RIP Stewart Udall

rimrocker · Mar 21, 2010

Stewart Udall died today. He was the last surviving cabinet member from JFK's administration and was a longtime champion of the environment, helping to strengthen national parks, and helping to pass the Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act among others. I had the honor of meeting him a few years ago in Santa Fe. He was sharp to the end and extremely funny. He was, by all meassures, a great man.

Stewart L. Udall, 90, interior secretary was guardian of America's wild places

By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 21, 2010; A05

Stewart L. Udall, who as secretary of the interior in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations launched a series of far-reaching conservation reforms that made him one of the most significant figures in protecting America's natural environment, died March 20 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 90 and had complications from a recent fall.

Mr. Udall had served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat from Arizona when President John F. Kennedy tapped him for the top job at the Interior Department. Mr. Udall initiated the first White House conference on conservation since the administration of Theodore Roosevelt and stated his credo at the beginning of his tenure: "Nature will take precedence over the needs of the modern man."

He brought conservation and environmental concerns into the national consciousness and was the guiding force behind landmark legislation that preserved millions of acres of land, expanded the national park system and protected water and land from pollution. From the Cape Cod seashore in Massachusetts to the untamed wilds of Alaska, Mr. Udall left a monumental legacy as a guardian of America's natural beauty.

"Stewart Udall, more than any other single person, was responsible for reviving the national commitment to conservation and environmental preservation," former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt, who was President Bill Clinton's interior secretary, said in 2006.

Despite having a testy relationship with President Lyndon B. Johnson, Mr. Udall remained in the Cabinet after Kennedy's assassination in 1963 and made concern for the environment a key part of Johnson's Great Society. He helped secure passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 (which now protects about 400 million acres of land in 44 states), as well as the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act (1965), the Water Quality Act (1965), the Solid Waste Disposal Act (1965), the Endangered Species Preservation Act (1966), the National Historic Preservation Act (1966) and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968).

Mr. Udall, who sometimes led hikes as long as 50 miles when he was interior secretary, helped create the first federal bicycle paths and jogging trails. He made Ellis Island in New York Harbor a national monument, protected the Outer Banks of North Carolina and designated Assateague Island in Maryland and Virginia, with its hundreds of wild horses, a national seashore. Four national parks, six national monuments and dozens of wildlife refuges, historic sites and recreation areas were created under his authority.

In his best-selling 1963 book, "The Quiet Crisis," Mr. Udall warned of the dangers of pollution and threats to America's natural resources, calling for a nationwide "land conscience" to conserve the nation's wild places.

"We cannot afford an America where expedience tramples upon esthetics and development decisions are made with an eye only on the present," he wrote.

Mr. Udall narrowly thwarted an effort in the late 1960s to build dams on the Colorado River that would have put vast stretches of the Grand Canyon under water.

"My own people from Arizona were desperate to build these dams," he told National Public Radio in 1996. "Some of them still dislike me because I helped stop the construction of these dams."

Mr. Udall, who continued to hike the Grand Canyon into his mid-80s, summed up his environmental ethic on a trip in the 1990s.

"I guess President Teddy Roosevelt, who slept out in the snow up on the South Rim nearly a hundred years ago," he mused, "said it right for all time. 'There it is, magnificent. Man cannot improve upon it; leave it alone.' "

Stewart Lee Udall was born Jan. 31, 1920, into a Mormon family in St. Johns, Ariz. His father was a chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, but Mr. Udall hardly led a life of privilege as a child.

"I grew up on the tail of the frontier," he told the Arizona Daily Star in 2005. "I plowed fields with horses and worked as a hired hand in high school for 50 cents a day."

He attended the University of Arizona, spent two years on a Mormon mission on the East Coast, then served as a B-24 tail gunner in the Army Air Forces during World War II.

After the war, he returned to the University of Arizona, where he played basketball and graduated from law school in 1948. He opened a law practice in Tucson with his younger brother Morris K. "Mo" Udall (D), who took over Stewart's seat in the House in 1961 and served until 1991. Mo Udall died in 1998.

Stewart Udall was elected to the House in 1954 and was an advocate of civil rights and an early supporter of home rule for the District of Columbia. Although best known for his fierce protection of the environment, he made several other contributions to Washington history. As a friend of Robert Frost, he arranged for the poet to read at Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. Mr. Udall also had a direct hand in integrating the Washington Redskins football team.

