More people should do what Bob Wefald has done. Wefald, a Bismarck attorney who served as North Dakota Attorney General from 1981-1985, and as a District Judge from 1999-2011, has written an autobiography, titled “Moments.”
I bought it in hopes that I could read it and find a passage or two which would qualify for my ongoing series “The Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota.” Alas, that wasn’t the case. Bob Wefald is a decent writer, as you might expect of someone who has likely written tens of thousands of legal briefs and opinions. He uses good grammar, his sentence structure is just fine, and his paragraphs are short, making the book easy to read. But, as Joe Friday (I’ll just bet he was one of Bob’s heroes) might say, he just stuck to the facts. The book just doesn’t inspire, or convey any great love for North Dakota. It could have as easily been set in Kansas or Kentucky.
I also bought it partly to see if I was in it, because I had quietly been one of the architects of his defeat in his re-election attempt as the Republican candidate for Attorney General in 1984, and then, 20 years later, helped him get through the early phases of his re-election campaign for South Central District Judge, a non-partisan office, in 2004. He came to the ad agency where I worked in 2004 for help getting out a press release announcing that he was seeking re-election to his judgeship post. He certainly knew I was still active in Democratic-NPL politics, and we chuckled about that a bit, but I was sincere when I told him I had heard good things about him as a judge (uh-oh, that’s going to draw some comments from some of my attorney friends) and would help him get his campaign started. As it turns out, he ran unopposed, as do most judges in North Dakota, so my help was of little consequence. And I wasn’t in the book.
But my money (he’s selling it for only ten bucks) certainly wasn’t wasted. I recall my friend Mike Jacobs once writing a review of an autobiography by former North Dakota State Senator Bryce Streibel. He started with something like “There are two words that describe Bryce Streibel’s autobiography: Awful. Interesting.” Bob Wefald’s book isn’t awful, but it is interesting.
I read it in two sit-downs. I read the first 25 pages or so to learn quickly about who he is, were he came from, his family, stuff like that, and then I skipped to the last 75 pages, which talk about his political life. A couple days later, I went back and read the 100 pages in between, covering the time from his high school years, through his marriage and having a family, and his Navy career and starting out as a lawyer. Total read time, about 3 hours for an average reader, I’d say. If you’re a political junkie like me, just go right to page 123 to read about lots of people you know and events you remember.
For example, he devotes about half a page to the first few days of 1985, when North Dakota had two Governors, and his role in that. George Sinner took office on January 1, but Governor Al Olson refused to leave until a few days later when the Supreme Court ruled against him. Wefald remembers it pretty much as I do. Sinner’s own memoirs will be off the press in a few weeks, and it will be interesting to see if Sinner recalls it that way as well. He also writes about Gov. Olson taking a pay raise in the middle of his term after he had told the public he would not take it, and discusses one of the key incidents in his 1984 defeat, the one in which a state crime bureau agent taped one of Spaeth's speeches and gave Wefald the tape. That’s the beauty of these “real-time” autobiographical books in a small place like North Dakota, where the authors are unimportant except in their own state. They're recording history that’s happening in our own lifetime.
I really don’t have any criticisms of the book, except to note that Wefald falls prey to the greatest danger for self-published books: sloppy proofreading. Wefald goes to great lengths at the front of the book to tell us that the book has been proofread by three people besides himself, but that he takes full responsibility for any mistakes. There are a few misspellings. For instance, he spells former Bank of North Dakota President Herb Thorndal’s name wrong a couple of times, and spells it two different ways in the same paragraph. But the most egregious error is the misspelling of the last name of the man who defeated him in 1984, Nick Spaeth. He spells it Speath every time he uses it, about a dozen times. This is the problem with self-published books. A publishing house would have employed a fact checker to check the spelling of every name in the book.
I take back my earlier sentence. I do have one criticism. There’s an incident for which he goes into pretty great detail which I wish he had left out, and I can’t for the life of me understand why he included it. You decide for yourself if you really want to know this. He’s writing about the trips that he got to go on as a member of the National Association of Attorneys General.
"The second wonderful trip (in May 1984) was one Susan and I both got to go to Japan – all expenses paid! When I heard about this trip I quickly got my name on the list. Bob Abrams, the New York Attorney General, at a cocktail party, met a prominent New Yorker – Angie Biddle Duke – who at the time was in charge of the U.S. – Japan Foundation. The foundation was funded by a gift of $50 million by a Japanese businessman who was successful “by day and by night,” i.e., he apparently controlled all the gambling in Japan. It started with us being told that all our expenses would be paid and that we could bring along our spouses if we paid for them. Then they said if we paid to get our spouses to Seattle, their trip expenses to Japan would be covered, but we would first have to attend a two-day seminar in Seattle and pay our expenses. We signed Susan up. Then we were told that if we were willing to fly business class instead of first class, the foundation would pay for all the expenses of our spouses. At the Seattle seminar we were told Japan was very expensive, so they could “only” give us $ 200 per day per AG spending money, and they handed out the money on the spot. Once we got to Japan it turned out that most of our dinners, events and hotels were covered. The trip lasted about two weeks . . . Our out-of-pocket expense for everything, including souvenirs, was less than $100."
I can’t even count the number of ethical lapses, much less the legal ones (including, likely, some IRS issues) in that paragraph. But the statute of limitations has long since expired, and the election a few months later took care of the problem, so I guess if he wants to brag or titillate us now, it’s okay. Just disappointing.
(Aside: Once, when I was North Dakota Tourism Director, an advertising agency with which we did business offered to me and my deputy tourism director a pair of tickets to the U.S. Open Golf Tournament which was being held in Minnesota. We asked the Attorney General (not Wefald at the time) whether it was okay to accept the tickets. He said it would be okay to take them if we paid for them. We did. About 50 bucks each, as I recall. We took a day’s vacation from the office and drove to Minneapolis. When we got there, we spotted the same Attorney General having greenside cocktails in the hospitality tent of a major corporation. We never asked him if he paid for his ticket.)
But back to matters at hand. You can buy Wefald’s book by going to the office of the State Bar Association of North Dakota on Washington Street in Bismarck. Bob donated a few hundred of them to the State Bar Foundation to sell as a fundraiser. As I said, it’s only ten bucks and well worth the price to read about people you know and events you may have participated in. Heck, you might even find your own name in there.
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