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Illustration by Alex Cochran, Deseret News

Politics The West Utah


MEET THE WEST’S MOST PROMINENT POLITICAL DYNASTY


IF SEN. MIKE LEE DOESN’T WIN A THIRD TERM IT COULD END A REMARKABLE STREAK OF
EITHER A LEE OR UDALL IN CONGRESS EVERY DECADE SINCE THE 1950S

By Matthew Brown
 Feb 27, 2022 10 p.m. MST
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A10-year-old Mike Lee heard a knock on the door of his McLean, Virginia, home,
where the family had just moved from Utah.







When his dad, Rex E. Lee, opened the door, the young boy listened to a man
outside, “Hi, we’re your ward teachers.”

“My dad just laughed and said, ‘Come on in guys.’ I remember him saying
something like, ‘Well, that shows how long it’s been since you’ve set foot in a
Mormon church, doesn’t it?’” the now Republican senator from Utah recalls.




His dad was poking fun at first cousins Stewart and Morris “Mo” Udall, who used
an antiquated title for Latter-day Saint “home teachers” who visit fellow
congregants in the neighborhood to share a religious message. Today, they are
called ministering brothers or sisters.

The senator said his dad’s cousins lived nearby in the same Fairfax County
residential community that has long been home to diplomats, members of Congress
and high-ranking government officials.

But the scene of his dad chatting it up with relatives, who all hailed from the
tiny eastern Arizona town of St. Johns, marked the first time the younger Lee
began realizing his extended family was populated with political and legal
legends from the West dating back to the 1850s.



Retired Brigham Young University President and former U.S. Solicitor General Rex
E. Lee is pictured during an interview in 1995.

Stuart Johnson, Deseret News

His dad had just been appointed solicitor general for the Reagan administration.
Stewart Udall was a former congressman and Interior secretary in the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations. And Mo Udall was in his 11th term representing Arizona
in the House. Three more Udall-Lee relatives (one Republican and two Democrats)
would serve in the Senate, and Mike Lee became the fourth.



If the senator from Utah fails to win a third term this year, it could break a
remarkable streak of a Lee or Udall relative serving in Congress in every decade
since the 1950s.



“The Udall-Lee run of eight consecutive decades in Congress is nearly
unprecedented,” said Jane L. Campbell, CEO and president of the U.S. Capitol
Historical Society. “Only the Dingells surpass the Udall-Lees for their
consecutive number of decades in either chamber of Congress. And only the
Kennedys match the Udall-Lees in that regard.”




Udall and Lee relatives often wave off comparisons to the Kennedys, Bushes,
Roosevelts, or Dingells. Former U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, of Colorado, once recalled
his aunt summing up such comparisons this way: “The Kennedys are wealthy,
Catholic New Englanders; the Udalls are poor, Mormon dirt farmers from the
West.”

For better or for worse, those “dirt farmers” have had an outsized economic and
environmental impact on the West, and observers say their public service the
past seven decades is felt today in the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court
and throughout the nation.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Udall-Lee family’s impressive political legacy had an inauspicious
beginning. Both lines of politicians share a common ancestor — the notorious
pioneer frontiersman John Doyle Lee.



An early convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Lee trekked
across the Plains and helped settle the harsh southern Utah desert. He served in
the Utah Territorial Legislature in 1858.



John D. Lee, circa 1877, the year he was executed for his role in the Mountain
Meadows Massacre.

Joseph Smith Papers

The political post came after Lee was a leading participant in one of the
darkest chapters in western United States history that led to his execution by
firing squad. Criminal trials nearly 20 years after the crime showed he helped
carry out the massacre of more than 100 men, women and children, during a
climate of hysteria when federal troops were headed to Utah. The victims
comprised an emigrant company from Arkansas making their way to California when
they were slaughtered on Sept. 11, 1857, by a group of Latter-day Saint settlers
and Paiute Indians in southwestern Utah.

Related
 * LDS Church issues apology over Mountain Meadows

A monument stands at the National Historic Landmark memorializing what is known
as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. And Lee’s involvement in the atrocity troubled
many of his descendants then, and now.




“I remember hearing my grandmother, Lela Lee Udall, who was a granddaughter of
John D. Lee, once express that it was a very heavy cross that her family had to
bear as a legacy of John D. Lee,” recalled Gordon Smith, a Lee and Udall
descendant who served two terms as a Republican U.S. senator from Oregon.

