Thanksgiving and Remembrance of Governor Dan Evans

— by Sheila Cain for Crosscut.com —

“I hope for a kind of government where people listen to and work with each other,” he says.  “Accomplishing good things takes bipartisan effort, because often what we’re trying to accomplish isn’t partisan.”

Former Washington Governor and U.S. Senator Dan Evans charted a middle path for the Republican party.

Dan Evans hadn’t seen the letter for decades. In fact, he’d forgotten he’d even written it. But when his father presented him with the handwritten missive shortly after he became governor of the State of Washington, Evans knew he’d taken the right path in life.

Evans had sent the letter to his father in Seattle when he was 27 years old and a Navy lieutenant stationed on a destroyer in the Pacific during the Korean War. The letter began as a Father’s Day tribute, thanking his dad for all he’d done for the family, but soon turned into what Evans calls a “diatribe” against the Korean War and the missteps he felt were being made by the country’s leaders in Washington, D.C.

“I told him that if I was back in Seattle, I would run for the legislature,” Evans says.

None of them knew it then, but he would eventually make good on that statement. Not only would Evans spend nine years in the Washington state House of Representatives, but he would also serve three consecutive terms as Washington state’s governor and spend six years as a U.S. senator.

During that time, the Republican would become known as a supporter of schools, an advocate for a regional transportation system, and a staunch crusader for the environment. He would welcome Vietnam War refugees to Washington state, lobby then-President Gerald Ford to preserve the Alpine Lakes Wilderness area, and help run the far-right John Birch Society out of the GOP.

(To read the full article, go to https://crosscut.com/2018/09/man-who-once-chased-far-right-out-gop )