The Late Cliff Hansen
The late Cliff Hansen – county commissioner, governor, U.S. senator, and rancher and family man – in his own words, next on Wyoming CHRONICLE…
I was a young reporter in Washington DC when I first met Senator Cliff Hansen, and he made an immediate impression: Poised, sharp-featured, and attentive to the lowliest scribe. To use a word journalists rarely use when describing politicians – he carried himself with a natural dignity.
In some ways, Hansen could be considered ‘old’ Wyoming – he was a working rancher, a county commissioner who fought against Grand Teton National Park, a fiscal conservative, a devoted family man. But others would call him a progressive of sorts – as governor, he pushed for a higher minimum wage, and decriminalization of interracial marriages. As a senator, he fought to increase Wyoming’s share of federal mineral royalties, and worked to protect the rights of surface landowners.
Clifford Hansen was devoted to the University of Wyoming, and served on the board of Trustees for 20 years. He was elected Governor of Wyoming in 1962, and then ran successfully for the U.S. Senate in 1969, where he served two terms, serving on the Finance and Energy and Natural Resources committees.
Hansen was open minded – years after his dramatic opposition to the creation of Grand Teton National park – when he and actor Wallace Beery rode into the park armed and on horseback – he came around to appreciating what the Rockefeller family had done in saving the park lands from development. He tells that story, and others, in some excerpts from interviews he gave to Wyoming PBS over the last decade.
When Cliff Hansen left the Senate in 1978 – he retired three days early, so that Al Simpson, who succeeded him, could be nominated and get a leg up in seniority. And though he retired from the Senate for health reasons, at the time of his death – on October 21, 2009 – he was the oldest surviving U.S. senator, at 97. For that, we can probably credit ranching in the good clean air of the Teton Valley, that he loved so much.
