Audacious
Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm (D) 1975 - 1987
Dick Lamm was in his second year of law school at Berkley when he heard “the clarion call to my generation.
"I've thought of this many times, I can see no harbinger of a political career until John F. Kennedy.”
Lamm had planned on a career as a lawyer and tax accountant but he started knocking doors for Kennedy.
“John F. Kennedy and that didn't make me want to be a politician but it seemed to me that the particular calling of my time was public policy. But I was just swept away by the idea that public policy could change things," he said.
Lamm describes his Republican father as politically uninvolved. He grew up in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, graduating from high school in Pittsburg.
"A crucial part of my life story is that I didn't make the football team and so what was I going to do with my manhood? So I decided to become an adventurer. I worked as a waiter at a fly-in lodge in Canada, I worked on ore boats and on a lumber camp in Oregon. I was a runner on New York Stock Exchange. These jobs made me a risk taker. Those experiences and the loneliness that came along with it was soul-building. Bismark said ‘success is the child of audacity' and I became audacious. Who I married, where I practiced, it all flowed from a capricious decision when I was 23-years-old. I was offered a job after I passed the California Bar, in Carmel. God you can't get any better than that but I had been stationed in Colorado in the Army.”
Lamm worked his way through the chairs of the local and state chapters of the Young Democrats and ran for the state legislature in 1966.
"Back in those days it was a crusade. It was civil rights. It was the women's movement. It was the war. It was all these things. These were heady times. We were gonna change the world!"
As a state legislator he didn't shy from hot button issues.
"Here I am a dumb freshman legislator. I didn't even know where the men’s room was but I became the chief sponsor of an abortion law. My Secretary at the Young Democrats was a beautiful young woman, Susie Barnes. She sat down and drafted the abortion bill and I took it to the legislative council and it was drafted into a bill on mental health, physical health, physical deformity, rape and incest. It's amazing how sometimes you push on a door you think is locked and suddenly it's open. This was 1966."
The bill passed, becoming the nation's abortion rights law.
"Because of the things I did in the legislature it confirmed for me that boy, if you want to change the world, you can change the world. I represented a Catholic district, so there's no reason that this isn't a career-ending action. But at that time I wasn't that invested in the legislature. Before I knew it I had 67 out of a hundred legislators as co-sponsors. It was just an atomic bomb. It was just one of these things that everything fell into place. We choreographed the hearings. It's amazing how many prominent women came up to me and said 'I've had an abortion.' We got a bunch of the clergy and a bunch of doctors on our side and it passed.
"This is the important thing: success is the child of audacity. I mean I was rewarded in those early years for things that other people would call, and they're probably right, 'politically stupid.' I saw that if you really believe in something and you put it forth, then things happen."
Because he was an accountant, Lamm was on the state audit committee. Colorado had won its bid to host the 1976 Olympics and Lamm, although an avid fan of the international sporting competition, saw a problem.
"I love the Olympics but they didn't have any idea what the costs were and they had no real plan. I started asking questions and I was being swatted away for being an unpatriotic legislator. The economic elite, the governor, the mayor of Denver and the Chamber of Commerce, (future Republican Governor) Vanderhoof played a role but (then Republican Governor) John Love went and made the pitch and I in the legislature voted to let the Olympics come to Colorado."
Smart growth was new thinking in the 1960s but for Lamm it was an idea that had been nurtured.
"My mother would drive around with two planned parenthood stickers on the back of her car. My mother was a Malthusian. She thought the world was going to explode, a population explosion. My mother was a very smart lady and she was really concerned about population and the environment and I was very much influenced by her feeling that the growth of population was not sustainable.”
Lamm's challenge to the Olympics was a matter of two things: first, Colorado was already one of the fastest growing states.
"And second of all they just didn't have the economics right. Montreal had lost a billion dollars hosting the Olympics and Sopporo, Japan had lost a billion and here we were, a little state and I just thought they were in way over their heads."
As it turned out, the citizens agreed and in the 1972 election a majority (60 percent) voted against allowing state funds to pay any of the tab.
"I was at victory party at Pat Schroeder's house and John Zappia, he's a big guy and grabs me and lifts me to the ceiling and a picture ended up in Time magazine and he says, 'ladies and gentlemen, the next governor of Colorado!' I don't want to say it didn't enter my mind - I guess it did - but all of the sudden while I was up there I looked around and saw that the same people that had just defeated the Olympics in a herculean effort - could elect me governor."
