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For Ernest Leroy Wilkinson, successful Washington, D.C., lawyer and seventh president of Brigham Young University, campaign politics was a game he could never master. From his rowdy youth in Ogden, Utah’s notorious Hell’s Half-Acre district, where blind eyes turned to cock-fighting and bootlegging, he had been fascinated by the nature and use of power. By the time he was fifty, he had secured a string of hard-won national victories as a tenacious and intimidating legalist. But the lure of politics remained the one attraction, despite other professional and personal accomplishments, he could not resist.

From the 1950s to the 1980s Ezra Taft Benson was at the center of a series of political conflicts within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1943 he became a member of…