In Service as a Family

Copyright © 2021 Michael O. Leavitt

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reveiwers, who may quote brief passages in review.

ISBN: 978-1-68564-073-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021921581

Publisher: Lairdhouse Trust

Permissions: Deseret News, The Salt Lake Tribune

Disclaimer: The author and publisher take no responsibility for any errors, omissions, or contradictions which may exist in the book.

Cover Photo: Chris Curtis, Shutterstock

Writer: Michael O. Leavitt

Contributing Writers: Laurie Sullivan Maddox

Editor: Megan Anderson

Designer/Production Coordinator: Roxanne Bergener

Special thanks to:

• Paula Mitchell, Special Collections Librarian, Gerald R. Sherratt Library

• Utah State Archives

• Ellie Sonntag, Mansion fire restoration

• Anna Daraban, The Salt Lake Tribune

First printing October 2023

In Service as a Family

VOLUME 4

The personal history of Michael O. Leavitt

Preface

I am a westerner. My hometown is Cedar City, Utah, where I was raised with my five brothers by two loving parents. Time, place, and purpose all begin there..

My forebears had become westerners in the mid-nineteenth century. The Okerlund branch of the family settled in Loa, Utah, while the Leavitts put down roots in Bunkerville, Nevada. One of those ancestors was Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt, who in an unpolished hand wrote down an overview of her life in six pages. Her story describes her conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the persecutions she suffered as a result. She experienced the loss of child and spouse, hunger, exhaustion, freezing cold, searing heat, and a journey both on foot and by handcart to settle this western home of mine.

Sarah’s essay and others on both sides of my family, close and distant, not only inspired me—they stirred an innate feeling of duty to capture what I have experienced and learned. Through genealogy, geography, faith, and affection, I am a westerner because of them.

So now I have concluded seven decades, it is my turn to add chapters to the history of my family, church, state, and nation. I do so with the aspiration that my reflections will offer similar benefit to future generations. Because of my forebears, my life has been much different than those gritty ancestors of mine. I have visited every continent; interacted with kings and presidents; come to know the poor as well as the powerful of the world; and witnessed historical events both triumphant and tragic—none of which would have occurred without my forebears’ sacrifices, goodness, and endurance.

Life and leadership are a generational relay. In fact, the compelling need I felt to write this personal history may have been driven by a desire to discover for myself whether my contributions met my obligations.

A personal history falls on a continuum of candor somewhere between a journal and a published autobiography. It is not a substitute for a journal that records the activities from each day, whether important or trivial. However, it provides the luxury of length and the inclusion of whatever I want to recount.

Volume IV: In Service as a Family

Volume IV turns the focus onto family, with a central question: How did my service as governor affect each of them? When I was elected, Jackie’s and my five children ranged in age from two to fifteen years old. Jackie was thrust into a whirlwind of new expectations and duties, her life no longer her own in many ways. My entry into public life had a profound impact not just on us, but on our parents, my brothers, and her sisters.

To capture this part of our family’s life during these years with accuracy and integrity, I invited Laurie Sullivan Maddox, who served as a speechwriter in the Governor’s Office, to be my co-author on the entire volume. Our desire has been for Volume III to be a means by which each of the family members could tell their story and perspective. Laurie interviewed each family member at length and then wrote a portion of the book devoted to their account. Each member of the family was given an opportunity to review the chapter for facts and tone.

My contributions to Volume IV came in the form of the introduction and a series of short essays— personal reflections on each of my family members’ experiences—placed at the end of their chapters. I also recount my thoughts as a parent during this demanding time and how our family preserved traditions and order.

My personal history will consist of at least four volumes:

• Volume I: A Sense of Place and Purpose

This volume encompasses both my Leavitt and Okerlund heritage, as well as my own recollections, beginning with my birth in 1951 and ending in 1993 when I was inaugurated governor of Utah at the age of forty-one. This volume includes my upbringing and young adulthood; my early professional life; marriage to Jackie; and the beginnings of our own family together.

Most of Volume I was drawn from two separate books I wrote in 2007 and 2008 with the help of a former colleague in the Governor’s Office, Therese Anderson Grinceri. Those were titled A Sense of Place and A Sense of Purpose. The 2021 version consolidated the two into one— A Sense of Place and Purpose.

• Volume II: Real and Right

Volume II recounts my stewardship as governor of Utah between January 1993 and November 2003, when I resigned to become a Cabinet officer in the administration of President George W. Bush. The title of this volume, “Real and Right,” was the theme of my campaign for governor in the 1992 election. I wrote this book with the intent to provide a window into my approach to governor, as well as give some insight to the unique aspects of being governor in Utah. I detail how I chose my Cabinet and other important staff members, how I dealt with the media, and how I worked with the state legislature. I give a general overview of the important tasks a governor has, such as giving speeches or staying close with the people.

And since I could not have been governor without my dear wife, Jackie, I have included a chapter on her own initiatives, which have also had a huge impact on Utah. I have also included a chapter on my recollections of September 11, 2001, and some events that occurred because of it as that was also a day that irreversibly affected our country.

• Volume III: A Sacred Trust

In my first inaugural address, I used the phrase “a sacred trust” to describe the responsibility I felt as governor of Utah. I have chosen to use the same phrase as the title of Volume III. Volume III responds to a question I am often asked: how would I summarize our most impactful accomplishments during the time I was governor? It takes time for the answer to such a question to mature; real impact occurs over many years. It has now been nearly twenty years since my service concluded, which is plenty of time to get a good sense of what worked and what did not.

• Volume IV: In Service as a Family Future Writing Projects

I plan to write additional volumes of my personal history, since there are many more experiences I hope to write about, such as my time serving on President Bush’s Cabinet, founding and contributing to the success of a group of health care businesses named Leavitt Partners, and my current position as the president of the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. I also plan to write a volume devoted to my spiritual feelings and experiences. While I have alluded to spiritual feelings and my faith in various parts of volumes one through four, because some of these are more personal in nature, I will write about them separately in a volume that will be held more closely then the others.

It is my hope that these volumes will resonate with readers and take hold in subsequent generations’ histories the same way Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt’s handwritten six pages of personal history galvanized mine.

In a history like this, one cannot write in great detail about everything, so I asked myself a question: What initiatives produced change and an impact beyond twenty-five years? This book seeks to answer that question by detailing eight legacy accomplishments I believe shaped the future of Utah long-term. Against that standard, I have written chapters on subjects such as the 2002 Olympic games; the land exchange we did with the federal government involving reform of the state’s school trust land system; my role in returning control of welfare to the states; the founding and establishment of Western Governors University; creation of a charter schools movement in Utah; the Centennial Highway Fund, which organized forty-four highway projects, including the rebuild of Interstate 15 and construction of Legacy Highway; and an initiative to double the number of engineering graduates from Utah’s colleges and universities via a partnership between high schools and higher education, which produced forty thousand new engineers and positioned Utah as a technology capital.

Acknowledgments

In 2018, I invited Laurie Sullivan Maddox, a speechwriting partner from my days in the Governor's Office, to help me with the compilation of my history. I first worked with Laurie when she was a news reporter with the Associated Press and The Salt Lake Tribune . She joined the governor's staff during my second term and became a co-author of many of my important speeches. Laurie has a creative flair and native capacity to give life to words. Throughout this project, she improved my words, always pushing me for clarity by asking the right questions.

In Volume IV, Laurie has taken a more primary role. I asked her to interview members of my family and to summarize their feelings and experiences. Hence, we have bylined those sections to designate her work.

Megan Anderson, a busy mom and extraordinary editor, later joined our team. She has added order and consistency to the project. Megan also introduced us to Roxanne Bergener, whose skill as a layout artist has combined shape and beauty into a wonderful design. She has a keen eye for choosing photos and artifacts that bring our work to life. Like Megan, Roxanne has given our text generation effort structure and discipline. Her dry and irreverent sense of humor enables her to keep us grounded, focused, and on schedule. These friendships have been a meaningful part of this experience for me.

As with the other volumes that make up this history, choosing among a wealth of subjects, thousands of pictures, and artifacts has been difficult. Hundreds of people contributed in important ways to the events described. Not all of them will be mentioned or credited in the way they deserve. For that I have regrets. I hope they will know of my affection and properly attribute the omissions to the complexity of the task.

Introduction

By Michael O. Leavitt

Prior to November 3, 1992, life had been fairly ordinary for the Leavitt Family. Then, with the closing of the polls and a flurry of election night projections, it wasn’t.

The precise moment of change became visibly apparent when I walked down the corridor of the Little America Hotel toward the ballroom and the vote-counting had reached the point of near certainty. Four uniformed Utah Highway Patrol troopers surrounded me, squared up by twos in front and back in a protective formation. Though I was not technically governor yet, just the mathematically likely governor-elect, it was electrifying.

A few minutes later, my parents, Dixie and Anne, saw the same thing—an abrupt indicator of change—as a contingent of troopers materialized and extended around the family.

This was the most immediate and observable adjustment to a high public office. I would have near-constant executive protection for the next eleven years in Utah (plus five more years as a member of the Bush Cabinet). But there were additional changes in lifestyle and comportment that came with the office.

Ours was a First Family both younger and larger than most, with teenagers, a toddler, and a couple preadolescents, all with lives revolving around home, school, church, jobs, sports, family, and a congenial neighborhood on Laird Avenue in Salt Lake City.

My own time with loved ones would be inevitably changed. Family members had already adjusted to time demands and a higher profile during the campaign. Now, that would intensify and become everyday life.

Becoming Utah’s First Family was a shared journey, as Jackie and the kids stepped into their new roles and carried on a semi-private way of life

for the ensuing decade. Fittingly then, volume four of Sense of Service will be shared with Jackie, my wife; my parents, Dixie and Anne Leavitt; my children, Mike S. Leavitt, Taylor Leavitt, Anne Marie McDonald, Chase Leavitt, and Westin Leavitt; and my brothers, Dane, Mark, Eric, David, and Matthew. Jackie’s parents Lewis and Cleo Smith, and sisters Christy, Dixie, and Kathie, and their children, deserve to be acknowledged and understood as part of this odyssey, for they, too, were rebranded, imposed upon and affected by my decision to seek this path. Each contributed in their own ways.

They had all rolled with me on this adventure, some working nearly as hard as I had, some taking blows intended for me, others supportive but more removed or oblivious to the ups and downs because of time or distance. Some had trepidation and went all-in anyway.

All of them gave of themselves, even when it meant an unsparing spotlight and living with the awareness that proximity to public service means you, too, will become public. Likewise, it brings excitement, opportunity and an engagement with the world around you, sometimes with a front-row seat to extraordinary times.

The entire Leavitt family knew that winning the governorship would impose some changes in lifestyle; we had discussed it periodically. Early in the campaign, Dane and Mark had been thrust into the spotlight when the whirling disease episode involving the family fisheries became news. Later, they both had to bear the harshest criticism and scrutiny apart from me when I became chief executive. Chase experienced a media fixation while still a high schooler, when everyone wanted to talk about Fight Club. On the other hand, he also got to meet Michael Jordan and the Dalai Lama.

Yes, this impacted those I love most in ways both anticipated and unforeseen, some briefly, others more enduring. Moments large and small left an imprint, as did the succession of people, places, and events over the course of my time in state office.

In order to capture this collage of perspectives and experiences represented by various family members, I invited my colleague and collaborator in compiling this history to co-write volume three of Sense of Service Laurie Sullivan Maddox’s career includes journalistic reporting for national and regional news organizations. She also experienced parts of this story firsthand when she served as my speechwriter for many of my most important public moments as governor.

Laurie interviewed family members to capture their feelings and recollections about this unique decade in our lives—the good and the bad. I felt it might be difficult for me to separate myself enough from my own perspective to capture it objectively. Laurie will.

We will deploy an unusual literary device in this section by alternating voices. Laurie’s writings will reflect her interviews with family members. I will respond with my own perspective and details as I remember them. Most often, they align. At times they do not—but both are honest perspectives shared in love because, to my knowledge, there were no relationship casualties in this experience, a blessing of heaven I want to acknowledge and speak gratitude for.

It is my aspiration that Volume IV will provide insight into not just the unusual and unique aspects of our life as a family, but also the ordinary. Jackie and I navigated the challenges of raising children, while our children navigated the challenge of being children during this time. We celebrated successes and worked to lighten insecurities. We experienced good behavior and not so good. We experienced happy moments and sad ones. We were a normal family in a quite abnormal situation.

There is a temptation when writing about something so dear as one’s family to want to capture every detail, event, and emotion. In relatively few pages it is impossible to capture the totality of a family’s experience over a period of eleven years. So this is not a journal or anything approximating a comprehensive history; It is a mosaic of experiences which I hope will radiate the spirit of our family.

Everything Changed

By Laurie Sullivan Maddox

The large Leavitt family—immediate and extended—was there, of course, on election night as the vote totals climbed and the protective trooper screen descended with the victory.

Anne Leavitt watched with composed jubilation and a whirlwind of thoughts, one just a little bit unsettling. “That was very impactful, the minute it was announced,” she recalls. “Michael’s children were surrounded by security. For me, it

was a realization that things were going to be different from that moment on, like there was a barrier erected. For the first time there was sort of a wall we would have to cross that would be different.”

For the five children, ranging in age from sixteen-year-old Mike to two-year-old Westin, it was a happy blur of confetti, cheers, friends, lights, cameras, and limitless M&Ms. They had won!

EVERYTHING CHANGED

Earlier that night, Candidate Leavitt had driven to the hotel with Jackie in the 1984 Dodge Caravan. After the victory, a security detail escorted the couple to a new Lincoln Continental, recently purchased for the next chief executive. The minivan was left behind in the parking garage to be retrieved later. From that point on, the fourteenth governor of Utah, even just an incoming governor that night, would always be driven and regularly accompanied by security.

“ I was standing right by my dad when the results came in, and as soon as it flashed that he was the projected winner, it was just such an amazing moment. Everything changed. ”

“It was an amazing night,” says Mike S., who had been informally renamed “ Bud” during the campaign—a name not particularly to his liking—to differentiate him from his father. “I was standing right by my dad when the results came in, and as soon as it flashed that he was the projected winner, it was just such an amazing moment. Everything changed.”

The second oldest, Taylor, fifteen years old at the time, remembers a shock of realization as well, and thinking, “My gosh. This is so different from everything we’ve ever experienced. This is really happening.”

Their Grandma Anne had experienced her initial pang of trepidation and tabled it. This really was happening. The campaign had been a bit of a roller coaster already—the low being what she and other Leavitts considered the obnoxiousness of the Republican primary that preceded the general

election—particularly the irksome personage of Richard Eyre, whose behavior still grated despite his having been vanquished months earlier.

Her grandkids laugh at the thought, even many years later, that Eyre was the only person on the planet to ever cause the straightlaced and proper Anne to unleash the words, “That’s bulls--t!,” after hearing him on a news program. They agree he had it coming.

Anne and Dixie knew well from Dixie’s years in the legislature, his senate leadership, and past campaigns, including his own bid for the governorship in 1976, that slings and arrows, doubletalk, and strained alliances are part of the game. The interplay of truth, decency, competition, and expediency creates unique pressures on the candidate or officeholder, but also ricochets among those in their orbit.

Loved ones sometimes feel the attacks and negative currents even more acutely. Hits leveled at a prominent public figure can glance off the intended target and land a resounding blow to the inner sense of decency, fair play, and well-being deep within the heart of the family member standing nearby. The Leavitt brothers, parents, and children had experienced it to various extents, as had the one standing closest, new First Lady Jackie Leavitt.

Amid the poise, smiles, and easy-going interactions with her fellow Utahns during the campaign, Jackie had worries as well, complicated by the fact that being First Lady meant integrating that profile and public persona with the essentials of family stability. This wasn’t a temporary campaign timetable anymore. It was their new life.

She had to be the one to nail the path to normalcy—the down-home sensibility of the prior life and also the simplicity of it, letting five kids be kids and maintaining the regular routines, all while complementing the chief executive, whose own time as a family man and hands-on partner would be significantly curtailed.

Outgoing First Lady Colleen Bangerter had described it to her during a preliminary tour of the Governor’s Mansion as simply a “different

1 The new residence of the Leavitt family—the Governor’s Mansion.

2 Governor Leavitt in the Gold Room of the Utah State Capitol.

3 Utah State Capitol at sunset.

4 Jackie and Mike in front of the mansion. This photo was on the cover of the Governor’s Mansion brochure.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

EVERYTHING CHANGED

level” of lifestyle. Jackie wondered what that might mean exactly. As she readied her family for the move to the Mansion, and the myriad of other changes to come, she had advice to ponder as well from a conference sponsored by the National Governors Association for new governors-elect, first spouses, and their families.

“It is an adjustment to an entirely different space or ‘intensity,’” she says. “And the goal, especially with children, is to make it as smooth as possible. I wanted to keep their routines and their lives: routines of chores, homework and school, activities and athletics. They had their old neighborhood friends over all the time. They had church and time with grandparents. All these things needed to stay the same. They are vital to keep consistent.”

For the five unique individuals in her care, and the husband Utahns had just elevated, Jackie set about making it so. It did not come painlessly. There was a period early on, shortly after the change of residence from the more relaxed family home on Laird Avenue to the fishbowl stateliness of the Governor’s Mansion, when things became overwhelming. Too many people with too many demands, and the unspoken expectation that she be everywhere at once, and unerringly correct at every turn.

These crosscurrents could be unbearable at times. There were scores of requests for her involvement, but also the regular needs of a busy household. Home was her turf, and the primary domain where she and the family could be themselves. And then there were public expectations and obligations. The demarcation lines were unclear early on, leading to some discomfort.

“I felt intensity about that. The pressure. Always more requests than time, and then people were always around at the Mansion because I never had control of my schedule,” she says. “That was really hard, and it took a year before I caught on.”

When the pressure would mount, Jackie found herself exclaiming, “There are just so many things to do!” Her husband told her he had to fulfill his government responsibilities and needed to stay constantly engaged, but she could choose. “It took me a while to understand him,” she says.

On a handful of occasions, there was a ready and willing understudy. Anne Marie, an extroverted eleven-year-old who loved accompanying dad on jaunts across the state in a rickety small plane during the campaign, did not find greeting and glad-handing distasteful in the slightest. When Jackie needed a respite, the First Girl would act as executive hostess.

“I remember being at every party and at the head of the table,” Anne Marie says. “I sat right next to my dad and made conversation with the people next to me. I knew my mom wasn’t feeling well, so I took over and I loved it. The parties were the best part of it.”

The cross-town move to the Mansion following the inauguration had evoked mixed reactions from the kids. Mike S. had no complaints. Cool place, new adventure. Chase was agreeable; Anne Marie loved it; Westin, a toddler, was blissfully unaware. Home was wherever mom was.

Taylor was resistant—not wanting at all to leave the old neighborhood or alter the comings and goings of his social whirl at East High School. He was placated with first pick of bedrooms and chose a third-floor hideaway with its own bathroom.

Social lives continued apace and hit peak crescendo one night during the second term of office when a spring gathering of some of Mike and Taylor’s college friends—mostly Taylor’s Mike says— set a record unmatched by subsequent or prior administrations for young people milling about exuberantly on the Mansion grounds.

Such high-octane events at the Mansion were memorable for the kids but rare, and largely came after the family was living back at their old home on Laird Avenue following the Christmas fire at the Mansion ten months into the first term. In what would be the best of both worlds, they lived at their familiar home for the rest of the time in office and used the Mansion for gatherings, events, and celebrations.

For Jackie, the first year was the craziest because of the uprooting and unknowns. Living at the Mansion had the dual demands of showcasing the grand

residence, a historical landmark and architectural beauty, and making it a home.

The split functions made for some disquieting moments sometimes, simply because of the building’s layout. Family quarters on the second floor were clearly viewable from the first floor where Mansion staff were omnipresent and tours came and went.

The family area was not marked private until after the fire and was accessible from the showstopper of a staircase that rose to all three floors, disembarking second floor occupants onto an ovalshaped and railed mezzanine-type hallway.

Doors with glass windows were the only barrier to curious onlookers, and inevitably there were “sightings,” such as a teenage Leavitt boy in boxers walking around unaware—or unabashed—since the floor plan of the family quarters made absolute privacy impossible.

Jackie once was spotted going about her day by a touring group and had to politely decline a tour guide entreaty. “Look, there’s Mrs. Leavitt!” the guide remarked, as if a safari had just encountered a rare gazelle, “Won’t you come talk to us?” On a couple occasions, strangers simply walked right into the family quarters.

The Mansion was part of the First Lady’s purview, but the boundaries of that responsibility were not always apparent. Others were regularly around—office staff, someone cleaning, someone fixing something, some group from the executive branch using the place for a meeting. “That was the positive and the challenging part both,” Jackie says.

One Saturday morning shortly after the family moved in, only Jackie was home with two of the kids. She was giving Westin a bath and a man kept ringing the buzzer at the gate. Still unfamiliar with the gate, she asked over the intercom what he wanted, and he replied that he needed her to come get some legal papers he had brought over. Can a new First Lady ignore incessant ringing of the gate bell? On a Saturday? Were these hand-delivered papers an urgent matter of state? Jackie whisked Westin out of the bath and went downstairs to the gate, but the episode didn’t sit well.

A bit more unsettling were when members of the public would gawk in windows from outside the gates and even train binoculars on the residence— and on family members inside. Even the shower wasn’t an absolute refuge.

A Mansion assistant once knocked on the bathroom door and called Jackie out of the shower to come downstairs and greet retired television host and local celebrity Eugene Jelesnik when he came by to give the family tickets to an event. “Just put on a robe and a towel over your hair,” the assistant suggested. Unsure of her rights of refusal, Jackie went down to say hello.

Soon, enough was enough. Jackie brought up the episode with her husband, and his solution was a relief: “When you’re on the second floor, you don’t have to come down,” he told her. And she no longer did. Soon enough, she would be the one setting the boundaries.

“You want groups and people to learn about the grandeur of the mansion, and when you invite people to meetings, dinners or events, they always want to come,” she says. Even so, it was a welcome development when the Mansion’s security and privacy were enhanced after the fire. All it took were an additional set of doors leading to the private quarters and a lock.

Outside the grounds, there was not much that could be done. Public curiosity ranged from the bold to the brazenly discourteous, as with the gawkers and their binoculars.

Occasionally, too, neighbors were not necessarily neighborly. Sometimes, someone had nothing better to do than turn an everyday occurrence into a political jab.

State government, policy, and politics were all legitimate and appropriate areas for public scrutiny and interest, the family knew. They accepted that and adapted. More uncertain was how or when their personal, everyday lives merited scrutiny and at what point did that cross a line.

One way to determine a quick mental cost/ benefit on a potential activity was just to picture it ending up on the news—or having it become snarkbait in “ Rolly and Wells,” a news-gossip column

EVERYTHING CHANGED

1 The famous 1985 tan van that the family drove for many years, including to the election night event. It was replaced by stateowned vehicles and fell into Taylor’s control, becoming an object of great note at East High School. It is parked in front of the Laird home.

2 The family leaving the Laird home to do some campaigning.

3 Chase and Westin playing pre-fire. The gate next to them was put in after the family arrived because the public tours keep wandering into their family space.

4 Chase, Taylor, Westin, and Anne Marie playing in the mansion kitchen.

5 The family in front of the Governor’s Mansion

6 Riley the dog with Chase

in The Salt Lake Tribune that trafficked in busybodies and scolds.

Not long after moving into the Mansion, the family adopted a dog from the pound—Sammy. Someone in the neighborhood soon complained to Rolly and Wells that the dog barked too much and disrupted the peace. When the family had the pooch trained with shock-collar conditioning to curtail the barking, new complaints arose, suggesting the dog must have been surgically de-barked.

Erroneous, petty, and all part of the new life, where an everyday occurrence could become a headline, and a headline turned into an outsized news event. The family gave up the pet and did not have a dog again until the move back to Laird after the fire.

It was expected as part of public life that episodes like this could happen for any reason at any time. The surprising thing was what would set someone off, or who could turn on them, even an acquaintance or friend.

A birthday cake for Anne Marie resulted in “Vanillagate,” courtesy of Rolly and Wells. The cake was picked up late from an ice cream shop in their old neighborhood because a staff assistant had a death in the family a day earlier. The shop owner, whom the family had known and given business to for years, had contacted the columnists about the late pickup.

And so, the guidance conveyed in one form or another to the five kids over time centered on the way seemingly normal things could have a “magnified consequence.”

The admonitions were along the lines of “use your head;” “consequences will reflect more on you and on the family;” or “you have a responsibility here that you have to stand up to.” And for the most part they did.

At the National Governors Association meetings for incoming officeholders, sitting governors and spouses had helpful advice based on firsthand experience. There were one or two tales, however, about how badly someone’s children had been treated by the press or public. Those were outlier anecdotes, but they appalled Jackie.

Utah was different, Jackie and Michael hoped and believed at the time—and ultimately it was. The family dealt with shocking or harsh moments as they occurred the way they felt most naturally inclined—shrugging it off and moving on. Or, as it is more commonly known in the twenty-first century—Keeping Calm and Carrying On.

Each family member had his or her sweepstakes winner when it came to strange occurrences or weird encounters with someone in the public. More importantly, each had exponentially more favorite moments and favorite people from the time in office, along with lasting friendships and endless memories. All are quick to say that the fun times and opportunities that resulted directly from the role as First Family and the proximity to power outnumbered any downsides—by far.

There were insecurities in their roles. There were regrets about having to sacrifice time with dad. There were harsh moments under a news media microscope. There were snide remarks or hurtful statements from people unable or unwilling to decouple the politics from the person.

There also were front row seats to once in a lifetime events, unforgettable encounters with extraordinary people, and unshakeable bonds that the experience forged among them.

On Inauguration Day 1993, the governor was forty-one; Jackie, forty-two; Mike S., sixteen; Tyler, fifteen; Anne Marie, ten; Chase, nine; and Westin, two. Four family members with February birthdays turned a year older just weeks later—the governor, Mike S., Anne Marie, and Westin. Jackie, Taylor, and Chase all have October birthdays. Mike S. would be the first to leave home and have the shortest time living under the First Family structure. Westin would spend his entire childhood in that unique framework.

Looking back many years later, the adult kids— some older than their dad was upon becoming governor, and all but one married with children of their own—affirm that their parents’ quest to maintain as normal a life as possible was successful. They have distinct perspectives and vivid memories, running the gamut from hilarious to head-scratching to insightful. They also have gratitude.

02

The Mansion Fire

This same chapter is also in volume two, Real and Right , because of how it affected both my personal service as governor and my family during the time I served as governor.

The days leading up to our first Christmas in office were merry and busy. In December 1993, the state capitol and the Utah Governor’s Mansion were bedecked in holiday finery, and both were abuzz with events, festivities, and the regular order of business heading into a legislative session just a few weeks away.

I was slated to give my first budget address to the legislature at midday on Wednesday, December 15. Later that evening, Jackie and I were hosting the Governor’s Mansion Artist Series, which would be attended by some of the state’s most prominent citizens.

Photo courtesy of The Salt Lake Tribune

The morning of the fifteenth started like most other days. I awoke around 6 a.m. in the master bedroom of the Mansion, where windows along the eastern wall framed the snow-covered branches of a large cottonwood tree outside.

I went over the day’s events in my mind before heading to the shower in the white-and-black-tiled master bath. The bathroom fixtures were more modern than the room felt; years earlier, Governor J. Bracken Lee had reportedly moved out of the Mansion in frustration over a showerhead that water-bombed him from every direction.

The opulence of an earlier time and an air of history permeated the place. The Mansion had risen lavishly at 603 East South Temple soon after the turn of the nineteenth century and became an entertainment showpiece as well as a residence. President Teddy Roosevelt had slept there, and President Dwight Eisenhower had dropped in for a visit.

French Renaissance Splendor

The building is a mansion by every conceivable measure. It was built in 1902 by Thomas Kearns, the son of a farming family from the Midwest, who traveled to Utah in 1883 to seek his fortune. He found it in mining. Kearns struck it rich by buying up a handful of mines in Park City where silver was found in abundance, including the Silver King Mine—one of the greatest silver mines in the world. Kearns became a prominent citizen, a co-owner of the The Salt Lake Tribune newspaper, and a US senator for one term. When he and his business partners became wealthy, each built their mansion along South Temple near downtown Salt Lake City.1

The Kearns mansion, designed in the French Renaissance architectural style by Utah architect Carl M. Neuhausen, was a twenty-eight-room marvel with six baths, ten fireplaces, an all-marble kitchen, electric lights, steam-heated radiators, a call board, dumb waiters, a billiard room, a thirdfloor ballroom, a bowling alley in the basement, and ornate trims and fixtures throughout. Kearns’s wife, Jennie Judge Kearns, traveled to Europe to

hand-select the finest art, furniture, and decor. The Mansion had turrets on three of its four corners, carvings around the windows and doors, and a carriage house on the grounds—initially for Thomas Kearns’s eight carriages, and later for cars. Kearns also had three vaults in the home, according to the Deseret News, to store his “copious wealth and wine stocks.”2

Following Kearns’s passing, Jennie donated the building to the state in 1937 with the condition that it serve as the official residence of the governor. A succession of governors resided there until 1957, when the property was turned over to the Utah Historical Society for two decades until the administration of Governor Scott Matheson, who launched a renovation of the Mansion in 1977 and restored it to its role as the governor’s residence by 1980.

“And a Merry Christmas to You All”

In line with that renewed tradition, our family had moved in upon my inauguration. I was observing another tradition on December 15 as well; my first event that morning was a breakfast meeting at 7:30 a.m. with the editorial boards, publishers, and owners of the major news organizations in the state to preview the budget message I would be delivering to legislators later that day. The budget-review breakfast with the media was an annual event started by one of my predecessors.

There had been a festive gathering of cabinet and governor’s office staff and families the night before in the ballroom, one of several held that year with music, cheer, and lots of food. People loved to come to the Governor’s Mansion anytime, but especially at Christmas.

Volunteers had begun decorating the Mansion inside and out right after Thanksgiving. Holly berry draped every wreath. Tiny lights made the woodwork and marble floors twinkle. Christmas trees animated nearly every room, including a twenty-two-foot fresh pine that reached from the main floor though an open ceiling all the way to the third floor. This was a masterpiece of tree

1. Brooklyn Lancaster, “Thomas Kearns Mansion and Carriage House.” Utah Historical Markers, University of Utah. https://utahhistoricalmarkers.org/c/slc/thomas-kearns-mansion-and-carriage-house/ 2. Jerry Spangler. “Loss is a blow to ex-First Lady,” Deseret News, 16 December 1993

1 Smoke from the fire coming from the mansion roof

2 Press conference with family in front of the mansion

3 Chase and Mike walking to safety after fire.

4 Firefighter on balcony

5 Damage from the fire inside mansion

Photos courtesy of The Salt Lake Tribune

Photos courtesy of The Salt Lake Tribune

decoration, complete with yule logs at the base and cotton on the branches to connote snow, along with hundreds of carefully placed ornaments and two thousand lights.

I was joined at the kitchen table by my older sons, Mike and Taylor, who were hurriedly eating bowls of cereal before rushing off to East High School. As the first guest arrived, I could hear Jackie getting Anne Marie and Chase ready for the drive to Bonneville Elementary in our old neighborhood.

Our guests assembled in the formal dining room on the main floor. As they ate, I laid out the details of the budget, taking care to pause on my priorities in hopes they would provide editorial support in their publications.

As I talked, I noticed a staff member walk through the grand hallway and plug in the big Christmas tree. An immediate brilliance filled the room, and we all paused to enjoy the moment. “And merry Christmas to you all,” I said, before moving on with my remarks. The editors and publishers asked questions and expressed their opinions. When we finished, I bid them goodbye, walked upstairs to make sure Jackie knew the details of when she needed to arrive at my office for the budget address, and off I went to the Capitol.

“ Governor, there has been a small tree fire on the second floor of the Mansion.“

It was interim day for the legislature, which meant committee meetings for lawmakers in preparation for the general session in January. Beyond the buzz of legislators, staff, and lobbyists circulating around the Capitol, the spirit of Christmas livened the scene. A large Christmas tree sparkled in the rotunda, and a high school choir sang carols on the east steps, their harmonies cascading along the granite walls and up toward the domed ceiling.

I still had preparation to do for the budget address, which was the main event of the day. I had already decided not to read a prepared speech, but rather to speak from talking points, using large charts as supporting materials. I wanted to take questions from legislators and engage them in a dialogue. It was the first budget my administration had developed entirely on our own, and I wanted the legislature to know I understood it and was prepared to defend it.

A Small Fire on the Second Floor

About 11:15 a.m., I was working with budget director Lynne Ward and chief of staff Charlie Johnson at the oval table in the formal office when Lee Perry, one of my security detail, appeared suddenly at the door of the office.

“Governor, there has been a small tree fire on the second floor of the Mansion. Apparently, they have it all put out and things will be okay,” he said.

My mind flashed back to when I was fourteen years old and our family home had caught fire. It was a traumatic experience for my family and me, and I knew that any such event would be unsettling to Jackie. Lee Perry’s brief report also was troubling; the second-floor tree he referred to was an artificial tree—not likely to be involved in a fire.

“I need to get down there,” I told Charlie and Lynne. “If I am delayed, ask the legislative leadership to delay the starting time of my appearance.”

It takes roughly seven minutes to drive from the Capitol to the Mansion. When in a hurry, security would turn on 2nd Avenue and drive toward G Street. As we got closer, I could see smoke. “That doesn’t look like a small tree fire on the second floor,” I said out loud.

As we passed G Street, I could see fire trucks and emergency equipment, with men operating in full emergency mode. We turned the corner and pulled into the parking lot of the adjacent Utah Arts Council building, where I could see Jackie standing with Westin. My anxiety level dropped immediately after seeing them safe. However, just as I stepped from the car, there was an explosion, with a shattering of glass and a roar of flames jumping skyward. A light snow began to fall as Jackie began to tell me what happened.

Jackie’s Firsthand Account

As she described it in a personal written account of the event:

“I planned to drive to the Capitol and join Mike at noon as he made his budget address to the legislature. Westin had settled in to watch a favorite video in the family room on the second floor, and I took a few moments to walk through the parlor and dining room on the first floor, checking on details for our next event.

