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George B. Hartzog, Jr., at the National Park Foundation Board meeting, Cumberland Island National Seashore, Georgia, 1972. Cecil W. Stoughton, photographer. (National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.)

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George B. Hartzog, Jr., served as seventh director of the National Park Service for nine years, 1964 to 1972. This oral history, the third in a series of interviews with former directors by Park Service bureau historian Janet McDonnell, records Hartzog’s commentary and judgments on the events of his tenure. It is a valuable contribution to the history of the national parks and the National Park Service.

I approach this foreword as both participant and historian. As participant, I served as chief historian of the National Park Service through the entire directorate of George Hartzog. As historian, I have had more than three decades to study and reflect on those frantic, momentous years, with the added perspective afforded by the passage of time.

As participant, I remember George Hartzog as an administrator of rare ability. He was a workaholic who drove his staff at his pace. He not only managed, he ruled. He could be deeply caring, friendly, and sentimental with everyone in the Service. He could also be nearly tyrannical in his demands for superior performance. He entertained a broad vision of what the national parks should be and should mean to the American people, and he pursued his vision relentlessly. Above all, both with the Executive Branch and the Congress, he possessed political cunning, insight, and mastery almost nonexistent among federal agency heads, and he employed these talents to the great benefit of the National Park Service and the environmental movement launched by his chief, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall.

I have been privileged to call George Hartzog friend in all the years since my experience as participant.

Casting myself now as historian rather than participant and friend, I stand back as far as possible to appraise the Hartzog directorate. In the interview, he deals with the events of his administration with all the charm, wit, candor, verbal facility, and articulation for which he has always been known. Here I place these events in more orderly form as background to his commentary.

Most important, he led the largest expansion of the National Park System in history. During his nine-year tenure, the system grew by seventy-two units totaling 2.7 million acres–not just national parks, but historical and archeological monuments and sites, recreation areas, seashores, riverways, memorials, and cultural units celebrating minority experiences in America.

Working closely with subcommittee chairman Senator Alan Bible in 1971, he laid the legislative basis for the expansion of the National Park System in Alaska. When the Congress in 1980 finally acted on this provision of law, it doubled the acreage of the National Park System.

Determined that the National Park Service reflect the growing national concern for minorities, Hartzog developed programs that gave the Service a different complexion. He named the first black park superintendent, the first career woman superintendent, the first American Indian superintendent, and the first black chief of a major U.S. police department. The promotion of women and minorities has steadily expanded over the years since.

Hartzog persuaded Congress to authorize a program for citizens to volunteer their time and talents to the needs of both park resources and park visitors. The Volunteers in Parks program (VIP) has flourished as budgetary shortfalls increasingly stressed permanent employees.

Beyond the parks themselves, Hartzog pursued outreach programs. Examples are the first environmental education curriculum in kindergarten through the twelfth grade. Complementing this initiative, he inaugurated study areas in a system of National Education and Development Landmarks, christened NEED. He also put into effect programs to make national parks relevant to an urban society, such as Summer in the Parks, Parks for all Seasons, and Living History. He obtained legislation creating the congressionally chartered National Park Foundation, which funded many worthy projects for which appropriations were unavailable.

Many other achievements and issues could be cited, but as a historian I want to give special emphasis to historic preservation. This is especially timely because in November 2006 Hartzog received the prestigious Crowninshield Award of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 broadened the concept of historic preservation from individual landmarks of significance to all survivors from the past that citizens thought worth saving as part of their local environment. Interstate highways and urban renewal had wiped out much of local value to citizens, not only individual structures, but entire districts and even treasured landscapes. The new act created a National Register of Historic Places, led to a network of State Historic Preservation Officers charged with nominating such local places to the Register, established a program of grants-in-aid to the states, and authorized an Advisory Council on Historic Preservation to advise the president and federal agency heads as well as enforce protective safeguards for registered properties.

The National Historic Preservation Act would not have passed, at least in 1966, but for George Hartzog. Many people worked hard on this initiative, but without Hartzog’s largely hidden political labors on Capitol Hill, with congressional staff as well as members, the law would not have been enacted. He not only brought his legendary political skills to bear, but ensured that the entire program would rest with the National Park Service. This I know because I witnessed it as participant.

The programs spawned by the National Historic Preservation Act have spread across the nation, onto the state and local levels and into the private sector. For people concerned with the quality of their local environment, the results of the act have proved one of the great success stories of the late twentieth century.

George Hartzog made great things happen. He benefited from a rare combination of circumstances that favored his vision. It fit neatly into President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and into Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall’s robust environmentalism. The secretary, moreover, not only had selected George Hartzog for the directorship but gave him full rein and support in pursuing his vision. A Democratic Congress receptive to the “Great Society” proved receptive to the measures Hartzog promoted. And the Democratic Congress also discovered that voters concerned for their national parks and the environment in which they lived were ready for the laws he sought.

Well versed in the history of the National Park Service, I am familiar with the record of every director since the creation of the agency in 1916. Excepting the co-founders of the Service, Stephen Mather and Horace Albright, I have no hesitation in pronouncing George Hartzog the greatest director in the entire history of the Service.

History will benefit from his own view of his legacy as set down in this interview with Janet McDonnell.

*Before his retirement from federal service in 1980, Robert M. Utley served not only as chief historian of the National Park Service but as director of the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation, assistant director of the Service for Park Historic Preservation, and deputy director of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. He is the author of sixteen books on the history of the American West.

This oral history is the product of three interview sessions conducted with George B. Hartzog, Jr., seventh director of the National Park Service, at his home in McLean, Virginia, in 2005. This oral history provides but a small glimpse of Hartzog’s Southern charm, warmth, and candor—and his great gift as a storyteller. He remains a commanding and inspirational figure. As no doubt with every task he has taken on, Hartzog approached this project with his characteristic enthusiasm—and some degree of humility. He insisted that the oral history focus on the Service’s accomplishments, rather than on his own, and was particularly intent that current and future Service employees benefit from his interview. Though George Hartzog retired from the Park Service decades ago, his passion for the parks and for the National Park Service remains evident. I have heard no one speak more eloquently or forcefully about the importance of national parks to our nation and the role of national parks in defining us as a people.

William C. Everhart graciously agreed to join us for the first and last interview sessions. The close friendship and mutual respect between the two interviewees were readily apparent. Everhart started his distinguished career with the National Park Service as a historian at Gettysburg National Military Park in 1951. His friendship and professional partnership with Hartzog began soon after Hartzog became superintendent at Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. As the result of a search for the best candidate to plan and develop the memorial’s museum, he invited Everhart to join him in St. Louis. When Hartzog became director of the Service, he selected Everhart as assistant director for interpretation, and Everhart played a key role in the Hartzog administration. Later Everhart served Directors Ronald H. Walker and Gary Everhardt as special assistant for policy before his retirement from the Service in 1977.

This oral history is not intended to serve as a detailed account of George Hartzog’s extraordinary career. For a more complete picture, one should look at Hartzog’s own published account, Battling for the National Parks, at a well written portrait in The New Yorker,1 and at several other oral history interviews conducted with him over the past few decades. Kathy Mengak produced a doctoral dissertation about Hartzog in 2002 as a Ph.D. candidate at Clemson University. I saw no need to duplicate the historical record already available to researchers. Rather, this interview attempts to focus on the Hartzog era as one of transition. Its goal is to add personal insight and depth to the historical record of what was a period of phenomenal expansion in the National Park System and significant change in the National Park Service. This oral history focuses on Hartzog’s career with the National Park Service, primarily on his tenure as director.

After the first interview session, Mr. Hartzog provided me with written comments to expand on some of the subjects we had covered. I have integrated short excerpts from his written statement into the transcript where appropriate and have in a few instances inserted additional detail. These additions are set in italic type. In addition, occasionally words or phrases are added in brackets for greater clarity.

In the course of the interview, Hartzog spoke eloquently and fervidly about why parks are important to the American people, how parks help define us a people and foster a common identity. Parks, he said, challenge us with the fundamental questions, “Why?” and “Who am I?” Throughout his career, the question “Why” remained critically important to Hartzog. It was not only a question he asked himself, but a question he encouraged others to ask. It is a question that remains relevant for us today. As a final note, spending time with Mr. Hartzog and his wife, Helen, was a rare treat—a privilege and a pleasure. I am deeply grateful for their warm hospitality and for the long chats about what was, by any measure, one of the most remarkable periods in Park Service history.

I am very grateful to Mary Ann Greenwood for carefully transcribing the original interview tapes and to Lise Sajewski for her great skill in editing the transcript. Tom DuRant at Harpers Ferry Center generously gave his time to locate many of the photographs. Kerry Skarda and her team at [B] Creative Group deserve much credit for their high quality design work. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Martin Perschler, acting manager of the NPS Park History program, for his expertise and diligence in seeing this oral history through to publication.

To fully appreciate the career and contributions of George B. Hartzog, Jr., it is important to understand something of his early life. His character and beliefs were shaped to a great extent by his mother, his Southern upbringing, the Great Depression, and the New Deal programs of the 1930s. George Hartzog, Jr., was born in 1920 in a rural community in South Carolina. His father, George, Sr., farmed roughly 150 acres in the Edisto River section of Colleton County, South Carolina, off State Highway 61, five miles from the village of Smoaks. George, his parents, and two younger sisters lived in a modest frame house, near a larger family home occupied by his grandparents. He began his education in a nearby one-room schoolhouse. The following year he began attending a school in Smoaks. George helped his father grow cantaloupes, cucumbers, watermelon, corn, green vegetables, and cotton.

The economic bust of the Great Depression forced the family to sell their farm to pay the mortgage and move into the home of George’s grandfather. When fire later consumed that household, Hartzog writes in his autobiography, the family lost everything “but faith in God and my mother’s determination.”2 The situation grew worse for the Hartzog family when George’s father developed chronic asthma that prevented him from working; his mother struggled with rheumatoid arthritis. The family survived these years, Hartzog later recalled, through the charity of neighbors and the welfare programs of the New Deal. The personal experience of the Great Depression and New Deal programs left a deep imprint on the young Hartzog and no doubt shaped his devotion to the values of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program decades later. Growing up in a rural South Carolina community and watching the daily struggles of women and African Americans also planted the seeds of his deep personal commitment to advancing opportunities for women and minorities in the national parks and in the National Park Service.

In 1933, the Hartzog family moved to Walterboro, the Colleton County seat, so George’s mother could find work. A talented seamstress, she quickly found work as the county supervisor of WPA sewing rooms, while George Hartzog, who had absorbed her strong work ethic, took on a series of part-time jobs to supplement the family income: mowing lawns, pumping gas, store clerk, busboy, dishwasher, and cook. In 1936, at age sixteen, Hartzog left school in order to work full-time, pumping gas during the day and operating as a hotel clerk at night.

Hearing that George had dropped out of school, Col. James F. Risher, headmaster of the Carlisle Military School, a high school in Bamberg, South Carolina, visited the Hartzog family at Walterboro. The colonel, a childhood friend of George’s mother, told the family that “to amount to anything, George must finish high school.” There were only six weeks left of the school year, but the colonel took George back with him, agreeing that if George passed the final exam, he could graduate. George did. In the summer of 1937, he was licensed by the Methodist Church as a local preacher, the youngest licensed preacher in the state at the time. An anonymous group of local businessmen provided funds to send the seventeen-year-old preacher to Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to study Methodist theology, but when the funds ran out at the end of the first semester, George returned to Walterboro, where he worked for a year and a half as a stenographer and interviewer for the Colleton County Department of Public Welfare.

In 1939 Hartzog went to work as a law clerk and legal secretary for Joe [Joseph M.] Moorer, a partner in the Walterboro law firm of Padgett and Moorer. There he read and studied law at night under Moorer’s supervision following the prescribed three-year curriculum. To augment his modest income, Hartzog joined a local National Guard unit. In September 1940 his unit was called into federal service and sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. After his return, Hartzog continued his studies back in Walterboro, passed the South Carolina bar exam, and was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of South Carolina on December 17, 1942, remarkably without completing college or ever attending a law school. He then went into private law practice. In March 1943 he was inducted into the army, where he first served in the judge advocate’s office of the 75th Infantry Division at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and later was assigned to the military police.

After his discharge from active duty in 1946, he began work as an adjudicator for the General Land Office (now the Bureau of Land Management). Six months later, he left the federal government to join a private law firm. Soon after, he accepted a position as an attorney for the National Park Service in its Chicago headquarters. When the Park Service headquarters moved back to Washington, D.C., in 1947, Hartzog and his new bride, Helen, moved there as well. He was subsequently transferred to Lake Texoma National Recreation Area in Denison, Texas, to administer the program for leasing land and in 1948 was reassigned to the chief counsel’s office back in Washington, D.C. The self-taught lawyer was admitted to practice law before the Supreme Court of the United States in October 1949.

Hartzog was promoted to assistant chief of concessions management in 1951. Over the next few years he continued his education at American University, where he received a bachelor of science degree in business administration. In 1955 he became assistant superintendent of Rocky Mountain National Park and two years later was transferred to Great Smoky Mountains National Park as assistant superintendent. He became superintendent of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1959. There he successfully initiated the construction of the historic Gateway Arch. With construction underway, Hartzog left the Service in July 1962 to become the executive director and secretary of Downtown St. Louis, Inc., a position he would not hold for long.

In 1962 Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall approached Hartzog about becoming the next director of the National Park Service. Udall had been favorably impressed when the two men met in 1961 during Udall’s visit to the Ozarks in southeast Missouri to review a proposal for a national monument. During a two-day float trip on the Current River, Udall quickly came to admire Hartzog’s enthusiasm, drive, and leadership qualities. They agreed that Hartzog would serve as an associate director under the current director, Conrad L. Wirth, and then step into the director’s position when Wirth retired. Hartzog became associate director in February 1963 and succeeded Wirth in January 1964, early in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. Udall had found what he was looking for in a National Park Service director—a forceful leader who would help implement President Johnson’s Great Society program. Hartzog approached his directorship with vision, passion, and energy, often working fourteen hour days and devoting many weekends to meeting with park superintendents. His was a very personal and dynamic style of leadership. He wielded power forcefully and effectively. As we see in this interview, Hartzog took personal control of the budget, personnel issues, and legislation, delegating everything else to his staff. Early on he decided to appoint each park superintendent personally.