Lamm was 38 at the time and athletic. He represented a new Democratic Party, a party outside the smoke-filled rooms.
“We got a house in Vail for a weekend and said, ‘well, what can we do?’ The walk wasn't my idea, it was Laughton Childs' idea and I just copied it, but it felt right to me. I was very much active in land use and things like detergents in our water. I had captured the environmental community and (Democrat opponent) Tom Farley hadn't but he had captured the labor community.”
Lamm had a political infrastructure in place that had just defeated the Olympics and some Republicans were grateful for his efforts.
“They had put the luge runs up in Evergreen where all these Republicans lived and a lot of the cross country trails were across public property. Johnny Vanderhoof did this incredible statement where he said, ‘well we lied a bit.’”
Adding to the momentum were charges that the Nixon White House had broken into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel.
“It was not my political genius as a strategist, it was a group of people.”
People and a walk across Colorado.
“The press couldn't stay away from it. We went up to the Wyoming border, I took my two kids, seven and three and here's this caravan of press and I kissed my kids goodbye and started walking down to the New Mexico. It was an incredible personal experience.”
Campaign aid Eric Sondermann remembered handing out brochures that featured the citizens of Colorado more than the Democratic candidate.
“You know, I felt a deep connection with the people that I stayed with me. I was an intellectual snob up to that point. The act of campaigning was really enlightening to me and the wisdom of people, who wouldn't even have a high school degree in some cases.”
Democratic challenger Tom Farley was the House Minority Leader.
The night that I won the Primary, Farley came over and in front of my people handed me a hundred dollar check and wished me good luck and that had a lot to do with my winning because the Democratic party came together. I owe a lot to Tom Farley.”
His Republican opponent was sitting Governor John Vanderhoof.
“Johnny Van was a war hero. A P-38 pilot in second World War. He'd been shot down, rescued, he was a good guy but he was very conventional - what colorado was when I moved here. This was a place where the Republican party and the Episcopal church and the Chamber of Commerce would sit down with God every Thursday and they'd decide what's good for Colorado. Denver went from cow pies to computers in just one generation and that was my generation.”
Lamm has fleeting memory of the debates.
“I know I was pretty good, I made no horrible mistakes, I had been a lawyer, I was used to talking on my feet. When I came to Denver one of the first things I did was I went down and joined Toastmasters - they just forced you to think on your feet. I wanted to become a better lawyer, more articulate.”
“I knew things were going well but it had been a Republican state for so long. In a lot of eyes, I wasn't just a Democrat, I was a traitor to the state because of the Olympics. I had turned down Colorado's big opportunity to be on the international stage and how could anyone have the audacity, the shamelessness to run for office? To this day there's people that hate me for that.”
Shortly after the Primary unreported income served as an September Surprise.
“I had some stock in a natural resource company that my parents had given me that I had not reported. Somehow in all my busy life I had not reported it. I just went in front of the press and said ‘I screwed up.’
“What works in politics is getting special interest money to spend on media that sells you like a bar of soap. I hate it but it does work. I was overwhelmed by money on the other side but it was the walk that worked for me. I was the young Galahad. That plus Watergate. Let's never forget Watergate.
When would-be public servants seek his campaign advice he tells them that first they must make sure their family is behind them.
“Second of all, I'm 21 or 22 years old at Berkley studying for the CPA exam and studying to be high in my class in law school and I got an ulcer. I went to a doctor and the doctor said, ‘men like airplanes have ceilings beyond which they cannot operate.’ He said ‘start getting some exercise.’ I tell them make sure you're healthy so many people get wrapped up in their campaign. The walk was a wonderful cathartic thing. This thing will drive you crazy. Strive to build a program of exercise and build your family into this. I suggest to all people that they have one day every week with their family where you can just forget the whole thing.”
“I tell them that there's nothing that can screw you up better than getting a campaign donation - that so-called unreported thing. It was the first time my integrity had been challenged. In my experience, don’t run unless you're running for a reason, unless you really have the motivation to do something good in politics. Don't do it because it looks good on your obituary. It can affect your family it can cause divorce.”
