Anchorage Daily News

JUNEAU -- "Ladies and gentlemen," declared House Speaker Pete Kott. "Jim Clark is here."

It was after 10 p.m. on a Saturday in May, just days before the Legislature was to adjourn for the year. Legislators, lobbyists and the press had crowded into the Butrovich committee room in the Capitol. The pivotal moment of the session was at hand, and the governor was in Seattle for emergency heart surgery.

Jim Clark, the chief of staff for Gov. Frank Murkowski and the most powerful unelected man in state government, casually turned to the crowd.

He appeared unfazed by the spotlight he had studiously avoided for so many years as a timber lobbyist and lawyer.

In matter-of-fact tones, Clark announced that if the House did not pass a statewide sales tax in the next two hours, the governor would rip state programs apart with veto cuts.

The tax failed and the vetoes came. Politicians would debate for weeks whether Clark's threat was a brash gambit that backfired or a shrewd move that gave Murkowski political cover for the unpopular budget cuts.

Either way, the dramatic Saturday night appearance served as Clark's public debut.

Solidly built and intense, but with flashes of self-deprecating humor, the gray-haired Clark evokes the take-charge college baseball catcher of four decades ago. Today the 60-year-old Clark turns heads in the Capitol halls, the industry outsider now at the heart of government, neatly attired in jacket, tie and monogrammed dress shirt.

He is a complex figure. He keeps a sharp eye on every corridor, but he has never learned how to send e-mail, preferring to dictate messages as he has his whole career. He is one of Alaska's top Republican figures today, seen by environmentalists in particular as their chief antagonist and tormentor. But when he first came to Alaska in 1968 he had a hand in the campaign of liberal Democrat presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. His wife, Susan, a former feminist activist, teaches yoga and remains involved in the peace movement.

Clark answers to no one but his old friend Murkowski.

"No question he has more authority than any chief of staff in recent memory," said Jerry Reinwand, who held the position for Gov. Jay Hammond and also once ran Murkowski's office when he was in the U.S. Senate.

Democrats go even further when describing the influence Clark wields within the Republican administration.

"We refer to him as Governor Clark," said Democrat Sen. Johnny Ellis of Anchorage, the Senate minority leader. "Because he is the one who seems to be running the show."

The image of Clark-in-charge was burnished by his stepping forward at key moments. He was the one who announced the end of state cash support to cities. He's known for putting in long hours at the office -- he is at his desk in the Capitol most days by 5 a.m.-- in contrast to his boss's frequent travels out of town for state business, diplomacy and vacations. His name, not Murkowski's, topped newspaper columns outlining administration policies.

"It's almost like Ed McMahon stepping in front of Johnny Carson," former Republican Rep. Andrew Halcro of Anchorage chided in a column last June.

But senior Murkowski aides are quick to dispute the notion that Clark is doing anything other than taking care of the details. Clark, aides say, is given great latitude because his views are so close to the governor's.

"He's not Al Haig," said Murkowski communications director Dennis Fradley, referring to President Nixon's limelight-grabbing chief of staff. "Seldom is he out of step with where the governor wants to go."

Clark himself gets energized in his denials when the "Governor Clark" talk comes up. In an interview, he kept doubling back to rebut it even after the questioning moved on. Murkowski stays in close contact even when traveling, Clark said.

"What I do is assist (Murkowski) in implementing the decisions he makes," Clark said, leaning forward in his chair as if to block a runner sliding into home plate. "But that's it."

Clark's importance is amplified because Murkowski's inner circle of advisers is so small: By most accounts, it consists of Clark, a friend of the governor since 1980, and Attorney General Gregg Renkes, who served as Murkowski's campaign manager and chief of staff in the U.S. Senate.

What's more, all three are in a sense outsiders to state government. Murkowski spent 22 years in the U.S. Senate. Renkes spent his career in Washington, D.C. Clark lived in Juneau but spent much of his legal career fighting state regulators on behalf of loggers.

This distance from state government may be to their advantage as they struggle to cut spending without giving in to entrenched interests. But it could also hurt them, some insiders say, if they hit sensitive political nerves without realizing it.

