Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

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Once GOP guv, now liberal wag
Ex-Delaware politician rants from Rockies cabin
By Gwen Florio
Denver Post Staff Writer


Wednesday, March 17, 2004 -

Russell W. Peterson kicks back in the summertime at his cabin in Ward, surrounded by the soaring vastness of the Indian Peaks. It is an antidote to the burgeoning development in tiny Delaware, the state he once governed.

But his mountain getaway afforded Peterson no relief last year.

Ignoring the spectacular views outside his window, Peterson bent over his desk, writing in longhand, pouring out his deepest fears.

"Today is a frightening time in America," he began.

Words like extremism and hatred, threat and tragedy flowed from his pen.

Peterson wasn't writing about foreign terrorists. His anguish - and anger - is reserved for a group of which he was once a member: Republicans.

"I think what they're doing is evil," Peterson said heatedly in a telephone interview from his home in Delaware. "It's absolutely painful. My country is being ruined by those characters."

He expands upon those sentiments in a self-published book released in December: "Patriots, Stand Up! This Land Is Our Land; Fight to Take It Back."

No amateur author, Peterson has written or contributed to books on technology, growth, and birding. In 1999, he authored "Rebel With a Conscience" - also written in Colorado, with a cover photo of Peterson in the Rockies - which is something of a precursor to "Patriots."

But Republicans in his home state call the book "a non-event."

"He has chosen at this time in his life - and I think it's rather sad - to go on the attack," says Priscilla Rakestraw, Delaware GOP national committeewoman. Harsh words for a former colleague.

Peterson sent copies to high-profile friends like Ted Turner, and longtime broadcast journalist Bill Moyers, who praises its "courage and inspiration."

"I was a moderate Republican for 40 years and proud of it," says Peterson, 87, citing impeccable corporate and GOP credentials: DuPont Co. researcher and executive for 26 years; former Republican governor with a Republican-controlled administration; head of the President's Council on Environmental Quality for Republican Presidents Nixon and Ford.

But in 1996, Peterson became a Democrat. It was a change decades in the making, he says.

Peterson says his first inkling that elements in the GOP were leaning, he felt, dangerously to the right came during the 1964 Republican convention, when supporters of conservative candidate Barry Goldwater viciously shouted down moderate contender Nelson Rockefeller.

Later, when Peterson pushed through a law to preserve Delaware's largely pristine coast from heavy industry, he earned the enmity of George H.W. Bush, a co-founder of the Zapata oil firm, one of 13 oil and transportation companies planning to develop that coast.

Peterson says Bush later tried to talk Nixon out of nominating him to the Environmental Quality Council. Ironically, Delaware's Coastal Zone Management Act is remembered as his greatest success.

"It was a wonderful act," says Rakestraw. "I have great respect for his environmental achievements."

The resulting notoriety pushed Peterson to the forefront of the environmental movement. He won the World Wildlife Fund's gold medal in 1971, and later headed the National Audubon Society. One of the chapters in "Patriots" is titled "War on the Environment."J

Other chapters accuse the Bush administration of isolationist tendencies, fiscal irresponsiblity, and curtailing civil liberties under the guise of fighting terrorism.

"I just decided," Peterson says, "that I had to stand up and fight."

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~45~2021124,00.html#