Stella Oaks was with her husband at a Colorado hospital when he died, so the role of delivering the heartbreaking news to their 7-year-old son, Dallin, back in Utah fell to the boy’s grandmother.
His mother had maintained optimism and faith that his father would recover from tuberculosis, and she and her three children had prayed fervently for his recovery.
So his father’s death shocked the boy.
“I ran into the bedroom at their old farm home and knelt down and began to pray that it wasn’t true,” he wrote later. “When I had been there just a few moments, Grandpa came in weeping. He knelt down beside me and promised that he would be a father to me.”
The devastation President Dallin H. Oaks felt that summer day in 1940 multiplied the following year with his mother’s nervous breakdown and departure for treatment.
“I was almost immediately an orphan,” he said recently.
He told his biographer he has no happy memories from that time, and the compounding trauma cascaded into his schoolwork despite all the love his grandparents could give him at home near Payson, Utah.
His fourth-grade teacher read his spectacularly bad math scores out loud to the class, and high school kids hazed and bullied him on the school bus.
“I just couldn’t concentrate,” he said. “Looking back on it, I’m sure my problems were due to the emotional disturbance of losing my father and mother at the same time. But as far as I was concerned at the time, I was just the dumbest boy in the world.”
That dumb boy became one of the nation’s brightest legal students and a scholar who served as the acting dean of one of America’s most prestigious law schools and as a university president. He then would be called from his place as a justice of the Utah Supreme Court to what has been a 41-year ministry as an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
That remarkable body of work and service culminated Tuesday in his ordination as the church’s 18th prophet and president.
Who is Dallin H. Oaks? Behind his prodigious intellect and enormous capacity for hard work is a warm, jovial family man with a defining faith in Jesus Christ.
He was targeted for violence by a guerrilla brigade and spit on by students while a university administrator in the turbulent 1960s. He survived having a gun held to his stomach during a 1970 robbery attempt.
He is also a champion of women in education and the places where he has worked with a lifelong record of concern and action for the poor and forgotten.
This is the story of the man behind the 94 talks Latter-day Saints have heard him give at general conferences across four decades.
Helping the forgotten
Born in the Great Depression and raised as a little boy by a small town doctor in an area where some lived in cardboard shanties on the nearby river, President Oaks watchfully observed his father provide free medical care to those who couldn’t afford to pay.
One day, Lloyd Oaks and his son stopped on a walk to look through the display window of a sporting goods store. A shabbily dressed boy longingly joined them. Lloyd Oaks put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and took him inside, let him pick out a pocketknife and bought it for him.
“I remember that he didn’t buy me anything on that occasion,” President Oaks wrote in his journal. He told his grandchildren that he asked his father why he didn’t buy his son a pocketknife, too.
“I want him to have a pocketknife,” the father said, “because he doesn’t have a father to buy one for him.”
Lloyd Oaks died before he bought his son a pocketknife. President Oaks bought pocketknives for all of his sons and grandsons when they were little boys, said his granddaughter, Tiffany Oaks Bratt.
“The love and attention he’s given us and the priority that he’s made each of us as his family members,” she said, “has just inspired me and helped me throughout my life to feel the love of the Savior.”
President Oaks began to focus on the legal problems of the poor as soon as he graduated second in his class from the prestigious law school at the University of Chicago, where he served as the editor of the law review.
While he clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1957-58, he reviewed petitions to the court from defendants considered indigent — too poor to pay for the necessary expenses of legal representation.
In 1959, an Illinois Supreme Court justice asked him to represent an indigent prisoner in an appeal before the court. As a law professor at Chicago, he regularly was invited to Washington, D.C., for seminars on the issue and created a new seminar at the law school about the legal problems of the poor.
The biggest motivation was his experience working for the Illinois attorney’s office in Cook County’s criminal courts, which led to coauthoring a book on the poor in the criminal justice system.
He played a significant role in the modern federal defender program because of his landmark Oaks Report, an exhaustive 1967 review of the application of the Criminal Justice Act across all 100 federal courts. He recommended the law be amended — it was — to include federal public defender offices that provide representation to those charged with federal crimes who cannot afford to hire an attorney.
“He is a person who feels things deeply,” said President D. Todd Christofferson, who President Oaks selected Tuesday as his second counselor in the First Presidency.
Like many others, President Christofferson noted that President Oaks has kept a print of Maynard Dixon’s painting “The Forgotten Man” on the wall of his office for years.
