In the past ten, twenty years or so there have been a number of new parks that first of all reflect some painful aspects of our history, such a Manzanar [National Historic Site] or the Martin Luther King, Jr., [National Historic] Site, and also parks that reflect a more diverse population. Do you see that as a positive trend? Do you see a need for the Park Service to attract not only urban communities, but also is it important for minorities to see their own stories reflected in them?
Absolutely it is. I mean our diversity is a reality and to me it’s a source of pride. We’re the only nation on the face of the Earth that is created like this nation. And it’s our diversity that lends a pride to it, but it’s our oneness as a republic under the Constitution that adds our freedom, which is also unique in world culture. So we are a unique nation and the creation that we have in the National Park System is unique throughout the world as well.
There were so many accomplishments during your administration and we’ve only touched on a fraction of them in our time together. Looking back at your administration what are the things that you’re proudest of?
Well, the Park Service was my life. I’m just proud of all of it.
Are there any accomplishments that eluded you?
Oh, yes. I missed an area here and there, and we all had our disappointments along the way. But I tell you, I don’t think that I missed many balls during those nine innings. I usually got what I went after, but I did miss a few. There’s no question about that. I got beat sometimes such as that seashore in Oregon. I lost that to the Forest Service. Eleven Point River in Missouri. But I didn’t lose many of them.
You never gave up the fight either.
No, there wasn’t one that took the fight out of me.
You wanted to share a few thoughts about the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.
The primogenitor which was the Ozarks and what happened there. The National Park Service had studied the Eleven Point, Current, and Jacks Fork Rivers and their confluence in Missouri in the Ozarks for a national monument. Some of the locals were violently opposed to a national monument. So while I was superintendent at Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Howard Baker was the regional director. He asked me if I would go down there and talk with those people and see what could be done to move the monument proposal forward, because it was not going anywhere. It had been hanging out for a couple to three years and all he was getting was opposition to it. The local congressman wouldn’t support it.
So I went down there and I first started shaking hands with these guys and told them who I was, and where I was from, and they weren’t all that happy about me or where I was from. Nevertheless they liked me. I got to know them, and went out to their shacks on the river and spent the night with them and fished. We talked about the heritage of which they were very proud. They had a great deal of pride in it. They wanted the river saved, but they didn’t want a national monument that was going to prohibit a lot of things they were doing, such as turkey hunting and that kind of stuff.
In those conversations we came up with the idea, well, why not a national river? We had never had one, but everybody wants to save the rivers. Why not come up with the title National River? So we changed it to National Scenic Riverways. We got almost unanimous support for it, except again stumbling over hunting. And we finally worked out an arrangement with them whereby in areas designated by the secretary, they could hunt. They agreed it was infeasible to hunt in developed public-use areas; somebody would get killed. The result was we had probably one of the largest local delegations to come to Washington from any area during the nine years I served as director in support of the Ozarks. Of course, we had great [congressional] hearings.
Stewart Udall had come to look at it before we ever moved it up to the legislative state in 1961, right after he became secretary of the interior. And we got a new [Missouri] congressman, Dick [Richard] Ichord, who was trying to find his way as to whether he was going to support this legislation with the changed concept or not. Stewart Udall was very much impressed with it. He writes graciously in the book about his meeting with me on the Ozarks and I appreciated that. It was out of that contact, I think, that I was probably able later to become director of the Park Service. But that’s another issue. The river made such an impression on him, he admitted later, that it stayed in his mind as a prototype for a whole system of national rivers. Later that evolved in the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System legislation.
Do you have any similar recollections for the National Trails [System] Act?
Well, not that precise. Of course, the inspiration for that was the Appalachian Trail, which is a large park, the creation of that famous man in Maine [Benton McKaye]. I reckon that is where it started, with his persistence over the years in taking it all of the way to Georgia. That was the inspiration that goes to the National Trails legislation.
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| Left to right: Bill Bailey, Missouri State Park Director Joseph Jeager, Jr., Congressman Richard H. Ichord, Secretary Stewart L. Udall, and George B. Hartzog, Jr., in the Ozarks in southeast Missouri, 1961. (National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.) |
They certainly all reflect the variety of the new types of units coming into the system.
Well, see that was the whole thing about the Kennedy-Johnson administration, the excitement and the tendency to innovate. What can we do to preserve our heritage? The heritage preservation became a great issue and it reflected itself in the plethora of legislation for the National Park System, the Wilderness Act, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, the trail system [National Trails System Act], the Wild and Scenic Rivers, all of those things were a package in effect growing out of the concept of the Great Society which was people oriented. All of this legislation was aimed at serving people, in one fashion or another. The way you serve them is you save something. You preserve something for future generations, which they can’t do for themselves.
That’s the oldest definition of government that I know of that was given by Abraham Lincoln who said, “The function of government is to do for the people that which they cannot do for themselves,” and preservation of natural and cultural resources is one of the things they can’t do for themselves. They might do it on an episodic basis like at Mount Vernon,36 but nationwide it can only be done by the government.
Do you think there’s such a thing as a National Park Service culture? If so, has it changed over time? You seemed to describe a [distinct] culture that existed at the time you came into office.
Well, I believe that there was a National Park Service culture, and I think that culture had at its [core] the expression “for the good of the Service.” That was a frequently used phrase during the time I was there. The sacrifices it would ask of you were “for the good of the Service.” But I was disappointed to read Bill Everhart’s most recent book about the Park Service in which he says that that is now largely gone. [He writes] that if you tell some employee that some move that may not be convenient or desirable from his standpoint that at the time is for the good of the Service, you’re liable to receive a derisive answer. Well, if that’s true I think that’s a great loss to the organization, because I think vibrant, talented, creative organizations do have a culture. They need it in order to grow. I mean it’s just part of the characterization of an alive, dynamic organization.
It certainly seems like it would be important for an agency’s effectiveness.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean you know that’s what binds them [the staff] together. You can write all of the policies in the world, but unless they feel a part of something larger than themselves, and that’s a culture, you’re not getting through to them.
As director did you see reinforcing that culture as part of your job?
Absolutely. Every year I spent thirteen weekends traveling, away from my family, to meet with every superintendent and his spouse or her spouse, and every regional director of the system for two and a half days. Friday evening, Saturday, and adjourn at noon on Sunday, to answer any question they had, talk about anything they wanted to talk about, no agenda, no minutes, no records, just to see and be seen, and explain, explain, explain. Why? We were creating a culture of change and innovation and hopefully inspiration. A oneness is what I was hoping for, and I think we probably did it. But I don’t know what’s happened since. Well, does it make sense to you?
Yes. It does. It makes a lot of sense.
I thought it did.