Dick Lamm was in his second year of law school at Berkley when he heard “the clarion call to my generation.
"I've thought of this many times, I can see no harbinger of a political career until John F. Kennedy.”
Lamm had planned on a career as a lawyer and tax accountant but he started knocking doors for Kennedy.
“John F. Kennedy and that didn't make me want to be a politician but it seemed to me that the particular calling of my time was public policy. But I was just swept away by the idea that public policy could change things," he said.
Lamm describes his Republican father as politically uninvolved. He grew up in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, graduating from high school in Pittsburg.
"A crucial part of my life story is that I didn't make the football team and so what was I going to do with my manhood? So I decided to become an adventurer. I worked as a waiter at a fly-in lodge in Canada, I worked on ore boats and on a lumber camp in Oregon. I was a runner on New York Stock Exchange. These jobs made me a risk taker. Those experiences and the loneliness that came along with it was soul-building. Bismark said ‘success is the child of audacity' and I became audacious. Who I married, where I practiced, it all flowed from a capricious decision when I was 23-years-old. I was offered a job after I passed the California Bar, in Carmel. God you can't get any better than that but I had been stationed in Colorado in the Army.”
Lamm worked his way through the chairs of the local and state chapters of the Young Democrats and ran for the state legislature in 1966.
"Back in those days it was a crusade. It was civil rights. It was the women's movement. It was the war. It was all these things. These were heady times. We were gonna change the world!"
As a state legislator he didn't shy from hot button issues.
"Here I am a dumb freshman legislator. I didn't even know where the men’s room was but I became the chief sponsor of an abortion law. My Secretary at the Young Democrats was a beautiful young woman, Susie Barnes. She sat down and drafted the abortion bill and I took it to the legislative council and it was drafted into a bill on mental health, physical health, physical deformity, rape and incest. It's amazing how sometimes you push on a door you think is locked and suddenly it's open. This was 1966."
The bill passed, becoming the nation's abortion rights law.
"Because of the things I did in the legislature it confirmed for me that boy, if you want to change the world, you can change the world. I represented a Catholic district, so there's no reason that this isn't a career-ending action. But at that time I wasn't that invested in the legislature. Before I knew it I had 67 out of a hundred legislators as co-sponsors. It was just an atomic bomb. It was just one of these things that everything fell into place. We choreographed the hearings. It's amazing how many prominent women came up to me and said 'I've had an abortion.' We got a bunch of the clergy and a bunch of doctors on our side and it passed.
"This is the important thing: success is the child of audacity. I mean I was rewarded in those early years for things that other people would call, and they're probably right, 'politically stupid.' I saw that if you really believe in something and you put it forth, then things happen."
Because he was an accountant, Lamm was on the state audit committee. Colorado had won its bid to host the 1976 Olympics and Lamm, although an avid fan of the international sporting competition, saw a problem.
"I love the Olympics but they didn't have any idea what the costs were and they had no real plan. I started asking questions and I was being swatted away for being an unpatriotic legislator. The economic elite, the governor, the mayor of Denver and the Chamber of Commerce, (future Republican Governor) Vanderhoof played a role but (then Republican Governor) John Love went and made the pitch and I in the legislature voted to let the Olympics come to Colorado."
Smart growth was new thinking in the 1960s but for Lamm it was an idea that had been nurtured.
"My mother would drive around with two planned parenthood stickers on the back of her car. My mother was a Malthusian. She thought the world was going to explode, a population explosion. My mother was a very smart lady and she was really concerned about population and the environment and I was very much influenced by her feeling that the growth of population was not sustainable.”
Lamm's challenge to the Olympics was a matter of two things: first, Colorado was already one of the fastest growing states.
"And second of all they just didn't have the economics right. Montreal had lost a billion dollars hosting the Olympics and Sopporo, Japan had lost a billion and here we were, a little state and I just thought they were in way over their heads."
As it turned out, the citizens agreed and in the 1972 election a majority (60 percent) voted against allowing state funds to pay any of the tab.
"I was at victory party at Pat Schroeder's house and John Zappia, he's a big guy and grabs me and lifts me to the ceiling and a picture ended up in Time magazine and he says, 'ladies and gentlemen, the next governor of Colorado!' I don't want to say it didn't enter my mind - I guess it did - but all of the sudden while I was up there I looked around and saw that the same people that had just defeated the Olympics in a herculean effort - could elect me governor."
