Sarah was one of eight possible successors whom Murkowski interviewed in person. Sarah’s interview, apparently, did not go well. “She came off as vapid and uninformed,” says Anchorage lawyer C. Donald Mitchell, who spoke to some of those who were advising Murkowski during the selection process.
Within days of the interview, Sarah received a call from Murkowski telling her she would not be his choice. “I knew all along it was a long shot,” she told the Frontiersman. “Maybe I’m someone who is perceived as being too conservative.” Murkowski named his daughter, Lisa, to the seat, a choice that outraged many Alaskans, none more than Sarah.
As Mitchell wrote in the Alaska Dispatch, “Sarah, a 38-year old former small town mayor who had never won a statewide election, reportedly was livid and reportedly never fully forgave Frank, because in her self-absorption she was certain that she should have been the obvious choice.”
As a consolation prize, Murkowski appointed Sarah to one of the two open seats on the three-member Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
When the Alaska legislature created the commission in 1978, it specified that one seat had to be occupied by a petroleum engineer and another by a petroleum geologist. Duties of the commissioners included fixing the liquid-to-gas ratios that well operators must maintain, monitoring oil and gas pool pressures, and regulating the drilling, plugging, and spacing of wells, the disposal of saltwater and oil field wastes, and the quantity and rate of production of oil and gas from particular wells. Despite the highly technical nature of the work, the commission’s third seat was open to any member of the public, no matter how unqualified (an oversight the legislature later corrected).
It was this seat to which Governor Murkowski appointed Sarah in February 2003. At the same time, in a display of the deep reverence for patronage that would soon have Alaska voters ruing the day they elected him, Murkowski tapped state Republican Party chairman Randy Ruedrich to fill the slot reserved for a petroleum engineer.
Sarah would be working in the commission’s Anchorage offices. It would be a full-time job, paying a salary of $118,000 a year, which, in those days was not an insignificant amount of money to Sarah and Todd.
The two appointments raised eyebrows. Anchorage assemblyman Eric Croft, a Democrat, said, “Anytime you appoint the head of your party … and the lieutenant governor runner-up, it looks a little questionable.”
Ruedrich, at least, could claim experience. He’d worked in the oil and gas industry for more than thirty years, including stints in Yemen and the United Kingdom. Sarah, on the other hand, said, “There is so much information and it’s all very technical. But maybe by the time this is finished I can have an intelligent conversation with my husband.”
The appointments required legislative approval. At Sarah’s confirmation hearing, one skeptical legislator wanted to know “what you bring to the mix.” Cheerfully ignoring the question, Sarah replied, “I’m absolutely motivated, excited and challenged to be able to serve in this capacity.”
Another said, “You’re going to be asked to make rulings on things of a very technical nature. I don’t see where you’ve had any background in oil and gas development … How are you going to keep people from blowing smoke up your skirts?”
“You’re right, I don’t have all the technical background,” Sarah replied. “But thankfully we have a technical staff here at the commission and I have confidence that they do with their technical knowledge give objective and fair advice to the commissioners.”
Despite her lack of qualifications, Sarah’s appointment proved the less controversial of the two. Both she and Ruedrich were confirmed by the state legislature in early March, but while eighteen legislators—all Democrats—voted against Ruedrich, believing that it would be a conflict of interest for him to serve on the commission while retaining his position as state Republican Party chairman, only three voted against Sarah, citing her lack of qualifications.
She’d been on the job for only four months when rumors began to circulate that she might challenge Governor Murkowski’s daughter, Lisa, in the 2004 Republican primary for the full-term U.S. Senate seat. In early August, Sarah said she was considering a run. In September, she said, “It’s not out of the question.”
But she had more pressing concerns. She was both chairwoman and ethics supervisor of the three-member commission. As Mitchell wrote in the Dispatch, “Within weeks of her arrival at the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Sarah knew she was drowning … She had no understanding of, and no interest in, the commission’s highly technical work … Sarah began searching for a face-saving excuse to quit a job she never should have been given.”
