DAVID E. SKAGGS. Born 1943.

TRANSCRIPT of OH 1704V

This interview was recorded on January 27, 2011, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program. The interviewer is Brandon Springer. The interview also is available in video format, filmed by Emily Shuster. The interview was transcribed by Diane Baron.

ABSTRACT: David Skaggs describes his own history leading up to becoming a member of the House of Representatives and some of the work he's been involved with since leaving public office. In the heart of the interview, he focuses on his interactions with Bill Cohen and Boulder Action for Soviet Jewry as well as his involvement with the Aleksandr Nikitin case, a Russian trial in which he participated as a member of the House of Representatives.

NOTE: The interviewer’s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets.

[A].

00:00 (Today is Thursday, January 27th, and my name is Brandon Springer. I'm interviewing David Skaggs, who is a former congressman who helped Boulder Action for Soviet Jewry advocate their cause internationally—as well as many, many other things. This interview is being recorded for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program and is being filmed by Emily Shuster.

So, David, my first question is when and where were you born?)

February 22nd, 1943, in Cincinnati, Ohio, but we were living in Kentucky across the river at the time.

(So, could you briefly tell us how you grew up and when you eventually came to Boulder, ?)

My family moved to the New York area when I was a little boy, baby really, and I grew up in and around —briefly in Queens, New York, then for all of my schooling years in Cranford, about 20 miles outside the city. I was a legal resident there until moving to Colorado but was not really living there while in college and law school and then for active duty in the Marine Corps.

I moved to Boulder because I had the good luck to visit Colorado on, actually, a dare from a girlfriend in the summer of 1962 and was about to go back to work for a Wall Street law firm after the Marine Corps and decided that life could be better in Colorado, so I moved out here in 1971.

David Skaggs Interview Page 1 (And was it better?)

Yes. Well, who knows? You know you can't control these experiments. I think so.

(Good to hear! So, tell me, when did you first meet Bill and Sara-Jane Cohen?)

My memory is that Bill and Sara-Jane started their law practice, Cohen and Cohen, maybe in '71 or '72, and they rented offices in the same building in what we then called the Woolworth Building in downtown Boulder at Pearl and Broadway. The firm I worked for was in the same building and we got to know each other, probably going to the restroom, I'm not quite sure.

(And how did your relationship with them evolve?)

Well, we had political sympathies that were nicely aligned, and then I'm also remembering—it may have been that Bill recruited me to be co-counsel with him in a law suit against Alex Hunter who was, at that time, the district attorney in Boulder County but also had an investment, I think, in some low income housing in Lafayette or Louisville, and there was a case that emerged out of that. I can't even remember the facts, Bill would know. So we worked together on that. And then, as I recall, did some work together on 's campaign for Congress in ’74 when I was essentially managing the campaign in Boulder County.

(And how did you get involved in the Wirth campaign?)

I was at the time the chairman of the Democratic Party for the Second Congressional District, so that naturally threw me into contact with Tim when he was first scouting out a race in '73.

(And so the Cohens were also working on the campaign?)

They did. I can't give you a play-by-play of exactly what they did and when they did it, but we were involved together.

(And what are some of your memories of the campaign?)

Well, it was a come-from-behind operation. People these days don't remember—not many do—that Boulder was a Republican city and county in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. And the Second Congressional District was as well. So Tim was trying to unseat a long-time incumbent, Don Brotzman. A very tough row to hoe, and ‘74 was notable, because in the summer Richard Nixon was impeached, and the Watergate matter finally reached its climax, and a lot of people who probably didn't have a prayer of winning, probably including Tim, won in November of '74. So that was kind of the background of a campaign that was a long shot to start with and then ultimately successful.

David Skaggs Interview Page 2 (And so we know that the Cohens had held a march for Soviet Jewry at about the same time, and Tim Wirth had been involved in that; he had marched with them. Do you have any memory of that?)

I don't, sorry.

05:14 (So Tim Wirth wins the election. What happens then for you?)

I took a leave from the law firm I was with and went to Washington to be Tim's administrative assistant. The title that was used in those days would now be called chief of staff. I had a wonderful couple of years working with and for Tim, managed his re- election campaign in 1976. I'm sure I had contact with Bill and Sara-Jane during those months and years, but I can't give you anything more concrete, I'm afraid.

