- [Reporter] Newspaper publisher, Steve Peck wrote this about the late Senator Mike Enzi, "He simply was not part of the hate machine that defines national politics now.

What Enzi did, for 24 years in the Senate, was get busy, stay busy, become informed, work to build consensus and pass legislation."

My interview with the late Senator Mike Enzi next on "Wyoming Chronicle".

(somber music) (upbeat orchestral music) - [Narrator] This program was funded in part by a grant for Newman's Own Foundation working to nourish the common good by donating all profits from Newman's own food and beverage products to charitable organizations that seek to make the world a better place.

More information is available at Newman'sownfoundation.org.

Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities.

Thinkwy.org and by the members of the Wyoming PBS foundation.

Thank you for your support.

- And as we begin this special Wyoming Chronicle, it's my honor to be joined by Senator Mike Enzi.

Senator, thank you for taking the time to visit with us today.

- I'm looking forward to the interview.

- So are we, and we're in your office here in Gillette.

I think the most appropriate question to begin with is how's retirement.

- It's absolutely delightful.

I didn't realize the amount of strain that a person's under when they're serving, just the trip back and forth from Washington to Wyoming plus the 500 miles a weekend around Wyoming is more of a strain than I realized.

It's very nice to have the extra time and not have to travel and to be around Wyoming people all the time.

- Well, we're certainly glad that you're here too and congratulations on such a wonderful life of service almost 50 years Senator.

(laughing) It seems like a long time.

- Yeah, I always think of it segments rather than as a whole.

It's much easier that way than a delightful adventure, I've gotten to meet so many tremendous people.

I've gotten a fantastic education.

Everything that I've ever worked on has been an education for me because I really didn't know as much as I should have to be able to handle the situation but I've also been lucky in that I've had some good people to work with.

I've never had anybody work for me.

I've only had them work with me and I was able to find tremendous groups of people to help me out through all of the different things that I've done whether it was being mayor, being in the legislature now in the United States Senate.

But of course the biggest help that I had was having somebody say yes to my request to marry.

(laughs) And she has been with me now for over 51 years, almost 52 years, and just been a tremendous help mate and actually does the bulk of the work and I get the bulk of the credit.

- And you're talking of course, about your wife, Diana.

- Yes, Diana.

- She's innovative in her own right.

And then the number of spectacular things helping out in other countries to remove landmines and showing people how homeless shelters can work better.

And just a whole variety of things that she's worked with as she's even adopted another community in DC that have nothing to do with Congress that she's been helping out with and getting to know and learning from.

- I wanna start by visiting about what Senator McConnell said about you.

As he was saying goodbye in the Senate, he said this he said, "The senior Senator from Wyoming "has accomplished enough in one career to fill two.

"He has seemingly glided from business success "to military service, to local government, "to state politics, to the United States Senate, "where he has built a remarkable, "productive legislative record."

Senator you've passed over 100 bills that in today's world, that seems almost incomprehensible.

It really does - Well, it is because things have changed so much.

We used to be able to work across the aisle a lot more and we did build a step at a time.

Now everything has to be comprehensive.

If you tackle a problem, you've got to cover the whole thing.

And so it's like 3000 pages in the bill.

Who can read 3000 pages comfortably.

And if you do find some things and you always find some things you'd like to correct, you can't correct them because the process is so cumbersome on doing it on the floor that it can't be done.

So you either have to accept it or not.

And most of the things don't get accepted, but if you bite it off a step at a time, you can actually scrutinize it, you can draw in other people and get ideas.

You can grow those ideas so that they will work and you can eliminate some things that are gonna cause a problem.

That's my 80% rule or 80% tool.

- And I wanna talk about that because you talk about that in the context of, it's not really compromised, it's common ground, as I understand it.

- Absolutely, yeah, compromise is where you give up half of what you believe in and I give up half of what I believe in and we wind up with something that nobody believes in, but there's, as you're going through issues you'll find that you can agree with 80% of the issues with the other person.