George Hartzog was one of the most influential and effective directors that the National Park Service has ever had. It can be argued that Hartzog ranked with the Park Service’s founders and first two directors, Stephen T. Mather and Horace M. Albright, in his political acumen and effectiveness. He fully understood and appreciated the important role of Congress in shaping public-land policy and had a deep respect for the legislative process. He was a skilled lobbyist and even today recalls with some satisfaction that he wore out three pairs of shoes a year making office visits on Capitol Hill. He was extremely successful shepherding new legislation through Congress. No doubt the strong support from Secretary Udall and their shared vision contributed greatly to Hartzog’s effectiveness.

During Hartzog’s nine years as director, the National Park System underwent its greatest period of expansion since the 1930s. Roughly seventy units came into the system, nearly three-quarters as many as in the preceding thirty years. His tenure not only marked a period of great expansion and growth, but also it was in many ways a period of transition for the Service. Under Hartzog’s skilled leadership, Park Service managers and professionals expanded their operations and activities in new directions. The director greatly enlarged the Service’s role in urban education, historic preservation, interpretation, and environmental education.

A remarkable array of new types of units came into the National Park System during the Hartzog years. Ozark National Scenic Riverways in Missouri, authorized by Congress in 1964, foreshadowed the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of October 2, 1968, which led to the incorporation of other free-flowing rivers into the park system. Pictured Rocks and Indiana Dunes on the Great Lakes became the first national lakeshores in 1966. The National Trails System Act of 1968 made the Service responsible for the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. Gateway National Recreation Area in New York City and Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, both established in 1972, would lead to similar units serving other urban areas. The director advanced the concept of national cultural parks with the establishment of Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts (now Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts) in Virginia.

The Hartzog years marked a transition from the era of Mission 66, the ten-year billion dollar program launched in 1956 by Director Wirth to upgrade and modernize facilities, staff, and resource management throughout the National Park System, to the environmental era. Hartzog was the first director to serve at a time when the environmental movement had to be addressed. During his tenure Congress passed a series of laws reflecting the new emphasis on the environment, including the Wilderness Act of 1964, National Trails System Act, and Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which helped transform the National Park System. There was a new emphasis on science, and natural resource management was restructured along ecological lines following a 1963 report on the condition of natural resources in the parks by a committee of scientists chaired by A. Starker Leopold. Environmental interpretation that emphasized ecological relationships and special environmental education programs for school children reflected and promoted the growing national environmental movement.

As noted, Director Hartzog had a strong personal interest in the values of the Great Society program. He viewed national parks much like other Great Society measures, as an investment in improving the way people lived, and was deeply and passionately committed to making parks more relevant to an increasingly urbanized American society. Under his skilled leadership, the Service reached out as never before to underrepresented and underserved groups, particularly urban populations, minorities, and young people, with urban parks and programs such as Summer in the Parks. Living History programs were introduced at many historical parks, ranging from frontier military demonstrations at Fort Davis National Historic Site, Texas, to period farming at Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, Indiana. Hartzog worked to expand diversity by expanding the management role for women and minorities within the Service. He appointed the first African American to head the U.S. Park Police (Grant Wright) and was the first to promote women, African Americans, and Native Americans from within the Service into park superintendent positions.

The Hartzog administration marked the greatest advances in historic preservation since the 1930s. Responding to the destructive effects of urban renewal, highway construction, and other federal projects after World War II , the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 authorized the Service to maintain a comprehensive National Register of Historic Places. The listed properties, whether nationally or locally significant, would receive special consideration in federal project planning and federal grants along with technical assistance to encourage their preservation. Thus the Service’s historical activities moved beyond park boundaries. During this interview Hartzog observed that his proudest accomplishments were twofold: his role in ensuring that large areas in Alaska were set aside (under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act), and his role in the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966. He was quick to point out that he did not initiate either of these measures, but accepted some credit for pushing the legislation through.

Under Hartzog, the National Park Service developed and instituted new management policies to address a greatly expanded and increasingly complex park system. On July 10, 1964, Secretary Udall signed a management policy memorandum that the Park Service director and his staff had prepared. It identified three categories for units in the National Park System: natural, historical, and educational. A separate set of management principles were devised for each; Service leaders distilled dozens of handbooks that governed how parks were managed down to just three. Hartzog launched a number of reorganizations within the Park Service, not all of which were popular or successful. For example, he consolidated professionals at the Denver Service Center and at the newly established Harpers Ferry Center in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. He created an associate director for resource studies and created the new Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation to oversee and implement the Service’s greatly expanded historic preservation responsibilities.

As part of Hartzog’s effort to build support for the parks outside the National Park Service, he played a key role in securing the 1967 legislation creating the National Park Foundation. The legislation authorized this private, non-profit foundation to encourage, accept, and administer private gifts for the benefit of the Service and to support and assist the Service in other ways in conserving the National Park System’s natural, scenic, historic, and recreational resources. The foundation would fund many significant projects for which congressional funding was not available. He also secured congressional authorization for the Volunteers in Parks program to encourage the public to volunteer their time and talents in the parks. Hartzog successfully organized the National Parks Centennial Celebration and the Second World Conference on National Parks held at Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in 1972.

George Hartzog was one of the last directors to span both Democratic and Republican administrations and work for Department of the Interior secretaries from both parties. He remained as director until January 1973 when President Richard M. Nixon replaced him. In this interview the former director stated that he had three major objectives during his tenure: to expand the National Park System, to make the National Park Service more relevant to the American people, and to incorporate more women and minorities into the management structure. By any measure he succeeded. With his vision, political skill, and dynamic leadership, he left behind a greatly expanded and invigorated agency. His rich legacy and contributions continue to be felt throughout the National Park Service and the National Park System today.

William C. Everhart, a veteran of twenty-six years with the National Park Service, participated in two of the three oral history interview sessions. Everhart grew up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and received a bachelor’s degree from Gettysburg College. During World War II , he enlisted in the army infantry, participating in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he continued his education. He received a master’s degree in history from Penn State and then enrolled in a doctoral program in history at the University of Pennsylvania. While pursuing his doctoral studies, he accepted a summer job as a ranger historian at Gettysburg National Military Park. During Everhart’s second year at the university, the battlefield historian, Fred Tilberg, hired him on a permanent basis as his assistant in 1951.

Everhart would have six different positions in his first six years with the National Park Service. After a year at Gettysburg, Everhart accepted a position as park historian at Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi, where he managed the interpretive program. He later became project historian with the Atlantic and Gulf Coast seashore survey and then went on to Philadelphia to supervise historians and curators in the restoration of Independence Hall. The Park Service transferred him to San Francisco in the mid 1950s to participate in a national survey of historic sites and buildings. Toward the end of his second year in San Francisco, Everhart was invited by George Hartzog to join him in St. Louis to research and plan the Museum of Westward Expansion underneath the Gateway Arch.

Everhart preceded Hartzog to Park Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. In 1962 he was assigned to serve on a task force preparing long-range plans for the Service. When Hartzog later became National Park Service director, he offered Everhart the position of assistant director for interpretation. Everhart became the first director of the Park Service’s interpretive design center opened in 1970 at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, to house graphic designers, editors, curators, photographers, and other professionals who developed interpretative displays and performed other tasks in support of the parks. After his work at Harpers Ferry Center, he served Park Service directors Ronald H. Walker and Gary Everhardt as special assistant for policy. Everhart retired from the Service in 1977. Following retirement he spent time as a visiting professor at Clemson University and published two classic Park Service histories: The National Park Service in 1972 (rev. ed., 1983) and Take Down Flag & Feed Horses in 1998.

You came to the Park Service, as I understand, in 1946 to the Chicago office. Would you describe what it was like to work in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago in 1946? 3

Well, it was really a great experience. And as a matter of fact, I think the commercial culture of the Merchandise Mart spilled into the government operations of the Park Service, not to affect its process or procedures, but to make it conscious of a larger world that you were a part of rather than just being a government employee. So I enjoyed my time in the Merchandise Mart very much indeed.

What are your recollections of the National Park Service director at the time, Newton Drury? Any thoughts on his leadership, his personality?

Newton Drury was a shy, introverted man, but a brilliant man and a deep thinker, who had tremendous visions and hopes, many of which, through his tenacity and his assembly of friends, he was able to implement successfully, such as the Save the Redwoods League in California. Most of the Redwood National Park, state parks, and national parks in California, owed their being to Newton Drury and his commitment to saving those redwoods. He was a very even-tempered man. I found him a delight to work with and as a young lawyer I was always awed when I was called into his presence and he frequently did that. He would have subordinate staff come into his office to discuss things with him, always in the company, of course, of Jack [Jackson E.] Price, the chief counsel, who was a great friend of Drury’s. They had a great rapport. I thought that Drury had a great commitment to the National Park Service.

I [will] tell the story about a leaning redwood in Giant Forest [in Sequoia National Park]. The owner of the concession [in the park] was Howard Hayes, a great figure in the history of parks, who owned the Riverside Press, the morning and afternoon newspaper in Riverside, California. He built the first cabins in Yellowstone National Park as a young man and then headed the See America First campaign during World War I. And then he got what the doctors considered to be terminal tuberculosis. He had to sell out his Yellowstone operation and went to California presumably to die, and he was bedridden for a year in California. And when they took him back in the hospital they could find no evidence of tuberculosis at all, so he began his life again as an entrepreneur. He started, at Stephen Mather’s suggestion, with a concession in Sequoia National Park, and then went on later to own the transportation concession at Glacier National Park. He was a wonderful person. I considered him to be one of my mentors, because he was of that breadth of influence and personality.

This tree was leaning over about seven or eight of Howard Hayes’s cabins. And Eivind Scoyen, who later became associate director, a legendary figure in the Park Service, was the superintendent at Sequoia and nobody could cut a redwood tree without the director’s concurrence. We were having this superintendents’ conference in Yosemite. This would have been in 1950. After that conference this team of Drury and Howard Hayes and Eivind Scoyen were to go back and look at this redwood tree.

Because of a great tragedy in the Park Service—the chief of concessions, Oliver G. Taylor, had climbed a tree in his backyard to trim a limb, had a heart attack, and fell out of the tree dead—I had just been detailed over to concessions as a young lawyer to help out. The director designated me as acting chief of concessions, so that’s why I was at the superintendents’ conference, to represent the concessions program in the Park Service. Mr. Drury said to me, “Why don’t you come down to Sequoia with me and look at this redwood tree?”

I had the experience of looking at three men whom I greatly admired in a very difficult situation. To see their interaction was an experience I can never forget, because the four of us assembled at this redwood tree. Those redwoods historically can lean for years without falling, but also they can in one storm topple, even if they’re standing straight, because they have a shallow root system. That tree was leaning in such a way that if it fell it was going to take out eight cabins, and if they were occupied, it was going to be a catastrophic loss of life. If they were not occupied, it was going to be nothing but eight wooden cabins destroyed in Giant Forest; … from the conservation standpoint it would have been the right thing to … get rid of them.

So round and round this redwood tree the four of us walked. Nobody said a word. And you cannot imagine the tension that built every time this group of four circled this tree. And why they kept circling the tree instead of stopping and talking was something I never did understand. But they continued to circle this tree and finally Newton Drury stopped and turned to them and he said, “Howard, my first responsibility is to the tree.” With that Howard Hayes exploded. He said, “My first responsibility is to the occupants of eight cabins, and if that tree were to fall on them, I would plaster this meeting across the front page of my newspaper.” This was the most absurd thing. Two guys I had the utmost respect and admiration and esteem for were really going at each other. Well, Eivind Scoyen spoke up and he said, “Mr. Director, why don’t you let me talk with Howard about this matter?” Drury turned and he said, “I think that is a great idea.” With that, the group dispersed and Mr. Drury and I came back to Washington. Of course, we cut the tree down. And that was a remarkable experience that I had.

W.E.– My definition of the Park Service is an organization in which, if a name is mentioned, a story is bound to follow and it’s often long. But it’s full of interesting characters who have stories to tell.

W.E.– That’s a good point and it is not as true. I don’t think there are as many characters as there used to be, because it’s a bureaucracy now, I guess it has to be, and so individuals don’t play such an important role as they used to.

Let’s move on to your tenure as director, Mr. Hartzog. When you became director what in your previous background and experience did you find most useful, maybe something out of your experience at Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Are there things you could point to when you became director and say, “Well, I know this, because of my past [experience],” that kind of thing?

Well, I was very fortunate. [In 1955] when I was the assistant superintendent at Rocky Mountain National Park, the government didn’t have any training for senior-level managers. The American Management Association gave the government eight scholarships to the managers program taught by the American Management Association at the old Hotel Astor in New York. I received one of those scholarships. Of course, the program was heavily supported by industry. Characters in my particular class came from Hughes, or from AT &T, Libby [Corporation]. All of those big-name companies had their mid-level managers at this program.

It was chaired by Laurence Appley, the chairman of the American Management Association, who had been the vice president of an international oil company and his domain was the eastern part of Asia. As he related to us, in his office there were two people, himself and his secretary. He pointed out that the reason was, “My managers in the field, when they had a problem, wanted to discuss it with me and not an assistant to me. And therefore I didn’t need any staff.” It was that tenor of the responsibility of a leader that I developed through that management program. I have a concept of management which I felt was pretty well grounded and was unique in terms of government service, because I never encountered that in the government.

I mean, the government was looked on as something different. I think one of the problems with government [work] today is [that] it is looked on as something different and something anybody can do. As long as it is politically acceptable, [you will have the attitude that] anybody can do government work, at any level. And that’s not true. Some of the most difficult, sophisticated management responsibilities in the world are done by government employees. I now have spent about half of my life in government and about half of my life as a private practicing attorney, and I would say between the two I have met more talented people in government than I have in private enterprise. There are a lot of advantages in private enterprise that don’t work in government, such as [family wealth] inheritance, that give people prominence and position and authority. They don’t get that advantage in government.

That was different than anything.… Then I went to St. Louis, and when I got [there] I discovered that I was not the first choice for St. Louis. I got the position because I was the last guy who would agree to go. They had offered the job to any number of more senior people who turned it down. They didn’t want any part of it. And as one of my friends wrote to me, “What in the hell did you do now that got you to St. Louis?”

