Rudy Perpich - Colorful Leader With International Goals

Colorful Leader With International Goals

Perpich had a reputation for colorful behavior. At one point while governor, he donated his $25,000 pay raise to help promote bocce-ball. Another time, he pitched an idea for a chopstick factory to be built in northern Minnesota. He also proposed selling the governor's mansion in St. Paul as a cost-saving measure.

Newsweek magazine brought Perpich national attention by bestowing the nickname "Governor Goofy," crystallizing the combination of affection and resentment his habits elicited. During his last years in office, commentators wondered whether he would shoot to stardom as a presidential hopeful or, as governor, sour Minnesota voters on the DFL party with questionable public relations. However, Perpich's activist vision of the governor's role was later cited as an important contribution to the Minnesota economy – even by unlikely admirers like his 1990 rival and successor Arne Carlson, who said in 2005 that Perpich "was the first person that I was aware of to focus on the international role that states are going to have to play."

Perpich's legacy of projects in Minnesota include the Minnesota World Trade Center in St. Paul, the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Golden Valley, the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, the University of Minnesota Duluth Natural Resources Research Institute, and the Mall of America in Bloomington. Additionally, he worked to promote Minnesota on the international stage by traveling to 17 countries in 1984, and bringing the foreign leaders Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and Dr. Franjo Tuđman of Croatia to the state in 1990.

Perpich opposed the Reagan proxy war against Nicaragua in the 1980's and was one of several governors who objected to sending their state national guard units to train in US bases in Honduras, where the US backed Contras were based. The Contras carried out atrocities in Nicaragua to topple the leftist government there. He was the named plaintiff in the 1990 U.S. Supreme Court case Perpich v. Department of Defense, which established that the U.S. Department of Defense could send National Guard units overseas even over the protests of the state's governor.