And if you pick out any one of those issues, you'll be able to agree on 80% of that issue, not the whole thing.

'Cause there's 10% on both sides that have been colliding for years.

I got to work particularly with Senator Kennedy on a lot of those issues that had been butting heads for years.

And what we did was figure out that you can take that piece out.

It doesn't destroy the bill.

It just doesn't do as much as what people might like to do in that one step, but it gets the rest of it done.

We'd worked on mental health parody.

He had worked on mental health parody with Senator Domenici for 14 years.

And hadn't been able to get it through.

And because of some other successes that I'd had with him, he came to me and said, would you take a look at this bill and see if there's something we can do to it.

And I showed him the parts that were killing it each time.

Now the interesting thing is those parts that were killing it were considered by the mental health community to be the most important pieces of the bill.

So we got the whole mental health community together.

And I said, so how long have you been working on this?

They said, about 14 years.

I said, how much have you gotten done?

They said, well, none of it.

So Senator Kennedy and I explained the different parts that we were gonna be getting done and the piece we were gonna be leaving out.

We said, wouldn't you like to get all of this done and just leave this out and the light bulb came on and instead of pushing against it on the floor, they started helping us.

And it went over the cliff and we got mental health parody.

- Senator some people today would look at what you've just talked about with working with Senator Kennedy, a Democrat.

And how could you ever do that from conservative Wyoming?

Yet you have a spirit of bipartisan support in your career that is almost unmatched.

What would you say to those folks?

- Well, what you try to do is find the common ground and you can do that with anybody if people will remain civil while they're doing it.

You can't be calling the other person names and expect them to cooperate with you.

You cannot stand totally.

I have some people that say, if you just stood toe to toe with them and yelled a little bit louder, you would get that done.

I'd say, I have tried that and I always wind up having to apologize.

And when you apologize, it puts you behind in the negotiations.

So it's much better to find out where the common ground is and try and work out some kinks and sometimes you can getfrom the 80% up to 90%, actually you can get to 100%.

The trick is define a whole new way of doing that 10%.

I've sent people off before that were that had a bill and said, get together with them and find some other way to do that.

And we'll be able to do it.

And they come back and they say, we found it, we found it.

And everybody on that little task forces, it was my idea.

And you know when they say it was my idea, they are passing it.

- That's right.

- And that's the way to get them done.

- I read this and I want you to tell me if it's accurate.

It was written in Politico.

Someone said that Enzi is among the least flashy personalities in the Capitol.

He often literally keeps his head down, immersed in either thought or reading, typically reading an e-reader device.

Is that you, that you were in Washington?

- Well, I primarily kind of avoided the media because you can't negotiate a bill through the media.

You have to negotiate it with the other negotiators.

And if you negotiate something by putting your idea out as being the prime thing in the media, you're stuck with it.

If somebody else wants to revise it, then everybody gets into this controversy of how come you were so wrong.

Well, I wasn't wrong.

It just needed to be done differently.

So I just never found any real advantage.

And I was working on so many things, I didn't have time to go seek out the media to see if I could get their approval or not.

Coy Knobel was my communications person for years.

And he agreed that the best listener you can get is earned publicity.

When you do something, then you can tell people about it.

If you're just working on it, that's no big deal.

Everybody's working on something.

- Coy was the first person you hired when you decided to run for the Senate.

- He was when I was just starting my campaign, I had no idea how to do a statewide campaign, I knew that the problem needed some kind of a person for press and Bob Beck was one of the people that talked me into running.

And so I went to him and said do you have any press person that you know, what should I do?

And he told me about this young kid.

That was really good.

He thought I could get, I interviewed him.

He called, Coy called back later and said, no I don't think I can do the job.

I call Bob Beck, Bob Beck talk to him.

He called me back and said, okay, Bob says is this what I ought to be doing?