The Redskins -- the last team in any major professional sport to integrate -- were set to begin playing in a new stadium (which Mr. Udall later named for Robert F. Kennedy) that sat on land owned by the National Park Service. In March 1961, Mr. Udall sent a sharply worded letter to Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, warning him that he was in danger of criminal prosecution if the team violated anti-discrimination laws. In 1962, Bobby Mitchell became the first black player to take the field for the Redskins.

After leaving the Cabinet in 1969, Mr. Udall ran an international environmental consulting firm in Washington for several years. Beginning in 1978, Mr. Udall and a team of investigators -- including four of his six children -- spent years probing the reasons for higher rates of cancer among people who had lived near a nuclear test site in Nevada in the 1950s and '60s. He kept up the legal fight for more than 20 years and helped draft the 1990 "Radiation Exposure Compensation Act," which offered reparations to the families of cancer patients affected by atomic radiation.

He published a book in 1994, "The Myths of August," about the long-term environmental and health effects of nuclear weapons.

In 1989, Mr. Udall settled in Santa Fe and continued to write and lecture. He lived long enough to become something of a grand old man of the environmental movement, but he also saw some of his accomplishments come under attack. He lashed out at the Interior Department under George W. Bush in a column for the Los Angeles Times in 2004.

"The Bush administration, determined to ransack public lands for the last meager pockets of petroleum," Mr. Udall wrote, "has turned my old department into a servile, single-minded adjunct of the Energy Department."

His wife of 54 years, Erma Lee Webb Udall, died in 2001.

His son Tom Udall is a Democratic U.S. senator representing New Mexico; a nephew, Mo Udall's son Mark Udall (D), represents Colorado in the U.S. Senate.

Other survivors include five children and eight grandchildren.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/20/AR2010032003261_pf.html
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rimrocker · Mar 21, 2010

NYTimes obit...

Stewart L. Udall, 90, Conservationist in Kennedy and Johnson Cabinets, Dies
By KEITH SCHNEIDER
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/nyregion/21udall.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print

Stewart L. Udall, an ardent conservationist and a son of the West, who as interior secretary in the 1960s presided over vast increases in national park holdings and the public domain, died on Saturday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. The last surviving member of the original Kennedy cabinet, he was 90.

Mr. Udall had been in failing health after a fall last week, according to his son Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico.

Though he was a liberal Democrat from the increasingly conservative and Republican West, Stewart Udall said in a 2003 public television interview that he found in Washington “a big tent on the environment.”

The result was the addition of vast tracts to the nation’s land holdings and — through his strong ties with lawmakers, conservationists, writers and others — work that led to landmark statutes on air, water and land conservation.

President Obama said in a statement Saturday night that Mr. Udall “left an indelible mark on this nation and inspired countless Americans who will continue his fight for clean air, clean water and to maintain our many natural treasures.”

Few corners of the nation escaped Mr. Udall’s touch. As interior secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he presided over the acquisition of 3.85 million acres of new holdings, including 4 national parks — Canyonlands in Utah, Redwood in California, North Cascades in Washington State and Guadalupe Mountains in Texas — 6 national monuments, 9 national recreation areas, 20 historic sites, 50 wildlife refuges and 8 national seashores. He also had an interest in preserving historic sites, and helped save Carnegie Hall from destruction.

“Republicans and Democrats, we all worked together,” Mr. Udall said in a television interview with Bill Moyers. But by the time of that interview, Mr. Udall added that Washington had been overtaken by money and that people seeking public office fought for contributions from business interests that viewed environmental protection as a detriment to profit at best.

In his years in Washington, he won high regard from many quarters for his efforts to preserve the American landscape and to educate his fellow Americans on the value of natural beauty, points he made in his 1963 book “The Quiet Crisis.” The book, whose aim, he wrote at the time, was to “outline the land and people story of our continent,” sold widely.

It was Mr. Udall who suggested that John. F. Kennedy invite Robert Frost to recite a poem at Mr. Kennedy’s Inauguration. Mr. Udall accompanied Mr. Frost to the Soviet Union in 1962, a trip meant to foster better ties with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Mr. Udall also held evenings at the Interior Department with the poet Carl Sandburg and the actor Hal Holbrook. In addition, he invited the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner to be the department’s writer in residence. It was Mr. Stegner’s presence that prompted Mr. Udall to write “The Quiet Crisis.”

Mr. Udall was also an early supporter of Rachel Carson, the biologist whose book “Silent Spring” brought attention to the environmental hazards of pesticide use.