Because I wanted an opportunity in any shape, manner, or form. I was on the make. I think that’s a modest way of putting it, don’t you, Bill?

G.H.– I thought it was an opportunity. When I got there I had a fantastic surprise, because the mayor of the city of St. Louis, Raymond R. Tucker, who turned out to be a mentor and a friend beyond compare, had issued an ultimatum to the director that if the project wasn’t under contract by July 1, he was going to make arrangements for somebody else to take it over, because he had been waiting for four years after the money had been appropriated for the Park Service to do something. I was unaware of that when I was appointed in December 1958 to report for duty in February.

The first thing I learned when I got there was that the relocation of the railroad tracks contract was to be under way by July 1, and they hadn’t even finished preparing the plan yet. There were fifteen organizations that had to review and concur on those plans, from labor unions, to railroads, to the city. So I was involved in a project for which I was only technically the final decision-maker. But to make that decision stick, I had to have the support and agreement of all of these people, any one of whom could bomb the project.

I learned a lesson in how to challenge people to something bigger than themselves, because when we got the plans for the railroad relocation from Eero Saarinen’s 4 office it was May. This was the first time anybody had seen those plans. And they had to be reviewed and approved by all of these agencies, including the state corporation commission, which controlled all corporations in the state of Missouri. I had tried to explain to my superiors in the Park Service that the normal Park Service review was never going to cut July 1, because you had to send those plans to the regional office. That became a month-long process and we didn’t have a month. We had less than two months left to get it [the railroad track relocation project] under contract.

I prevailed upon my regional director, Howard Baker. He was a remarkably fine man, whom, when I became the director, I made my associate director for operations. I said, “Howard, we’ve got to get everybody in a room, and we’ve got to let Saarinen’s people explain these plans, and they’ve got to sign off. We’ve got to go to contracting on a unit-cost basis, so much for a yard of excavation, so much for a yard of concrete, so much for a cross tie, so much for a foot of steel track, a unit-cost basis for everything, and we’re not going to know how much it costs until we’re finished. All we can have is an engineer’s estimate against which to open for bids. The bids have to be evaluated on the unit cost, who is offering us concrete the cheapest, and what is the aggregate sum of that.” “Absolutely no way can it be done that way. It has to be a lump-sum contract,” my superiors contended. Well, fortunately for me he [Baker] came to the plan review meeting. And when he saw the condition and the issue laid out in front of him, he immediately agreed we would be able to go to bid on a unit-price basis. The result was that we had the groundbreaking ceremony for the railroad relocation project on June 23. We made it by seven days. That was one of my first projects.

The second project was getting Bill [Everhart], because nobody had yet decided what the story was, what the story of expansion was. We were going to build the largest museum in the history of the National Park Service on the largest subject (westward expansion) that the National Park Service had ever been charged with interpreting and [we] hadn’t written the first chapter yet. I had a park historian who was more interested in being a superintendent than he was in being a historian. So I arranged for him to become a superintendent. Then I had to find a historian, and that’s how I found Bill, from the first promotion list.

And that was another thing about park management I found out. The first list they sent me, the guy at the top of it was a guy they were trying to get rid of at the park he was in.

So he was recommended superlatively. Everything was superlative. I didn’t call the regional director in whose region he served. I called his friends, because we shared some mutual friends. I knew who he was. I didn’t know his competence. I called them and they were the ones who said to me, “They’re trying to get rid of him. They’re trying to unload him. He’s incompetent. He’s a nice guy, but he’s over his head.”

I took that list and I got on a railroad train from St. Louis to Omaha, Nebraska, and I walked into [Regional Director] Howard Baker’s office and I handed him the list and I said, “You can have them. I don’t want them. The one I want I found from these many telephone calls, a guy named Bill Everhart, who’s working for the [historic sites] survey team in San Francisco.” Howard said to me, “Hell, he’ll never go to St. Louis.” I said, “Have you asked him?” He said, “No, I just know he won’t come.” I said, “Well, I want him on the list, number one, and you can put anybody else you want on it. But you put Bill Everhart on the list first and give it to me, and I’ll go back to St. Louis, and then I’ll tell you whether he’ll come or not.” So I called him [Bill Everhart], and, of course, Howard was right. Bill wanted to know who this idiot was on the phone talking with him, [asking him] to leave San Francisco to come to St. Louis in the first place, in the second place, to undertake a project which nobody had even started, let alone described the dimensions of it, and he didn’t have anybody to help.

W.E.– Let me tell you why I was available. About two months before that I had gotten a call from Omaha. They had an opening for a person who would be in charge of exploring new areas in the Rocky Mountains. Wonderful. So I came back to my wife, who was from Canada, and I mentioned the possibility of going there. In all my married life I’ve never heard her use a four-letter word before, but what she said was, “Where in the hell is Omaha?” It suggested to me something, so I turned the job down and was available [for another assignment].

Of course, being in the Park Service, I did the same thing on [George] that he did on me. I hadn’t heard much about him, so I started checking around and seeing what kind of job, what kind of program he had. It just seemed a fantastic opportunity so I took it. But I was called up for jury duty in San Francisco and I went to report that I was going to be moving out. The judge said, “Where are you moving to?” “St. Louis.” The judge said, “My goodness, from San Francisco?” We both sort of felt the same way. What a great town San Francisco is—but it worked out.

As George was saying, both he and I were working with Eero Saarinen. I mean working with the guy meant you in turn brought in the best possible people that you could get and those people changed our minds about design, all kinds of design, and so forth. Yes, I started work.

You both shared a history with the Park Service and worked together from that point on. Mr. Hartzog, I’d like to talk about your vision for the Park Service when you became director. The two of you must have had a shared vision. I’d like to hear both of you talk about your vision of what the Park Service could be, what it should be, how it should define itself.

I think that’s a very germane question and I’m so happy you ask it that way, because that’s exactly the way I approached my notes to talk with you. I think that is the heart of my nine years as director, because I think we did, and I think we shared the same vision, because we had talked about it for a long, long time. So there was not much new in terms of what he and I thought about the operation. There was a heck of a lot new in what we did about it when we got here, because, of course, Bill beat me to Washington. He left me [in St. Louis] and came to Washington for a promotion. So he was in Washington when I came as director. And one of the first things I did was to promote him and make him my assistant director for interpretation, because he had the vision for a new emphasis on interpretation and what it could mean. He can tell you about that. That’s one of the reasons I wanted him here [for this interview], because he was an integral part of what we tried to do.

I want to make one other point: when I came here I was aware of the fact that the opportunity for achieving your ambition is greatly enhanced with allies. That’s how we were able to build that project in St. Louis—with our allies. I learned the importance of legislators in a project’s success, such as the St. Louis City Council, Missouri State Legislature, and Missouri Congressional delegation.5 Success breeds success. When we were able to get that contract under way, we created more interest from more people than you can ever imagine in the city of St. Louis, because it had been there so long with nothing. We took a lot of ridicule, of course, [references to the proposed Gateway Arch as] the “wicket” and all of that, but we never let that depress us. It kind of excited us, because we were going to build the biggest “wicket” in the world, and we did. So the fact that you had to involve other people, and the ability and the recognition of the need to work with other people in achieving your objective was very much a part of my philosophy when I came here.

Now, with that in mind, what were the motivations that drove me to change things? Well, when I was in the field I had spent my time in Washington as a lawyer and as assistant chief of the concessions division, for a short while as the acting chief of the division when the old gentleman as I mentioned earlier, Mr. Oliver G. Taylor, passed away. And then I went [back] to the field but during that Washington experience I wrote three administrative manuals: land acquisition, concessions, and law enforcement. I got out to Rocky Mountain [National Park] and I had just finished the concessions manual, the last one of the three before I got there. We had the forms in the back that were acceptable for use in authorizing concessions. The form I had used for a saddle horse permit was the best one I had seen up to that point. I put it in the manual, but when I got to Rocky Mountain, I found one that was much superior.

So when it came time to issue those permits the next year, I said to the superintendent, “You know, this is a better form than the one in the book. Let’s use this.” He agreed and so we authorized our saddle horse operators under this park form. At that time you had to send a copy to the region. So the region got my copy. In two or three weeks, maybe a month or so, we got a memorandum back from the regional director wanting to know why we had used this form instead of the one prescribed in the manual. So the superintendent came in and he said, “What’s this all about?” I said, “Well, it’s better than the one in the manual. I wrote the manual so, I mean, I know what they are talking about. If I had had this form, it would have been in the manual instead of the one that’s in there. So I recommend you put that memo in the trash,” and that’s what he did while he was standing there. We heard nothing further of the matter.

But that fixed my view about administrative manuals. So when I came here as director in 1964, there were several things I was intent on doing. One of them was that the last time a secretary and the director had agreed on how they were going to run the park system was when Secretary [of the Interior] Franklin Lane and later Secretary [Hubert] Work both did memos for Horace Albright and Mather.6 Since then, no one had written a memorandum that set out how they wanted the Park Service run and who was going to run it. So the first thing that Bill Everhart and I started working on was a memorandum to me for the secretary to sign saying what the policies of the Park Service were going to be and what its modus operandi was going to be.

After reviewing the draft I had prepared, the secretary signed the memorandum on July 10, 1964, establishing six policy objectives: to provide for the highest quality use and enjoyment of the parks; to conserve and manage the parks responsibly; to expand the National Park System; to cooperate with other conservation organizations; to communicate the significance of the American heritage through the National Park System; and to increase the effectiveness of the National Park Service. In 1964, we had to change attitudes and motivate people to respond to the emerging needs of an urban America. That was a secretarial objective; therefore, it became my imperative.7

That was the beginning. The second thing I did was—after I got that [memorandum]—I then gave it to the legislative committees of Congress. Secretary Udall’s memo recognized the three categories of areas in the National Park System: natural, historical, and recreation. I wanted that defined by statute so that both the administration and the Congress were in agreement as to what’s in the park system…. Then we wrote these three management handbooks, [which] compiled for the first time in one place the individual policies that applied to natural areas, historical areas, and recreation areas.

Then another thing that we did was—we didn’t have any agreed-upon mission statement for the Park Service—so we developed what we called the Pledge of Public Service [card]. I’ll give you that if you don’t have one.8

G.H.– That was our mission statement. You turn that over on the other side, and there were goals, our goals in personnel management, because, you see, at that time if you left the Park Service, you were gone forever. They didn’t want you back. My experience was that I would welcome you back with the added experience and learning that you’d acquired. That’s one of the goals you see listed on the card. We [encouraged] you to go out and get additional experience.

Absolutely—and changing a structure that’s based on books to a structure that’s based on people. That concept of [having a] mission statement and the secretary’s memorandum saying what his objectives for the Park Service were, and we then developed those individual administrative policies that codified these sections. Then we developed program goals each year to tie it to the budget and that I meant to have mentioned that earlier, but I’ll mention it now.

The first thing I did when I came to Washington was I took control of the budget, personnel, and legislation with the explanation that I didn’t care who approved the master plan. Nobody was getting any people or money until I approved the budget and made the personnel appointment. So the critical juncture of management is people and money, and then legislation, the foundation for both of them. You can’t operate without money, and you can’t achieve your objective of expanding the system without the Congress, because they set the public-land policy of America—you don’t. So you’ve got to involve them. I took legislation, budget, and personnel; they were my province. Then I delegated the rest of the operation to the deputy, associate, and assistant directors in the Park Service. Now about that there are a lot of questions. Some of them say it was a good job, and some of them say that it was not done very well. But that’s why I’ve got Bill, and he’ll fill you in on that.

The other thing I did is that I wanted to know what my customer thought about my operation. What are the visitors getting, and what do the visitors have a right to get? So I set up an operations evaluation team.

I wanted to know that internal controls were in place as required by the laws enacted by Congress and the regulations promulgated by the General Accounting Office [now the Government Accountability Office], the Office of Management and Budget, and the secretary for accountability for money and property. I had an assistant director for administration who oversaw these functions, but I wanted to know more.

The Park Service is in the park-resource-preservation and people-serving business. You can have a clean bill of health from the auditors that tells you no one went south with anything of value. But it does not tell you how well you accomplished the mission. I established an operations evaluation unit to answer that question. The unit was small with two clerical workers and three senior executives who had experience in legislation and regulations, budget and appropriations, personnel management, and field operations.9

There were three people of senior rank on the team. One of them had been my previous personnel officer. One of them had been my previous chief of legislation and congressional affairs, and one of them had been a previous regional director: Hank [Henry G.] Schmidt, Frank Harrison, Jack Pound. They traveled. That’s all they did. No audit. They were forbidden to go into the back office and look at the books. Their view was the visitor’s view in the park. What do the signs look like? What is the condition of the roads? What do the buildings look like? What is the condition of interpretation? Does it have a story that the visitor understands and is interested in? Is it communicated well? Or does he [the ranger] have on a dirty uniform and not know what he’s talking about? What does the visitor see? That’s what I wanted to know.

They went from area to area and what they found to be excellent or very good in one area they shared with another, so in that way what was innovative and creative was quickly spread to the field where it counted. What was a real problem they sent to me in a blue envelope,10 a lousy park operation or a superintendent not on top of the job. I sent a copy [of the report] to the regional director with a note that I wanted to see him and the superintendent in my office in thirty days to discuss this.

The first one that went out happened to be involving one of my favorite people, Fred Fagergren, who had been superintendent of Grand Teton and whom I had just promoted to be regional director in Omaha. He got that memorandum, and he just came apart. You couldn’t imagine this wonderful man using such language to describe the inspector who wrote that report. What did he know about park operations? “Well,” I said, “Fred, he doesn’t know anything about them, but I had the doctor certify that he has very good vision. He can see. He’s not blind and that’s all that is—a report on what he saw. The signs are not maintained. The road has potholes in it. The ranger had a dirty uniform on. The other thing that he [the inspector] went on about involved an interpretive program in which the person stood in front of him and read half of it instead of having memorized the exercise. That’s what the visitor saw and it was a lousy visitor experience, and that’s what I want to talk about.” “Well, I know that’s not the way it is,” [Fagergren retorted]. I said, “Well, why don’t you do this. Why don’t you just cool off and go to the park and see what’s happening. Maybe it’s not the same park that you left.” Well, he quieted down.

