher education and law school
After the war, Stevens attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1947. While at UCLA, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Theta Rho chapter). He applied to law school at Stanford and the University of Michigan, but on the advice of his friend Russell Green's father to "look East", he applied to Harvard Law School, which he ended up attending. Stevens's education was partly financed by the G.I. Bill; he made up the difference by selling his blood, borrowing money from an uncle, and working several jobs including one as a bartender in Boston. During the summer of 1949, Stevens was a research assistant in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California (now the Central District of California).
While at Harvard, Stevens wrote a paper on maritime law that received honorable mention for the Addison Brown prize, a Harvard Law School award for the best student-penned essay related to private international law or maritime law. The essay later became a Harvard Law Review article, and, 45 years later, Justice Jay Rabinowitz of the Alaska Supreme Court praised Stevens's scholarship, telling the Anchorage Daily News that the high court had issued a recent opinion citing the article. Stevens graduated from Harvard Law School in 1950.
Early legal career
After graduating, Stevens went to work in the Washington, D.C., law offices of Northcutt Ely. Twenty years earlier, Ely had been executive assistant to Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur during the Hoover administration, and, by 1950, he headed a prominent law firm specializing in natural resources issues. One of Ely's clients, Emil Usibelli, founder of the Usibelli Coal Mine in Healy, Alaska, was trying to sell coal to the military, and Stevens was assigned to handle his legal affairs.
Marriage and family
Early in 1952, Stevens married Ann Mary Cherrington, a Democrat and the adopted daughter of University of Denver Chancellor Ben Mark Cherrington. She had graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and during the Truman administration had worked for the State Department.
On December 4, 1978, the crash of a Learjet 25C on approach at Anchorage International Airport killed five of the seven aboard; Stevens survived, suffering a concussion and broken ribs, but his wife, Ann, did not. Stevens would later state in an interview with the Anchorage Times "I can't remember anything that happened." Smiling, he added, "I'm still here. It must be my Scots blood." The building which houses the Alaska chapter of the American Red Cross at 235 East Eighth Avenue in Anchorage is named in her memory; likewise a reading room at the Loussac Library.
Stevens and Ann had three sons (Ben, Walter, and Ted) and two daughters (Susan and Elizabeth). Democratic Governor Tony Knowles appointed Ben to the Alaska Senate in 2001, where he served as the president of the state senate until the fall of 2006.
Ted Stevens remarried in 1980. He and his second wife, Catherine, had a daughter, Lily.
Stevens's last Alaska home was in Girdwood, a ski resort community near the southern edge of Anchorage's city limits, about forty miles (65 km) by road from downtown. The home was the subject of media attention after it was raided by FBI & IRS agents in 2007.
Prostate cancer
Stevens was a survivor of prostate cancer and had publicly disclosed his cancer. He was nominated for the first Golden Glove Awards for Prostate Cancer by the National Prostate Cancer Coalition (NPCC). He advocated the creation of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program for Prostate Cancer at the Department of Defense, which has funded nearly $750 million for prostate cancer research. Stevens was a recipient of the Presidential Citation by the American Urological Association for significantly promoting urology causes.
Early Alaska career
In 1952, while still working for Northcutt Ely, Stevens volunteered for the presidential campaign of Dwight D. Eisenhower, writing position papers for the campaign on western water law and lands. By the time Eisenhower won the election that November, Stevens had acquired contacts who told him, "We want you to come over to Interior." Stevens left his job with Ely, but a job in the Eisenhower administration did not materialize as a result of a temporary hiring freeze instituted by Eisenhower in an effort to reduce spending.
Instead, Stevens was offered a job with the Fairbanks, Alaska, law firm of Charles Clasby, Emil Usibelli's Alaska attorney whose firm (Collins & Clasby) had just lost one of its attorneys. Stevens and his wife had met and liked both Usibelli and Clasby, and decided to make the move. Loading up their 1947 Buick and traveling on a $600 loan from Clasby, they drove across country from Washington, D.C., and up the Alaska Highway in the dead of winter, arriving in Fairbanks in February 1953. Stevens later recalled kidding Governor Walter Hickel about the loan. "He likes to say that he came to Alaska with 38 cents in his pocket", he said of Hickel. "I came $600 in debt." Ann Stevens recalled in 1968 that they made the move to Alaska "on a six-month trial basis".
In Fairbanks, Stevens made contacts within the city's Republican party division. He befriended conservative newspaper publisher C.W. Snedden, who had purchased the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in 1950. Snedden's wife, Helen, later recalled that Snedden and Stevens were "like father and son". However, she would add in 1994 that "The only problem Ted had was that he had a temper", crediting her husband with helping to steady Stevens like you would do with a son, and with teaching Stevens the art of diplomacy.