Truly, the Mansion was in its finest with the colorful Christmas decorations—poinsettias lining the carved wooden staircase up to the third floor; garlands on the fireplace mantles; a large nativity scene; and the large, fresh, blue spruce Christmas tree that had been cut and brought into the Grand Hall. The residence was spectacular.

Special tours had been going on, as the Mansion was open to the public every day of the week before to share its holiday grandeur. The glorious sights and sounds of Christmas music filled this impressive structure as musical groups performed carols during these tours and at the other public gatherings.

Judith George and Carol Bench, the Mansion office staff, informed me that two men had arrived for the purpose of checking the fire alarm system. Two other maintenance men had also come to do some work on the furnace in the basement. Lauralee Hill, Mansion assistant, was in the second-floor kitchen as I went to the master bedroom to change from my casual clothes into my suit before traveling up Capitol Hill.

“ There’s a fire! Run! “

I heard a strange sort of popping noise just outside my open bedroom door. The sound came from just below the large oval opening, which overlooked the first floor Grand Hall. I stepped out and looked over the wood railing to see a shocking sight—a fire racing up the twenty-two-foot Christmas tree approaching

the second level hallway. I instantly yelled, “Fire!” and started to run toward Westin. My mind raced, “What have those crazy fire alarm men done!”

I heard Carol Bench calling out from the first floor, “Get out, get out, get out!” As I ran toward the family room, I yelled, “Westin, Westin!” He came directly into the hall and I swooped him up. Hearing the commotion, Lauralee Hill ran into the hallway. “There’s a fire! Run!” I said to her.

The three of us hurried down the back stairway within seconds. At the bottom of the stairs, I handed Westin to Lauralee to quickly grab two coats from the closet. I threw one around Lauralee, wrapping it around them both. Then, we ran past the office reaching the back door of the Mansion, Judith, Carol, and the two men who had been on the first floor checking the alarm system, quickly fell in behind us, and I yanked on the door.

I pulled forcefully on the back door, but it would not budge. Intense suction of the air, affected by the flames—which had now burst upward from the tree past the first floor to the large, open, third-floor ceiling dome—caused a powerful backdraft. The two fire alarm technicians at the rear of our group quickly came forward and together were able to pull the door open. A loud whoosh of air blew by us as we ran out, and the door slammed shut with a bang.

We stood together in the parking lot looking in shock at the home when someone asked, “Is everyone out?” In just a moment, the two furnace repairmen who had been in the basement came out. Luckily, they had been near the back stairway of the Mansion, saw the smoke, and ran up the stairs and out the door.

We exchanged anxious words as smoke poured from the windows. Carol’s yells for us to get out quickly had alerted Judith, who in turn had placed a call to 911 before she joined us at the back door. Carol had been walking through the Grand Hall at the moment the

1 Dome

2 Grand Hall fireplace

3 Fire destroys grandfather clock in the Grand Hall.

4 Taylor looking through the oval

5 Firefighters and inspectors looking over the tree and source of fire..

fire actually started. She heard the popping noise and saw the sparks that ignited the tree. The speed with which the fire leapt up the tree made it impossible for her to get an extinguisher or do anything to stop the burst of flames exploding up the tall tree.

I asked Lauralee to take little Westin to her apartment. The frightening sight was distressing to adults and certainly much more so to a three-year-old.

Finally, the fire engines arrived and the men began their task.

Mike arrived at the scene and the group of us moved to the larger parking lot east of the Mansion to give the firefighters more space and for us to be at a safer distance. It was clear the fire was spreading throughout the home.”

The Kids

Watching his Disney video in a room on the north side of the building, Westin had heard his mother’s urgent calls. Running out to her, he saw the south side of the family quarters, where he shared a bedroom with Chase, erupt in flames.

“I remember loud pops and booms and pieces of wood just being shot up,” he recalled. “Where my room was, that was gone. If I had been in my room, I would’ve been trapped. But I happened to be in the farthest possible room.”

He remembers the scramble down the stairs with Jackie and Lauralee, the difficulty getting out the back door, and then congregating in the parking lot next door.

That is where I met up with Westin and Jackie and, gratefully, found them safe.

It was clear that news of this would spread quickly. Large crowds had amassed on the periphery, and news media were broadcasting the scene live. We were concerned our four older children, all at school, would hear the news, possibly in second-or-thirdhand distorted ways, and would have undue concerns about our safety. They needed to be with us, so I sent two members of the security

detail to retrieve them, one to East High and the other to Bonneville Elementary. We had previously established emergency protocols with the schools in case the kids needed to be quickly picked up, so within thirty minutes, all four joined us at the Arts Council building.

“ If I had been in my room, I would’ve been trapped.”

Taylor, then a sophomore at East High, was walking down a hallway at school when a friend of his brother slammed him in the arm and told him, “Your house is on fire.” Taylor then heard an announcement over the school public address system to come to the office and had “a premonition of what was about to happen.”

When Mike S. got to the office, school officials told them, “Everybody is safe. There has been an incident.” The office had a small television where the boys could see live news coverage showing smoke and flames billowing out of the Mansion.

“Oh boy,” Mike thought, as he and Taylor checked out of school and headed over. “I wouldn’t say it was traumatic. I think when you’re seventeen or however old I was, your brain just hasn’t fully developed. You don’t understand what could have happened to my mom and my little brother.”

Taylor recalled listening to an Eric Clapton song play on the radio as Mike drove and wondering to himself, “Is the house totaled?” Once at the scene, he remembers a fire department official tearing up as he informed the group how badly the building was charred.

Lee Perry, the UHP officer who first told me about the fire, picked up Chase and Anne Marie from Bonneville Elementary and brought them to join the family. Chase was struck by the number of emergency vehicles and the sea of flashing lights as they arrived. He saw Taylor, red-eyed in the parking lot. “I always looked to him,” Chase said, “so I knew, ‘Oh no, this is bad.’”

Perspective and Gratitude

Jackie and I drew them close. It was a moment when perspective benefitted all of us. “I said to them, “Everyone is safe. No one was hurt. Things can be replaced.” We all hugged each other.

When the fire was out, an official—I believe from the state fire marshal’s office—came over and gave a dreary report to the group. Though the building’s interior and contents were a total loss, we were heartened that the exterior walls still stood firm. The officer explained that the fire department had preplanned how to fight fires in certain buildings. In the Mansion’s case, part of the effort had been to build dams or berms inside the structure to direct the massive amounts of water needed to fight the fire outside, thereby protecting the integrity of the building from additional damage.

The fire official then invited me to go inside and view the extent of the damage with him. I asked each member of the family if they wanted me to bring anything out. Jackie needed her purse. Chase wanted a pair of shoes that Utah Jazz star Karl Malone had given him after he wore them in a game. The shoes were damaged, but not totally unsalvageable. Jackie’s purse and wallet were destroyed.

The house was still smoldering. The Christmas tree now looked like a twenty-two-foot stick man, scorched and devoid of any sign of life. The woodwork and floors were blackened; the gears and workings of the eight-foot grandfather clock in the Grand Hall had melted together; a woodcarved statue of Neptune was completely charred.

Gratefully, the framework of the home was intact. But what was not burned was melted, saturated with smoke, or both.

The chief explained how a fire like this works. In a dry tree, as the once-fresh pine in the Grand Hall had become, fire burns so quickly and so hot that once ignited, there is no way to stop a conflagration. Within forty-five seconds the fire was burning at four thousand degrees. I asked about the explosion I observed as I drove up. He said that fire needs oxygen to survive and goes in pursuit of it, and the fire had found a weakness—the windows— and blew them out looking for life-giving air.

Likewise, the chief said, that was why the door was sealed shut when Jackie tried to exit. It was a vacuum caused by the fire suctioning air from the interior rooms. The chief used a screwdriver to take the cover off a light switch. He showed me signs of smoke and heat under the screws, explaining that the fire was looking for oxygen even under the screws of the light socket.

I left the Mansion that day eternally grateful that no one was hurt, and tried to avoid thoughts of the tragedy that could have happened if the fire had occurred at a time when a hundred people were in the house. We were truly blessed.

The Aftermath

I still had work to do. Jackie and I had to meet with the media and answer their questions. At that moment, there were more questions than answers, but people needed to know that we were all right and feeling resilient. There was a universal concern, of course, for our young family. We felt the love and prayers of people who had extended both on our behalf. And once we knew the family was safe, there was a palpable calm.

There were three things that needed my immediate attention. I called the security team together and said, “I’m going to need your help.” I gave one the assignment to find a place for us to stay. Second, we needed clothes and basic supplies. I took credit cards out of my wallet and gave one to Jackie, since hers were melted by the fire; the remaining cards went to highway patrolmen. Jackie then divided

1 Structural repair to dome

2 Painter working on the large ballroom turret

3 Gold leaf being applid to decorative border

4 Stencil work for walls redrawn

5 The process of rebuilding the detailed spindles of the staircase banister

Photos courtesy of Ellie Sonntag

1 Informal dining room after fire restoration

2 Cherubs decorate the Mansion, and these were remolded after fire damage

3 Formal dining room after restoration

4 Intricate column restored in the Grand Hall. Stencil of wall in background was all redone.

5 View of grand staircase from above after restoration

Photos courtesy of Ellie Sonntag

the children up into teams, saying, “Let’s each think what we would need if we were packing a bag for a trip.” One trooper took off with the older kids to shop for necessities; another went with Jackie and the younger children. Two days earlier I had dropped off two suits and a few shirts at the dry cleaners, so I asked one of the detail to stop and pick them up. Lastly, I had a budget address to give at the State Capitol. We agreed we would all meet back up at a hotel to be determined later, and we started the task of putting our lives back together.

A couple hours later, at two p.m., I walked into the House of Representatives chamber for the budget address. Legislative leaders had offered to cancel it, but keeping the commitment seemed like the right way to convey that everything was okay. It also was a chance to express my gratitude in a public way and lift the mood with a bit of humor. I said, “Thank you for deferring our meeting. About 11:30 this morning I learned about a need to amend the state budget.”

People immediately understood my light reference to a serious situation. I reported that we were all safe, and that I had been assured that the structure was insured properly, in a way that would cover repairing the house and maintaining the historical integrity of the building. I finished the budget address and went immediately to find the family.

I was notified that we would be staying at the Marriott University Park Hotel in Research Park at the University of Utah. Then, within a few days, we moved into a very nice condominium in American Towers in downtown Salt Lake City.

We stayed there for about three months, including the Christmas of 1993. Many of the children have remembered that as one of their favorite Christmas memories. My aunt and uncle—Jane and John Piercey—brought us a Christmas tree. We had Christmas Eve dinner at Lamb’s Grill across the street from American Towers. And it became a poignant and cheery time, uncomplicated by many of the more commercial aspects of the holiday, because all we had were each other.

But we did need a more permanent home. Jackie and I had leased our family home on Laird Avenue to a couple upon moving into the Mansion nearly

a year earlier, and we decided to approach them about buying the lease out. As it turned out, they were mulling a return to Las Vegas, where they had lived previously. The payment from us made that possible, and we were able to move home. At the time, we didn’t know how long the Mansion would take to restore, or how we would feel about things when the restoration was completed. However, we knew for now that moving back to the house on Laird Avenue was the right thing to do.

So, we moved back. The security team built a small office in the basement of the house and put up a large communications tower so that our home could be monitored day and night from the Capitol building. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I imagined the protective team there watching early in the morning as I dodged onto the front porch in my underwear to get the newspaper. But, we were back living an extraordinary experience while surrounded by the feel of ordinary life.

Restoration and Reconstruction

The Mansion’s return to life from the fire, which was determined to have been caused by an improperly spliced electrical wire in the base of the tree in the Grand Hall, would take two-and-a-half years and nearly eight million dollars to complete.

“ My thoughts were how in the world were we going to put it back together. ”

The Salt Lake Fire Department had taken the first immediate steps toward mitigation when they placed dams in the building while fighting the fire to prevent water from further damaging floors and woodwork.

Further damage was averted by nightfall that evening by state employees from the Division of Facilities Construction and Management (DFCM) and mitigation contractor Utah Disaster Kleenup, who moved quickly to restore heat to the building and begin vacuuming up water, drying out the

Photos courtesy of Ellie Sonntag

Mansion, and topically cleaning windows, woodwork, and other surfaces of smoke and soot.

Officials next had to assess the extent of damage and determine a plan going forward. The assessment team included DFCM, the State Fire Marshal’s Office, and the Division of State History. Their consensus was that the structural integrity of the building was good, with enough original materials retained, to warrant reconstruction.

Going forward, the basic philosophy was to preserve the building’s original craftsmanship to the extent possible; replace original features lost in the fire; and clean, repair, and restore items that were salvageable. Additionally, the effort expanded to make the Mansion more user-friendly as an actual residence to governors and their families, and to modernize the building with seismic upgrades and a comprehensive updating of heating, ventilating, cooling, electrical, lighting, computer/communications, and fire suppression systems. Other changes were made to allow better exiting in the event of a future fire, which was done with hallway and corridor reconfigurations rather than the addition of a new stairway. Also, the family quarters were made more private and secure.

Max J. Smith and Associates was selected as the project’s architect and Culp Construction as the general contractor. A number of specialist firms were brought in as the work continued, week after week, month after month.

“My thoughts were how in the world were we going to put it back together,” Fred Fuller, an architect with DFCM, told the Provo Daily Herald newspaper about the day he first surveyed the destruction at the Mansion.3 Beyond the charred interior, smoke and soot had permeated spaces within interior walls and had to be cleaned. More than eighty percent of all plaster had to be removed from the Mansion’s interior walls to expose all the framing materials of the building.

Soot and smoke remediation alone took ten months and one million dollars, according to Culp Construction. An innovative new process called sponge blasting—which shoots small particles of highly absorbent sponge at high velocity onto contaminated surfaces—was employed, along with grit blasting, to remove soot. Ozone generators also were used for deodorization before walls were replastered.

The restoration team took the building interior apart and documented all surfaces and elements for restoration or replication. Then, over time, the interior was put back together. Throughout the process, photographs and historical records guided the work.

Among the specialists called in for highly skilled artisanal restoration was Agrell and Thorpe, Ltd., a California wood-carving company.

Woodcarving and plasterwork were unique architectural features of the Mansion. The original French white oak carvings were of extraordinary quality, crafted in Europe at the turn of the century by German or Austrian artisans. The fire destroyed most of the carvings, with the worst damage occurring in the Grand Hall where the Christmas tree stood.

The burned carvings sent to Agrell and Thorpe to replicate included a large volume of intricately carved balustrades, newel posts, figures, capitals, columns, and egg-and-dart molding. The company’s Master carver, Ian Agrell, described the Mansion carvings replication as the largest wood carving project undertaken anywhere in the world in the previous ten years. The company’s twelve craftsmen spent nearly twenty-thousand hours over two years recreating the mansion’s original carvings—by hand, just as it was originally done.4

Another unique restoration involved the golden dome centered over the balcony of the second and third floors above the staircase. Remaining sections of it were removed and carefully rebound, and the Baltimore firm of Hayles and Howe used

4. “Case Study: Utah Governor’s Mansion Fire,” Agrellcarving.com , https://agrellcarving.com/2016/07/12/case-study-utah-governorsmansion-fire/

3. Donald Meyers. “Governor’s mansion remodeled, restored to Victorian splendor,” Provo Daily Herald , Utah State Archives (No date is mentioned, but context indicates this was August 1996.)

historic photos and drawings of the charred pieces to cast a replica of the original dome. After the new dome was assembled, craftsmen from EverGreene Painting Studios in New York City gave it a brilliant golden hue.

Back to Life

It had cost Thomas Kearns $350,000 to build his mansion at the turn of the twentieth century. The $7.8 million-dollar restoration brought the home back to its original 1902 style, with twenty-first century upgrades.

Work concluded in mid-1996, and the magnificent building officially reopened to tours on July 29, 1996, as Utah was celebrating its centennial-year anniversary of statehood.

“This is one of the most outstanding historic restorations in the country,” the Park Record newspaper quoted me as saying on July 6, 1996. “The painstaking work of the many artisans and craftsmen to restore this architectural treasure is remarkable. This is one of the great treasures of the state of Utah. Its reopening is a grand moment in our Centennial celebration.”5 Our family had been settled back in our Laird home for two years, but there was great happiness to have the Mansion restored to glory—and back in our lives.

We used it regularly for meetings, ceremonies, and grand events. Guests, both of the family and

the state, stayed there, and the building was filled with light and life again for holidays and special occasions, such as the Winter Olympics in 2002.

“ This is one of the most outstanding historic restorations in the country.”

And ten years after the fire, a First Family moved back in. I had accepted an appointment from President George W. Bush to head the Environmental Protection Agency and was succeeded as governor by Lt. Governor Olene Walker, who was sworn in as Utah’s first woman governor on November 5, 2003. She and her husband, Myron, moved in that fall.

A few weeks later, she invited KSL-TV over to see the building decked out for Christmas and told them of her plans to celebrate the holiday there with six of her seven children, and twenty-five grandchildren. Christmas trees sparkled throughout the building, lit up in all its finery.

“It is beautiful,” Olene said. “And I didn’t even have to put a string of lights up.”

5. “Public invited to tour newly restored governor’s mansion.” Park Record , Utah State Archives, 6 July 1996.

Jacalyn Smith Leavitt

By Laurie Sullivan Maddox

Life was going very well, in Jackie’s estimation, when her husband decided to run for governor. She was hesitant, foreseeing that it would impact all their lives in untold ways. “He wanted to do it, he had spent time thinking it through, and I will say I absolutely had doubt. It changes your lifestyle, and it impacted our lives.”

There were so many positives, though, about the endeavor, the public trust, and the life it brought, she says.

The difficulty she foresaw—and then lived— was how to lighten the load on the children. “I said to Mike, ‘Can’t we do this when they’re older?’ I felt things were stable, they’re progressing. And he just felt the timing was right. He has a phrase, ‘You have to catch the wave, and the wave is here.’”

With that, Jackie became supportive but remained concerned for the children. Once she grew accustomed to the role, and the years passed, others in high-profile public positions came to her for advice, eager to know how she had guided her own kids through it.

“I always tell them there are real challenges when you have children who are not grown up. It can have more of an impact on them. Also, each child will respond differently depending on how they handle challenges—and depending on their age.”

That is the primary reason she placed so much emphasis on regular things, making sure each child did their chores, made their beds, and picked up their clothes, even though there was housekeeping help at the Mansion. “Because that’s life,” she says.

Routines beyond chores were just as important, including all of the typical school and extracurricular activities, plus family time and church. “Particularly with the differing personalities among the kids, if you don’t have those routines,” Jackie says, “it just doesn’t work so well.”

Family living at the Mansion was a big initial adjustment, and then was reshuffled again just ten months into the term by the Christmas fire. Once back in the family home on Laird Avenue by mid1994, much of the pressure subsided.

The best part of the new lifestyle and the association with high office, Jackie says, was how interesting it was. The engagement in current events, the people she met around the state, and all the ways fellow Utahns were willing and able to commit to causes and projects that helped others.

Another fulfilling aspect was her own impact on projects and events—the First Lady initiatives she associated herself with from the beginning of the Leavitt Administration, working on them throughout the time in office and long after.

Jackie’s premier efforts were the Immunize by Two and Baby Watch childhood immunization and health programs; the Governor’s Initiative on Families Today (GIFT); and its subsidiary, the Utah Marriage Commission.

More were developed in the second and third terms in office: the literacy-boosting Read to Me campaign for children; the Worth Remembering series of books she wrote, emphasizing values associated with events such as the 2002 Winter Olympics and state centennial; and a series of children’s books and far-reaching programs tied to Faux Paw the Techno Cat, all part of the Internet Keep Safe Coalition, which Jackie further developed and advanced during the follow-on years in federal service.

First Lady Confidence

By the second term of office, the job of First Lady had become second nature for Jackie. Meshing the public and private roles while managing kids, household, initiatives, invitations, and expectations smoothed out over time, as did the ease of saying yes—or no.

Saying no had been nerve-wracking early on, particularly for one so gracious, who felt obliged to be all things to all people.

Very soon after the family had moved into the Mansion in February 1993, the governor was in demand as a speaker at the Republican Lincoln Day dinners typically held around the state that same month. He had accepted an invitation from the Davis County GOP, but a trip to Washington, D.C., bumped it from his schedule. Jackie was asked by a campaign supporter to go in his place.

Swamped with the move into the Mansion and so many comings and goings, she still accepted. “It was so long and crazy!” she recalls. “They were giving away loaves of bread, and everybody was speaking, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I got to get home to my kids!’”

She stayed to the end, and then worried later whether her remarks had been too saccharine or apolitical. “It was way too long, and it lasted so late. You come to realize you just do not have to say yes to everything. It was fine if Mike couldn’t make it. People understood that he was in D.C.”

It took a year, Jackie says, to decline some invitations, say no to competing requests, and resist the pressure to accommodate everything and everyone.

During the campaign she had attended numerous events and spoken publicly, an activity she enjoyed because of her comfort with performing and her college education in speech and drama. She also enjoyed visiting with people and did not consider herself shy. Impassioned political speechmaking, however, was her husband’s forte, not her thing.

Mrs. Bangerter had simple descriptors about how to carry oneself in public settings. “Put on your First Lady confidence,” was one. The other was about adopting a certain tone, inflection, or projection. “You have to use your voice in ‘that way,’” she advised.

JACALYN SMITH LEAVITT

1 Jackie singing the “Star-Spangled Banner” at Rice-Eccles Stadium for the Fourth of July celebration.

2 Franklin Elementary School, third grade, December 14, 2001

3 Artist Series at Governor's Mansion

4 Governors Initiative on Families Today, (GIFT)

5 Immunize by Two event at Hogle Zoo

“That was something that took some practice because you have to say more than ‘Hello’ when introducing yourself when talking to groups,” Jackie says. “You have to express yourself and express ideas more perfectly than in a casual conversation. These are not casual conversations. They expect you to have something important and polished to say. I realized I needed to shine up my First Lady persona.”

“It isn’t that you aren’t approachable or caring. It’s just . . . you have to be ‘On.’ You have to be alert, and you have to be ready. How many times when you just go into a meeting you’re just there to listen and look? No, you have to be ‘On.’”

“ You need to do this job the way that suits you, that you feel comfortable with. ”

Jackie felt her persona was that of a teacher, and she engaged with others in that fashion—someone welcoming and glad to see you, interested in what you had to say. When it came to policy or issues, she demurred, except for those she had specifically put herself forward to promote or felt fluent in discussing.

Family Safety

Family safety was not an everyday concern, and the ever-present security detail, who had offices at the Capitol and Mansion, and a makeshift office later at the house on Laird, was always reassuring. “We always knew they were on our side,” she says.

Jackie recalls two threats involving the children that the detail, headed by Alan Workman, acted upon quickly. One was a man who had communicated something to the Governor’s Office about knowing what time the children went to school. The First Couple wondered if someone was parked outside the Mansion, watching. Or if it was something even more sinister.

Executive Protection would analyze how real a threat was, she says. In the case of the schooltime stranger, they investigated and did not go into depth or provide any details, simply telling Jackie, “This has been resolved.”

The security detail regularly kept a list of people who had come to their attention for any number of reasons, whether a questionable remark, cyberbullying of the kids, or something more. One of the boys had come across the list one day taped up inside the security office at the Mansion and was surprised by it.

The kids heard mentions of things from time to time. A school friend had once informed Chase that he knew about “someone who wants to kill your dad,” Jackie says. That happened more than once, and security would “jump on it and try and figure out if it was a real threat.”

Sometimes, everyday life had its perils. On a walk one evening, Jackie says, a BB whizzed past her eye and ear, missing the eye by micro-millimeters. It was just a few kids in the area goofing off with a BB gun given as a birthday present, but Jackie counted herself lucky. Another time on a walk in the avenues neighborhood she was bit by a dog and knocked down.

There was one occasion Jackie knew of when Alan Workman had to stop a man who headed aggressively toward the governor at an event after expressing some displeasure with his position on an issue.

Security matters were kept discreet for a reason, she says, even simple questions from people asking how many security officers guarded them. “We’d say there are enough, or, they do a great job.”

Being First Lady—Her Way

Among the hardest aspects of the lifestyle were the demands on her husband’s time, which Jackie found “difficult and excessive.”

The governor had explained it in general terms. He envisioned the commitment as a set duration of time proscribed by the term of office itself, and then a carve-out of daily hours within that time which a

JACALYN SMITH LEAVITT

1 Speaking at the lunch for the International Daughters of Utah Pioneers

2 Read to Me campaign photo

3 Faux Paw the Techno Cat

4 Westin and Jackie at Centenarian Brunch for 100 and older

5 The “Motherhood Awards.” Around Mother’s day, twenty mothers were selected for an award and received praise and gifts.

6 Baby Your Baby Press Conference at the Governor’s Mansion

responsible public servant is obliged to give. Emergencies and various calamities demanded even more of his time than he thought, however. She had discussed all this with her husband and agreed with his assessment—in theory, if not always in practice.

“He was well-intentioned, but I don’t think it can easily be done,” she says. “I know he spent at least twelve hours every day and he was gone a lot. And it’s the way the office is.”

Going to National Governors Association (NGA) conferences each summer was always helpful and refreshing for all of them because there was a children’s itinerary alongside the adult sessions, plus fun and interesting off-time with sites to see and things to do, all arranged by the NGA.

First ladies who were currently serving would present on topics ranging from first-spouse initiatives and governor’s residence issues to keeping the marital relationship strong and not neglecting the marriage while in office.

“They clearly did say, ‘You need to do this job the way that suits you, that you feel comfortable with,’” Jackie says.

Quite interesting, she adds, were the different personalities and roles in evidence among some of the officeholders themselves. Some other states’ first ladies were not involved with their states at all; some had careers that took priority over the

first-lady role. One governor shared that his wife eschewed anything in the way of traditional duties and once had a reporter thrown out of her office. What they all conveyed, Jackie says, was “You get to choose.”

“ If you can see it through there are a lot of positives that will come, and they’ll have an experience that was very memorable.”

Some had warnings about the media. One first lady said she had remarked offhandedly one time about not liking to be rushed. The statement ended up in print, and not in a complimentary way.

Jackie soon discovered how potentially fraught the offhand or innocuous could be. One day the old minivan died in front of the house on a morning when Taylor needed to drive to school. Some reporter heard that it had been towed and began making inquiries. “We were just amazed,” Jackie says. “They wanted to be sure no one from the state had come to tow the car.”

Jackie and her husband learned the ins and outs as time went on and soon came to marvel how it was possible for any government officeholder to ever engage in something illegal or morally questionable, since so many eyes were watching. “Reporters,” Jackie says, “want to check everything, double-checking and seeing if you’re doing anything wrong.”

Sammy the dog was one of those strange episodes, coming the first few weeks after the move to the Mansion. Even before the neighbor complained to the press about the barking, grounds maintenance workers weighed in first, wondering if they were expected to clean up after the dog outside, and then whether he was going to be allowed inside.

The governors’ spouses at the National Governors Association

JACALYN SMITH LEAVITT

After moving back to Laird, they got another dog, Jackie says. “Nobody cared and we could let him in. He was a really nice dog, a lap dog.” And dogs living in the Mansion under future administrations never seemed to raise an eyebrow.

First Lady Initiatives

There really was no predicting what might draw criticism or unwarranted suspicion. Jackie’s first lady initiatives mostly steered free of controversy and sniping. Those efforts were always proactive and bipartisan, she says, aimed at helping people. Her own staff coordinated those in tandem with the Governor’s Office.

The only one that did generate pushback was the immunization effort. Jackie chaired that task force for eleven years and had researchers, doctors, and public health specialists overseeing the science and substance of the work. Still, for parents and other members of the public opposed to mandated vaccinations, coordinated state outreach on the subject was viewed as innately heavy-handed.

For her many visits and interactions at schools, the governor’s education deputies helped with contacts and logistics, while the Utah Department of Health coordinated the child immunization and health projects.

Then came Faux Paw, a multifaceted campaign built around the orange tabby cat who lived in the Governor’s Office during the work week. Jackie was quickest to see the larger educational opportunities beyond a clever public relations concept, and she took the lead on developing an Internet safety program around Faux Paw. It caught on with the public, and she expanded both the program and its reach, building it into a national effort running from the third term of office, through the federal service years, on through the present day. The cat and the campaign were a huge hit, with videos on Youtube and six illustrated books (now e-books as well) co-authored by Jackie that continue to be shared with schools.

Faux Paw became famous and was given a strong identity. “He’s really spunky,” Jackie says.

(Faux Paw the real cat is male, while Faux Paw the Techno Cat in the books is a female.) A state employee who loved cats and had her own would take the First Cat home at night and on weekends, then it was back to work at the Capitol during the day. Work for Faux Paw mainly entailed chilling in the Governor’s Office just being a cat, “just doing its thing,” Jackie says.

“ To be able to move forward and see the positive, we all have to do that. ”

Faux Paw and Internet safety came along in 2000, as two terms in office were about to become three. Throughout her time as First Lady, Jackie would gather helpful inputs on initiatives and projects from NGA friends and contacts, and in turn, would share her own insights and successes. As with the conferences, she loved the peer interactions.

“It was a positive camaraderie in the NGA First Spouses.” Jackie said. “I particularly enjoyed chairing that group.” She contacted Barbara Bush and she agreed to speak to them.

Ups and Downs of Public Life

Public life, on the other hand, came with random unknowns and occasional unpleasantness. Within Utah, everybody wanted the governor’s ear, and his family’s for that matter, if given the opportunity.

Human nature being what it is, not everyone was nice, even-tempered, or even cordial. Jackie encountered all types—those who were difficult to work with, treated others poorly, or had biases. She recalls a legislator who went into the Governor’s Office one day and found that both the governor and chief of staff were gone. The head of communications, a woman, asked if she could help. The legislator said, “Isn’t anybody in charge here?”

Jackie cheering for her cheerleader, Anne Marie

JACALYN SMITH LEAVITT

To prepare the children for any political barbs directed at them, she and her husband advised them: “This is a time when most everybody will treat you well, but some won’t, and the only reason is because they don’t agree politically.”

Each Leavitt child had an individual experience, and some took to the lifestyle more than others. Westin, she says, bonded instantly as a young child with the daughter of Nevada’s governor, and the friendship endured.

Mike S. had an instructor in a government class at Southern Utah University who made disparaging remarks about Governor Leavitt before learning that his son was one of his students. The professor then invited the governor to come speak to the class, which the governor readily did.

Some teachers would give “a little dig, just to the kids.” Or they would be needled once in a while by a supposed friend. “That was kept to a minimum,” Jackie says. “We tried to stay tuned to it.”

The Fight Club boxing drama that enveloped Chase still has Jackie indignant. Not because he was called out for questionable judgment, but because it was so overblown in terms of perspective and proportionality.

Chase had both the media and an ambitious assistant district attorney on his tail over the episode, in which he and some school friends, one with a key to the church gymnasium, decided to stage boxing matches at the ward among themselves. A flyer was circulated at East High School and admission charged by some of the more enterprising teen organizers.

Chase, barely eighteen and a senior at East, boxed a seventeen-year-old buddy from the football team. A sizeable group of teens was on hand, estimated at fifty to eighty by the Deseret News. Soon Salt Lake City Police showed up. The news media and Sim Gill, a deputy prosecutor who went on to become the elected district attorney, weren’t far behind.1

Chase was the only one charged in the case— misdemeanor counts of battery, disturbing the peace, and trespassing. Prosecutor Gill said the charges were warranted and that Chase was the only “adult” at the gathering, having turned eighteen two months earlier.

“Are you kidding!” Jackie exclaims.

“No parent wants their kid to do that, but it was not like they were going there to have a gang fight . . . And such a big deal was made out of it!”

She and the governor discussed it with Chase in a judicious way. “We had to help him feel and know that it had consequences, it was not the best decision,” Jackie says. “But he should not feel like he had done something that was extremely serious.”

The son of then-Mayor Deedee Corradini had been arrested on a DUI charge while in high school a few years earlier. There was just a small article in the newspaper. For whatever reason, Chase’s situation was deemed significantly more newsworthy.

“It upsets you, but you have to just move forward and not make it a big deal,” Jackie says. “But at the time that’s hard because it is unfair.”

The story told at the early NGA conference that upset her so much involved a news barrage faced by Governor David Walters of Oklahoma, who endured considerable criticism over campaign contribution irregularities. His only son, twenty-years-old and going through difficulties of his own at the time, took his life by overdose while parked in a car near his former high school.

Jackie had instinctively felt concerns about the timing of their own run for office with impressionable children of varying ages. The Walters’ tragic story exacerbated the worry.

“I always said this is easier if you don’t have children at home,” she says. “And yet if you can see it through there are a lot of positives that will come, and they’ll have an experience that was very memorable.”

1. “Leavitt’s son sentenced on ‘fight club’ charge.” Deseret News, 20 September 2002. https://www.deseret.com/2002/9/20/19678496/ leavitt-s-son-sentenced-on-fight-club-charge

For herself, the rowdiest episodes mostly consisted of people “just expressing themselves—inappropriately and loudly.” It could be as simple and fleeting as going down a parade route and someone yelling out, “Cut our taxes!”

“And you just go—OK, thank you.”

Usually her husband was the target, but sometimes it felt pointed at her, and the edgiest remarks were animated by issues. “‘Teachers need to be paid more!’ Stuff like that.”

Being thick-skinned was essential, not just for the children’s sake.

“You had to take each one as it would come. You’d have to just take the time to go over it in your mind and recognize what it was, what it wasn’t, then you had to let it go as much as you could.

“To be able to move forward and see the positive, we all have to do that. You can’t overthink. You have to let go. Even if you feel really strongly, just let it go. So that you can move forward and not feel inhibited and feel like ‘I can’t do this.’ Lesson learned, let’s go forward.”

The upside, Jackie says, always was, and always will be, the many, many positives afforded by those eleven years within the ultimate state office. Those were much more numerous and far more enduring.

It all was interesting—the pace, the people, and the engagement with current events and public life. She had grown up in a family of Democrats in rural Cache County who had always been involved in party politics and community life.