Three or four weeks went by and it was time for my meeting. Helen Johnson, my secretary, called Fred to set up the meeting. One afternoon, late, I got a call from Fred and he said, “We don’t need that meeting.” I said, “Oh, yes, we need that meeting, because I want to find out what’s at the bottom of all of this.” He said, “I’ve already done it [identified the problem] and it won’t happen again.” So the reports had the added incentive of giving the regional directors insight into how their parks were being run. Often they get involved in paperwork, just as the director does, and do not see park operations often enough.

Mr. Everhart, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the vision that you shared. In my reading, a theme of that vision that really stood out was relevancy, and maybe if you could talk about that, too.

W.E.– When the Park Service was formed back in 1916, there were maybe fifteen national parks. Within a couple of years, interestingly enough, the leaders of the Park Service decided one of the major objectives of the values of the park was education. The Park Service was established in 1916 and by 1920 in some of the major national parks they were trying out evening campfire programs. If you’ve ever gone to a national park they’re still doing that to tell people about things. Horace Albright, one of the founders in Yellowstone, was hiring naturalists. And they used to give walks, and in the evening put on slide shows. Well, they called it initially “education.” Then they thought that sounded more like lectures and so forth, but what they were doing was telling people stories about the animals, and the flowers, the trees, … “interpreting” wildlife management, biology, geology, and so forth. Essentially, they were translating a foreign language. So interpretation became one of the four important park activities, along with ranger activities, administration, and maintenance.

At the time I joined the Park Service, I was a historian at the University of Pennsylvania working on a Ph.D. I came back to Gettysburg, my hometown, over a weekend and ran into the park historian at Gettysburg, who offered me a job as a seasonal. So I worked one summer and then went back to school until the Park Service invited me to come back and be a permanent employee. Well, at that time I didn’t think that much of the Park Service and I thought it over. But I did figure here I was, nearing 30. I didn’t even own an automobile. I needed the money. So I joined, intending to finish up the Ph.D. soon.

In the first six years I was in the Park Service, I had six different jobs. What I realized is that the archeologists, the architects, and the historians and so forth were doing programs in the park which should be of a value and an excellence comparable to the park itself. When you’re doing things in Yellowstone, whether you’re doing the visitor center, or whether you’re doing the exhibits in the museum, they ought to be on the same level of [quality] and interest as the park itself. This is no place to do sloppy work.

Underneath the Gateway Arch, the Park Service planned to develop the largest museum it had ever undertaken. That’s what George called me to do. But as we made visits to Eero Saarinen’s office and saw the quality of the work being done, we got the idea of why not hire Saarinen to do the museum? We would do all of the historical research and have him design the museum.

So I went up a couple of times to his office— so we decided to ask Saarinen to do the museum. He agreed and invited Eames to help. I don’t know if you’re a fan of Charles Eames,11 the chair maker and designer and so forth— Well, to make a long story short, they made their pitch to the director. He told them, “No, we already have the best museum designers in the country.” But later on, the museum was designed by a former Saarinen architect.

G.H.– That’s the vision we brought back here. And that caused a lot of consternation, because it had been an organization that was run by personalities and by administrative manuals. We had fifty-six of those books, and I was convinced that that was the bottom line of why we couldn’t bring about any change. So I asked the regional directors about that, because we had to not only develop our program standards but also develop personal performance standards. These standards told the employee the conditions that exist when the job’s done satisfactorily. I was convinced from what I was hearing that always we went back to those cotton-picking manuals.

So I asked the regional directors to look at the manuals. They agreed that many of them were out of date but said we should keep them because it insured uniformity, and that’s when I came unhinged. I said, “You know, that happens to be the last thing I’m looking for. I want creativity, and innovation, and we’ll get it my way, if we abolish them.” And I abolished every one of them, thinking that never again would the Park Service be able to put them together, because they wouldn’t have that many people. Well, I wasn’t gone five years before they’d rewritten up to seventy volumes of them. Do you want to know the difference in the Park Service then and now? That’s it! Now you’re using a book to run the place, and back then we used people to run the place. I’m perfectly happy to have the record compared when we used people as opposed to when you use books.

I guess part of that emphasis on people was, again, with this idea of relevancy, looking for ways to reach out to a broader American public, a more diverse American public, and attract them to the parks.

We were already excluding from our management over half of our population, because no woman except one and no minority had any management job in the uniform service of the National Park Service. We had one woman who was a park superintendent. She [Wilhelmina S. Harris] was Mr. [Brooks] Adams’s secretary when the Adams [Memorial Foundation] gave the Adams Mansion to the National Park Service, and the requirement in the transition was that she be retained as the manager of the estate. I like to tell the story that the only woman superintendent we had was a gift. And that was it.12

That was the situation when we opened the system up to women and minorities. We also opened up the Park Police. I appointed the first minority chief of any major police department in the United States. You know, here we are—and we’re saying that crime is rampant and that most of it is in the center [inner] cities. Most of it is generated by impoverished minority groups, and yet who is running the place? We have nobody who can speak their language. We’ve got nobody who is empathetic to them. And I learned from my experience in St. Louis where our guard force was African Americans. They were some of the most competent people I had there. I don’t think there was any one of them whom we had who didn’t have the respect of every professional we had on the staff there.

Can you put that in the context of President Johnson’s Great Society program? It seems like what you were trying to accomplish also fit into the broader goals of the administration.

I don’t think there’s any question but that the success of it depended upon the fact that it was consistent with what he and the secretary were trying to do. But I think that my explanation is: Why was I so committed to that? Because my experience from my youth said to me that women are the most competent people. Our family was saved by my mother, not by my father, because the Great Depression had made an invalid out of him. Our family was saved by her. So I knew what women could do.

Of course, I had the same experience with the blacks in the South. I knew that some of the most talented people in our town, our little rural country town, were the black people. An electrician who was a black man was one of the most competent people in town, but he had to come into your house by the back door. That was repulsive to me. Those were the motivating factors that said, you can’t exclude such people from management and have a successful team. But certainly it would never have succeeded without being consistent with what the secretary and the president wanted. And President Johnson’s experience was very much like mine. We both were raised in the South.

It sounds like you’re describing a very personal commitment to the goals of the Great Society. Is that accurate? Do you want to elaborate on that?

Absolutely. I don’t have any problem with that [the goals of the Great Society]. I believed [in] that and I believe it still to this day. Yes, I do. I believe that and I think that we are leaving behind a great segment of our population, which is a tragic failure of government. But that’s not because the government employees are incompetent. That’s because we’ve got an administration that doesn’t share those objectives.

A common Southern reason for believing black people are poor is because they’re lazy. Well, it’s just a falsehood, that’s all. They have had no opportunity. When they have opportunity they’re as successful as anybody else.

Certainly the Park Service has begun in the last ten years to incorporate sites into the National Park System that reflect a more diverse history. Is that a trend that you’ve also seen?

W.E.– Women’s Rights National Historical Park, speaking of the way in which that [trend is exemplified]—and another one, we can talk about how Wolf Trap came about.13

G.H.– You know, Bill Everhart and I believed that our historical cultural parks were mostly birthplaces and battlefields. That was what we were commemorating. The military started it by saving battlefields, which ultimately in the 1930s were transferred to the Park Service and became the core of our historical parks in the system today. Birthplaces and battlefields, but nothing in between about what the creative people who came to this country accomplished. Every politician is anxious to jump out and proclaim [these sites as symbols of] the American way of life. When I became director, we hadn’t commemorated any of that. We started that [effort] when Bill and I were in the Park Service, and Wolf Trap is one of them. We had a whole list of cultural park proposals.

I even had a cultural park on the boards to interpret the cultural heritage of the Zuni Tribe…. It would have been a “counterpart proposal.” We would interpret the Zuni history and we would put in a Park Service career organization, and the chairman of the Zunis would appoint a counterpart. NPS and American Indian staff would work side by side. We agreed that when the Zuni had reached a level of competence that he could handle the job, we’d take our career employee out. [Eventually] that cultural park would be staffed entirely by Zuni Indians. Just think what a marvelous experience that would be today for somebody from New York being able to walk into a great cultural park in the Southwest and all they meet are Indians, Native Americans. Well, that went by the boards because one of the [Nixon administration’s] objectives in getting rid of me was to stop that legislative flow of new areas into the park system. The administration … operated under the slogan of “thinning of the blood.”14 I’m sure you’ve run into that.

If you would, talk about your concept of the system: how you would define it and whether it’s a finite thing or whether it should continue to grow; just your concept of parks as a system and how to determine what should come into the National Park System.

I saw a television program last night on this fantastic formation in the state of Washington. Did you happen to see that? Well, I forget what the title of the program was but it was about Missoula Lake. Have you ever heard of Missoula Lake?

I never had either. But there was a glacier independent of the Canadian glaciers that came down in the Ice Age that formed, that blocked the river that goes through Missoula, Montana, and created a 500-mile lake, 1,000 feet deep. And when the water broke the dam of the glacier from the Washington State side, that water washed across the state of Washington and into the Pacific Ocean. I don’t know the name of it, but it’s a formation that we don’t yet have in the National Park System. I think it should be in the National Park System. I think the natural areas have not had nearly the opportunity for expansion.

We still lack a good hardwood national forest park in the Northeast. We were going to do one in Pennsylvania. That was when the concept of national preserves came about. I told Joe [Rep. Joseph M.] McDade [of Scranton, Pennsylvania], the senior minority member on the House Appropriations Committee, that Pennsylvania had a large area of land that had been polluted with tailings from mining. This land could be set aside as a preserve. We were going to set it up as a preserve for thirty years with no visitation, use it for the Job Corps boys and girls to go in and restore the natural environment. The restoration could take decades but the result would be a great natural park. This is much like what the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] boys did in Shenandoah [National Park]. Shenandoah was all farmed over, cut over, burned over, and today we argue about the size of the wilderness. That’s what we could have if we used those preserves in that way in the Northeast [and took] over this mined out, depleted land, which often is a burden to the communities where which it exists. McDade could not get enough support and never introduced legislation. Instead he focused on Scranton, Pennsylvania, and railroads. He wanted the Park Service to look at Scranton as a site to interpret railroads. The Park Service was not interested in doing this. When McDade secured an appropriation for a railroad historic site, the Service had no choice. Steamtown [National Historic Site] was not the best national park but it is the only one that reflects the history of the railroads. We’re creating history everyday, so there will never be an end to historical areas.

We haven’t nearly finished commemorating the cultural achievements and the achievements of the Industrial Revolution in America and the contributions that … enrich our lives everyday. Those things ought to be in the National Park System. We’re building the park system for eternity, not for tomorrow. So you can talk away the relevance of it: “We got one that looks like that so we don’t need another one.” But we don’t have that one that talks about the Industrial Revolution. We have the Saugus Iron Works [National Historic Site], but the Saugus Iron Works to represent the Industrial Revolution is like a pimple on an elephant. I mean, there is so much more to the Industrial Revolution that is not commemorated. They got a little bit of the Ford family money in the museum to Henry Ford in the Detroit area. But heavens, that’s just a miniscule part of the whole story of transportation [as it evolved through the Industrial Revolution and afterward] in this country, none of which is in the National Park System. And all of which ought to be.

You mention the term “thinning of the blood,” which former director James Ridenour coined. How do you feel about that concept? Do you think that the process of deciding what sites come into the system has become too politicized?

Let me tell you. You can’t get it too politicized. You know why? Because the framers of the foundation of this government said politicians are the ones who are going to establish the public-land policy of America. That’s why you find that my term as director was so much different than those of my predecessors. Mather and Albright believed very much, as I did, in the role of the Congress. That’s why Mather spent thousands of dollars personally taking congressmen out to the parks.

I had a “show me” trip every year, in which I invited the Congress to go see the parks in the National Capital Region. The idea came from Horace Albright who said that the National Capital Parks was a microcosm of all of the natural areas and cultural areas that we had in the National Park System outside of Washington. And that’s true. We’ve got the monuments as cultural, historical areas; we’ve got Rock Creek Park, one of the first natural areas saved in the National Park System. We’ve got them all. So I ran that “show me” trip every year financed by a donation from Laurance S. Rockefeller, which Horace Albright arranged. Those members of Congress, the politicians, are the ones who make the policies so you’ll never get me to say that there is a “thinning of the blood” of any congressionally approved area, because that is the policy-making body of all public lands in America, not the bureaucrats in the National Park Service.

Now the historians, they have their criteria. Chickamauga [and Chattanooga National Military Park] may not be as historically significant as Gettysburg, but the Congress established them both. Who is to say which one shouldn’t be there? And certainly I can agree that Gettysburg was more influential in the course of [the Civil] War than perhaps Chickamauga. But I don’t know that I would exclude Chickamauga to have Gettysburg. I don’t think you can get too much politics in it [the selection of sites], that’s all I’m trying to say.

Related to that, in a 1981 interview you indicated that during your administration the Park Service witnessed what you called “the largest legislative explosion in its history.” I would love to hear you talk about how you account for that explosion. It sounds like recognizing the important role of Congress was part of that.

Absolutely. I wore out three pairs of shoes a year walking the halls of Congress to make it happen. Yes. Absolutely. That was it. That was my commitment. I never once missed a congressional hearing in which I was asked to testify. Not once, because that’s the body that sets the public-land policy of America. The president is important, because he represents one-third in the legislative process. He can veto it, and then it takes two-thirds plus one to overrule him. So he represents one-third minus one. But he’s not the maker of public-land policy, and neither is the director of the National Park Service. That’s why I was very careful to get my directive from the secretary confirmed by the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee and a piece of legislation saying the National Park System consisted of natural, cultural, and recreational areas as the foundation for my management policies.

I’ll say this without any sense of criticism, but when the [presidential] administration decides in public-land matters that Congress doesn’t count, they’re absolutely totally mistaken, because that’s a constitutional responsibility of the Congress. It’s nothing dreamed up by one politician or one political party that has a minority or a majority of the voters at any time. That is a mandate given the Congress by the founders of the Constitution to set the public-land policy of America. So I never felt they were meddling. I did my damnedest, and I make no apologies, to engage them and cultivate them, and to take them fishing if that’s what it took to get the bill through. Or to take them hiking if that’s what it took to get the bill, whatever it took to get the bill through, I was for doing it.