Lamm was 38 at the time and athletic. He represented a new Democratic Party, a party outside the smoke-filled rooms.
“We got a house in Vail for a weekend and said, ‘well, what can we do?’ The walk wasn't my idea, it was Laughton Childs' idea and I just copied it, but it felt right to me. I was very much active in land use and things like detergents in our water. I had captured the environmental community and (Democrat opponent) Tom Farley hadn't but he had captured the labor community.”
Lamm had a political infrastructure in place that had just defeated the Olympics and some Republicans were grateful for his efforts.
“They had put the luge runs up in Evergreen where all these Republicans lived and a lot of the cross country trails were across public property. Johnny Vanderhoof did this incredible statement where he said, ‘well we lied a bit.’”
Adding to the momentum were charges that the Nixon White House had broken into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel.
“It was not my political genius as a strategist, it was a group of people.”
People and a walk across Colorado.
“The press couldn't stay away from it. We went up to the Wyoming border, I took my two kids, seven and three and here's this caravan of press and I kissed my kids goodbye and started walking down to the New Mexico. It was an incredible personal experience.”
Campaign aid Eric Sondermann remembered handing out brochures that featured the citizens of Colorado more than the Democratic candidate.
“You know, I felt a deep connection with the people that I stayed with me. I was an intellectual snob up to that point. The act of campaigning was really enlightening to me and the wisdom of people, who wouldn't even have a high school degree in some cases.”
Democratic challenger Tom Farley was the House Minority Leader.
The night that I won the Primary, Farley came over and in front of my people handed me a hundred dollar check and wished me good luck and that had a lot to do with my winning because the Democratic party came together. I owe a lot to Tom Farley.”
His Republican opponent was sitting Governor John Vanderhoof.
“Johnny Van was a war hero. A P-38 pilot in second World War. He'd been shot down, rescued, he was a good guy but he was very conventional - what colorado was when I moved here. This was a place where the Republican party and the Episcopal church and the Chamber of Commerce would sit down with God every Thursday and they'd decide what's good for Colorado. Denver went from cow pies to computers in just one generation and that was my generation.”
Lamm has fleeting memory of the debates.
“I know I was pretty good, I made no horrible mistakes, I had been a lawyer, I was used to talking on my feet. When I came to Denver one of the first things I did was I went down and joined Toastmasters - they just forced you to think on your feet. I wanted to become a better lawyer, more articulate.”
“I knew things were going well but it had been a Republican state for so long. In a lot of eyes, I wasn't just a Democrat, I was a traitor to the state because of the Olympics. I had turned down Colorado's big opportunity to be on the international stage and how could anyone have the audacity, the shamelessness to run for office? To this day there's people that hate me for that.”
Shortly after the Primary unreported income served as an September Surprise.
“I had some stock in a natural resource company that my parents had given me that I had not reported. Somehow in all my busy life I had not reported it. I just went in front of the press and said ‘I screwed up.’
“What works in politics is getting special interest money to spend on media that sells you like a bar of soap. I hate it but it does work. I was overwhelmed by money on the other side but it was the walk that worked for me. I was the young Galahad. That plus Watergate. Let's never forget Watergate.
When would-be public servants seek his campaign advice he tells them that first they must make sure their family is behind them.
“Second of all, I'm 21 or 22 years old at Berkley studying for the CPA exam and studying to be high in my class in law school and I got an ulcer. I went to a doctor and the doctor said, ‘men like airplanes have ceilings beyond which they cannot operate.’ He said ‘start getting some exercise.’ I tell them make sure you're healthy so many people get wrapped up in their campaign. The walk was a wonderful cathartic thing. This thing will drive you crazy. Strive to build a program of exercise and build your family into this. I suggest to all people that they have one day every week with their family where you can just forget the whole thing.”
“I tell them that there's nothing that can screw you up better than getting a campaign donation - that so-called unreported thing. It was the first time my integrity had been challenged. In my experience, don’t run unless you're running for a reason, unless you really have the motivation to do something good in politics. Don't do it because it looks good on your obituary. It can affect your family it can cause divorce.”