It certainly was a great education and training for me in politics and in Congress to be Tim's right-hand going through his first term and doing a lot of important reform work in Congress and elsewhere.

(What kind of reform work?)

Tim was the leader, maybe just one of the leaders, of the effort that was launched after the '74 election by the newly elected Democrats to really, not quite do away with, but undo the usual seniority system that had really dominated House practice and committee chair selection for ages. So for the first time, committee chairs were not just sort of migrated by seniority through the ranks to chairmanship if they lived long enough and got re-elected enough times. But instead, chairmanships were elected by the full Democratic caucus, which meant that junior members and more reform-minded members had a chance to really hold their committee leadership accountable. Tim was involved in a number of other things: telecommunications, energy, but I think the seniority system upheaval was probably the most important thing to mention.

[pause in recording]

(So how long did you serve with Tim Wirth in Congress?)

I was his AA—chief of staff—for his first term and briefly into his second term in 1977. I stuck around to help him hire my replacement, but at the time I was adamant with Tim that I didn't want to get sucked into a career in Washington and wanted to get back to Boulder.

(And you did?)

And I did, briefly.

(So Tim Wirth decides to run for Senate, correct?)

David Skaggs Interview Page 3 Correct. Which was because Gary Hart decided to run for President.

(Which didn't turn out so well. But did you work on his campaign as he ran for Senate?)

No, I was busy running for Congress in 1986 so I had my hands full. Again, the complexion of Boulder had changed markedly in the intervening years, but Tim had barely survived re-election in 1984, I was running against the guy who almost beat him in '84 when I ran in '86, and was the underdog until the very end and was able to squeak out a win with a little less than 50% of the vote.

(And what had prompted you to run for that seat?)

I think any explanation that any politician gives for why they run for office is inherently flawed, including mine. I found the ability to work on important public policy at the state level—I was in the state legislature until then—and the prospect of doing it nationally was pretty intriguing. It's a cool job, right? [chuckles] You know, you don't do this without some modicum of ambition. But I really credit Tim for a lot of this, because it really was the experience seeing first-hand what one could do as a member of the House of Representatives if you worked at it. That seemed to make it a worthwhile thing to give a try. So I did and squeaked out the win.

(And that was in 1986?)

Right.

09:45 (Now Boulder Action for Soviet Jewry had started in 1987, and before that they had been working on various things. And you had helped them in Congress?)

I did. I can't place the timing exactly of when I became aware of their work and was enlisted to lend a hand.

(And what sorts of things did you end up helping them with?)

Well, I think before the Aleksandr Nikitin case, which we'll talk about in a while I think, there were just very specific persons of interest that the committee focused on and asked members of Congress to take various steps in behalf of, so that could be writing to the Soviet ambassador, generally signing on expressions of support of one kind or another. I forget exactly when it transitioned into a fairly determined effort to get these cases to be attended to by high level Administration officials so that when there were negotiations and meetings going on between the vice-president or the president and Soviet officials that these cases would be on the agenda.

(What sorts of things did you specifically work on?)

I'm sort of patching this together, because my memory of it isn't as concrete as you would like it to be, but what I recall, again short of the Nikitin case, which was a much more

David Skaggs Interview Page 4 long terms and serious effort personally for me, it was really the letter-writing, sending "Dear Colleagues" around, meeting with Bill and others to hear about these cases, trying to get the administration to pay attention. You know, I do recall, but I think it was a Nikitin related meeting that we actually got the Soviet ambassador to come up and meet with members of the House so that it wasn't just a "paper" kind of protest.

(And do you recall that meeting?)

I recall that it happened. Again, I'm not—I think it was a "Nikitin-centric" meeting, but it may have been about the more generic problem of Soviet Jewry and the need for exit visas and all of that associated kind of concern.

(One of the more specific and bigger cases that BASJ worked on and advocated for was that of Naum Meiman—)

Yes, I remember that.

(And you were the one who distributed a "Dear Colleague" letter through the House?)