Sen. Mike Lee said he senses the two criminal trials his ancestor went through
may have influenced his grandfather’s decision to go to law school. John D.
Lee’s first trial ended with a hung jury. And his attorney, William Bishop, who
expected the same result in the second jury trial, was caught unprepared as a
new prosecuting attorney won a first-degree murder conviction, said Richard E.
Turley Jr., a former assistant church historian and co-author of a forthcoming
book on the aftermath of the massacre and the Lee trials.

Lee’s execution by firing squad took place at Mountain Meadows.



John D. Lee is pictured sitting on a coffin with others standing around just
before his execution.

University of Utah special collections

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Among Lee’s most loyal defenders was his son John David Lee, whose mother was
Lee’s 14th polygamous wife. And it was from John David that the Lee-Udall
political progeny sprang.



Two of his daughters — Louisa and Lela — married Udalls, who themselves and
several of their siblings held prominent public offices throughout Arizona,
including mayor of Phoenix and chief justice of the state Supreme Court. And
their children continued the tradition with Stewart Udall becoming the first in
the family to be elected to Congress in 1955 as a Democrat.

He served until 1961, when he was named interior secretary in the Kennedy and
then Johnson administrations. His brother Mo Udall succeeded him and represented
the state’s 2nd Congressional District for 30 years. During that time, he lost
the Democratic nomination for president to Jimmy Carter in 1976.



Stewart Udall, the former secretary of the interior, is pictured on Oct. 23,
2002, in Salt Lake City.

Paul Barker, Deseret News

Their Republican cousin Rex E. Lee, a grandson of John David Lee, served as U.S.
solicitor general from 1981-85. His oldest son Thomas Lee, an associate justice
of the Utah Supreme Court, had been on short lists, along with his brother Sen.
Mike Lee, of potential U.S. Supreme Court nomineesduring the Trump
administration.

When Mo Udall resigned in 1991, a Udall-Lee descendant was absent from Capitol
Hill for nearly six years, until Smith was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996.
Two years later, cousins Tom Udall and Mark Udall, both Democrats, won
congressional seats in New Mexico and Colorado, respectively.

In 2008, Tom and Mark won U.S. Senate seats but Smith lost his bid for a third
term. The rare occurrence of having three relatives serving in the U.S. Senate
at the same time happened two years later, when Sen. Mike Lee was first elected.

While far apart politically, Lee said the Udalls supported their freshman cousin
across the aisle.



“Every new member is assigned a mentor upon arriving, and Tom was assigned to be
mine,” Lee said. “It’s someone to look out for you and tell you how the place
works. He was very helpful.”

Tom Udall, Stewart Udall’s son, is now U.S. ambassador to New Zealand after two
terms in the Senate.



New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall speaks in Salt Lake City on Jan. 24, 2015.

Chelsey Allder, Deseret News

Research into political dynasties in America finds that “power begets power.” A
2007 study on political dynasties in Congress since 1789 found that “legislators
who enjoy longer tenures are significantly more likely to have relatives
entering Congress later.”

The research didn’t offer reasons, but one of the authors told Reuters that it
could be children of political parents gained name recognition, learned valuable
political skills or got access to political machinery that smoothed the way into
a career in politics.

Mark Udall, Mo Udall’s son, explained there was never pressure in the family to
pursue politics, but when people like Bobby Kennedy and other prominent people
are dropping by the house it does leave an impression.

“I just thought public service was a wonderfully exciting and rewarding and
meaningful way to be in the world,” he recalled.

Rep. Morris K. Udall, D-Ariz., pictured in this undated file photo, ran for the
Democratic presidential nomination in 1976.

Deseret News archives

Smith had a similar experience. His father, Milan Smith, served in the
Eisenhower administration, so he spent his early years in Washington, D.C., and
was well aware of the political prominence of his distant cousins Stewart and Mo
Udall. When he considered entering Oregon state politics, he and his mother paid
a visit to her cousin Mo, who was hospitalized with Parkinson’s disease.

“I told him I was thinking of running for the Oregon state Senate. And he didn’t
make any comment of regret that I was a Republican, but he encouraged me to do
it.”