By September, the search for a way out had become her highest priority. Winter would soon be coming on. She’d found the commute from Wasilla tedious even during Alaska’s long summer hours of daylight, but Sarah had even less desire to make the drive, as Mitchell wrote, “in the pitch dark down an icy, moose-strewn highway.”
For months, she’d known that Ruedrich was conducting Republican Party business from his commission office. She’d seemed unfazed by the blatant impropriety. After all, she’d done the same during the final months of her tenure as Wasilla mayor.
But Ruedrich now became her exit strategy. She reported his transgressions to Governor Murkowski’s chief of staff in early September. The administration took no action. In October, Ruedrich sent an e-mail promoting a Republican fund-raiser at the Petroleum Club in Anchorage. His attempt to solicit donations from the very energy companies he was supposed to be regulating showed that his conflict of interest was more than theoretical.
Publicly, Sarah came to Ruedrich’s defense on November 3, saying the Petroleum Club event would raise money only for national, not state, candidates. “Randy has told me that he is not soliciting funds or raising funds on a state level,” she said.
Privately, she was compiling evidence against him. The attorney general’s office had begun a clandestine investigation of Ruedrich and had asked Sarah, in her role as the commission’s ethics supervisor, for assistance. She later said she was told to “get on his computer and send us anything that you believe to be partisan.” But she was instructed to keep her activities secret from Ruedrich, the third commissioner, and the commission’s staff. “I printed off things that were obvious Republican Party documents,” she told the Daily News.
Pressure for Ruedrich to resign from one of his two positions was mounting. Wev Shea, a former U.S. attorney for Alaska and a prominent Republican, said, “I think the conflict of interest is atrocious.” Even Wasilla Republican strategist Tuckerman Babcock, who had served three years on the commission, said Ruedrich should quit one job or the other.
On November 7, Sarah said, “It’s not fair to Alaskans to have these questions about a possible conflict of interest hanging over the head of this agency.” Going further, she said that if Ruedrich didn’t soon quit, she would. This, of course, was exactly what she wanted to do. Ruedrich beat her to the resignation punch, however, announcing on November 8 that he was giving up his commission job. “I think the ethics issue was way overblown,” he said, “but I felt the right thing to do is to end this.” Sarah, in her capacity as chairwoman, announced herself pleased. “The right thing has been done here,” she echoed.
Had the matter ended there, it’s likely that no one outside Alaska ever would have heard of Sarah Palin.
But Sarah wasn’t going to let it end. She’d recognized for months that she could turn Ruedrich’s misconduct to her own political advantage. Now, with him gone—and with the assistance of a computer expert—she hacked even more deeply into his electronic files. She found that in the haste of his departure he’d failed to wipe his hard drive clean. Sarah downloaded and printed dozens of e-mails and other documents that proved that Ruedrich had not only been conducting party business, but also leaking commission files to companies the commission was supposed to be regulating.
Under state law, the attorney general’s office wasn’t a
llowed to say that Ruedrich was under investigation, much less why, and Sarah wasn’t allowed to say anything. While not yet a pit bull, Sarah didn’t like being muzzled.
She called Murkowski’s attorney general, Gregg Renkes, in mid-November to ask if there actually was an ongoing investigation. He said he was not in a position to answer yes or no. In notes she made at the time, she wrote that Renkes “couldn’t advise me on whether an investigation was needed, but agreed RR’s departure should be the conclusion to the problem.”
In December the assistant attorney general who had first contacted her told Sarah that the investigation was continuing and asked her to send all the materials she’d acquired by delving into Ruedrich’s computer. She sent a package on December 11, but heard nothing, not even whether the items had been received.
At about the same time, Anchorage legislators Eric Croft and Ethan Berkowitz sent Renkes a letter asking him to appoint an independent investigator to “look into the ethical and criminal consequences” of Ruedrich’s misuse of his commission office.
In addition, the Anchorage Daily News made a public records request for the e-mails Ruedrich had sent from his office computer. Acting as commission chairwoman, Sarah denied the request. She wrote, “The records you seek are required to be kept confidential by state law.”