I think that I was also right, and I'm slightly embarrassed not to have—you've had a chance to look at the papers, right? And I haven't tried to refresh my memory and my records are all at the library at CU, so I trust your having checked that out. And I got to meet him when he got here!

(And do you remember that meeting?)

I do. I mean, I remember meeting him. I can't give you exactly when, where and what, but yes. And it was a treat to see the positive outcome of the work.

Bill, as you probably have experienced, is an enormously persuasive and diligent and determined advocate. And I was an old friend, and I was his congressman, and, you know, when Bill came to ask me to do things, unless there was some reason not to, which I can't remember there ever being, I took instructions from Cohen on this stuff. [chuckles] A little bit of an exaggeration, obviously. We were careful that we were doing something that was appropriate for a member of Congress and other members of Congress to be involved in. But Bill, also, had done his homework and really laid out a rationale for why this was really important for the United States and for the Congress to be involved with.

It was also an appealing proposition for—not that I was soft on defense, I don't believe— but it was nice opportunity to have a different kind of way of dealing with our overall set of concerns in the Soviet Union. Other than just looking at, you know, the military to military dynamic of the relationship and taking advantage of the decision that—I forget who was the leader in the Soviet Union at the time—that they signed on to the Helsinki accords and really gave us a leverage point for going after these issues.

15:23 (So then, Bill Cohen is really your connection to the Soviet Jewry movement?)

David Skaggs Interview Page 5

Right.

(When did the Nikitin case—you mentioned the Nikitin case—Aleksandr Nikitin—come up, and could you explain how you got involved in that?)

[Explanatory note on the Aleksandr Nikitin case (source: Wikipedia): “Aleksandr Nikitin, a Russian former submarine officer and nuclear safety inspector turned environmentalist, started to co-operate with Norwegian environmental Bellona Foundation in 1994. He was arrested in February 1996 by Russian FSB and charged with treason through espionage for his contributions to a Bellona report on the nuclear safety within the Russian Northern Fleet. After having spent 10 months in pre-trial detention in Saint Petersburg he was released on the order of Mikhail Katushev, the then deputy Russian Prosecutor General, in December 1996. The charges were however, not dropped. Nikitin first stood trial in October 1998, when the St. Petersburg City Court rejected the evidence against him. But rather than acquitting him, the Court sent the case back to the FSB for additional investigation. The Supreme Court confirmed this decision in February 1999, and the FSB filed new charges in July 1999. The second trial started at the St. Petersburg City Court in November 1999, and ended on December 29 with a full acquittal. The prosecution appealed to the Supreme Court, but the acquittal was confirmed and reached legal force on April 17, 2000.”]

Bill and I had also worked together on Rocky Flats matters, and of course, Nikitin's case came out of the fact that he, in his work for the Bellona Foundation had been instrumental in putting together information—he didn't release it, it was in the public record already in various forms—in putting together information about the nuclear waste dangers and other problems associated with the Northern Fleet nuclear powered vessels in the Soviet, and then the Russian Navy.

He [Nikitin] was arrested and charged in that case—a clear violation of sort of ex-post- facto requirements for rule of law. And although it was not—I don't know what Nikitin's faith is, but I don't believe he's a Jew, so I don't think—I don’t really remember how Bill became particularly interested in the Nikitin matter, but he brought it to my attention, and it was a compelling case that really resonated with the work that had been going on by Tim and me and hundreds of others dealing with the eventual closure of the Rocky Flats plant south of Boulder.

Bill believed, and we did some investigation to confirm the fact—and also Bellona then had a staff person in Washington that we were dealing—all seemed to point to the potential good effect of having real attention paid to this case by Congress. So, again, there were letters—"Dear Colleagues"—sent to other members, letters signed by the members to, I think, both Soviet officials and—we were successful in getting this on the agenda for what were the Gore-Chernomyrdin meetings that had become a kind of hallmark effort of the new relationship between the U.S. and now Russia, not the Soviet Union, to work through a whole bunch of problems. Vice-President Gore accepted

David Skaggs Interview Page 6 putting this matter on his agenda for a Chernomyrdin meeting. I can't give you a date on that, but I'm sure it's in the record.

