Edwin Edwards
Edwin Washington Edwards was an American politician who served as the U.S. representative for from 1965 to 1972 and as the 50th governor of Louisiana for four terms. A member of the Democratic Party, he served twice as many elected terms as any other Louisiana chief executive. He served a total of almost 16 years in gubernatorial office, which at 5,784 days is the sixth-longest such tenure in post-Constitutional U.S. history.
An influential figure in Louisiana politics, Edwards, who was dubbed the "very last of the line of New Deal Southern Democrats", was long dogged by charges of corruption. In 2001, he was found guilty of racketeering charges and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. Edwards began serving his sentence in October 2002 in Fort Worth, Texas, and was later transferred to the federal facility in Oakdale, Louisiana. He was released from federal prison in January 2011, having served eight years. He was also considered to be the last remnant of the political machine founded and led by Huey Long and Earl Long to serve as governor.
In 2014, Edwards again sought election to the U.S. House of Representatives, running to represent. He placed first in the jungle primary, but was defeated by Republican Garret Graves by nearly 25 percentage points in the runoff election, a sign of Edwards' precipitous decline in popularity due to his felony conviction, as well as the Republican Party of Louisiana's growing dominance over state politics.
Early life and career
Edwin Washington Edwards was born in rural Avoyelles Parish near Marksville on August 7, 1927. His father, Clarence Edwards, was a half-French Creole Presbyterian sharecropper, while his mother, the former Agnès Brouillette, was a French-speaking Catholic. Edwards' ancestors were among early Louisiana colonists from France who eventually settled in Avoyelles Parish, referred to as the original French Creoles. Like many 20th century politicians from Avoyelles, Edwards assumed that he had Cajun ancestry, when in fact he may have had none. His father was descended from a family in Kentucky that came to Louisiana during the American Civil War. His great-great-grandfather, William Edwards, was killed in Marksville at the beginning of the Civil War because of his pro-Union sentiment.The young Edwards had planned on a career as a preacher. As a young man, he did some preaching for the Marksville Church of the Nazarene. He served briefly in the U.S. Navy Air Corps near the end of World War II. After his return from the military, he graduated at the age of twenty-one from Louisiana State University Law Center and began practicing law in Crowley, the seat of Acadia Parish. He relocated there in 1949 after his sister, Audrey E. Isbell, who had moved there with her husband, told him there were few French-speaking attorneys in the southwestern Louisiana community.
Edwards entered politics through election to the Crowley City Council in 1954. He was a member of the Democratic Party which, in that era, had a monopoly on public offices in Louisiana, but which fell out of favor in the late 20th century. Edwards remained on the Crowley council until his election to the Louisiana State Senate in 1964; in that race he defeated, in a major political upset in the Democratic primary, the incumbent Bill Cleveland, a Crowley businessman who had served for twenty years in both houses of the Louisiana legislature. Years later as governor, Edwards appointed Cleveland's daughter, Willie Mae Fulkerson, a former member of the Crowley City Council, to the Louisiana Board of Prisons.
1971–1972 campaign for governor
In the election of 1971–1972, Edwards won the governorship after finishing first in a field of seventeen candidates in the Democratic primary, including the final race of former governor Jimmie Davis and Gillis Long, a relative of Huey Long. His greatest support came from southern Louisiana, particularly among its large numbers of Cajun, Creole, and African-American voters.Both Edwards and Johnston ran on reform-oriented platforms during the primary, but Edwards was more adept at making political deals and building alliances for the runoff round of voting. Edwards said that the major philosophical difference that he held with Johnston was in regard to their "awareness of problems of the poor". Johnston won the endorsement of Edwards' legislative colleague, Joe D. Waggonner of Bossier Parish, but the Shreveport state senator declined to accept Edwards' offer of a televised debate between the two.
Bill Dodd, who was defeated for state superintendent of education in the same election cycle that Edwards was winning the governorship in for the first time, attributed the Edwards victory in part to political kingmaker Louis J. Roussel Jr., of New Orleans. According to Dodd, Roussel "can do more than any other individual in Louisiana to elect any candidate he supports for any office in this state. ... He is such a good administrator and motivator that he can put together an organization that will win in business and in politics."
First two terms as governor, 1972–1980
Both in his political rhetoric and in his public persona, Edwards cast himself as a Louisiana populist in the tradition of Huey P. Long and Earl K. Long. He was inaugurated as governor on May 9, 1972. One of his first acts was to call for a constitutional convention to overhaul Louisiana's bulky charter.On taking office, Edwards hired J. Kelly Nix as his executive assistant and in 1974 elevated him to first executive assistant. In the second term, however, Nix left the administration to take office as the Louisiana state school superintendent. Dale Thorn, who had been Edwards' press secretary while he was in Congress, continued in that position for the first and most of the second Edwards terms. He was later associate commissioner of higher education for the Louisiana Board of Regents, and a journalism professor at Louisiana State University.