You have also spoken over the years about the distinction between congressional authorization and appropriations, and how important getting the money was. Would you like to elaborate on that for a minute?

You better believe it. That was, so far as I know, the first time ever that I got the authorization committee [the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs] to go sit down and talk with the Appropriations Subcommittee [the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies]. But I was able to do that because of my total commitment to the fact that not only the authority that I had, but the money that I needed, had to come out of the Congress, because I can’t spend a nickel unless they give it to me. I’ve got to first get it authorized, and then I’ve got to get it appropriated. If there is a difference between the two committees, I can have all the authorization in the world, but if I can’t get the chairman of the Appropriations Committee to appropriate the money, it’s useless. That was when I was able to get congressmen and the leadership of my subcommittees [House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies] to sit down across the table from each other and talk about my budget. I don’t apologize for that. I think that is what has to be done if you’re going to get your money.

Let’s talk about cultural resources and historic preservation. Would you put your initiatives in the area of historic preservation in the broader context of the historic preservation movement at that time, and maybe talk a little bit about the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and what that meant for the Park Service?

Well, I looked on the Historic Preservation Act of 1966 as being the mechanism for the Park Service to extend its influence [in historic preservation], which began with the Antiquities Act of 1906 and increased with the 1935 Historic Sites Act.15 The 1935 legislation was the first time that the Congress assigned the Park Service responsibility for the preservation of our national history. Prior to that, the president was authorized to establish national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906. The president established national monuments by presidential proclamation. But in 1935 this young bunch of creative people came in the government as a result of the federal [New Deal] programs to put people back to work. I forget all their names, but it started with Ronnie Lee and Herb Kahler.16

The 1935 act was the one that authorized Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to recognize historic sites. That was the basis for St. Louis JNEM [Jefferson National Expansion Memorial]. JNEM was the first area established under the Historic Sites Act of 1935.17 The legislation gave us a broad charter, but it didn’t provide any money. By the time the 1960s came around, there were a lot of areas and program activities and other departments that were eroding the responsibilities in the areas of the National Park System (both the natural areas and especially our historic and cultural areas) [like] tearing down historic buildings, putting roads through the center city, knocking down historic districts.

Could you tell me a little more about your role in securing passage of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966?

In 1964, Rep. Albert M. Rains, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Housing, indicated to Laurance G. Henderson that he would be interested in pursuing a project of public interest after retirement. Henderson and Carl Feiss, a trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, decided that the former congressman should lead a special committee that would examine preservation activities in Europe and prepare a report detailing the need for preservation in the United States.18

[There was] a young man, Larry Henderson, who was an assistant to Senator [John J.] Sparkman of Alabama, and Casey Ireland, assistant to Bill [William B.] Widnall. Bill Widnall was a Republican congressman from New Jersey on the House Subcommittee on Housing. Larry and Casey persuaded these legislators of the need to have a look at what was happening. They persuaded them to look at historic preservation in America using the insights that could be garnered from the restoration of the face of Europe after World War II . They19 went to the Ford Foundation and got financing for a grant from the Ford people to do this.

Gordon Gray, former secretary of the army in the Truman administration and former president of the University of North Carolina, was then the chairman of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which was an organization [that had grown] out of the 1935 Historic Sites Act. The Trust was established in 1949. The Park Service had played a key role in that with Ronnie Lee and Herb Kahler and others. I was an ex officio member of the board of directors of the National Trust. But the moving force in it was Gordon Gray. They [the board of directors] had enticed Gordon Gray to take over the leadership of that organization. Gordon Gray gave political muscle and enlarged the perspective of the Trust.

Henderson, Feiss, and Rains recruited members for the special committee. They invited heads of federal agencies involved in financing public construction projects or pursuing preservation activities to serve as ex officio members. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall was one, and [Secretary Robert C.] Weaver of Housing and Urban Development was one, and the [secretary of the] Department of Commerce was one.20

It was [urban renewal] programs that impacted the core of the cities, which is where you find most of the cultural resources in America. And the highways were just busting right through cities, destroying neighborhoods and historic heritage right and left. The money the Ford Foundation put up enabled them [Henderson and Feiss] to involve the Governors Association, and the League of Cities, and the [U.S.] Conference of Mayors, all of which were very potent political organizations. And in the league there were prominent preservationists.

Henderson served as the committee’s director and made the trip arrangements, assisted by Casey Ireland. The special committee, which became known as the Rains Committee, visited eight European countries with notable records in preservation.21

They went to Europe to discuss [restoration], and to discover, and evaluate what had happened on that continent after the devastation of World War II. The secretary designated me as his representative on that task force. That’s where my involvement started. So it was there that I made all of my contacts, with Phillip Hoff, governor of Vermont and a very prominent Democrat in the establishment, and Gordon Gray, whom I got to know very personally, and Casey Ireland and Larry Henderson.

Several weeks after returning from Europe, the Rains Committee met in New York City and approved recommendations that Feiss and Ireland had drafted for a new national historic preservation program in the United States.22

It just kind of evolved that we wrote a report. With Heritage So Rich [Random House, 1966] was the name of the final publication that included the report we wrote. One of the recommendations of the report was that [the federal government take an active role in historic preservation]. We took the position that the most important thing we needed was money to support state and local and private historic preservation efforts, which was a key to the success in Europe with the local government and private enterprise.

That trip brought all of this together. I reckon [the reason I was included] was primarily because I was an ex officio member of the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, but also because I was director of the Park Service, and the fact that I was a damned good lobbyist. I got a note from a guy that I have a great deal of respect for, Carl Hummelsine, who used to be the chief lobbyist for the State Department before he went to Williamsburg, as the president of Williamsburg, for the Rockefellers, and developed that. He wrote me one day a note [calling me] “the second best lobbyist in Washington.” Then he put, “P.S. I’m the first.” And he was, because he was there with John Foster Dulles, and he was the face of the State Department on the Hill. I don’t think there was a more prominently associated politician in Washington. He [later] went to Williamsburg.

Out of that Rains Committee came this proposal for legislation that would not only set the dimensions and create a National Register of historic sites and structures, which we found to be of special significance, especially in France, but would also provide money to match state and private money to give spirit and body to the historic preservation effort in America. It was left to Gordon Gray and me to get that legislation through the Congress.

As I understand, it wasn’t easy initially to get the draft legislation through Congress.

It wasn’t. I’ll tell you about it. Nobody paid much attention to the legislation until I got it to the Hill. And then when I got it to the Hill, then the HUD [Housing and Urban Development] people decided, “Oh, there’s money here.” Then all of a sudden Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian discovered, “My goodness, there’s international representation here.” And this gives the Smithsonian a chance to branch out. Both of those [groups] tried to raid that legislation. I don’t take any credit for writing the bill, because that was done in the committee. But I was the principal [person] who got the [National] Historic Preservation Act of 1966 [passed]. And I’m the guy who saved those provisions of the international representation, the IUCN [The World Conservation Union]. The matching grants program which HUD wanted is in the Park Service today as a result of what I did in getting that bill through.

As you say, it wasn’t easy. But I had the confidence of Casey Ireland and Larry Henderson, a Republican and a Democrat, both of whom were most intelligent, articulate guys, who believed in me as an individual and who believed in what I was trying to do. They, too, believed in the concept of keeping the various historic preservation responsibilities together under one agency because of the close coordination required, rather than spreading it all over hell’s half acre. So yes, with Gordon Gray I take credit for having passed the Historic Preservation Act of 1966. There were many hands on the tiller getting to that point, but when it came down to the bottom line, it was Gordon Gray and I who got that bill through.

Your administration marked a transition in so many ways. The National Historic Preservation Act, as you mentioned, extended the Park Service’s preservation responsibilities outside park boundaries. We talked only briefly about the explosion of new legislation during your tenure, such as the National Trails System Act. Mr. Everhart, you wrote that Mr. Hartzog “might be termed the last director of the old Park Service.” I’d love to hear both of you comment on the idea that this was a transition period. Would you like to go first, Mr. Everhart?

W.E.– I think that with the coming together of President Johnson, Stewart Udall, and Hartzog for the Great Society, there was really sort of a revolution. I’m a historian. I know the people who live through a revolution never realize it. It’s the next generation who has to realize it. So that was the time, and the great tragedy for the country was that LBJ got caught up in the Vietnam War. And that is where all of the money went.

But during that time, all things were possible and the Park Service started looking where it had never looked before for parks and for activities. Like Wolf Trap, Stewart Udall and George, engaged in a little conversation, mainly, “Is culture a part of history?” And when they decided that it was, then many others expanded it [the number of cultural sites]. At the same time with the victory [for historic preservation, the Service started] getting involved in so many things that the organization itself got to be—I think in our time 7,000 employees; now it’s up to 15,000 employees—now it’s probably a bureaucracy. We always tried. At the same time we [the Service] are doing things that George and I would be astonished to even find out we’re doing. But once it started up it hasn’t stopped. The Park System has expanded, but I think it was during those days that it took off for the big revolution.

I suppose in looking back you would have thought it was a transition. I never really looked on it as a transition. I thought of it as a revitalization, and I still look on it as that. You look back at Steve Mather and Horace Albright, and I put them together, because of the great difficulty Mr. Mather had with two or more years of his administration.23 It was really Horace Albright’s administration. They were interchangeable in the years from when Mather was director through Albright’s term; it was really one.… That was a period in which the Service set its bounds, branched out into new areas. It had no historic areas. Horace Albright brought them in, in that one fortuitous trip that he made as a passenger with the secretary and President Roosevelt to Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge Parkway. That’s where Horace Albright got the historical areas in that few minutes that he talked with the president about it.24

So I looked on it as a revitalization of that era in which there were no limits. There was a great rapport between the Service and the Department [of the Interior]. The secretary was involved and gave me free rein to go and do. I always kept him fully informed. He knew everything I was doing.

Udall. I had the same kind of relationship with Secretaries [Rogers] Morton and [Walter] Hickel. They didn’t circumscribe me. That’s one of the reasons that they give for President [Richard] Nixon’s quote in [H. R.] Haldeman’s book: “Rogers Morton won’t get rid of the son-of-a-bitch. But he’s got to go.” Nixon meant “Morton wouldn’t contain him, so I’m going to contain him. I’m going to get rid of him,” you know. But they [administration officials] were a part of it, because I always kept the secretary advised of my activities and pending legislation. The White House wanted to stop the expansion of the National Park System.

Be that as it may, if people want to look on it as a transition, then it was a transition, because I’m sure we came out of it a different organization than we went in. The Park Service had become a bureaucratic organization hidebound by its books and its rules and regulations. I think Bill Everhart and Ted Swem and Howard Baker and Ed [Edward A.] Hummel, and those of us who had a new vision about what created the Park Service, could bring it [the organization] back to the [original mandate for the] Park Service. And we restored it by abolishing handbooks, making superintendents responsible for management, saying to the employees what a satisfactory level of performance is, what the policies are and they decide how to run the park on a day-to-day basis without having somebody in Washington write a book answering all of their unasked questions.

In that 1981 interview, you indicated that you had: “A freedom of movement which none of my successors have ever had, and which I doubt if any of them will ever have again.” It sounds like that’s what you were talking about with the support from the department.

Absolutely. Yes. I don’t know if any of them have had that liberty since, do you?

W.E.– Well, it’s gotten so big, but one thing is that George initially went in and got the approval from Udall that he [Hartzog] would appoint every superintendent in the park system. Well, that was a clever way to do it, because every park superintendent in the system was looking forward to moving upward, and he knew that he would have to impress George. So by doing that George was able to get the support he wanted. I guess, as I recall George’s conversation with me one time, he was pointing out that he gave the superintendents his authority, because they had to do things and make decisions and so forth. But he could not delegate his responsibility. In the end it was all going to come, the things that get out of hand, come back to him.

So that is the way to operate the system, and the difficulty was it got too big. Now it would be literally impossible. The Park Service has become a bureaucracy. I guess what’s happened is, it [the responsibility] has moved down. The superintendent now runs his park, and it’s a bureaucracy. And a lot of the goodwill came out of it [the Service when it became more bureaucratic]. [But] it’s still a great organization, and we still have a great park system.

G.H.– I met with every superintendent in the National Park System once every year, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We convened on Friday night, had our meeting on Saturday, and tried to adjourn by noon on Sunday, so they could be home to go back to work on Monday morning. They were invited to bring their spouses, and I met with the wives separately during that session to hear what they thought about the Park Service.

I don’t know. That took an awful lot of time from my family, but my wife approved of it before I started it. I left this area on Friday morning, and I didn’t come back usually until Monday, because if a superintendent wanted to stay individually and talk with me on Sunday after the meetings were over, I stayed overnight for that purpose. No minutes. No agenda. Just your problems, whatever you want to bring up we’re going to talk about it. The only record ever made was, if you brought up a problem and we agreed on an answer that had Service-wide implication, then that answer went out the next week on a pink memorandum to all regional directors so that that communication went throughout the Service. But otherwise no record was ever made of it.

I felt that was one of the most important things that I did in meeting with those guys, because we could sit across the table from each other and talk about their problems. I had no agenda. I spent the first fifteen minutes telling them what was going on in the department and in Congress, where the legislation was, where the appropriations were, what, if anything, the secretary was all churned up about and wanted to do something about. That was it.

I also insisted that the regional directors give me a list of five of the most talented people in their region every year. And I kept that list in my desk drawer. At the end of the year, I took it out and compared it with where those thirty-five people were at the end of the year. And generally every one of them had been moved to a new position during the course of that year.

Absolutely. We contracted with the Federal Executive Institute at Charlottesville, Virginia, to devise and implement a team-building program to foster cohesiveness in our changing organization. The institute was established by the Civil Service Commission (now the Office of Personnel Management) to train senior managers in the federal government. The University of Southern California loaned the director of its School for Public Administration, Dr. Frank Sherwood, to the federal government to head the institute. The sixty-day residential program that Sherwood designed for federal managers was the most creative, innovative effort made by the federal government during my career to improve the quality of government management. I attended the first session and sent some of my principal assistants to each session thereafter until each deputy, associate and assistant director, and each regional director had completed the program. I thought it was one of the most innovative, substantive things ever done to improve the quality of government management.