"Jim Clark has always looked at government from outside and generally looked askance at it," said Jim Ayers, who served as chief of staff for Murkowski's predecessor, Tony Knowles. "He works hard, cares a great deal about the state and his country. And he really believes the state government and the public process get in the way."

THE MAN TO SEE

As chief of staff, Clark can make things happen -- sometimes without saying a word. Like the day last March when he ambled into the House Special Committee on Fisheries meeting. He sat down and said nothing.

But people noticed.

Critics were testifying that a coastal zone management bill supported by industry and the administration would cut local communities out of resource development decisions. And indeed, the bill would be softened later. But on this day the silent testimony from the back of the room spoke loudest of all. The committee performed as the administration wanted and voted to move the bill along.

"It was very unusual but very effective," Reinwand said of Clark's quiet presence.

Clark would even appear in the gallery of the Senate chambers when it came time to vote, something longtime lawmakers never saw a chief of staff do before. Clark attended closed-door meetings of the Republican majority caucus. Republican legislators saw him as the person to talk to, the governor's alter ego who had all the details down and could make things happen.

"He served as a go-between between the administration and the Legislature," said then-Rep. Jim Whitaker, a Republican who is now the mayor of the Fairbanks North Star Borough. "He is not averse to being very tough. But by the same token I think that he is reasonable and fair."

Anchorage Republican Rep. Mike Hawker worked closely with Clark on the sales tax proposal. Hawker, another early riser, would get calls from Clark at 6 a.m.

"We've moved this far; where do you want go from here?" Clark would ask. Hawker said he found Clark "extraordinarily thorough" and professional.

Polite and even-tempered, Clark has often been a pragmatist looking for compromise, even when representing ideologically rigid clients, said Bruce Botelho, the new mayor of Juneau and former state attorney general. He seems to be playing that role in the governor's third-floor office, Botelho said.

Several Democrats, though, said that Clark had an arrogant "swagger" and earned a reputation as a bully.

Rampart Democratic Sen. Georgianna Lincoln declared on the Senate floor that she had been threatened with a loss of rural school funds for opposing a bill Murkowski wanted. Lincoln later alleged Clark dispatched an aide to make the threat. Clark and the aide said it was a misunderstanding.

Anchorage Democratic Rep. Ethan Berkowitz was especially critical of Clark.

"He refused to deal with me personally at the end of the legislative session and made every effort to fracture my caucus," said Berkowitz, the leader of the House Democratic minority.

Everyone agrees that Clark is an incredible worker, organized and untiring. His workday is so long he has early- and late-shift secretaries. Botelho -- also known for putting in long hours -- called Clark a "workaholic's workaholic."

"He works 100 hours a week, I'm sure," said former Juneau mayor Bill Overstreet, a longtime friend.

Even when Overstreet and Clark went salmon fishing near Juneau one Saturday last summer with a couple of Clark's relatives from Brooklyn, Clark got "maybe a couple of dozen" calls on his cell phone, Overstreet said.

"He was a great inspiration to us in the '80s," conceded John Sisk, who fought Clark on timber issues for the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. "His office was on top of the Spam Can (office building), and when you saw his light on early in the morning you dropped what you were doing and got to work. You don't want to be outhustled by him."

Clark dove into the job of chief of staff, adopting a wary, top-down style that scrutinized even the smallest details of state agencies. He demanded all agencies cancel their subscriptions to magazines and newspapers, then had each request to re-subscribe reviewed on a case-by-case basis.

He issued a memo telling agencies to cancel all their memberships in organizations to save fees, "unless you wish to provide me a good reason not to." He wanted to review employee travel, hiring and contracts for consultants.

Larry Persily, a former deputy revenue commissioner who worked in both the Knowles and Murkowski administrations, called it cut-the-fat symbolism that made a point. The savings were probably minimal, he said, compared with all the agency work necessary to gather the information.

Clark agreed he was sending a message and not just to the bureaucracy.

"The thing we need to get across to the Alaska people is that the party is over," he said. "We don't have the money."

ALL IN THE FAMILY

For all the talk these days about budget cuts, the subject that most animates Clark is resource development. Clark likes to put it in human terms: Timber, mining and oil development mean jobs that allow kids to grow up and remain in Alaska.