“So I had always been aware. But with this—public service—you would have a particular impact on so many things. Along with the children, I felt an impact on so many efforts.”

Reflections as a Husband

By Michael O. Leavitt

During the 1992 election campaign, Jackie and I had not spoken about what our lives might be like post-election. It had seemed forbidden territory while the campaign was under way, as if it could jinx our chances or set us up for a big disappointment.

Shortly after the election win, we took the family away to a beach house in San Juan Capistrano, California, for a few days. It was a favorite family vacation place, and the getaway was a great way to gather ourselves as a family and let emotions settle. And now that the crucible of the election was over, Jackie and I could talk things over and recalibrate.

She and I used our week at Capistrano Beach to take long walks, scoping out the challenge in front of us. We were united in our pleasure that the pressure of the campaign had ended, but we were experiencing different emotions about the future.

Everything seemed adventurous to me; it felt much weightier to Jackie.

I understood, at least theoretically, that my new job would bring a degree of disruption. However, I felt, perhaps naively, that it would all work out; that we would figure it out. That all would be fine. I have often joked that politics is dependent on a steady supply of people who don’t know what they are getting themselves into. I may have personified my own humor.

Jackie is a complementary opposite from me. She is a nurturer, not an adventurer. She finds comfort in knowing the orderly execution of details, not the sweeping aspirational visions I thrive on. She cultivates privacy, and depends on predictability and routine as the foundations of her life. All this change made her feel anxious and off-balance. The time in California helped us both.

Within a week of our returning home from California, Jackie and I attended a seminar for new governors held by the National Governors’ Association (NGA) in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In addition to orienting us to the nature of our jobs,

a group of veteran governors and their spouses spent several hours speaking in quite emotional terms about the complex balancing act required between their public and private lives. Their stories were poignant and worrisome.

Clearly, the most important takeaway from those sessions was that being governor is a complicated job, but being the spouse of a governor is a role, not a job. And there is no template for how to conduct that role; the bottom line was just “do it your way.”

Jackie and I concluded that “our way” had a foundational, unalterable premise—that Jackie’s job was to be mother and spouse looking after the well-being of our family. We left the new governors seminar feeling less overwhelmed, but that simple premise proved easier said than done.

We faced a torrent of challenges and changes. I had a government to organize, state budgets to prepare, an inauguration to plan, speeches to write and a thousand

new demands. All of which seemed like the most exhilarating experience of my life.

Jackie, on the other hand, began overseeing preparations for the move to the Governor’s Mansion, a historic home built by Thomas Kearns early in the twentieth century, with our five children. Each of those children was dealing with his or her own logistical concerns and insecurities. In addition, Jackie suddenly had the Mansion and its staff to deal with, as well as a new array of demands on her time.

As a new incoming administration, I felt a need to build relationships with the legislature, the media, and the families of our new colleagues. This meant entertaining several times a week—at the Mansion. There also was the pressure of public tours conducted regularly at the Mansion, and the fact that the Mansion was now our family home. All of these new expectations were invading Jackie’s life at once.

By her nature, Jackie feels the weight of expectations and holds herself to the highest of standards. It was different for me. A reception at the Mansion in the evening was just one more event on the 3 x 5 schedule card I carried in my pocket. For Jackie, it was inviting people into her home. If our three-year-old escaped into the party area in his pajamas, I thought it was charming. To Jackie, it was a management failure, and then she intuitively felt guilty at not being upstairs tucking him into bed.

Within a couple of months, the impact of all this began to create significant health issues for Jackie. It was just too much. We had to reset, and we did.

Jackie set up working hours with her staff. They were asked to not enter the private quarters on the second floor. We instituted a weekly lunch between Jackie and me that became a regular ritual. Jackie and her assistant began attending our scheduling meeting, and we changed the rules related to her engagement and involvement. Jackie was scheduled for far fewer events and accepted only the events she felt had purpose for being there. We agreed that on any given day, if things were not going as expected, she could opt out of attending any event with me. Importantly, Jackie deferred for a time some of the initiatives she had been planning until after our first year.

By the end of the first school year coinciding with our service, the rhythm of our days had begun to stabilize into manageable routines. Then, in December 1993, the mansion fire occurred. This event is detailed separately, so I will simply say that as difficult as that event was for all of us, it had the effect of putting us back in our family home on Laird Avenue, where we stayed for the balance of our service. The impact of moving our family back to our private home was overwhelmingly positive. Still, we all treasure the time we had living full time at the Mansion and it continued to be an important part of our lives while we resided on Laird.

When Westin, our youngest, started school and our children became older, Jackie began to feel more comfortable spending time on specific interests she wanted to advance. She set up the Office of the First Lady and started focusing on issues related to children and families. Her background in performing arts caused Jackie to adapt naturally

to the use of media. While she would resist me saying this, the fact is she became a widely recognized public persona, starting from late in the first term on through the duration of our service.

Jackie developed a circle of close relationships among her fellow first ladies. The same year I chaired the NGA, she chaired the NGA’s spouse organizations and was able to turn some of her state initiatives into national efforts. Jackie was loved by the other spouses and was routinely sought by newer governors’ wives as a mentor. Starting out, Jackie had been appropriately cautious about her public role. By the end of our service, she was widely respected by other spouses and spoke often about how much she enjoyed her service. One thing had never changed, though. She always put our children first, and it made all the difference.

In the beginning, serving as Utah’s First Lady truly had to be a side job for Jackie. The rest of the time she was a roll up your sleeves, drive the minivan, police the homework, fix dinner kind of mother. Over time there were tasks she learned to delegate. The Mansion staff included an assistant who, in addition to handling preparation for all the entertaining done on site, also provided some of our family meals. Because we were not living at the Mansion, those were delivered at the first of the week in a packaging format most conducive to feeding a family of seven with multiple schedules.

Mike S.

By Laurie Sullivan Maddox

Michael O. Leavitt was a phenomenal, involved dad, says Michael S. Leavitt. He coached his eldest son’s basketball teams, taught life lessons, and never put a foot wrong in leading by example, particularly in the ways he acted with genuine care and compassion toward others.

So, by the time Mike S. had to abruptly start sharing his father with the state of Utah at age sixteen, there was a discernible shift in daily equilibrium, but no tremendous upheaval.

“I look back and I didn’t lack for anything in terms of good emotional relationships with my dad. And when he ran for office he was gone. But because he put so much in the bank for me emotionally, it wasn’t a jarring experience,”  Mike says.

He himself was a calm kid but not an easy child, he says, due to learning difficulties growing up, related to how he tested and performed under measured criteria rather than any intellectual challenges.

His parents steadfastly navigated and supported him in overcoming those throughout his childhood. Whatever it took, they did it, from tutors to teacher consults, and his parents never wrote him off as “just not inclined” toward academics.

“They did a fantastic job. And as a parent now, I have even more appreciation,’’ he says. “They never said ‘You were challenging,’ but I know I was.”

Throughout all the years spent engaged in politics and its rough and tumble, Mike never saw either parent angry, complaining, or vengeful, never saw them “want to hurt anybody or just speak really sharply about how horrible someone is.”

“They have opinions of course, but they’re just really wonderful parents. The more you go through the world and see how people are, the more you know how privileged you are. I had parents who had unending love for me.”

An amiable, sensible eldest child, Mike greeted the twists and turns of public-service life as new adventures: interesting, fascinating, fun, eye-opening, normal for the most part, with some truly larger-than-life moments. Nothing struck him as too outrageous in terms of cruel remarks from strangers, unfair assumptions, phoniness, or craziness.

Adjustment to Public Life

While going through the campaign and the initial adjustment to a new public life, there were general feelings of insecurity, not in regard to family structure or his parents suddenly being disengaged from family, but about a newly unpredictable environment and situation. It started with the campaign.

“You don’t know the outcome. He’s traveling a lot. I remember times thinking, ‘I hope there’s not an accident.’ It was a new sense of insecurity about how this is all going to end up.”

Shortly after the first victory in 1992 and before the swearing-in, the family took a vacation to Southern California to unwind and regroup. Unlike any other previous family vacation, an executive protection detail accompanied them.

“The security guys were following us everywhere. I’d be thinking, ‘This is so weird!’ We went to Disneyland and there were two or three of them following us.” New and strange, but not without its upside. “I know we were able to cut in line because of it, and that was fun.”

As a high school sophomore, Mike had a typical teenager’s anxiety about what the changes in his father’s job and life meant for his own, particularly when they shared the same name. Jackie came

up with the name “ Bud” to keep the two straight, but it never took hold. His preference since adulthood has been Mike S., and to family he will always be “Mikey.”

He had the longest period of ordinary life; he was closest to adulthood when his father was elected, then left home late in the first term for Southern Utah University, followed by a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Liverpool, England, and then the University of Utah.

There were some occasional annoyances. Most bothersome was the name thing—being Mike Leavitt, but not that Mike Leavitt. Some would ask if he was joking, and then whether he was related. “I’d say, ‘Yes,’ and hope they would stop. Sometimes they did.”

“That dynamic was a little challenging. Sometimes you don’t realize it in the moment, but now, decades later, I look back and that was an issue, being able to separate who I was from this big identity, this big shadow that he cast. That took some time to kind of sort through. But it’s fine. It’s all worked out, and there were the benefits and the advantages that came from it. “

“ They did a fantastic job. And as a parent now, I have even more appreciation. ”

As for truly bizarre moments, he counts just one. While at the gym one day, an older man struck up a conversation and, without knowing who Mike was, proceeded to expound on the state education system, its problems and failures, and his own surefire solutions.

“I’m thinking, ‘I gotta get away from this guy.’ And then he asked my name,” Mike recalls. “I shouldn’t have told him. He got really misty-eyed, put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I was spiritually led to you today.’ He said we had gotten connected and that my dad has got to listen.”

1 Mike S. as assistant coach with his dad

2 Westin, Mike S., Taylor, Chase, and Mike at a conference

3 Hike with Mike S. in West Zion, 1987

4 High school graduation

5 Mike S. returning from his mission.

6 Mike S. and Mike at the Ogden Ice Sheet Winter Olympic Event

4 University of Utah graduation

5 Three generations

1 Mike S. shaking hands with the Dalai Lama

2 Taylor, Mike S., Westin, Jackie, Mike, and President Clinton at the airport

3 Christmas as a family

of Leavitts: Dixie (grandfather), Mike (father), and Mike S.

Fun times largely eclipsed any intermittent weird experiences, and many of those were associated with socializing at the Mansion, which the family used frequently for gatherings, events, meetings, and celebrations after it was restored from the fire. Mike was even a live-in caretaker of the residence for a year with his wife Carrie when they were newlyweds.

Teenage Hijinks

Living at the Mansion years earlier as a teenager, teenage hijinks naturally ensued. He once put up a giant-sized poster of actor and martial artist Jean Claude van Damme on the second-floor balcony, curious to see if it would make the news. It did. Another time a television news camera was pointed at the Mansion, Mike didn’t know what the reason was, but he showed up on TV anyway just by looking out his window.

Did he and his siblings consider the Mansion their regular “home” in the way the average person thinks of home? “Yeah,” he answers immediately. “I had many social events there.”

One social event that topped all others was the “mega-party” he and Taylor held while both were college students—Mike at the University of Utah and Taylor at Utah State University— which grew beyond all initially foreseeable bounds. One person told another and the grapevine did the rest. The retelling of it decades later still conjures up amazement.

As Taylor describes it: “Over one thousand people showed up. It was unbelievable. I learned that two couples who met there have since been married. There was no alcohol or anything, but the story ran a little bit unfairly on the news that it was a crazy group. Somehow, I ended up with most of the blame.”

According to Mike’s best recollection, it was indeed mostly Taylor’s friends and Taylor’s doing. One of those things that just goes viral—before going viral was even a thing. Conveniently, mom and dad were away.

“Absolutely insane,” Mike says. “I can’t believe it happened to this day. I was on the second floor

and looked outside, and it looks like a mosh pit. You can’t even see a blade of grass.”

Security began to get complaints and the revelry would tamp down, then amp back up again. Noise complaints continued as the evening went on. Salt Lake Police showed up, and security had to finesse it.

“Leavittpalooza” made the news, and there was not much ado after that, Mike recalls. “It was very interesting. My dad never even commented about it. I don’t think he was aware.”

“There was enough order to it that it prevented us from getting in real trouble. But just in terms of the sheer number of people, it had to have set a record. If my dad had seen it, he would’ve lost it. I think maybe he talked to Taylor. I didn’t have my fingerprints on that.”

A boxing watch-party a few years earlier had been the previous record holder. The Leavitt boys hosted a pay-per-view showing of the Oscar de la Hoya vs. Fernando Vargas fight for about four hundred of their high school friends. Assiduous hosts, they erected four king-sized white bedsheets as a giant screen along the east wall of the Mansion for primo viewing.

Dad was en route from the Capitol, headed for a meeting at the Mansion with an official from the Mexican Consulate. Driving down South Temple, a glowing light from the big screens at the Mansion loomed ahead, growing brighter as they approached. Noise levels spiked as well. The governor met with his Mexican guests, and then ushered them outside to join the crowd and watch the fight themselves.

Those were the most raucous moments as regular kids living life as a First Family. There also were unforgettable moments and opportunities associated with the position and the life.

Unforgettable Moments

Mike was ringside at the heavyweight title rematch in November 1993 between Evander Holyfield and Riddick Bowe, attending the fight with the

son of Nevada’s governor. The two governors were seated nearby, as were celebrities like Sylvester Stallone and Jack Nicholson. Suddenly, a strange figure in a parachute with a fan strapped to his back descended from the sky and flew into the ring.  The soon-to-be-infamous Fan Man landed, and pandemonium erupted.

“They stopped the fight and complete mayhem ensued. The security guys are like, ‘Where’s your dad, where’s your dad?’ And you can see me right there in the video at ringside wearing a hat.”

It was equally memorable, and undeniably more serene, when the Dalai Lama came to town and stayed at the Governor’s Mansion for a week. He slept in Mike’s old bedroom at the residence and Mike marveled at the worshipful crowd lined up outside to get a glimpse of the man.

The Dalai Lama had a deep voice and a sense of humor, Mike recalls, and seemed very down to earth. A staffer from the Governor’s Office who had a young adult son battling cancer brought the young man to see him. “The Dalai Lama talked to him and said, ‘I just want you to know I’m just a human being, just a man.’ I thought that was very genuine . . . not trying to bamboozle him.”

A Father’s Impact

More lasting and indelible for Mike were his own father’s outlook and approach to life—as a governor and as a man—and all the ways that impacted his own life.

Western Governor’s University (WGU) was a prime example. WGU was regarded with suspicion and even derision in its early design and implementation phases, but Mike believes his father’s vision and conceptualization abilities in creating the first online university, and correctly foreseeing the opportunities of the Internet Age, were nothing short of astonishing.

Mike saw it in close-up, going to work at WGU on the fundraising and special projects side of the new “startup” when the going was tough and students had first to be found and persuaded to enroll with scholarships from donors. He was in charge of the teacher-scholarship portfolio, while Max

Life on the Loa farm. Taylor, Mike S., and Westin

Farbman handled overall fundraising. For a time, it was just those two working to bring in the donations—led by the guy who came up with the idea and was its most compelling front man, the governor.

People were generous when asked, and there was a fundraising blueprint, including Mansion events in which the governor made the pitch to invitees and Mike followed up—all just to get WGU off the ground.

“ There was enough order to it that it prevented us from getting in real trouble. If my dad had seen it, he would’ve lost it. ”

In the end, WGU had the last word. The university hit a milestone in 2016 of seventy-five thousand total graduates and consistently has yearly enrollment figures nearing one hundred thousand. For Mike, the initial work was challenging but fun, and the online university’s success brought much satisfaction.

“I look back on that with a lot of pride and admiration, seeing something that made sense, seeing that dream come to fruition,” he says.

Mike chalks up many other such successes to his father’s foresight and ability to deliver—his way of getting involved with something and making it happen.

On a more personal level, Mike picked up a theme within his father’s record: expanding access, making things work, and getting a job done so that it will improve people’s lives.

Mike saw manifestations of that basic compassion long before anyone was looking. As a young child years earlier, his dad had taken him to Salt Lake International Airport to watch airplanes land and take off. Afterward, he was promised a treat.

While there, they saw a young woman in tears and approached her to see if she needed help. She was from another country, had a sick infant, and had been abandoned by her husband without enough money to get home.

“I was young and didn’t know what they were talking about,” Mike recounts. “And then he walked away and said, ‘Let’s go home.’”

“I said, ‘What about my treat?’”

His father responded, “I gave all my money to her. She had a baby, and the baby was sick, and she didn’t have enough to go back home.”

“He basically said, ‘Here’s my money, go buy a ticket.’”

Mike describes that as one of the most profound experiences he has ever had. “It showed me that this is what people do. I’ll never forget it. It impacted my life.”

Taylor, Chase, Mike S., and brother-in-law Hyrum McDonald at the Masters. Tiger Woods is front and center.

Reflections as a Father about Michael S. Leavitt

By Michael O. Leavitt

Michael Smith Leavitt is the eldest son of an eldest son. He was sixteen years old during the campaign of 1992, but spent much of the summer in Loa, Utah. There, like his father and Leavitt uncles before him, Mike spent part of several summers working on the family farm.

Finding New Friends

In the fall, Mike returned home and entered East High School. During the first few months of high school, things began to change with many of his friends. He realized that their personal behavior was headed in a direction he did not want to go. It produced an episode that captures the essence of who Mike is as a person—and, I might add, one of my most cherished experiences as his father.

Mike approached me in a very deliberate way, describing his observation about his friends. These were boys we all loved; Mike had grown up with them. He described some of the things that troubled him, and by implication

suggested he knew he would be drawn that way unless he made some changes. He knew it would be a painful transition and he was not sure how to go about it. His question was straightforward: “Can you help me figure out how to make different friends?”

Mike is by nature cautious but steady, balanced, and calm. All at once he was confronted by the move from middle school to high school. It was all happening in the midst of a swirling political campaign where he and his entire family had become conspicuous. He had every reason to feel unsettled.

Together, we developed a strategy. He would stay friendly with his current crowd, but at key moments in coming days he would seek to find new friends by sitting with those he wanted to form new relationships with at lunch. He would invite them to do something on the weekend or send other signals of friendship. Slowly, I promised, the change would occur.

Each night we would talk about the day, who he interacted with, what he said, and how they reacted. It was a deliberate and difficult change, but he made it. In the process, I came to understand the depth of my son’s character and his willingness to define what he wanted and then pursue that desire. It is a pattern I have seen repeat itself many times as he matured. It not only impressed me, but it also taught me.

My Firstborn Son

His interviews with Laurie Maddox for this book suggest our relationship had a full emotional tank when the campaign started. I felt that way also and am relieved we shared that view. I had tutored, coached, and been an ever-present part of his life. There is an attachment between a father and his eldest. While it is not greater in proportion than is felt for his siblings, it is a definably unique bond, a genuine closeness that comes with the first.

Obviously, we shared a name, too— Mike Leavitt—and that name (his, as well as mine) appeared on billboards,

television ads, and lawn signs, and has, over time, likely been both a benefit and disadvantage. It was simply too present not to affect his brand, too. Perhaps when we as a family decided to distinguish Mike S. from Mike O. by calling him Bud, it was in hopes of giving him some space. “Bud” was a familial label I often used, but as more of an adjective, as in, “You’re my buddy!” Mike went along with the renaming scheme, but it never really stuck, giving way mostly to Mikey—which self-corrected to Mike S., or simply MSL as an adult in work settings.

After the campaign, we reentered one another’s emotional orbit again and the things that had always bound us together surfaced. Mike decided to try out for the high school golf team. It was a game we shared. Mike also played in a recreational basketball league. I have a clear memory of sitting on the sidelines at one of Mike’s games with Jackie’s OB/GYN physician, John Nelson, who had agreed to join me in government at the health department. He also had a son, Eric, on the team. It was during the legislative session, and as we cheered for Mike and Eric, we concluded how to structure a key piece of our health reform legislation. That moment symbolizes the double-tasking nature of fatherhood I engaged in during those days.

Boxing and Golf

Mike’s high school years are dotted with memories for me. Earlier, in his elementary and middle school years, Mike had become deeply interested in the sport of boxing—an interest that never abated. He and a neighbor friend, John Spikes, had developed the interest in the sport from John’s grandfather.

They spent hours watching the Spikes’ grandfather’s video library of great fights. It was a contagious interest that soon enveloped Taylor and me. Once elected governor, I discovered I could get invitations for big fights through the governor of Nevada, Bob Miller, whose son Ross was equally interested in boxing. We attended several of the most notable moments in boxing during those eleven years. Mike mentions in Laurie’s interview just some of the fights we attended together, so I will not elaborate, except to say it became our thing to do together.

Not only did we see live fights, but every time there was an important payper-view fight on television, we filled the Governor’s Mansion basement with Mike’s and Taylor’s friends—and often the friends’ fathers. Sometimes there were forty or fifty of us there with pizza and drinks. Everybody cheering and shouting, arguing about who won the rounds. They were delightful evenings.

After the legislative session was over one year, I scored an invitation to play golf at Shadow Creek, a super-elite private golf course just outside of Las Vegas that was owned by Steve Wynn. I invited Mike and his friend Ben Curtis to join me. We had an unforgettable day. On the front nine, Mike shot even par—a feat he had seldom achieved. Ben also played well. However, on the back nine, the excitement of the front nine began to catch up with both and they crashed in a spectacular way. We also laughed because Ben kept leaving clubs behind. Occasionally, Mike and Ben get together as adults and we still tell the story of our day at Shadow Creek.

A Steady Pioneer Taylor and Mike were at East High School most of my first term. However, when Taylor entered East High, a year

after Mike, life changed. I have to say that I do not remember Mike getting “in trouble” a single time in high school. He was a rule keeper and has always had a very limited propensity for risky behavior. Taylor . . . not so much. I have always suspected that Mike had a great time in high school because he instinctively learned to draft on Taylor’s sometimes over-the-top plans and execution. Mike had a knack for staying just close enough to the action to have a good time, but he would abandon ship at just the right moment. Taylor and Mike were the best of friends in high school, and it was fun to listen to them talk, share friends, and yet approach the experience in somewhat different ways.

Mike’s role in our family was to be the steady pioneer. He went off to college first; he left for missionary service first. Of course, he also returned home first. All these firsts resulted in Mike being absent for parts of my first two campaigns. And he was away at college and then on a mission to Liverpool, England, much of my second term. He departed during the early part of the 1996 campaign and returned in 1998, just as the Olympic preparation and scandal were breaking into full bloom.

Missionary service seemed to transform Mike into a different person. I could see it happening in his letters. However, I have frozen in my mind the moment he walked off the airplane from England. He stood taller, had filled out physically, and carried himself with more confidence. He had become a tenacious studier and a willing leader.

A few months after his return, our family traveled to the UK on an official state economic development trip. I made business stops and then attended a Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square

performance in London. The trip also gave us an opportunity to meet many of the people Mike had associated with in Liverpool, and we were also able to attend the dedication of the Preston Temple.

A Confident Young Man

When Mike returned from his mission in England, he decided not to return to Southern Utah University but rather to transfer to the University of Utah. He lived at home with the family on Laird Avenue, parking his white Jeep Wrangler in front of the house for the next three years as he attended the U. In 2000, Mike and I finally got to work together on a campaign. We spent a lot of time working on my reelection effort.

During the three years Mike lived at home on Laird, we got to know the more assertive and confident Mike that came home from England. He joined student government, dated a lot, carried a 3.8 GPA, and cultivated a great group of friends. It was fun to watch and be part of.

As graduation approached in his senior year, I accidentally opened a letter meant for him. It was a notice that he had to rent his cap and gown. I called Mike’s attention to it. He said, “I’m not going to do that. They want sixty-nine dollars to rent it.”

I insisted, “This is a big deal, and you need to get the picture. Look, I will pay the sixty-nine dollars, but you need to do graduation. We’re all proud of you.”

Some weeks later, I was standing on the curb at LAX, the airport in Los Angeles. My cell phone rang, and it was Mike. “Well, I did it!” he said.

“Did what?” I asked?

“I walked for graduation, got the picture, like you wanted,” Mike said.

“Wait. You mean today was graduation? What? Wait! We were supposed to be there!”

“Oh, I didn’t think you cared about the ceremony—I just thought you wanted the picture.”

I have teased Mike about that for years. Fortunately, it was not the last time he donned a cap and gown. He went on to get a law degree and an MBA. When he graduated from law school at the University of Utah, I was asked to speak at commencement. I relayed that story and expressed my great pleasure at finally seeing him in a cap and gown.

One Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks after his graduation, I went for a hike with Mike and his brothers to the top of a mountain range east of the city. As we hiked, I listened to Mike telling Taylor that he was thinking about asking Carrie Carter, a nursing student from St. George, on a date. However, he was hesitant because of some sort of etiquette he was observing which involved a friend of his who also wanted to ask her out. Taylor either knew Carrie or knew of her, and I distinctly remember him saying, “Mikey, if you have a chance to date Carrie Carter and don’t do it, you’re crazy.”

The following December in 2001, Mike and Carrie were engaged and were married in May 2002. We celebrated the wedding with a delightful event at the Governor’s Mansion where we all danced, including Carrie’s then eighty-year-old Grandfather Lael, who put on quite a memorable performance of agility and endurance.

The history of Western Governors University (WGU) found in volume two of this history recounts in more detail an important role Mike played in the formation of the university. Mike had applied to enter law schools in the fall of 2002. During the interim, he worked with a colleague of mine at WGU in the development office. Mike and I raised money to provide scholarships for more than three hundred teachers. The experience of working together on this endeavor is a cherished one for both of us.

Mike was accepted to law school at the University of Utah in 2002. During that time, Mike and Carrie lived in the basement of the Governor’s Mansion as live-in caretakers. While we worked at and used the Mansion all through this time, we were still living on Laird Ave. Hence, the need for a caretaker couple. As a result, it can ironically be said that Michael S. Leavitt lived at the Governor’s Mansion longer than the elected governor, Michael O. Leavitt.

Taylor

By Laurie Sullivan Maddox

To the second son in the First Family, winning a governorship was epic. Occupying a Governor’s Mansion . . . not so much. Always an outgoing guy with a posse of friends, Taylor did not want to leave the old house and neighborhood because moving meant “taking it out of the network.”

Age fifteen, and he had a network. Then again, he was the cool cucumber who remained friendly with two of Richard Eyre’s sons but once strolled into their dad’s campaign headquarters, chowed down on their food, checked things out, and got one of the sons to show him the stash of purloined Mike Leavitt signs piled in a back room.

He also was enterprising enough to parlay his recalcitrance over the Mansion into the first pick in the Mansion bedroom draft.

If the new status as Utah’s First Family was supposed to change him and those around him, Taylor did not notice. Or comply.

“Most people knew who we were,” he says. “I honestly felt no different. In college there was maybe a little more of having to overcome stereotypes. But high school didn’t feel different. I stayed at the same high school. All my friends knew me.”

He credits his parents for that. “They kept life as normal as can be.”

Fight poster for a Tyson fight we attended. His first since his prison sentence was completed. We also met him in the dressing room thanks to Governor Bob Miller. Also sat at ringside and were able to feel the power of the punches.

Throwing water balloons from it did not. The boys had human-looking dummies and would throw them down the stairs when people came over. Sometimes, it was milder—just dangling a skeleton or scary-looking hand from a prime vantage point for Halloween.

Guy stuff, normal life. Taylor says he wasn’t high-profile; the office and settings were. Mom and dad were tolerant to a point. Taylor confirms he was the one to reach and exceed parental red lines more often than the others.

Normal meant friends, studies, extracurricular activities, and the everyday flow of things. “And then sometimes you get to visit the locker room of the 1993 NBA All-Star Game.” A regular life, punctuated by some extraordinary experiences and a few mischievous escapades thrown in.

His sister, Anne Marie, describes him as “always the one who pushed the limits, and always the most gentle at heart.’’

Taylor's Pranks

It was with one or two of the ubiquitous buddies that he came up with the idea to borrow the flashing police light from the Towne Car (one of the official vehicles used to transport the governor) mount it in the minivan, act like police, and pull over girls.

A prank of the first order with no downside. Or so they thought. The patrols commenced with no immediate repercussions. Afterwards, the guys went to a movie. “And then I feel this stern poke,” Taylor says, acting out the scene.

“There’s my dad, gesturing and stern. I thought we were busted for going to the movie. I forgot about the cop lights. Someone took our license plate number, and it went out that Mike Leavitt is pulling over girls in a tan minivan.”

Some of the zany stuff would get noticed, some not. Putting the Jean Claude van Damme poster on a Mansion balcony attracted attention.

“I was a trailblazer for punishments. We had curfews. I think mine was a half hour earlier than everyone else’s.” Some infractions caused a loss of driving privileges. The worst penalty was being grounded, deprived of the social life. A shot to the jugular.

“My parents were not rollovers, my mom in particular,” he says. “But once you hit that point with my dad it would be worse even from a punishment standpoint. Dad was always even-keeled, but when I went beyond my mom’s strictness point—and then you’d go past the point of my dad being laid back— that was the moment when I knew I’d be in trouble.”

“ Most people knew who we were. I honestly felt no different.”

Taylor would serve out his penalties each time, but never quite reformed. “It was worth it,” he avers. Except . . . as a father now—with four girls, no boys— he increasingly finds himself acting and sounding more and more like his parents. “I repeat their model all the time. I’m doing the exact same stuff.”

Winning the governorship in 1993 wasn’t a huge surprise to Taylor. He had felt it coming—the rising polls, excitement, and building momentum.

Election night was “euphoric,” he says, culminating in the giant confetti dump the boys rigged up to drop on their dad, football-sideline-style minus the Gatorade.

1 The family had originally agreed to go campaigning, but the kids wanted to go to Cherry Hill for the waterslides. So the family pitched their tent at the campground and had a great time. Mike, Chase, Taylor, and Westin, 1994

Taylor, conducting an assembly as the student body president of East High School, 1996.

Cherry Hill camping trip

4 Taylor and Mike on a day voyage of the USS Salt Lake City, a nuclear submarine based in San Diego, with one of the officers as they waited to board, 1996.

5 From left : Anne Marie, Taylor, Westin, Chase, and Mike S., at a Rams game in St. Louis while the family was there for the NGA conference (the year Mike was elected chair of the NGA). They were hosted in the owner’s box for the game.

2

3

“That’s when it really started to take on a life outside of life as usual. It was all very new, very exciting. We realized we were on the cusp of having life change and were not sure how that was going to be.”

The initial adjustment was hardest on his mom, he says, but created a bit of early shock for all of them. “I think trying to find that new groove is a challenge. We all got there. We were all going into this for the first time.”

With his friend network intact and a choice bedroom secured at the Mansion, things settled in quite nicely for Taylor. His brother Mike was old enough to drive them to school by the fall of 1993, and Taylor thrived there with sports, friends, and student government.

He was one of the sons who came face to face with a tour group one Saturday morning, wearing only boxer shorts. He had slept in, had just woken up, and was headed to the kitchen downstairs. It was a quick trip back up. “Those things were a little unusual.”

Otherwise, people would be surprised, he says, at how routine things were. There were, of course, difficult moments—instances and interactions in everyday settings when he, like his siblings and other family members, had to sit tight and just take it. Sometimes that was exceedingly difficult, like the occasions when personal or political shots were aimed at his dad or others in the family. The whirling disease fallout drove him crazy. KTVX television reporter Chris Vanocur, whom Taylor believes had it in for his dad, was a regular annoyance.

The statements of ousted Salt Lake Olympic Committee President Tom Welch, essentially that the governor knew about bribes and skullduggery in the Olympic bid process before it was exposed in an international scandal, incensed Taylor. Mostly he let things roll. But when one of his professors at USU derided his dad over the Olympics in class one day, Taylor fired back.

“For whatever reason, that was the moment. It must have been an alignment of stars. I let my own emotions get the best of me,” he says. “It was so removed from what the reality was. I said, ‘I think you’re being quick to judge.’”

For the most part, Taylor says, he tried to emulate his dad, who never let flashpoints of criticism or controversy get to him, “at least not in front of us.”

It helped, too, that none of the Leavitts are hotheads. “What we’d see from our parents, it never seemed to bother them—or they were very good at hiding it. So, we didn’t react either.”

There was no drama, he says. “The worst things that happened were probably my friends retaliating for pranks we’d done.”

The situation surrounding Chase and the Fight Club was absolute overkill to Taylor—and loaded with irony. For one, the attention was outsized, given the countless times he and his brothers put on boxing gloves and boxed in their own basement with friends.

“This is what teenagers do,” he says.

Eight people altogether boxed in the Fight Club episode, he adds. Only Chase was singled out. It also was out-of-whack in the cosmic sense. Given all the mischievous things he did, Taylor thinks the more innocent brother ended up getting nailed— and unfairly.

“The thing that bothers me most of all was nobody ever gave Chase credit for the win. He boxed great! He won the gold medal in the Utah Summer Games.”

Positive Experiences

Boxing was a big deal to the brothers. They were known for it. In high school, whenever a big fight was about to be aired, people would call in hopes the Leavitt boys would be arranging another watch party. The first time they obliged at the Mansion, it was a decent size group and a single bedsheet affixed to the wall. Success begets success, so the next time brought the four-king-sheet extravaganza with four hundred people.

“We had to cover the cost for the pay-per-view so we were charging some money. I had my little brother Westin collecting. That’s a bit of a no-no on state property, but I paid for a few tanks of gas with that.”

1 Jazz game, 1994. The family was occasionally invited by the Jazz to come to the game, and they often sat either in the front row next to the team or on the court and one row back. Front row : Chase, Preston, and Mark Leavitt. Back row : Taylor, Jackie, and Mike

2 Mike McGwire locker inside the Busch Stadium. They were in St. Louis for an NGA meeting, 1999.

3 Taylor and Mike in the Oval Office meeting President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, 1995. (Taylor used this picture to run for East High student body president by photoshopping the face of his VP candidate over Mike’s.)

4 Mike and George Steinbrenner, whom he met at an Allen and Company conference. Steinbrenner invited the family to visit spring training, so they went when they planned a family trip to Florida. At the training, they met many famous players/former players, like Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra, 1995.