And he worked for me the rest of the time through the Senate and has been just a tremendous help and was great on press and then became communications and then actually became my chief of staff.

- And you ran that first campaign with three and a half people.

(laughs) How did you manage that?

What was it like going out to do a statewide campaign for the first time?

- It really helps not to know what you're doing.

- You say that with some seriousness.

- I do, I do.

And not having enough money to have the professionals who can tell you how you can start some controversy so that you can get press because that forces the other people to spend more money which forces you to spend more money, and it just goes back and forth that way.

The best thing is listening to people.

We did a lot of door to door and invited people to ice cream socials in the park.

We didn't go and say, would you vote for me?

We said, we're having this little get together.

We can come and have some ice cream and soda pop in the park at five o'clock, incidentally five o'clock is the best time to do it, people are on their way home.

If they get home, they have dinner, they're not coming back out for something political but they will come and visit with you at five o'clock.

And we just did a lot of the door to door that way.

And it compensated for not having a lot of money 'cause people like to be able to tell you what they're thinking.

I don't do town hall, I didn't do town halls.

I did listening sessions.

At a listening session, I had somebody prominent from the town do the introduction and set up the rules and I just sat at a table and took notes and we had a microphone and they could get in the line and come up to the microphone and tell me what they were thinking.

They could ask questions too but I wasn't necessarily answering their question.

I didn't answer any questions at that time.

I wrote down things and circled some that I thought were great ideas.

And then at the end, I got the last 15 minutes to do some answering questions and deploying out the greatideas that I had heard that people in Wyoming are phenomenal at ideas.

Of course, most of them are working that idea every day on their job.

And they're thinking about it all the time that they're on their job and they come up with these great ideas.

Now, when I first started all these ideas to Washington people would say too simple, never work.

That's just good common sense.

Well, common sense doesn'tgo very far back there but as time went by, they said, well, is this another one of those things that somebody that's working on the ground out there in Wyoming came up with?

He asked him, he said, okay, we'll do it.

- You've talked about not liking committee meetings but enjoying round tables in your legislative career.

What's the difference.

And why was that important to you?

- Well, at a committee meeting, the majority party picks all of the people that are gonna testify except for a small portion usually one and the other side picks that one.

And then everybody comes and beats up on the witnesses and the purpose of a hearing shouldn't be to beat up on anybody, not to make political speeches.

It should be to find out what the ideas are for that.

At a round table what we did, Senator Kennedy and I actually experimented in this early on is we'd agree on who ought to be invited because they had done something in that area.

And we would give them a set number of questions that we wanted them to answer.

And then they would tell what they did, why they did it, how they did it and what they would do if they were gonna do it over again.

And then the panelists would discuss, 'cause they'd all have similar things that they'd done.

And they'd make some suggestions for how maybe what that guy said might work a little bit better or wonder if it would.

And I remember after the first hearing we had Sandra Kennedy came to me and he said, you know it's really interesting to learn something about what we're doing before we write the bills.

(laughs) - Not (indistinct) yeah.

- Yeah, it's just a novel approach.

- Take us back in your history Senator, you grew up in Thermopolis and then moved to Sheridan.

So was your first job, selling worms Senator?

(laughs) - I don't think it was my first job 'cause I think I was already more in lawns and things, but yes, I had, I raised worms.

I captured nightcrawlers and sold them.

And that came into play later when I was in the legislature because Eli Bebout had the same kind of a background.

And so on one of the bills that we were discussing, we went into what our background was on money and how it applied to the bill.

It was a lot of fun but I learned a lot from everything that I've done.

Sometimes we do things and we don't realize how much we're learning from it.

- But you love fishing even at an early age.

- Yes, I did.

I had a grandpa took me fishing and he had a little heart problem.

So he had to have somebody with him.

And so I got sprung a lot to go with him and he taught me a lot.

And we went through the transition from the old casting rods to the spinning rods, to the fly rods.