As the Nikitin case was moving toward trial, folks thought it would be useful actually for there to be a U.S. Congressperson observer over there. So I went over there the first time while still in office. I wish I could remember dates better at this point, but I think it was in 1998, I was no longer running for office and had decided to retire, and then went over a couple more times after leaving office again to maintain the pressure and attention that having a member, or a former member, of the U.S. House attend the trial and other hearings and meetings with prosecutors and others in the Russian hierarchy in St. Petersburg.

19:34 (And so what are your memories of those trips?)

It was a very serious, purposeful undertaking. It was startling to me as a Western-trained lawyer to encounter what was still sort of the residues—and I don't know that they've been eliminated even today, but certainly then—of a court system that was making some preliminary move toward independence but hadn't quite gotten there yet.

I'm trying to remember the name of the judge, Golatz, I think, was the trial judge who, because of the verdict ultimately, took the then still pretty courageous step of deciding the case on the merits and not under pressure from the FSB [Federal Security Service in the Russian Federation] or prosecutorial authorities.

The funniest memory I have, given that Nikitin was a submarine officer and the case circled primarily around the nuclear-powered submarine fleet in the north, was that I went to the courthouse one day—I can't remember whether it was the first or second trip there—but went to the trial court to actually introduce myself to the judge, because I thought having him know that I was there, if I could make my introduction appropriately, would be a useful marker to put down. And he actually was in his chambers and he—I couldn't have told by looking at it, but I believe he acknowledged that he was playing a video game having to do with submarine warfare, [laughter] which seems like, you know, a really remarkable coincidence given the nature of the case.

(And what was his reaction to you, an American statesman?)

He was very gracious as I recall. I was grateful that he would greet me, didn't seem to be put out by the fact that I was there doing what I was doing, so it was no big deal.

(Was that common among the Soviets that you met while you were there?)

That I was no big deal? [laughter] It depended. You know I met with the chief prosecutor for the St. Petersburg district. That was a very stilted and formal occasion and I think the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg had been instrumental in getting that meeting set up, and it seemed to me to be one in which this man had been told it would be a good

David Skaggs Interview Page 7 thing to meet with me, but he was not particularly interested in engaging on the merits of the case.

(And what was your impression of the atmosphere in the Soviet Union at that time?)

Russia.

(Yes, Russia. Excuse me.)

Well, this was tough times in Russia and certainly in St. Petersburg—you know: currency fluctuations, a lot of poverty. My house out in Boulder, in Niwot, has a number of paintings that I purchased on the street in front of the major church on Nevsky Prospekt, the main drag in St. Petersburg, because artists—you know it's an art-centered city in many respects—painters were unable to sell their paintings and were willing to make very agreeable, from a Westerner's point of view, deals. So I got—but anyway, there was that sense of a very cultured but frayed city and economy. A proud city, a beautiful city, a both hopeful and disappointed environment because of the hopefulness that came out of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the new openness and yet a feeling that things hadn't really gone quite as they should have yet. I can't recall exactly where we were in the takeover of so much of the previously state-owned industry by the oligarchs, but there certainly was a sense of opportunities slipping through their fingers as far as a real broadening of the economy and the democracy.

24:51 (You had mentioned the FSB earlier. Could you explain who the FSB are and then what your impressions of them and their role in the Russian state?)

Well, this was sort of the domestic security police, the successor to the KGB and they had been the police instrumentality that had brought the case against Nikitin or prepared the case that was prosecuted against Nikitin. I don't know that I had any direct connection with anybody from the FSB. They might not have told me if I had. But what was evident then was that the pretension to any rule of law or compliance with basic notions of due process were largely overlooked.

(In what ways?)

Well, the fundamental proposition in Nikitin which was the application to conduct of his that had occurred some years before of, as I recall, a fairly ambiguously-worded statute about disclosure of state secrets. One was its retroactive application to what he had done, and even more perplexing was the fact that what were claimed to be state secrets at the time had been in open sources for years, and so whatever he'd done, he hadn't disclosed state secrets. So, for somebody coming out of our culture, there was a kind of "through the looking glass" unreality to how do you get your mind and arms around a legal system that is able to create its own rules for the convenience of the state.

