On Friday, January 2, the United States Senate adjourned sine die. When it did, Theodore Fulton "Ted" Stevens, who had been Alaska's senior senator for more years than a majority of his constituents are old, ended his political career in ignominy after having been defeated for reelection in November after having been convicted of seven felonies in October.

I first met Ted Stevens in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 1978, when I testified on behalf of the Rural Alaska Community Action Program (RuralCAP) before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to urge the Committee to include in H.R. 39, a bill to establish new parks, refuges, and wilderness areas in Alaska, a provision that would protect subsistence hunting and fishing from capricious regulation by the State of Alaska. I finished and the opportunity to ask questions moved down the dais to Senator Stevens, who, with his lip curled and a pugnacious angry edge to his voice that, I had not expected, Ted lectured me and everyone else in the hearing room that the provision RurALCAP wanted "will be in this bill over my dead body."

That's how it kicked off. I was 31 and Ted was 54. Today, I am 61 and Ted is 85.

In 1980, Congress included the provision RurALCAP wanted in H.R. 39. And Ted Stevens let it happen, not only because he did not have the votes to prevent it, but also because, as I came to understand better years later, when his temper dampens down, Ted Stevens is a pragmatist, rather than an ideologue.

After our first dust-up, for the next 15 years I represented the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN), which frequently took me into Ted Stevens's Capitol Hill office. And when I departed AFN, I continued to represent Alaska clients regarding legislative matters that required me to work with Ted and his staff. In 1997, when Alaska Governor Tony Knowles got into the soup by mishandling a lawsuit that had potentially disastrous consequences for the State of Alaska, Ted hired me to handle his request to the U.S. Supreme Court that the Court straighten the situation out, which it did. And when I wrote a book about the history of the Alaska Native land claims movement, Ted was extremely generous to me with his time and recollections. That book, Take My Land Take My Life, contains the only published Ted Stevens political biography to 1971. As a consequence and by default, Take My Land is cited as a principal source at the end of the Ted Stevens biography posted on Wikipedia.

Even though I am a Democrat who has never voted for Ted Stevens or given his campaigns a dime, over the past thirty years I have come to like Ted personally and to have immense respect for his intelligence, his tenacity, and his work ethic. But I have no respect for the bilious hair-triggered-tempered abuse that, throughout his career in the Senate, Ted Stevens regularly inflicted, not only on colleagues and staff, but on any and everyone unlucky enough to find him or herself within range when a messenger delivered a message that, no matter how courteously it was conveyed, Ted Stevens did not want to hear.

Simply put, Ted Stevens is, and has always been, a truculent bully who over the years became so used to demanding to have everything his own way--and usually getting it--that he came to consider his most reprehensible character defect a virtue in which he took pride by bragging about what a mean son-of-a-bitch he is and wearing his signature Incredible Hulk necktie onto the floor of the Senate.