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By Root 2987 0

Joseph Bristow (a Bull Moose in 1912). When Fred was a child, the Seatons moved to Manhattan, Kansas, where his father owned the Manhattan Mercury (later the Manhattan Chronicle). Eventually the family had a financial stake in newspapers in Alliance, Nebraska; Sheridan, Wyoming; and Deadwood, South Dakota. Outgoing, friendly, and a solid B student, young Fred attended Kansas State Agricultural College (which later became Kansas State University) from 1927 to 1931; there, he held the post of director of sports publicity. But because he was nine science credits short, Seaton never officially graduated from college—although this situation was rectified when Kansas State University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1955. Fred’s father purchased the financially troubled Daily Tribune of Hastings, Nebraska. It was another newspaper trophy. In 1937 Fred moved to Hastings to run acquisitions. As the elder of two boys and the first out of college, Fred took over publishing responsibilities at the Daily Tribune. Seemingly overnight, he turned it into a profitable business. He went on to become city editor of the Manhattan Mercury. As a pioneering publisher, Seaton figured out how to develop the newspapers’ stories from the wire services.26

Of medium build, with grayish blond hair and sharp blue eyes, Seaton was a real white-shirt downtown Republican, proud to be in the party of Lincoln and TR. He was always meticulously groomed. During the 1936 presidential election Seaton served as the personal secretary of the Republican nominee Alfred Landon. Always a great team player, Seaton was a consistent Republican, never once casting a vote for a Democrat. As a political consultant, Seaton accumulated Republican jobs in both Kansas and Nebraska. While brash in temperament, he had fine manners. When he died in 1974, the New York Times noted: “It was said of him that no one in politics was wiser in the ways of not giving unnecessary offense.”27

When a legendary U.S. senator, Kenneth S. Wherry of Nebraska, died in December 1951, Seaton was selected by Governor Val Peterson to fill the sudden vacancy. Earnest, unflagging, and more cerebral than ideological, Seaton served only a little over a year in the Senate, just enough time to be called “senator” by constituents. But Eisenhower liked Seaton, considering him a fellow Midwesterner full of modest intensity. That wasn’t unusual. Everybody liked Fred because Fred liked everybody. In a long public career in the Great Plains, he never really received bad press. Now, Seaton’s career took off. When Seaton got married, Alf Landon attended the wedding. Seaton and his wife, Gladys, adopted four children. From 1945 to 1949 he was elected to the Nebraska unicameral legislature. His first real political hero was Harold Stassen, the boy wonder who had been elected governor of Minnesota at the age of thirty-one. In 1948, Seaton managed Stassen’s unsuccesful bid for the U.S. presidency.28

When Eisenhower became president in 1953, he appointed Seaton as assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs (1953–1955), then as administrative assistant for congressional liaison (1955), and then as deputy assistant to the president (1955–1956). Like a utility infielder in baseball, he could fill various slots. When Secretary of the Interior McKay fell ill in 1957, Eisenhower asked the forty-six-year-old Seaton to be McKay’s successor. McKay’s tenure had been rocky; he had been accused of making sweetheart public land deals with industries. The deeply ethical Eisenhower didn’t like having a new Albert B. Fall on his hands. Seaton, who served as secretary of the interior from June 8, 1956, to January 11, 1961, proved to be an inspired choice.

Fair-minded, and not wanting to see America’s natural resources mismanaged, Seaton also had the all-important advantage of being extremely close friends with L. W. Snedden, publisher of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, a fierce lobbyist for statehood. From 1956 to 1961, whatever Snedden thought needed to occur on the North Slope, Seaton concurred with him.29 And from