Tony Park, who died earlier this month at 90, through his long public life came across as cheerful, friendly, almost easy going; watch him over time and you saw someone who could laugh without strain and accept setbacks as they came.
Not, you might say, the kind of personality type you’d usually expect as a stereotype state attorney general. Which he was, in fact, at the time when I first came to Idaho about a half-century ago.
He managed to reach that high office, and lost it, in part because of another quality, a willingness to walk headfirst into a hurricane, to jump into a political contest even when the timing was off and the environment was not favorable. Adverse circumstances did not seem to throw him.
That might be the side of him you’d most guess at from the title of his memoir, An Idaho Democrat. (Disclosure here: I published it in 2021.) He subtitled the book, “A political memoir of a political life,” and though he had a full life in other areas – including a law career long prominent in Idaho – that told you something about his priorities and concerns.
He spoke to that too, directly: “My purpose in this endeavor [writing the memoir] is to demonstrate through my personal experiences and progression how the Idaho political landscape—particularly regarding Democrats—has changed in the latter half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, despite the fact that many issues so important to Democrats, such as taking care of working people, the environment, the problems with one-party rule, etc., are as urgent now as they were when I got my start.”
Looking back, we often forget the losses and the downsides of political and government careers; the successes get the celebrations. Park learned from both ups and down, and he didn’t shy away from them.
As a young Boise attorney, he ran for the Idaho Legislature twice in the 60s, losing both times. (Boise, now Democratic, was a solidly Republican city then, more so than the state overall.) That didn’t stop him from taking on a bigger race, for attorney general, in 1970, and winning. Persistence was one of the lessons he learned.
Timing cut the other direction in 1972, when not halfway through his statewide term he ran for an open U.S. Senate seat: The lure was irresistible, as open Senate seats don’t come along often. But he wasn’t well enough established – “It was simply too soon for me to run,” he would write later – and he didn’t make it through the primary. The timing, which also involved the successful candidacy of Republican James McClure, who was the front runner in the contest from start to finish, was bad this time.
Another lesson came when he agreed (on request from Governor Cecil Andrus) to take over the state investigative unit on illegal drugs, a group that famously became known as “Park’s Narcs.” It did not go well; the group became the subject of a number of scandalous headlines that damaged the new attorney general, even as he made well-received moves on other subjects.
But Park never avoided the subject – he devoted a chapter of his memoir to it – and learned from it the need to properly control, manage and situate sensitive government operations. Had he stayed in government – he lost his bid for reelection in 1974 – the lessons he absorbed might have resulted in some useful government management.
When Park died, some of the comments about him suggest an artifact from a bygone, and in many ways a politically better, era.
I suspect he would see it a little differently.
Conditions and timing and hurricanes be damned: Walk into the whirlwind. Sometimes you can win and make a difference. Not always, but maybe enough.
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