NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Former Louisiana Gov. Dave Treen, who became the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction when he was elected in 1979 but lost a re-election bid to the flamboyant Democrat Edwin Edwards four years later, has died. He was 81.Treen’s son, David C. Treen Jr., said Treen died early Thursday of complications from a respiratory illness at East Jefferson General Hospital in a New Orleans suburb. Funeral arrangements were not complete. Treen had been in the hospital about two days, his son said.”He was a worthy adversary and an absolute honorable man. In spite of the different roads we traveled, we had become very good friends. I truly regret his passing and send condolences and sympathies to his family,” Edwards, currently serving federal prison time, said in a statement released to The Associated Press by Mary Jane Marcantel, an Edwards family friend.Edwards had served two terms as governor and could not run for a third consecutive term in the 1979 race. Treen’s victory over Democrat Louis Lambert was a watershed for the state’s Republican Party in a state that had long been dominated by Democrats. It was a precursor to Republican growth in the state that would coincide with the two terms of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and continue through today.”He was one of the leaders of building the Republican Party in Louisiana,” said current state Republican Party chairman Roger Villere.Treen, however, was destined not to benefit from the rising Republican tide. Edwards, who was still wildly popular when he left office, would come roaring back in a 1983 landslide — despite Treen’s unassailed reputation for integrity and Edwards’ penchant for scandal that would later see him indicted in three criminal cases and convicted in one.Treen’s term was marked by frustration, highlighted by a downturn in Louisiana’s boom-and-bust, oil-based economy. Oil prices and production fell during his tenure, cutting sharply into state revenues.He tried to make up for it, taking on oil with a proposal to tax production, but business interests shot it down.Meanwhile, Treen’s critics, Edwards chief among them, lambasted him as too methodical. Treen “preferred to be behind a desk, enmeshed in the details of running the governor’s office,” historian Joseph G. Dawson III wrote in his 1990 survey of Louisiana governors.”Treen was very open. He wasn’t super-fast, but I think he was super-honest,” former Gov. Buddy Roemer recalled Thursday in an interview.Personable and even jocular when out of the public eye, Treen was colorless on the campaign trail and no match for the quick-witted Edwards, who delighted in making Treen the butt of his jokes. Edwards once famously quipped that Treen was “so slow it takes him an hour and a half to watch ‘60 Minutes.'”Treen didn’t hold a grudge. Edwards is serving a 10-year sentence for a scheme to rig the riverboat casino licensing process during his fourth and final term in office, which ended in 1996. Treen repeatedly called for a commutation of the 82-year-old former governor’s sentence, which is scheduled to end in 2011, but failed to win mercy for Edwards in the final days of Republican President George W. Bush’s administration.”That’s classic Dave Treen. Classic Dave Treen doesn’t hold grudges and just looks at the human side of every angle of every individual,” former Gov. Kathleen Blanco said.Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered flags at the Louisiana Capitol flown at half-staff in Treen’s honor. “Louisiana has lost a visionary leader and a tireless advocate for our state,” Jindal said.Treen’s was an archetypal, clean-government, low-taxes administration. He focused on education, like governors before and after, establishing pay incentives for teachers who took summer classes. He also established the Department of Environmental Quality.None of that resonated with voters, who gave him only 36 percent of the vote in his re-election bid.Treen also appointed more minorities to state government than any of his predecessors, including Edwards. But he often encountered opposition in the Legislature from blacks. And he had to counter his early history of involvement with segregationist groups.As a young attorney in New Orleans at the end of the 1950s, Treen became chairman of the Louisiana States’ Rights Party in 1960, an anti-Kennedy elector for the party, and a “stalwart” of the white supremacist Citizens Council, according to historian Adam Fairclough. Treen later reacted angrily to mentions of this part of his biography, and he omitted it from official resumes.As a convert to the tiny Republican party in the 1960s, he three times unsuccessfully took on Congressman Hale Boggs. Treen attacked Boggs for having supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which enfranchised millions of Southern blacks. From a suburban, white-flight New Orleans district, Treen finally made it to Congress in 1972, and his constituents sent him back to Washington three more times.He was born in Baton Rouge on July 16, 1928, attended Fortier High School in New Orleans, and graduated with honors from Tulane Law School in 1950. A stint as an Air Force lawyer was followed by private law practice in New Orleans.Later, as governor, newly powerful blacks in the legislature consistently opposed him. In his first year, he set off protests when an unexpected $300 million windfall was directed at tax cuts, roads and the state debt, instead of social programs.Runs for governor (1995; 2003) and Congress (1999) followed; Treen withdrew from the first two, and was defeated by David Vitter, now a U.S. Senator, in the third. His last years were spent in retirement in Mandeville, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans.Treen is survived by his son and two daughters. His wife, Dolores “Dodie” Brisbi Treen, died in 2005.- – – -Contact The Daily Reveille’s news staff at [email protected]