“It’s a somber painting of a man sitting at the side of the gutter, people passing by,” President Christofferson said. “He keeps that in a prominent place in his office, I think indicating what he really cares about. He cares about people, especially those who have real needs, who are discouraged or in whatever (difficult) circumstances.”
President Camille N. Johnson, Relief Society general president, said President Oaks has been particularly sensitive to the downtrodden.
“I think President Oaks’ upbringing and his experience growing up with a widowed mother has naturally influenced his concern for the downtrodden,” she said, “and it’s been evidenced in his legal work, but also in the way that he’s sought to address the needs of the one.”
A childhood turnaround
His mother needed two years to recover from the shock of the loss of her husband, but after she recovered, she and the children — Dallin, Merrill and Evelyn — moved to Vernal, where she accepted a teaching position.
President Oaks said the combination of putting the family back together and the influence of his fifth-grade teacher, Pearl Schafer, “turned me around.”
The dullest boy soon became one of the brightest. He enjoyed considerable scholastic success while attending high school in Vernal, where he began working as a 15-year-old with a squeaky voice on KJAM radio, and in Provo, where he worked for KCSU and played on the football and basketball teams and threw discus and shot put in track.
Ironically, he earned a ‘C’ in theology as a BYU freshman, when he earned a ‘B’ average.
Then he met June Dixon of Spanish Fork. After they married on June 24, 1952, in the Salt Lake Temple, President Oaks suddenly got almost nothing but ‘A’s.’ He graduated with high honors and a bachelor’s degree in accounting and economics.
“My academic achievement and career successes have been based on the fact I married someone I loved, who helped me focus my energies,” he said.
An abrupt end and a new beginning
The reports that two U.S. presidents had President Oaks on their short lists of candidates for nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court are absolutely true, said his biographer, Richard E. Turley Jr., author of “In the Hands of the Lord: The Life of Dallin H. Oaks.”
He also served as the acting dean of the University of Chicago Law School in the turbulent 1960s. In 1969, he was chair of the university’s disciplinary panel for student protesters. Once while driving, he narrowly avoided being pinned in by other vehicles and kidnapped by a guerrilla brigade that wanted to put him on trial to embarrass the university, Turley wrote.
During one public hearing, a student ran up and spit on his face. After another, he tussled with one student before his bodyguard made a hole and he escaped through a fire exit.
In 1971, he was named the eighth president of Brigham Young University, where he worked characteristically hard while being described by students as a dynamic and playful leader.
Once, he dressed up as the school mascot, Cosmo the Cougar, wrapped up as a mummy and placed in a coffin on the basketball court in the Marriott Center. When the coffin creaked open, Cosmo stepped out and unraveled the wrapping. When the mascot removed the Cougar head to reveal President Oaks, the crowd roared and cheered.
One of his major achievements at BYU was the creation of what is now a top 20 law school, a stunning accomplishment. He shared with students his personal motto, “Work first and play later,” and he put his money where his mouth was, playing tennis once a week at 10 p.m. with his late wife, June.
President Oaks once turned down the position of associate U.S. attorney general and interviewed for the job of solicitor general of the United States.
In 1981, he was named a Utah Supreme Court justice, and he also served for five years as chairman of the board of PBS from 1979 to 1984.
Through it all, his chief motivation was his faith in Jesus Christ, Turley said. He frequently quoted a Latter-day Saint scripture that grounded him, “To some it is given by the Holy Ghost to know that Jesus Christ is the son of God, and that he was crucified for the sins of the world.”
“That’s me,” President Oaks said repeatedly. “I know that.”
Everything changed in 1984.
“When he was called to the service of the apostleship, he was in a position of tremendous responsibility,” President Johnson said.
From the Supreme Court to the apostleship
When President Oaks joined the Utah Supreme Court, he did so after he received a prompting in the temple after praying about the opportunity: “Go to the court, and I will call you from there.”
Justice Oaks formally was called to become Elder Oaks at the church’s general conference on April 7, 1984.
The story behind the calling is far more colorful.
President Gordon B. Hinckley of the First Presidency struggled to reach Justice Oaks, who was traveling, but finally reached him the night before his name would be presented in conference. The two men had trouble communicating on the phone because Justice Oaks was in a Mexican restaurant in Tucson, Arizona, where he was presiding over a moot court. A mariachi band was playing loudly inside the restaurant, so the two men agreed to speak again when President Oaks returned to his hotel room.
Initially, Justice Oaks expressed fear and apprehension at the enormous responsibility. “I have so far to go to qualify as a witness of Christ,” he said.
