When former Gov. Cowper met Carnahan

After reading my blog post about the late JB Carnahan, former Gov. Steve Cowper responded with a letter about the strange circumstances under which the two of them met. It’s no wonder they became friends. In 1987, Cowper appointed him to the Legislature after the death of Don Bennett, but Senate leaders refused to confirm Carnahan.

Here is Cowper’s letter:

In 1970 I was a reporter in Vietnam for the Anchorage Daily News and anybody else I could sell a story to. In the course of investigating a civilian program called the Public Safety Advisors, who were running what was called the Phoenix Program, I was introduced to the person in charge of PSA in Hué, up north in "Eye" Corps, which is what people called an area stretching up to the DMZ .

He was JB Carnahan, an ebullient ex-cop from California. We leapt into a jeep and drove north along the highway towards Quang Tri, and suddenly there was a sharp rattle that sounded like fire behind us. JB stopped the jeep and ordered me to jump out and get down flat. As I dove from the jeep my camera went off by accident.

It wasn't an ambush after all, just a similar noise. As we got back into the jeep a Vietnamese man came walking down the road hauling a two-wheel wooden cart over his shoulders with his family and all his possessions. Right behind him was an American tank with a noncom standing up on the tank, yelling for the Vietnamese man to get out of the way. That was the photo I took by mistake, and it was the only photo I ever took that sold to more than one newspaper.

The following year I was back in Fairbanks. One evening I turned on the news and there was a gun battle going on between somebody holed up in a small house a little ways up from downtown. A State Trooper had been shot. As I watched, the front door opened and the shooter was propelled out the door with his arms twisted into an unnatural position. Other troopers took over. The camera zoomed in on the person doing the twisting. I looked, then looked again.

"What in the hell is Carnahan doing here?", I said.

The government has its ways. We resumed our earlier friendship and he continued to live his remarkable life. It was a life based on service, not on the accumulation of money.

America needs more people like that.

RIP, my old friend.

Steve Cowper