Stepovich lobbied for Alaskanstatehood, supported by Nixon

Published 12:00 am Saturday, February 22, 2014

Mike Stepovich, the last presidentially appointed governor of the Territory of Alaska, who helped lobby the U.S. Congress for statehood, died Feb. 14 in San Diego. He was 94.

The cause was complications of a fall, his daughter Antonia Gore said.

Stepovich bridged Alaska’s past and future, and not just politically. In the late 1890s, his father, Marko, a miner chasing the Klondike gold rush, traveled from his native Yugoslavia to a frontier then called the District of Alaska.

Decades later, the miner’s first son had become a lawyer in the growing city of Fairbanks, a representative in the legislature of the Territory of Alaska and, in 1957, at age 38, the governor of the territory, appointed by a fellow Republican, President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Stepovich’s most memorable achievement in office was that he worked himself out of it.

For years, many Alaskans resisted statehood, uncertain that they wanted the federal involvement that came with it, and plenty of members of Congress were uncertain about adding to the federal government’s responsibilities with a 49th state. But Stepovich lobbied for the cause across Alaska and elsewhere, particularly on Capitol Hill, where he was one of the effort’s most visible faces.

His diplomacy, persistent but warm, was widely credited with helping to build consensus. On June 9, 1958, with momentum toward statehood peaking, his portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine along with an illustration of a totem pole.

On June 30, Congress approved a bill granting Alaska statehood. Eisenhower signed it on July 7. A month later, Stepovich resigned. But he did not lose interest in politics.

With Alaska set to become a state in January 1959, five major offices in Alaska were in play in a special election that November: two Senate seats, a House seat, the governorship and the post of secretary of state. The only one that Republicans believed they could win was a Senate seat, because Stepovich was seeking it.

Vice President Richard Nixon spent three days in Alaska speaking on his behalf. Interior Secretary Fred Seaton stayed two weeks. Republicans emphasized that Stepovich was 39, with a long, presumably bright future, while his Democratic opponent, Ernest Gruening, was 71.

Despite the Republican push, Democrats swept all of the offices — the Stepovich-Gruening race was the closest — increasing their margin in the Senate to 64-34. Stepovich ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1962, losing a close race to the incumbent, William Egan, with whom he had lobbied for statehood a few years earlier. In 1966, he lost in the Republican primary for governor to Walter Hickel, who was elected that fall (and who later became secretary of the interior under Nixon).

Mike Anthony Stepovich was born in Fairbanks on March 12, 1919, the only child of Marko and Olga Stepovich. He moved to Oregon with his mother after his parents separated.

He graduated from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., in 1941. (His daughter Nada was a star volleyball player at Gonzaga, where she met John Stockton, a basketball star there and later, an NBA player. They married, and their son, David, now plays basketball for Gonzaga.) Stepovich received a law degree from Notre Dame in 1943.

After serving in the U.S. Navy, he returned to Fairbanks to practice law and served in the territorial House and Senate, where he was minority leader and fought Democratic efforts to raise taxes on mining, fishing and logging. After his political career ended in the 1960s, he continued to practice law in Fairbanks until moving back to Oregon in 1978.