Church leaders gave him a month to clear over 100 cases pending before him at the Utah Supreme Court. He was ordained an apostle on May 3, 1984, stepping into what is a lifetime appointment.
At the time, he reminded a writer that Thomas Jefferson had coined the metaphor about a wall between church and state.
“I have heard the summons from the other side of the wall,” he said. “I’m busy making the transition from one side of the wall to the other.”
He was 51 years old; he remains the youngest apostle called since 1970. He swiftly came to a realization.
“I knew that if I concentrated my time on the things that came naturally and the things that I felt qualified to do, I would never be an apostle; I would always be a former lawyer and judge,” he said. “I made up my mind that was not for me. I decided that I would focus my efforts on what I had been called to do, not on what I was qualified to do. I determined that instead of trying to shape my calling to my credentials, I would try to shape myself to my calling.”
He quickly found some footing when a senior apostle, Elder Bruce R. McConkie, who was dying of cancer and who was renowned for preaching church doctrine, complimented one of President Oaks’ first talks as being genuinely doctrinal.
“I told him I wanted to be one who preaches doctrine,” said President Oaks, who then assumed the role. Combined with the serious expression he regularly wore during talks, some thought him legalistic. A daughter once told him he looked mad when he spoke.
The man behind the talks
That isn’t close to a full picture of the real man, according to family and friends.
“I saw him has a jovial person, a remarkable storyteller, a person who could relate limericks and entertaining stories about a host of topics, someone who I knew personally and found to be warm and engaging, kind and caring,” wrote Turley, the biographer who has known him for four decades.
Bratt, one of his 29 grandchildren, said some of her favorite memories are sitting around her grandfather’s dining room table and listening to him tell funny stories that kept the whole family laughing together.
“My grandfather has a deep, joyful laugh,” she said, “and it just makes the whole family start laughing whenever he tells a funny story.”
“He is gentle and funny, but at the same time possesses a steel-like quality to get things done,” late PBS President Larry Grossman once said of him.
In February, at the start of a video calling for an emphasis on the celebration of Easter, President Oaks joked about his serious face.
“I’ll try to manage a smile,” he said, eyes sparkling above a broad smile. “My wife tells me that I always look like a judge instead of an apostle.”
Building a family
President Oaks was born Aug. 12, 1932, in Provo, Utah. He graduated from BYU High School in 1950.
He had joined the National Guard in high school, and before his 18th birthday his unit was alerted for duty in Korea. While waiting for further orders, President Oaks enrolled at BYU, hoping to complete at least one quarter before being sent to Korea.
“I went clear through Brigham Young University under an alert to serve in Korea that never became active duty orders,” he said. The alert ruled out missionary service.
He and June Dixon Oaks had six children — Sharmon, Cheri, Lloyd, Dallin, TruAnn and Jenny. He loved to camp, hunt and fish with them.
Sister Oaks died of cancer in 1998.
President Oaks then married Kristen McMain on Aug. 25, 2000.
“He’s a wonderful, wonderful parent and husband,” said President Jeffrey R. Holland, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. “Kristen and President Oaks are a wonderful couple. They’re a delightful couple. She’s as happy as he is and she (inspires) his happiness and his joy.”
President Oaks continues to make time for his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Bratt said.
He displays one grandchild’s photo in his office each month and writes a personal letter to tell them they are the grandchild of the month.
“He is just the most loving person that I’ve ever been around,” Bratt said. “Every time we walk in the door, he gives us a big bear hug and tells us that he loves us. We just have always felt that unconditional love from him, which inspires us to be better people, because he’s just so full of love for everyone.”
President Oaks and Sister Oaks once held a sleepover for the grandchildren where they gave each of them a biography of his mother’s life and told them stories about her. They all wore hats and decorated everything in yellow, because she loved hats and that color.
President Oaks also has made time to attend plays and graduations and more, Bratt said.
“It’s a blessing and a privilege to be his granddaughter,” she said.
Apostolic achievements
President Oaks descends from many early Latter-day Saints. For example, he is the great-great-grandson of Emer Harris, brother of Martin Harris, one of the Three Witnesses of the Book of Mormon.
He shared his purpose for accepting the call to the apostleship in 1984 when he announced his resignation from the Utah Supreme Court to begin his ministry.
“My most important duty,” he said, “is to serve as a witness of the life and mission of our Savior, Jesus Christ, that all may learn of him and grow in faith and determination to live by his teachings.”