5 At the MTC in Provo, sending Taylor off on his mission. (Mike S. was already in England.) 1998

6 Chase, Mike S., Taylor, and friends posing with Michael Jordan.

They made their own fun, but sometimes incredible moments evolved directly from state matters and the governorship—like chatting it up with NBA superstar Michael Jordan or prominent figures from politics and government.

“ Talk about the wisdom of life you can gather at that age—how things operate, how the world turns. It was really neat.”

It was Taylor who answered the phone when Michael Jordan called to talk with the governor after a little dustup that occurred amid NBA All-Star Weekend, held in Salt Lake City in February 1993.

The governor had barely been sworn in when he made a self-described “rookie mistake.” Jordan had complained that it was being held in snowy Utah, crimping his passion for golf. The governor remarked publicly that Jordan’s comments were off-the-mark, then declared a “Michael Jordan Day” in Utah and invited the NBA superstar to golf with him in the warmer environs of St. George.

The governor received flak over it from Utahns and Jazz diehards, but Jordan was gracious. When he called the Mansion to speak personally to the governor and invite the family to the Eastern AllStars’ locker room, Taylor picked up the phone. “He said, ‘It’s Michael Jordan,’ and I said, ‘riiight.’ Indeed, it was, and the invitation to visit was readily accepted.

Not long after, he had a more exuberant meet-up with another famous person. At their first-ever NGA conference in 1993, President Bill Clinton was a keynote speaker. Keen to meet a U.S. president, Taylor bounded past the Secret Service right up to Clinton, threw his arm around him and coaxed him into a buddy picture. A pre-smart-phone selfie.

“That one has to stand out because it was pretty dramatic. I’d never seen a president before.” There was a crowd for the president’s appearance and people were laughing about Taylor’s enthusiastic breach of formality. Clinton himself was a good sport, even if it momentarily panicked the Secret Service. “I’m sure I was on the edge of some laser being pointed at me,” Taylor says.

Their paths would cross again. Where brother Mike liked the workings of the Capitol and served as a page in the Utah Legislature, Taylor liked business and tagged along with the governor when the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed

The famous selfie of Taylor and President Clinton, taken with a disposable camera, at the family’s first NGA conference, 1993.

at the White House by Clinton. Afterward, he got to visit a bit longer in the Oval Office.

There were other witness-to-history experiences. He was a fly on the wall later for some of the discussions his dad (by then NGA chairman) had with Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich over welfare reform and Medicaid.

Taylor met Gerald Ford, Rosalyn Carter, Al Gore, George H.W. Bush, Barbara Bush, and George W. Bush. Sometime after his presidency, George W. Bush was in Salt Lake for a book signing and Taylor went to it. “We were in line, and he said, “Oh, it’s the Leavitts!”

“He’s really funny and a lot smarter than anyone in the media would ever give him credit for,” Taylor says of the younger President Bush. “He had a great memory and a quick wit. A persona was built in the media that was unfair.”

All of the siblings had a unique vantage point on current events as they unfolded because their father opened those doors to them—and encouraged their interest.

“Talk about the wisdom of life you can gather at that age—how things operate, how the world turns. It was really neat. And he was not shy about letting us be part of it. I don’t think he ever told us no on anything. He loved having us there and being a part of it. We’d be off to the side, but he’d let us be part of it.”

Taylor remembers the small details as well. Two decades later, he can still rattle off the phone numbers of the security officers who protected them.

“I was getting chased once and ran into the Governor’s Mansion. Big John Mitchell comes out and saves the day,” he says. Security’s job was looking after the family, but some became like extensions of the family as time went on. There was always a security detail that stayed at the Laird house once the family moved back.

Sometimes the day was saved when it seemed it could not be, just by family being together. Taylor lost all his clothes in the 1993 Mansion fire, along with “all my fireworks that I shouldn’t have had that maybe came from Wyoming.”

Their first temporary home immediately after was the University Park Marriott near the U of U. Then came the American Towers condominiums for several months. Christmas that year was very different, but also very special. American Towers was home, for the moment, because being together made it so.

“There’s something about a Christmas when you’ve lost everything and where people come together,” he says. “So I lost all my clothes. But then you just have a unique Christmas experience where what you get is more than what you just lost. If you asked all five siblings, I’m sure they would say that was their most memorable and favorite Christmas.”

Reflections as a Father about Taylor Leavitt

By Michael O. Leavitt

At the 1993 National Governors Association (NGA) summer meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, President Bill Clinton addressed the plenary session. It was our family’s first NGA summer meeting. Understandably, all the children were excited to see the president of the United States.

As a governor, I sat with my colleagues at tables organized in a hollow square so that every governor faced the podium. Family members sat in the seats behind. When the president had concluded his remarks, the audience stood and applauded, and then adjourned to accommodate the president’s departure.

Taylor was sixteen years old and on a personal mission to meet Bill Clinton.

“Dad, I want to meet the president, okay?” he stated.

I glanced up to see others gathering around the president and said, “We can give it a try.” Before my sentence had even been completed, Taylor bolted

toward the president’s position behind the podium area, darting through the crowd like a running back headed for the endzone. We were in a secure area, so his approach drew little notice from the Secret Service agents who surrounded the president.

Taylor stepped fearlessly up to the president and said, “I’m Taylor Leavitt, Governor Leavitt’s son from Utah. Could I have a picture?”

The president obligingly shook Taylor’s hand as he looked for the White House photographer who is always nearby.

Taylor took a pose position on the president’s left and then calmly lifted a yellow disposable camera in front of their faces and pushed the button. Flash! A sharp light went off at shortrange, taking a picture of a smiling Taylor Leavitt and a wide-eyed and totally startled president of the United States of America.

Introducing Taylor Leavitt, our adventurous, spontaneously bold son (and

future business partner), who spent his adolescence tempting fate—and had a great time doing it. His father being governor was simply an atmospheric for Taylor’s fun-loving approach to life.

Taylor and Mike

Taylor was fourteen-years old in the fall of 1991 when my initial campaign for governor launched. He was born October 18, 1977, in Cedar City; only twenty months and a single school year separated Taylor from his oldest brother. They were a package, each forming opposite sides of a risk/reward equation. We often pushed Mike to take advantage of the full measure of the boundaries we gave him. Taylor, on the other hand required the well-defined parental limits. With Taylor present, I knew they were having fun. And if Mike was present, the chances of their safety went up considerably.

It should be noted that Mike and Taylor were not without the typical argument and turf battles that

accompany any family situations. Often, those were created when Mike’s well-refined talent for teasing his younger siblings was in play. Most notable were the moments when Mike would exploit one of Taylor’s most endearing traits—a reverence for streaks. Taylor cultivates things that are consistent and endure. For example, I think one of his streaks is that Taylor has read the Book of Mormon every day for years. (His older brother figured out that he could get Taylor’s ire up by threatening one of his streaks.)

Memorable Moments with Taylor

Taylor also spent the summers of 1991 and 1992 at our farm in Loa changing sprinklers, among various other farm jobs. In addition to the development of our two sons, there was also a “divide and conquer” parental strategy at play for Jackie and me. The summer of 1992 was intense. Fundraising, vying for convention delegates, attending national and state political conventions, and other constant events made having our two oldest in Loa working on the farm a wonderful win for everyone involved. Upon his return to Salt Lake City, Taylor became engaged in the election as it moved into the early fall period of the campaign.

My opponent in the primary election, Richard Eyre, lived in the same area of Salt Lake City, so our children knew the Eyre children. They had many friends in common, so there was a natural element of rivalry, awkwardness, and tension. Taylor dealt with the situation by simply embracing it. On election night he worked the crowd at Leavitt headquarters and, when that got slow,

he walked with his friends a few blocks away to Eyre headquarters and rather enjoyed the stir his presence made. He then returned with his posse of friends and set about creating their own unique victory celebrations, which had the main objective of getting themselves on television.

With the election over, we started our planned family move to the Governor’s Mansion on South Temple. Taylor resisted the idea of leaving Laird Avenue and his friends, but he adapted quickly, staking out the only bedroom on the third floor. Because of the fire, we lived full-time at the Mansion for only ten months, but it was long enough for Taylor to establish plenty of lore bearing his signature mischievousness. One example was the night we entertained an arts group at the Mansion, only to discover during the reception that Taylor had hung a rubber human arm inside the fireplace so it looked like a person was trying to crawl down the chimney. The local arts patron who came upon it first was quite unsettled. I simply asked if she had teenagers.

Another memorable moment was the Saturday afternoon where I had lain down to take a nap after an exhausting week. I was awakened by security checking on me. It seemed someone on a mansion phone had called 911. The police, fire department, and news media had all shown up at the west gate. I assured them I was okay, but I knew without asking who was likely behind this. My investigation revealed that Anne Marie and her cousin Jenni Leavitt were in the Mansion office. Taylor had casually told Jenni that a lot of people call the governor to

register their discontent, so a “What’s your beef” phone line had been set up. “Go ahead, try it,” he coaxed, “Just dial x11-beef (911).”

The 911 system in Salt Lake City is programmed to signal an all-response police and fire alert if an emergency call comes from the Governor’s Residence. Jenni’s innocent call triggered an every-available-resource response, and within minutes they all came with sirens blaring, along with the media.

A large poster-sized picture of a famous body builder was observed by a journalist draped over the front balcony of the Mansion, so naturally it was written about in the newspaper. Taylor again.

The “spontaneous party” on the Mansion grounds while his parents were away—attended by nearly a thousand kids (I am not exaggerating) on a spring evening—yes, that was Taylor as well.

Then there was the pay-per-view boxing match that was projected up on the side of the Mansion on large sheets that had been rigged up using PVC pipe and ropes, with a crowd of nearly four hundred in attendance. Well, okay maybe I agreed to that one—sort of. I think Taylor’s words were, “Do you mind if I have a few friends over to see the fights?” His explanation after the fact was, “Things got a little out of hand, more people showed up than we expected.”

On yet another occasion, the security detail called to say that a 1984 Dodge van licensed under my name had been reported using a red light to pull over cars full of teenage girls. It did not

take long to figure out who was behind that either. Yes. Taylor. Suffice it to say, that one got a little messier than some of his other pranks.

Over time, my prayers as a parent that Taylor would survive adolescence were answered. The truth is Taylor had good friends and totally avoided the scary things a parent worries about most, like drugs, alcohol, and other dangerous behavior. Likewise, academics came naturally for Taylor and he got good grades. Using his charismatic leadership style, he was elected student body president at East High School his senior year.

One of my favorite aspects of Taylor’s student presidency was all the Sunday nights that year when the “Leopard Den” report was assembled in our basement on Laird. The East High mascot was a leopard. One of Taylor’s innovations as president was the creation of a weekly video called the “Leopard Den.” It summarized announcements and information about various student government activities in a video produced and edited in our basement by a small team of Taylor’s colleagues and friends. The videos were played over the school’s closed circuit television system. They were hilarious and occasionally over the top, but having those kids in our basement each week was a delight.

Leaving Home

Taylor selected Utah State University for college. He was granted a spot on the Presidents Leadership Council. Living in Logan gave him regular contact with Grandma Cleo and his Smith family cousins. At the conclusion of his freshman year, he spent the summer working

with me on my 1996 campaign. He took photos and served in a role referred to as “body man,” which simply means he was with me all the time. We both knew his impending departure on a mission meant our proximity would change, and we had a great summer together. After the election, Taylor accepted a mission call to the Santiago South Mission in Chile.

A mission did for Taylor what missions do for most. Like his brother Mike, when Taylor arrived home, he was an adult having shouldered significant responsibility. He had also seen poverty and a different life than we lived in Utah and had mastered the Spanish language.

Shortly after Taylor returned home, I led an economic development mission to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Jackie and Taylor accompanied me (at our expense). Taylor served as my interpreter on several occasions during the trip and it gave me a chance to see his ease with the culture and language.

We built a couple of days into the schedule in Chile so we could visit some of the places Taylor had served and meet families and people who had become his friends. The Chilean government was deeply concerned when they learned I wanted to go into some of the neighborhoods where Taylor lived. They were dangerous places, according to Chilean authorities. But we were able to meet families who lived simple lives under harsh conditions, and they loved Taylor.

Once home from his mission and back in school, it became clear that he was now an adult. We celebrated our family traditions together and took

every opportunity to connect, but he operated in his own orbit and got busy quickly. Anne Marie had joined him at Utah State University (USU) by then. With both on the President’s Council and surrounded by Jackie’s family, it could not have been better.

Just as he did in high school, Taylor got deeply into student government at USU. He narrowly lost an election for student body president but was quickly assimilated into other roles and gravitated toward the study of business. In 2002, he earned a degree in finance at USU, and upon graduating moved back to Salt Lake City, where we got to work together in a public policy organization called the Oquirrh Institute. During that time, he met Tammy Palmer, a public information officer at the Department of Public Safety. At our 2003 end-of-year family gathering in California, Taylor proposed marriage to Tammy. It was just as I transitioned to Washington. The following fall they moved to Los Angeles, where Taylor would attend MBA school at UCLA.

Anne Marie

By Laurie Sullivan Maddox

06

Anne Marie occupied a special place in the family line-up: smack dab in the middle with two older brothers and two younger. The only girl, she is the one the governor describes as most like him.

She was a go-getter in her many pursuits— head cheerleader, member of seminary counsel, attendee at Girls State—all while in high school. She liked politicking and had gleaned at a tender age—via her father’s regular campaign-consulting with the likes of President Ronald Reagan and Senator Jake Garn—that “politics is what we did.” During her dad’s campaign for the governorship, Anne Marie remembers her parents striving to defuse any harshly competitive sentiments among family—and her Grandma Anne’s valiant struggles to contain her own irritation over the primary.

Even so, she says it was clear dad’s opponents were “the enemy”—at least to her—and had she been older and able to drive during that first campaign, she doubts she would have held back when the rumors swirled about stacks of Mike Leavitt signs stashed down the street in the Eyre garage.

“I’d back my car right into their driveway. I’d throw their garage door open and say, ‘Load it up boys.’”

She loved traveling around and campaigning with dad, even if the thought of all those

trips made in the little airplane now terrify her. She was nine turning ten during the campaign, and they would crisscross the state for meetings and events all the time.

While she can’t recall the pilot’s name or story, she remembers him telling her what to do if the plane ever went down: She should not look back at him or her dad, “just open this door and run.”

“That was just the routine. So now I’m petrified as an adult by little planes. Because little planes do go down!” she exclaims now.

It was incredible fun, though, to hit the smaller Utah towns with her father, since it felt like smalltown Utah liked him and considered him one of their own. Cedar City was best of all because “half the town had babysat him at some point.”

A Grand Life

Then came the victory, the sweeping into office of the new First Family. To the only Leavitt girl, life was pretty grand after that. Dazzlingly so.

“My parents basically opened the Governor’s Mansion like it had never been opened before. There were all these parties and people over,” she says. “The Mansion has a personality and has a story. I very much felt welcomed there and loved there. It was the fun element to the stress and demand on my dad’s schedule.”

Anne Marie wanted to be a part of all of it and readily made herself “on call” to fill in anywhere, anytime.

“Being the only daughter is special. Whenever mom wasn’t able, I’d step in. I was always on call to be the whatever-it-may-be. My mom prefers to be home and likes to operate in balance and by routine. To this day, I’m energized by people and events. I love to go out and be out.”

The downsides of her father being governor always came down to time and scheduling, lost moments with her father, and the occasions when precious time claimed for family would get reclaimed by the job. Even a planned trip to Hawaii had to be nixed in the aftermath of the 2000 State

Republican Convention, when the governor was booed by some delegates and ended up with a GOP primary opponent.

Dad was always “steady,” Anne Marie recalls, and just went out and did what needed to be done. Both parents always conveyed a unified front to the kids.

Exploring the Mansion

Anne Marie practiced piano on the grand piano in the mansion’s parlor and choreographed dances with friends in the ballroom. She also took to playing in the carriage house on the Mansion grounds, which wasn’t used except for storage and at times seemed haunted. Dolls weren’t her thing; office supplies were. So she rearranged some chairs and other furniture just laying around in the carriage house and played “office” there.

That was fun, having her own private playhouse, until a state worker in charge of the grounds discovered she was there and made her stop and put everything back in its original place. “He was bothered that I was using it,” she says. Jackie just scoffed.

“We weren’t bothering anybody, and he insisted, ‘All must go back, immediately.’ It’s probably still there to this day collecting dust. We were always respectful of the rules. Mom has later said, ‘I wish we had just said no! I wish I would have been more bold.’”

“ My parents basically opened the Governor’s Mansion like it had never been opened before. There were all these parties and people over.”

Anne Marie and Jackie both note that the next two governors and families had dogs inside the Mansion and within the family quarters. Nothing

ANNE MARIE

1 Anne Leavitt holding Anne Marie in the christening dress Anne Marie wore when she was blessed.

2 Anne Leavitt holding Anne Marie’s daughter, Jaclyn, who is in the same dress Anne Marie was wearing in photo 1.

3 Anne Marie in her T-ball shirt, Boys and Girls club, June 1988.

4 Fishing at Lake Powell with security looking on.

5 Anne Marie, Westin, and Melissa Handley, Mansion Manager.

6 Celebrating Anne Marie’s birthday party in the Governor’s Mansion informal dining room.

happened—no snide press reports. Another reason why the move back to the old neighborhood brought a measure of relief.

“I was so glad we had the opportunity to do both. It was a good thing for our family to be at home. For all the dazzle, the Mansion was also a giant fishbowl—the state’s fishbowl. Laird Avenue was theirs.

The teenage boys could carpool and later drive themselves to East High School, but Anne Marie and Chase, attending Bonneville Elementary, had to be driven from the Mansion. Previously, they could just walk to school. School life was mostly the same at Bonneville and later at Clayton Middle School. Things changed a bit once Anne Marie started at East High.

The dad, whose childhood pet name for Anne Marie had been “Lover,” now was imposing curfews. Even after she graduated. “Was I the princess? No. But was he more protective of me? Absolutely.”

Prying Eyes

Anne Marie felt prying eyes and whispers the most in high school. She was involved and hardworking with schoolwork and activities—cheerleading, dance, theater, and selection as a Sterling Scholar.

“I always gave my best effort. I really tried hard. It was a good time, but it also came with a lot of pressure,” part of it related to who she was—the daughter of a governor.

She is more circumspect and private as an adult. “Now, to this day, I have a hard time being public on social media because of how it reminds me of the fishbowl and the harsh judgments that follow.”

Unlike her brothers, who found that the harshest remarks they encountered were aimed at their dad, his politics and policies, or the family name, Anne Marie discovered that some of the strangest questions or statements were directed more personally at her.

There was a bizarre conversation with a woman in the neighborhood she babysat for. Anne Marie would typically wash dishes and clean up while watching the children and was conscientious. The woman had no issue with her work.

Instead, the woman began asking questions one day while dropping Anne Marie off after a job. “She said, ‘I know you’re in a public family and this would be really hard to tell me. I just want to say, has your dad sexually abused you? Because I noticed you’ve gained weight this year, and I’m a safe person to tell.’”

Anne Marie was flabbergasted, and then upset. “I reassured her, ‘No! My dad is a good person!’ And I cried myself to sleep that night.”

Encounters like those taught her a great deal about boundaries and public life. “There are no boundaries for a family in political office,” she says. “There’s just not. People feel an ownership.”

Simple activities like dining out, going to a Smith’s supermarket or anywhere really, people would come up to them and tell her dad their problem or issue. “Strangers would bombard him. We shared him. That’s just another element of being in the fishbowl.”

Her mother explained matter-of-factly one day— after a friendly and professional relationship the governor had with a key legislator became more strained—that you don’t have true friends in politics.

“It’s not something that someone not in the political world would ever think about,” Anne Marie says. But it rang true. “We learned these life lessons at a concentrated rate. We had to because it was simply our life.”

Despite the unkind words or conversations, Anne Marie did not struggle or have ongoing difficulties as a result of her teenage years coinciding with the governorship. They were fun overall, and she was motivated by the high expectations.

“We all handled it differently,” she says of her siblings.

The Only Girl

Anne Marie says it was “always chaotic” and boisterous with four brothers, and her life was better for it. If she ever became too “girlie,” someone would call her on it, including her father. One night, while on a father-daughter dinner date at the Five Alls Restaurant, she spied a mouse running across

ANNE MARIE

1 Anne Marie in her lucky campaign outfit, fourth grade

2 Chase and Anne Marie at an East High game

3 Cattle drive with cousins and uncles

4 Anne Marie in the lead role of the school musical, Mystery of Edwin Drood

5 2002 Governors Gala

the floor. She jumped onto her chair screaming that it was a rat. Dad was chill. “He said, ‘Anne Marie, it’s a mouse. Sit down.’’’

During those teen years, she and Jackie would frequently pair off to go shopping and the guys would form up with dad to golf. “When I was a little older, I told my dad, ‘I’d like you to take me golfing with you sometime.’”

“ Don’t worry, baby, you look great. He called me baby. It’s fun to reflect on it now. ”

She is a mother now of both boys and girls and it’s all familiar.

“I learned more for having had brothers. There would be girls in college crying over boyfriends, but being around the boys gave me insight on how

the mind works. I’m just as comfortable being at a ball game as I am at a dance event. That’s just part of being in a household with boys.”

The security detail added more machismo to the mix. Bruce Clayton, a UHP trooper, was the one who taught her to drive on the safe, uncrowded roads in Loa. He coached her, too, on her first driver’s license test, saying, “The governor’s daughter should not fail the test.” She passed it.

Open Doors and Thick Skin

Being the governor’s daughter also opened some doors that might have otherwise been closed, she believes, and that too could set some tongues to wagging.

When she was accepted to Girls State, a high school program of civic patriotism held annually each summer at Southern Utah University, she was thrilled. Then an email came in from somewhere implying her selection had more to do with her last name than her resume. She had to work with her father and his communications adviser on a reply, spelling out her qualifications.

From left: Jackie, President George W. Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, Anne Marie, and Mike

ANNE MARIE

The same thing happened when she got the lead role in the school musical. The pattern was to question her merits.

“Do I think I’ve been given opportunities because of it? Yes. Did I learn to work harder because of the position I was in? Yes.”

Sometimes she would stick up for herself, other times not. At one of her dance competitions, a woman tried to bully her, and Anne Marie’s assertive response shocked Jackie. “It’s not natural for me to have thick skin.” she says. “I’ve learned to advocate for myself over time. I’m a feeler and I often take on people’s feelings.”

When making new friends, they are fascinated by her childhood, but can’t quite grasp it, she says. She plays it off as something that happened years ago, “but it’s one hundred percent of who I am.”

The years spent in the public consciousness shaped her. “I’m opinionated. I’m politically minded and involved in local politics,” she says.

Favorite Political People

Among her favorite people from the political years were Lieutenant Governor Olene Walker and President George W. Bush.

“I loved Olene,” she says. “When she was in office she drove this little red Miata. After watching Olene, I knew some day I’d own a red convertible. She was strong and involved and not pushy. She was a unique leader and the perfect lieutenant governor for my dad.”

President Bush and her father were colleagues and friends before her dad joined the Bush Cabinet. “President Bush would tell me what a great job my dad was doing. He was always warm and ever so charming.”

Once, when family members were taking a formal picture with the president, Jackie admonished her daughter to be sure to tuck in her bra. “President Bush was right there, and he said, ‘Don’t worry, baby, you look great.’ He called me baby. It’s fun to reflect on it now.”

Anne Marie found much to appreciate about her father’s approach to people, recognizing it as an extension of how he dealt with her.

She remembers him taking her up to Snowbird as a four-year-old and teaching her how to ski. He showed her “the pizza” and “the French fry” and patiently went through the maneuvers. He took her down the slope one time. “Then he took me up again, pushed me and said, ‘I’ll see you at the bottom.’ He shows you, does it along with you, and then pushes you on your way with full confidence you’ll find your way.”

Reflections as a Father about Anne Marie Leavitt

By Michael O. Leavitt

On a Tuesday night in mid-February 1993, our family had finally settled into the former Thomas Kearns Mansion at 603 E. South Temple in Salt Lake City. “Settled,” in this case, meant most of the boxes were unpacked, not that the Governor’s Mansion had instantly become home. We were still waiting for a more familial feeling to engulf us.

The legislature was in session around this time, and a group of state senators and their spouses were scheduled to sit at the formal dining room table for dinner.

I generally sat at the east end of the long-polished cherry wood table. Jackie’s place was at the opposite end where she could more easily make conversation with a different set of guests. For this particular dinner, Jackie was unable to attend. That night, and on a number of others like it, I would cohost not with the First Lady, but my first

daughter—Anne Marie; my only daughter, and the child in whom I see many of my own attributes.

Anne Marie would turn eleven years old just a few days later. She wore a green Sunday dress and an air of confidence that shone through a dimpled smile and a natural social smoothness that has always reminded me of my mother, Anne. Before we walked down the stairs for dinner, Anne Marie showed me how a floral pattern in the dress shimmered in the light when she twirled around.

As the dinner service began, I watched out of the corner of my eye to ensure she seemed comfortable. Not to worry. She loved a party and feeling like she was part of the show. She chatted up the guests with the ease of a seasoned socialite.

When dessert was finished and all the words had been said, Anne Marie and I stood at the carriage entrance

door as the staff retrieved winter coats. We shook hands with each and bid them farewell. I put my arm around Anne Marie’s shoulder as we walked up the grand staircase to give her mom a full report.

Eighteen months earlier I had launched my campaign for governor with a news conference in our living room on Laird Avenue. We cleared the furniture out of the front room and set up a podium in front of the fireplace. There was barely room for the reporters and television cameras in the remaining space. Anne Marie was only nine at the time. I understand better now how disruptive it might have felt to a little girl her age. It is hard to know if I was simply naïve or if it was the simple faith I felt that our children could thrive in an environment that involved having a more public persona. Now with nearly thirty years passed, it seemed evident that Anne Marie navigated the whole

thing with real grace, though not without a few bruises, which she references in her interview with Laurie.

Daddy’s Girl

I have tender feelings when I think of Anne Marie as a little girl. I hope she felt as much like daddy’s girl as her daddy felt she was. She became my exercise partner early in life. We would go for walks clear to the top of G Street while we were living at the Mansion. During summers in Loa, we both preferred mornings, and we would often walk on a dirt road with farm fields on both sides. The smell of the fresh morning air and the sounds of meadowlarks and sprinklers humming still brings those early walks back to me.

Anne Marie seemed to gravitate to activities that felt grown up to her. She was always willing to come along with me on business or political trips. One time, she traveled with Jackie and me to Mexico on a trade mission. She stuck with the staff team as I remember it, just because she liked hanging out with them. I remember specifically an interpreter assigned to our party being delighted by Anne Marie, who accompanied us on diplomatic visits on that trip. The highlight (or lowlight depending on your point of views) was the president of Mexico kissing Anne Marie on the lips.

Much of Anne Marie’s play was constructed around work-like fantasy. In addition to her make-believe office in the carriage house at the Mansion, I remember weekends when the Mansion staff was away where she would

ANNE MARIE

take over the actual office. She would use the office equipment, make copies and answer the telephone in a makebelieve world.

When she was twelve or thirteen, Anne Marie decided to set up a business doing pedicures for older ladies in our Laird neighborhood. She got a self-warming foot tub and learned how to bathe and massage a foot, practicing in part on me. She got some instruction on the clipping and filing as well. When she felt confident in her abilities, Anne Marie started offering her services. The first service was free, and she would come to a customer’s house. The older ladies in our neighborhood loved it; she got several takers as I remember it. Over time, her passion faded but it showed an entrepreneur’s instinct that has carried over into adult life.

Anne Marie’s Extracurricular Activities

During her middle school years, Anne Marie participated in dance. Like every parent, I attended those endless dance programs, the ones that have forty-three different dance acts by a variety of age groups. Of course, the first forty-two dance performances all lead to the finale, where every child danced—an arrangement strategically designed to ensure no parent left. This is a place where the assets of my job came in handy. Most of the recitals were at Kingsbury Hall on the University of Utah campus. I would leave the advance person on the security detail at the recital, and I would slip over to

the university’s small golf course to practice my short game. The security trooper would summon me back just in time to watch Anne Marie.

The mention of golf causes me to express a regret I have as a parent. Anne Marie is extraordinarily athletic. She is strong, stays fit, is competitive by nature, and has unusually good coordination. When she was an adult, she took up golf. One day she said to me, “I love golf. I love to play it. I love the clothes and the equipment. I love the way the grass smells when I play. Dad, why did you waste all that money on dance classes when I could have been learning golf?”

I know Anne Marie benefited from the dance and she probably said what she did in jest. However, the conversation caused me to realize that among the things I would do differently is expose Anne Marie more to the world of sport. Women’s sports had only begun to develop, and I missed a real opportunity.

Anne Marie was involved in the sport of cheer as a high schooler, however. I grew up in a family of all boys, so I really was not tuned into

the world of cheer, but Anne Marie started as a freshman and progressed throughout her years until she was head cheerleader her senior year. What I learned is that cheer is a spectator sport. And it’s not just leading spectators in cheers—parents go to watch their children cheer in the same way they would as if the child plays on the field. I must confess that sometimes when cheerleaders did the stunts I had to look away. They just seemed too dangerous.

A lot more came out of her cheer experience than just a demonstration of her athleticism. It brought together her infectious personality and leadership qualities. Anne Marie really blossomed in high school. I remember feeling teary watching her sing as the lead in TheMysteryofEdwinDrood . She just looked so adult.

Like every father of a teenage girl, I had the boy worries. She promised me her first date, which she reported in her interview with Laurie. We went to dinner in a kind of ceremonial coming-ofage moment every dad should cherish.

Past Curfew

One night about 12:30 a.m., a little past her curfew, Anne Marie called and asked me to pick her up at a friend’s house. I had discontinued having a Highway Patrol detail staying overnight in our basement by this time, but they often left a patrol car in front of the house to provide the appearance of an officer. For reasons I cannot recall, the patrol car was the only car available. So, at 12:30 a.m., I got dressed and headed to the patrol car. Getting in, I adjust-

ed the seat and turned on the key. To my horror, the siren went off. It was a booming sound that echoed off the houses on our block. I frantically tried to figure out how to turn it off but could not find a switch. I turned the engine off, but the siren continued. Several minutes passed as I tried to find a button. Jackie came to the door, as did neighbors. It was humiliating.

As a last resort, I decided to drive the car, siren and all, to the state Capitol, where I could get help from one of the duty officers. I was momentarily amused by the thought of picking Anne Marie up on the way. Retrieving my daughter in a UHP vehicle with siren blaring seemed like a clever curfew infringement sanction.

Again, I fiddled with the seat, this time revealing that when I had adjusted it before, I had tripped the siren switch in the process. Once my heart rate receded, I went about the original mission. Anne Marie was scandalized enough being picked up in a police car. The siren would clearly have been over the top.

Attending College

The summer after she graduated from high school, I was engrossed in my third campaign, which featured an unexpected primary and a fairly competitive general election. Anne Marie joined the campaign staff through the fall, when she started at college. We drove her to Logan and helped her set up her computer in Merrill Hall. Her roommate was Marie Danielle Needham, a first cousin. They were surrounded by family, but independent. The next year she moved off campus

to Hillside Apartments where a number of President’s Leadership Council students resided, including Taylor, who was in an apartment just one floor up. He was home from his mission in Chile and had a green Pontiac Sunfire, which I am pretty sure Anne Marie drove as much as he did.

Anne Marie, like Taylor, spent a lot of time with their Great-Grandma Cleo, which was an enormous blessing for all three of them. Cleo was in her early eighties and still very active, going to exercise classes and helping neighbors. She was quite involved with our children and their cousins during the college years in Logan.

During the summer of 2003, as Anne Marie was preparing for her senior year at Utah State University, she got an internship working at the Office of Family Services in the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington., D.C. It was about the same time that I started having conversations with the Bush Administration about joining the Cabinet.

ANNE MARIE

Hyrum McDonald

I followed Anne Marie’s social life only sporadically. A dad is not normally the first person a daughter wants to share details of her social life with. But I got some information through Jackie, who was always right up to date. I knew that a guy from Utah State had been traveling to Washington, D.C., to see Anne Marie and that they had been dating at school. Consequently, later in the fall I was a little surprised to observe what appeared to be a fast-growing relationship with this Hyrum McDonald, who had recently returned from a mission in Canada and was planning to play football in Arizona. Apparently, he was making trips to Logan to see Anne Marie every weekend. I was even more surprised when Jackie told me how emotional Anne Marie became when she found out the Christmas to New Year’s week would be a couple of days longer than expected, because, I was told, “because she didn’t want to be away from Hyrum!”

“Who?” I said.

This guy had come out of nowhere. It did not help that I kept mistakenly referring to Hyrum as “Heber” in conversations with Anne Marie.

Then part way through the holiday trip, I got the full-court press from Anne Marie—with an assist from Jackie—to

have Hyrum come to California to join us for a few days. That inspired Taylor to invite Tammy Palmer to join him, so our party grew.

It was a good thing I liked Hyrum instantly, because the relationship between him and Anne Marie was serious and on a fast track. Sure enough, Hyrum asked for some time alone. I knew what that meant. Before we left to go back to Utah, we had two engagements— Hyrum and Anne Marie, and Taylor and Tammy.

Many times since, I have thought what good choices our children have made in spouses. I had always hoped that I would be able to embrace the spouses like they were our own. Hyrum has proven to be among the most solid human beings I have ever met. He is a great father, an extraordinary provider and example, and wonderful husband. I trust him completely and I enjoy his company immensely. He feels like our son. Just what a father wants for his first, and only, daughter.

As of this writing, Anne Marie and Hyrum have four children and a happy and prosperous life.

Chase

By Laurie Sullivan Maddox

Chase was mostly indifferent to the lights and drama on victory night. He had gamely worn the Mike Leavitt t-shirt, Mike Leavitt cap, and Mike Leavitt fanny pack like a good foot soldier for months on end before that. He also had picked up on the competitive vibe that permeated everything up through the election.

What stood out most for the fourth Leavitt child, nine years old at the time, was his dad, just before departing for election night festivities at Little America, assembling the kids in the living room and giving them the lowdown.

