This piece appeared in The St Paul Pioneer Press on Feb. 27, 2003… I wrote it after Gov. Elmer Andersen summoned me to his Arden Hills home because he wanted me to help him get the word out: He had certainly NOT given his endorsement to Tim Pawlenty, the newly-elected governor who, despite claiming to be a Republican like Elmer, represented the kind of narrow partisanship that Elmer loathed. Elmer was governor from 1961 to 1963. He died in 2004, at age 95. I still miss him.
— Nick Coleman
A GOVERNOR’S LAMENT – ELMER L. ANDERSEN TAKES STOCK OF MINNESOTA AND FINDS IT AT RISK OF BEING DIMINISHED.
When Elmer Andersen speaks, Minnesota should listen.
“We wanted to have good services and to put the common good above the individual welfare. We are a state where people have been willing to join hands to pay taxes for public service, a way of life and a culture of caring.”
DIFFERING VIEW
Andersen, who will be 94 in June, is the dean of Minnesota Republicans, a virtual icon representing old-fashioned Republican values of good government, fiscal responsibility and compassion. He doesn’t see eye to eye with the present Republican leadership.
Last fall, in fact, he refused to endorse the GOP candidate for governor, Tim Pawlenty. He may not even have voted for Pawlenty, whom he criticizes for pledging not to raise taxes during his struggle to win the Republican nomination.
“Pawlenty is a good man, and he means well,” says Andersen . “I like him, but I told him I thought he’d gone too far overboard (to get the nomination). He asked me for endorsement, and I didn’t give it. If state expenditures are too high, Pawlenty (who was the Republican majority leader in the House before being elected governor) was largely influential in bringing that about, so he can’t be too critical of it.”
Did he vote instead for DFLer Roger Moe or the Independence Party’s Tim Penny?
“I’m withholding confession of how I voted,” Andersen says. “I told Pawlenty I thought he’d gone too far. That’s all I want to say.”
But he says he thinks Moe would have beaten Pawlenty if not for the airplane crash that killed Sen. Paul Wellstone.
“Pawlenty acts like he has a mandate from the election to cut taxes, but I beg to disagree. The election was an aberration caused by a tragic accident,” he says, referring to the crash that killed Wellstone as well as to the controversial memorial service that followed, which he says was “blatantly misused by well-intentioned people.”
‘FOLLOW A UNILATERAL COURSE’
Despite the infirmities of age that have confined him to a wheelchair, Andersen keeps up a keen interest in politics. In the evenings, his wife, Eleanor, has been reading David McCullough’s biography of John Adams to him. Each afternoon, he works in a study lined by photographs of Lindbergh and President Eisenhower and others. When I ask him who the medieval gentleman is in one portrait, he tells me it is Erasmus, the influential 16th-century Dutch scholar, and then summarizes Erasmus’ famous work, “In Praise of Folly”:
“Human frailty is a fact of life,” Andersen tells me, which I suppose we all should know after four years of Jesse Ventura. “We should be sympathetic and caring and understanding and not too harsh in our criticism of others, because we’re all guilty. One of my prime hopes is that we’ll get over this period of feeling the government is the enemy and taxes are evil and that we know it all in the world and can follow a unilateral course.”
Which brings us to Iraq. Andersen was governor during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and remembers President Kennedy inviting him to a briefing where he was shown surveillance photos of nuclear-tipped missiles in silos.
“Here were those missiles, pointed at us, and yet Kennedy held out for a diplomatic solution that saved a war and the lives of many people,” he says. “Iraq is a foolhardy venture. It’s wrong for the U.S. to make a pre-emptive strike. It’s not our country’s way to start wars. For us to embark on a sole course of war is out of character for our country.”
RIVALS YET FRIENDS
Talk of war brings us back to Gov. Freeman, a World War II veteran who suffered a severe battle wound and went through a long recovery before becoming the DFL’s first governor and (after Andersen defeated him) serving as secretary of agriculture in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
When Andersen assumed office, he kept some of Freeman’s appointees in place. And before that 1960 election in which Andersen unseated Freeman, when Andersen was a Republican leader in the state Senate, he and Freeman agreed to fix a school-district taxing problem by forcing under-taxed districts to raise taxes to a fair level — and to refrain from using the issue against each other in the coming campaign.
“He kept his word and never mentioned it in the campaign,” says Andersen, who plans to attend Freeman’s funeral Friday. “We enjoyed a great friendship. He was largely responsible for many accomplishments (the credit for which) sometimes went to others. I’ve always admired Orville Freeman as one of the best, even though we were rivals.”
Talking about men named Orville and Elmer is a clue, I suppose, that we are talking about a bygone era. But even more of a tip-off is the fact that these are men who knew how to put aside partisan differences in the best interests of the state. So I decided to ask Elmer L. Andersen what message he would give today to the state’s political leaders.
He thought for a bit and then gave it to me, fast and furious, in a whole paragraph that I wouldn’t mind seeing chiseled on the Capitol someplace:
“Get back to the traditions of Minnesota as a progressive, thoughtful, sensible community of people that addresses issues as they come up in a bipartisan setting and with due regard to economic stabilization and a caring concern for the education of future generations and the ultimate well-being of those less able to compete.”
Works for me. And it used to work for Minnesota pretty darn well. But that kind of attitude could get Andersen in hot water with leaders of his own party these days.
“That’s all right,” he says. “At my age, I’d rather be in hot water than nowhere. I remind people I want to be known as a liberal Republican. If that’s a dirty word, so be it.”