Life & Career

Richard Douglas Lamm was born Aug. 3, 1935, in Madison, Wis. He was raised in Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin, where he majored in accounting. But Lamm was not your average accounting student. Instead of spending summers crunching numbers at an office, Lamm worked as a lumberjack in Oregon, a stock-boy in New York, and even helped out on an ore boat. Lamm graduated from college in 1957, then served as a first lieutenant in the Army until 1958. From 1958-1960 Lamm held jobs as an accountant, tax clerk and a law clerk.

After graduating from University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lamm attended law school at the University of California, graduated in 1961, then moved to Denver in 1962, where he set up a law practice. Lamm took to the Colorado lifestyle, becoming an avid skier, mountain climber and hiker. He also took to Colorado politics. In 1964 he was elected to the Colorado House of Representatives as a Democrat. His constituency lived in an affluent district near the University of Denver. In the House, he made a name for himself as a strong defender of the environment and sponsored legislation that became the first liberalized abortion law in the country. (The law was passed in 1967, 5 years before the Supreme Court handed down Roe V. Wade. It made abortion legal in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity, or when the life of the mother was threatened.)

Politics

Dick Lamm was the personification of Colorado's shifting political environment; he was a young professional with a strong ideological bent. Lamm and other young Democrats, most of whom were not Colorado natives, were united in their opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. By the early 1970s, protecting the environment became the most popular issue in Colorado, and the Democrats led the fight to prevent over-development. There was also a movement in the Republican party toward hard-edge conservatism in the 1970s. Colorado politics once had a reputation of "bipartisan conservatism" in which neither party was particularly ideological.

A defining event in Lamm's political career took place in 1972, when he lead the referendum campaign to prevent the 1976 Winter Olympics from coming to Colorado. (Environmentalists opposed the new development the event would require, others opposed tax dollars being spent to build new facilities.) Lamm gained notoriety, which he parlayed into a successful bid for governor in 1974.

Lamm challenged Republican incumbent John Vanderhoof, a moderate former lieutenant governor who assumed the office in July 1973 when Gov. John Love became Secretary of Energy under President Nixon. Vanderhoof labeled Lamm an environmental extremist whose plan to halt all development would lead to widespread unemployment. Lamm countered that he supported controlling the rate of development, but was particularly interested in preventing the federal government from exploiting Colorado's coal and shale resources. Lamm defeated Vanderhoof, 54-46 percent.

Lamm held on to the governor's office for 12 years, longer than any other governor in Colorado's history. But it took Lamm a full term to learn how to effectively govern the state, and he won re-election 1978 only because his opponent's campaign was plagued with mistakes. But Lamm soon learned the ropes and became an extremely popular governor, even if the voters didn't necessarily share his rather dark vision of the future.

Governor Gloom

In 1984, Lamm was dubbed "Governor Gloom" for his statement that elderly people on life support systems "had a duty to die and get out of the way." (But he had been making dire speeches about the troubled future for years. Even his first inaugural address was somewhat dark.) Lamm has always been concerned about the future, and this led to his interest in issues that he saw as the most threatening to America's future: environment, immigration and entitlement reform.

Lamm's opponents say he is more than just gloomy, he is also cheap. As governor he often complained about the "financial sacrifices" he made leaving his prosperous law practice for full-time public service. The most famous instance of his frugality occurred in December 1983 when he and his family vacationed in San Francisco. Not wanting to pay for an expensive hotel, he went through a 'home swap' agency and, for a week, traded houses with an architect from San Francisco. The architect enjoyed the perks of the governor's mansion, such as a chauffeur and state chef-prepared meals. Political opponents and the press had a field day when the story broke.

"Man Of 1,000 Projects"

Being gloomy and penny-pinching did not make Lamm one of the nation's most popular governors, but he is, above all else, a man of ideas and energy. (Or, as T.R. Reid of The Washington Post called him, "the man of a thousand projects.")

Dick Lamm has authored six books on public policy -- mostly on immigration -- but also fiction. He has written countless academic and op-ed pieces, worked as a political analyst for a Colorado cable television program, and is a college professor. He has called himself "almost obsessive" and "Type-A," but says exercise helps him keep control and map out the best use of his time.

He has also admitted he liked the attention he received as governor, and worried leaving public office would lead to obscurity.

After leaving the governor's office, Lamm had many options. He wanted to make money (his children were about to attend college), but he thought practicing law would not allow him enough time to reflect and write. Lamm decided to take a job at the University of Denver's Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues. He is the director and a professor.

As the director of a think tank, Lamm has a platform to participate in the national debate, and enough time to continue his writing and keep his name in the ring for future political campaigns.

Run For The Senate

In 1990, state party leaders tried to get Lamm to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Tim Wirth, also a Democrat. Lamm declined, saying that the Senate was "nothing but a big head trip" that had "the illusion of power." By 1992 he apparently changed his mind and made a run for the U.S. Senate but suffered his first political defeat. Ben Nighthorse Campbell beat him in the Democratic primary and went on to win the seat. (Nighthorse Campbell later switched to the Republican party.)

Lamm says he schedules time in for his family, and his family seems almost as busy as he is. His wife, Dorothy ("Dottie") is active in Democratic politics and writes a popular, liberal-leaning column for the Denver Post. His daughter, Heather, shares her father's interest in generational politics. She graduated from Brown University in 1993 and since has worked for the Kerrey-Danforth Commission on Entitlements, a commission studying how to restructure Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. She also has worked for the deficit-hawk Concord Coalition, and has served on the board of Third Millennium -- a group advocating entitlement reform. Heather has appeared as a commentator on C-SPAN and CNN. Lamm also has a son, Scott, who was born in 1967.

Lamm's interest in national politics is not new. After he left the governor's office in 1986 he said, "National politics is a very tempting way to go ... Yes, I think about it." He has said he left the Democratic party because of its demagoguery on the Medicare issue during the budget debate of 1995-96 and because of the tight rein special interest groups, especially trial lawyers, now have on the party. When asked why he didn't become a Republican, he said special interests, such as the Christian Coalition, also control the GOP.