“He said, ‘Look, I just want to let you guys know tonight could work out for a victory or benefit. Whatever happens, we’re family.’ He was just basically trying to stabilize the whole thing. And then he left.”

Chase’s other vivid memory is that he was allowed to bring his good friend Michael Paul Henroid along for the celebration, but then they got busted and yelled at by Uncle Mark for throwing ice off a seventeenth-floor balcony. The coolest moment was the big confetti dump his older brothers orchestrated with friends.

Then the next day at school, during a few brief minutes after the Pledge of Allegiance when a student could share the day’s news, Chase had an update. “I raised my hand and gave out some things, and then: ‘Oh yeah, my dad won governor.’”

He wondered what this might mean for him, and asked Jackie, “Do I get a car and driver?”

With his dad on an errand one day shortly after the election, when all were still getting used to the ever-present security, he had another burning question: “What if they catch you not working?”

Karl Malone Shoes

Moving into the Governor’s Mansion was all right with him. He usually tended to follow Taylor’s lead on things but not this time, since his older brother was opposed to the move. “I was intrigued by the fact that it was a mansion,” he says.

Lauralee Hill, the childcare assistant at the Mansion, drove Chase and his sister to school at Bonneville and picked them up afterward. “My friends liked it, and I thought it was all pretty cool.”

Then ten months later, security officer Lee Perry arrived midday and whisked him and Anne Marie over to the Utah Arts Council building next to the smoldering Mansion. Of all the destroyed and lost-forever belongings inside, his prized and autographed Karl Malone basketball shoes were the one thing salvaged. A picture of him outside clutching the shoes was one of the most memorable news photos of the ordeal. The shoes were scorched and smoke-damaged, but not destroyed. And Karl Malone, soon after hearing of the loss, gave him another pristine pair.

A short time later, basketball brightened Chase’s day again. He had asked for an indoor hoop game for Christmas, but figured he was not likely to get it. The family was then living in American Towers, disrupted by the fire. But his parents remembered his wish list. Come Christmas morning, there was the hoop.

The elementary years were great— “so small and intimate it all seemed to work in my favor.” Then came middle school and turbulence. Some older kids had it out for him from the beginning, hounding him for no reason other than he was the governor’s son.

One of the repeat offenders told him things like how he was going to “fix the next election and my dad was gonna lose. I remember thinking, ‘He’s tall, maybe he can.’” The same kid would threaten to fight him, but his body would shake while he was doing it. Chase called him on that one.

A Newfound Love of Boxing

Chase played sports in school and traveled in what he calls the competitive circles. Mike S. was the“silentleader”ofthefivekids;Taylorhadfriends and flair. Together they were a complementary tandem, so Chase followed their lead. To a point.

“I think I’m wired a little differently, and I got in a lot of fights. I had ground and people to protect in my mind. I don’t think they [Mike and Taylor] had the same worry about that. They were better at school, doing student government and things. And they had good friends. Some of my friends have faced challenges, and unfortunately, they're currently not in the best situation.”

It was Mikey who started the governor and all the brothers down the road on boxing fandom. Once, when the folks were encouraging more reading and told Chase he could pick out any magazine he wanted, he picked Boxing magazine, and the match was lit.

“ Oh yeah, my dad won governor. ”

Going back home to Laird Avenue not too long after was a helpful return to the familiar. Ties of friends and routines went on like normal, he says. “I walked to school with my friends, and my basement was kind of the main hangout for many years. It was also the same youth in the church and I had my place. It just rallied from there.”

The brothers would have pillow fights, and later boxing matches, in the basement almost daily. They would fight and then grab a popsicle.

As it became regular, they started keeping records. Upon entering high school, Chase says he had eight fights under his belt. Sometimes to mix it up, they would videotape fights and grade the best-looking knockout.

4 Chase sitting at the desk of the study in the governor’s mansion.

5 Chase and Westin in the master bedroom suite bathtub of the Governor’s Mansion, 1993.

6 Chase playing Little League football.

1 Visiting the coal mines in Emery County with cousins

2 Christmas morning entrance in American Towers, where the family had been living since the fire. One Leavitt Christmas tradition is to have the kids line up youngest to oldest to enter the room to see if Santa Claus had come.

3 First day of school. Laird house.

Jackie would break it up if she discovered it, and if she kicked them out, they’d move down the street to the park or school. Chase got so good he competed in the Utah Summer Games while in college—with Mike and Taylor manning his corner.

Fight Club

The Fight Club episode that ended up in court was “baloney,” Chase says.

He was a senior at East High with a “king of the hill” attitude. Two football players decided they would fight and had a more chest-thumping attitude about it than anything Chase had ever conveyed. Another student was “the promoter.” The idea grew and soon had an undercard, and more matches developing. Chase was scheduled first against a football player.

By then, flyers had been printed up, and it was an improbable scene when Chase showed up at the ward gym with his girlfriend. The parking lot was full and some kids were charging admission to freshmen, he says.

Chase and his opponent squared up and started punching. After barely two rounds, in swooped the police, ordering everyone out. All of it was captured on another student’s video camera.

“I kind of forgot about it, then a couple weeks later, the police officer at our school is saying that attorneys from the county district attorney’s office came in and they had confiscated a tape, and brought it to school and said ‘Can you help identify these kids?’”

“Then it got serious real fast. They’re coming after you, they’re charging you.”

That was the point when Chase got scared. He lost his student publicity manager position at the school.

His dad’s reaction intrigued him. “At some early point my dad knew, and it was interesting enough that he really wasn’t upset with me. It was— “This is a byproduct of you being my son. I need to get all the info I can.’”

The governor was upset, however, at the way things were unfolding. “I remember him saying,

‘You’re not guilty of anything. And I remember saying, ‘I don’t really care, dad. Don’t make a deal of this.’ He was always respectful to not do that.”

It was felt that Sim Gill, the assistant D.A., wanted to make a political name for himself via a more famous name. Chase was charged with multiple misdemeanor accounts—battery on a minor, boxing without a license, trespassing.

Walking the halls at school after that, everyone was looking. Neighbors stared out windows at news trucks. To this day, Chase says he has not watched a second of television news coverage about it. But he heard what was being reported. The first word of it came while he was in California with his choir group, and it was a circus.

“They’d talk about this Fight Club and affluent kids in the neighborhood. At that point we were all just laughing.”

When it came time for the legalities, they hired defense attorney Larry Weiss. The count of boxing without a license was dropped. Later, the judge in the case dismissed the battery charge. Trespassing was thrown out because the kids had let themselves into the ward with a key.

All that remained was a count of disturbing the peace. Chase was sentenced to community service at a home for elderly residents. “I really enjoyed it,” he says.

It wasn’t just family who thought he’d gotten a raw deal. “I’ve literally been pulled over, and had police looking at my license and saying, ‘You’ve been through enough. We’re going to let you off with a warning.’ People are like, ‘That’s B.S. You can smell it from a mile away.’ No one else got in trouble. It was me.”

The episode hovered over him throughout the next year. It still lingers in certain places. “It’s joked about a lot. I go to the building that this all happened at. It’s very there.”

The football player he boxed never had any ill will. Most ironic was that Chase had never seen the movie “Fight Club,” which was referenced in nearly all the news reports and had the memorable

1 Leavitt cousins: Preston, Chase, and Dixon.

2 Chase and Grandma Cleo, taken at the Laird house after Chase’s high school graduation, 2002.

3 Christmas morning 2002

4 Chase and friends at the Laird house, where they spent a lot of time hanging out. From left : Andrew Bennion, Chase, Michael Henroid, John Stoker, Joey Middleton, and Dal Price, 1995

5 Chase’s thirteenth birthday.

6 Chase receiving his Eagle Scout. From left : Mike, Chase, Jackie, and Dick Craeger (scout master)

7 Will Tukuafu, Fui Vacapuna, Conner McKeown, and Chase in Tonga, 2001.

CHASE

tagline: “The first rule about Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club.”

After so many boxing escapades at home, the regularity of it, and the normalcy of a family of boys liking boxing, the fuss was too exaggerated. Chase says the only element out of the ordinary was that it played out in a ward gym and had a promotor hyping it.

“Certainly, the judge saw it that way, which is evident.”

Boundary Issues

A negative experience in the limelight gave Chase more finely tuned antennae on how and when people could act up, whether they viewed him differently—and whether all of it was because of his father’s position.

“It felt so easy to identify who had curiosity. It was kind like, ‘Oh, so your dad’s the governor. That’s cool.’ The gas pedal and brake aren’t always the smoothest. It was easy to tell.”

Watching his dad interact enough times, the shock value would go down “and you start realizing how normal people are. That was something I developed really fast.”

Bad apples could surface in any setting. Chase was at a backyard dinner with some friends when a man in his late twenties or early thirties recognized him and started drilling down on Legacy Highway, wetlands, and environmentalism. He had facts and figures memorized and clearly seemed bent on humiliation.

“I think he thought I was just going to go at him, and he felt so well-studied on the topic he was just going to bury me. The thing I think he forgot was that maybe I just don’t care.”

Sometimes there were clueless apples with boundary issues. Everyone wanted a conversation or to speak their piece with the governor, and Chase recalls his dad turning people aside if they acted as though the public servant role overrode private time with family.

At a bowling alley once with his parents and two siblings, Chase says people came up and asked to

buy the governor a game. Others approached wanting pictures. His dad declined, politely, saying he was with family.

On another occasion, he and Chase were walking to the car and a woman came up close—too close—and began lecturing about school funding. His dad just made a wave of his arm and security ended the encounter.

Chase was the one who had seen the list of potentially threatening individuals inside the security detail’s closet at the Mansion—a taped-up list with language indicating that none of those listed were to be allowed anywhere near the premises. Printed at the top were the words: “Will Harm.”

“I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this is how it ends,’ and being scared. Those people are coming. They’re not going to stop until they get what they want.” He was nine or ten then, but the subject came up in his mind again when he was older and learned of the assassinations of the Kennedys.

His parents had a way of dispelling worries. “I remember them saying this will all go away. This isn’t forever. I think that home layer was the crux of it, because there were so many pieces of the environment that overpowered what any one person can do to assure you that things are OK.’’

“ I never really took to it, just the idea of prominence.”

In fact, Chase says, home and community were the key to everything—stability, normalcy, and family. “That’s where we started, that’s where we end, that’s where I still am. I truly think that’s the X-factor for living a normal life.”

Security Officers

Having security officers around was different, and a number of those guys became like brothers or uncles, Chase says, singling out Bruce Clayton, Alan Workman, Shane Terry, Kyle Bushnell, and Brian Smith.

One officer didn’t work out so well. During one of the family trips to San Diego, the governor and Jackie were flying home but wanted to reduce expenses by having the younger three children driven back by security. When the road group hit Mesquite, Nevada, the security officer thought they should stay over and insisted that Anne Marie should have a separate hotel room from her younger brothers. She called her parents in protest, and the governor called the head of the detail. The road stop was nixed, and the officer who was overruled turned his ire on the kids.

“He turns around and he’s like, ‘I want you guys to know something. All the things we do, all the lifting of bags and things . . . it’s all courtesy. I’m just doing my job and you want us to treat you like royalty.’ And the next thing we know, he’s gone. They were all pretty cool, though.”

Many years later, one of the favorite officers, Brian Smith, had a tragic downturn in his life after his service with the family.

According to KSL-TV, Smith had been decertified as a law enforcement officer in Utah in 2008 after becoming addicted to alcohol and opioids following an off-duty traffic accident. He had moved to Texas with his wife and five children and was working in sales.1 In the days leading up to Christmas that year, he went on a freeway shooting rampage near Dallas that killed two people and injured a third. He shot himself after an hours-long standoff with police and died on Christmas Eve.

“That wasn’t the Brian I remembered,” Chase says. “We were all heartbroken because he was so nice.”

Heartbreaks were mercifully rare; Happy moments and positive memories were more the reality.

For Chase, the highlights were courtside seats at Utah Jazz games at least five times; getting into

1. Nate Carlisle and Ern Alberty, “Suspect in deadly Texas shooting spree is ex-UHP trooper.” The Salt Lake Tribune, December 4, 2008. https://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/ci_11295838

any Olympic events he wanted to see, gliding right through with the security detail; and the NGA conferences, which had great family activities. “We met others like us there, which was rare.”

Uncomfortable with Prominence

Meeting President George W. Bush and the Dalai Lama were unforgettable. “Dad taught a Sunday school class and brought the class to meet the Dalai Lama. Those were the moments where it was like, ‘Wow, this is truly unique.’”

Otherwise, Chase didn’t quite feel comfortable with prominence. There isn’t a playbook for it. But life was as unpretentious as it could be under the circumstances.

Jackie was the catalyst for that, he says. “She believed in my dad and sacrificed what a lot of people wouldn’t have. She came from great parents, and by all indications was very capable, and she just put all of her energy into us.”

It was dad, however, who pushed Chase to focus on jobs and his future as time got closer to high school graduation. Chase had applied at RC Willey and did not get hired as a truck loader. His father discussed ideas with him and encouraged him to consider things he might be overlooking, such as firefighting,

“It started getting bad. The last thing I needed was more free time. I had quit basketball. All I wanted to do was be with my friends.”

Chase took his dad’s advice and began the process of looking into state requirements and eligibility parameters for firefighting—testing, physical fitness, licensure—and unexpectedly gravitated to the Lone Peak Hotshots, an elite ground unit.

He was accepted for the program about the same time he entered Southern Utah University, spending four months as a Hotshot before leaving on a mission to Vancouver, British Columbia.

Chase believes his father’s position helped him get the Hotshot job and abbreviated some of the time-in-training steps. On just his fifth day of

physical training he was assigned to a firefighting trip and given Hotshot gear. It generated questions among some of the firefighters since he clearly was a rookie. But he had to earn his place among them and live up to the credo.

“After a while we really bonded, and we worked hard and saw some cool things and stayed in touch for years. It kind of all came about in an unorthodox way, but it was great.”

His father never said if he had put in a word to help. “I think it was more like taking a risk on a kid as a favor,” he says. The work was grueling, exhausting, and exhilarating all at the same time. He worked fires across the western states and would spend ten to twelve days at a time in the hills, mountains, and wilderness, living on MRE’s.

He was on his mission when his parents and Westin left Utah for Washington, D.C., and the governor’s new position as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. The home base had moved east.

“So, when I came back, none of my family was here. It was completely different. We had a party for about three days and then everyone went poof!—gone.”

Looking back, he says he is grateful it was as normal as it was. “I don’t know how it would have worked out otherwise, because I never really took to it, just the idea of prominence.”

He became closer to his brothers and sister as a result and finds those days easier to talk about with time and distance—and easiest to talk about with them.

His own children now will sometimes express amazement, as in, “Whoa, you talked to Michael Jordan?” He downplays that just a bit. “I say, ‘If you want to talk to Lebron James, I can’t make that happen.’”

Bruce Clayton (security), Chase, and Taylor pulling out of the Laird house in the Lincoln town car used to transport Mike as governor, 1996.

Reflections as a Father about Chase Leavitt

By Michael O. Leavitt

On May 11, 2003, during the midpoint of my tenth year as governor, our fourth child, Chase, was nineteen years old. He stood at the podium of the Yalecrest Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to publicly speak about an assignment he had accepted to do missionary work for two years in Vancouver, British Columbia. As part of his talk, he shared the following story:

“Last summer I was hired to fight forest fires. I was part of the Lone Peak Hotshots. Fighting fire has lots of similarities to war and hotshot crews are the ground soldiers on the front line. We were sent to fires all over the west. We worked sixteen hours a day. You carry everything you have on your back and we slept where we dropped at night.

I was the newest, youngest, and skinniest guy on the crew. Many of them had worked together for many years. I remember walking up to join the crew on the first day and feeling that awkwardness that comes when you don’t know anybody and you’re not sure how you’re going to measure up.

Onthesecondnight,ImetKeithCromptonforthefirst time.Hewasthesquadforeman.Hewasinhismid-thirties and had been through twelve fire seasons. He is tough,experienced,andhasashotofcraziness.Theman has swagger.

Every morning starts with a situation briefing. We were told our assignment for the day was to position ourselves on top of a mountain. From where we were at the bottom, it looked a lot like Mount Olympus.

Crompton led us straight up the side of the mountain. It was a force march. Normally, on a hike like this we would stop every twenty minutes or so, but on that day we just kept going. Twenty minutes, forty minutes,

an hour passed. My lungs were burning,myheartwaspounding.I wasgettingdizzyandsick,butwe just kept going. I really wanted to rest, but Crompton just kept going, pushing me well beyond any physicalormentallimitIhadever experiencedbefore.Finally,wehit the summit.

Later, one of the other firefighters said to me, “I guess you know what that hike was about today. He was testing you, and you passed. Good job man.”

I never doubted that I would have the physical strength to do the job, but the night before I had prayed that I would have the strength in my spirit to endure it.”

Keith Crompton set out to find out what Chase Leavitt was made of; Chase dug deep enough to find out. My thoughts about how our family’s eleven years in public service affected Chase begin with a couple of observations about his general nature, things a parent notices from a young age about their child.

Authentic to the Core

From my earliest memory, Chase has had a well-defined sense of individualism. He decides the fashion trends he follows and the hairstyle he sports. He thinks clearly, but processes information in his own way. He is a quick learner, but more natural with equations than with prose.

He is authentic to the core; he accepts people as they are and is slow to judge. People love him because they

sense his realness. He was a member of a public service family but often felt an inherent dissonance when confronted by the disingenuousness of politics.

When I was elected in 1992, Chase was nine years old. That is an awkward time to have one’s life changed dramatically. Chase’s three-year-old brother Westin was, for the most part, oblivious to the impact of the change. His sister Anne Marie was eleven and emotionally more mature. She had begun to figure out the world and found parts of the change quite exciting. Chase was inbetween. Too old to be oblivious and yet too young to find it appealing. I have little doubt that when Chase was placed on the periphery of public life, things undoubtedly were a bit unsettling. The truth is Chase intuitively did not like a lot of attention.

Though we had moved to the Governor’s Mansion, we kept the children in the same public schools. Chase was in the third grade and Anne Marie in fifth grade at Bonneville Elementary. After the final bell on the first day of school after the inauguration, Anne Marie and Chase met up in the hall with instructions to meet Lauralee, one of our team members who had been assigned to pick them up after school. As they departed through the front door, by coincidence there was a limo parked in front, which had been sent to take a group on an after-school birthday party. Worried, Chase turned to his older sister and said, “Do you think that car is for us?” Such a humiliation was his worst fear.

Of course, the car was for something else. Jackie and I did everything possible to provide a sense of normalcy in our goings and comings.

Bonding with Chase

Chase and I bonded mostly through sports. But even that was not exempt from unwanted attention. We were at a BYU basketball game one day, and as a courtesy, the university gave me advance notice that a scoreboard-linked camera would focus on us at some point in the next few minutes. I told Chase that our picture was going to be on the scoreboard. I suggested he keep his fingers away from his face or the camera might catch him in an embarrassing pose. A few minutes later, but before our picture was actually displayed, a notable roar went up from the crowd, inspired by something totally unrelated. Chase said to me under his breath, “Hey, our picture must be up there.” It is a little hard to enjoy a game as a kid if you have to worry about something like that.

Chase and I started collecting baseball hats and t-shirts that were constantly being given out at events I

attended. We had more than a hundred of each before the mansion fire. I would bring them home from events and we would ceremoniously add them to the collection. Unfortunately, we lost our collection in the fire.

Speaking of the fire, Chase and I loved going to Utah Jazz games together. Once, I arranged to go to the locker room after a game to congratulate the team. Chase got to meet Karl Malone, who was sitting by the edge of his locker dressed only in a towel. Karl asked him some questions and then said, “Would you like to have these?” holding out the shoes he had worn in that night’s game. They were gigantic and perhaps the best souvenir ever landed by an idolizing third grader.

The shoes were the only keepsake retrieved from the Mansion fire, but were blackened and damaged. When Karl heard they were damaged he invited us to another game and made a presentation of a new pair to Chase.

At one point in the first term of office, I was invited to visit the elementary school I attended in Cedar City. I had started there the first year it opened, and like Chase, I was in the third grade at the time. So, I invited Chase to go with me. We had such a good time.

There were times like these when Chase lived with privilege, but other times when people made unwelcome remarks about him being the governor’s son or said unkind things about his dad. There were requirements to

get dressed up and go places and then there was the pressure of living in a nineteenth-century mansion away from your friends and everything that gave you pleasure.

Things got better for Chase after we moved home to Laird Avenue after the mansion fire. He had a group of regular friends who lived on the same block, and there were convenient gathering places like Laird Park at the end of the street or his buddies’ houses.

More Independent

As boys get older, they get more independent. Chase’s group was no exception. Jackie and I knew these kids and their obstinance well because we taught this age group in Sunday School for four years. The key to our success was Jackie’s kindness and the M&Ms I brought to class. Even then, keeping them quiet and attentive was nearly impossible. We considered just keeping them in class a success.

One event I never tire of recounting with Chase took place while we were teaching their Sunday School class. It started in our basement on a Saturday afternoon where John Stoker, Michael Henriod, and Chase were hanging out. Jackie sent me on a mission to the basement to persuade all three of them that it was a good idea to attend the weeklong campout with the scout troop they all belonged to. They were having none of it. It should be evident that executive orders issued by Utah’s Governor held no sway with them.

Having failed at persuasion, I appealed to their egos, proposing the basketball equivalent of a duel. Me against the three of them on our backyard court. I win, they go. They win, they didn’t have to go and I would quit bugging them. I think there may even have been a trip to McDonalds thrown in to boot.

My proposal proved irresistible. They were three self-assuming teenage jocks who figured this was an easy path to a Happy Meal and a clear conscience.

What ensued on the basketball court behind 1872 Laird Avenue was the basketball equivalent of the “Thrilla from Manila.” We pounded it out for the better part of an hour. Heaven was clearly on my side. I beat them not once, but twice.

While I wish I could say they went on to scout camp, their continued refusal has only added to my pleasure in reminding them of the humiliation they should feel for letting a forty-sixyear-old desk jockey beat them—and then them not keeping their word.

Traveling Together

As Chase got older it was hard to get him away from his friends. However, he would do anything involving the Jazz, golf, or things that could involve his friends. Neither Chase nor I will forget flying on the Jazz team plane to the NBA finals to watch the Jazz lose to Michael Jordan and the Bulls.

When Chase was in high school, he traveled with me to Australia, Tonga, Samoa, and American Samoa in the sum -

mer of 2001. It was a delightful journey, made extra memorable by the presence of some of his friends. I wanted to visit Australia to learn how their economic development organizations had built upon the foundation of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. While I was in the region, I thought it would be a good idea to visit the islands. Utah has a large Polynesian community because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a significant presence in the Polynesian Islands.

Our family had developed close relationships with the Polynesian community, because many of Chase’s better friends belonged to that community. Chase just fit right in with that culture. They loved him and he loved them. Among many of his Poly friends were Will Tukuafu and Fui Vakapuna. Chase was an all-region wide receiver on the East High football team where he started alongside Will and Fui. They spent a lot of time at our home, sometimes for days on end, and we welcomed it. They were good kids from very large families, and we felt through us they were exposed to parts of life they might not have otherwise seen.

I learned that Will’s grandmother lived in Tonga, and that Will had never met her. I concluded to invite Chase, Will, and Fui to come along on the Australian trip. Rich McKeown’s son Connor was a classmate of theirs, and since Rich would be traveling with me, we invited Connor as well. In Australia, the four boys had all kinds of adventures,

including spending two nights in the hotel hot tub talking to Hollywood actress Renée Zellweger, who was staying at the same hotel as she filmed a movie.

In Tonga, we met the King of Tonga and went in boats to a remote island, where we walked for a couple of miles to a small village where Will got to meet his grandmother. In Samoa and American Samoa, we were treated as official guests of the state. It was a grand adventure for all of us.

Redirection

Chase was popular at school and got elected to a role in student government, as well as chosen as a co-captain of the football team. However, from the time he started at East High it became clear to me that this wide array of friends and his desire to accept people on their own terms posed a danger. Chase was torn between two groups of friends with very different trajectories. We talked openly about it. He said he felt loyalty to both sets of friends and felt like he could manage the differences in their behavior.

His boyhood friends were all headed in the right direction, and while he kept his relationships with them, the time spent on them diminished. Chase began to get remote, and we could feel him being drawn in ways that were dangerous for him and frightening to us as parents. It occupied a lot of our prayers and time.

Amid this period Chase went through what we call “the Fight Club”

incident, where Chase was singled out among 150 kids for prosecution, five months after the fact for a harmless incident where high school kids gathered for a self-organized boxing tournament. I will not comment much here on the matter. Chase covered it in his interview with Laurie Maddox. Likewise, I will write in a later section about what I learned about the justice system from the experience. Suffice to say that what happened to Chase was unfair and hurtful. It was ironic that Chase, the member of our family least comfortable or desirous of being part of our political life, was victimized in a very hurtful way. Even more ironic was the fact that he was among his positive-trajectory friends when this occurred. The school reacted by requiring him to resign his student body office, and the fallout of the episode seemed to isolate Chase and nudged him toward his less purposeful friends. Chase was in the final semester of his senior year and his future direction felt very uncertain.

It was at this point that Chase got the job fighting fires as a member of the Lone Peak Hotshots. A summer spent fighting fires was transformative

for Chase. It gave him time away from the confusing situation with his friends, cleared his head, put money in his pocket, and provided a renewed sense of self.

He enrolled at Southern Utah University (SUU) and spent a semester living at Juniper Hall. What he learned in the classroom was undoubtedly valuable, but the most important part of the experience was the hour he spent nearly every day with his Leavitt grandparents reading and discussing the Book of Mormon. It is a ritual my parents have repeated with many of their grandchildren. By the end of the semester, Chase concluded he would apply for missionary service following the school year.

At that point, Chase made a move that revealed a decision he had made in his life. He concluded he did not want to be living in Salt Lake City between the time that SUU’s semester ended and the mission began. He felt that it could result in him being drawn in a direction he

did not want to go. He moved to Logan instead and registered for a full schedule of institute classes. Taylor and Anne Marie were there, as were his cousins and grandmother Cleo Smith. Chase essentially spent a semester just preparing himself to serve both intellectually and spiritually. There is much to learn from Chase’s decision, not just about Chase but about the process of making change.

About six months into his missionary service in Vancouver, Jackie and I called Chase to explain to him that I was resigning as governor and would now serve in Washington D.C. He served a great mission and returned while we were in Washington, re-enrolling at SUU. He graduated four years later in business.

While in Cedar City, Chase met Nellie Bunker, both standing in the same chapel where Jackie and I had met thirty years earlier. The two of them moved

to Salt Lake City, where Chase got an MBA in healthcare from Western Governors University.

Chase and I got to work together nearly six years at Leavitt Partners. Then he resigned to spend full time building an e-commerce business he started on the side. It has been a great success. He and Nellie have four children and purchased our family home on Laird from his uncle Matthew.

For Chase Leavitt, following his fire squad foreman Keith Crompton up a mountainside was not just about a physical feat. It revealed the essence of Chase Leavitt.

Westin

By Laurie Sullivan Maddox

Life immersed in public service and politics was normal for the youngest Leavitt child, more than any other. Just two years old on election night, turning three shortly after the inauguration, Westin Leavitt’s earliest memories were made in the Governor’s Mansion.

Dad always had security and was always boss—of the state, then the Environmental Protection Agency, then the Department of Health and Human Services—up through adulthood for Westin.

The Mansion Fire

Only a toddler when the public service began, he was too young to understand the intensity of things, even the fire at the Governor’s Mansion that briefly trapped him, his mother, and several others before they got out. His child’s mind recorded the basics of the chronology and the scene—and associated fire alarms with big trouble for a number of years after the fact.

All of his siblings were in school on December 15, 1993, and Westin was about to watch Pinocchio. His mother was around the corner in a hallway, when suddenly she ran in and snatched him up. Jackie held him for a moment and then passed him over to Lauralee, his regular babysitter.

Westin then saw the flames sweeping up the south interior of the Mansion and heard the

loud pops and cracks of superheating wood. Mansion assistant Carol Bench had called out, “Fire!” but those upstairs hadn’t heard her initial alerts.

Jackie, Lauralee, and Westin raced down the stairs and joined Judith George and Carol at the back door. It wouldn’t budge. Coincidentally, two technicians had been testing the fire alarm system and actually had triggered alarms that morning as part of the test. (When it went off for real, caused by faulty lighting in the large main floor Christmas tree, the others thought it was part of the test.) Luckily, these workers appeared at the back door and forced it open.

“ I remember the Y2K bunker under the Capitol. It was a really cool thing that we were important enough to be in a bomb shelter.”

It was harrowing for the adults inside. “But I don’t remember any feelings of trauma or it being dramatic because I was only three turning four, so it was just a spectacle,” Westin says.

Other family members arrived in short order, with the governor coming from the Capitol, and they all congregated in the Arts Council parking lot next door. Westin was taken by security to his Uncle Eric and Aunt Melissa’s house. He had been wearing a pink ballerina outfit earlier, and his aunt and uncle gave him regular clothes—and a measure of comfort.

Westin had been roommates with Chase at the Mansion, and dad’s salvaging effort after the fire had turned up Chase’s Karl Malone shoes. However, Westin’s record player and beloved Disney record featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were goners. “I was so sad,” he says.

The upheaval and loss it caused the family did not really register. Things had always been new and interesting for the family’s youngest member. And always lively.

The Mansion had been a frontier of exploration for an inquisitive child. Back at the Laird house, there was less terrain, but also less formality. “Routine-wise, normalcy wise, friend-wise . . . it was so great to be home,” he says. “Our basement was the place. People were there all the time.”

The Youngest Sibling

The Mansion was still used regularly after its reopening, and the pace of the governorship had never abated. Nor had his siblings’ comings and goings.

“Palpable energy,” Westin says of four older brothers, a big sister, and all the talk, laughter, and commotion of a whirlwind family. And if none of them were around, there were cool events to go to with his parents. In time, as the siblings left one by one, ebbs outpaced flows, and things slowed down. Westin felt it and missed the earlier days.

“It takes a kind of an adjustment in adulthood to realize it’s not going to be the same,” he says.

For a young boy growing up, though, amid the action, big things could seem really big, and being the baby had its unique perspective, and its perks. He remembers the buildup to the turn of the millennium on December 31, 1999, and the attendant concerns surrounding “Y2K,” when government leaders around the globe braced and prepared for potential disruptions to technology, order, and way of life caused by the simple turning of the clock to the year 2000.

Nothing happened at 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 2000, in Utah or the world, except for the usual parties and revelry. But for that particular New Year’s Eve, there was a watchful readiness as his dad and a large crew of state government officials assembled in Utah’s Emergency Operations Center in anticipation of the countdown.

“I remember the Y2K bunker under the Capitol,” he says. “It was a really cool thing that we were important enough to be in a bomb shelter.”

1 Before the fire, December 11, 1993

2 Westin at the fire house, 1994

3 Westin in front of the house on Laird Ave, 1995

4 Westin sitting at the governor’s desk in the ceremonial office, 1997.

5 Westin and Chase in the backyard of Laird house, having a water party.

6 Westin at the Governor’s Mansion inside the formal dining room.

For a youngster of ten, there were no worries, just adventures.

After the three eldest siblings had headed off in sequence to college, missions, and independence, it was just Westin and Chase left at home. The NGA conferences were still a highly anticipated event, and since Chase was six years older and a high schooler, Westin was allowed to bring a friend along.

At one conference in Las Vegas, the kids hung out at a Wet ‘n’ Wild waterpark, and gift baskets were delivered every day and left on their beds at the Mirage Hotel. “For seven-year-olds it was just rad,” he says.

His travel buddy was typically his friend Logan Keller, and the tag-alongs became something of a déjà vu loop. “It was a very frequent thing to do. My parents would say, ‘Bring Logan, get pizza and hang out.’ If it was an event at the Mansion, Logan would always ask, ‘What should I wear?’ And the answer was always standard—khakis and a collared shirt.”

Deliberately Rude

When your dad is governor, there are uniquely fun and memorable times. The inverse reality was when people were deliberately bold or rude— because your dad is governor.

The barbs of other children ran along the lines of, “You think you’re so cool because you’re the governor’s son.” But there were edgier things as well. “I had one kid in school say he was going to kill me. Highway Patrol security had to go to his house and investigate,” Westin says.

The incident occurred during the third term of office when Westin was in seventh grade. Instant messaging was now part of everyday life, and the boy called Westin some names and then let fly with threatening remarks about killing, not just Westin but others in the family.

“I had a P.E. class with him. You don’t know what a kid can do, you don’t know if it’s his dad talking. I told my mom, and mom told security. It wasn’t that I wanted to get him into trouble. They went to his house and investigated him. The next day when

I saw him, he gave me a package of Reese’s and apologized. I didn’t talk to him again.”

“Teachers would say things, too. One faculty member at my middle school caught me being late and said, ‘You think you can be late because your dad’s the governor?’ I just wanted to be a normal kid.”

Westin was indifferent to political undertones and whether ideologies were behind some of the slams. There were certainly people who would indicate their parents did not like his father for political or other reasons.

“I had this interesting sense of that not being relevant to me. I don’t care what your parents think. That was very empowering to me.”

Sometimes he felt the urge to rebut, particularly in elementary school. “I’d stick up for him,” he says. “And I was a smart elementary kid.”

Bonuses of Being the Governor’s Son

Among the larger-than-life experiences were the Olympics and being twelve with an all-area pass during the Games. The governor could go anywhere, of course, and he had guest passes that could be used by the kids. And Chase was also working in the Olympics VIP office.

Westin saw American gold-medal favorite Michelle Kwan fall right in front of him during the Ladies Free Skate in figure skating, a move that dropped her from gold to bronze, behind the Russian silver medalist and the teenage winner of the gold, sixteen-year-old American Sarah Hughes.

With his dad, he went to the Athletes Village and met the Canadian skating pair whose silver-medal score in the finals was challenged, setting off a scandal and investigation after a French judge claimed she was pressured to give top marks to a Russian team.

“I was there,” Westin says. “Mitt Romney was there. Dad was saying, ‘We’re so sorry for this. It’s not what Utah is about.’ But I was enamored of the fact that the Olympic Village had an all-you-caneat McDonald’s.”