In addition to providing advanced training for Service managers, Hartzog retained the management consulting firm of James M. Kittleman and Associates to conduct an organizational study of the National Park Service. Later, Hartzog retained Kittleman personally as a part-time consultant to monitor and advise him on the implementation of the study and evolving management issues.25

Jim Kittleman, who was a consultant from Chicago and the Federal Executive Institute, Frank Sherwood and R. T. Williams, they were under contract for [a study of] organization development. Jim Kittleman was the contractor for management [issues]. I kept those two organizations as long as I was director, because that gave me an outside viewpoint [along with] every one of my senior executives [whom] I sent to the Federal Executive Institute, so that I had a community of people who spoke the same language. I had them constantly in contact there. They’d call the regional director, they’d call the assistant director, they’d call the director of Harpers Ferry. Bill Everhart and Frank Sherwood became great personal friends. I mean it was that kind of relationship, always getting the outside viewpoint, because I felt that that was important for us to understand the world in which we were trying to operate.

I would like to hear your thoughts on what you view as the appropriate relationship between political appointees and careerists. It’s generally regarded that after your departure from the Park Service, the director position seemed to change with the political administration. There were, as you mentioned in an earlier interview, instances of political appointees making operational decisions that might be best left to the careerist. Would you talk about that for a few minutes?

That problem was beginning before I got fired.26 But that just never existed when I was director. If I had an assistant secretary, and I had several of them, who wanted something done, I always made it clear to them that when they went out in the field and they saw something they didn’t like, something they thought ought to be changed, if they would call me and tell me about it, we would talk it over. If I agreed with them, we’d change it and we’d do what they wanted done in the way that they wanted it done, because they’re from the outside. They’re sensitive to the community and the political environment that exists.

Remember that I went through a change of administrations, so I worked for Democratic assistant secretaries and Republican assistant secretaries. But the one thing that we had an agreement on was that they never ever ordered a change in my management directly to a superintendent. I had one assistant secretary who had a tendency to let his staff do that. I finally made a telephone call to all of my regional directors, a conference call, in which I said, “I’m advised that the assistant secretary’s office calls the superintendents in your region saying he wants this and that done. You get on this phone today, before you go home, and talk with each superintendent you’ve got. You tell him that I said if the assistant secretary calls him and tells him to do something, and he has the money and he wants to do it, do it. But I want to know how much it costs, because next year I will reduce his budget by the same amount that he spent on this project.”

Then when I finished that conference call to the regional directors, I got up and went to the other end of the hall and walked into the assistant secretary’s office and I told him exactly what I had told the regional directors. I said, “I’ve been trying to work with you to get you to understand that if you want something done in the parks, tell me and I will tell them, because we can’t have two directors of the Park Service. Those superintendents know they report to me. When I call them and tell them to do something, they do it, and when I get somebody off in left field here calling them and telling them to do something, that confuses them.” I told him, “If you continue to let that happen, they can do it if they want to, but the cost of that project will be deducted from their budget next year.” He knew I could do it, because he knew my relationship with my Appropriations Committee was such that 99.9 percent of the time they would do what I asked them. If I told them I wanted Yellowstone’s budget cut $100,000, they’d cut it $100,000. That [the assistant secretary’s interference] stopped.

It seemed to me that you can’t run an organization if everybody is intervening and countermanding what the director has told them to do. That is unacceptable operation, and besides, in many instances, like male alligators they eat their own. The career service works for the political establishment. The interface between the political bureaucrat and the career bureaucrat is of paramount importance to effective and efficient government. The political bureaucrat has resources beyond his comprehension that he can direct to any project he wants done, if he involves that career bureaucrat in transmitting that energy through that system. The career bureaucrats are much smarter than the political bureaucrats give them credit for. See, this comes out of the philosophy that everyone [specifically every political bureaucrat] is capable of doing a government job. That is simply not so. They’re simply not. A political bureaucrat may be a great guy and a lousy manager at the same time.

The Army Corps of Engineers is one of the agencies I greatly admire. I say to people, they [the Corps] can do any damn thing in the world that the Congress tells them to do and puts up the money for, but they’re not efficient. I’ve adopted a lot of their tactics, because I was never really all that innovative. I stole ideas everywhere I could find them from whomever I could find them. And I was very much in the tradition of Mo [Rep. Morris K.] Udall in telling jokes. The first time I used it, I said, “The Army Corps does this and this and this, and this is what we think. And this is what I think we ought to do.” And after that it was my idea. You [the other person or organization] get credit for it the first time. After that it’s my story. Mo Udall said he always stole his stories from everybody. The first time he told it he said, “Joe Blow told me the other day.” The next time he told it, “This is what I heard.” It’s my story now.

W.E.– To back him up, we had a slogan, “shop the competition.” Our interpretation is fine, but there are obviously other people who are doing better at whatever it is you’re doing. So look out. Just because we’re the Park Service that doesn’t mean we’re the best in all elements of it. Go out and look and shop the competition, which we did.

G.H.– You know I used to send maintenance people to Coney Island. Now, why would I pay government transportation and per diem to send people to Coney Island? They knew more about picking up trash than anybody on the face of the Earth, because they had more of it. I don’t know what the situation is now. I went there and I saw, and it was the cleanest beach in America. You rode along our parkways and there was trash all over the side of them. I paid to send them [Park Service staff] up there to let them experience how you pick up trash. As Bill said, my motto was “shop the competition.” Somebody has done what you’re now doing or you’re going to try to do. Go see how they’re doing it. And if they’re doing it better, steal it. They don’t have a copyright or a patent on it. So it’s in the public domain. Take it.

Is one of the things that you’re talking about a level of mutual respect between the political appointees and the careerists? Earlier you talked about what is clearly your great respect for the legislative process.

But also the political appointees respecting the expertise and experience of the careerists, is that part of it?

And the career guy respecting the process by which this [political] guy got his job. This guy has some access to the president of the United States, who has been selected by the people of the United States for four years to be the chief of their government. He is the guy, and he has chosen this man or this woman to be his representative for this segment of that responsibility. So this is a presidential appointee and he’s entitled to a lot of deference and a lot of respect. [But] he can’t make you violate the law, and he’s not an excuse for abusing your authority.

I was impressed when [Walter] Hickel became my secretary. I wrote a memorandum for him that outlined how he wanted the Park Service run. And I gave it to him. He invited me to ride to the Hill with him one afternoon. I had the draft and I took it with me and we got in the backseat, and Carl McMurray, his chief of staff, was in the front seat. Hickel started reading this thing and his face lit up like a candle. I’ve never seen a man who was reading something and every word you could tell was penetrating and shedding new light that he had never seen before. He read it, and he handed the first page to McMurray, and the second one, and the third one, and when he finished he said, “This is wonderful. The only thing I want changed is I don’t want you contracting out campground operations,” because I had started doing that because of the shortage of personnel. “I think the Park Service ought to continue to operate its own campgrounds. So you change that one sentence, and I’ll sign it.”

He said to McMurray, “Carl, as soon as I sign this memorandum, I want every agency in this department to write me a similar memorandum for how we’re going to manage them.” Of course it never happened. He never followed through. Most of why this occurs is that the political bureaucrat is so insecure as to what he wants to achieve that he will not write down what his vision is. And the career bureaucrat is so enmeshed in his bureaucracy and in his awe of the new political leadership that he will not volunteer to say to him, “Here is an idea that you might want to consider for your leadership.” Help him get over that mountain. The political appointee is just as insecure in his job as the career bureaucrat is in his, because he can fire you. In most career appointments he [the political appointee] can’t fire you, but he can move you out of that job in 90 days to Timbuktu if he wants to.

But the whole thing is, once he’s been there for two weeks he [the appointee] has got enough smarts to know that you can send him down so many dead-end roads that he’ll never find his way back. So I mean both have got their own advantages. They just don’t ever sit down and talk about how they are going to get the president’s job done. I think it’s the greatest tragedy of government that every president, when he comes in, doesn’t say to every cabinet officer, “In ninety days I want you to report to my chief of staff that you have an understanding with each agency in your department about how it is to be run for the next four years.”

Those cabinet officers, in my judgment, are equally uninformed. They have walked into a department the dimensions of which are enlightening to them every day. The most experience that they’ve had is (if they have practiced law in Washington) they know generally this area of that department’s responsibility. But they have no comprehension of the totality of the authority that they now have….

There is no superior in the White House or the departments who will say to the political appointees in the agencies, “How are we going to run this agency?” “How are we going to run it?” “What do we want to achieve?” “What are our objectives?” If he would just understand that he has a reservoir of talent that is incomparable to anything that he’s ever known in his life, no matter where else he’s been. Whether it’s academia, or business, or anywhere, I’ll put the government employee up against [people in any of these areas] for intelligence, for commitment, for ability, for vision, for insight, whatever category you want to evaluate…. I’ll take the government employee with me and put him beside anything that you’ve ever experienced. It is the most incomparable pool of talent, and they [the political appointees] let it go to waste by stupid damned arguments over, “We’re going to do this and we’re not going to do that.”

That was my biggest problem with new assistant secretaries, getting them to understand that if they wanted to move a mountain all they had to do was call me and I had people skilled in moving mountains. If they wanted to build a new vision, all they had to do was call me. I had people skilled in that, too, and they were all their people. They’re your people. They’re not my people. They’re your people. They work for the government. They work for the taxpayers. Now if you’re going to run a donnybrook, don’t call me, because I haven’t got anybody who runs donnybrooks.

When you were talking earlier, it did sound as though you had learned a lot during your earlier positions with the Park Service, things that really benefited your operations as director.

No question about it. And that experience in St. Louis was so illuminating, because Mayor Ray Tucker and I sat down and we understood, could see. Howard Baker took me down and introduced me to the mayor as the new superintendent. We had a nice discussion and that’s where I was advised that the relocation of the railroad track was to be under way by July 1, in my meeting with the mayor. I was scared beyond my intelligence to learn that, because here I was finding out stuff that I had never even dreamed about.

When that meeting was over and Howard left town the next day, the first call I made was to the mayor’s office, to go over and sit down and talk with him. That’s when we had a great conversation. I told him who I was. “I’m a country boy from South Carolina,” I said. “I know the bureaucratic game from square one, but I know nothing about big city politics.” That’s when he made that great statement. He said, “We’ve got a winner. You handle the paper and I’ll take care of the politics,” and that’s the way we worked it. I’d call his office and say, “This is a political game and I can’t move it.” And boy, he moved it.

I’d like to talk a little bit about the relationship that you had with the Johnson White House and compare it to [your relationship with] the Nixon White House.

Well, we didn’t really have a lot of direct contact with the Nixon White House. It mostly came through the secretary’s office, Walter Hickel, and then Rogers Morton, especially Rogers Morton, who was a personal friend of President Nixon. I did have occasion to deal with some of their staff people early on, especially his [Morton’s] deputy and John Whitaker, who later came over as an undersecretary of the Department of the Interior, and there were several others over there. Of course, I knew Ron Walker. He was head of the president’s advance team. I didn’t have a lot to do with him, because they [Nixon’s senior staff] never went to parks. Nixon, I think, went to Grand Teton National Park once, unlike [John F.] Kennedy, who made a tour of the national parks when he became president.

So there was not a lot of direct contact. But there was enough that they knew who I was, and primarily where we had contact the most was on the Hill, because the Nixon administration wanted no park legislation. Of course, coming off of the Johnson administration, I had a tidal force of legislation in the Congress, and as you see in the record, we passed almost as much in the Nixon administration four years as we did in the Johnson five years, because that tide was moving in and there was literally nothing they could do to stop it. Ron Walker made that statement, which I’m sure you’ve heard, and which I’m sure he will repeat for you, that my relations on the Hill were perhaps better than the president’s in terms of getting legislation through. Nixon reciprocated by never having a park signing ceremony. He never had one, whereas with President Johnson, his staff would set them up before I even got the bill passed. So the relationship was different.

I reckon where the closeness came was with the First Ladies, because in the Nixon administration I was chairman of the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. This was a committee that worked with the First Lady in preserving the furnishings and the historic rooms of the White House. Mrs. Nixon was a very wonderful person. I always felt that I had a very good personal relationship with her. She was a lovely lady, an all-together different kind of personality than the president himself. So I had a very good relationship with her and her staff. Of course, with the Johnson administration my primary relationship was with Mrs. Johnson, and she became a “First Lady of National Parks.” If you had a park trip, she and Liz Carpenter, who was her press secretary, they were gung ho to go. And they went. She was responsible for building up that wave of environmental interest and preservation interest in the National Park System. In the case of the Redwood National Park proposal, she arranged for President Johnson to have a pre-legislative press conference announcing his support for the Redwood National Park, even before he sent legislation to the Hill.

That personal relationship continued on after they left the White House. I became much more personally acquainted with the former president, and we got along very well indeed, because we shared a lot of mutual background, his growing up in west Texas, the Hill Country, and my growing up in the Low Country of South Carolina. We had a lot of the common understandings of politics.

Well, our program fit precisely in with his vision. He was not a person that went to a lot of parks. He went to the Statue of Liberty to sign a bill. He went to his boyhood home before it was authorized to sign the education bill, but he didn’t go to a lot of parks. Mrs. Johnson did that. There was no question, however, that our park program was an integral part of his legislative agenda, and he never missed an opportunity when a bill was passed to have a bill signing ceremony and invite the legislators who were responsible for it to the White House, which was a very important part of keeping the interest going in the National Park System.

That just wasn’t a priority for the Nixon administration to have those ceremonies?

They never had one. I interpreted that as a message to me they didn’t want that legislation. But the Congress, as I pointed out to you, is in charge of the public-land policy of America. President Nixon never had the courage to veto one. So he signed it, but he never had any ceremony to acknowledge it.

What legislative achievement are you most proud of? Is there one piece of legislation that stands out in your mind?

