In his remarkable autobiography, "Who Owns America?" Hickel said that, as a youth...

I often asked my father why he did not buy a farm. He always answered by explaining the impossibility of borrowing money. Even as a boy I thought that there was something totally wrong. Dad was a good farmer, a successful one. I would say to Dad that there must be some way to get our own land, but apparently there wasn't any way. It finally dawned on me that we would never own the home we were living in. Somehow it could never be for sale--to us. This was a crushing realization to me. (p. 41)

That desire to own his own property, to take care of property that was "his," was a factor in his desire to skip college, leave Kansas, and explore the world. A Golden Gloves boxing champion in Kansas, Hickel was confident, and his initial desire was to go to Australia. When he learned that it would take weeks to get a passport and visa to go to Australia, he headed for Alaska instead. The steamship S.S. Yukon took him to Alaska in 1940, with just 37 cents in his pocket.

In 1968, Republican Governor Hickel had helped Richard Nixon become President. He received a phone call from President-elect Nixon over Thanksgiving in 1968. Nixon said:
"Wally, after great consideration, you are the one I have chosen to be Secretary of the Interior." Hickel wept after the phone call, knowing that he had to answer the call to service and leave Alaska for Washington, D.C.

As Secretary of the Interior, he was tough on oil companies who drilled offshore. He was known as a visionary. But Nixon fired Hickel 22 months into his term, because Hickel wrote Nixon a letter opposing the Vietnam War. Considering the fate that would befall the Nixon presidency, it was probably good fortune that he got fired and returned to Alaska. His "Faithfully Yours, Wally" letter to Nixon earned him a quick return to Alaska.

But his concerns about Vietnam were very real, and proved to be prophetic. After Kent State, Hickel was concerned that Nixon was losing a whole generation of young people.

To understand Hickel's showdown with President Nixon over Vietnam, you sort of have to know the Hickels. They don't back up. The Hickels are generous, funny, industrious and, like I say, they don't back up. Days before he was fired Hickel told Sixty Minutes that he would not quit under pressure. He said he would only go away "with an arrow in my heart, not a bullet in my back." That statement is the quintessential Hickel statement.

Ever since his childhood frustration of seeing his Dad be unable to borrow money, Hickel had an almost fanatical belief that high interest rates and "tight money" would ruin the USA. As a young man, Hickel knew nothing of the Populist Movement in Kansas in the 1890's, but it appears that his ideological bent was very much Populist. As he said in his autobiography:

Had I been born 50 years earlier, I almost certainly would have been an outspoken Populist. When I was born on August 18, 1919 in Claflin, Kansas, historians had not gotten around to assessing the very considerable influence of Populism on American politics, and as a small boy I would not have known what a Populist was. But the people's grievances which the Populists represented over a period of twenty years, when America was emerging from it's 19th century rural condition into a new century of technology, were very real to a Kansas boy in the early 1920's. Wartime prosperity was only a memory then, and farmers by and large never did share properly in the synthetic prosperity of the Coolidge years. (p. 39)

Hickel wrote that he understood the central issue of Populism to be the scarcity of "cash money." "Obviously there was a lot of money in existence, but it always seemed to be held by a few people," he wrote. Hickel was not talking about populism with a small "p", but the Populist Party, the "People's Party" that rocked Kansas and the nation in the 1890's. Had Hickel been born earlier, he may have been another "Sockless Jerry Simpson," or Mary Elizabeth Lease, lambasting the "Wall Street" bankers.

As a boy, Hickel had a vision that someday he "was going to own a string of houses that stetched as far as he could see across the Kansas flatland." But in the end, "poor" tenant farmers couldn't get loans. If his Dad had been able to own his own farm through borrowing money at low interest rates, and if Wally could have done the same, would he have ever left Kansas? Who knows, although the Dust Bowl conditions Hickel observed in the 1930's convinced him that Mother Nature was reacting to overcultivation, and he saw his dreams move elsewhere.

Kansas' loss was Alaska's gain, and Hickel transformed Alaska like no other leader in the state's history. Every time I have met someone from Alaska, I always ask them: "Do you know Wally Hickel?," and every one of them seemed to know him personally.

After my mom's death in 2002, my Dad was fortunate to eventually have the chance to date Wally's sister, Patty, a widow, whose husband, Dr. James "Bud" Degner had died years earlier in an airplane crash. My Dad and Patty got married in 2006. Patty is the best stepmom I could ever ask for. My three stepbrothers and one stepsister are all physicians: Chris Degner, Jamey Degner, Rex Degner, and Denise Degner Shaw. And suddenly, Wally Hickel went from being someone I admired a great deal, to my Dad's brother-in-law.

Walter Hickel had a remarkable life. He will be missed.