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In crash that killed Stevens, the echo of an old mystery
alaska from A1
tion’s most politically prominent, and different, clans for decades. “It brings back a lot of memo- ries and connections,” said one of Nicolas Begich’s sons, Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), who ousted Stevens from the Senate in 2008. Begich said he had waited for news about the crash as he pre- pared to fly from Anchorage to Kotzebue and later placed a con- dolence call to the Stevens house- hold, just as Stevens had called Begich’s mother 38 years ago. “He lost his wife in a plane
crash, and I lost my father,” Beg- ich said. “You think about all those pieces in the equation.” In the hours after his father’s plane went missing a generation ago, Tommy Boggs, the son of Hale and Lindy Boggs and now one of Washington’s most power- ful lobbyists, also received a call from Stevens, then Alaska’s new senator. “He said he knew the pi- lot and that there was nothing to be concerned about,” recalled Boggs, who himself was rushed back to Washington last month after suffering heart problems on an Alaskan cruise with his grand- children. “He was upbeat.” The mothers, brothers and sis-
ters of the Boggs and Begich fami- lies have all dealt differently with the losses of their husbands and fathers, and with Alaska’s loom- ing hold over their family’s fate. “All of us kids in one way or an- other were really driven by the early death of my dad,” said Tom Begich, one of the six children in a family that has long harbored doubts about the government’s response to the disappearance of their father’s plane. He added that his younger brother Mark’s elec- tion to the Senate “closes the cir- cle and makes things whole.” The Boggs family has been both
drawn and repelled from the state that claimed their patriarch. “A lot of my family has this con-
nection to it,” said Cokie Roberts, the political correspondent and Tommy Boggs’s younger sister. “And I have this sense that it is the place that took my father. I don’t want to go there.”
A veteran and a rising star Hale Boggs took office in the
House of Representatives in 1941, after running against the rem- nants of the Louisiana political machine built by Huey Long. At 26, the Democrat was the young- est member of Congress. He lost a 1942 reelection campaign, but won the seat back in 1946 and held office for the next 26 years, amassing power, a stately gravitas and eventually, in 1971, the posi- tion of House majority leader. Along the way, he also garnered some powerful foes. His outspo- ken doubts from within the War- ren Commission and his claims
that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI improperly kept him under sur- veillance aggravated some of his fellow legislators, as well as Presi- dent Richard M. Nixon.
Nicholas Begich, then a fresh-
man Democratic congressman from Alaska, was hardly on the president’s radar. A bespectacled Minnesota native of Croatian an- cestry, he had sensed political op- portunity in the open lands of Alaska, where his political men- tor, Hubert H. Humphrey, helped get him a government job. In 1957, Begich drove to what was then still the Territory of Alaska in a new Dodge with his 18-year-old bride. Shortly after, he left govern- ment work for a teaching job, but eventually won office in the state Senate. When authorities deter- mined that he couldn’t teach and hold elective office simultaneous- ly, he took the case to court, along with another politically ambi- tious teachernamed Don Young, a Republican from Fort Yukon. “We were both teachers,” said
Young, who was represented in the case by a lawyer from Indian- apolis who had moved to Alaska and pioneered the territory’s push for statehood. “Ted Stevens was my lawyer.” The two teachers lost the case and, along with Young’s lawyer, concentrated on politics. In 1968, Alaska’s Republican governor ap- pointed Stevens to a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. In 1970, Begich ran for the state’s lone seat in the House of Representatives. As he flew around the state to cam- paign, bad weather forced his chartered plane to make an emer- gency landing on a sandbar, where rescuers found him and the other passengers unharmed eight hours later. He won the seat, beat- ing Republican Frank Murkowski. With Begich now part of Alas-
ka’s three-man congressional del- egation, he took his 32-year-old wife, Pegge, to Washington to find a suitable house for their family, which included children ages 2 to 12. They bought one on Forest- wood Drive in McLean.
“I can still remember the house
there,” said Mark Begich, recalling the basketball and shuffleboard courts and a swimming pool. Begich and his wife furnished the place, which had been a model home, just in time for Christmas in 1971. One day, as they put on the final touches, their phone rang. Lindy Boggs, the charming Southern wife of Hale Boggs, was on the line.