- And you even tie your own flies today?

- I do.

And a guy named Sam has helped to teach me how to tie flies.

He's a famous person in Sheridan and tied.

I invented a fly in fourth grade.

I was trying to tie a ginger quill.

It looks nothing like a ginger quill, but it caught fish.

And there was a point when the only flies I ever carried with me was this Enzi specialist, capital, Z special.

And it pretty much will always catch fish but it doesn't look good.

So it'll never be in a magazine.

Nobody's gonna really try to duplicate this thing 'cause they like art in their flies.

- I know if it works.

- The fish like ones that looked like they might've been chewed on a little.

- You were in the JCs.

- Yes.

- Why did you join the JCs when you were younger?

(laughs) - Well, when we first got to Gillette, Diana and I were the only people working in the store and actually we had to build a store because it was a boom time.

- And this was a shoe store.

- A shoe store, yeah.

The town got big enough for a shoe store.

We had just gotten married.

So week after we got married we came to Gillette and started building a shoe store.

And we did the carpentry work on it with Diana holding up big walls and got it into operation.

But after a while, Diana, I said, you know, the only person that I get to talk to is you.

And the only person you get to talk to is me.

We ought to have some friends while we tried to figure out how in a community we'd make any friends.

And Diana had been in the junior miss pageant and Sheridan and knew about the JCs from that.

So I checked into the JCs which was a young men's leadership organization.

It had a comparable women's group called the JCS but you couldn't be a JCL unless your husband was in JC.

So I joined JCs so that she could have some other friends, some other people to talk to.

And I got involved in that and wound up being the local president kind of by accident.

And, but the chapter did real well that year.

And then I got to state appointment and then I ran for the state presidency because I didn't think anybody was really suggesting anything they ought to do, they just wanted the position.

And so we ran for that and did ice cream socials with it and didn't have any business probably doing it, we got it anyway and then I went all over the state talking about leadership.

- Including making a speech and Cody.

- Yes.

- That's a same Senator - State convention was in Cody and our keynote speaker was Senator Simpson and he did his normal really spectacular humorous job speaking.

I talked a little bit about leadership and afterwards he took me by the elbow led me off in the corner of the room and he said I don't know what party you're in but that town you're in needs of mayor.

And it's time you put your money where your mouth is on this leadership stuff.

So coming back from Cody, Diana was driving.

She does a lot of the driving for us.

I said, you know, maybe I ought to run for mayor.

And she drove down into the borrow pit and back up I could show you the spot.

And then we talked about what our community needed for the next three hours, getting back to Gillette.

- 'Cause Gillette was not booming yet.

Correct, it was on the cusp of it.

- Oh it was already having a little bit of an oil boom.

And it had a power point.

- And you're 30 years old at the time.

Is that right?

- 29 then, yeah.

(laughs) And, but we could see what was coming and we could hear a lot of complaints about what was coming due but it's all we talked about what the community was gonna need if all of these things happened.

And I ran on that.

I'm probably the only person that's ever been elected to office in Wyoming that ran on a planning platform.

Actually, though what I had on my brochure was that I was gonna have an agenda at the council meetings and the balanced budget.

- Sounds pretty simple, Senator.

- JC has taught you about having agendas so that you could get through meetings efficiently.

And the state already had a requirement that you had to have a balanced budget.

So, but I wanted the community to be a place that people would like for their kids to grow up.

And evidently the people liked that idea and I got elected and then I found out what kind of job I had gotten into 'cause we didn't have any water.

We didn't have any snow removal equipment.

We had a bad winter that year.

We needed sewer and water and sidewalks and everything you could do.

In fact, they, I got a call from the person that provided electricity.

The City of Gillette who owned their own electrical systems said what are you gonna do when your only substation blows up?

And I said, what's a substation?

And they explained it was a giant transformer.

And when the heat of fall came that thing was gonna blow up.

I said, so what would the result of that be?