U.S. Attorney
Nomination
Stevens had been with Collins & Clasby for six months when Robert J. McNealy, a Democrat appointed as U.S. Attorney for Fairbanks during the Truman administration, informed U.S. District Judge Harry Pratt he would be resigning effective August 15, 1953, having already delayed his resignation by several months at the request of Justice Department officials newly appointed by Eisenhower. The latter had asked McNealy to delay his resignation until Eisenhower could appoint a replacement. Despite Stevens's short tenure as an Alaska resident and his relative lack of trial or criminal law experience, Pratt asked Stevens to serve in the position until Eisenhower acted. Stevens agreed. "I said, 'Sure, I'd like to do that,'" Stevens recalled years later. "Clasby said to me, 'It's not going to pay you as much money', but, 'if you want to do it, that's your business.' He was very pissed that I decided to go." Most members of the Fairbanks Bar Association voiced their disapproval of the appointment of a newcomer, and members in attendance at the association's meeting that December voted to instead support Carl Messenger for the permanent appointment, an endorsement seconded by the Alaska Republican Party Committee for the Fairbanks-area judicial division. However, Stevens was favored by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Senator William F. Knowland of California, and the Republican National Committee, (Alaska itself had no Senators at this time, as it was still a territory). Eisenhower sent Stevens's nomination to the U.S. Senate on February 25, 1954, and the Senate confirmed him on March 30.
Career as U.S. Attorney
Stevens soon gained a reputation as an active prosecutor who vigorously prosecuted violations of both federal and territorial liquor, drug, and prostitution laws, characterized by Fairbanks area homesteader Niilo Koponen (who later served in the Alaska State House of Representatives from 1982 to 1991) as "this rough tough shorty of a district attorney who was going to crush crime". Stevens sometimes accompanied U.S. Marshals on raids. As recounted years later by Justice Jay Rabinowitz, "U.S. marshals went in with Tommy guns and Ted led the charge, smoking a stogie and with six guns on his hips." However, Stevens himself said the colorful stories spread about him as a pistol-packing D.A. were greatly exaggerated, and recalled only one incident when he carried a gun: on a vice raid to the town of Big Delta about 75 miles (121 km) southeast of Fairbanks, he carried a holstered gun on a marshal's suggestion.
Stevens also became known for his explosive temper, which was focused particularly on a criminal defense lawyer named Warren A. Taylor who would later go on to become the Alaska Legislature's first Speaker of the House in the First Alaska State Legislature. "Ted would get red in the face, blow up and stalk out of the courtroom", a former court clerk later recalled of Stevens's relationship with Taylor. Later on, a former colleague of Stevens would "cringe at remembering hearing Stevens through the wall of their Anchorage law office berating clients." Stevens's wife, Ann, would make her husband read self-help books to try and calm him down, although this effort was to no avail. As one observer remembered: "He would lose his temper about the dumbest things. Even when you would agree with him, he got mad at you for agreeing with him."
In 1956, in a trial which received national headlines, Stevens prosecuted Jack Marler; a former Internal Revenue Service agent who had been indicted for failing to file tax returns. Marler's first trial, which was handled by a different prosecutor, had ended in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial. For the second trial, Stevens was up against Edgar Paul Boyko, a flamboyant Anchorage attorney who built his defense of Marler on the theory of no taxation without representation, citing the Territory of Alaska's lack of representation in the U.S. Congress. As recalled by Boyko, his closing argument to the jury was a rabble-rousing appeal for the jury to "strike a blow for Alaskan freedom", claiming that "this case was the jury's chance to move Alaska toward statehood." Boyko remembered that "Ted had done a hell of a job in the case", but Boyko's tactics paid off, and Marler was acquitted on April 3, 1956. Following the acquittal, Stevens issued a statement saying, "I don't believe the jury's verdict is an expression of resistance to taxes or law enforcement or the start of a Boston Tea Party." Stevens then followed "I do believe, however, that the decision will be a blow to the hopes for Alaska statehood."
