Uncle Ted

I grew up in Alaska and both my parents were passionately involved in Republican Party politics.

My step-dad, Dick, was elected a member of our town assembly and my mom, Elaine, worked for years as a kind of legislative staffer.

Through all that time, Sen. Ted Stevens was an institution, a guy who existed beyond politics. He helped make Alaska a state.

His title was Senator. But in a state with only a half million people, Stevens wielded a kind of power that was more intimate, more personal.

Everyone had met him. And if he hadn’t helped you directly — with a job, an earmark, a letter of recommendation to a military academy — then you knew someone he had helped.

When I met Stevens, I was working as a journalist and he had already taken on some of the aura of entitlement and arrogance that seem to have brought him down.

It’s a failing of many politicians: the sense that the public treasury is your own; and the belief that normal rules of ethics simply don’t apply.

I actually believe Stevens when he says that he doesn’t feel that he did anything wrong.

He felt that he could color outside the lines — maintaining a complicated financial relationship with an oil industry company — while maintaining his integrity and his independence.

He was wrong. There were rules and laws governing his behavior. Not suggestions or guidelines.

In the end, it’s always startling what men like Stevens are willing to give up in exchange for a pittance. He was convicted for receiving a quarter-million dollars in illegal gifts.

A historic career that spanned a half-century — his status as a legend in America’s Last Frontier — thrown away for $250,000.