His own two daughters were infants when he and his wife, Susan, moved to Juneau in 1973. The daughters are still in town and married, though many of their old classmates are gone.

One daughter, Meilani Schivjens, 30, is the director of Southeast Conference, a lobbying and public policy coalition of municipalities and businesses in the Panhandle. The other, Jocelyn Clark, 33, lives with her German composer husband in Clark's garage. She is finishing her Harvard University dissertation in Korean music. Jocelyn and her husband are also founders and producers of the CrossSound Music Festival, an esoteric annual event in Juneau featuring Asian and avant-garde modern classical music, which Jim and Susan Clark help support.

Susan Clark is not at all like her husband. They have disagreements on political issues, including resource development. Susan Clark said Jim is working in "real time" to encourage development to solve problems now. But she said that she believes in a Native American admonition to consider the impacts seven generations down the line.

A peace sign hangs on the front door of the Clarks' modest home in downtown Juneau. Susan Clark has been involved with liberal causes over the years. She has lobbied on behalf of the League of Women Voters, the National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union.

"I did it for 10 years and kind of got burned out and took a break," she said. "And now I'm a yogi, which is a different way of impacting government ... because as you change, things change around you."

Susan Clark, a clear-eyed and bright woman who often wears a head kerchief, found yoga through a friend in the mid-1990s. Today she teaches yoga classes in Juneau and sometimes goes by the spiritual name Sushma, which means, she said with a wry twinkle, "the central channel through which the energies flow through all the chakras to come out upon the thousand-petal lotus at the top, never to return."

Her involvement in politics is quieter these days. She marched with the People for Peace and Justice in Juneau's Fourth of July parade and said she offers her perspective on women's and children's issues to her husband.

She clearly loves and admires her husband, who listens to Gregorian chants every morning when he gets up in the predawn to prepare for work. Susan Clark calls that time of day the "ambrosial hours."

"One of Jimmy's great talents, I think, is that he does have an ability to bring both sides together to come up with creative solutions," she said.

Something the Clarks share is a commitment to Juneau. Jim for years was a leader in the fight against efforts to move the state capital to Southcentral Alaska. Susan expects they will never move.

"I can't imagine any other place," she said. "And Jimmy likes the rain."

ROAD TO JUNEAU

The son of an Air Force officer and the grandson of working-class Democrats, Jim Clark was born in Queens, N.Y., but grew up in places like Alabama, Hawaii, Japan and Washington, D.C.

He spent first grade in Anchorage in 1949, while his father was stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base. Clark said his clearest memory from that lone year in Alaska was of kids making forts out of wooden crates. One fell on him, Clark said, and broke his collarbone.

He went to college at Johns Hopkins University, a top school in Baltimore. He had a triple major in philosophy, literature and history, played on the football and the baseball teams, and spent days marching in the Reserve Officers Training Corps.

"One of the things that people talk about him now is his incredible work ethic. That kind of dedication was clearly evident as a freshman," said John Katz, Alaska's Washington, D.C., office director under the past six governors, who played freshman football with Clark in 1961.

Clark met his future wife during his senior year. She was a student at nearby Goucher College. Clark and a buddy showed up at a film history class where Susan was the projectionist.

"From that point on, it was pretty much Susan and John," Katz said.

Next came a law degree from Cornell University, where Clark saw a posting on the bulletin board for a job with a Juneau law firm. Clark thought back to first grade and was intrigued at the idea of coming back up to the young state to do legal work.

In the summer of 1968, Jim and Susan Clark crammed all their belongings into a Chevy Impala and drove from the East Coast to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, to get on the ferry to their new Alaska home.

Six months later, Jim Clark passed the Alaska bar exam, which meant it was time to fulfill his ROTC obligation and join the Army. It was a big step for the Clarks, who the previous year had been holding dinners for McCarthy's anti-war presidential campaign.

"I think I took the bar in January of '69 and three or four days later I was on the boat to head off to Fort Benning (Georgia) and infantry training," Clark said.

He was quickly transferred into the Judge Advocate General Corps to serve as a military lawyer. For six months he helped with the Pentagon investigation of the My Lai massacre, in which American troops had killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in a Vietnamese village.