“She had actually misdialed,”
Pegge Begich said. Lindy asked to speak with Rita
Gravel, the wife of Alaska’s then- senator Mike Gravel, but recov- ered quickly when she realized she had reached the Begich home. “She was just this wonderful, wonderful Southern lady, very open and warm,” Pegge recalled.
“She walked me through different things that were good for wives. She was my first big welcome.” Most days, Begich worked long hours on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, amid buzzing telex machines and a half-dozen staffers. But on several occasions, he and his wife visited the Bethesda home of Boggs. At an annual garden party, the cou- ple made their mark. “I wore hot pants,” Pegge Beg- ich recalled, with a burst of laugh- ter.
Her husband’s boldness mani- fested itself politically. Nicholas Begich had designs on the Senate seat of Gravel, a Democrat who would later make a habit of odd- ball presidential runs, and planned to challenge him in the 1974 Democratic primary. Polls he commissioned were promising. But first he had to demonstrate his strength by winning reelec- tion in 1972 by a convincing mar- gin against Young, his fellow schoolteacher and plaintiff who had since moved to the state Sen- ate.
“I couldn’t beat him with a
stick, and I knew that,” said Young, recalling a phone con- versation, just days before Beg- ich’s disappearance, in which the congressman tried to convince him that he had no hope of win- ning. “ ‘I don’t know what you are doing,’ ” Young recalled Begich saying. For an added boost in his race, Begich asked Boggs to accompany him on a campaign sweep through Alaska. There was some talk of the wives coming along. “We had both considered it,”
Pegge Begich said. But she and Lindy Boggs even- tually decided that there were too many responsibili- ties to attend to in Washington. The men would go alone.
On Oct. 16, 1972,
SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 2010
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
On Oct. 21, 1972, Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Hugh Huleatt flew over Alaska’s Chilkat Range, scanning the rugged terrain for signs of the missing plane. The 39-day search was the largest in the state’s history.
this time it felt different. She went back to the TV room and abruptly told the children it was time for bed. Mindful of her mood all day, they shuffled off to their rooms. Alone, she sought to absorb the
gravity of the situation. Then she started dialing. First she rang her parents and family. But after the first few calls, it became clear that word had already spread. After the 10 o’clock news reported the plane’s disappearance, Begich called Lindy Boggs and, in an un- fortunate reversal, explained the lay of the land. A search in Alaska, Pegge told
About the series In Monday’s Style section, the Begich and Boggs children look past the tragedy and test their own strengths.
Boggs, 58, and Begich, 40, met at Anchorage International Airport. Conditions were not good, with rain and low visibility. The clouds hung low. The air was turbulent. They had chartered a twin-engine Cessna 310 for a 550-mile flight from An- chorage to Juneau. Don E. Jonz, a daring bush pilot who had argued in an aviation magazine that a “sneaky” pilot could “disregard 99 percent of the B.S. you hear about icing,” decided he could make it. At 9 a.m., the plane — carrying
the two politicians, Begich aide Russell Brown and the pilot — de- parted and flew along the narrow Portage Pass. It glided near the sloping Portage Glacier, which calved chunks of luminous blue ice into the lake. It approached the snow- and cloud-shrouded Chugach Mountains. At 9:12 the pilot made a final communication with the control tower. Then nothing.
At 9 p.m. Eastern time in Mc- ASSOCIATED PRESS
On Oct. 20, 1972, four days after the crash, Air Force Maj. Henry Stocker showed journalists a map of the search area.
Lean, the Begich family had gath- ered around the television to watch “The Rookies,” a newpolice drama. Pegge Begich had been in a bad mood all day and appreciat- ed the down time. The phone rang and Mark, 10, ran to pick it up. When he came back to the family room, he tugged his mother’s arm. Gov. Bill Egan was on the phone. “I just had an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach,” Begich said. As her youngest daughter, Stephanie, 6, sat at her side with a worried look, the governor ex- plained that the plane carrying her husband had gone missing and that an intense search was underway. Begich sought solace in the safe outcome of her hus- band’s previous close call — but
Lindy, was not like one in Mary- land or Virginia, or Louisiana for that matter. The state was a terri- tory of uncharted wilderness and ice, with more coastline than the entire Eastern Seaboard. She told Boggs that this had hap- pened before, but this time the search would probably take longer. She en- couraged Boggs
to take her family to Alaska so they would have a better idea of the dimensions involved. Begich hung up as friends filled the house. She stayed up most of the night. In the morning, with still no sign of the plane carrying her hus- band, Begich, who rarely cried, called her children down to the family room. She calmly ex- plained that their father had gone missing. It would be in the papers and on the news. Their friends and teachers would be whisper- ing about it. They didn’t have to go to school if they didn’t want to. The kids decided to go to
school. “It was almost an escape,” said Nichelle Begich Mauk, who was 14 at the time and remembered a house full of well-wishers and a doorbell that rang so often it seemed stuck. The two older sons, Nick, 13,
and Tom, 11, walked to James Fe- nimore Cooper Junior High. They stopped at a little creek, and Tom looked up at the clouds, trying to divine messages about his father’s fate from the shifting shapes in the sky.
