Is it because of the political nature of some of the top jobs?
People have always said politics and the Park Service is relatively johnny-come-lately. That’s really not true. It’s always been there to a fair degree. There is no doubt, in the Nixon tapes, it referred to the need to get the Park Service under control. Nixon mentioned on one of the tapes that he needed to get Hartzog out of there. This led to a general weakening of the leadership at the Washington office plus, not only the director, but those key players that the director has to have, speaking of the career employees. The same thing [is true1 in the regional directors. Gee whiz, golly. We’ve had some marvelous regional directors in contemporary history. Perhaps one that I felt was the pick of the lot was Lorraine Mintzmyer. [She] was absolutely a superb, tough, real leader as a regional director. She survived up until very recently and they finally got her. It was not through lack of ability. It was just that Lorraine was going to stand there and be counted on behalf of the National Park Service. There were people that did not like that. So they finally arranged some kind of donny brook thing and got her. I don’t know all of the players, today, Some of them, I ‘ m sure, are very, very good. But I question that there are more political animals that, despite their titles, really don’t know what the Park Service is all about.
That is really too bad, and that carries down to the superintendent. You have superintendents that don’t really know what the Park Service is all about. They just don’t. The fact that you have Dave Morris here indicates that Crater Lake is an exception (7). Dave certainly knows what the parks are all about. But there are an awful lot of superintendents that don’t. They are being made superintendents for all the wrong reasons, and I think it is showing. It is showing in areas that you don’t see. It’s is the real leadership that’s going to carry us into the next 10 years. I had thought maybe this Secretary Babbitt might really be able to move things back into a sense of where there was leadership in the Park Service. I don’t know anything about this new director, but the fact that I have heard nothing indicates that he ain’t the guy.