By the time the My Lai case went to court in 1971, the 28-year-old Clark had gone to Vietnam himself for a yearlong tour of duty. As chief of military justice in Da Nang, he was essentially district attorney for the 40,000 American troops in the area. A surprising amount of his work involved heroin cases, he said.

He came home from Vietnam changed but not disillusioned. He said the experience made him more optimistic about his country, about the sacrifice young soldiers were making and the Cold War strategy of containing communism. And he grew "annoyed that most college kids were able to figure out ways to avoid going to Vietnam."

He finished his Army stint in Washington, D.C., handling court martial appeals as the Watergate scandal raged in the city. At night, he went to law school at George Washington University, getting an advanced degree in an exploding new field: environmental law.

The first Earth Day had been celebrated not long before. Congress was adopting new laws to clean up the nation's air and water and require environmental impact statements. A brave new regulatory world was taking shape, and everyone needed legal help, from citizens groups to major corporations.

When he was ready to return to Alaska in 1973, Clark found a place to put his new expertise to use. The law firm he used to work for didn't have an opening. But Clark was invited to join Robertson, Monagle and Eastaugh, a firm representing Alaska Pulp Co., one of the biggest employers, and biggest polluters, in Southeast Alaska.

TIMBER WARS

Timber was king in Southeast Alaska in 1973. Huge trees grew in the rain-soaked emerald forests of the Panhandle. Japanese capitalists had poured fortunes into the region and exported pulp and log slabs to the Far East. Massive mills dominated the economies of Sitka, Wrangell and Ketchikan.

"(Timber) had the largest manufacturing plants in Alaska. And I got involved with that industry and was able to apply all the stuff I just learned," Clark said. "I was just happy to be back in Alaska after leaving the Army, happy to be involved in natural resources law, happy to be living in Southeast Alaska."

The next three decades would establish Clark's professional and political presence in Alaska, stamping him with the experience -- more in defeat than victory -- of the environmental battlefield. While he did not become well-known in most of Alaska, his steady labors on behalf of timber companies and other clients, such as the Greens Creek mine near Juneau, made him infamous in some conservation circles.

"I guess I would describe him as the No. 1. enemy of conservation in Southeast Alaska for the last quarter century, or since statehood even," said Buck Lindekugel, a longtime Juneau-based environmental activist with the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council.

In the early years, Clark said, his work wasn't political. Environmentalists had not yet challenged logging on the Tongass National Forest. He was working on "straightforward" stuff like a logger suing the company or business-focused arguments with the U.S. Forest Service.

Clark's first big political arena involved the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, or ANILCA. He represented timber interests on a pro-development lobbying group, Citizens for the Management of Alaska Lands.

"We were immediately put on the defensive," Clark said. "But the timber industry at that point was stronger even than the oil industry, which was just getting started."

Clark's clients did well under that law. After years of jockeying, the Alaska lands bill signed by President Carter in 1980 more than doubled the size of the nation's park and refuge system and nearly tripled the amount of land set aside as wilderness. In Southeast's Tongass, ANILCA protected some old-growth areas as wilderness, but it also mandated generous timber sales and annual government road-building subsidies. Local conservationists went so far as to complain they'd been sold out by their national allies.

The ANILCA fight drew Clark into electoral politics as well when he joined an effort to get a Fairbanks banker named Frank Murkowski elected to the U.S. Senate.

Murkowski's candidacy grew out of disappointment with Alaska's Democratic senator, Mike Gravel, trying to stall a compromise Alaska lands bill in 1978. Gravel's Republican counterpart, Sen. Ted Stevens, supported the compromise. Gravel killed it at the last minute.

"You've got yourself in a big battle now, buddy," Stevens screamed at Gravel on the Senate floor.

Clark was furious too.

"Gravel was no help. So there were a number of us who felt the most important thing we could do for our state was to find another senator. And Frank Murkowski was the guy we were looking for," Clark said.

Clark and Murkowski first met during that 1980 U.S. Senate campaign. Clark was impressed -- and liked the fact that the candidate had grown up in the timber town of Ketchikan.

"He was just kind of like my role model of what a real Alaskan was," Clark said. "Somebody who had a lot of strong principles, strongly held beliefs, and believed that we could have the economic growth in the (timber) industry. ... He and I had a strong alignment of interests. And kind of immediately hit it off."