1 Horseback riding in Loa

2 Westin and Mike at the Laird house in the morning, 1998

3 From left : Mike, Chase, Jackie, Mike S., Anne Marie. Front : Westin. Together in England for a combination of a family and business trip.

4 Laird home

5 Shaving Westin

Having a birthday during the Olympics was even more serendipitous. Westin had turned twelve one week into the Games, and the birthday celebration that year involved taking a group of his friends to one of the hotter venues in town— the Olympic Medals Plaza on the corner of South Temple and 300 West.

Famous bands would play nightly after the awards, and the whole extravaganza ended each night with a thundering fireworks display. Westin dearly wanted to see the boy band NSYNC, but the group was sold out. He settled for Creed.

“I only knew one Creed song, so we left halfway through because it was cold,” he says.

But there was still more fun to be had. Security officer Shane Terry was driving Westin and his friends home in the Chevrolet Tahoe, which had been fitted with police lights and a siren for the Olympics. Westin made an “it’s-my-birthday” plea, coaxing Shane to make just one street pass with full-on light and sound. “So he put on the lights and sirens down South Temple. I felt so cool with all our friends in the back. It was a lot of fun as a kid.”

The Move to Washington, D.C.

Westin’s last year in a Utah public school was 2003–2004, eighth grade at Clayton Middle School. The governor had taken the helm of the EPA the previous fall, and Westin finished the school year before moving to Washington, D.C., with Jackie

The move was timely in his estimation. “I was having a rough time with my friends,” he says. “They were starting to get into stuff that I wasn’t a fan of.”

The adjustment to life in Washington was not simple, though. Westin had looked forward to it, then became ticked off by the realities of it, remaining mad for a year. “I was pissed. We were sitting in an apartment. I was home-schooled. I quit soccer and thought as soon as the election was past, we’d move into a home.”

That did not happen, and he moved on from home-schooling to Yorktown High School and into a sea of politically connected schoolmates.

“Everybody’s parents are somebody, so it doesn’t matter anymore that you’re ‘Leavitt.’ And even if you do tell them, they don’t really care. It was more academically focused, more cause focused. Human rights,” he says.

In Utah previously, his identity in school had tracked more with being “somebody’s little brother,” the kid brother of a Leavitt who had gone through before. Washington, D.C., “was a whole new world.”

His freshman year was hard but sophomore and junior years great. Then it was back to being problematic as a senior. “You’d sneak out at night, take your parents’ car, and go see monuments with friends at two in the morning.”

Mom and Dad

Utah was all associated with childhood and the governorship, being a bigger fish in a littler pond. It was much smoother in that setting, and with two parents he believes complemented each other extraordinarily well.

“My dad would not have been able to do it without my mom. My mom is a rock. My dad’s an idea guy, mom is the executor. He does one thousand things at 80 percent. My mom does select things at 1000 percent. The structure, the sense of normalcy that she brought, my dad could not have done that.”

Jackie and Westin were together the most. She was protective and “very aware of what she wanted with the kids early on,” Westin says. She had defined days when First Lady business was the focus. Otherwise, it was all about the home and the kids.

The characteristics he admired so much in his father included his understanding of the impact a governor had on regular people. On Sundays for many months there was a pattern to this. The governor took the children to the University of Utah and Primary Children’s hospitals to go room to room, just greeting people and lifting their spirits, Westin says. “He caught on it [being governor] wasn’t about him, but about the role.”

1 Westin as a shepherd in the Nativity play at a ward Christmas party.

2 Olympic kickoff in Cedar City, Mike, Jackie and Westin

3 Westin as Pharaoh in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat , 2003

4 Westin at the Cesna plant with Mike, Dell Loy and Lynnette Hansen

5 Westin and Mike on an overnight demonstration cruise of the USS Teddy Roosevelt, 2006

6 Alaska fishing trip with Westin, Mike, and Taylor

His father’s vision was remarkable as well, Westin says. Correctly foreseeing the technology boom to come, the importance of Silicon Valley, and the potential upside for Utah during the internet’s earliest formative days all were huge.

“I went to Silicon Valley with him multiple times. He was really pushing this idea that Utah is an hour-and-a-half plane ride, faster than some of your commutes. And it’s cheaper.”

As manager over the Adobe account in his job at a software firm now, Westin relishes his dad’s success, and the persuasive power it took, to lure Adobe and its CEO, former Utahn John Warnock,

“ My dad would not have been able to do it without my mom. My mom is a rock.”

back home. The Adobe office campus in Lehi and the John Warnock Engineering Building at the University of Utah attest to the vision, as did an initiative to partner university engineering programs with STEM-focused high schools.

“He saw all that ten years before it took off. People don’t know that. Nobody knows that Adobe story. eBay came out here, too, because of my dad. So many companies are out here because of his work and his vision. I wish that could be his legacy.”

Another of Mike Leavitt’s signatures was including people, Westin says, and that extended to his children, particularly with the big events and

the big names. Like his siblings, Westin got to meet the Dalai Lama and several U.S. presidents—but he alone of the siblings met former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The other kids were in school.

It would take a few more years and his father’s role in the federal government to finally meet a British royal—an obsession of his since middle school. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were the honored guests at an embassy party Westin attended with Jackie in 2007.

Federal service brought additional opportunities to learn more about people and places before it ended in 2008, bringing the Leavitt public-service era to an end almost simultaneously with the end of Westin’s childhood.

He keeps a news article still that Jackie gave him, dating back to when it all began in 1993. A local newspaper did a feature on the new Leavitt administration and the young First Family. Westin remembers posing with some toys on the giant staircase at the Governor’s Mansion for a photograph accompanying the story, which noted he was the youngest child in fifty years to live at the Mansion. He still holds that record.

Deseret News article and photo featuring Westin. Article was entitled, Babes in the Mansion, January 17, 1993

Reflections as a Father about Westin Leavitt

By Michael O. Leavitt

Westin Leavitt was a frequent flyer on the Utah state aeronautics aircraft that often took me on state business to other states and other regions of Utah. One day, the state’s King Air took off for San Jose, California. On board with me were two security officers, two pilots, Westin, and his friend Logan Keller, who was a regular presence in our home. Both boys were around nine or ten years old.

My primary purpose for the trip was to attend meetings, some that would include President Bill Clinton. My secondary purpose was to spend dad time with Westin. Logan was like part of our family, and I knew there would be times on this trip when I was occupied, so Logan’s presence made it easier for both Westin and me.

Once settled in our hotel, we devised a strategy and an itinerary well known to any dad that has taken a son along on a business trip. It included a trip to the famous technology museum after my meetings and full use of the swimming pool, plus an all-day unlimited video game package on television. Westin was well acquainted with the intricacies of how one charges room service food to a hotel tab. There was one tentative additional bonus; it was possible I could arrange for them to meet the president of the United States.

In the two days we were there, the entire schedule was accomplished, including a one-on-one conversation with the president. Back in the air headed home, I sought to impress upon the two of them what a remarkable trip it had been.

“How did you enjoy the trip?” I asked. “What would you say was the most memorable part?”

Both expressed appropriate gratitude.

“Good,” I said, “so what would you say was the most memorable thing you did?”

Logan spoke first. “Going to Johnny Rockets for dinner, and the all-day video games.” Then Westin: “The tech museum and charging stuff to the room.”

“Wait, you met the president of the United States—that didn’t even make the list?” I asked.

“Oh yes, that was cool too.”

A Normal Child, Abnormal Setting

Westin was a quite normal child who grew up in a considerably abnormal setting. There is little question that setting became part of who he is, but it affected him in mostly positive ways. He developed a comfort in conversing with adults, developed sophisticated interests, and was exposed to notable people as a child and throughout adolescence.

As Westin’s siblings left home, there may have been extra privileges. A lot of the intensity of parenting has been smoothed out by the time you get to the youngest. But, for a lot of reasons, including our public service, there was also additional weight. I was gone a lot and Westin stepped in often to cover the breech.

On the day I publicly announced my intention to run for governor, Westin would have been roughly eighteen months old. He was a squirmy little boy with boundless energy, six years younger than his nearest sibling. He was the one in most all our early campaign photos being held by either Jackie or me.

One of my favorite pictures of our early days in the Governor’s Mansion was taken by the Deseret News as the still not-yet-three-year-old navigated the stairs, climbing down them one

stair at a time. His very presence in our family meant a new culture would be introduced at the Governor’s Mansion.

The Mansion’s thirty-plus rooms provided an endless game of hide and seek. His perpetual interest in what was going on downstairs added to the challenge Jackie was having trying to maintain any sense of normalcy. It was not at all unusual for all work to stop at the Mansion while staff responded to an all-hands-on-deck Westin search.

I took only a tiny bit of literary license in using his hide and seek antics as a humorous opening to my speeches, adding in a telephone exchange Westin and I once had. “Where’s mom?” I queried. His reply: “Looking for me.”

Audiences loved the picture of this little boy in command of the Mansion, and they were not far off.

Automobiles and Planes

Westin was precocious in ways, and the sophistication of his language skills was startling. He was fascinated by automobiles. Before he turned four, he could flawlessly identify the make, model, and often the year of nearly every car. His siblings took great delight in testing him as they drove from place to place. His favorite was Lieutenant Governor Olene Walker’s red convertible Mazda Miata.

Westin not only knew the make and model of cars, but he also felt confident he could drive one. On two occasions, that confidence created near misses with disaster. The first: when he released the parking brake on a highway patrol car parked inside the fence at the Mansion, driving it into the flower beds.

The second one was at the ranch in Loa, where he turned on the ignition of a manual transmission car owned by my brother, lurching it through the doors of a storage closet in the garage.

A naturally cute kid anyway, his persona was made even more distinct when he had to start wearing round, quite stylish, corrective glasses just before his fourth birthday. To boost his confidence in wearing them, the entire family referred to the glasses as his “handsomes.” It worked. He took on a very distinctive look one could characterize as a cross between Dennis the Menace and Harry Potter.

Westin was an eyewitness to most everything in the early days of our service because he was at home with Jackie. That includes the Mansion fire. His interview with Laurie Maddox goes adequately into that experience, but I will acknowledge that though everyone was safe, it was a traumatic event for this little boy. For a considerable period, whenever he would hear sirens, he sought the comfort of a parent and often cried.

Returning to our neighborhood home on Laird after the fire provided a somewhat less conspicuous day-today atmosphere, but his place in our family still put him in the middle of most of Jackie’s activities.

Once Westin started school, he seemed to be pretty much in self-pilot mode. Yes, there was homework and school projects we all pitched in on, but he just seemed to get things. He was

an early reader; his natural language skills extended to written as well as verbal expression.

Westin played all the youth sports— baseball, soccer, and basketball. However, when many kids were thinking about Pokémon cards, Westin always seemed to have a focused interest in something surprising. I have already mentioned his remarkable capacity as a child to differentiate automobiles. At about nine-years-old, his Uncle Mark flew Westin and his cousin Lauren in his single engine Piper Lance from St. George to Loa. Suddenly, airplanes replaced automobiles as Westin’s primary hobby.

Keyboards and computers were intuitive to Westin. After the flight with Mark, Westin began spending hours on internet sites showing small planes. Very quickly, he had added small general aviation planes to his memory. We would go to the airport and he would point at the plane and say, “Piper,” or whatever it was we were seeing. He could visually identify the make and model of any plane.

One Christmas, he received a game called Flight Simulator 2000, a highly realistic piece of software that allowed him to pretend to be the pilot. He spent hours practicing until he had mastered it. He would plan and take long imaginary trips.

Another time, also around Christmas, Dell Loy Hansen had invited us to fly to Oceanside, California, using charter-flight credits he had on a Hawker. Westin was fascinated, and soon corporate aircraft became his passion. He would spend hundreds of hours digging through websites where corporate jets were listed for sale. He learned their names, studied their specifications and performance parameters, such as the amount of fuel they burned per hour or the altitude at which they cruised. He became intimately familiar with the price ranges and which corporation owned which jet.

Cessna Aircraft Factory

As we approached Westin’s tenth birthday, I told him that I would like to take a day off work and do whatever he wanted to do. After only a little reflection he said he wanted to go see the Cessna aircraft factory in Wichita, Kansas.

I called Dell Loy Hansen, because I knew he had been shopping for a jet. Coincidentally, he was going to the factory and I arranged for me and Westin to accompany him. It was fascinating to watch Westin examine each step of the process. However, the most amusing part of the trip was his interrogation of the sales team on every detail. Then he finished by asking them when

they were going to start producing a smaller jet in a particular class. The two salespeople looked at each other in disbelief to be having such a question from a ten-year-old. Their response was to give him the name of the CEO and chairman of Cessna with the suggestion Westin ask him.

I have written elsewhere in this history about our family trips to Allen and Company at Sun Valley resorts. Many of the attendees were people who flew elaborate corporate jets. As we landed at the Sun Valley Airport, Westin would gaze at the planes, calling out the name, class, and facts about them. I had a similar experience with him at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. I was invited to speak to the Business Roundtable about the taxation of e-commerce, and Novell offered to fly me to the meeting for the speech, so I took Westin along. As we landed, we could see about one hundred jets lined up along the tarmac. Westin said to me, “This has to be corporate jet heaven.”

We walked from plane to plane. Often the pilots would be in the planes and let us look. Again, like the Cessna representatives, they were astonished and amused by the intricacy of Westin’s questions.

As Westin got closer to twelve, his travel-related interests took another turn. Online travel reservation systems, like Expedia, had come on the scene. Westin immediately became intrigued. Almost every Sunday, he would enlist me in a virtual travel adventure. He had seen complex travel itineraries when I traveled with staff and security.

He would say, “Give me a trip.” I would dictate an elaborate travel itinerary. For example: A trip for me, two security, and two staff members. I would say, “I want to fly to New York City. Then I need to go to Paris for two days and on to Bonn, Germany, for a day. From Bonn, I want to go to Beijing. I will stay in Beijing for three days. We will need air transportation, ground travel, and hotels each place. Please work out the schedule and give me the cost as closely as you can.”

Two or three hours later, Westin would return with a multi-page travel plan. After examining it I would role play something like, “Those connections look too close. Can you price it out leasing a private jet?” Westin had figured out how to price leased airplanes and would generate a proposal.

Confident

By middle school, two sides of Westin’s personality became more evident. The first was a sense of personal confidence. He ran for student

government and started participating in various dramatic productions. As an eighth grader he auditioned for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat . He was given one of the leads, playing the Pharaoh with Elvis Presley-like mannerisms. He owned the part and it really surprised me. I remember turning to Jackie and saying, “Wow, where did that come from?” I already knew the answer; it had come from her.

The second personality trait was confidence in his own point of view. I will simply say it this way: A fourteenyear-old who is totally confident of his position on just about everything requires careful management. Actually, Westin came from the womb confident in his position on just about everything. By the time he got to be a teenager he was double-down confident.

It was the summer before Westin’s eighth-grade year that I had my first conversation with President Bush and the White House about going to Washington. One day, Westin said to me, “So,

it sounds like there is a chance you will be going to Washington to be on the President’s Cabinet next year?”

I responded, “It appears that could happen.”

“Well,” he said, “that’s good, but let me explain to you what I’m going to be doing next year. I am going to be on the Clayton Middle School Student Council. Right. Here. In Salt Lake City.”

He was sure, and in this case he was also right. In the fall I agreed to resign from the governorship and assume a role on the Bush Cabinet. Westin finished out his school year, and the following fall he and Jackie joined me in D.C.

There is little doubt that my service affected Westin’s early life. While some of the implications were difficult and constituted sacrifice, other elements of our family’s service contributed to the sophisticated and able man he is today.

Dixie and Anne

By Laurie Sullivan Maddox

The union of Dixie Leavitt and Anne Okerlund was complementary from the beginning, and made all that was to come possible, says Eric Leavitt, middle son and CEO of the Leavitt Land enterprises in Cedar City.

Dixie was the vision behind the family businesses and the family name, Eric says. Anne’s

strength was executing it and creating the environment for unity, the “feelings of love, connectedness, and forgiveness and acceptance when needed,” that bonded the six Leavitt brothers.

“You would be hard-pressed, honestly, to find two more different people than my parents . . . But they made it work because of a combination of

absolute commitment to one another, to their children, a commitment to virtue and the willingness to often subjugate their own desires and pursuits for the good of the family,” Eric says. Family pursuits were family affairs, whether growing and sustaining the businesses or rallying behind the political endeavors and ensuing obligations of public service.

Team Leavitt

Team Leavitt had coalesced and marshaled for Dixie’s legislative campaigns and his own run for governorship in 1976; it championed Southern Utah University’s expansion from a small branch college to a thriving university; and it formed a united front behind Mike’s winning bid in 1992 and the governing decade that followed.

But in the beginning, before it had players, the team consisted of just its two co-captains, Anne and Dixie. Anne had always been uneasy with politics, disliking its hyper-competitiveness and the ways it can turn personal and nasty. There were differences between her husband’s races and her son’s, she says, but the unsettling nature of the game persisted.

“ You would be hardpressed, honestly, to find two more different people than my parents.”

Politics is “just absolutely against my basic nature,” she says. “When Dixie filed for governor, I just had this pain in my chest that I thought was a heart attack. I hated this idea of putting us out there and being at risk.”

She discovered along the way that she was “very good at it”—conventions, one-on-one conversations with everyday people, the positive approaches and interactions that yielded votes. “By the time Michael ran, I had matured and could handle it.”

Attacks on her loved ones were the tough part. A client of her legislator husband once said something derogatory about him, “and I practically tore the man apart.”

With her son running for governor many years later in 1992, “I suffered way too much and had too much animus toward people who said unkind things about him. I just didn’t like the people who ran against him.”

Blessings of a Defeat

For Dixie, the legislative battles, his own victories and defeats, and the experience gained from all of it helped pave the way for the triumph of his son. That includes the sting of his own loss of the governorship after working tirelessly, coming out on top at the Republican convention, then losing the primary to Vernon Romney, who in turn lost the general election to Democrat Scott Matheson.

“That was the biggest blessing of my life, to have lost, because my life would have gone in a different direction than it went on a number of things,” he says. “Mike wouldn’t have had the opportunities that he’s had now, not likely, if I’d been elected governor.”

Additionally, he says, the boys were all young then. Dane was on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Matthew was only four years old. “And it would have been a glass house with the public, and with every one of [my boys] now good, strong, capable men.”

That race, and losing it, led Dixie to an eight-year interval of focusing solely on his business, until he and Anne were called to be a mission president for the Church in Leeds, England, in 1983. When he came home, he returned to the insurance business, and then the Utah Senate in 1989. Dixie was at the state Capitol when his two eldest sons—Mike and Dane—reported back on a scouting trip they’d taken to Washington, D.C., to explore a possible US senate run for Mike.

Senator Jake Garn had designated Mike as his heir apparent, and the brothers were methodically exploring the pros and cons of a Senate run in Washington. The legislative branch, or even the US senate, wasn’t a natural fit, they determined. Utah’s executive branch was.

Dixie wasn’t surprised. His son Mike had told him that the Senate didn’t get anything done, and if he was going to get into politics it would be where he could make a difference. “I said, well, if you want to run for governor, do it, and I’ll give you all the support I can.” As a number of family members found out, supporting could sometimes entail sacrificing.

Son as Governor

The primary was aggravating, and it was an unusual three-man race in the general election, with Republican Mike Leavitt, Democrat Stewart Hanson, and Independent Merrill Cook.

“He won the governorship with less than fifty percent of the vote, but he won,” Dixie says. That has burnished the family name and given them immense pride.

“ If you want to run for governor, do it, and I’ll give you all the support I can.”

His son had natural political gifts that made him a very popular and a very good governor, his father says.

“I don’t sense any arrogance about him. I sense his feet squarely on the ground. I think he’s a good listener. He’s able to communicate—standing on his feet, unrehearsed—very, very well. He’s very personable, and in my opinion, he was handsome and an attractive candidate that way.”

For her part, Anne found herself marveling, with a pervasive thought over and over, usually beginning with the words, “How did this child of mine . . . ?”

She felt it at the inauguration and many times before and after. “Sort of an underlying sense of wonder maybe, or pride in him, maybe astonishment.”

“I have watched Michael become very, very well informed on a great many things. He’s quiet about

it, but he just has so much insight. But he’s curious and he learns. I still think how in the world did he become so well informed on so many things and interested in so many things? Another thing, he’s very fair. I have a propensity to be passionate about my point of view, and he’s very much fair in his considering everybody’s point.”

Anne had written her poignant pre-inauguration note to him with the Gunsmoke catchphrase—“it’s a chancey job and a little lonely”— to assure him about not having to face things alone, and she knew it had touched him in a meaningful way. She did not recall that he had incorporated it into his first inaugural speech as governor.

“That was a nice moment—that he’d have heaven’s help, and I wanted to remind him of that.”

The inauguration itself, she says, was grand. “Everybody loved it in our family, especially my mother. We hoped his grandfather was watching, and it would have pleased them all. A very high moment for me.”

The new governor’s emphasis on his middle name Okerlund, her family surname, was another memorable, unifying touch, she said.

It had been Dixie’s idea to give all six boys the Okerlund middle name, a “really sophisticated idea for as young as we were,” Anne says.

“He really understood the demographics of his own family, how complicated and how numerous the Leavitt family was, and he wanted people to know which union these children came from. I was really pleased but had no idea how significant it would be. It also bonded all of them together.”

Anne feels a sense of satisfaction, and no real surprise, that throughout his eleven years in the state’s highest office, her son never lost his connection to home and family.

“He never lost the sense of who he is.”

There was inevitably a tradeoff, however, which some family members felt acutely. Anne calls it “a paucity of time.” It was simply a diminished amount of time together, given up in

DIXIE AND ANNE

1 Anne and Dixie Leavitt

2 Serving as mission president in Leeds, England, 1983

3 Dixie Leavitt Business Building, Southern Utah University

4 Utah Governor Norman H. Bangerter sits at desk, signing a document granting SUSC university status. Standing behind him ( from left ) are SUSC President Gerald Sherratt, Haze Hunter, Dixie Leavitt, Kay McIff, and Michael Richards.

5 Loa fish hatchery

deference to the requirements of high office and the demands those responsibilities placed on their son and brother.

Second-Class Citizens

Dixie and several of the brothers also describe another toll taken, a “second-class citizen” status borne by them to avoid any perception of favoritism from a government and bureaucracy led by a Leavitt.

One instance of the family-state dynamic that irritated Dixie occurred, in what was for him the normal course of business, when he was acquiring properties for Leavitt Land and Investment. His land company had purchased a building near 180 North 100 West in Cedar City that had a state government tenant. The tenant agency wanted renovations of the space, and Dixie pursued that contract, too, working with the Utah Division of Facilities and Construction Management.

Not long afterward, Dixie was at a Salt Lake Bees game with his son and told him about the

latest developments. The governor stiffened up and registered some discomfort. “Mike felt like somebody’s going to think that that department was following some kind of command for him. We had a good building, a good location, and a good tenant. I didn’t want him to feel uncomfortable. I ended up selling it.”

“ We have tested up there. We found the disease in big fish, in little fish, young and old, every species. ”

Left unspoken was the indignity of the assumption—that a father who had built a scrupulous reputation in his business and public dealings would need to shelve an honest transaction because state agencies were ultra-sensitive about any interactions with a Leavitt.

It smarted at the time, and still does years later. Yet it paled in comparison to the whirling disease saga, which Dixie describes as “devastating,” particularly to his son Mark.

Dixie was serving his mission calling in England when his sons started the fish processing business at the ranch in Loa, located below a state hatchery. Mark had transferred batches of smaller fish to a different location to thin out the schools and prevent a die-off.

After the move, tests he ran on the fish showed the presence of whirling disease. Twice, he took those results to the Division of Wildlife Resources and advised they test their own runs upstream. Twice the state reported back that their results were “clear and clean,” Dixie says.

Mark then went to the business’s own expert in Ogden, who confirmed it again, and the state finally determined the disease was present in its runs. “And so the whole press comes out here. Whirling disease! This terrific, horrible disease has

been found in the governor’s family operation. And it’s never gotten off that,” Dixie says.

It had so many adverse effects on family members in so many ways, he says. Self-preservation kicked in among state officials, compounded by press coverage and by aspersions cast that insinuated favoritism for Leavitt family members from the Leavitt Administration.

Dane provided facts and figures; family members urged state officials to go public with exculpatory information they had expressed privately. All to no avail.

“We ended up paying twenty-five thousand dollars to the state. You’re buying your way out of a lawsuit,” Dixie says. Much later, too much later, exoneration came when Bruce Schmidt, the state’s head of fisheries regulation, wrote a letter owning up to the fact that the disease had originated in state waters above the family’s operation.

Before then, Dixie had talked with the head of Natural Resources, Dee Hansen, whom he knew well.

“Dee said, ‘We have tested up there. We found the disease in big fish, in little fish, young and old, every species. There’s no way you could have caused that because that’s uphill.”

Dixie urged him to go back and say that to the media. “He said, ‘I can’t.’”

“I said, ‘Why can’t you? It’s true!’”

“He said, ‘I’m hired at the behest of your son, and they’ll have it back on me that your son pressured me.’”

“That’s the type of thing that happens,” Dixie says. “Second-class citizens to the state of Utah. They didn’t know how to test [for whirling disease]. We taught them how to test it, and each time the reporters, especially The Tribune, you go through this whole thing. We’re still at fault.”

Ultimately, Mark and Dane closed the processing business. If ever started again at some future point, it won’t be a processing enterprise anymore, but a recreational and sport fishing venture, Dixie says.

More scrutiny and aspersions would follow, regarding land deals and family foundation acquisitions or sales, during the confirmation hearings when the governor was appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency and later Health and Human Services Secretary in President George W. Bush’s administration.

Like the issues that dogged the family during the governorship, these caused “lots of pain,” Dixie says. “It was not Mike’s fault. It was because of the politics of the thing.”

As with all others in the family, Dixie catalogues and then shoos away most of the difficulties family members encountered as a result of the high-profile office, elaborating more sanguinely about the wonderful experiences it afforded.

Western Association of Leavitt Families

The large reunion of Leavitts from across the country held in Salt Lake City in 1998 is one of Dixie’s favorites. It came about almost by accident. When a Leavitt became the governor of Utah, Dixie says, his son started getting inquiries and questions from eastern and midwestern Leavitts—was it possible that family members had moved west

and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? The governor responded warmly that the possibility was very likely, and why not consider Utah for a reunion?

“To his surprise, they accepted. So, he’s on the phone . . . ‘Dad, I need your help.’ A group was formed, consisting of descendants of the fifty-five Leavitt families who made the westward trek, seven of whom perished on the trip. The group was called the Western Association of Leavitt Families—and their 1998 gathering in Utah was momentous.

The Leavitts discovered that the original Leavitt settler in the United States put down roots in Hingham, Massachusetts, but as time passed and a westward migration followed, a large Leavitt group moved to Québec, Canada. When missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints arrived in Québec, many in the Leavitt family decided to join the Church. Those Leavitts went with the Saints to Kirtland, then Missouri, and eventually to Utah.1

Remarkably, this genealogical subset had produced three Utah governors: Mike Leavitt, Calvin Rampton, and Jon Huntsman Jr., the latter through his mother, Karen, whose Haight lineage included a prominent Church of Jesus Christ authority whose own mother was a Leavitt.

About 120 Leavitt descendants and relatives came to the reunion from out of state, Dixie says. “We thought, these are all going to be sophisticated people coming from this metro area back east. And they came thinking—all these rich Westerners! But we just melded together.”

“It went on from there, as some of the families went back and established monuments at the burial places, or as close to where we could find them, where they had perished, honoring them.”

This, too, would not have happened if his son had not been governor. And it was a very good thing, Dixie says.

Upsides of a Son as Governor

There were more. Dixie and Anne were invited to the National Governors Association’s national conference, headed then by their son, the year Bill Clinton addressed it as president. Afterward, they received a dinner invitation to the White House with President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

It was a source of pride, too, to hear of the respect and admiration others held for their son. The governor exerted strong leadership in his various chairmanships of national governors’

Dixie’s 70th birthday at Governor’s mansion. Left to right: Elder Joseph B Wirthlin, Elisa Wirthlin, Kaye Cash, Don Cash, Tom Pugh, Brenda Pugh, Colleen Maxwell, Elder Neal A. Maxwell, Anne Leavitt, Dixie Leavitt, Jenny Belliston, Angus Belliston, Norman Nelson, Jan Nelson, Jane Piercey, Gordon Beckstrand, Norma Beckstrand. Standing: Mike and Jackie.

1. For more on this story, see Volume I: Introduction for a brief history of the Leavitt family.

organizations, and Gary Locke, the Democrat governor of Washington, told Dixie and Anne, “I want you to know that I would follow your son over a cliff.”

“Of course, that type of thing makes you feel good,” Dixie says.

Anne says her eldest child was “kind of born old. He was quite a mature little boy, with adults always, and then when he started getting brothers he was just the leader. But besides that, there was a very car ing, nurturing pattern with him.” And he knew who he was.

She delighted in the same experiences and achievements as Dixie did, and especially cherished her son’s respect for his roots and the occasions when he wove family themes into speeches, remarks, and public moments throughout his service.

That started with the memorable campaign advertisement that highlighted the wisdom of his Okerlund grandfather—Anne’s father, Melvin—and the slogan “real and right.”

Another Grandpa Okerlund story was poignantly carried forward in later speeches and in a painting commemorating Utah’s Centennial. This was the Keeper of the Flame metaphor about then ten-year-old Melvin, caught in a snowstorm while returning with two older brothers and a dozen lambs from the family’s sheep camp above Loa. Through the storm he struggled to keep the last embers of a fire burning so that his brothers, searching for firewood, could find their way back.

“He took his thoughts and his themes from his life, and he never did lose the connection with who he is,” Anne says. “I think that’s why Michael is so successful with what he is doing now. He does not create distance between himself and others.”

Difficult experiences were certainly part of the impact on family, and some had a lasting effect, she says, citing the public travails of the sons most closely involved with the whirling disease episode.

endure, but was not the “white hot pain” that the whirling disease saga became. Anyone openly taking on the governor, or any of her sons for that matter, automatically set off a protective instinct. “That is so natural to us in our family. We stick together. We’re kind of one for all.”

Times and political environments change over time, as does society, and politics was a bit more civilized when Dixie served in the legislature. Anne says working relationships were more collegial, for one thing. Republicans and Democrats got along better and worked together more.

With her son, it seemed there were more opposing individuals within his own political party than among the Democrats. Those dramas could be painful, but “then again, Michael was triumphant, and that helps a lot.”

Offsetting the painful things, by far, were the many great events or opportunities her son’s public service made possible, she says. “We did things and went places as guests of the governor that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”

Among Anne’s highlights was the White House dinner with President Clinton and Secretary Albright. Another was a mother-son trip she was able to take with the governor to the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1998.

Jackie and the children could not go, and the governor thought his mother would enjoy the trip.

1 Olympics running of torch through Cedar City. From left, front row: Dixie, Anne, Westin, Jackie, Jana (sister-in-law) Back Row : Mike and Preston (nephew).

2 Mike and Anne Leavitt at the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, 1998

3 Mike and Jackie’s family with President Bush in the Oval Office.

From left: Dixie, Anne Marie, Mike, Anne, President George W. Bush, Cleo, Mike S., Jackie, Chase, Dell Loy Hansen, Westin

4 Elder Haight at the beginning of the Leavitt reunion.

5 David B. Haight and Governor Leavitt talk before the program at the Assembly Hall, Temple Square, June 20, 1998. Haight’s grandmother was a Leavitt. Photo by Kristan Jacobsen

She and Dixie were heading the mission at the St. George Temple Visitor’s Center at the time. Normally, missionaries are not allowed to leave their post.

“Michael called President Hinckley and said, ‘Jackie can’t go, I’d like to take my mother.’ And Hinckley said, ‘You take your mother!’” Accommodations were pretty tight, so Michael and I just slept in the same room in two little beds. People were quite stunned that we did that, but it was because we wanted to talk.”

It delighted Anne and Dixie, too, while serving the mission with the St. George Visitors Center and historic sites, that their son invited the Western Governors’ Association conference to the area one year and included a program at the St. George Tabernacle in the itinerary.

A Focus on the Issues

It was also a source of pride to both parents that their son, as governor, elevated issues and took on initiatives that Dixie had championed or brought to the forefront during his legislative service.

The governor’s focus on public lands—R. S. 2477 roads, school trust lands, wilderness, and federal-state management issues—reflected Mike’s roots and his father’s philosophy on land use, both say.

Dixie, too, had foreseen during his later years in the Senate that the incredible growth of online commerce could have a downside. Left untaxed, state sales tax revenues would be adversely impacted as Internet sales rose and brick-and-mortar businesses, which did have to collect sales tax, were disadvantaged by the imbalance.

Internet sales taxation was elevated as an issue nationwide by their son, who saw both the extraordinary potential of the Internet and the challenges of e-commerce, and championed a more level playing field for buyers and sellers two decades before the issue was resolved by the US Supreme Court in 2018.

Western Governors University, meantime, reflected the game-changing side of the Internet and was, to Anne, “absolutely spectacular.”

“From the very beginning, that was Michael’s idea. He put the whole thing together. He made it a cooperative effort with other states, and many governors get the credit because they worked together. But it was Michael’s conception. We do look at that with great pride and satisfaction.”

For all her tender advice or notes—and her son’s references to Anne’s common-sense “Mother’s Rules” as guidance—Anne says she never really talked issues with the governor or considered herself a sounding board. Probably because there wasn’t any dissension.

“I always applauded his positions,” she says with a laugh. “He was never wrong, I remember that.”

Then, too, there really haven’t been political disagreements within the family overall. “We’re in accord on our positions,” she says. “I can’t think of any time we haven’t been. Well, I will say we have some extended family . . . that causes a few nudges here and there.”

Anne followed her son’s service attentively, though. “I didn’t want to miss anything. It didn’t ever become old or ever become overwhelming. We just wanted to know what he was doing. Never did we have any reason to have angst about Michael’s public performance.”