(And what had the FSB done with Nikitin?)

David Skaggs Interview Page 8 As far as I know, they had been the agents that had tried to repackage the facts in his case in a contrived way to fit within the state secrets disclosure statute that he was prosecuted under. You know, I'm not really informed about all that may have gone on other than that they were the police agency that brought the case.

(Was disclosure of state secrets a common thing to be prosecuting in the early years of the—?)

I seem to recall that there were a couple of other similar high profile cases more or less at the same time period, but I don't know if it was a generalized way of getting at people that were—from the State's point of view—out of line.

(But then the Nikitin case turned out well? For Nikitin.)

After several iterations, right. It went up on appeal and it was, as I recall, a favorable decision upholding the trial court's acquittal. But under their system, opening it up for reprosecution which was initially in the works. I can't—I’m thinking—because I went back for that occasion—what actually happened in the end? Maybe you've looked into it and you can remind me, you know, whether the case was dropped finally under continued attention and pressure, whether the trial court when charged with retrying the case, basically ditched it? I think that's what happened, but I'm fuzzy.

(And did you meet Nikitin after that?)

Well I met him there. I met him on those occasions certainly. And I was on a task force that Bill Richardson—who was Secretary of Energy in the second Clinton administration—he constituted a group of which I was a member, that went in to look at securing Russian fissile materials. Anyway, we had occasion to go back to St. Petersbur,g and I got to see Aleksandr [Nikitin] then without having a trial looming.

Then he came as a fellow to the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington early in the last decade, 2003 maybe, I forget. So he was a fellow at Woodrow Wilson and I was able to have him out to my home for dinner and some vodka. Sue Hardesty, who was one of my congressional staffers who had worked very diligently and passionately on the Nikitin case, was able to join us and get to meet Aleksandr as well. So it was a quite warm and affectionate and joyful opportunity to see him in a very different circumstance.

30:44 (So tell us a little bit about what he was like during the trial and then how he changed once you saw him again afterwards.)

I think, other than maybe a broader smile and a more relaxed demeanor, there wasn't a whole lot of change. He was just a stand-up kind of guy and in a way stolid and unflinching during the prolonged prosecution and legal proceedings. He always seemed to have a sense of balance and perspective, and he was doing the right thing, and clearly was a brave individual for being willing to do what he did and to have years of his life consumed with defending a righteous decision.

David Skaggs Interview Page 9

I think he was pleased when he had a chance to visit me at my home and meet Sue and my wife and kids. It was just a very different environment than the sort of barren courtroom in St. Petersburg with peeling paint.

(So do you have anything else about the Nikitin case you would like to talk about?)

No. I'm enormously grateful to Bill [Cohen] for having gotten me interested and involved in it because it was a very meaningful thing for me to be able to help. I’ve never been taken with the self-importance of [being] a member of the House of Representatives, although others, I’m sure, would say I was, from time to—. Anyway, you’re one of 435, we come and go—you know, no big deal. But it made a difference to have one of us—it happened to be me—over there for these proceedings, and it had an impact, and people paid attention in a way that it might not otherwise have, so I was gratified to be able to carry the American flag, if you will, in a way that maybe caused this to turn out a little bit better.

(So, moving a little bit backwards to Soviet Jews, Naum Meiman was released from the Soviet Union in 1988. Had you continued to do work for Soviet Jews, and after that for Russian Jews after the Soviet Union sort of dissolved, the post-Soviet Jews?)

I did, but it is the blessing and the bane of congressional life that you're doing a lot of things all the time, and so without going back and looking at records, I couldn't really give you a good idea of all that we were doing in 1988 versus 1995 versus '98.

Somewhere in there that problem largely went away because the restrictions on exit visas were lifted and the problem was a matter of history not current affairs. Maybe you can remember when that happened, but clearly things got better.

You know, Bill, again, was overly generous in crediting the work that me and my office did on all of this. Let's say we were willing accomplices with Bill on a good cause.

34:58 (So then during this period—you had mentioned a lot of the "Dear Colleague" letters—I'm curious first, was there any sort of struggle in getting people to sign those and also what was your—in relation to other congressmen and senators—what was your level of involvement?)