Murkowski won the race and the friendship grew. In 1985, Murkowski appointed Clark to manage a blind trust holding more than $250,000 of Murkowski's personal wealth, paying the lawyer out of surplus campaign funds. Three years later, when the relationship came to light, it brought an outcry from campaign watchdog groups. How could a U.S. senator from Alaska have such a close business relationship with the timber industry's leading Washington lobbyist?

At the time, Murkowski and Clark scoffed at the supposed conflict of interest. The two saw eye to eye on Southeast timber issues and the senator needed no lobbying, they said. Within weeks of its public disclosure, however, Murkowski dissolved the trust. He accused environmentalists of dredging up the relationship with Clark for political purposes.

By that time, Clark was locked in an all-out battle, legal and political, with environmentalists over the Tongass. His opponents ran a very effective campaign, he says today.

"It was like being the goalie in a hockey net," Clark said, recalling the anti-logging lawsuits. "They would shoot at you and shoot at you and shoot at you and sooner or later one or two or three were going to get through."

He said he found it infuriating that environmental lawyers would get their fees paid every time they won a lawsuit -- but as "public interest" litigants not have to pay the other side when they lost.

"They were able to finance through government funds this assault on the timber supply in the Tongass," he said.

By 1990 the Tongass Timber Reform Act had rolled over Clark and his timber clients, eliminating road subsidies and making other changes to boost timber prices and environmental protections.

"I think they overreached, and (the law) was the natural consequence of overreaching," said Southeast Alaska Conservation Council's John Sisk.

Clark was busy not only in Washington, D.C., but in Juneau. In 1994 he helped push through a state law barring the kind of anti-nuisance lawsuit that had been filed in Sitka against his client, the Alaska Pulp Corp., for polluting Sitka Sound. Within months, the retroactive law was thrown out of court as unconstitutional, and APC settled by paying cash to a community cultural fund.

By then the Southeast timber industry was unraveling. APC closed its Sitka pulp mill in 1993 and its Wrangell sawmill in 1994. The Ketchikan pulp mill closed in 1997.

Environmentalists say reasons for the mills' failure were complex, having to do with aging equipment, expensive anti-pollution upgrades, union troubles and overseas competition. But company officials said it all came down to pressure on timber supplies from environmentalists and the Clinton administration.

"We all felt like we fought the fight but the enemy was too big," said George Woodbury, president of the Alaska Forest Association and former timber manager for APC. "He did the best he could."

In making their exits from their long-term contracts for trees, the two main timber companies took different routes. Louisiana Pacific, the owner in Ketchikan, settled quickly with the government for $140 million. In contrast, Clark's APC, a consortium of Japanese-owned companies, filed a damage claim against the Forest Service worth $1.5 billion. Initial rulings have favored APC, and a final decision on damages is expected soon.

Clark said any big-money damages awarded his former employer will not benefit him financially -- "only spiritually." He said he was not consulted by the Japanese owners as they plotted their exit strategy. The reason, he said, may have been they knew he would argue against any plan to close the plant and lose hundreds of jobs.

CHIEF OF STAFF

Soon after Clark moved into the governor's office, the Murkowski administration turned its attention to the very government agencies and rules that had created regulatory obstacles to timber development.

One of the first changes, and one of the most controversial, transferred the Habitat Division of the Department of Fish and Game, whose biologists had been pestering the logging companies for years over issues such as logging roads, culverts and buffers along streams.

Carl Rosier, who served as fish and game commissioner under Republican Gov. Wally Hickel from 1990 to 1994, said that under his tenure he fought an unsuccessful attempt by timber lobbyist Clark to ax the Habitat Division. Rosier, who now represents a sportsmen's group, said he is convinced Clark orchestrated the Habitat Division's move into the more development-friendly Department of Natural Resources -- shedding some career biologists in the process.

"I believe that when you look at Jim's background in terms of defending the logging industry and so forth, there is no question about (his role)," Rosier said.

In a parallel move that got less attention, the state Division of Governmental Coordination, the official referee in resource development arguments, was demoted from the governor's office to a new slot inside DNR.