Instead, there was always pride. Anne was struck by how much the governor liked an annual party the state sponsored for centenarians and remembers a newspaper picture of him kneeling down to talk with a wizened elderly lady. “He was smiling. There are many, many things where I would see his goodness, and there was always the warmth of that.”

She pauses to consider whether this comes across as an “irrational” affection for her children, and then dismisses the thought. “No, it’s not irrational,” she says. “It’s deep and I’m loyal.”

Getaways

By Michael O. Leavitt

Like any family, it was important to us to periodically step away from the routines and requirements of daily life and simply recharge. Amid the busyness our family experienced over our eleven years of state service, we were able to get away, make new memories, change the pace, see new places, and relax. In doing so, we carried on some family traditions that long predated the time in office, as well as developed new, memorable traditions as a result of the office.

Family trips and gatherings had to be carved into the governor’s schedule, and sometimes that was not simple. Even then there was overlap, like when our much-anticipated Christmas getaways coincided with the run-up to the legislative session and my annual State of the State speech.

Requirements of the office sometimes yielded time back to the family, though. The national governors organizations sponsored fun and interesting family activities at their conferences and annual

meetings, and we liked those so much that the meetings became regular family events for us.

Those ended when the time in office did, but most of our other traditions, holiday gatherings, and memory-making occasions endured and were carried forward.

Take Loa, for example. Spending time at the home base of the Okerlund side of the family at our ranch in Loa, Utah, was among the most enduring experiences—a pattern that started in my own boyhood and became a generational carryover when my own children worked the land and connected with grandparents the same way I did.

Summers in Loa

Loa is a small town—population just over five hundred—in the south-central region of Utah. My mother grew up there, and my grandmother, Phyllis Okerlund, lived there with my grandfather, Melvin Okerlund, until his death in the mid-1970s. Upon Grandpa’s death, my father Dixie Leavitt bought the Okerlund ranch and continued to acquire adjacent land as it became available. A cousin, Gary Hallows, managed our cow-calf operation. We also raised alfalfa, which was used for the cattle’s winter feeding. My brothers and I had spent many a summer there learning how to work a ranch and care for crops and livestock. My own children’s time there continued the pattern set with my brothers and me. Part of cousin Gary’s job, beyond the cattle and alfalfa, was overseeing a crop of Leavitt children as they became old enough to work.

We would relocate the family to Loa each summer, and I would do my best to turn Loa into the governor’s summertime office annex. If I had to be in Salt Lake, I would go back and forth. Usually, my mother and father spent a lot of time in Loa as well—this was a bonus feature, that our children had time with them. Another bonus was that for the first several years of our service, my Grandma Okerlund was still living and became a wonderful part of my older children’s lives. Beyond my own mother, I would say Grandma Okerlund was the most influential woman in my early life, so it was a poignant and valuable experience to have my own family form a relationship with her.

My staff colleagues would often come in small groups and set up shop at the Road Creek Inn, a small bed and breakfast inn our family owned. For a portion of each day, we would plan, write speeches, or make phone calls. On numerous occasions, media would originate programs from there. One time, we held an hour-long, question-and-answer call-in program on statewide television, broadcast from the front lawn of the ranch house.

It was a glorious change from the regular order of being the First Family. While most of each day was dominated by state business, I could often take an hour in the morning or evening to help the boys change sprinklers or go for a walk around a section of alfalfa. Clean air, singing birds, and pure serenity created a familial reminder of my many summers there as a boy myself. Occasionally, I would take the kids fishing or exploring for arrowheads. A couple of times a summer my brothers would join me in driving the forty-five minutes to Ferron to play golf at Millsite Golf Course, a charming little course community members built for themselves. The time was nurturing for me and our family, as well as grounding for our children—they learned to work.

I also used those weeks in Loa as a base of operation to visit communities in rural Utah, often taking some of the children with me. One memorable trip was a tour of the coal mines in Carbon County (which is aptly named as the epicenter of Utah coal country). The mining companies wanted me to see their mines, and I told them I would come if they could accommodate a few of my kids. It turned out to be an educational adventure for all of us.

Christmas in California

Among our longest-standing family traditions is the tradition of gathering at a beach house in southern California during the week following Christmas. We started making these beach trips in the late 1980s at the invitation of dear friends of ours, Larry and Sue Lunt, who over the years have owned beach houses at Capistrano Beach near Dana Point, California. Most of these beach adventures of ours occurred during summertime, but the winter getaways became a standard feature on our calendar.

1 Mike S. working in Loa.

2 Westin going horseback riding in Loa

3 Taylor at the Loa farm house

4 Jackie and Westin paddle boating

5 Anne Marie at Grandpa Okerlund’s sheep cabin, Loa 1

Southern California was the place we escaped to immediately after the 1992 election. And from the following year onward, we started renting various homes near the Lunt’s beach house beginning the day after Christmas. The timetable often aligned with the Lunt family’s own plans and those of our mutual friend, Bud Scruggs. We became a little Utah colony during that week each year.

After several years at Capistrano Beach, another friend of ours, Dell Loy Hansen, offered the use of a home he owned in Oceanside, California. For the balance of our time in public service, our tradition shifted to this wonderful family gathering place. While it was not directly on the water, it was separated by only one row of houses and access was easy. We used Dell Loy’s guest house, a two-level, four-bedroom bungalow that shared a yard with the Hansen family’s main house. Dell Loy was often there and became a big part of our family experiences; he has remained a close friend of each of the children.

Like so many activities during those years, I was required to double task as a father and governor. My family and I were always accompanied by security, and occasionally members of the governor’s staff would travel there as well, mostly for speech writing. In other years, I ended up dealing with complicated issues, like the Olympic scandal, while in California. Nearly every year, I wrote the outline of my State of the State address from our holiday retreat. In years that had an inauguration (1996 and 2000), I had the added pressure of the inaugural address, which had to be delivered only a few days after we returned home. I would be on vacation, swapping drafts of the speeches with staff. The ease of working remotely that we are so accustomed to now did not exist then. Beginning in the late 1990s, we gained the ability to email drafts back and forth, but there was no such thing as video conferencing or collaborative net-based software.

My Christmas vacation pattern all those years was consistent. I would get up very early and work while it was quiet. As the kids got up, I would start dishing out cereal and other breakfast foods. During the day, everyone would mix in various activities at the beach or take long walks. If any of

the Utah football teams were in a bowl game, we often got tickets and attended.

The year 2003 goes down as one of the most memorable in Leavitt family history. I had just transitioned from being governor to administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and we had two engagements during our Christmas holiday. Taylor invited his girlfriend, Tammy Palmer, to join our family gathering that year and proposed marriage. Hyrum McDonald also joined us for part of the week, and one of those early morning beach walks facilitated our father/future son-in-law talk leading up to his proposal to Anne Marie. And the beat goes on. Our family has continued the beach trips for more than thirty years, and it is as lively as ever with grandchildren now added to the mix.

Work and Play at Governors Conferences

Veteran governors clued Jackie and me in about the great family times to be had at the summer meetings of the National Governors Association (NGA) and other governors conferences. They suggested we make attendance a family tradition, because it had been fun and helpful for their children to become acquainted with first-family counterparts from other states. Were they ever right. We made family attendance at one or more of these conferences a priority each year, and it was advice we passed along to others.

The largest gathering was the NGA summer meeting, held every year in July or August. Governors and their states competed to hold the meeting and went to great lengths to host well. For the governors it is nearly all business; for their families— nearly all fun. The host committees provided special activities and programs stratified by age groups.

In addition to the NGA, Jackie and I occasionally took the family to similar meetings of the Republican Governors Association (RGA) and the Western Governors’ Association (WGA). Each of the associations made their events fun and friendly. When we first started attending, our children ranged from Westin, age three, to Mike, age sixteen. There were eleven NGA summer meetings during our time in

1 During the time that Mike was running his first campaign. A trip to the beach in California.

2 Republican National Convention in San Diego, California, 1996

3 Anne Marie, Mike, Westin, Chase, and Jackie at a California beach house

4 Family trip to California. Chase, Mike, and Anne Marie

office, and the consensus of our children was overwhelmingly positive. The trips produced delightful, lasting memories for most of them.

1993 National Governors Association Summer Meeting, Tulsa, Oklahoma

The 1993 summer meeting of the National Governors Association was memorable because it was our first. Sworn in just months earlier, I was surprised by the number of people who attended these events—at least one thousand, sometimes more, were registered. Every governor brought a delegation between five and fifteen staff members. The balance of the attendees were representatives of the news media, organizations with interest in the policy discussions that were taking place, and lobbyists. It was a don’t-miss event for many people every year.

Plenary events were generally held in a convention area with the governors sitting at small tables organized in a hollow square. Hundreds of

media people covered the NGA event, with some of the policy-oriented media organizations such as C-SPAN covering events live. Nearly every evening there was live entertainment, but the governors and spouses generally had private gatherings for dinner and quiet conversation.

Tulsa was the site of Taylor’s famous selfie with Bill Clinton covered in chapter four. But he was not the only family member who had a personal encounter with the president; Bill Clinton thrilled elevenyear-old Anne Marie by reading her name tag and saying, “Hello, Anne Marie, where is your father?”

Taylor also remembers the hotel. “We were such a Marriott Courtyard kind of family we were not accustomed to anything quite like that. It had separate rooms and everything.” The kids were especially impressed by the bomb-sniffing dogs that searched our room and the “secured” tape on the door as we entered. Every part of the routine was a new adventure.

Westin, Anne Marie, Chase, Taylor, and Mike S. on an outing during one of the NGA conferences

Anne Marie and Mike in Loa

One night, there was a musical theater performance of scenes from Oklahoma . It included a dramatic reenactment of a gun fight that freaked out three-year-old Westin. One of the actors saw his distress and explained it was all make-believe. What Mike S. remembers about the evening was the Will Rodgers character who realistically portrayed the colorful sage.

Mike and Taylor had a friend from Bonneville Elementary named Jeremy Sears, who had moved to Tulsa. They had been close friends with Jeremy when he lived in Utah, but lost track of him after his move. A fair amount of detective work went into figuring out how to see Jeremy, but they found him. Their success was just one more great family memory of the Tulsa trip.

1994 National Governors Association Summer Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts

Our family’s second NGA summer meeting was in Boston. There was always a sense of excitement among our children about getting to our hotel room because of the arrival gifts, which the kids dubbed “the swag bags.” Typically, the bags included local food items and locally featured products—Taylor wore a Boston Red Sox hat he got in the swag bag for years. There was always a conversation among the kids rating the swag.

Often, there would be a memento for the governors presented at each meeting. At the Boston meeting, a colonial chair with each governor’s name carved into the back was presented. It is still in use at the Leavitt home.

The Boston meeting featured a tour of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and a lobster-feeding activity the kids remember. They also talked about attending Phantom of the Opera and a tour of Fenway Park. Also, they had a chance to meet famed film director Stephen Spielberg, who talked about the making of Schindler’s List.

Westin remembers the Boston meeting as the event where he first got to know Megan Miller, the daughter of Nevada Governor Bob Miller. Megan and Westin would have been about five years old at

the time. It was a relationship that continued for the entire time of our service and beyond. Likewise, our older sons got to know Ross Miller, Megan’s brother.

1995 National Governors Association Summer Meeting, Burlington, Vermont; Western Governors Association Meeting, Park City, Utah

The summer of 1995 was a highly intense time as it related to my work as governor. I was chairman of the Republican Governors Association while also leading a national governors’ effort to shape the reforms of the nation’s welfare and Medicaid systems. Likewise, I was working to bring the Conference of the States federalism initiative to a soft landing. (My federalism work is covered extensively in Volume III of this history). Given the intensity of the agenda and the fact that I would be hosting the Western Governors Association summer meeting in Park City—plus having the children busy working in Loa during some of that time—we decided to have the kids skip the Vermont conference.

1996 National Governors Association Summer Meeting, Puerto Rico; Republican National Convention, San Diego, California

If 1995 was hectic, 1996 was doubly so. I was deeply involved in welfare reform, up for reelection myself, and chairing Senator Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in Utah. Given the distance to Puerto Rico, site of the NGA conference that year, we decided to make the Republican National Convention in San Diego our main family trip. It was a good decision, because I was deployed from the Puerto Rico NGA event to Washington, D.C., by the other governors to negotiate welfare reform on their behalf. Had the family been there, it would have created a hardship for Jackie.

Our plan to rent a beach house just north of San Diego during the Republican Convention worked out much better; I was able to just commute to the convention each day. What I remember most about that week was preparing to give a speech on the fourth night of the convention, just before the presidential nomination speeches began. I labored for hours over the speech, missing most of the family

1 NGA Boston

2 Western Governors conference at Utah Olympic Park in Park City

3 Leavitt family at an NGA conference

time. The speech turned out to be more honor than excitement since it occurred just before prime time and, although covered by television, was delivered to an audience that was paying absolutely no attention.

1997 National Governors Association Summer Meeting and Western Governors Association Meeting, Las Vegas, Nevada

I did not have as heavy a load this time around, which meant the family and I had a great time. Yes, I had governors’ meetings, but was able to enjoy time with the kids. The Las Vegas governors’ conferences had rapidly gained a reputation among our children as “the conferences to squash all conferences.” We attended not just the NGA conference but also a WGA conference held in Las Vegas as well. Because of the prominence of the gaming and tourism industry in Las Vegas, Governor Miller was able to enlist resources unmatched by other areas of the country.

At one of the conferences, our sons—the ultimate boxing fans—knew the names and backgrounds of famous Las Vegas-based referees. They knew that Richard Steele, who had been in the ring for dozens of fabled boxing matches, worked at the Golden Nugget Casino on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. The most important pursuit of the week for them was a Richard Steele sighting, and they cased the Golden Nugget for hours on two separate occasions. They began to ask employees where they could find him, following clues like it was a treasure hunt— never mind that it was unlawful for children to be in the casino area. To my knowledge, they never found him, but they did learn their way around the Golden Nugget.

Westin remembers our room at the Mirage as “insanely cool—huge,” and the waterslides and pools as being “the next level.” There were gifts on the bed every day, including a Discman CD player. Westin also claims that—someplace—there exists a picture of him and Governor Miller’s daughter Megan holding a tiger cub.

1998 National Governors Association Summer Meeting, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

This was a midterm election year, so there were many governors up for reelection. At this meeting I was elected vice chair of the National Governors Association, serving alongside Tom Carper of Delaware. My most prominent memory of the Milwaukee conference was the Harley Davidson motorcycle ride through the Wisconsin back country. Harley Davidson is a Milwaukee company, and Governor Tommy Thompson was a motorcycle enthusiast, so they brought Harley Roadster Hogs for every governor to ride. We were kings of the road.

The kids remember an all-day water park adventure with the park all to themselves. Who would not remember that? They also have memories of the abundant number of people at the conference wearing the signature Wisconsin cheesehead hat.

1999 National Governors Association Summer Meeting, St. Louis, Missouri

In July 1999, I was in the middle of the Internet sales tax issue (detailed in another volume). I also was vice chair of the NGA and therefore very active throughout the conference. Jackie and the children had to carry on quite autonomously. The kids remember going to Busch Stadium and seeing Mark McGwire’s locker. McGwire was having his record-beating home run season at the time, so being in the locker room was meaningful to the boys. They also attended an NFL preseason game, seeing the Oakland Raiders ( Taylor’s favorite team) and the Super Bowl Champion Los Angeles Rams play—all from seats in the owner’s suite. They also visited the famous Gateway Arch next to the Mississippi River.

2000 National Governors Association Summer Meeting, College Station, Pennsylvania

I had been elected NGA chairman at the 1999 meeting. Hence, this was the year I chaired the association’s summer conference, conducted the meetings, and designed the agenda. My theme for the year had been “Strengthening the Role

1 NGA Conference in Pennsylvania

2 NGA Conference in Pennsylvania

3 From left : Carrie, Mike S., Mike, Jackie, Anne Marie, and Hyrum McDonald. NGA Conference in Sun Valley

of the States in the New Economy,” playing into the overriding theme of my national efforts to promote federalism. At the conference, I welcomed General Colin Powell, who in 2001 would become Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. Also attending were the chief executive officer of Verizon, Ivan Seidenberg, and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. All three spoke at the event, as did President Bill Clinton in his final appearance at NGA as president.

Taylor was studying economics at Utah State University at the time and not only wanted to listen to Clinton’s speech but was determined to meet him—in a more decorous way than the selfie encounter as a teenager. He accomplished both objectives.

Another lasting memory was created in a moment at College Station as the kids walked down a hall together. A law enforcement officer, by their description, “literally tackled an innocent bystander by pushing them into a wall,” all because the individual had been perceived as a threat to the family of a governor. The children were shocked when it occurred, but the moment gained a place in family lore because, to this day, the moment is playfully reenacted when they are together.

2001 National Governors Association Summer Meeting, Providence, Rhode Island

As the former chair of NGA, my direct duties were by now less intense than at previous conferences, allowing me to spend more time with the family. But my most prominent memory of this conference did not occur at the conference itself; I spent much of the time dealing with family matters of a different sort. One of our children, who had chosen not to make the Rhode Island trip, decided it was a good opportunity to organize an excursion of his own (guess which child). He loaded the family van full of friends and made an unauthorized road trip to Las Vegas. However, his mischief was no match for a dad who commanded the Utah Highway Patrol.

Governor Lincoln Almond was the host of the meeting in Providence. Our family stayed at the Westin Providence Hotel, “Westin” being a global hotel brand name which always delighted Westin

Leavitt. A prominent memory for the family was an outdoor dinner at the Wrigley Mansion in Newport. It was the first time any of us had tasted Dippin’ Dots Ice Cream—the “ice cream of the future.” We also went to a baseball game of the minor league Pawtucket Red Sox at McCoy Stadium. The otherwise forgettable game made my official history by virtue of a great ballpark hot dog and the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy: I caught a foul ball.

2002 National Governors Association Summer Meeting, Boise, Idaho

By 2002, my responsibilities at NGA had begun to subside. I had been chairman and it was time to let others lead. This allowed me to enjoy the conference more as part of the family. The events in Boise typically unfolded around a western theme— rodeos and cookouts.

I noticed at the 2002 NGA conference how the participation of our children had begun to shift. In the past, their attention was exclusively focused on the fun and unique opportunities. But by 2002, the older children had become genuinely interested in the substance of the conference, and they wanted to sample the night life of the city. I think Taylor went out dancing with members of my staff team.

By 2002 I had also begun to give thought to whether I would run for a fourth term of office or bring my service to a conclusion. Within that context, I had two notable memories. I was having breakfast one morning with the family when Governor Howard Dean of Vermont walked over to say hello. After we exchanged pleasantries, he said, “I want to tell you about a new development in my life. I have decided to run for president in 2004.”

Continuing breakfast, the family and I talked about whether Dean was viable. Howard and I had been in the same class of new governors in 1993. He had been chairman of the NGA and also of the Democrat Governors Association, just like I had been with the NGA and RGA. He was from an even smaller state than Utah. I was taken aback by Howard’s brashness, but at the same time found myself wondering if I had been selling myself short. If Howard Dean could run and be viable, maybe I was too self-limiting in my own expectations and aspirations.

As it turned out, Howard Dean did seek the Democrat Party nomination for president in 2004 and was considered the frontrunner for a significant period. He was ultimately undone by an exuberant screech that capped the remarks he made on live television after losing a primary—an instantaneous moment that he likely intended to be a rallying cry of confidence. Instead, it created a weird “scream meme” that played endlessly, and he never recovered from it. All of his momentum vanished. Circumstances in my own political party did not present the same type of opportunity for me to consider running, but the experience was an important one in providing perspective.

The second experience was quite the opposite. The family and I went to an evening event at the hotel. There was a small Dixieland band playing upbeat music. I immediately recognized the clarinet player—it was Phil Batt, the former governor of Idaho and one of my favorite governors. He only served a single term but was well liked. He was down to earth and straightforward. Seeing Governor Batt at the NGA, entertaining as a clarinet player, gave me another perspective—the opposite from Howard Dean. It involved less political ambition and perhaps a purer sense of service. Just before he left office, I asked Phil, who had spent his lifetime farming, what he planned to do next. His response was classic Phil Batt, clever, simple, and full of meaning: “I’m going back to growing onions—and complaining about the government.”

2003 National Governors Association Summer Meeting, Indianapolis, Indiana

In June 2003, I was contacted by the White House about joining the Bush Cabinet. No decision had been made, but it was very much on my mind at NGA. As it turned out, I later accepted the Bush appointment and this NGA meeting would be my last.

A lot had changed since our first NGA meeting ten years earlier; Westin was in middle school and the older children were either in college or working. Consequently, I think Westin was the only family member traveling with us. To make things a little more interesting for him, we invited his great friend Logan Keller to travel with us. Logan accompanied us frequently during this period. We found that things went better when Westin had a friend along—a general truism with children, I believe, as they get into middle school and high school.

Westin was anxious to introduce Logan to some of his NGA friends, especially the oldest daughter of Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan. Westin confessed to having a bit of a crush on her. The three of them spent considerable time together on that trip.

The Brothers

By Laurie Sullivan Maddox

Mike Leavitt was forty-one years old when he was inaugurated. Dane was thirty-six, Mark thirty-five, Eric thirty-one, David twenty-nine, and Matthew just twenty. The brothers had been a bit like musketeers in their all-for-one, one-for-all closeness growing up—at least when those closest in age weren’t sparring or pranking each other, as families with boys tend to do.

Mike’s attainment of a high public office tested and affirmed the dynamic in various ways, and the brother bonds held up.

As the next oldest, though five years younger, Dane looked up to Mike throughout childhood, admiring his achievements and sports exploits. As adults, they were business colleagues and friends as well as brothers. So, when Mike launched his bid for the governorship, it was Dane who took the reins of the Leavitt Group, adding Mike’s responsibilities to his own to maintain operational continuity—and to keep Mike’s position at the ready if he did not win the election.

Dane had been his brother’s wingman before, accompanying Mike on his fact-finding trip to Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1991 to determine whether he should run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Jake Garn. Dane took extensive notes, asked questions, and was a sounding board for his brother.

“A couple weeks later [Mike] made the decision. Not the senate, but the governorship. That required a very quick shift in his own life and priorities,” Dane says. “Mike’s life was in Salt Lake; he’d lived there since 1977 and split his life between the Leavitt Group and his political affairs advisory group. He had made a balance, helping the Leavitt Group move forward at the same time he moved forward on the political side. I was in Cedar City, contributing to the forward movement from there.”

The repositioning of roles in the family business would be a necessary adjustment, although Mike initially had a glimmer of hope that public office might not preclude him from any role whatsoever in the Leavitt Group. Dane, a lawyer, thought it unlikely, given time constraints and state regulations.

“ Then it was him going down to the ballroom where we realized that while he remained our brother, he was no longer just ours. ”

“And so he left the family business, and we kept him informed, and I sought to help him any way we could with the campaign,” Dane says. “My job was to give him the security that he still had a job.”

On election night, like others in the family, Dane had his own moment of realization that life would be different. Family members were all gathered in a suite watching the returns on television when the election was called for his brother.

“I remember my father giving Mike a blessing after the outcome was known,” he says. Mike, in turn, spoke of a passage from Mosiah in the Book of Mormon in which a new ruler was “chosen by this people and consecrated by [his] father . . .”

The words had significance for family members, Dane says, because “remarkable things had happened to bring him from two percent name identification to being governor of our state,” and because of the symbolism of Dixie, the family patriarch and former state senator, figuratively passing the political torch to his son.

Then came the walk to the ballroom with the security escort, and amid the exhilaration, Mike called to Dane’s wife, Ruth, asking her to please take pictures of everything happening that night. Ruth captured what she could. “Then it was him going down to the ballroom where we realized that while he remained our brother, he was no longer just ours.”

Keeping the Governor Grounded

Mark and Eric—numbers three and four in the sibling order—had, from the beginning, seen it as their duty to state and family to keep Utah’s chief executive grounded. The two felt it as much of an imperative as Jackie did that normal life and familiar ways had to be maintained to the extent possible amid the power and trappings of the governorship.

“Through all of his service, I think we all—and I especially—kind of felt like my assignment was to get Mike to remember he’s just a kid from 700 West in Cedar City,” says Mark, six years Mike’s junior and the acknowledged jokester of the bunch. Humor was key to that effort.

Notorious pranksters all, the governor included, the brothers had to declare a cease fire once Mike became the Honorable Governor Leavitt. Over the years, some of the pranks had been doozies, and a governor had too many resources at his disposal, plus the decorum of the office to uphold.

But they could still keep it real (and right) with some lesser hijinks here or there. The office itself presented some opportunities. One of those was the radio program the governor initiated not long

after taking office, called “Let Me Speak to the Governor.” For an hour every three months, the chief executive would field constituent questions and concerns, patiently listening and directing staff to follow up.

“ This guy says he’s the governor. Says he needs to call the Secretary of Defense. Says he’ll use his credit card. Watch him.”

Calls streamed in from across the state from regular Utahns with issues large and small. But sometimes an irregular Utahn—or two—got through.

“We’d call in and affect a Southern Utah accent and ask some random off-the-wall question like when he was coming to take care of that damn sign, or we’d say something like ‘I’ve been calling state transportation to come fix this sign for fifteen months now,” Eric says. “He’d answer them straight up and then call us and say, ‘That was you, right?’ And it was Mark and I.”

Mark believes he spent more time with the governor than any of the other four because he was traveling regularly back and forth to Salt Lake. And their time together was spent “just being the way you normally always were.”

“It was just important enough that you were around. And it was the sense that I belong to this group, and at the end of the day that was more important than anything I’m doing.” Mike was wise to it, Mark recalls. “He would say, ‘The moment you start believing all the things people tell you about yourself, you’ve lost.’ Because they’ll want to fawn over you.”

Mark says he and Eric had too much of a “demented sense of irreverence” to let their brother succumb to fawning—and the brothers enjoyed each other’s company too much to let it lapse.

Because he was frequently in Salt Lake, Mark and the governor were able to escape somewhat

regularly to the golf courses, although the demands of the office compressed the window of opportunity into a limited time block shortly before sunset. Undeterred, they created “fire-drill golf:” expedited rounds where they moved quickly from hole to hole, completing eighteen holes in an hour and fortyfive minutes.

Good grounding moments regularly came about through excursions like golf, and from other everyday encounters in life.

Brotherly Shenanigans

One of those was a gem. Fairly early in the first term, the governor was busy with federal base closure issues, and then got a few days respite. He and some of the brothers headed to the Millsite Recreation Area near Ferron to golf and relax. The governor didn’t have to shave and could go about his business in jeans and a ballcap, essentially incognito. Until the security detail’s phone started going off.

Cellular service was spotty, and something was clearly urgent. It was the Defense Department calling about base closure matters, and the governor needed to call back. Mike and the brothers had just gone into the Grub Box Drive Inn for some hot dogs, and the governor asked the counter clerk if he could use the cafe’s phone.

The clerk didn’t recognize him in his Levi’s, golf shirt, and hat, so she was skeptical. He explained the situation and the urgency of his need to make a phone call. The woman at the counter reluctantly agreed. Mike went into the kitchen to use the phone and overheard the still-doubting waitress say, oozing with sarcasm, “This guy says he’s the governor. Says he needs to call the Secretary of Defense. Says he’ll use his credit card. Watch him.”

Finally, his identity and status were proven to hers and the proprietor’s satisfaction—and to their chagrin and apologies afterward. The call was placed, the brothers doubled up in laughter through the episode.

When the brothers met up with the security detail—a number of whom became like brothers themselves—more pranking went down. Whenever

1 Mark and Dane with "Buckley" the family Ford F150

2 Mike (twenty-one years old) with David (nine years old) reading the Church News

3 Family photo taken in Dixie and Anne's backyard.

4 Mike and Eric showing off

5 Mike (twenty-two years old) holding Matthew

6 Mike (twenty-one years old) wrestling with Dane and Mark in living room

the governor was at the Road Creek Inn in Loa, the brothers would have to convince the troopers to relax. “They’d either sit around and feel nervous or go do things,” says Mark.

One day, Mark and officer Doug McCleve played a prank on Alan Workman, the detail’s head. They gathered two roosters from the pheasant-hunting operation on site, stashed them behind the shower curtain in the tub of Alan’s room, and closed the door.

“And then we just waited for him to get back. He came in and said, ‘I don’t think I closed that door.’ He’s got a gun out. He turns on the light and these pheasants just came flying at him,” Mark laughs.

“ Mike was clearly management and we were clearly labor. ”

Alan was a favorite and was devoted to the family. He was known for how fast he liked to drive—everywhere—and even with the governor on board. “We were driving down the street, North Temple, and Mike says, ‘Alan, these lights are timed, and if you go thirty miles an hour, you’ll move right through.’ And he said, ‘Yes, it works at sixty, too, governor.’”

Management Is Where It’s At

For Eric, ten years younger, his oldest brother was larger than life in many ways: Mike was part parent, part protector, and a star athlete as well. And it was Mike’s election to the governorship that precipitated Eric’s move from the energy sector to become CEO of Leavitt Group Enterprises.

He says he knew Mike would be accomplished, whatever he pursued. A clear sign of that was when Mike, at age twenty-two, procured the contract to manage garbage removal from the campgrounds on Cedar City Mountain and Panguitch Lake, and made his younger brothers his employees.

“Mike was clearly management and we were clearly labor,” Eric says. “He put us to work, and I would be surprised if Mike lifted more than five or six garbage can lids that summer. But he learned

early on that management was where it was at. I think that drove his desire to be well-educated, well-read, and to be thoughtful and aware that great change can be wrought by those who take risks and are willing to venture. That’s certainly a hallmark of his.”

Eric was awed by the skills and vision his brother brought to the office, and says the governorship was the perfect job for him. From WGU to the innovations in state trust lands administration, and a dozen things beyond, there were always big ideas and a fearlessness in identifying and advancing them. On top of that, Mike had oratorical gifts and was great at relationships, Eric says.

Related to a Governor

As businessmen and managers of various family enterprises, Dane, Mark, and Eric all experienced a heightened level of scrutiny and often suspicion in business dealings once their brother was in office— due, as Dixie described it, to the hypersensitivity of state agencies and regulators to any notion of favoritism.

“Most people would say, ‘Oh, it must be quite an advantage to have your brother as governor.’ That’s certainly true with the experiences that were brought about. As it related to dealing with state government, it was about four times the opposite,” Eric says.

Mark took the most heat, Eric says, because he was the manager of the family fisheries and the one who dealt most regularly with the Division of Wildlife Resources, which zealously sought out a whirling disease culprit for two key reasons.

“One, it shielded them from acknowledging that whirling disease existed before they acknowledged it existed, and in their facilities; and two, they didn’t want to be, nor did Mike want to be, accused of giving the Leavitt family special treatment dispensations.”

Political considerations compounded the toll. When the whirling disease controversy led later to media insinuations about conflicts of interest regarding a restructuring of the state’s Department of Wildlife Services, Mark and Dane

had to fend off allegations of favorable treatment even as they continued to dispute that the family aquaculture operation was responsible for whirling disease in the first place. Much later it came out that the disease had surfaced upstream from Road Creek, but the damage had been done.

It took a couple decades, but Mark says he’s finally at the point where he is OK with what was “unquestionably the most painful experience I had in my life.”

The frustration and sense of injustice were manifold for years, and it was a case of him being in the wrong place at the right time. Mark would get phone calls from people in state labs about tests and results, telling him “you guys are getting hosed on this.” But none would or could say that publicly. A lot was learned about government, the media, and human nature from the ordeal.

The media was informed by some one about the whirling disease situation just one day after the brothers’ initial conference call with the state about the presence of the disease at the Road Creek fisheries. And just like that, the family’s life and finances were emblazoned on newspaper front pages. The feeding frenzy ramped up from there.

“ If they had just taken shots at me, I would have been OK. Except it was always the Leavitt Family. ”

“Once it starts—even with people that knew it was wrong—as long as no one starts to stand up in front of that rock and stop it, you’re going to get run over by it. It’s just going to go until it stops,” Mark says.

The governor was unruffled when the shots were aimed at him, Mark says. “He didn’t get angry as in ‘You guys are giving me a black eye.’ It was, ‘Geez,

I’m really sorry.’ The pain for Mark sprang from the feeling that “what you were doing and what you’re attempting to do as a business is now dragging your family down in ways that are so unfair.”

“It’s a family that spent their entire life working to have a reputation of honesty and integrity and straightforwardness. Now, there are not only questions about integrity but about your ill intent,” he says. “If they had just taken shots at me, I would have been OK. Except it was always the Leavitt Family.”

Learn a Lesson from the Tuition

The too-little, too-late exoneration letter from Bruce Schmidt helped a bit, as did time. Mark says a lesson he’s conveyed many times as a bishop for the Church of Jesus Christ about living and learning also held true. “It is this: Look, mistakes in life always have a tuition attached. If you learn a lesson from the tuition, you never pay too much. If you don’t learn the lesson, you’ll pay more the next time around. So, you learn the lessons. You become grateful for it and quit pointing fingers back, saying ‘This bastard caused this.’ Life is too short.”

As for Eric, he detected a bit of bias-overcorrection in some of his insurance industry interactions with the state, an “embedded presumption” on state officials’ part that Leavitt family members might be looking for favors.

“Each brother viewed that as being something we would not do. It certainly didn’t put a strain on our relationship with Mike. But an unwillingness to impose—or a desire to not be seen as someone who hangs on to the coattails of a prominent person—I think probably caused us to withdraw, maybe a little bit unnaturally from what it had been before.”

Dane had acted as a company spokesman, working closely with Mark, in navigating through the whirling disease episode. The goal at the time, he says, “was to get through it honorably and to acknowledge the problems.”

With the hindsight of nearly three decades, he has no residual anger and even remembers some of the state people who were involved with fondness for ultimately acknowledging that Leavitts did not bring the trout malady into the state. He also values

the learning and character-shaping that resulted from the pressure.

Two key lessons emerged for Dane. One, that seeking God’s help in a crisis makes a big difference. The other: anger is dangerous. “You need to be really careful with anger. It doesn’t mean you’re right. The sun comes up tomorrow, and as you work through problems you make headway.”

“On balance, I feel good about the way we handled it. We minimized the impact on Mike. And rather than fight a perceived unfairness, we pleaded no contest and put it behind us.”