Lee, who also recalls dropping by cousin Mo’s congressional office when the
younger Lee was a Senate page, added that he never felt any expectation to enter
politics and that the Lee-Udall legacy in Congress isn’t a factor in his seeking
a third term.

“I can tell you without hesitation that has never entered my mind,” he said.

Mark Udall believes future generations of the family will likely get into
politics when the timing is right for them. He didn’t decide to run for
political office until his mid-40s and the process of campaigning didn’t come
naturally.

“I had climbed the third-highest mountain the world, but I was too scared to go
knock on doors,” he said with a laugh.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Mike Lee addresses the crowd after being elected to the U.S. Senate as his wife,
Sharon, left, watches during a Republican Party gathering at the Salt Lake
Hilton on Nov. 2, 2010.

Scott G Winterton, Deseret News

The future generation of Lee-Udall politicians will be following ancestors who
affected the lives of nearly everyone in the West and many around the country,
observers say.



“If you live on the Wasatch Front and all the way to Tucson, you’re affected by
them every day through water because they got both the Central Utah Project and
the Central Arizona Project funded,” said retired history professor Ross
Peterson, who has researched and written about the lives of Stewart and Mo
Udall.

Endangered species protections, national parks and recreation areas, wild and
scenic river designations, and wilderness designations were created and expanded
under the watch of the two brothers.

While they were both icons in the environmental movement, the wisdom of the
ambitious hydroelectric dam building during the 1960s that fueled ongoing
economic growth in the West is questioned by some today. Researchers have since
learned more about the impact the projects have had on fisheries, and the
megadrought afflicting the region the past two decades has policymakers
rethinking how to quench continuing growth with a shrinking water supply.

Smith, who lost a son to suicide stemming from mental illness, sponsored
legislation to put federal funding for mental health on par with other health
care needs and changed the debate over mental health in Congress.

Peterson said the family’s efforts through national policy and nonprofit
initiatives to right wrongs done to Native American tribes by white settlers
began when their grandfather Levi Udall wrote the majority opinion for the
Arizona Supreme Court extending the right to vote for Native Americans living on
reservations.

The Lee influence on the law didn’t stop at the state level. Smith’s brother
Milan Smith Jr. was appointed to 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006, where he
wrote a unanimous opinion in 2020 finding Nevada’s COVID-19 restrictions
violated religious freedom.



The most influential in the legal arena was arguably Rex E. Lee, who is regarded
by conservative and liberal legal scholars as the model solicitor general, said
retired D.C. Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith.

While Rex E. Lee is often noted for winning a high percentage of the cases he
argued for the government before the Supreme Court, Griffith said he was admired
by his successors for skillfully and balancing the interests of the
administration and the nation at large.

“Sometimes the solicitor general is referred to as the ‘10th Justice.’ That’s
overstating it a little bit, but there is a history of the Supreme Court being
able to trust the solicitor general,” Griffith said. “And as much as anybody,
Rex is responsible for that.” 

The solicitor general wasn’t the only Lee or Udall to have impressed and
influenced Griffith. He lived across the street from Congressman Mo Udall, who
gave the 15-year-old neighbor boy his first job on Capitol Hill as a summer
intern.

Being too young to drive wasn’t a problem for Griffith.

“Every morning that summer, Mo Udall would come up in his used Mustang
convertible and honk the horn and little Tom Griffith would sit in the car with
him and drive down to Capitol Hill. And then at 5:30 at night, he’d come by and
say, “Let’s go home,” Griffith recalled. “It was awesome.”



While their politics diverged, they stayed close until Udall died in 1998.
Griffith, a Republican, was serving as chief legal counsel to the Senate and was
asked by Udall’s widow to sit with the family during a memorial service in the
Capitol. When Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle came over to pay his respects
he gave Griffith a quizzical look, prompting the Republican appointee to explain
his awkward situation.

“I told him, ‘I don’t want you to tell this to (Majority Leader Trent) Lott. I
used to work for Mo Udall and he’s one of my heroes.’” Griffith recalled. “And
he looked at me and said, ‘OK, our secret.’” 

Editor’s note: Matthew Brown’s wife, Barbara Jones Brown, is co-author with
Richard E. Turley Jr. of a forthcoming book on the aftermath of the Mountain
Meadows Massacre and criminal trials of John D. Lee.















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