Another old nemesis to feel the sting of the new administration was the coastal zone management program, which used to give local coastal districts a say over some timber and other resource projects. The new law reduces the districts' power, again centralizing authority under the DNR commissioner.

The Murkowski administration also hit back at just the kind of lawsuits that Clark said helped kill the timber industry in Southeast. It pushed through a bill to make environmental groups -- and others who sue the state on "public interest" issues -- pay the state for lawyer fees if the suits fail.

"I think he has 25 years of frustration with a system that he perceives works against his ability to cut trees, and when he found himself in charge he was in a position to fix the problem," said Jim Stratton, a former Southeast Alaska Conservation Council director who managed state parks under Knowles.

The motive isn't revenge, said Juneau Democratic Sen. Kim Elton, who has known Clark for years.

"I think what he's doing, he does it because he believes in it," Elton said.

Clark takes great pains to deflate perceptions that he is central to such Murkowski administration decisions. But he vigorously defends them. The agencies and individuals who handle environmental oversight might have changed, he argues, but the environmental standards themselves are still in place.

Clark's words border on hero worship when he talks about Murkowski. He describes the governor as a courageous, complex, intelligent man, a "walking encyclopedia" who is always far ahead of his staff.

"The challenge for me is always to go in and be prepared to be able to deal with every single question that he asks. I've never been able to do that once since I've been here. Not once," Clark said. "I believe that at the end of the day he will be seen as the greatest governor that Alaska ever had."

Gregg Erickson, a Juneau economist and publisher of a respected newsletter on Alaska government, has known Clark for years. Erickson said that Clark describes Murkowski in terms that are more glowing than "one would think reasonable of any human being on this Earth."

"But Jim clearly considers it his job to show the governor in the best possible light," Erickson said.

In an interview last month, Murkowski called Clark a "longtime confidant" and praised his judgment and knowledge of government and Juneau.

Murkowski said Clark's job is to carry out the policies of the administration. Clark's recommendations, along with those from other Cabinet members, help create those policies, the governor said.

"If anything, I'm worried about him because he works too hard," Murkowski said.

At press conferences, Murkowski and Clark act as a team. Murkowski's political strength is in relating to people. Though he can be gruff, he can also come across like a favorite uncle, the kind who would pull coins out of a kid's ear. People want to trust him.

But sometimes, at least in public, the governor can be fuzzy on details. He'll turn to Clark. And Clark has the details.

The administration has had some rough patches under Clark's watch. There have been unpopular budget cuts and heat over appointments that went bad.

Clark's job requires long hours, bitter political battles, public criticism and constant demands on his time. He is the one often called on to tell people "no." He has taken on the reins of chief of staff in a difficult period. The state budget is in trouble, and much of the talk that comes out of Juneau now is about taxes or cutting state services.

"What a nightmare job," said Juneau Republican Rep. Bruce Weyhrauch.

But Clark seems to be enjoying himself.

"He repeatedly tells me he never knew it could be this much fun," Renkes said of his inner-circle counterpart.

Alaska's state government was set up to make the governor an especially powerful figure, able to make many changes by administrative fiat, Clark noted.

"We've had many governors that are good governors, but he's the first one who's been willing to seize the power, the tremendous power ... and use it to make changes," Clark said.

"They believe leadership's important," said Reinwand, the lobbyist and Murkowski friend. "And they're not afraid to take positions, even though they have taken a terrible pounding."

How much time do they have? Clark refutes talk of the 70-year-old Murkowski being a one-term governor, saying no decision has been made about a second term. He insisted Murkowski won't "pull his punches," not to help him run again nor to improve the chances of his daughter, Lisa, in her run to retain his former U.S. Senate seat next fall.

Meanwhile, with Republicans in control of the Legislature and the state's congressional delegation as well as the White House, Clark is up in the ambrosial hours and working 16-hour days. He says the worst part of the job is not having enough hours in the week.

Reporter Tom Kizzia can be reached at tkizzia@adn.com or 1-907-235-4244. Reporter Sean Cockerham can be reached at scockerham@adn.com or 1-907-586-1531. Photographer Erik Hill can be reached at ehill@adn.com or 257-4331.