Department of the Interior
Alaska statehood
In March 1956, Stevens's friend Elmer Bennett, legislative counsel in the Department of the Interior, was promoted by Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay to the Secretary's office. Bennett successfully lobbied McKay to replace him in his old job with Stevens, and Stevens returned to Washington, D.C., to take up the position. By the time he arrived in June 1956, McKay had resigned in order to run for the U.S. Senate from his home state of Oregon, and Fred Andrew Seaton had been appointed to replace him. Seaton, a newspaper publisher from Nebraska, was a close friend of Fairbanks Daily News-Miner publisher C.W. Snedden, who was in addition friends with Stevens, and in common with Snedden was an advocate of Alaska statehood, unlike McKay, who had been lukewarm in his support. Upon his appointment, Seaton asked Snedden if he knew anyone from Alaska who could come down to Washington, D.C. to work for Alaska statehood; Snedden replied that the man he needed (Stevens) was already there working in the Department of the Interior. The fight for Alaska statehood became Stevens's principal work at Interior. "He did all the work on statehood", Roger Ernst, the then Assistant Secretary of Interior for Public Land Management, later said of Stevens. "He wrote 90 percent of all the speeches; Statehood was his main project." A sign on Stevens's door proclaimed his office as "Alaskan Headquarters", and Stevens became known at the Department of the Interior as "Mr. Alaska".
Efforts to make Alaska a state had been going on since 1943, and had nearly come to fruition during the Truman administration in 1950 when a statehood bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives, only to die in the Senate. The national Republican Party opposed statehood for Alaska, in part out of fear that Alaska would, upon statehood, elect Democrats to the U.S. Congress, while the Southern Democrats opposed statehood, believing that the addition of 2 new pro-civil rights Senators would jeopardize the Solid South's control on Congressional law. At the time Stevens arrived in Washington, D.C., to take up his new job, a constitutional convention to write an Alaska constitution had just been concluded on the campus of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. The 55 delegates also elected three unofficial representatives (all Democrats) as unofficial Shadow congressmen: Ernest Gruening and William Egan as Shadow U.S. Senators and Ralph Rivers as Shadow at-large U.S. representative.
President Eisenhower, a Republican, regarded Alaska as too large in area and with a population density too low to be economically self-sufficient as a state, and furthermore saw statehood as an obstacle to effective defense of Alaska should the Soviet Union seek to invade it. Eisenhower was especially worried about the sparsely populated areas of northern and western Alaska. In March 1954, he had reportedly "drawn a line on a map" indicating his opinion of the portions of Alaska which he felt ought to remain in federal hands even if Alaska were granted statehood.
Seaton and Stevens worked with Gen. Nathan Twining, the incumbent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who himself had previously served in Alaska; and Jack L. Stempler, a top Defense Department attorney, to create a compromise that would address Eisenhower's concerns. Much of their work was conducted in a hospital room at Walter Reed Army Hospital, where Interior Secretary Seaton was receiving treatment for reoccurring health issues with his back. Their work concentrated on refining the line on the map that Eisenhower had drawn in 1954, one which became known as the PYK Line after three rivers (the Porcupine, Yukon, and Kuskokwim) whose courses defined much of the line. The PYK Line was the basis for Section 10 of the Alaska Statehood Act, which Stevens wrote. Under Section 10, the land north and west of the PYK Line – which included the entirety of Alaska's North Slope, the Seward Peninsula, most of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, the western portions of the Alaska Peninsula, and the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands – would be part of the new state, but the president would be granted emergency powers to establish special national defense withdrawals in those areas if deemed necessary. "It's still in the law but it's never been exercised", Stevens later recollected. "Now that the problem with Russia is gone, it's surplusage. But it is a special law that only applies to Alaska."
Stevens, illegally, also took part in lobbying for the statehood bill, working closely with the Alaska Statehood Committee from his office at Interior. Stevens hired Marilyn Atwood, daughter of Anchorage Times publisher Robert Atwood, who was chairman of the Alaska Statehood Committee, to work with him in the Interior Department. "We were violating the law", Stevens told a researcher in an October 1977 oral history interview for the Eisenhower Library. Stevens explained in the interview that they were violating a long-standing statute against lobbying from the executive branch. "We more or less masterminded the House and Senate attack from the executive branch." Stevens and the younger Atwood created file cards on Congressmen based on their backgrounds, identity and religious beliefs, as he later recalled in the 1977 interview. "We'd assigned these Alaskans to go talk to individual members of the Senate and split them down on the basis of people that had something in common with them." The lobbying campaign extended to presidential press conferences. "We set Ike (Eisenhower) up quite often at press conferences by planting questions about Alaska statehood", Stevens said in the 1977 interview. "We never let a press conference go by without getting someone to try to ask him about statehood." Newspapers were also targeted, according to Stevens. "We planted editorials in weeklies and dailies and newspapers in the district of people we thought were opposed to us or states where they were opposed to us." Stevens then added "...Suddenly they were thinking twice about opposing us."