“I wonder if that means the plane is going to be found,” Tom remembered saying to his broth- er.
By noon, Pegge Begich had called all of her children back home. Shortly after, Lindy Boggs in- vited the Begiches, who were also Catholic, to their Bethesda home to celebrate a private Mass with Hale’s brother, Robert, a Jesuit priest. Each day, the families heard new reports of plane debris. None of them panned out. Spirits rose and sank.
“Your hopes get so worn,” re- called Begich, who debated what to share and what to keep from the children. Boggs took Begich’s advice and went to Alaska. Her daughter Co- kie, 28 at the time with two young children and a television news job in California, was reluctant at first. She said the family’s entire support system was based in Washington, and she had reserva- tions about going to unfamiliar territory where they knew no one. “If you were missing in Alaska,” Lindy told her daughter, “Daddy would go looking for you.” Tommy had no such hesita- tions. “I wanted to go,” he said. About 10 Boggs family mem- bers and close friends hunkered down and received briefings with pictures from the spy planes at El- mendorf Air Force Base in An- chorage, where every morning they agonized at the sound of plane engines revving. Worse were the days when bad weather kept the engines silent. The men in the family respected the mili- tary’s judgment not to fly on those days, but the women, Roberts said, “kept pressing them.” After Halloween, Tom Begich’s
birthday, Pegge and her oldest son, Nick, returned to Alaska. Their mission was to rally support for her husband’s candidacy. He could still be alive, they argued. Nothing had been determined.
Grueling search, long wait
The 39-day search was the larg- est in Alaska history. More than 70 aircraft, logging more than 3,600 hours, searched for signs of life or wreckage from above. Boats patrolled the waters. Hunters combed the countryside. A spy plane that could identify people from 15 miles above Earth tele- scoped the Alaska coastline. Another plane that had been missing for 17 years was found in the search. But no sign of the poli- ticians’ plane surfaced. Instead, far-fetched leads filtered in. “All these whackos came out of the woodwork,” said Nichelle Beg- ich Mauk, remembering the mys- tics who knocked on the door of- fering only their intuition as to the plane’s whereabouts. The FBI received reports that
state-of-the-art tracking equip- ment had spotted plane debris — and two survivors — near Yakutat. When things grew dire, the mili- tary appeased the families by fol- lowing the premonitions of psy- chics. Dark theories held that Hale Boggs’s dissenting role in the Warren Commission may have played a part in the plane’s fate, or that a bomb exploded onboard. Pegge Begich received a for- warded note, marked “personal,” from her husband’s Anchorage of- fice. Scraps of newspaper from the Detroit Free Press had been pieced together to spell out an
ominous message: Her husband had been assassinated by Serbi- ans because of his Croatian heri- tage and support of Croatian na- tionalism. “It freaked me out,” said Begich, who called her husband’s Wash- ington office to report the letter. But she believed above all that
the investigators weren’t doing all that they could. “It made me question my gov- ernment,” she said, adding: “I have to question if things were followed up as they should have been.”
She wasn’t the only member of the family to express skepticism. Nick Begich wondered whether the antagonism between Boggs and Nixon contributed to what he considered the FBI’s lackluster follow-up. Tom Begich concluded that communication between the CIA and the FBI was wanting. But the grieving Begiches pleaded with Alaskans to hold out hope. Weeks after communica- tion with the Cessna was lost, 55 percent of voters chose Nicholas Begich over Don Young. Pegge noted that the future congressman was “defeated by a dead man.”
On Dec. 29, which would have
been Nicholas and Pegge Begich’s 16th anniversary, an Anchorage court held a hearing on whether to declare the congressman pre- sumed dead. Days later, on Jan. 3, 1973, the first order of business in the House of Representatives was to officially recognize the deaths of Boggs and Begich. Special elec- tions to fill their seats went for- ward.
