Former Idaho Governor and U.S. Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus, who engineered the conservation of millions of acres of Alaska land during the Carter administration, has died at the age of 85. His family says Andrus passed away due to complications from lung cancer.
A onetime lumberjack, 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.
Even before it was evident Carter would not be re-elected in 1980, Andrus had publicly said he planned to return West in 1981. After returning to Idaho to work as a consultant, Andrus mounted a comeback campaign and narrowly won election as governor again in 1986 over Republican Lieutenant Governor 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, Governor Phil Batt, and the energy department ultimately signed a 1995 agreement to remove all the radioactive rubbish 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 Governor 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, Oregon, 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 to work at his father’s sawmill. After the sawmill closed, Andrus entered the insurance business.
His 35-year political career began when he arrived late at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Orofino to discover his beer-drinking 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 before an unsuccessful 1966 bid for governor. He returned to the state Senate in 1968. (AP, Idaho Statesman)
