TRAVERSE CITY – Here’s a little story that may indicate why Bill Milliken, the longest-serving governor in Michigan history, came to be the most beloved leader the state ever had.
One night long after he left office, I was having dinner with him at a hotel in Traverse City, the city where he was born in 1922 and lived almost his entire life.
This was a man who had done more to protect Michigan’s environment and the Great Lakes than any governor ever had; who knew and served with four Presidents of the United States; a mild-mannered Republican who won the respect and admiration of that acerbic black Democrat, Detroit Mayor Coleman Young.
At one point, I told the server, a young woman who could have had no memory of him in politics, who he was and that he had been perhaps the greatest governor of her state.
“Well, I never heard of you,” she told him, and walked off.
Governor Milliken stared – and almost doubled over with laughter. How many politicians can you imagine doing that?
Not many, if any. William G. Milliken, who died Oct. 18 at 97, full of years and honor, could enjoy a joke at his own expense, because he knew who he was, knew what he stood for, and was completely comfortable in his own skin.
He was a man of impeccable integrity, whose word was his bond. “He’s sort of the North Star for grading public servants and guiding the public,” his biographer, Dave Dempsey, said, adding that Bill Milliken was “the standard by which a lot of us measure Michigan politics today and will continue to do so in the future.”
He had an amazing, “greatest generation” life, the son and grandson of state senators who owned the department store in his home town. He went to Yale, but then left when World War II began.
As a gunner on a B-24 bomber, he survived crash landings, bailouts, and 50 tough missions. He was repeatedly wounded.
He came home, finished Yale with classmate George H.W. Bush, and dreamed of public service. He had wanted to be governor since he was a boy, but first had to go save the family department store.
After his father died, he built it up and expanded it into a small chain. He went on to the state senate in 1960, then outwitted a rival supported by George Romney to become lieutenant governor.
Then, in 1969, Mr. Romney went to serve in Richard Nixon’s cabinet. Mr. Milliken, still an extremely boyish-looking 46, succeeded him. The experts thought he would be a temporary placeholder.
Instead, he went on to win three four-year-terms in his own right, by steadily increasing margins. He had opportunities to run for the U.S. Senate; some suggested him as a potential vice president.
He wasn’t interested. “I just wanted to be governor,” he told me later. When he was 60, he decided he’d served long enough.
He went home to Traverse City, became president of the Center for the Great Lakes and co-chaired the Michigan Land Use Leadership Council, and went on fighting for the things he believed.
William Milliken grew increasingly estranged from a Republican Party that was becoming more and more right-wing on social issues. He shocked his fellow Republicans by endorsing Democrat John Kerry for President in 2004.
His local Grand Traverse County GOP expelled Mr. Milliken from the party when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. But when I asked if he was tempted to leave the party, he said “No. I am just going to keeping trying to get them to come around.”
As governor, he made a few mistakes. It troubled him that he had signed the “650 Lifer” drug law that filled Michigan prisoners to overflowing without doing much to stop the illegal drug trade.
His administration also didn’t move fast enough to take control of the PBB poisoned cattle feed crisis in the mid-1970s, though that was partly the fault of a pigheaded agriculture official he hadn’t appointed and didn’t have the authority to remove.
But in the end, the state did the right thing, and though he may have been deserted by some grumbling farmers, he was reelected after that in a landslide. When it came to the environment, he more than made up for whatever slowness he showed on PBB.
No governor has ever done as much to protect the Great Lakes and wetlands. Mr. Milliken fought to enact strict regulations on phosphates in laundry detergents in 1977. He successfully pushed for some nation’s strongest wetlands protection laws two years later.
Most remarkably, he decided in the 1970s that you couldn’t have a prosperous Michigan without a vibrant Detroit – and pushed his fellow Republicans in the legislature to enact an “equity package” compensate Detroit for the costs of cultural institutions that benefited the entire region and the entire state.
Many of those in his own party resented it, and sneered that he had become the “ghetto governor.” Mr. Milliken, on the other hand, said “I think any policy … that attempts to write off blacks is not only morally wrong but politically stupid.”
Many years later, he told me how proud he was as an American when Barack and Michelle Obama were living in the White House.
But while partisan gridlock was the rule in the Obama years, when Bill Milliken was in power in Lansing, things got done.
“Governor Bill Milliken was a role model for decency and civility in politics – the gold standard,” said Jim Blanchard, the Democrat who became governor after him. “He also governed effectively in a bipartisan fashion, something unheard of today.”
“The best governor in at least a century,” said former Republican Congressman Joe Schwarz of Battle Creek.”
“I won’t argue with that,” said Frank Kelley, a Democrat who was Michigan’s attorney general all the years Mr. Milliken held office. “He was a man of his word, and yeah, I loved him.”
Try to imagine all that being said about anyone in politics today.
