Frank Church: The Senator Who Saved the River and Exposed the CIA

Frank Church represented Idaho in the United States Senate from nineteen fifty-seven to nineteen eighty-one, and he used that time to do two things that no other senator managed in the same career.

The first was to protect two point four million acres of central Idaho as roadless wilderness, the largest contiguous wilderness area in the continental United States outside Alaska. The fight took nearly two decades. Dam builders had targeted the Middle Fork of the Salmon River for a hydroelectric project that would have flooded some of the most remote canyon country in North America. Church blocked the dams repeatedly, absorbing significant political cost each time, and in nineteen eighty he finally passed the River of No Return Wilderness Act. The Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, as it was named after his death, is still the largest contiguous roadless area in the lower forty-eight states. The Middle Fork runs about one hundred miles, undammed, through the center of it.

The second thing was the Church Committee. From nineteen seventy-five to nineteen seventy-six, Church chaired the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. The hearings revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and other foreign leaders. They revealed the Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO program, which had conducted illegal surveillance and disruption campaigns against civil rights leaders, antiwar activists, and American citizens the Bureau considered subversive. The hearings produced the most comprehensive accounting of domestic intelligence abuse in American history and established the oversight framework that still governs United States intelligence agencies today.

Church paid for the Committee work politically. He lost his Senate seat in nineteen eighty. The wilderness he protected outlasted him. He died in nineteen eighty-four.