86 Facts About Ted Stevens

Ted Stevens was the longest-serving Republican Senator in history at the time he left office.

Ted Stevens was previously Solicitor of the Interior Department from 1960 to 1961.

In 2008, Ted Stevens was embroiled in a federal corruption trial as he ran for re-election to the Senate.

Ted Stevens was the most senior US Senator to have ever lost a re-election bid.

Ted Stevens died on August 9,2010, near Dillingham, Alaska, when a de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter he and several others were flying in crashed en route to a private fishing lodge.

Around this time, when Ted Stevens was six years old, his parents divorced, and Stevens and his three siblings went back to Indianapolis to reside with their paternal grandparents, followed shortly thereafter by their father, who developed problems with his eyes and went blind for several years.

Ted Stevens helped to support the family by working as a newsboy, and would later remember selling many newspapers on March 1,1932, when newspaper headlines blared the news of the Lindbergh kidnapping.

Ted Stevens worked at jobs before and after school, but still had time for surfing with his friend Russell Green, son of the president of Signal Gas and Oil Company, who remained a close friend throughout Ted Stevens's life.

Ted Stevens corrected his vision through a course of prescribed eye exercises, and in 1943 he was accepted into an Army Air Force Air Cadet program at Montana State College.

Ted Stevens said that, after scoring near the top of an aptitude test for flight training, he was transferred to preflight training in Santa Ana, California, and he received his wings early in 1944.

Ted Stevens received the Distinguished Flying Cross for flying behind enemy lines, the Air Medal, and the Yuan Hai Medal awarded by the Chinese Nationalist government.

Ted Stevens was discharged from the Army Air Forces in March 1946.

Ted Stevens applied to law school at Stanford and the University of Michigan, but on the advice of his friend Russell Green's father to "look East", he applied to Harvard Law School, which he ended up attending.

The essay later became a Harvard Law Review article, and, 45 years later, Justice Jay Rabinowitz of the Alaska Supreme Court praised Ted Stevens's scholarship, telling the Anchorage Daily News that the high court had issued a recent opinion citing the article.

One of Ely's clients, Emil Usibelli, founder of the Usibelli Coal Mine in Healy, Alaska, was trying to sell coal to the military, and Ted Stevens was assigned to handle his legal affairs.

Early in 1952, Stevens married Ann Mary Cherrington, a Democrat and the adopted daughter of University of Denver Chancellor Ben Mark Cherrington.

Ted Stevens had graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and during Truman's administration had worked for the State Department.

Ted Stevens was a survivor of prostate cancer and had publicly disclosed his cancer.

Ted Stevens was nominated for the first Golden Glove Awards for Prostate Cancer by the National Prostate Cancer Coalition.

Ted Stevens advocated the creation of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program for Prostate Cancer at the Department of Defense, which has funded nearly $750million for prostate cancer research.

Ted Stevens was a recipient of the Presidential Citation by the American Urological Association for significantly promoting urology causes.

In 1952, while still working for Northcutt Ely, Stevens volunteered for the presidential campaign of Dwight D Eisenhower, writing position papers for the campaign on western water law and lands.

Ted Stevens later recalled kidding Governor Walter Hickel about the loan.

Snedden's wife Helen later recalled that her husband and Ted Stevens were "like father and son".

However, Stevens was favored by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Senator William F Knowland of California, and the Republican National Committee,.

In 1956, in a trial which received national headlines, Stevens prosecuted Jack Marler; a former Internal Revenue Service agent accused of failing to file tax returns.

At the time Ted Stevens arrived in Washington, DC, to take up his new job, a constitutional convention to write an Alaska constitution had just been concluded on the campus of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

Ted Stevens, illegally, took part in lobbying for the statehood bill, working closely with the Alaska Statehood Committee from his office at Interior.

Ted Stevens hired Marilyn Atwood, daughter of Anchorage Times publisher Robert Atwood, who was chairman of the Alaska Statehood Committee, to work with him in the Interior Department.

Ted Stevens stayed in this office until the Eisenhower administration left office on January 20,1961.

Ted Stevens became a member of Operation Rampart, a group in favor of building the Rampart Dam, a hydroelectric project on the Yukon River.

Mike Gravel stated had no issue with Stevens being the senior senator, because he was 7 years Stevens's junior, and Stevens had been in public service for longer than he had.

Ted Stevens was very partisan, and, even after losing the 1968 Republican primary, he embarked on a state-wide campaign for the Republican nominee, Elmer Rasmuson, during which time Ted Stevens attacked Gravel on his time as Speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives.

Jackson wasn't about to let Ted Stevens take over the hearings and the framing of this legislation.

Lewis, Ted Stevens again tried to put their rivalry aside, sending a letter inviting Gravel and his wife to a "nice dinner" with him and his wife.

On December 4,1978, Ted Stevens had a meeting scheduled in Anchorage with the leaders of Citizens for the Management of Alaska's Lands, the major pro-development, lobbying group.

Ted Stevens had been considered as one of the Senate's happiest marriages, and his wife's death hit him very hard.

When Ted Stevens came back to Washington, he seemed "bitter and in terrible emotional pain".

However, on February 6,1979, Ted Stevens was testifying before the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, which Udall chaired, which had just begun to reconsider the lands bill, and he brought up the plane crash.

In 1979, Ted Stevens began to recruit primary challengers for the Democratic nomination to Gravel for his re-election campaign the following year.