The Alaska Statehood Act became law with Eisenhower's signature on July 7, 1958, and Alaska formally was admitted to statehood on January 3, 1959, when Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Proclamation.
Solicitor of Interior
On September 15, 1960, George W. Abbott resigned as Solicitor of the Interior to become Assistant Secretary, and Stevens became Solicitor. He stayed in this office until the Eisenhower administration left office on January 20, 1961. In his position as the highest attorney in the Interior Department, he authored the order that created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1960.
Return to Alaska and service in the Alaska House of Representatives
After returning to Alaska, Stevens managed Richard Nixon's 1960 campaign in Alaska. Nixon lost the election narrowly to John F. Kennedy, but won Alaska, which was unexpected due to Alaska's Democratic lean. Shortly after, Stevens founded Stevens & Savage, a law firm in Anchorage. Stevens was then joined by H. Russel Holland, who later became a federal judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska, and the firm's name changed to Stevens, Savage & Holland. Stevens became a member of Operation Rampart, a group in favor of building the Rampart Dam, a hydroelectric project on the Yukon River. Elected to the Alaska House of Representatives in 1964, he became House Majority Leader in his second term. In this position, he helped push through the repeal of a law that the Governor must appoint a U.S. Senator of the same party as their predecessor when filling a Senate vacancy, benefitting from this law change the next year when Bob Bartlett died.
U.S. Senator
Service
Stevens's service as a United States Senator was, at first, marked with instability and controversy. Mike Gravel stated that he had no issue with Stevens being the senior senator, because he was seven years Stevens's junior, and Stevens had been in public service for longer than he had. Even after losing the 1968 Republican primary, Stevens embarked on a state-wide campaign for the Republican nominee, Elmer Rasmuson, attacking Gravel on his time as Speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives. When they were being sworn in together in 1969, Stevens approached Gravel and apologized, asking if they could "let political bygones be bygones", so that they could work together. However, Gravel replied "I don't want to be your friend, Ted. I didn't appreciate you going around the state and lying about me." Gravel and Stevens never recovered, with Gravel later recalling "We'd talk about things. I'd joke with him. He's got a sense of humor." However, Gravel would add "He didn't use it on me unless I was the butt of it."
During the inaugural meeting of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs during the 91st United States Congress, Stevens commandeered the meeting, booming: "The first priority has to be settlement of Alaska Native land claims. This committee hadn't had the guts to do it at statehood." By the end of the meeting, Stevens and Gravel had ended up in a shouting match, constantly interrupting and disrespecting each other, boiling out into the hallway, fists raised, giving statements to the press in a makeshift conference before Chairman Henry "Scoop" Jackson interrupted and broke up the fight. In one incident, Stevens began lecturing Jackson, the chairman. Jackson put his foot down, stating "Now just a minute. You're new here and I want to tell you how these things are handled." Ed Weinberg would recall that Jackson treated Ted Stevens like he was a rebellious schoolboy and, as such, would make him "sit in the corner with a dunce cap on." "Jackson wasn't about to let Ted Stevens take over the hearings and the framing of this legislation."
Following the 1974 campaign, where Stevens begrudgingly campaigned for the Republican nominee, leading John Birch Society member C.R. Lewis, Stevens again tried to put their rivalry aside, sending a letter inviting Gravel and his wife to a "nice dinner" with him and his wife. However, Gravel turned it down, later recalling he showed Stevens that he "didn't want to socialize with him." Gravel felt Stevens did not behave appropriately during the campaign, adding "I wanted nothing to do with him socially."
On October 13, 1978, the last day of the second sitting of the 95th Congress, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, an act to conserve around a third of Alaska as 'America's last huge, untouched wilderness', an act which Stevens championed after providing a compromise with Mo Udall, was killed by Gravel. One theory why was that Gravel killed the bill in an attempt to spite Stevens, but it is more widely accepted that Gravel had killed the bill as part of his 1980 re-election campaign. The day before, Gravel had written to Stevens that he 'supported Stevens' and was reconsidering his opposition of any attempt of a compromise. On the day, the bill was granted an extension for a year by the House, but when the Senate debated the extension, Stevens did not present Gravel's objections to the Senate. In response, Gravel stood up and killed the extension, stating that astounded him how members of Congress could "meet so much on a subject" that "affected someone else's state." Gravel would then add that he "had been willing to rise above this and work on the compromise", even though he believed the bill "...was anathema to what I thought was right and in the best interests of Alaska..."