In his first conference talk as an apostle in October 1984, he said, “I have gladly forsaken my professional activities to spend the rest of my days in the service of the Lord. I will devote my whole heart, might, mind and strength to the great trusts placed in me, especially to the responsibilities of a special witness of the name of Jesus Christ in all the world.”
But President Oaks had never been a full-time missionary, a bishop, a mission president or a temple president — paths followed by many general authorities en route to the church’s highest councils.
“I feel,” he said, “like a man who stands at the foot of a mountain so tall he can’t see the peak, but he knows he has to climb it.”
Just as he did as a student and lawyer, he overcame the staggered start.
From 2002 to 2004, he served on special assignment as the Philippines Area President, where he focused on strengthening the church, particularly by emphasizing temple attendance and priesthood ordinances. The country now has nearly 900,000 Latter-day Saints.
President Oaks has used his lawyer’s skills to defend the church and freedom of religion around the world.
“It really matters right now,” said President Johnson, the Relief Society leader who is a trained attorney, “that the president of our church has that breadth of understanding, particularly of the constitutional principles that will bear upon the church’s ability to gather scattered Israel.”
Jonathan Rauch, a public policy expert at the Brookings Institution, visited BYU last year and praised the church’s position on civility and President Oaks as a chief architect of it.
“I can only think of one church that has worked out an articulated civic theology of how Christians should address politics and the public world,” Rauch said. “A civic theology is a doctrine, a fully articulated doctrine, of how Jesus would want us to behave — not just in our community, not just rebuilding the homes when the hurricane strikes — but how we behave, for example, on social media, how we comport ourselves in politics.”
President Oaks led out on the church’s Utah Compromise in 2015, when church and LGBTQ+ leaders struck a stunning deal to protect each other, President Christofferson said.
The compromise created an agreement that was codified in Utah law that provides anti-discrimination provisions for LGBT people in exchange for carefully targeted exemptions for religious entities.
“He’s been a man of action in regard to peacemaking and finding a way forward,” President Christofferson told the Deseret News about the compromise, an approach the church calls “Fairness for All.”
“I advocate the moral and political imperative of reconciling existing conflicts and avoiding new ones,” President Oaks said in a landmark talk at the University of Virginia. “The goals of both sides are best served by resolving differences through mutual respect, shared understanding and good-faith negotiations, and both must accept and respect the rule of law.”
Gifted speaker and writer
The former radio broadcaster developed a deep, clear voice. He could write and speak with charisma and style but felt spiritually chastened when he did.
Instead, his standard talks focused on a single doctrine with a purpose stated clearly at the beginning. He still coined memorable phrases, including one in a 2007 talk that became a Latter-day Saint staple.
The talk was rooted in a moment when one of his sons found an old Sears mail-order catalog in his mother’s basement. President Oaks opened it and was reminded that items were listed by degrees of quality — good, better, best.
“As we consider various choices, we should remember that it is not enough that something is good,” he said in general conference. “Other choices are better, and still others are best. Even though a particular choice is more costly, its far greater value may make it the best choice of all.”
He delivered a landmark talk at a 2014 general conference that reiterated and clarified Latter-day Saint doctrine that women in the church act in their callings with the authority of the priesthood. “The Lord has directed that only men will be ordained to offices in the priesthood,” he said. “But, as various church leaders have emphasized, men are not “the priesthood.”
“We are not accustomed to speaking of women having the authority of the priesthood in their church callings, but what other authority can it be?” he added. “… Whoever functions in an office or calling received from one who holds priesthood keys exercises priesthood authority in performing her or his assigned duties.”
At BYU, he had insisted on equal treatment, including equal pay, for women faculty and students, former professor Marilyn Arnold told Turley. “He saw women as capable as men.”
President Johnson said President Oaks has treated her with gentleness, kindness, sincerity and concern.
“He seems keenly aware of what the sisters are doing in the church,” she said. “I’ve been in meetings with the First Presidency where he has expressed specifically his concern for the women of the church, that they feel loved, that they know how valued and important they are.”
President Oaks has used his skill as a writer to minister not only to his grandchildren but hundreds of others.
“So many of us here at church headquarters have received beautiful notes after we’ve given a talk,” General Primary President Susan H. Porter said. “He mentioned something specific that he appreciated or that he thought about or that he thought would be a blessing to all of us. This is a great gift that he has that he uses to minister.”
The boy who once felt suddenly orphaned and lost has spent his life developing a body of work and a ministry to help others feel connected.