Perception grew that both Sarah and attorney general Renkes were involved in a cover-up. A letter writer to the Daily News said on December 29, “I used to have an enormous amount of respect for Sarah Palin. She used to have strength, independence and guts … No more. She’s begun toeing the party line and stonewalling the (non)investigation of her former boss.”
Sarah’s frustration grew. On January 2, 2004, she sent Governor Murkowski a certified letter in which she wrote, “Since Dec. 11, I have not received any further instructions except to be told to keep things ‘confidential,’ to deny media requests for information, and I have been threatened that I would face penalties if I were to divulge even whether or not there may be an ongoing investigation into the Ruedrich matter.” She demanded that the state either announce that she had been ordered not to speak about the investigation or that they let her “handle this issue the way I deem is most appropriate.” She closed with a threat: if she did not receive a satisfactory response to her letter, “I will take such further action as I deem appropriate to protect my reputation.”
Whatever else one might say about Sarah, there can be no doubting her sense of timing and the acuteness of her political instincts. Even before she’d become mayor of Wasilla—the only job in her life, incidentally, that she did not quit—she’d said that one day she hoped to be president of the United States. Even with God opening doors for her, she’d never make it if she got dragged into the muck of statewide political corruption.
There was only one way out, and she took it, announcing her own resignation from the commission on January 17, 2004. “I’m forced to withhold information from Alaskans, and that goes against what I believe in,” she said, adding that the “oomph” had gone out of her passion for public service.
The state filed a civil complaint against Ruedrich on February 27, but kept the action confidential, which meant Sarah was still not free to discuss her role. On April 6 her lawyer, Wayne Anthony Ross, informed Governor Murkowski that if details of the Ruedrich case were not disclosed within ten days, Sarah would speak publicly about “what she knows about this entire matter and why she chose to resign from the Commission.”
On April 12, Ruedrich himself, while again proclaiming he’d done nothing wrong, announced the existence of the investigation. Sarah’s muzzle came off. As she told her story of forcing Ruedrich out of his job, the press hailed her for her highly principled resignation and cast her rooting about in Ruedrich’s computer as the courageous act of a crusading ethical reformer. The Daily News called her a “Republican rising star,” and speculation increased that she would challenge Governor Murkowski’s daughter, Lisa, in the upcoming Republican primary.
On April 23, Sarah announced that she would not run for the U.S. Senate because her fourteen-year-old son, Track, had asked her not to. She said her three daughters, aged thirteen, nine, and three, were all for her candidacy, but Track was not. “How could I be the [hockey] team mom if I was a U.S. senator?” she said. Instead, she announced her support of Lisa Murkowski’s more conservative opponent, former state senate president Mike Miller of Fairbanks (no relation to Joe Miller, whom Sarah would support against Murkowski in 2010).
In June, Ruedrich admitted his violations of state ethics law and agreed to pay a $12,000 fine. But Alaskan ethical standards were so low that he was allowed to continue as state Republican Party chairman.
In August, Lisa Murkowski trounced Miller in the primary. In September, Sarah went public with the inside story of how she herself instigated the Ruedrich investigation, telling all—or at least her version of all—to Daily News reporter Richard Mauer, who published a 5,695-word story on September 19.
Public acclaim was deafening. A Daily News column in October said Alaska Republicans should adopt as a motto: “What Would Sarah Do?” She was described as “part Nathan Hale, part Sherlock Holmes” and “that rarest of all creatures, a politician with a conscience—and the guts to follow it.”
The Daily News hadn’t yet called her “the Joan of Arc of Alaskan politics,” but that would come.
ELEVEN
THE GREBE CHICKS have hatched!
I’ve seen only two, but there may be more. I find myself wanting a cigar. That grebe couple and I have been through a lot this spring and I’m delighted to welcome their babies to the neighborhood. I’d like to go down to the lake and take a picture, but I don’t want to risk being seen with a camera in my hands.