Well, I reckon, you’re right. There were so many of them I wouldn’t want to put a priority on any of them. If I were putting a priority on them, I would put the priority on the people side of it, the National Park Foundation, which today is a major source of funding for national parks and for program innovation, and the Volunteers in Parks, without which the park system couldn’t operate today. And, of course, the Alaska bill that preserved eighty million acres from state and Native selection in Alaska.27

If you had to prioritize them, Alaska would be my most significant achievement, for the simple reason that it was achieved despite significant opposition. A similar provision failed in the House despite the support by the most powerful members in the Congress, Morris Udall and John Saylor. The House disapproved it. So the only reason that I got directly involved in it was when John Saylor called me after that fateful [House] meeting to say we’d lost it and if we were to save Alaska we had to do it in the Senate. That’s when I went to see Senator [Henry M. “Scoop”] Jackson, who said he had given the responsibility for Alaska to Senator [Alan Harvey] Bible and that if I was to get what I wanted in Alaska, which he agreed … was desirable, I’d have to convince Bible.28

So I went to see Senator Bible and he said, “I’ve never been to Alaska, and I’m going to be guided by what the two [Alaskan] senators want.” Well, of course, I knew that Ted Stevens and [Senator Mike] Gravel didn’t have any mind for what I wanted. And I said [to Bible], “Senator, you’ve just got to go.” He said, “I’m not going, because I agreed with my former law partner, Bob McDonald, and my dearest friend Dr. Fred Anderson, that we are going to take our wives on a quiet vacation for the first time since I’ve been in the Senate.” I said, “Senator, if you’d just take them to Alaska I will guarantee you a vacation like none of you have ever had.” And he said, “Well, you know I’m not for that, but I’ll think about it and I’ll talk with them.” So, of course, I was on pins and needles for two weeks until he finally called and said, “Well, I talked with Dr. Anderson and Bob McDonald and we’ll go to Alaska.”

I took those six people to Alaska. Of course, the great bounty of that [vacation] was that when Anderson and McDonald saw it [the state], they wanted even more of Alaska than I did. Coming back from Alaska, Bible had invited Mrs. Hartzog and me to go and visit with him and Lucille Bible, his wife, at their cabin on Lake Tahoe at the end of the trip. So we went to Tahoe and spent, I reckon, the better part of three days there with them. During that time [in Alaska] he had not said one word to me about whether he was going to support any program that I had in mind for Alaska or not. I mean you knew as much about what he was going to do as I did.

We got up the first morning after we had gotten in there late in the evening, and after breakfast he and I went out to the front yard and sat down looking over the lake and he said to me, “Well, why don’t you go ahead and draft for me what you would like to have in Alaska.” And that’s how we got the Alaska Reservation legislation.

I had recommended seventy-six million acres, and he upped it to eighty million, because while it was Alaska, neither the Forest Service nor the Fish and Wildlife Service had done anything to try to get the Senate to reserve any land for them. So toward the end of our trip to Alaska, I said to him, “You know, Mr. Chairman, while we are here I think it would be useful if you have had the opportunity of visiting with the local Fish and Wildlife and Forest Service people.” “Well,” he said, “that’s not a bad idea. How would we do that?” And I said, “Well, I can call the regional directors and arrange for them to meet us in Anchorage and get a little coffee and let you have an opportunity to chat with them.” He said, “Why don’t we do that?”

We were staying at the Captain Cook Hotel when we returned to Anchorage, and that incidentally was a hotel developed and owned by Walter Hickel, who later became secretary of the interior. So I called the Forest Service regional director and the Fish and wildlife people and invited them to come down and have coffee with Senator Bible and talk about their needs and their visions. It was on the basis of that [meeting] that he added four million acres to what I had proposed.

Then, of course, when the bill passed, the administration took control of it and this is now the Republican Nixon administration. Rogers Morton is secretary and Nat Reed is the assistant secretary, and Nat Reed makes quite a record down in Florida about what he did in connection with the Alaska lands. My view is what he did in connection with the Alaska lands is he reduced considerably the amount of acreage that was supposed to have been in the National Park System, to leave it in the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service. As I pointed out in my book and as I’ve said and say again, the reason they did that is because those two areas are accessible to the users. I mean the “rape and run” crowd, that’s where they operate, in Fish and Wildlife areas and the national forests. They don’t operate in national parks. If they had put the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge lands in the national park, which we proposed, they would not be talking this nonsense about drilling in it today. But they went and added it to the existing national wildlife refuge there.

People have asked me why I did it that way. Well, I did it that way because I thought that was the logical way to do it, to give the Congress an opportunity to decide individually what they wanted done, because there had been a lot of controversy when the Kennedy administration came in between the House committee and the Kennedy administration over the exercise of the presidential and secretarial authority to establish areas without consultation of the Congress, national monuments and historic sites.29 Finally [Congressman] Wayne Aspinall forced the administration to agree to insert in all of those orders that no money would be provided to them until legislation authorizing them had been approved. Well, I didn’t want that kind of fiasco in Alaska. So I still think I was right in just simply reserving it, preserving the Congress’s opportunity to do what they wanted to. In doing that I ran the risk of that administration reducing the park system, which is what the Nixon crowd wanted to do all along.

Where were some other pockets of support in Congress? Do any of the other senators or representatives stand out in your mind?

Oh my goodness, yes. We had them. I can’t recall all of them. It would be an injustice for me to start naming them, because I will omit somebody, because, you know, I’m eighty-five years old, and I told you my caveat is that recollection is a damn poor witness to truth.

Well then, let me ask you this. We talked in our previous session about the phenomenal expansion of the National Park System during your tenure. You’ve just described Alaska, which was a huge addition, but what about national recreation areas? Those marked another expansion of the system. What were the challenges that you faced in accommodating and managing that expansion?

Well, of course, my theory, and I think my analysis of the record pretty much does support me until the Vietnam War caught up with it. When Vietnam caught up with it, as you recall, I closed the parks two days a week, because they were not properly funded by the administration and the Congress. But until that episode, the appropriations and the personnel grew in relationship to the additions to the system. I always argued that the additions finance themselves and in many ways enhanced the base, because they brought into our orbit a new group of congressmen and senators from the urban areas of America where we were not previously represented. That was an important part of the expansion, to make the park system relevant to an evolving urban society, because I still contend that wilderness will never be preserved by the people who manage it. Wilderness will be preserved by the people who elect representatives to the Congress.

It occurred to me that in managing this expansion, at least for a period, you benefited from having the appropriations keep pace. But there’s a connection, too, I would suspect, to your management policies. By having those new management policies in place the Park Service was better able to handle this expansion.

Absolutely. And we made provision for it in our management policies. That’s why we categorized the areas of the system into recreation, natural, and historical, so that we could accommodate a variety of uses. In other words, I agree with those management policies the way they’d been written. I see nothing objectionable as applied to Lake Mead [National Recreation Area]. But it’s only when back in 1978 in the Carter administration they tried to take Lake Mead and make it Yellowstone [National Park]. I was very concerned about that and expressed my concern then, that some administration at some point in time would take the whole thing and turn it upside down and make Yellowstone [a recreation area like] Lake Mead.

Let’s look more at administration in terms of the organization of the National Park Service. As I understand, you did institute a number of reorganizations.

Well, they’ve got a movie on that. You ought to get the movie. Harpers Ferry [Center] made it, for the party they gave me when I got fired. It was titled “Reorganization.” And it shows me walking down the hall and every door I entered was a reorganization.

You created some new offices, like the Office of Urban Affairs, a law enforcement office in the headquarters. If you want to talk specifics, that’s fine, but I’m also interested in just what your guiding principle was in reorganizing. How were you framing that? What in general were you hoping to accomplish by reorganizing various elements of the Park Service headquarters specifically?

Well, I was trying to respond to what I perceived to be the need of the organization to respond to an urban society, and the requirements of that urban society. At the same time I was trying to maintain or recover the vibrancy and the youth of the National Park Service in its innovative years following its establishment and in the 1930s. And I allude to that in that paper [reference to Hartzog’s memo, “Supplemental Remarks”] I gave you. Those were the two most innovative periods in the history of the Park Service, after its establishment in 1917 and then in 1930s when Franklin Roosevelt reorganized government and made government responsive to the Great Depression and the needs of the population. I was trying to recapture that vitality.

I was trying to respond to what I perceived to be a new challenge, at the same time to recapture the vitality that no longer seemed to be there. And I don’t know that the philosophy of it was more profound than that.

That’s just what you’ve been describing though. That really was your overarching [philosophy].

You spoke a little in our previous interview about what you perceived as the appropriate role for superintendents and giving superintendents more authority. What about the role of regional offices? Would you describe how you viewed the role of regional offices?

Yes. The regional office was my management center for the concentration of parks with instructions that it was to monitor what was going on in the big parks, but it was to provide supplemental service and assistance to the small areas that didn’t have the same level of professional expertise as Yellowstone did. As a matter of fact, when I found that the regions were not uniformly doing that,… I even organized state offices so that we limited the authority of the regional director in supervising the superintendents. I put them under a state director with the idea of giving them the additional professional support they needed. So the regional office performed an essential function in my concept of organization. Its role was to encourage and to promote and assist the small area that didn’t have the same level of professional support.

We spent some time talking about cultural resources and historic sites, but we didn’t get to natural resources. Before we talk a little bit about that, I’d be interested in hearing you talk about how you balanced your attention to cultural resource issues with attention to natural resource issues.

I don’t think I divided it. I thought I had two of the most competent people in our organization to head each of these areas. [For natural resources] I was fortunate to get our first chief scientist, Starker Leopold, who was the son of the famous Aldo Leopold, and [for cultural resources] Ernest Connally, who was a professor of the history of architecture at the University of Illinois, [to head the new Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation]. I felt those were pretty capable people to advise me in those two areas, so I tried not to be the onsite manager, except for personnel and budget and legislation. Then I wanted to know what was happening. If I knew what was happening in operations evaluation then I was comfortable with letting other people do the work.

Oh, it was fabulous. It changed the whole attitude about natural history management in the Park Service.…When I came to the Park Service as director, we had a $12,000 budget for research. One of the recommendations of the Leopold committee was we had to revitalize the research program of the National Park Service. So I went to see the chairman of our [House Committee on] Appropriations Subcommittee [on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies], Mike [Rep. Michael J.] Kirwan, who was a very powerful member of the legislature, and about whom I write significantly in my book. Mike was a great friend of parks. He was a great personal friend of my predecessor, Connie Wirth. With Wirth’s ideas and his power he implemented Mission 66 after World War II.

I said to him, “Mr. Chairman, I got this report. The secretary has approved it and directed me to do something about research.” And he sat and looked at me very intently as I’m looking at you and he said, “Research.” Put his hand on his chin and he said, “Research.” He said, “George, that’s what NIH [National Institutes of Health] does. What the hell are you doing it for?” And that was my response from the Congress on research.

Faced with that I came back and I said, “You know, we’re never going to get that money. We’ve got to change the concept.” And we did. We changed it to resource studies. I went back to see him and I said, “You know, we’re not going to do research, but we’ve got these fantastic resources and we’ve got to study to see what’s going on out there.” “All right,” he said, so he funded resource studies.

The Congress went even further with me. While we were going in this period of expansion and innovation, they agreed that I could withhold from the appropriation an administrative reserve to solve immediate problems that came up. And I did. I withheld 5 percent of my appropriation, which I controlled. That’s how I moved change in the National Park System. When I wanted something changed and called a superintendent and said, “I’d like it changed,” the first thing he did was look at it and say, “I don’t have any money.” My response was, “If you would like to implement this change, tell me how much you think it will cost you and I will give you the money, and I will put it in your budget next year.” And then I got change done. I got a lot of work done through that reserve. That money funded the innovative programs for serving people, Summer in the Parks, Parks for All Seasons, Living History [program], all of those things that went to make our parks responsive to an urban environment came out of that reserve.

In an earlier interview, you talked about Congress’s tendency to support existing programs. They were much more hesitant to support innovations. Was that [administrative reserve] a way of accommodating that fact?

Absolutely. That was. I mean the innovation of my getting Summer in the Parks started with Mrs. [Julia Butler] Hansen.31 I took her to lunch for the sole purpose of getting her to agree to landscape the block behind the Civil Service building, which was brand new, in accordance with Mrs. Johnson’s beautification program. So after lunch I had the [park] police officer drive us by there and I said to her, “Madame Chairman, this is what Mrs. Johnson would like to have landscaped this spring, and I need so many hundred thousands for it.” She looked at me and she said, “George, I’ve given Lady Bird all of the money I’m going to give her this year, so you can forget it.”

At which point I said to the park policeman, “Take me to Lincoln Park.” That’s that little park east of the National Capitol with the statue of Mary McLeod Bethune in it. And fortunately for me it was a nice, warm day, and little children were all over the street playing basketball. The park was disheveled, unkempt, a first-class mess. He slowed down, in some cases had to stop for them to retrieve their ball as he drove us around the park. As he got around on the other side, I said to her, “Madame Chairman, what would you think about doing something about this?” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Getting those youngsters off the street and in that park.” She said, “If you’ve got a program to do that I’ll finance it.” I said, “I’ve got one. It’s called Summer in the Parks.” She said, “How much?” I said, “$275,000.” She said, “I’ll add it.” With that she gave me $275,000 to start Summer in the Parks, and that summer we put 300,000 of those children in the parks. For less than $1.00 a piece we got them off the street instead of feeding them to the drug and crime mills of the District of Columbia.

You mentioned the Living History program, and I wondered if you wanted to talk some more about your initiatives in that area.

Well, they did some very innovative things. I mean they made lye soap at the Lincoln Boyhood Home [National Memorial] in Indiana. Imagine that, lye soap. I don’t know whether you were ever exposed to lye soap. I grew up in rural South Carolina in the Low Country and lye soap was our only soap until they came along with octagon soap, which was the first [alternative to lye soap] one. You wash in that stuff for a while, you shrivel up. It eats you alive. But we made lye soap at Lincoln Boyhood, and they cut it in slices and they couldn’t keep it in stock. People were buying it for 25¢ a slice. I often wondered what those lovely ladies did with that lye soap when they got home with it. If they started to wash their hands in it, and then looked at them …

That’s right. And then we had a superintendent at Richmond [National] Battlefield [Park], who baked hardtack, which was a bread that the Confederates ate when they were under siege in Richmond. It would take a horse to chew it. We couldn’t keep it in stock. People bought so much hardtack. They did all kinds of things.

