Merrill Cook dies; maverick Utah Republican served in the U.S. House

Merrill Cook arguably was the highest-profile and most prolific political loser in Utah history, running for public office more than a dozen times and winning only twice.

But in his long, combative, colorful career, his passions forced public attention on issues such as tax reductions, term limits and immigration reform, and his ability to gather signatures for grassroots ballot initiatives compelled Utah lawmakers to consider legislation they otherwise would have ignored.

Described by fans and foes alike as a unique political figure on the Utah landscape, the state may never see another politician quite like him.

Cook died Monday. His family said in a statement that he died peacefully but did not announce a cause of death. He was 79.

“Merrill was a maverick and never went along with the flow,” said longtime supporter Janalee Tobias, who worked with Cook on numerous conservative issues. “There were people in the [Republican] party who wanted to tar and feather him, but he appealed to a certain populist base that made him more representative of their values than the establishment Republicans.”

‘Merrill was a fighter’

While Cook’s family roots were in Utah, he was born May 6, 1946, in Philadelphia, where his father, Melvin A. Cook, had been working for DuPont after obtaining a doctorate in chemistry from Yale.

The elder Cook was a key researcher for DuPont in the development of explosives to be used in mining but was deployed as part of a team to enhance the use of explosives in weapons used by the Allies during World War II.

He was credited with making a more powerful bazooka that could penetrate German tanks. After the war, he was still working on those projects when Merrill was born. Melvin returned to Utah in 1947 when Merrill was an infant to teach metallurgy at the University of Utah.

It was his expertise in the development and use of explosives — along with Merrill’s business acumen (he earned a master of business administration from Harvard Business School after graduating from East High and the U.) — that led the two to found Cook Slurry Co., the mining explosives manufacturer that financed much of the son’s long and expensive political pursuits.

Cook’s first venture as a political candidate came in 1984, when he ran for an open seat on the Utah State School Board (now known as the Utah State Board of Education). He lost.

A year later, at age 39, he ran for Salt Lake City mayor, when then-Mayor Ted Wilson resigned in midterm. Cook lost to Wilson’s protege, Palmer DePaulis, by a whopping 3-to-1 margin — 28,330 to 11,029 votes — despite spending a record $536,745 on the race.

He followed that effort a year later with a run for a Salt Lake County Commission seat, losing a close race to Democrat David Watson.

Those defeats just inflamed his desire for public office even deeper.

He ran for Utah governor as an independent in 1988, finishing third to Republican incumbent Norm Bangerter, the winner, and Wilson, the Democratic challenger, but he garnered more than a fifth of the vote, an almost unheard-of tally for a candidate without the backing of a major political party.

“Norm always thought Merrill, as a fellow conservative, had hurt him by being in the race, but I’m convinced he took more votes away from me because he appealed to a certain type of Democratic voter in the economically depressed areas of the state over his anti-tax message,” said Wilson, who lost to Bangerter by 12,000 votes. Wilson died in 2024. Bangerter died in 2015.

Before he announced his candidacy for governor that year, Cook had hooked up with Utah Tax Coalition founder Greg Beesley on petition drives to get three tax limitation measures on the ballot that, if they had proved successful, would have slashed state and local taxes by $900 million.

That effort won Cook the endorsements of Arthur Laffer, father of the “Laffer curve” that President Ronald Reagan used to establish his trickle-down economic theory popular with conservatives, and of Howard Jarvis, the most prominent backer of California’s Proposition 13, the ballot measure than created massive tax limitation policies in the Golden State.

But Cook lost the endorsement of the Utah Libertarian Party after he criticized former Utah Gov. J. Bracken Lee — an icon of the small government, anti-tax group — when Lee endorsed Bangerter.

Cook ruffled more feathers among the political establishment when he appealed directly to the Utah Supreme Court to halt the distribution of ballots just two weeks before the election because he alleged his name had been unfairly placed in a disadvantaged position. County clerks complained that many of the ballots already had been printed and that forcing a reprinting would be prohibitively costly. The court initially granted Cook’s motion for a restraining order but eventually let the original ballots be distributed.

“Merrill was a fighter,” Beesley said. “That oftentimes got him in trouble with the party establishment, but he was a hero in some quarters.”

“I was a young mother with a newborn,” Tobias recalled. “Merrill’s anti-tax message was fresh and new. Not many politicians talked like that. I became a lifelong supporter.”

In 1990, Cook joined a bipartisan coalition that supported a ballot initiative to eliminate the sales tax on food and boost the minimum wage. He partnered not only with his old colleague Beesley but also with Utah AFL-CIO President Ed Mayne and Utah Democratic Party Chairman Randy Horiuchi, with whom he had battled on the political stage just two years earlier when Horiuchi campaigned for Wilson for governor.