On the downside, T. C. Mitchell, who wrote the “deadly force” editorial in the Frontiersman, has been fired. This disturbs me. Yes, it was careless and even dumb for him to write what he did. But I feel bad for Mitchell. This is Alaska, where there’s a tradition of people saying what they think. And I don’t like to see a publisher fire someone for something he wrote.
I get Mitchell’s e-mail address and write him to say that if he thinks it will help, I’ll contact the publisher and ask her to reconsider. He says not to bother, that there were other issues besides the editorial. We agree to meet for lunch sometime soon.
ON YET ANOTHER gray, drizzly morning in late June—if this weather continues, I’m going to combine “gray” and “drizzly” and just call it “grizzly”—I’m heading for Jitters coffee shop in Eagle River for an early-morning meeting with Walt Monegan, the man Sarah fired as director of public safety because he wouldn’t knuckle under to her and Todd’s demands to fire her ex-brother-in-law from the state police.
The Monegan-Wooten saga wound up as the subject of two separate state investigations that came to different conclusions. One, commissioned by the bipartisan state legislature, said Sarah had abused the power of her office in her effort to have Wooten’s head served to her and Todd on a silver platter; the other, commissioned more or less by Sarah, absolved her of any blame, although it left open the possibility that she had perjured herself during her sworn testimony to an investigator.
The one point both investigations agreed on was that Walt Monegan sacrificed his job for the sake of his principles. He wouldn’t do what Todd and Sarah wanted him to do, so she canned him. Cut through all the Sturm und Drang and that’s the core of the story.
“Sarah only talked to me about Wooten twice,” Monegan says once we’re seated. I’ve ordered a latte. Monegan, in character, drinks regular and drinks it black. “Of course, in eighteen months of working for her, I only talked to her four times in all. I thought at the time she must have been preoccupied with oil and gas issues. Now I realize she was only preoccupied with herself.”
Terry and Walt Monegan (illustration credit 11.1)
Monegan is relaxed and affable, although he’ll have to leave in half an hour for his job with the Anchorage Board of Educ
ation. No chips are visible on his shoulders. He’s moved on. He ran for mayor of Anchorage in the spring of 2009, but finished a distant fourth. “After thirty years of not being allowed to accept a free cup of coffee,” he says, “my biggest problem was asking people for money. I knew I had to do it, but I hated it, and I didn’t do it either well enough or often enough. That’s okay. I got a taste of campaigning and found out for sure it’s not for me.”
One of the things I didn’t know about Walt Monegan—and I didn’t learn it this first morning, either—is that he’s the only man in Alaska who ever peed on Harry Truman’s leg.
Monegan’s father, also named Walt but later nicknamed Tank Killer, was a U.S. Marine from Melrose, Massachusetts, who received a posthumous Medal of Honor for heroism in the face of an enemy tank and infantry attack near Sosa-ri, Korea, in 1950.
Walt was born in spring of 1951. He was nine months old when his mother brought him from Seattle to Washington, D.C., for the Medal of Honor ceremony. After the award was presented, President Truman invited the young widow into his office. He told her he loved babies and asked if he could hold Walt. And he did, on his lap, behind his desk in the Oval Office—for about sixty seconds. Then the president said, “Mrs. Monegan, I think your son needs some attention.” Walt’s mother looked in horror at the urine stain on the president’s trouser leg. Walt was already showing he was not afraid to express himself to a higher authority.
He did it again in 2008 when the Palins made it clear that if Wooten didn’t go, Monegan would. Monegan was chief of police in Anchorage in 2005 when Todd and Sarah launched their campaign against Wooten, and didn’t learn how obsessed they were until Sarah appointed him director of public safety in 2006.
“The fact is, from having reviewed the files, I didn’t think Wooten was a very good cop,” he says. “The department probably made a mistake by hiring him. But that wasn’t the issue. Every charge against him had been investigated and considered, and after he’d come back from his suspension he’d been as pure as Snow White. There was no decision for me to make: unless he screwed up again, he couldn’t be fired. Todd just couldn’t swallow that.”