Alaskans deserve a full accounting of the state money already provided to process the Ted Stevens papers before giving millions more

More than a year before his death in 2010, former Sen. Ted Stevens deposited his Congressional papers with the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where they would eventually be available to researchers and the public.

The other Alaska senators have their papers at UAF, which holds “more than 20,000 linear feet of archives and manuscripts and in excess of one million photographs.”

The vast 4,700-box collection of Stevens papers should have remained in Fairbanks at the largest and finest research library in the state, but the heirs of Stevens decided to move the papers to Anchorage in 2015 for reasons they never explained.

If a first-rate biography of Stevens is ever to be written, the author will have to rely on this vast collection and have full access to tell the man’s story—his triumphs as well as his failures. He was the most influential political leader in the history of Alaska. He had a quick mind, a solid grasp of the U.S. Senate and a sharp tongue.

I wrote in 2015 about an example of the kind of material I fear may be censored by family and friends of Stevens eager to erase what some may think were his rough edges, but were really essential parts of his character.

Reporter Joel Southern recalled the time that David Whitney, a great reporter who worked in Washington, D.C. for the Anchorage Daily News, beckoned to Stevens, who was waiting on the Capitol steps to have his photo taken.

“Whitney called out to get Stevens’s attention, and Stevens flipped Whitney a middle finger in return – just as the photographer snapped the picture. According to aides, the photo remained in Stevens’s files a long time,” Southern wrote.

“Stevens had hoped to give David a print of the photo as a gag gift. Aides could not find it, so instead David got a box containing a glove, which had all but the middle finger folded back,” Southern said.

If that photo turned up in the files, would an overprotective Stevens loyalist or family members make it go away? Perhaps.

My late brother Terrence used to joke that Ernest Gruening should not have called his autobiography “Many Battles,” but “Many, Many, Many Battles.”

In a rough-and-tumble career in which Stevens tangled with countless enemies real and imagined, he fought more battles than even Gruening.

What’s not clear today is to what degree the Stevens papers were sanitized after the family removed the papers from UAF to house them in Anchorage, where they have been under control of the Ted Stevens Foundation since 2015. Members of Congress own the papers they accumulate while in office.

Sean Parnell, now the UAA chancellor, is promoting a plan to spend $20 million over the next three years to expand the UAA library and house the papers of Stevens, the late Rep. Don Young and others.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski earmarked $6 million for the project in the federal budget, while the University of Alaska says it will need at least $14 million from the state over the next few years.

In a press release promoting the “historic gift” of the Stevens papers, Parnell said the university wants an “Alaska Leaders Archive,” but he neglected to mention that the papers had been at UAF when Stevens was alive.

He also neglected to mention that the major political archive collections in Alaska are at UAF and the state provided $1 million for the Stevens work when Parnell was governor for additional processing of the papers at UAF.

The press release quotes Catherine Stevens, the widow of Ted Stevens, as saying “It was Ted’s wish for his official papers, as well as those of other prominent Alaskans, to be donated to the university. I am pleased to honor this wish, and I look forward to sharing his legacy through his collection.”

To be clear, it was Ted’s wish that the papers go to the UAF library when he approved the deal in 2009.

The new plan sounds like an attempt to build a political shrine to Stevens and Don Young, paid for by the federal and state governments, at a time when the university is struggling for state support.

Before Stevens died 13 years ago, BP provided $1 million to the University of Alaska, a donation subsidized by the state with a tax credit, to “catalog and process more than 4,500 boxes of papers and media from the congressional career of former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens,” the university and BP said in 2009.

Key companies in the pollock fishing fleet chipped in $250,000 and the university added $435,000 in assistance to the Stevens project.

The university estimated the preliminary processing cost and digitizing costs at $700,000.

With millions of pages to be processed, an exhaustive cataloging effort of a collection this extensive could last for many years and cost far more.