He said, well, the people would be without power for about six weeks.

I pictured myself being tarred and feathered when that happened and started immediately to buy a substation which was not in the budget.

And that made, that would have made that illegal.

But I came up with a financial technique that we were able to use that did that.

But then I had to go out and get easements too.

That was a whole nother experience for me buying easements.

And I had one that I couldn't get.

So we had to go to court on that to condemn.

And as part of the process, the engineer for the substation was said so why do you need this easement?

He said, well we don't get these when we can connect up to substation.

And the whole power system will go out.

And at that moment, the electricity went off in the courthouse and the other attorneys started yelling about the atrics closed his book.

And I ran over to the window and looked down where my substation was and there's this puff of smoke going up.

- True story, oh my Goodness.

- True story, true story.

But it was not the substation that blew up.

What had happened is that something had happened over in Buffalo and it affected our electrical system and blew a fuse and the fuse caught on fire and it was going up.

(laughs) We got a substation.

It just number of things, water.

We were already on water rationing and our water was color-coded, the hot water, the cold water came out kind of red from the iron in the water.

The hot water came out black from the goal evidently in the water, nobody drank the water.

People had a lot of medical problems from that.

So we knew we needed more water and needed more water storage, everything.

So I was able to do that over the course of the time that I was in as mayor.

- And for someone who didn't wanna be in politics to start with.

When my, I think that that would have been plenty but on your go to state off.

- Well, I learned that things as mayor and there were a lot of things that I thought ought to be done differently for municipalities and I ran and got on the corporations committee because that's who handles all these municipal things.

And one of the things I learned quickly was that they considered me biased since I'd been a mayor.

So after two years on that committee and not a lot of success, I said put me on something else, well they put me on education.

And since I'd never even served on a school board, I'd never done anything, I wasn't a teacher, I'd never done anything except go to school.

So I was an expert in that committee and got a lot done.

It was a better experience for me but I learned a lot about education which helped me when I got to the US Senate.

- Sure.

- 'Cause I got on the committee with health education, labor pensions but I'd done some safety work in the oil field.

And so there were some things that I wanted to clear up at the federal level that I thought I could do when I got there.

So that's why one of the reasons I picked that committee it also had more turnover because like I got on that committee down at the legislature and they said why are you getting on that committee?

We just give that to the people that don't have anything.

No, I want to get some things done here.

So I got on the health committee and a safety committee down there and got a bunch of things done so.

- What do you miss about Washington?

Or what do you think you will miss about Washington?

- I'll miss the people and that's about it.

I got to serve with some tremendous people and I got to work with some tremendous people that were on my staff and on other people's staffs.

And I hope that I can see some of them again, most of them again, any of them that want, we've invited a lot of people to come to Wyoming and we'd give them a tour.

I don't know if anybody will take us up on it but I'll miss the people.

- Well, Senator we appreciate your service to our great state.

Full disclosure, your wife now is a member of the Wyoming PBS Foundation board and we appreciate her as well.

- Yeah, well, she's been the essential part of my life and has handled all kinds of problems that I never had to worry about.

And she handled it more efficiently than I would have.

And I'm just so pleased that I got to have this adventure that the Wyoming people trusted me to be their United States Senator and act on their behalf and the same for the City of Gillette and the people in the state that led me learn all of those things.

People need to have adventures, get outside their comfort zone.

And I certainly have, and it's been a privilege and an honor and just so many wonderful memories.

- We certainly wish you the best.

- Thanks.

- Thanks for joining us on Chronicle.

- Thank you.

(upbeat orchestral music) - [Narrator] This program was funded in part by a grant for Newman's Own Foundation, working to nourish the common good by donating all profits from Newman's Own food and beverage products to charitable organizations that seek to make the world a better place.

More information is available at Newman'sownfoundation.org.

Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities.

Thinkwy.org and by the members of the Wyoming PBS Foundation.

Thank you for your support.