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June 26, 2025
As word spread about the death of former U.S. Rep. Pat Williams on Wednesday night, the people who worked closely with Williams during his earliest years in the U.S. House kept offering the same lament: they were all nearing life’s trail’s end.
Montana’s longest-serving representative in the U.S. House was gone. Many of the Republicans who challenged Williams during his nearly two decades in Congress were gone as well.
Ron Marlenee, the eastern district Republican Williams defeated in the 1992 race for Montana’s at-large House district, died in 2020.
There was a sense that with these departures, a generation of lawmakers willing to speak directly with constituents was quickly fading.
Williams, at the dawn of the cellphone era, was known for showing off the missing features on his: the button to shut people out, said Joe Lamson, who managed all of Williams’ campaigns.
“This is my cellphone,” Williams would say. “You notice that it does not have a delete button, does not have a minus on it.”
Williams was known as a door-to-door campaigner, but Lamson suggested his friend was really more kitchen table-to-kitchen table. Any voter who invited Williams inside was sure to get a long conversation. The Williams family, in an obituary issued Wednesday night, recalled the congressman personally knocking on 51,000 doors during an 18-month congressional campaign.
Leading up to the Persian Gulf War, the congressman worked the doors to see whether constituents supported going to war.
Former Democratic U.S. Sen. Max Baucus in a statement Thursday said Williams “tirelessly, relentlessly, in Montana and in Congress, he proudly championed the rights and concerns of Montanans. It was in his blood. Always decent, always a gentleman, always honest, he was wonderful to work with. Pat was a good friend. No one was more courageous than Pat.”
Baucus, who is 83, praised Williams’ defense of the National Endowment for the Arts, which has frequently been the target of congressional scorn from lawmakers objecting to the free expression funded by the endowment.
The Montana state House and Senate minority leaders recognized Williams for his time in the Montana Legislature, dating back to 1967.
“As current State Legislators, and as minority leaders for House and Senate Democrats, we not only honor Pat’s legendary service at the federal level, but also his hard work in Montana’s Capitol where he began his lifelong career of looking out for children and working families. His contributions to the state will not be forgotten and we will continue to honor his memory,” read a statement issued Thursday by Sen. Pat Flowers, D-Belgrade, and Rep. Katie Sullivan, D-Missoula.
One major work from Williams’ state legislative days was the creation of the coal tax trust, from which interest flows to fund multiple programs in state government. Raiding the trust has been considered a political third rail, in part because of all the things it pays for, but Lamson recalled pro-trust lawmakers having to fight off several attempts to end the trust in the fund’s first several years of existence.
Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte asked Montanans to keep the Williams family in their prayers.
“Susan and I join Montanans in commemorating the life and legacy of former Montana Congressman Pat Williams. As Montana’s longest-serving congressman, Pat championed Montana’s interests, working to find common ground for nearly 20 years in Washington. He was a dedicated public servant. We ask all Montanans to keep his wife Carol and their children in your prayers,” he said in a statement Thursday.
There were too many anecdotes to share. Sheena Wilson recalled working with Williams on the Mountain-Plains Education and Economic Development Program, an early 1970s attempt to turn the shuttered Glasgow Air Force Base, with a community-sized inventory of government housing, into a sort of Job Corps for applicants with families in tow.
Six states were to feed recruits into the program. Wilson recruited the state of Idaho for participants. The program was one of several attempts to repurpose the base after the Air Force withdrew. Mountain-Plains Education and Economic Development Program was rolled out only after the federal government considered relocating Cuban refugees to the base.
Williams was a hard-driving boss and also one who wrote well, Wilson said, as she discovered while working in his D.C. congressional office.
“He was a tough taskmaster, and he was a very good writer. When anyone drafted something for him, whether it was researched or not, you would get these letters back with a big ‘redo’ over the top,” she said.
In his later years, Williams was known to hold a coffee group at a Missoula coffee shop. Wilson said her nephew, who practices law in Missoula, would stop in to get a jolt of Williams’ hard-nosed assessments of current politics and what needed to be done.
Despite his strong delivery, Williams was becoming fragile. He had fallen and suffered a mild concussion and fallen again later, Wilson said. It seemed like age caught up with Williams after the last fall.