I think probably a whole range of levels of attention and involvement by actual members and senators. A lot of this work gets done at the staff level. There were, I think, a handful of people in the House really known for their human rights work. I was not one of those. I mean I was glad to do some serious work and hope that it made a difference, but Frank Wolf and Chris Smith and Tom Lantos and several others were really the key people in the human rights efforts members of the House. The nice thing about this was that it also provided an issue and an area of work that didn't know partisan boundaries, so Republicans and Democrats were able to make common cause in a way that I think everybody was glad to have, because so much of the business of the place is divisive.

David Skaggs Interview Page 10

(And why do you think it was such a non-divisive issue?)

Because I think it appealed to our fundamental American values and there is always, I think, a hunger for some opportunity to stand together as Americans and as American politicians without regard to party labeling, so this was a nice occasion for that to happen. I think that people found that appealing as well as the compelling nature of the human rights violations that we were trying to deal with.

(Are there any other memories or stories of working with Soviet Jews or meeting Soviet Jews or meeting other Soviet refugees that you'd like to impart?)

There have been other folks that have migrated to Boulder that I've met back in the '90s. I can't give you a recitation of names and occasions but it was gratifying, again under the auspices of Bill [Cohen] and other of his colleagues in the community, to see the positive results of a lot of hard work.

And you're too young, if I can say this, to appreciate as fully and as viscerally as those of us who grew up in the Cold War years—you know, seeing the Wall come down in the fall of '89 was absolutely a miracle. I went over, again with Bill Richardson, on a congressional delegation under the Helsinki Commission work to monitor the East German elections in the spring of 1990. These were things that we would never have dreamed were possible when I was your age and growing up in what seemed like a permanent state of affairs between East and West. So getting to play even a minor role in facilitating the transition was wonderful and another time when you realize, for me anyway—you know, I happened to be in office at the time this was happening, but it was really a crusade that good people in the U.S. and in the West had been working on for, at that point, forty-some years. So, I just happened to be there when the good stuff happened.

39:41 (How long did you serve as a U.S. Congressman?)

Twelve years.

(So that would mean you were there until 1998?)

Technically you leave office in January of 1999 in my case, so yeah.

(And what did you do after that?)

I started a center for Democracy and Citizenship, a little non-profit operation that was affiliated with the Aspen Institute in its D.C. offices and then moved a few years later to another home—it’s something called the Council for Excellence in Government—but this was an effort to get at some of the root causes, as I had experienced them as an elected official, in the fragility of American democracy and our attention to our own democratic system and the problems that come from neglecting civic education, getting young people

David Skaggs Interview Page 11 involved in politics. It was a chance to kind of work on those public policy issues from the outside, having experienced some of the—what’s the right word? The gradual, incremental lowering of the vitality of our own democracy over the years and realizing that that needs attention all the time.

And I did some lawyering and some teaching at the University of Colorado.

(What did you teach?)

A little bit of constitutional law at the Law School and political science.

(And how did you get to where you are now?)

Well, in 2004—my wife and I had always wanted to get back home to Colorado even though we stuck around Washington for while after Congress and had bought a piece of property up north of Niwot, and finally the kids were grown and married and so on, and we decided it was time to come home, which we did in 2006. Governor Ritter was elected in the fall of '06 and unexpectedly asked me if I would be willing to head up the Department of Higher Education. So I did that for three years, ending a year and a half or so ago.

I ended up being affiliated here with this law firm about a year ago and have maintained a couple of different involvements in the federal government. So I have been chair and now co-chair of something called the Office of Congressional Ethics that set up to help the House of Representatives adhere more truly to its code of ethics.

Also I'm a board member of something called the Public Interest Declassification Board, which is about what it sounds like it would be about, dealing with how we get classified information out into the public domain.

(Well, we've covered a few decades worth of history, so is there anything else you'd like to go back and touch on, any other stories that you'd like to relate?)

Oh, I think probably for your purposes and for my afternoon timeline, have done okay. If you're satisfied, I am.

(I'm satisfied.)

Okay.

(Thank you so much.)

Thank you.

43:49 [End of Tape A. End of Interview.]

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