Former three-term Colorado Gov. Richard “Dick” Lamm died Thursday evening at age 85. He was one of the longest-serving governors in the state’s history, and is remembered for his complicated legacy of independent-minded leadership when it came to environmentalism, opposing Colorado playing host to the Olympics and fighting for abortion rights, as well as for his later-in-life hardline stance on immigration.
“With great sadness, but also gratitude for a life well lived and in service to his beloved Colorado, I want to share the news of the death of my husband, former Governor Richard D. Lamm,” his wife, Dottie Lamm, said in a written statement Friday. As of Friday afternoon, details about services for Lamm were not available.
Lamm would have turned 86 next week, but was surrounded by family when he died after complications from a pulmonary embolism earlier in the week, said Dottie Lamm, herself a 1998 Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, activist and former Denver Post columnist. The couple had two children.
The former Democratic governor, who was born in Wisconsin and raised in Illinois and Pennsylvania before moving to Denver in 1962, served three terms from 1975 to 1987.
He also was a state representative from 1966 to 1974, an associate professor of law at the University of Denver from 1969 to 1974 and codirected DU’s Institute for Public Policy Studies from 1987 until 2017.
Fritz Mayer, dean of DU’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, called Lamm an “excellent professor, and instrumental in developing the public policy program.”
“Dick was a unique and adventurous person,” Rick Caldwell, who served as Lamm’s codirector for 30 years, added in a statement. “His intellectual capability and record as governor made him such a valuable asset to DU.”
Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement Friday that Lamm “took on tough issues, and he never shied away from civil political discourse and embraced collaboration.”
Former Democratic Gov. Roy Romer, who served three terms after Lamm, was part of Lamm’s administration first in the Colorado Department of Agriculture, then as chief of staff and finally as state treasurer.
“He was a very thoughtful man, a very good human being, and was a great governor, good public servant,” Romer told The Denver Post. “He had certain issues that were very important to him and he was not shy about pushing his point of view.”
Those issues, Romer said, included population growth, the environment, land use and resources and immigration.
“He was a man of great integrity. You never found him in a questionable circumstance,” Romer said. “He just avoided that kind of problem.”
A life of service
Before holding office, Lamm was in the U.S. military, and became an attorney and certified public accountant.
During his time in the state legislature, Lamm spearheaded the effort to pass the nation’s first law loosening abortion restrictions in 1967, allowing women to get abortions because of health issues, in cases of rape or incest or if an unborn child had birth defects (it came six years before Roe v. Wade).
He also cosponsored the state’s first open-records law, and championed and signed the first law in the U.S. that required the state legislature to reauthorize programs, agencies and regulations, known as a sunset law.
Lamm’s governorship was marked by Republicans holding at least one and sometimes both legislative chambers, which meant he was at odds with the GOP on environmental issues and “controlling population growth,” according to the book Colorado Politics and Policy by Thomas E. Cronin and Robert D. Loevy.
Lamm once likened politics to surfing, Cronin and Loevy wrote.
“You have to look where the waves are coming from,” he said of needing to adapt while in office.
“He showed you could have the courage of your convictions and make the times catch up to you rather than wait for change,” U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper said in a statement.
In the early 1970s, Lamm successfully campaigned to put a stop to Colorado hosting the 1976 Winter Olympic Games after the state had been awarded them, and he also campaigned in 2018 against bringing the games to Colorado, citing environmental and fiscal concerns.
One of Lamm’s lieutenant governors, Nancy Dick, was the first woman elected to that position in Colorado. In 1979, he appointed the first female justice, Jean Dubofsky, and the first Latino justice, Luis Rovira, to the Colorado Supreme Court. He also, for the first time in Colorado history, appointed Black and Latino leaders to his cabinet.
Former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb was a state representative in 1975 and, alongside others, protested Lamm’s inauguration because the governor hadn’t appointed any Black professionals to his cabinet.
Lamm later chose Webb as the director of the Department of Regulatory Agencies in 1981, and Webb said Lamm became a friend and mentor — with Lamm even backing him in the Denver mayor’s race in 1991.
Webb told the Post on Friday that Lamm was a great governor and a futurist — “many of the issues we see today” related to population growth, traffic, rising health care costs and protecting the environment, he said, are ones Lamm began talking about 40 years ago.
Lamm ran for the Democratic nomination in Colorado for U.S. Senate in 1992, but lost. After complaints about the Democratic and Republican parties, he unsuccessfully sought candidacy to higher office as the Reform Party presidential nominee in 1996.
Controversial views
Lamm was a vocal critic of increasing health care costs and spent time researching the issue during his governorship and after he left office. In 1984, he received backlash after saying in a speech that people had a “duty to die”, a phrase that he said people took out of context. He said he was referring to how much society was spending on health care costs, which would lead to younger people going bankrupt.
Lamm also became a hardline critic of immigration and was an advisor to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers to be a hate group due to its ties to white supremacists.
A 2003 short speech by Lamm titled “I Have a Plan to Destroy America” went viral among anti-immigration advocates. In it, he claimed that multiculturalism, bilingualism and “the cult of diversity” were ruining the country.
“I’m saying that there were issues that he was right on, and that there were people issues that he was wrong on,” Webb told the Post on Friday about Lamm’s views, particularly about Latinos.
In 2006, Lamm claimed in a speech that Black and Latino people lack the drive and ambition of Asians and Jews. Although Webb said the good outweighed the bad with Lamm and that no one was perfect, he called comments like that “outrageous and wrong.”
Lamm wrote in his book, “Two Wands, One Nation,” that he dreamed of having a magic wand to wave “across the ghettos and barrios of America and infuse the inhabitants with Japanese or Jewish values, respect for learning and ambition,” The Denver Post reported in 2006.
Fellow Democrats denounced his remarks that year, and then-U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, a Latino, said Lamm “belittles people” and stereotypes them. Former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart said Lamm’s remarks “condone sophisticated kinds of racial profiling and racial characterization.”
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