Lindy Boggs presented herself as a candidate in the Louisiana special election and won her hus- band’s seat for the first of nine terms. Pegge Begich also sought her husband’s seat but came up short. Young, the Republican who stood with Begich as an ambitious teacher years before, claimed Beg- ich’s seat and has held it ever since. “He passed on, and I got to be congressman,” Young said. In the years following the
deaths of their husbands and fa- thers, the Begich and Boggs fami- lies rarely saw each other. But a bond forged in grief and tested by political ambition would push them back together. In 1977, Lindy Boggs learned
that the historic Congressional Cemetery erected cenotaphs for members of Congress who had been temporarily buried there be- fore being taken to their homes. “She thought that would be a
good idea for Daddy and Nick Begich, because they were never found and couldn’t be buried,” Roberts said. “Daddy’s plaque is on one side of it, and Nick Begich’s is on the other side. So it’s like they are together for eternity.”
horowitzj@washpost.com
Obama: Backing right to build mosque is not an endorsement mosque from A1
crats, who would have preferred that he not embroil himself, and them, in a controversy that the White House had previously deemed to be a local matter. It is also one that could distract from their efforts to spend the August recess focusing on the economy. “It’s going to play poorly for
many Democrats and will be used as a political club by those Re- publicans willing to exploit it,” said one senior Democratic aide on Capitol Hill, where the presi- dent’s party is worried that it could lose control of one and pos- sibly both houses of Congress this fall. The aide asked for anonym- ity to speak freely. Their concern is not that Oba-
ma’s comments will feed the myths about his citizenship, his religion and his allegiances that have taken root in the far reaches
of the right; those voters are ce- mented in place against the Dem- ocrats already. Rather, they fear that taking a stand on the issue of building a mosque so close to the spot where thousands of Americans lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001, could further alienate swing vot- ers. A CNN poll this month found that 68 percent of those surveyed oppose the idea; among inde- pendents, 70 percent were against it. White House officials said the president’s comments Saturday were not at odds with what he had said the night before — and they insisted they should not be seen as Obama backing down be- cause of political pressure. He was merely clarifying his posi- tion, they said. Yet Obama had left the distinction between prin- ciple and prudence unstated in his declaration Friday night that
“I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a
mosque there.” — President Obama
“Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. And that in- cludes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.” The Cordoba House, as the Is- lamic complex is known, is planned for a site two blocks from Ground Zero where a dam- aged building now stands. The 15-story facility is envisioned as a community and cultural center for the area’s Muslims but sparked controversy because of
its proximity to the site of the Sept. 11 attacks. After months of debate, New York officials have now cleared the project for con- struction. White House aides said the timing of Obama’s decision to weigh in on the debate was driv- en by his desire to wait for local zoning officials to finish their de- liberations.
Obama, who is a constitutional
law professor by training, had been eager to voice his opinion on the broader principle at issue, aides said, but felt restrained by the idea that local officials should
not feel pressure from the White House. The president also worried
that the issue could prove to be a distraction for a White House al- ready struggling to keep to its message about the economic re- covery, aides said. When the proj- ect won approval just days before the long-scheduled iftar dinner, Obama and his advisers believed they had found the right moment — and thought it would have seemed odd if he had not ad- dressed it. “It’s not a question I think we
can avoid,” one aide recalled the president saying. “And I don’t think we should avoid it.” As with Obama’s decision to pursue an overhaul of the health- care system and to go to court to block Arizona’s new immigration law, this was a fight the president could have sidestepped — but one, his advisers say, that speaks
to his larger principles. “It is not his role as president to pass judg- ment on every local project,” said White House deputy press secre- tary Bill Burton. “But it is his re- sponsibility to stand up for the constitutional principle of reli- gious freedom and equal treat- ment for all Americans.” However, to his critics it sug-
gests a disregard for the wishes of the public. “It feels very Bush- esque,” said Matthew Dowd, who was a top political adviser to for- mer President George W. Bush until they parted ways over the Iraq war. Dowd said Republicans will exploit the controversy to ask, “Does this guy listen, or does he think he’s too smart for all of us?”
tumultyk@washpost.com shearm@washpost.com
Staff writer Scott Wilson contributed to this report.
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