Under Edwards, Michael H. O'Keefe of New Orleans in 1976 was named president of the state Senate, an office that was held by the lieutenant governor prior to the implementation of the state Constitution of 1974. In 1983, as Edwards prepared to return to office, O'Keefe was engulfed in scandal and forced to resign as senate president. He was as replaced by Edwards loyalist Samuel B. Nunez Jr., of Chalmette in St. Bernard Parish. On the same day Edwards won election to a third term, O'Keefe lost his bid for a seventh term by a wide margin to state Rep. Ben Bagert. In 2013, O'Keefe was still serving time in prison for a 1999 conviction.
During his first two terms in office, Edwards developed a reputation for being one of the most colorful and flamboyant politicians in the history of a state known for its unorthodox political figures. Charismatic, well dressed, and quick with clever one-liners and retorts, Edwards maintained wide popularity.
Policies and achievements
After enduring three grueling rounds of voting in the 1971–1972 campaign, Edwards pushed a bill through the legislature that limited state elections to two rounds by having Democratic, Republican, and independent candidates run together on the same ballot in a nonpartisan blanket primary. Though the jungle primary system was intended to benefit Edwards' own political career, many observers cite it as being a major factor in the eventual rise of the state's Republican Party and the creation of a genuinely competitive two-party system. For this, Edwards was facetiously christened "father of Louisiana's Republican Party".William Denis Brown III, a lawyer and a state senator from Monroe, was Edwards's floor leader in the upper legislative chamber in the first term as governor. A native of Vicksburg, Mississippi reared on a plantation north of Lake Providence in East Carroll Parish, Brown was instrumental in drafting the Louisiana Mineral Code. Thereafter from 1980 to 1988, Brown was the chairman of the Louisiana Board of Ethics.
Early in the first gubernatorial term, Edwards initiated the creation of the first new Louisiana state constitution in more than a half century. He intended to replace the Constitution of 1921, an unwieldy and outmoded document burdened with hundreds of amendments. A constitutional convention was held in 1973; the resulting document was put into effect in 1975., the 1973 Constitution remains in effect. Edwards also undertook a major reorganization of the state government, abolishing over 80 state agencies and modeling the remaining structure after that of the federal government.
Edwards named State Representative J. Burton Angelle of Breaux Bridge as his director of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, a key appointment which Angelle filled for Edwards' first three terms of office.
Edwards' tenure in the 1970s coincided with a huge boom in the state's oil and gas industry after the gas pricing crisis of 1973. Edwards was able to greatly expand the state's oil revenues by basing severance taxes on a percentage of the price of each barrel rather than the former flat rate. This oil money fueled a massive increase in state spending, and Edwards was able to consistently balance the state budget due to the boom in oil revenue. Much of this increased spending went toward health and human services programs and increased funding for vocational-technical schools and higher education.
Edwards easily won reelection in 1975, with 750,107 votes. In second place was Democratic state senator Robert G. "Bob" Jones of Lake Charles, son of former governor Sam Houston Jones, with 292,220. Secretary of State Wade O. Martin Jr., ran third with 146,363. Thereafter, Jones and Martin became Republicans. Addison Roswell Thompson, the perennial segregationist candidate from New Orleans, made his last race for governor in the 1975 primary.
Early scandals
Though arguably minor compared to the Edwards scandals of the 1980s and 1990s, the governor was embroiled in several ethics controversies during his first two terms in office. At the time, Edwards was remarkably candid about his questionable practices. When questioned about receiving illegal campaign contributions, he replied that "It was illegal for them to give, but not for me to receive." He also insisted he saw no problem with investing in a proposed New Orleans office building called "One Edwards Square" while still governor, and demonstrated his gambling prowess to the press on one of his frequent gambling trips to Las Vegas. Later, Edwards' commissioner of administration Charles Roemerfather of future governor Buddy Roemer – was convicted of taking bribes and having connections with Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. Edwards managed to avoid direct implication in the Roemer case.During the governor's first term, a disaffected former Edwards bodyguard named Clyde Vidrine made several high-profile accusations of corruption, including the sale of state agency posts. The accusations were investigated by a grand jury, but the Edwards administration attacked Vidrine's credibility and the investigation stalled. Later, Vidrine published a tell-all book called Just Takin' Orders, which included salacious details of Edwards' frequent gambling trips and extramarital escapades. Vidrine was murdered in December 1986 by the husband of a woman he was guarding, who believed Vidrine was having an affair with his wife.
In a 1976 scandal known as Koreagate, it came to light that Edwards and his wife Elaine had received questionable gifts in 1971, while Edwards was a U.S. representative. South Korean rice broker Tongsun Park was under investigation for trying to bribe American legislators on behalf of the South Korean government, and for making millions of dollars in commissions on American purchases of South Korean rice. Edwards admitted that Park gave Elaine an envelope containing $10,000 in cash, but insisted that the gift was given out of friendship and that there was nothing improper about it. In the course of the controversy, Edwards stated that he thought it was "super moralistic" for the U.S. government to prohibit American businessmen to accept gifts from foreign officials in the course of their business dealings. The scandal also engulfed Edwards's former congressional colleague Otto Passman of Monroe, who was later acquitted of all charges in the case, but nonetheless was defeated in his 1976 re-election bid by Jerry Huckaby of Ringgold.