From Mr. Alaska to Uncle Ted: How Stevens became Alaska's most influential leader

Donald Craig Mitchell captured Ted Stevens' coming into the country in his 2001 Alaska history book, Take My Land, Take My Life: The Story of Congress's Historic Settlement of Alaska Native Land Claims, 1960-1971. Here's an excerpt from pages 220 to 242.

An intellectually energetic man on the short side of medium height Theodore Fulton "Ted" Stevens was born in 1923 in Indianapolis. His parents lived in Chicago where his father was employed as an accountant until the Depression ended the work and his eyesight failed. When Stevens was six his parents divorced. When the family disintegrated, Stevens, his father, and three siblings returned to Indianapolis to live with Steven paternal grandparents. In 1938, by which time his father and grandfather both had died of cancer, the fifteen-year-old Hoosier moved to California to live with an aunt and uncle in Redondo Beach, a breezy shore town o the Pacific Coast Highway south of Los Angeles.

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During his years as a "Fighting Seahawk" at Redondo Beach High Stevens surfed, worked before- and after-school jobs, and found time for an extracurricular career that included working on the High Tide, the school newspaper, and serving as president of the Junior Hi-Y Club (a service society affiliated with the YMCA) and the Barnstormers, a student theatre group. Senior year he was a member of the Boy's "R" Club, the Fighting Seahawks' lettermen's society.

There is a sunlit Ozzie and Harriet Nelson texture to the southern Cali­fornia beach town life Ted Stevens lived during the early 1940s, but there also is a darker side to the story. During Stevens' junior year at Redondo High there was a Japanese student club on the campus. By the end of Stevens' senior year, however, the club had disbanded since its members and their parents by then had been relocated behind the barbed wire fences of the concentration camps into which the army herded the west coast Nisei when the nation went to war with Japan.

When he graduated from high school in 1942, Stevens enrolled as an engineering student at Oregon State College. But democracy's fight (in the guise of the draft) came calling, so he enlisted in the army air corps. By March 1943 he was attending a corps flight school in Montana. In 1944 the rookie aviator received his wings and was ordered to the China theater, where he piloted cargo planes, a contribution to America's victory for which he subsequently was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and a medal from the Nationalist Chinese government.

When the war ended and First Lieutenant Stevens mustered out, instead of unpacking his slide rule, he abandoned engineering and enrolled in the political science department at UCLA. He graduated in 1947 and then headed east to attend Harvard Law School on the G. I. Bill. When he graduated in 1950, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work for Northcutt Ely.

In 1929 Ely, a recent graduate of Stanford Law School, had accompanied Ray Lyman Wilbur, the president of Stanford, to the national capital when President Herbert Hoover appointed Wilbur secretary of the interior. During his tenure as Wilbur's executive assistant, Ely specialized in water policy. In 1933 when Hoover departed the presidency and Wilbur and Ely left the Department of the Interior, Ely opened a Washington law office. By 1950 when he hired Ted Stevens, Ely had a bustling natural resource law practice.

Deciding to go to work for Northcutt Ely was Ted Stevens' first career move of consequence. His second was striking up a friendship with Elmer Bennett, an attorney six years Stevens' senior who worked on the staff of Republican Senator Eugene Millikin of Colorado, one of the states involved in a convoluted lawsuit over the allocation of Colorado River water in which the Ely law firm was involved. As a consequence of his friendships with Ely and Bennett, in January 1953 when Dwight Eisenhower succeeded Harry Truman as president, Ted Stevens knew at least two Republicans who knew other Republicans who controlled patronage jobs in the new administration.