In 1989, I was transitioning out of the ranch and evolving into my next incarnation, and I decided to run for state senate from Sublette County. Part of the reason I did that was because I had this absolutely exquisite ivory gavel that had two gold butts and a gold band around the middle. After my grandfather had created the county, he immediately ran for its senate seat. They gave him the gavel when he became president of the Wyoming senate. When my father became president of the senate, he had the gold band put in the middle of the gavel and had his name and dates inscribed there, leaving the other butt of the gavel blank. It led me to think that I had some kind of destiny to fulfill by getting my own name on there.
It was not a race in the usual sense of the term. President George H. W. Bush had appointed my close friend and political buddy John Turner, who had been the senator from Sublette and Teton counties, as the new director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. His senate seat was now vacant, and there was to be a caucus of all the precinct captains of Sublette County to appoint his successor.
There were a number of candidates, and I decided I would be one of them. If a freely confessed acidhead was ever going to get elected to the senate in the most conservative place in the non-Islamic world, I knew it would require an awful lot of glad-handing on the part of somebody who was also not afraid to take a drink. Because in Wyoming, that was really de rigueur.
One of the precinct captains at the caucus was a close friend of mine, a marine who had also been a SEAL and had been in combat ops in both Korea and Vietnam. We had spent a lot of time together, and it seemed to me that healing over what had happened in Vietnam had taken place in us. I really thought that we respected each other a lot.
In the middle of the proceeding, though, this little voice inside my head alerted me to the fact that something weird was about to happen. The guy I thought was my friend stood up rapier straight and denounced me as though he was Cicero and I was Catiline. Because of my anti-war position on Vietnam, he said, I was a traitor. People like me had lost that war for America. People like me had turned their backs on people like him.
There were at least fifty people there, and even though he had just given this incredibly denunciatory speech, I still lost by only one vote. I knew the guy they wound up choosing instead of me very well and the last I heard, he was still in the Wyoming senate leading a life little better than incarceration in a maximum security prison. But he was the kind of guy who liked that sort of thing.
When I found out what the results were, I was out in front of the courthouse with my old friend Alan Simpson. Alan looked at me and said, “One vote. That’s gotta mean something. That’s no accident.”
In fact, it was providential as shit. If I had received that vote, so many things that are the great milestones in my life, both good and bad, would never have happened. There would have been no Electronic Frontier Foundation. And I would still be married, I suspect.