Dane also felt his father and brothers’ same discomfort in regulatory environments from time to time, primarily with the Utah Insurance Department. He had served on a state insurance-code task force in the late 1980s, before his brother took office, and was familiar with the issues and state players involved.

Once his brother became governor, “the ability to get anything done with the Insurance Department took a lot longer because they had to be so careful, and I had to be so careful. The process became clunky.”

“ Hey, you know I’m still your brother. ”

At one point, Dane was advising the Insurance Department on proposed changes to the Utah Worker’s Compensation Fund, whose officers wanted their entity’s structure changed statutorily into a mutual. There were some pitfalls to the move, which Dane was pointing out. And since it involved a state government entity and a Leavitt, there were some tensions.

Those were among the personal costs of the office for the brothers, and talking about those costs more than two decades later brings Eric to tears—and to a quick effort to stifle them with a humorous aside, saying, “Leavitts cry at supermarket openings!”

At places or events family members could attend, they would still retreat a bit, he says, because

everybody there wanted a piece of the governor, and family did not want to add to the crush or “be viewed as groupies.”

That was another one of the tolls exacted by the office—a different kind of togetherness. The governor, always attuned, picked up on it.

“As time went on, we got accustomed to it and we fought through that,” Eric says. “Because Mike felt it and he would say, ‘Hey, you know I’m still your brother.’ So, we’d have to mindfully power through that.”

It was a sacrifice that could not be articulated, Eric says, “Because how dumb is that—to sacrifice to have your brother be governor? Think of all the experiences we had that never would have materialized otherwise. They were terrific, but it wasn’t free in terms of the cost.”

Memorable Experiences

Costs and payoffs, each in turn. As family members all attest, the positive experiences were plentiful: meeting presidents and prime ministers; accompanying the governor on trade and other official trips overseas; access to the Olympics; conversations with the likes of the Dalai Lama, Colin Powell, Kofi Annan, and President George W. Bush.

“We got to have opportunities that most people just don’t get,” Eric says. “We tried not to take that for granted and also worked really hard to not presume that we were entitled to them.”

Dane says there were times when having a governor in the family was not bad for business at all. On acquisition trips out of state, if the other parties they were dealing with knew their brother was governor of Utah, he says, “We’d have instant credibility.”

Occasionally, there were lifetime memories made that sprang up spontaneously. One of Dane’s most memorable experiences happened that way.

He was at the Capitol one day, and a former Israeli official (Dane cannot recall the official’s name and position) was there to meet with the governor. The official was retired and elderly by then, and his visit to Utah was low-key and unnoticed. But he had been a high-level military commander or government figure who helped lead Israel through

some of the epochal moments in the nation’s history. Mike waved Dane in, and the three had a riveting conversation in the governor’s private office.

The official talked about being a young soldier many decades earlier during the Arab-Israeli War from 1947 to 1949, which occurred as Israel became an independent nation and was attacked by neighboring Arab countries. He described how he and other soldiers dug graves during momentary lulls in combat, not knowing who would fill them but knowing they would be filled by soldiers who had lost their lives in battle.

“I just listened, and we asked questions,” Dane says. “He was a captivating presence. The pathos of his existence and the difficult problems he and others had to lead the people through . . . it gave you a perspective of just how good things are here.”

President George W. Bush was memorable for Dane as well, hitting all the right notes, from strength to humor, when he came to Utah for the Winter Olympics six months after 9/11. Bush could turn on a dime, Dane says, reassuring millions on television that America was safe, and then delivering a wry observation that cracked people up, as he did when two Utahns in their nineties were being introduced at a small gathering in the Governor’s Office. The old couple was wheeled in by their seventy-year-old sons, prompting Bush to remark, “Oh, the Hanson boys are here.”

A Birthday Escape

The governor was in his third term by then. Dane had known long before, when his brother’s reach expanded beyond Utah, taking on a national profile and scope midway through the second term, that he was not coming back to the previous life.

“His life had taken a pivot. We filled the holes left by his absence. One of those was Eric. He and I worked together on the insurance side; Mark was on the agricultural side most of those years. We’d continue to go to the Governor’s Galas, and we continued to love it when he came at Thanksgiving time—bringing the security detail.”

“And we enjoyed his stories. They had a national flavor because of his experience on that stage.

Our life continued. We continued to try and build the business and continued to be grateful for the exceptional job he was doing running the state.”

The governor never closed a door to them or acted above them during any of those years, Eric says. “In fact, it was the opposite—why don’t you hang around a little more?”

“ His life had taken a pivot. We filled the holes left by his absence.”

Finding the time and the right opportunity were always complicated, but the stars aligned for Mike’s fiftieth birthday on February 11, 2001, as the brothers pulled off a surprise. They arranged with Alayne Peterson to get time blocked out on the governor’s official schedule under bogus pretenses. Next, Jackie packed a bag with Levi’s and other casual clothes. Security was in on it as well. Dane, Mark, and Eric went to the Capitol to wish their brother a happy birthday, then guided him to his official vehicle, where security whisked the group off to the 49th Street Galleria for several hours of bowling and laser tag.

“He changed clothes in the back of his car and mooned one of his constituents,” Dane says. It just got better from there.

The brothers had rented the entire Galleria for the afternoon and had it all to themselves. They bowled game after game, and Dane got the highest score he’s ever recorded, then or now. Laser tag had ringers, however. “Mike had the highway patrolmen on his team,” Dane says, “and they won.”

“We had just a wonderful experience. We were there from probably ten in the morning until two in the afternoon, and it created a great memory.”

The eleven-year Leavitt Administration coincided with a time of tremendous growth and possibility, which Eric believes his brother presided over—and led—phenomenally well. It was, he says, “just a deep blessing to be part of it, even on just a peripheral basis.”

1 Mike with David and Chelom Leavitt in the governor's office

2 Mike with Jana and Mark Leavitt in the governor's office

3 Mike's farewell party at the Utah State Capitol

4 General Election, Ian on Eric's sholders

5 Family at Governor's Mansion.

6 Family celebration at the mansion.

“If I can teach some of my children what can happen in terms of Mike taking a risk and moving it forward and having a long-term view—that has been such a wonderful thing for me to see, and I would hope that generations of our family would see it the same way.”

Tailbacks and Fullbacks

David Leavitt, the only other Leavitt brother to face voters in an election, looked up to his oldest brother for years, an admiration that became more nuanced when his own worldview and outlook on government service started diverging.

Nearly thirteen years older, Mike was a herotype figure who affectionately ruffled his little brother’s hair and looked out for him. As a small boy, David would wear Mike’s high school basketball uniform around the house, and by age ten David was a junior apprentice on the crew of Leavitt brothers Mike paid to haul garbage from Cedar Mountain. When David wanted to open his first bank account, Mike was the one who went with him to State Bank in Cedar City and co-signed on the account.

David did not follow Mike or any of his other siblings into the family business, even though that was his initial intent. He was a new father finishing up law school—married to fellow law student Chelom Leavitt—when Mike’s political aspirations first surfaced. By the time the gubernatorial campaign was under way, new lawyers David and Chelom also had a new law practice in the central Utah community of Fillmore.

There was little time to engage with the campaign, but David was intrigued by the process, calling Mike to get the latest poll numbers and fiercely defending him against critics.

Election night had a “wow factor” atmosphere with the political coronation, the sudden activation of security, and the instant change as Mike became governor-elect. “It was quite a moment to see the realization come over him that he was, in fact, going to be the governor,” David says. “Suddenly, you realize that this is . . . other people take this seriously, too.”

Life changed in other ways once his brother took office. In addition to the law practice in Fillmore, David had public defender contracts in Millard and Juab counties. “I was this young professional, and suddenly people that I really only had tangential connections with started knocking on my door because they wanted to get to Mike.”

The two viewed things from different prisms, David says, his own being that of a criminal defense attorney—and later a prosecutor—with a “micro” perspective, compared to the “macro” sensibilities of his governor brother.

“I started to notice that our life experiences and our basic temperaments created a distinctive difference of how we looked at the world. So that was interesting to start to piece together this weird mixture of being intensely loyal and defensive of who he is, seeing things that somehow I didn’t quite align with him on, and then noticing the difference—that Mike’s a tailback and I’m a fullback like my dad.”

A tailback, David explains, gains his yardage by not getting hit by people, whereas a fullback doesn’t gain as many yards, but those he gets are harder earned.

Because of David’s legal background, Mike sometimes discussed judicial appointments with him. In 1994, a district court position became vacant in Juab County. A female attorney, who would have been the first woman appointed to the Fourth District bench, was the odds-on choice and preferred candidate among the governor’s advisors. David liked—and lobbied a wee bit for—the incumbent county attorney, Don Eyre.

The governor bucked the consensus candidate and went with Eyre. David regards it as his brother laying down a marker of sorts that Mike, not staff, was the ultimate decision-maker. And as a Leavitt brother, David saw almost a humorous parallel to a family rule playing out—the “six-to-one rule” of patriarch Dixie, which held that if a vote pertaining to family business matters ended up six-to-one, “the ones have it.”

Not long after the judicial appointment of Eyre, Juab County officials named David to the county attorney position vacated by the new judge, making

David a “minor elected official” in a state where his big brother was the most major of officials. Before too long, David says, that made for some interesting scenarios as well.

In one such instance, he learned, through the use of new DNA forensic technology, that two men serving time for sexual assault could not have committed the crimes they were accused of. He was going to wait two weeks for the next time a judge would be available in Nephi to get the men processed and released from prison. David called his brother.

“That was a pivotal moment for me when Mike’s response was, ‘Let me get this straight. You got two guys serving four years in prison, and you’re waiting two more weeks to let them out?’”

Point taken, and David called the judge and the Department of Corrections right away to get the men released. Corrections officials balked and David pressed the issue. “The end of the story is I was certain I would not have the ability to dictate how that was going to happen with the Department of Corrections if Mike had not been my brother.”

David and Mike’s Different Paths

Their professional paths converged again in 1998 with the governor’s public relations brushfire over polygamy prosecutions, and whether polygamy was constitutionally protected religious freedom. The governor had walked back his remarks and clarified that polygamy prosecutions were best left to state and local prosecutors. A few weeks later, the national news show Dateline NBC called David seeking an interview.

The governor and David had streamlined the message: Polygamy is against the law, it ought to be against the law, and the state would prosecute through local county prosecutors if brought a case.

All was well, David says, up until the point when the program aired and the opening segment of the piece was all about Tom Green, a Juab County resident who flaunted his polygamist lifestyle. The segment with David followed. Essentially, the show was cornering the state by proffering a case, along with a local prosecutor who happened to be the governor’s brother.

“At that point in time I knew I had a problem because polygamy was this touch issue.” David successfully pursued a prosecution of Green, the first polygamy prosecution in Utah in fifty years.

I knew I had to stand up and be who I was going to be,” he says. Green was convicted and sentenced to prison. And in 2002, David lost his bid for reelection.

Losing office was a painful experience, he says, because his identity had been tied to “being someone like Mike Leavitt or Dixie Leavitt, and suddenly you weren’t.” He went back into private practice and became a federal public defender.

Increasingly, he felt he would indefinitely remain in the shadow of his older brother—as governor and later a federal Cabinet member—if he did not break the mold in a big way.

In 2004, David moved his entire family to Ukraine and became an advisor to the Supreme Court of Ukraine just months before the start of the Orange Revolution, when protests and civic unrest broke out over claims of fraud and corruption in the nation’s presidential election.

Returning home several years later, David unsuccessfully challenged Republican incumbent Congressman Chris Cannon in 2008 for the GOP nomination in Utah’s Third District, a seat ultimately won by Jason Chaffetz. Ten years later, he entered the race for Utah County District Attorney and won.

David believes there is a steep price paid by those who spend years in public service—paid also by their families. When focused on being important and impacting the world, he says, you’re not playing catch with your kid in the backyard.

The governor made sacrifices—and made decisions that had huge impact on lives. “He’s a good, good man,” David says. “But he’s paid a price that he may not recognize, but I think his children may recognize a little better, and it’s a price that I have paid. It’s a price my dad has paid. The moral of the whole story to me is it’s not that important to be famous. It’s a whole lot more important to be loved, and to love.”

Despite some disagreements and the difficulties when their separate public service roles overlapped, David says his brother’s experience unquestionably helped him.

“I am a huge beneficiary of Mike’s service. He’s a beneficiary of my dad’s service. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing without those that went before me. At the same time, I’m a huge beneficiary of seeing some of the pitfalls of the service, seeing where I didn’t have to take the same step.”

The Youngest Brother

The youngest Leavitt brother did not need to take as many steps to differentiate himself. Time, place, and a twenty-one-year age gap helped distance Matthew Leavitt from being swept up in his oldest brother’s public service whirlwind, the spotlight, and the questioning as to whether there was advantage or disadvantage that accrued because of the governorship.

He was twenty when his forty-one-year-old brother was elected governor. He also was six thousand miles away serving a mission in Romania. Letters from his mother were his main conduit of news about the campaign.

Even so, there were some surprising tie-ins to the race, which had narrowed in the closing weeks of the general election to a contest mainly between his Republican brother and Independent Merrill Cook.

Matthew’s mission companion happened to be the son of Cook’s campaign manager. Coincidentally, another missionary with them in Romania was the daughter of his brother’s GOP primary opponent, Richard Eyre.

“You had Mike Leavitt’s brother, Richard Eyre’s daughter, and Merrill Cook’s campaign manager’s son. So, it was a real interesting dynamic,” he laughs. “All in Romania, all focused on other things.”

“It was kind of the nice thing about being there. If we were back in the heat of things in Utah, we probably wouldn’t have gotten along.”

Growing up, Matthew hung out more with Mike and Jackie’s oldest boys, Mike S. and Taylor, than he did with his brother. Mike was a young professional starting a family while Matthew was still a young boy.

One thing was clear, though, even way back then. Matthew remembers his brother being “technology centric” years before he led Utah into the age of the internet.

“He had the first video camera I ever saw. I remember hearing the story that he owned the first digital calculator in the high school. He spent a huge amount of money buying the calculator because he could see that that was the future.”

The first video Matthew ever remembers seeing was at his brother’s house, too, watching Popeye with his nephews and nieces. He was in awe and went back home and to tell his friends that his brother had a machine where you could watch any movie you wanted.

“Mike was always the guy on the cutting edge, and he was a gadget guy. So, that did make him really interesting. He also was the first owner of a Sony Walkman. This is from the eyes of a sixyear-old.”

Mike was a loving brother as well, who, in a sense, related to Matthew almost like an uncle. At age eleven, Matthew moved with his parents to England when their mission call took them to Leeds. Mike “hadn’t gone off and conquered the world yet. He was just a cool guy.”

The relationship changed and became brotherly during Matthew’s high school years, he says. The two would take road trips from Salt Lake to Loa and have wonderful conversations, mostly of the spiritual and philosophical variety.

“Mike liked to go deep,” he says. “He’s very insightful in his study of scripture and very practical in the way he applies it.”

Matthew was aware of his brother’s work and ascendancy as a political consultant. As a fourth grader in 1982, Matthew himself had walked around his Cedar City neighborhood with friends, “polling” neighbors on their support for Mike’s client, Orrin Hatch, and excitedly reporting the results back to his brother.

It was a complete surprise, however, when Mike entered the race for governor ten years later. There undoubtedly had been aspirations, Matthew says, even if he hadn’t heard of them. There also had been at least one memorable harbinger.

As student body president at Cedar High School in 1987–88, Matthew had asked his brother to speak at an assembly. Matthew doesn’t recall why—Mike was not a public figure and only the most veteran teachers would have known who he was.

“I’ll never forget Mike in front of the crowd of these students. He just took the microphone, and I’ve never seen the student body so engaged. He’s at that point a forty-year-old guy that nobody knew who he was, and he came in and was so engaging he just had the kids cheering. He played the crowd incredibly well. I’ve never seen anything like that. Looking back, he had that in him. He didn’t learn that in the Governor’s Office. He could read a crowd and predict how they were going to respond and play them in ways never seen.”

Not long after, Matthew was off to Romania, receiving all news of the gubernatorial campaign from letters. That was also how he learned his brother was elected—from a letter.

“ My filter for Mike’s tenure as governor the first two years was through my mother’s eyes, and he could do no wrong.”

“We couldn’t call home, and I had pulled the letter but hadn’t opened it until I got back to my apartment. There I was in Sector Two of Bucharest, and there it is—Mike’s the new governor of Utah. It was sort of like, ‘Wow, I wonder what that’s going to be like, to go home and have Mike be the governor.’ That’s about all you can think about it.”

It was through letters, too, that he learned of all the excitement and happenings of the first half of the first term. It was always good tidings, he says “because my filter for Mike’s tenure as governor the first two years was through my mother’s eyes, and he could do no wrong.”

When Matthew returned home, the First Family was living in the Governor’s Mansion. That was December 7, 1993. Eight days later came the fire.

The office and the new roles of First Family did not feel different to Matthew, other than his brother “now had some security guard friends who would come to family gatherings.” “We got to know those guys and they kind of faded into the family,” he says.

The governor and Jackie also had some advice in the romance department for Matthew—one match-making idea in particular that first surfaced during Matthew’s last year of high school and was revived in earnest upon his return from the mission.

Jackie and Mike had been the ones who had introduced Matthew several years earlier to the girl who would become his wife. The mission made any follow-up impossible. But in 1993, new First Lady Jackie pressed him almost immediately upon his return to Utah to move decisively if he wanted to capture the heart of Louise McConkie. Matthew called her the same day.

The two would often meet up at the house on Laird Avenue, take walks in the neighborhood, and spend time together with the First Family there. When Mike and Jackie moved to Washington for Mike’s Cabinet appointment, Matthew and Louise bought the house on Laird Avenue and raised their nine children there. After sixteen years in the house, they sold it—to Chase and Nellie.

There was symmetry to Mike and Jackie turning the place over to Matthew and Louise. Matthew says it also made for some interesting conversations and a few “urban legends” about the house, due to its role as the governor’s residence for most of his brother’s time in office.

The UHP security detail had maintained their office in what became Matthew and Louise’s laundry room. Security cameras were still in place when Matthew bought the house, and people would ask all kinds of questions, such as whether the home had bulletproof glass and whether cellular coverage was terrible in the neighborhood because the residence had some kind of blocking mechanism.

That all came later, though, after Matthew had graduated from Southern Utah University, obtained his medical degree from Dartmouth Medical School, and finished his pathology residency and fellowship at Stanford University.

For a time during his brother’s second term, Matthew worked in a genetics research laboratory at the University of Utah. He was considering the U’s medical school, too, at the time. At the lab, he

brother. “So, while I was completely proud of him, as his brother, and I will never shy away from that, you also want to make your own way.”

Ultimately, he decided against attending the U of U and went with Dartmouth, a campus and program on the other side of the country in New Hampshire.

It was not altogether different from David’s approach—or the governor’s own approach for that matter, wanting to establish separate, independent paths apart from the name, Matthew says. “Mike never wanted to be known just as Dixie Leavitt’s son. He’s so proud of Dixie Leavitt but wanted to be his own man.”

“ So, while I was completely proud of him, as his brother, and I will never shy away from that, you also want to make your own way.”

says, “They didn’t like Mike much and didn’t like the conservative legislature much, so for me it was a little bit painful to just be in that environment where there was this negative feeling toward my brother whom I loved and respected.”

On the flip side, the lead researcher who had hired him was a huge fan of the governor. It was a plum position for a pre-med student with no experience in genetics. “Mike didn’t get the job for me, but I ultimately think the researcher was politically shrewd enough to say, ‘This could be helpful.’”

His brother was on a roll in the second term, Matthew recalls. Bold ideas about the Internet, along with his championing of federalism and the Conference of States, were taking off and propelling him into the national limelight just as Congress and the political environment were most conducive.

“I think those kinds of things were what helped him to rise in the National Governors Association because he was a guy with ideas and energy and could convince the other governors to go along. It really is remarkable that he was able to do that,” Matthew says.

The connection was no roadblock as Matthew was applying to medical school at the U. Still, he did not want to be there as just Mike Leavitt’s

The name did loom large, however, in an entirely unexpected way while Matthew was in New Hampshire. Matthew and his family were picking blueberries one day when they came upon Leavitt Hill, the homestead area where the first Leavitt ancestor to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—Jeremiah Leavitt— was born.

The New Hampshire roots ignited Dixie’s interest, and he launched the research, outreach, and relationship-building that culminated in the reunion of the branch of Leavitts who had migrated westward.

It also brought about a dedication ceremony of the graves of Leavitt ancestors, which Governor Leavitt attended, and enlisted New Hampshire’s governor to take part in as well.

“We certainly developed a lot of tender, sweet relationships with our Leavitt roots there,” Matthew says. “They probably wouldn’t have cared so much about this young couple that was at Dartmouth if we weren’t the family of the governor and this Leavitt cousin was governor of Utah,” he says. “That probably helped us.”

Jackie’s family at Mike’s third inauguration, 2001. Left to right, back row: Eugene Needham, Dixie Lou Poole, Morris Poole, Cleo Smith, Kathie Powers, Mike Leavitt. Front row: Christie Needham, Lewis Smith, Jackie Leavitt.

Jackie’s Family

By Laurie Sullivan Maddox

The marriage of Mike Leavitt and Jacalyn Smith brought together the oldest son from a southern Utah family of six boys with the youngest daughter in a northern Utah family of all girls—uniting two families with rural sensibilities and similar beliefs.

It was a natural fit across the board, except for politics. The Leavitts were active Republicans—a GOP officeholder in Dixie Leavitt’s case. Jackie’s parents, Lewis and Cleo Smith, were politically engaged Democrats, due largely to their farming background and the national farm subsidy programs supported by Democrats from President Franklin Roosevelt onward. Lewis also had been appointed to state wildlife boards by Democratic governors of Utah, serving under Governors Calvin Rampton and Scott Matheson. The four Smith daughters— Christie, Dixie, Kathie, and Jackie—leaned mostly Democrat as well. Voting Democrat was philosophical and familial.

“Then here comes Jackie with this Michael that’s a Republican, and our reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh, now what are we gonna do?’” says Christie Needham, eldest of the four Smith sisters, who had never before voted for a Republican. Until Mike.

“Over time we all switched over, and by the time he ran for governor we were strongly behind him. He was the first Republican I voted

for, but I found out my philosophies of life aligned more with Republicans at that point,” Christie says.

Ditto for Jackie’s two other sisters, Dixie Poole and Kathie Powers. “Once we met Mike, it was all over,” Kathie says. “We fell in love with him and his whole family.”

Lewis and Cleo loved and respected him already as a son-in-law, so it was not a hard sell to cast a vote for him once he sought the state’s highest office. Even so, Dixie says, “When Mike was running, we had to review for our parents how to vote Republican. They couldn’t just vote a straight Democratic ticket.”

Cleo went all in for Mike, as she frequently did for loved ones, handing out flyers, distributing signs, and promoting her son-in-law wherever she could. Lewis, when not working the farm, would drive her on her campaign rounds.

For his campaign kickoff, Mike had scheduled announcement events in cities and towns across the state in early 1992. In Cache County, the kickoff was held at the Logan office of Dixie’s husband, Morris Poole, a successful, well-known orthodontist, who took Mike around the county, introducing him to local leaders and potential supporters in the business community.

Christie and Dixie worked diligently in their brother-in-law’s behalf as well, as did the brothers-in-law—Morris Poole and Christie’s husband, Eugene Needham, a prominent Logan businessman, artist, and jeweler. Kathie and her husband, Eddie Powers, supported the effort from afar, as they were living in southern California at the time.

“[Mike] was determined to work the hardest and meet the most people, and he did. That’s how he won,” Dixie says. “And it was something important for the whole family that Mike achieve success.”

Four Girls in Five Years

The four Smith sisters had been born in quick succession after Lewis came home to Newton, Utah, from World War II—Christie in 1946; Dixie in 1948; Kathie in 1949; and Jackie in 1950. “So we were close in age as well as close in our relationship,” Dixie says.

The girls grew up working hard on the farm, mowing hay, driving tractors, and moving sprinkler pipes during the summer. It was arduous, physical, muddy work on a twice-daily schedule— five in the morning and then again in the evening, every day throughout the growing season.

“Someone asked my dad, ‘How do you like not having any boys?’ And he said, ‘My girls work so hard I don’t need to have guys,’” Kathie recalls.

Lewis and Cleo were frugal. Growing up, Cleo and her mother made all the girls’ clothes, including beautiful coats made from buying up bunches of inexpensive coats at Deseret Industries and cutting those up to refashion and repurpose them. The girls wore gloves to church and always had bows in their hair.

One thing never scrimped on was lessons, Christie says. Dancing lessons, singing lessons, speech, drama, piano, accordion, marimba, and so on. It was important to Cleo that her girls were accomplished, that they were developing their talents and engaging with the world around them through performances. She likewise pressed the girls to excel academically and to further their educations.

“ Then here comes Jackie with this Michael that’s a Republican, and our reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh, now what are we gonna do?”

By the time the youngest Smith sister caught Mike Leavitt’s eye at church in Cedar City in the summer of 1972, Jackie was, as her husband describes it, a talented, well-accomplished woman and down-to-earth farm girl. Twenty years later, he was governor-elect and she was Utah’s First Lady.

Friends and In-Laws

Kathie was in her early twenties, working at the Utah State University admissions office, when

JACKIE'S FAMILY

1 Lewis Smith

2 The Smith Family

3 Front row : Christie Needham, Cleo Smith, Jackie Leavitt

Top row : Dixie Poole, Kathie Powers.

4 Family at Christmas

Jackie first introduced him to her boyfriend, Mike. The family liked him immensely.

When Mike and Jackie married, Christie and Eugene hosted the wedding reception at their home—the imposing, historically-registered residence at 250 West Center Street built in 1907 by businessman David Eccles, Utah’s first multimillionaire.

“ Stick with what you’re doing. I know you want a home run, but you just keep plugging and get to first base.”

Gene and Christie were becoming fixtures in the Logan business community. They owned and operated a jewelry store, bookstore, art gallery, and various apartment properties. But there had been a rough turn along the way. At one point in 1984, the couple encountered financial challenges with some of their business interests, Christie says. Mike and Jackie came up one weekend to visit, and the future governor reached out to Gene with ideas and encouragement.

“It came at a time when we could really use some encouragement,” Christie says. “He basically said, ‘Stick with what you’re doing. I know you want a home run, but you just keep plugging and get to first base. Then, you’ll get some breaks and things will happen and you’ll get to second base. Keep with the plan and program, and then you’ll get home.’ At the time it just helped us to understand not to give up, not to change; just keep working—and breaks and things will come our way, which it did, and we were able to break out of it.”

It was almost a precursor to “real and right,” the philosophical catchphrase from Mike’s first campaign for governor eight years later. Christie never forgot the lift it provided, along with the insight into her brother-in-law’s character. Jackie was the same way, her sisters say.

Warmth and Generosity

“When they first started on the campaign for governor, he only had about one or two percent approval, but I knew, once the state gets to know who he is—such a wonderful man, so kind and considerate. He cares about everybody,” Kathie says. “Same with Jackie. She worries about people and wants to make them all happy. She’s a caring person, too.”

Their little sister was an extraordinary partner for Mike, as both a political spouse and as wife and mother. Campaigning and the intense public scrutiny upon becoming First Lady were hard on Jackie, who responded over and over again with warmth and generosity, Dixie says.

That trait reminded Dixie of their mother, Cleo, and was epitomized by what extended family up north came to know as “the red bag.” After becoming First Lady, Jackie had a red, insulated tote bag that would be filled up with food left over from events, dinners, or gatherings and taken to family, cousins, older folks, or friends back home to share. Jackie did the same thing with flowers, having those sent to hospitals or nursing homes. Sometimes a small gift or souvenir would go to a specific recipient. Mindful of costs and budgets, Jackie would want the red bag returned, where it would be filled and shared over and over again.

That was very much like Cleo, who would bake twelve loaves of bread and give ten of them away to others. Their mother’s generous ways carried on throughout the girls’ childhoods and for years after that. “Jackie inherited that quality of wonderful sharing,” Dixie says. “She received a lot of inner peace from doing what she observed our mother do. Everyone would laugh when they saw that red bag coming up the steps. It was pretty terrific. That’s just her. She’s kind and thinks of others.”

Having a sister as First Lady and a chief executive brother-in-law was fun and interesting, the sisters say. There were Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners at the Governor’s Mansion or one of the extended family homesteads, and numerous other

opportunities throughout the eleven years of service to attend special events and meet famous people, from concert pianists to presidents.

Even the concept of a security detail was intriguing. “It was kind of fun to tell you the truth, because Mike had all these security people,” Kathie says. “So, we’d go in a special car, and they were right with us, and they’d take us into a place where normal people don’t go. I can remember when he was sworn in the second time and security put us right in. We were lucky. We would never be able to experience those things otherwise.”

Christie recalls one Thanksgiving at the Governor’s Mansion when they had been given a fifty-pound turkey, donated by turkey farmers in Sanpete County. Try as they might, Christie and the others preparing the dinner could not get the bird cooked all the way. As the appointed dinner hour came and went, they began cutting off meat and cooking it separately to get the feast back on track.

Christie also remembers the thoughtful invitations that came their way, including a private piano performance by one of the laureates of the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, a worldwide event based in Salt Lake City known for discovering and launching young piano virtuosos. Being a piano player herself, it was a thrill to attend, as was a performance by Donny Osmond one year at the Mansion.

There were numerous other events they were able to be part of, and famous personages encountered, as a result of Mike’s service. “I like to tell it as, we bask in his glory,” Christie says. “It gave us a lot of opportunity to meet people and do things we wouldn’t otherwise.”

Among Kathie’s highlights were the hospitality events associated with the 2002 Winter Olympics. She and her husband Eddie were able to attend a luncheon gathering at the Czech Republic delegation house in Salt Lake—memorable because Eddie was of Czech heritage.

“So, it was very special for my husband,” Kathie says. “Those were some of the little different things we got to do; all kinds of fun things.”

In return, having sisters nearby gave Jackie a place to escape the spotlight and First Lady demands. They would have lunch, go out, or just hang out. “She’d relax with all of us. It was just down to earth,” Kathie says. “We’d go shopping, things like that.”

Indeed, having a First Lady sister put a new light on clothes and shopping. Dixie says the sisters helped “step-up” Jackie’s wardrobe to add evening wear and daytime suits. Governors’ galas and other high-profile events required it—for Jackie’s sisters as well, since family was always invited to the annual galas. “So pretty soon we all started looking for evening wear.”

Lewis and Cleo were always included in the major events and celebrations, attending when able, along with smaller events or opportunities they might be interested in. They had moved to a home in Logan closer to Christie and Dixie and their families after Lewis stopped farming and became more infirm in later life.

The intrepid World War II pilot had become wheelchair-bound in his eighties and passed away in March 2002 at age eighty-four, just a few weeks after the Winter Olympics. He had not been able to attend any Olympic events but googled and followed them on computer devices.

Cleo remained at her own home for eleven more years after Lewis’s passing, with her daughters nearby and taking turns looking after her. Kathie, whose own husband had passed away in 2012, had returned to Utah and moved nearby to North Logan. Cleo was a presence in all their lives up to her death on December 30, 2013. She had one last Christmas at Christie’s house a few days earlier, where family members sang and filled her final days with her beloved music.

Cleo had always kept Kathie up to date in California on what was going on with the governor, whom she loved and admired. Lewis was never as talkative, but the girls knew his mind as well. “He was very proud of Mike. [Lewis] thought he was a wonderful person, and he was proud of what he was doing and what he was accomplishing,” Kathie says.

The extended families interacted often. A number of Needham and Poole cousins matched up in age with their Leavitt counterparts. A couple of them roomed together as college students, while others stayed close and connected with each other over business pursuits as young adults. Margo Poole worked in the Governor’s Office for a time, while Georgina Needham was involved during the 2002 Winter Olympics with Jackie’s “ Light the Fire Within” music and education program that introduced Utah school children to the winter games and the character values associated with them.

Dixie and Christie also took part in the annual marriage and family conferences held throughout the Leavitt Administration as part of the Governor’s Initiative on Families Today, which was headed by their First Lady sister.

Morris Poole, in the meantime, had amusing and recurring experiences unlike anyone else in the family—he was regularly mistaken for the governor in various public settings. There is a resemblance, Dixie affirms, and Morris occasionally was an emissary or stand-in for Mike at events in the northern regions of the state.

One time, Morris and Dixie were headed to a viewing stand for the Days of ’47 Parade in Salt Lake when a young lady who had just ridden in the parade as a princess or member of royalty made a beeline to Morris and asked for his autograph. Morris just rolled with it.

As Dixie tells it, he replied, “I’m not Governor Leavitt, I’m his brother-in-law.” It didn’t quite register with the young woman, so her father, who was with her, said, “Go ahead and sign it, she’ll never know.”

“So he signed it ‘Governor Mike Leavitt’ and put his own initials down small, like you do when you make a mistake on a check. Mike arrived about five minutes later.”

“People always got my husband and Mike mixed up. Things like that happened many times,” Dixie says, including one occasion when Mike was newly installed in office and a reporter covering an event stuck a microphone in Morris’s face rather than the governor’s and asked for comment about a particular issue.

Extended family was invited and made to feel welcome at events and special occasions, and those opportunities created lasting memories for all of them, Jackie’s sisters say. And there were several opportunities for them to serve as well. Dixie accepted a volunteer appointment to serve on the Utah State Library Board, commuting from Logan to Salt Lake for meetings over the course of two four-year terms. Morris likewise served an appointment to the Utah Commission on Volunteerism, a state board that promoted volunteerism across the state. Christie and Gene Needham served volunteer appointments as well—she on the State History Board and Gene on the Utah Arts Council.

Elected office beckoned, too, for the Needhams, not long after Mike became governor. Gene had been on the Logan City School Board previously for two terms starting in 1986. Christie decided to run for the board herself in 1994 and won, serving for twelve years. In 2003, their son, Joseph Needham, ran for the Logan City Council at age twenty-seven and served one term. Then Gene ran for the council in 2013 and served through 2017.

“We all learned how to campaign from Mike,” Christie says. “He gave us the bug.”