Episode Details

Ernest Gruening was born in New York City in 1887 to a Jewish family; his father Emil, a German-born eye and ear surgeon, had fought in the Civil War and was present at Appomattox. Gruening graduated from Harvard in 1907 and Harvard Medical School in 1912, then immediately left medicine for newspapers, rising from the Boston American to editor roles at the Boston Evening Traveler, the New York Tribune, The Nation from 1920 to 1923, and the New York Post. His 1928 book on Mexico earned him the Order of the Aztec Eagle and a place in the Roosevelt administration running the Division of Territories and Island Possessions. In 1939 he became governor of the Alaska Territory and held the job for 13 and a half years.

As governor he faced a tuberculosis epidemic with as many as 4,000 patients and 289 hospital beds, and the 1942 Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor and occupation of Attu and Kiska. His 1955 keynote, Let Us End American Colonialism, pushed statehood, and in 1959 he and Bob Bartlett became Alaska's first two senators. On August 7, 1964, Gruening and Wayne Morse were the only senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. He lost the 1968 primary to Mike Gravel, retired to a cabin on the Glacier Highway in Juneau, and died in 1974.

• He signed the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945, the first anti-discrimination law in the United States.
• He opposed a prewar Interior Department plan to resettle European refugees in Alaska, citing the territory's lack of housing and hospital beds.
• He introduced the congressional resolutions that led to the nationwide 911 emergency number.
• Former POW Isaac Camacho reported that Viet Cong interrogators used Gruening's antiwar speeches as propaganda against American prisoners.
• In 1980 his grandson Clark Gruening defeated Mike Gravel in the Democratic Senate primary.