When the ballot initiative fizzled after enjoying early success in the polls, Cook again managed to offend a large swath of the populace by complaining that Utahns are too prone to bowing to authority figures rather than asserting their own will. A lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Cook drew flak when his comments were seen as an implied slap at fellow members after he added that Utahns’ attitude about authority “is based on our religious roots and our history of isolationism from the rest of the country in the 19th century.”

Cook and Beesley then formed the Utah Independent Party, and he ran for governor again in 1992 under that banner. This time, Cook captured 34% of the vote to Republican Mike Leavitt’s 42%, finishing second ahead of Democrat Stewart Hanson Jr.’s 23%.

Cook seemed to be gaining momentum among Republicans and Democrats with his populist push and led the movement to get another initiative on the ballot, this time for term limits. The initiative would limit all public officeholders to 12 years.

The measure had widespread support but became moot when the Utah Legislature passed a term limits bill that did what the initiative would have done. Before the 12 years had expired, the Legislature repealed the law.

Losing, and winning, a House seat

Cook ran as an independent for Congress in 1994, coming in third behind Republican winner Enid Greene Waldholtz and incumbent Democrat Karen Shepherd.

When Waldholtz became plagued with scandal in her first term, she declined to run for a second term, so Cook rejoined the Republican Party and ran again for the seat in 1996. He came in second in the GOP convention, never quite commanding the backing of the party establishment, but he cruised in the Republican primary and then topped liberal Democrat Rocky Anderson for his first election victory.

“I got pretty upset with his political posturing,” said Anderson, who later would become Salt Lake City’s mayor. “I once put together an analysis documenting how many times he changed his position depending on who he was talking to. When I showed it to him, he laughed and acknowledged that, yes, he did have a tendency to do that. But he was open about it. No matter what you say about Merrill, he had a good heart.”

The campaign took a nasty turn when Cook focused on Anderson’s support of same-sex marriage. One morning, pink flyers had been attached to power poles and lampposts in downtown Salt Lake City proclaiming the danger to family values if Anderson were elected to Congress.

Those tactics were forgiven years later when Anderson asked his former antagonist to join his Restore Our Republic organization, dedicated to a bipartisan effort to cleanse the political system of corruption fueled by its dependence on big money.

“Merrill readily agreed,” Anderson said, “and came to most of our meetings, always bringing his wife, Camille, who by that time was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.”

Cook won a second term in 1998, but he continued fighting with the Republican establishment and for a time was banned from state GOP headquarters after a tirade at the office. Cook was furious that the party had omitted his name in a get-out-the-vote effort after his campaign had kicked in $25,000 toward the cause.

Cook lost his bid for a third term in the 2000 Republican primary. His GOP opponent, Derek Smith, then faltered in the general election to Democrat Jim Matheson.

Cook continued running for office after that, trying again for his 2nd Congressional District seat, vying for a 3rd Congressional District seat against Republican Chris Cannon, running for a U.S. Senate seat and twice for Salt Lake County mayor.

He had lost much of his earlier luster and never got past his party’s convention. He tried for another ballot initiative to combat the Utah Legislature’s guest worker program in which undocumented workers could apply for work visas in the state. The signature-gathering effort didn’t take hold, and he lost a motion at the Utah Supreme Court that challenged the way county clerks were handling the process.

Caring for Camille

His participation in politics slowed considerably in 2013, when he decided to become a full-time caregiver of his wife, Camille, whose Alzheimer’s had grown progressively worse.

Cook, whose passion for politics began when he was 8 years old, just couldn’t stop running for office, he said in a 2014 interview with The Salt Lake Tribune. And while it wasn’t Camille’s passion, “she was always there for me. She always supported me. And it wasn’t easy.”

So when she became sick, he wanted to be there for her. In the final years of her life, he fed her, clothed her, bathed her and was her constant companion.

“I’ve learned more things, had more satisfaction, had more sense of accomplishment taking care of my wife than anything I’ve done,” he said. “That includes running a successful business and serving in Congress.”

The same passion he had for politics was manifest in his courtship of Camille, he confessed.

They had met as students at the University of Utah and were engaged when Camille, an accomplished classical singer, spent the summer with an opera company in Pennsylvania while Merrill prepared to go to Harvard that fall.

“She sent me a picture of a rehearsal where a fellow cast member was lifting her in the air,” Cook recalled. “I got so jealous I got in my car and drove straight to Pennsylvania. I ran out of gas in the middle of the night in Wyoming, but I finally got there and sat in the front row during the rest of the rehearsals.”

The couple had five children, all of whom grew into successful adults. Camille died in January 2015 at age 68.

After her death, Cook returned to his second love: politics. When Republican State Treasurer Richard Ellis resigned in 2015, Cook registered as a candidate to replace him. But GOP delegates chose David Damschen instead. After that setback, Cook led a relatively quiet life focused on his family.

A public memorial service for Cook is scheduled for Saturday, July 18, on the grounds of the Utah Capitol. A private interment service is set to take place at the Salt Lake City Cemetery.

Note to readers • Paul Rolly is a former political reporter and columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune. He retired in 2018.