By Steve Cowper
For The Cordova Time
My old friend Elstun Lauesen phoned late Saturday night to advise that former Alaska Speaker of the House Mike Bradner had died from the coronavirus on Friday, Feb. 26. Elstun wanted to know if I might want to write a comment on Mike’s great service to Alaska. Of course, I would.
In August 1973 the U.S. Congress voted to allow the building of the Alaska Pipeline. It was apparent that life in Alaska was going to change. Managing that change was mostly up to the 1975 Legislature and Gov. Jay Hammond. The Speaker of the Alaska House in 1975 was Mike Bradner, of Fairbanks. I was a new House member, also from Fairbanks. Hammond himself, a Republican and a former fighter pilot, had just been elected by a narrow margin. It was up to us, and we took it on.
Mike Bradner was in many ways a kind of ultimate godfather to all that followed, from 1975 until 2009, when extreme political party warfare took over from simply trying to do the right thing. We had wanted a moderate and well-functioning state government with low taxes; later, the extremists on the right seemingly wanted to get rid of government entirely.
It has been 47 years since I first met Mike Bradner, and more and more I appreciate the wisdom and subtlety of what he caused to happen in the Legislature of 1975-1977. The election of 1974 was held during the Watergate events and the Republicans suffered accordingly. Even in Alaska, there weren’t many of them left in the Legislature; at the same time the Alaska pipeline had been finally approved in Washington, with its promise of a seemingly endless money stream. In Anchorage and elsewhere, a group of mostly young Democratic legislators were elected. They had ambitions and they wanted to change Alaska for the better with the oncoming oil money. Mike Bradner, a Democrat, was the person who had to impose order lest things get out of hand. With the help of the great Willard Bowman and Hugh Malone, he did just that. As always there was muttering in the hall outside the chambers, but the legislature worked with Gov. Hammond to design a rational and moderate design for the future of Alaska: not just for the next year, but for a future that stretched beyond the end of the oil era, through the wise use of earnings from something called the “Alaska Permanent Fund” which Mike, Gov. Hammond, Malone and the rest of us created through a Constitutional Amendment we put on the ballot in 1976.
Time flies. For a while in Alaska, things looked promising. Now, nationally as well as in Alaska, people rightfully wonder whether an American-style democracy can function at all. Perhaps, some think, we need a dictator.
In Alaska and elsewhere in America, people might derive some comfort by knowing that long ago and far away, there was an effort that suggested that an elected government could indeed do what it was supposed to do. For the benefit of Alaskans who weren’t around in those days, that effort lasted from 1975-2009, arguably. All such changes must be written into law. The person who got this great effort started was the Speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives.
His name was Mike Bradner. His passing will not go unnoticed. We who participated in Alaska’s government in those days, we will remember you.
Steve Cowper served as the sixth governor of Alaska from 1986-1990, the period that included the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.