Ted Stevens would continue to win re-election easily until his defeat in 2008 by Anchorage Mayor, Mark Begich, the son of former US Representative from Alaska Nick Begich.

Citizens Against Government Waste stated that Stevens had secured over a billion dollars in federal funding for Alaska from 1991 to 2000.

In 1968, Stevens ran for the US Senate, but lost in the Republican primary to Anchorage Mayor Elmer E Rasmuson.

Since Gravel took office ten days after Ted Stevens did, Ted Stevens was Alaska's senior senator for all but ten days of his forty-year tenure in the Senate.

Ted Stevens won the seat in his own right in 1972, and was reelected in 1978,1984,1990,1996 and 2002 elections.

Ted Stevens was the longest-serving US Senator in history to lose re-election, beating out Warren Magnuson, who had served over 36 years before his defeat to Slade Gorton in 1980.

Ted Stevens served as the Assistant Republican Leader from 1977 to 1985.

Ted Stevens served as Acting Minority Leader during Howard Baker's run for president during the 1980 Republican primaries.

In 1994, after the Republicans took control of the Senate, Stevens was appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee.

Ted Stevens became the Senate's president pro tempore when Republicans regained control of the chamber as a result of the 2002 mid-term elections, during which the previous most senior Republican senator and former president pro tempore Strom Thurmond retired.

Ted Stevens chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee from 1997 to 2005, except for the 18 months when Democrats controlled the chamber.

Ted Stevens resigned his ranking-member position on the committee due to his indictment.

At various times, Ted Stevens served as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, the Senate Ethics Committee, the Arms Control Observer Group, and the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress.

In between speeches by Snowe and Dorgan, Ted Stevens gave a vehement 11-minute speech using colorful language to explain his opposition to the amendment.

Ted Stevens referred to the Internet as "not a big truck", but a "series of tubes" that could be clogged with information.

Ted Stevens was a long-standing proponent of logging and championed a plan that would allow 2,400,000 acres of roadless old growth forest to be clear-cut.

However, as a former member of the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership, Stevens supported human embryonic stem cell research.

Ted Stevens was long an avowed skeptic of anthropogenic climate change, instead believing the threat was from natural causes.

Ted Stevens noted the amount of CO2 and CH4 now in the air is well above what the earth has experienced during the last 450,000 years and climate change is in progress in full steam in the Arctic.

Ted Stevens was one of the sponsors the Title IX amendment to the Education Amendments of 1972, and was influential in it's passage, with the Washington Post nicknaming him "The Father of Title IX".

In December 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported that Stevens had taken advantage of lax Senate rules to use his political influence to obtain a large amount of his personal wealth.

In 2006, during wiretapped conversations with Bill Allen, shortly after the VECO offices were searched and Allen agreed to cooperate with the investigation, Ted Stevens expressed worries over legal complications arising from the sweeping federal investigations into Alaskan politics.

In September 2007, The Hill reported that Stevens had "steered millions of federal dollars to a sportfishing industry group founded by Bob Penney, a longtime friend".

In 1998, Stevens invested $15,000 in a Utah land deal managed by Penney; in 2004, Stevens sold his share of the property for $150,000.

On July 29,2008, Stevens was indicted by a federal grand jury on seven counts of failing to properly report gifts, a felony, and found guilty at trial three months later.

The FBI not only had calls between Allen and Ted Stevens, they had thousands of wiretapped conversations involving the phones of both Allen and VECO Vice President Rick Smith.

Ted Stevens declared, "I'm innocent," and pleaded not guilty to the charges in a federal district court on July 31,2008.

On October 27,2008, Ted Stevens was found guilty of all seven counts of making false statements.

Ted Stevens faced a maximum penalty of five years per charge.

However, it was thought unlikely that Ted Stevens would spend significant time in prison.

Obama said Ted Stevens needed to resign to help "put an end to the corruption and influence-peddling in Washington".

McCain said Ted Stevens "has broken his trust with the people" and needed to step down, a call echoed by his running mate, Sarah Palin, governor of Ted Stevens's home state.

Ted Stevens was the longest-serving US Senator in history to lose re-election, beating out Warren Magnuson's record in 1980.

Ted Stevens ended up losing the Senate race, and on November 20,2008, gave his last speech to the Senate, which was met with a loud standing ovation by the other members of the chamber.

Allen said that Persons subsequently told him that Ted Stevens was just "covering his ass".

Ted Stevens claimed that prosecutors not only withheld evidence but "created false testimony that they gave us and actually presented false testimony in the courtroom".

Ted Stevens initiated a criminal contempt investigation of six members of the prosecution.

The investigation and prosecution of US Senator Ted Stevens were permeated by the systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence which would have independently corroborated Senator Stevens's defense and his testimony, and seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government's key witness.

The Ted Stevens Foundation is a charity established to "assist in educating and informing the public about the career of Senator Ted Stevens".

When discussing issues that were especially important to him, Ted Stevens wore a necktie with The Incredible Hulk on it to show his seriousness.

On December 21,2005, Ted Stevens said the vote to block drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge "has been the saddest day of my life".

On December 30,2006, Stevens delivered a eulogy of Gerald R Ford at the 38th President's funeral service.

Ted Stevens held this record until he was overtaken by Orrin Hatch on January 13,2017.

Ted Stevens was confirmed dead in the crash via a statement from his family.

Ted Stevens truly was the greatest of the 'Greatest Generation.

When Ted Stevens held this role, it was the 2nd highest position, behind Secretary.