Among the many conditions attached to the agreement, Stevens “will retain control over access to the collection and he or his estate can rescind the agreement in 10 years,” Richard Mauer of the Anchorage Daily News reported in 2009.

"I am told it's the second largest collection of documents in the history of the Senate, the first being Robert Byrd's," Stevens said during his trial on ethics charges in 2008. Mauer wrote that the “subject of his archives, and a future Stevens library, came up several times.”

Stevens had hoped to live long enough to work through his collection, but he died in a 2010 plane crash.

A 2009 press release from the university quoted Stevens as saying, "Alaska is my, home and it’s my hope that this collection of papers and material will contribute to the body of knowledge about the many important federal issues which have affected our state."

Under the agreement Stevens signed in 2009, most of his papers should have become public in 2015, five years after his death.

But that never happened.

The Stevens family—within its rights under the original deal with UAF—had the documents repacked and shipped to Anchorage where private archivists using state and private funds continued to go through them.

The 2009 agreement said the family would have the option of transferring the collection to a university library in Anchorage, "provided that such facility is then able to accommodate and properly store, process and make use of the collection."

In 2014, Parnell put $1 million in the state capital budget for more processing work on the Stevens papers, the money going not to the university, but to the Stevens Foundation.

“State funding will contribute to the ongoing private financing efforts to preserve the collection for future generations of Alaska,” the Parnell administration told the Legislature.

In 2015, Catherine Stevens wrote to UA President Pat Gamble that she appreciated the work the university did in organizing and preparing a database, but “much more remains to properly prepare the collection for public access.”

“To achieve this, I have made the difficult decision it is necessary to terminate the deposit agreement with the university and to relocate the papers to a private facility in Anchorage where the archival process will continue,” she wrote to Gamble.

As I wrote at the time, the papers should have been opened to the public, as Stevens had proposed. And especially because of the $1 million appropriated by the Legislature.

The 2009 agreement included a confidentiality statement that anyone accessing the records would have to sign, promising to keep certain details secret. The boxes and the folders had been cataloged, but not the individual documents.

In 2015, I had a long exchange of emails and two phone conversations with lawyer Tim McKeever, former Stevens aide and the chairman of the Stevens Foundation.

McKeever, along with other former staff members, lobbyists and Stevens backers, helped start the foundation when Stevens was still in office. It received its first significant funding during a 2004 effort that included a $5,000-per-plate dinner in Washington, D.C. when Stevens was at the height of his power.

Among other things, the purpose of the foundation was to “preserve the records and mementos” of the senator.

When the foundation said it wanted the papers moved to a private facility, I believed that the move was being made because of dissatisfaction by the foundation with how the university had handled the papers. McKeever said that was not the case.

He rejected my argument and said it was all about protecting privacy and removing things that should not be made public. He said the foundation was committed to making the collection public as soon as it could, though he did not have a schedule.

“You obviously have the right to your opinions about where and how the papers should be processed,” he wrote to me eight years ago. “It appears that you disagree with our thoughts about the best way to accomplish our goal of making the papers available to Alaskans.”

After I wrote about this issue, Juneau Empire editorialized on the topic, raising a legitimate question about whether the Stevens Foundation planned to sanitize the collection.

McKeever and another former Stevens staffer, Karina Waller, responded by falsely claiming the Empire editorial was an “attack on the senator’s legacy. . .”

McKeever and Waller wrote that the Stevens Foundation was dissatisfied with the university’s handling of the material, contradicting what McKeever had told me.

They alleged that the university “declined to request additional funding for the Ted Stevens Papers project from the Legislature. Given the importance of continuing to prepare the collection for opening to the public, the foundation requested and received a state appropriation,” the $1 million when Parnell was governor.

They claimed that “experts” had decided the collection belonged in Anchorage.

And the foundation rejected claims of censorship. “The collection will be open to the public, but must first be processed according to acceptable archival methods, which does NOT entail censorship,” they said.

Future historians of Alaska may one day know what was left in the collection, but they will never know what was left out.

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