Mr. Udall stepped onto the national stage in 1954, when he was elected to Congress from Arizona. In the hotly fought Democratic presidential primary of 1960, he urged his fellow Arizona Democrats to support Kennedy. When Kennedy won the White House, he nominated Mr. Udall as interior secretary

After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Mr. Udall was kept on by Lyndon B. Johnson.

“I think probably part of that was Lady Bird,” Mr. Udall said, referring to Mr. Johnson’s wife, with whom he collaborated on beautifying the nation’s capital and similar projects. “She treasured me and we were wonderful friends,” he added.

Roger G. Kennedy, who was director of the National Park Service in the 1990s, said Mr. Udall “escaped the notion that all public land was essentially a cropping opportunity — the idea that if you cannot raise timber on it or take a deer off it, it wasn’t valuable.” On the other hand, Mr. Kennedy said, Mr. Udall understood that public lands like parks enhanced the economic value of privately held land nearby.

This lesson was sometimes communicated with difficulty. For example, in the 1960s, when the Kennedy administration, with Mr. Udall in the lead, began efforts to establish the nation’s first national seashores, people in regions including Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and Point Reyes in California objected that taking coastal land out of private hands would ruinously inhibit economic development.

Instead, the parks have been beacons for lucrative tourism.

On this and other fronts Mr. Udall pushed with a formidable combination of political acumen and political allies — including his brother Morris K. Udall, who succeeded him in Congress and in 1976 ran for president in a campaign that his elder brother managed. Much of the significant environmental and land-protection statutes that became law in the 1970s and ’80s, including the Endangered Species Act, bore their stamp and influence.

“That was a wonderful time, and it carried through into the Nixon administration, into the Ford administration, into the Carter administration,” Stewart Udall said. “It lasted for 20 years. I don’t remember a big fight between the Republicans and Democrats in the Nixon administration or President Gerald Ford and so on. There was a consensus that the country needed more conservation projects of the kind that we were proposing.”

Stewart Lee Udall was born on Jan. 31, 1920, in St. Johns, Ariz., a small community in Apache County in the northeast, into a family with strong ties to the Mormon Church. His mother, Louise Lee Udall, was a granddaughter of John Doyle Lee, who was executed in 1877 for his involvement in the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah, in which a wagon train of California-bound migrants were killed in 1857.

Mr. Udall served as a Mormon missionary in Pennsylvania and New York. During World War II, he was a gunner in the 15th Army Air Forces, serving in Europe.

He received bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of Arizona. After graduating from law school in 1948, he started his own law practice in Tucson, where he and his brother Morris later became partners.

After leaving Washington, he taught at Yale, practiced law and wrote several books including “The Myths of August” an account of the effects of uranium mining and nuclear weapons work in the Western desert.

That grew out of his representation of thousands of uranium miners, nuclear weapons industry workers, and citizens exposed to radiation from atomic weapons manufacturing and testing in the West.

Though he won the first case in 1984 in Federal District Court, an appeals court overturned the ruling and the United States Supreme Court declined in 1988 to hear arguments. Mr. Udall then turned to Congress, working with lawmakers of both parties, particularly Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The law, administered by the Justice Department, provided up to $100,000 for those sickened by radiation exposure, and issued a formal apology for harm done to those who were “subjected to increased risk of injury and disease to serve the national security interests of the United States.”

Throughout his life he relished physical challenges. He was an all-conference guard on the University of Arizona basketball team and he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, in East Africa, and Mount Fuji, in Japan, while heading American delegations to both regions. When he was 84, at the end of his last rafting trip on the Colorado River, Mr. Udall hiked up the steep Bright Angel Trail from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the south rim, a 10-hour walk that he celebrated at the end with a martini.

Mr. Udall’s wife, the former Irmalee Webb, died in 2001. Besides his son Tom, he is also survived by his other sons, Scott, Denis and Jay, and his daughters, Lynn and Lori, as well as eight grandchildren.

At his death, Mr. Udall was a senior member of one of the nation’s last and largest political dynasties — in the West it was often said there were “oodles of Udalls” in politics. David King Udall served in the Arizona Territorial legislature; Levi Udall was for decades an elected judge in the Arizona Superior Court and later a justice and chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court; Mr. Udall’s brother Morris was followed to Washington by his son Mark Udall, elected in 2008 as a senator from Colorado, the same year that Tom Udall was elected.

But Tom Udall said that in recent years his father had become greatly concerned over the state of politics in the country, worrying “we were losing the bipartisanship in the environmental area.”

He added that Mr. Udall had recently written a letter to his grandchildren, urging them to focus on “trying to transform our society to a clean energy and clean job society.”
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