Perspective: The bull-headed congressman was willing to do anything to send money to his home state, even pull a knife
Usually at these dinners, people mingle and work the room, but I realized Young was to be by my side for the night. Searching for an icebreaker, I asked if he really carried a knife everywhere, including to a formal dinner.“You can disable a man like this,” he said, and used my gown-clad back to teach me where to strike an attacker with just the knife handle, a defensive skill, he said, every woman should know. I remember the wide eyes of the people near us in the crowded ballroom.
It was an unmatched reelection record that mystified many people — except the ones who voted for him again and again. He bedeviled a Who’s Who of Alaskan Democrats and even Republican challengers. It didn’t seem to matter what he said or how he said it: He told me the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill was not a natural disaster but nature taking its course. He joked that a set of black eyes, the byproduct of minor surgery, was from a fight with a “greenie commie.” A staunch opponent of gun control, Young told me after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot at a constituent meet-and-greet in 2011 that he would carry a gun to similar events, “returning anything that happens to me.
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