Democratic New Hampshire Senator John A. Durkin rose. "The whole chamber knows what the senator is up to. He is out to torpedo this bill!" Gravel rebutted "I will not admit that!", continuing to speak until Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd took the bill off of the floor. The Senate descended into rage, Gravel unsuccessfully trying to talk over the Senators' angry commotion. Stevens then rose and stated that "I feel like a father who has just arrived at the delivery room and found out his son has been stillborn." He accused Gravel of lying, adding Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus and President Jimmy Carter would take away 'millions of acres of Alaska from development'. Durkin then rose again; "We worked out an extension to protect Alaska, and he is torpedoing that now. I hope the press is listening, as well as every village in Alaska, so when the secretary (Andrus) invokes the Antiquities Act there will be no ticker-tape parade." Hard to hear over the anger of the Senate, Durkin then finally added that Alaskans should know that the compromise "foundered on two words, after forty-seven markups, and those two words are 'Mike Gravel.'" Gravel argued that Stevens was selling out, and, in rebuttal, Stevens told the press that Gravel had broken his word, adding "Gravel is an international playboy who needs psychiatric help.", following "I'm not even sure if God could fathom his thinking."
1978 plane crash
On December 4, 1978, Stevens had a meeting in Anchorage with executives of the major pro-development lobby "Citizens for the Management of Alaska's Lands". On the same day, Governor of Alaska Jay Hammond, would be sworn in for a second term in Alaska's capital, Juneau. Tony Motley, the Chair of CMAL, arranged for a friend's private plane to pick them up after the inauguration had finished, and then fly them from Juneau to Anchorage so Stevens could attend the meeting. During takeoff from Anchorage International, the plane had risen only a few feet above the runway when it was hit by a sudden, strong gust of wind, which flipped the plane around and pointed it straight up in the air. In an attempt to re-orient the plane, the pilot pulled back the throttle, but the plane stalled and crashed violently into the ground. Out of the seven people on board, including the pilot, only Stevens and Motley survived the crash. The other five passengers, a group which included Ann Stevens, who was Stevens' wife of 2+1⁄2 decades, died on impact.
Stevens's wife's death hit him very hard. On the day of the crash Gravel was on a trip to Saudi Arabia, but he flew back to attend Ann's funeral. Afterwards, Gravel asked a Stevens aide if he could express his condolences personally, but he was informed that Stevens didn't want to see him. Upon Stevens' return, he seemed "bitter and in terrible emotional pain", hinting in both Alaska and D.C. that he believed that the only reason he made the flight was that he had to rebuild the effort for a land bill back together, and that thus the primary reason was Mike Gravel killing the bill. Most of his remarks were not printed by reporters, who saw them as statements of someone "half-crazy with grief".
However, on February 6, 1979, Stevens spoke to the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, which Udall chaired, which had just begun to debate the new edition of the lands bill, and he brought up the plane crash. "It was on that trip to Alaska to reconstitute the efforts for the coming year that I and Tony Motley, who passed away ... were involved in an accident", he said, the fact that Motley had survived seemingly lapsing his mind. "The trip was neither spur-of-the-moment nor stopgap. It was and is to me the beginning of this year's effort to achieve an acceptable D2 lands bill. As I am sure you realize, and many of you can imagine, the solution of the issue means even more to me than it did before." He shortly talked about the bill, before finally adding: "I think if that bill had passed, I might have a wife sitting and waiting when I get home tonight, too."
In 1979, Stevens began to recruit primary challengers for the Democratic nomination to Gravel for his re-election campaign the following year. After some courting, Stevens decided to back Clark Gruening, the grandson of Ernest Gruening, who Gravel had defeated in the primary 12 years prior. Stevens had also reportedly (and unsuccessfully) attempted to court Tony Motley, the other survivor of the 1978 crash to run as the Republican nominee, but Motley stated he had only briefly touched upon entering the race with Stevens and that he was not a candidate. The junior Gruening would defeat Gravel in the primary by a margin of 11 points. Gruening would then lose the election to banker Frank Murkowski by 7 points.
Early legislative achievements
Stevens's fiery attitude greatly assisted him in pushing the highly controversial nomination of Alaska Governor Wally Hickel to the office of Interior Secretary through the workings of the Senate, as well as passing numerous major bills, such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971, Title IX in 1972, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act in 1973, something which endeared the Senator to President Richard Nixon, and, an act which Stevens had picked as his key legislative achievement in 2006, the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, along with Washington Senator Warren Magnuson. Stevens's ability to do so helped propel him in popularity, allowing him to easily win re-election in 1970 in an upset.