GEORGE P. LEE, 1943 -- 2010
I suspect when he crossed over, it was Spencer W. Kimball who stood waiting to embrace him.
George P. Lee is dead.
The first Mormon general authority excommunicated in half a century, a man whose last 20 years were spent in drifting dissolution, forgotten by most and loved by few, is gone.
It was probably a welcome liberation.
Shattered by his own failings, tortured by diabetes, fallen about as far as a man can fall, death sometimes is a peaceful liberation.
I hope it was such for George P. Lee.
I never met him, but he was loved by men I loved, and known by people I knew, and for more than 30 years the title “President Lee” has applied in my mind to just one man.
George P. Lee was a Navajo. His father was called Son of Donkey Man and his mother was called Red Woman. He grew up on a reservation and in a culture unimaginable to the average American.
His formative years were spent looking inward at his heritage and northward to the white Mormon family in Utah who took him in through each school year. One of the first participants in the Indian Student Placement Program, he found a place in a white home so that he could attend a good school and be acculturated into Mormonism.
Which he was.
And when he graduated from high school in Orem, Utah, he simply drove across town to attend Brigham Young University.
He did this at a time when the Mormon church was keenly interested in Native Americans. The church saw in Native Americans the descendants of people chronicled in the Book of Mormon, and it worked earnestly to bring to them the ancient record and faith of their ancestors.
George P. Lee flourished in this environment. And he flourished under the tutelage of the Mormon leader most responsible for promoting that environment – apostle and later church President Spencer W. Kimball.
Spencer W. Kimball grew up in southern Arizona, and knew and loved the native peoples of the Southwest. At one point, recuperating from a heart attack, he retreated into the forested Chuska Mountains of George P. Lee’s tribal homeland.
George P. Lee was the personification of Spencer W. Kimball’s vision for Native Americans. He excelled in the church and he excelled in academia. And just as he was finishing his PhD, Spencer W. Kimball called him to be the president of the Arizona Holbrook Mission.
Three months later he would also be called, at 32, into the First Quorum of the Seventy. One of the youngest modern members of the general authorities, one of the first non-whites, and the first Native American. His was an historic appointment and that fact was recognized by all.
I knew him through his missionaries.
The Arizona Holbrook Mission covered the Four Corners area and replaced the old Southwest Indian Mission. It included the major and minor Indian reservations of the region, and the border towns around them.
He went home on July 1, 1978, and I came out on August 19, 1978. He had been gone for six weeks, but all the older missionaries had served under him, and the culture of the mission was still very much influenced by him.
Most of the missionaries loved him, and some thought he could do no wrong. In the months before he went home, he had cracked down with a program called Living With Exactness. It required the missionaries, among other things, to stop writing to girlfriends at home – without explanation – as a sign of dedication and focus. Some missionaries resented that, some also resented his seeming preference for Indians over whites – or “Anglos,” as he called them.
And maybe that’s what eventually brought him down.
George P. Lee served as a general authority until 1989 when he was excommunicated. It was a shocking development, unknown in the lifetimes of most church members.
At the time of his excommunication, little was known about the reasons for it. Shortly thereafter, however, there circulated a “manifesto” he had written in the form of a scolding letter to the leaders of the church. It accused them of obstructing the Lord’s work among the Lamanites – as the Book of Mormon calls the native peoples of the Americas.
After the death of Spencer W. Kimball, the Mormon church withdrew significantly from its Native American outreach. Programs dried up and were cancelled. The Arizona Holbrook Mission was dissolved. The special stewardship which Mormons had felt toward Indians since pioneer times shifted south, as it became clear that the fulfillment of Book of Mormon prophesies was taking place not among Native Americans, but among Latin Americans.
This offended George P. Lee, and it wounded his pride. Further, he seemed to resent the fact that white men led the church, and – pointing to Book of Mormon passages – he said that he, as a Lamanite, should rightfully lead the church.
He was also bothered by what he felt was his second-class status among the general authorities. His dignity was wounded when he was asked to submit his general conference addresses beforehand for approval, and treatment that was the result of his relative youth and inexperience he chalked up to racism and disrespect.
He also seems to have had some sort of breakdown. Either through spiritual collapse or mental illness, or some combination of the two, by the time he wrote his manifesto, he was not rational. A man who had written a doctoral dissertation penned the ravings of a madman and sent them forth for all the world to kneel before.
He declared himself a prophet by blood, by rightful inheritance, and called upon all to repent and honor him.
He was 45.
And he wasn’t a Mormon anymore. And though he ran for Navajo tribal chairman, he is better remembered as a child molester, for fondling a 12-year-old girl who lived next door.
His fall was complete.
When he failed to register as a sex offender, his booking picture was the stereotype his earlier life had tried to run from – a scraggly haired drunken Indian. All the education and all the acculturation and all the opportunity had come to naught, he had ended up representing not the highest aspirations of his people, but the lowest.
His fall was complete.
I read about him from a distance, and over the last decade have renewed acquaintances with the missionaries who served under him. Each of them has wondered about and prayed for President Lee. None of them had written him off, all of them hoped for his recovery and repentance. None of them could let go of the man who had led them years before on the reservation.
Some had seen him working at a convenience store in St. George, some had said he was taking the discussions, some had said his health was failing.
All now will have to say good-bye.
Because George P. Lee is dead.
His autobiography is still easily found in Utah second-hand stores, and people of middle age remember his name, but he and his era are gone, he is a footnote and barely that.
He is the tragic figure of a man brought low by the snares of Satan and the weakness of man. He crawled in a hogan and walked in temples and now he is dead.
I suspect when he crossed over, it was Spencer W. Kimball who stood waiting to embrace him.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2010
