Senator has long pushed for drilling

Perhaps no one else alive had a greater hand in establishing the initial Arctic National Wildlife Refuge than Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska.

And perhaps no one would be more vindicated if Congress opens the refuge up to drilling than Stevens, 81, who has talked about its oil-and-gas potential for 45 years — two decades longer than the issue has been argued in Congress.

In 1960, Stevens, who eventually would become arguably the Northwest's most powerful congressman — and one of the most powerful in the country — was an attorney in the Eisenhower administration's Interior Department, and intimately involved in the creation of ANWR.

At the time, the environmental movement was trying to permanently protect Alaska's northeast corner as wilderness.

After John F. Kennedy won the presidency, but before he took office, the Eisenhower administration compromised, setting aside 8.9 million acres as the Arctic National Wildlife Range, banning homesteading and mining — but not oil and gas drilling.

"So a conservative Republican administration, on its way out the door, decided to unilaterally make the largest land withdrawal in Alaska's history," said Don Mitchell, author of two books on Alaska.

"And Ted Stevens was right there."

Stevens, then legislative counsel at the Interior Department, drafted portions of the order that created the range and was responsible for selling it to an angry Alaska governor and congressional delegation.

"It doesn't mean you can't have oil and gas development," he told the Fairbanks Daily News Miner, in a 1960 interview recovered last year by the Anchorage Press.

By the mid-1970s, Stevens was in Congress. But the environmental movement had grown stronger and again was pushing to protect the entire refuge as wilderness, which would bar drilling.

Congress and President Carter instead expanded it, changed its name from "range" to "refuge," and asked for an assessment of the potential for oil development.

After that, they said, it would be up to Congress to fight about whether to drill. And it has been ever since. And ever since, Stevens has fought vehemently to open it.

In 2003, for example, on the normally staid Senate floor, Stevens said this about a pending ANWR vote: "People who vote against this today are voting against me, and I'll not forget it."

But environmentalists, too, have had their heels dug in.

"It didn't get full protection, as it should have in 1980," said Dee Frankfourth, an environmentalist who worked in Alaska in the 1970s. "It would not be the battle it's been if either side felt they'd won back then. This is truly unfinished business."

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com