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Interview with J. Michael Pichette, May 5, 2005

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Interview with J. Michael Pichette, May 5, 2005 Archives and Special Collections Mansfield Library, University of Montana Missoula MT 59812-9936 Email: [email protected] Telephone: (406) 243-2053 This transcript represents the nearly verbatim record of an unrehearsed interview. Please bear in mind that you are reading the spoken word rather than the written word. Oral History Number: 396-022 Interviewee: J. Michael Pichette Interviewer: Bob Brown Date of Interview: May 5, 2005 Project: Bob Brown Oral History Collection Opinions expressed are those o f the interviewee and not Northwestern Energy. Bob Brown: We're visiting today with Mike Pichette on the fifth of May, 2005 in his offices in Helena. Mike works for the Northwestern Corporation, but he's also worked for Montana Power Company and as the executive director of the Democratic Party in Montana, for Congressman Arnold Olsen, for Senator John Melcher, and Governor Ted Schwinden. He has a long history spanning decades of involvement in public service and politics in the state of Montana. Mike, what got you interested in following a career of public service and involvement in politics? J. Michael Pichette: I guess at the very beginning it was a political family I came into in Great Falls and my high school years. One uncle was an elected official for the city, the treasurer. Another uncle had been deeply involved in politics through his life and worked for the Public Service Commission. So I listened to a lot and we became involved in minor elections to some extent. So I had that background. Didn't intend to be in politics as a career at any point until the spring of 1970. I was returning home to Great Falls from Peace Corps service in Brazil and decided to visit a few friends in Washington, D.C. Walking around the capitol, I spotted Arnold Olsen, who was a congressman from Montana. I thought, "Well heck, I'm a Montana kid. I can go up and talk to my congressman." So I went up and introduced myself and that was it as far as I was concerned. Except when he found out I was from Great Falls, he said, "Well my secretary is from Great Falls, up in my office. She never sees anybody from Great Falls. Go up and talk to her." I said, "I don't know who she is." He insisted, so I went up to meet her and in the course of standing there met his executive assistant, who wanted to talk for a while, and it resulted in a phone call a month later saying, "Would you like to come back and go to work in Washington for Arnold Olsen?" That started a series of job moves that have just led to where we are now, just because we ran into each other in the basement of the capitol. BB: You know, Mike, I remember you were an outstanding high school student and you were elected to become a delegate to Montana Boys' State and then the Boys Staters elected you to Boys' Nation. You were there in the same Boys' Nation class with President Bill Clinton. I believe you met him, didn't you? MP: didn't realize that until Governor Clinton was running for president and when he used commercials showing footage from Boys' Nation, I recognized that it had to be the same time, even though I was a year older than he was. The way the Montana Boys' State program worked is that you went a year late instead of the same summer. So yes, it turns out we were there. I 1 J. Michael Pichette Interview, OH 396-022, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. don't remember meeting him at Boys' Nation, but we did exchange Christmas cards, which I subsequently found in my files. BB: Well that's exciting and interesting and it shows that you were interested in politics also, even as a high school person. MP: That's true. BB: So you went to work for Congressman Olsen, lived back in Washington, D.C. How would you describe Congressman Olsen? MP: I thought first off that he was a great gentleman and he was treated that way by others that came into the office and people who talked about him. He seemed to be very confident about what he was going to do in terms of legislation and voting. He didn't need to sit around and talk to anybody and think it out ahead of time with staff. Of course, I would have been a junior staff member and he might not have chosen to, but those days the congressional staffs were smaller. There were only probably eight or nine of us on the whole staff. I think it would be generally noted that he was in the shadow of the giants of Montana politics at the time he served—Mansfield and Metcalf—and followed their lead probably in a lot of things that went on in Congress. He seemed to me to be a perfectly great guy to work fo r—heart in the right place and doing his job. But 1970, when I joined in the spring, turned out to be the year that he got beat after serving ten years and so I didn't have a long history with his office. It was about nine or ten months. BB: That was regarded as somewhat of an upset too, wasn't it? MP: Quite a great upset. Mayor Shoup from Missoula had been the candidate running against him. I remember on the morning after the election I came into the office and the staff said, "Well, Arnold's two thousand votes behind but we think he's still going to pull it out," but of course, that didn't happen. He lost the election and tried again to return but never made it back. BB: Was there an issue, what happened? Was he just over-confident? MP: The only issue I can recall Arnold himself mentioning afterwards was a gun control measure that was in the congress that year which Mike Mansfield—also on the ticket in that election—had supported for his own good reasons. Arnold had gone along in the House on the same issue and he thought that while Mike's stature was enough to carry him through that controversy that the vote for Arnold was too much. BB: Yes, could be. Now he served on the Post Office and Civil Service Committee, I think, didn't he? 2 J. Michael Pichette Interview, OH 396-022, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. MP: Right. BB: And was that his only committee? MP: Boy, I'd have to just go check a directory. That's the only one I remember. BB: You remember issues he was particularly involved in? MP: No, I don't because it seemed my assignments didn't involve working on legislation with anyone. The occasional lobbyist would come to the office and I'd visit with them about their issues, but I don't recall him having a big program going on that year, so no, I don't know. BB: So then you returned to Montana and went to work for the Democratic Party? MP: No, I started in the fall o f'71 for the Superintendent of Public Instruction Dolores Colburg, working in her office in the research and planning department. I did have a degree in education from college and I had intended—except for that chance meeting in Washington—to come back to Great Falls and look for a teaching job, which I've never actually done. My mother, until her death, insisted that I had pretty much wasted my education and maybe not quite my life by never teaching, which she wanted me to do. In the course of working for Dolores, she asked me to be her campaign manager when she ran for reelection in '72, so that was the next step into the political world that pretty much kept me on track since. BB: And you had no real background as a political campaign manager but you were just a young guy, politically savvy and interested and so she... MP: Willing to do the work and she was a strong candidate that was going to be re-elected and basically didn't need a savvy campaign manager, just needed someone to do work. BB: So you were in her office for several years, then? MP: Until spring o f'74, when I was offered the chance to be the then-executive secretary, now executive director, of the Montana Democratic Party. BB: I see. Now Dolores Colburg I think went on to serve as a faculty member at Harvard, didn't she? MP: I think so. She went back to Maine after her term and spent time there and studied some more and then taught back in the New England area. BB: And so then you, in '74, which was a great landslide year for Democrats, you were the party's executive secretary during that election. Did you take credit for the massive Democratic victory? 3 J. Michael Pichette Interview, OH 396-022, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. MP: I gave more credit to Watergate. BB: You couldn't have done it without Nixon, huh? [Laughs] MP: Right. But the result of that election was stupendous in terms of change. The Democrats ended up with sixty seven members of the Montana House and thirty members of the Montana Senate, which is a two-thirds vote in one and strong control in the other, which made for pretty heady times in the '75 Legislature for the members that had such a large majority and felt they could do what they wanted.
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