Fabulous success. Fabulous. We had the [Navajo] Indians weaving their rugs in Hubbell Trading Post [National Historic Site], sitting in the building.

Why do you think it’s important for the Park Service to educate the American public about their natural and cultural heritage?

Oh, I think the only instrument in our society whose whole purpose is to restore a sense of community in our society is in the national parks, because it’s in the national parks that we can discover the answer to the great question—Who am I? It’s in the cultural parks that we can respond to—What have I done? What have my ancestors done? Where did I come from? Who am I?

Who am I? That question harasses and follows every one of us every day of our lives. Who am I? What am I doing here? What am I to do? Why? Why? Why? And until I have some feeling for the answer to that question, I have no relationship with you. And the National Park System is a place for the reestablishment of a sense of community in our society and that’s why I think those programs are important. That’s why I think the system is important.

What you’re describing, that parks help us define who we are as the American people, has that become even more important as American society has become more diverse?

We’ve just been talking a little bit about the Park Service’s dual mandate, to preserve these cultural and natural resources, but also to provide for their use. I would very much like to hear your thoughts on that dual mandate and also the question of whether those two things are inherently contradictory. Can you do both, effectively preserve and provide adequately for public use?

Well, I think that you can, but it requires some new thinking about what “use” really should mean. I was mentioning just a few minutes ago in our conversation the idea that I’m not sure that the proper use of Old Faithful is to build an Old Faithful Inn. I don’t see the efficacy of somebody spending the night at Old Faithful in order to use Old Faithful. That’s what I’m talking about, the extent of the use. I think that sometimes we have erred in putting permanent facilities and long-term temporary facilities that are incompatible with the preservation of the natural environment in the wrong place.

That’s what’s got the public confused about the contradiction. I don’t see anything wrong with tour buses taking people to observe Old Faithful, Old Faithful as an observation point, to be inspired and to stand in awe of the handiwork of nature. That you can do by standing on the ground that’s exterior to the preservation of those hot-water pools and the environment around them and the geyser itself. So, yes, I think they’re [the elements of the dual mandate] compatible, but I think they’re greatly constrained in the way the Park Service is interpreting “use.” I don’t think Yellowstone should be a tourist mecca for the permanent overnight visitor. I think those accommodations should be outside the park.

I think that were we to adopt a policy that said we were even belatedly going to do that [keep accommodations outside the park], we could have the same success that they’ve had at the Great Smokies. When that park was established, Secretary Ickes said that if North Carolina and Tennessee would develop adequate recreation facilities outside the park, he would never allow government hotels and restaurants in the park. And to this day there are no permanent hotels and restaurants there, except for the historic Le Conte Lodge, which was there even before the park was established. It is a facility you can reach only by hiking to it.

We’ve talked about various ways in which your tenure marked a transition. Just a few minutes ago we talked about the role of science and the change that appointing Starker Leopold, a chief scientist, made. It seems to me that your administration was the first one in which decisions about preservation could be informed by science.

The decisions about preservation could, for the first time, be made on the basis of real scientific knowledge about the resources.

That’s precisely the basis on which we sold the program to the Congress in the resource management field, that you couldn’t make those kinds of decisions without an adequate base of study of the value of the resource. And that was inherent in the study of the North Cascade Report which was chaired by Ed [Dr. Edward] Crafts, deputy chief of the Forest Service, who was the director of the Bureau of Recreation. [The committee] consisted of two representatives from Interior and two from Agriculture who started looking at the North Cascades to decide whether there was a national park and recreation areas there or not. We agreed that we were first going to identify the resource and its value, and then we would decide who managed it and its use. That’s why you have a park at the core of that recreation complex that is to be preserved. It’s not to have hotels and highways in it. It’s to be preserved.

Do you have some additional thoughts on the basic purpose of the National Park Service and the National Park System? You talked a few minutes ago about how it brings us together as a people. Is there anything more you want to add to that?

I encouraged Freeman Tilden in his last book that he wrote for us, to answer that question: Who am I? The two books of which I am very proud are Ronnie Lee’s book the Family [Tree]— it was the last book he wrote that was about the evolution of the National Park System—and Freeman Tilden’s Who am I?32 I feel that the National Park System’s mission in life is to answer that question in our society, because we don’t get it answered in the church. We don’t get it answered in our political system. We don’t get it answered in any of the other organizations of which we are members, because they’re divisive in nature. Even the churches divide up into little sects and segments. As for our political system—if ever anybody wanted to know about its partisanship, I think that it’s now at the worst stage I have ever witnessed in my eighty-five years.

None of those things tend to build a sense of community, which is so important to the freedom that we cherish as Americans, except in the National Park System, where you can’t help, when you’re standing alone in a redwood grove at Sequoia or Yosemite, that you know that you are a part of that system. And that was the theme of our [first] world conference: there’s one web of life and you’re a part of it. The web of life is in trouble and you can do something about it. It’s the park system that knits that one web of life together and puts man at the center of it. That’s what I think its ultimate value is all about, not baking in the sun or running ski mobiles, or Jet Skis, or anything like that.

During your administration what did you see as the most serious threats to the National Park System?

I see the Park Service creating its own greatest threat by withdrawing from its contacts with society, and especially an urban society, because I think the salvation of the National Park System lies not in its managers but in the voters who send the Congress to Washington. More and more of those voters are in urban areas and they’re sending urban-oriented congressmen. So unless you can take the National Park System and make it relevant to men like Charlie [Charles B.] Rangel [a congressman representing a New York City district], for example, you’re missing an opportunity for the survival of the National Park System. If the urban population ever decides that the national parks are not relevant to them, then we’re not going to have them, because the Constitution says the Congress sets the public-land policy of America. So it’s not whether the Park Service believes or the citizen environmental organizations believe it’s a good thing; it’s whether the Congress believes it’s a good thing. And that depends on what those individual members of Congress are committed to when they stand for reelection every two and six years.

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?

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. 33

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? 35

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.

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.

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?

We covered a lot of ground in these sessions, but there are a few areas that I’m hoping we can talk about a little bit more. One thing we have not discussed is the advisory board. It would be helpful for me to get a sense of what role the secretary’s Advisory Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings and Monuments played during your tenure.

Well, I felt very good about the role the advisory board played at the time that I was there, because we made a substantive change in the way we managed the affairs of the advisory board. If we had already made up our mind on an issue, we didn’t send it to the advisory board. We started using them only for substantive material about which we had not yet made any conclusions, so that we asked for their professional judgments on what the issues should be and what the results should be. The result was that after two or three years the [congressional] committees were sufficiently impressed by the major change in the emphasis of the work of the advisory board that they started always in the hearings asking for the report by the advisory board on the subject matter.

We took them on their field trips and we challenged them in new areas of work that were under consideration. For example, the year that Mel [Dr. Melville B.] Grosvenor became chairman of the advisory board. He was also the CEO of the National Geographic Society. We took the advisory board to Alaska to review almost all of the proposals that we were making up there for the expansion of the system and saving that great natural and cultural area. Out of that trip came subcommittees appointed. I remember the one on the land bridge between Russia and America. The historians, I think, have pretty well settled with the archeologists today that there was originally a connection between the continents. [Dr.] Emil Haury was the chairman of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Ned [Dr. Edward B.] Danson, [Jr.,] who is the director of the Northern Arizona Museum at Flagstaff, one of the greatest museums in the country, Bob [Dr. Robert L.] Stearns, the president of the University of Colorado, and Justice Byron White’s father-in-law.… that continued to be the composition of the board until the Nixon administration came in. They came in and they started politicizing it.

G.H.– The other thing that we did to utilize people like Alfred Knopf, we created a council to the advisory board so that when these very distinguished people—and Alfred Knopf was one of them; Frank [E.] Masland, [Jr.,] was another one of them, and the great old guy, who was the president of the University of California, Dr. Robert G. Sproul—but when they went off, when their term of six years expired, we didn’t want to lose them, so we created a council which in effect gave them like an emeritus appointment and they continued to work with the board. They had no vote after their term was over. But they could participate in making a contribution to the learned discussion of the committees and of the board, and many of them did participate. We paid their travel, but they served without compensation. They didn’t get any fee or anything. It was a contribution. But we did pay for their travel.

That was your initiative because you started to feel like you were losing some expertise?

We did that when I was director, to capture that talent which otherwise would be lost. After six years of experience, you see, they’d been through the ropes. They knew it and they knew the history of the Service. I’m glad you mentioned that.

W.E.– Also, wasn’t it customary that all proposals for new parks were passed on to the advisory board?

Well, after you left, the advisory board became a Park Service board instead of functioning at the secretarial level. Is there anything you want to add about the board’s role and how it might have changed?

W.E.– It was a board that was listened to and the secretary would put things before them, like any proposed new park, and the Congress, I mean, Alfred Knopf, yes, they listened to him. The fact that he would take this job, he was a very busy man, I mean, if it was only to be a figurehead he wouldn’t have taken it. For us it was great; he got a real interest in the parks. He started to visit them and speak very highly of them. So it was not politicized at all. The board was part of the 1935 Historic Sites Act.

Did the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 make the board’s role any more important?

I don’t think it made it any more important, because, you see, the 1966 act created the President’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, so most of the authority that was given in the 1966 act went to the president’s council. It became a very important part of the cultural programs.

The Park Service had responsibility for maintaining the National Register, which was an advisory board function. The review of the [national] landmark decisions went to the secretary’s Advisory Board on National Parks. And they had to clear them and then they went on the [National] Register.

You have the vantage point of not only steering the [National Historic Preservation Act] legislation through, but being director long enough to see the implementation.

That was the crux of it. I was there long enough, fortunately, to give it structure so that I left it exactly as I wanted. Now, I don’t know what’s happened to it since. What I do know firsthand is that President Carter sent it all over to the BOR [Bureau of Outdoor Recreation] and reconstituted that. The bureau messed up a lot of peoples’ lives and a lot of programs.

When you had a chance to see the implementation of the [National Historic Preservation Act], was there anything that surprised you? It’s one thing to draft legislation, to believe in that legislation, to steer it through. But sometimes there are effects from that legislation that simply can’t be anticipated. Did you experience anything like that? Do you think the full impact on the Park Service was clear to you?

I don’t think we fully understood the importance of money and matching grants when we started doing it. We had the example of BOR and the Land and Water Conservation Fund,37 but this was a brand-new program. There’d never been anything like it, matching private funds. What we did with the Historic Preservation program of 1966 is that we reached out to use that money for matching private money, which gave it a whole new dimension that I don’t think and I don’t think anybody else in the Park Service had any comprehension of what it meant when you started reaching out and touching private people with matching money. I mean, you just open up a whole Pandora’s [box] of power.

I didn’t look on it as an impediment. I looked on it as an opportunity, because you’ve got powerful people involved in it. You’ve got a lot of rich dowagers who had property that they were directing to the National Trust, because that’s where you could get the public money to match their private money. So I think that’s the most significant part of what I didn’t understand. I don’t think there was much question that I relied on the help of Ronnie Lee, Herb Kahler, and Bill Everhart. I reckon we had a guy named John Corbett who was an archeologist. There were five or six of you guys?

G.H.– I had the talent right there. We had already put the talent together before we got the authority. So we had the talent and we had the experience, all of which fed into dealing with as to how we were going to organize it and everything else, because it did substantially change the structure of the Park Service, wouldn’t you say, the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation?

I’d like to hear more about that from either of you. It sounds like you viewed the legislation as opportunity rather than being concerned with the restrictions that it placed on the Park Service.

Yes. The neatest trick in town is legislation, something very worthwhile.… and it’s worth the effort.

Well, what about your take on the implementation of the legislation [National Historic Preservation Act], Mr. Everhart?

Yes, I’d rather you ask Bill. I’m telling you what I thought, but he can tell you how it was done. He saw it.

W.E.– Well, of course, history [the inclusion of historic sites] came to the Park Service late. The original emphasis was on natural history, and everything was there until the changeover under [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt,38 so that most people who worked in the natural areas thought that they were much more important than the historical areas. Of course, the new historical areas tended to be small and peoples’ interest in them [different]; peoples’ response to the Grand Canyon was one thing and to a Civil War battlefield another. So that it really took a lot of doing for the Park Service to begin to believe that historical parks were on the same level as the natural parks.

W.E.– With good cause, because still “the great western parks,” that used to always be the description, they were thought to be our greatest. So I think this was one of the steps along the way to give history some recognition and support inside the Park Service itself, as well as outside the Park Service. And when you’re a park superintendent in the historical parks, you look at it one way. If you’re a superintendent of a great western park, you look at it another way.

So the implementation you were talking about sort of changed the balance [between natural and cultural parks]?

W.E.– Well, it moved it. It changed it, but it took a lot of time for the Park Service, inside the Park Service as well as outside, to get the impetus. Now it’s almost going the other way. All kinds of parks are now coming along and people are pushing the protection of particularly Civil War areas in this area and so forth.

G.H.– Well, you see, at that time, too, we hadn’t yet finished [with natural resources] because the Leopold Report had really reoriented the natural history areas, and in addition to which Starker Leopold had agreed to come aboard as our chief scientist. So the Historic Preservation Act of 1966 gave us an opportunity, as Bill says, to elevate history to the equal status of natural history. I think that was the first opportunity that the Park Service had had to do that since Horace [Albright] got the historic parks from the army in 1933. Don’t you think, [Bill]?

G.H.– And that brought about a reorganization of the cultural resource program into a very powerful unit.

W.E.– I think that while Utley39 was here—you know, Bob Utley left the Park Service, and one of the reasons he left was he still didn’t think that the people in the Park Service were giving history the emphasis that it needed.

G.H.– Well, when they got it [the historic preservation functions] back from BOR, I don’t think they did. I don’t think it [historic preservation] has it [emphasis] today. Do you? I don’t think they ever recovered from that [transfer to BOR].

I think the emphasis [was] on rangers and the George Wright Society40 and the natural history. I don’t think the cultural resource program ever caught up after that setback they got from going to the BOR. I don’t think they had any director who was interested in correcting that imbalance, because, I mean, all they did with those talented people they got back from BOR was disperse them. A lot of rich talent was just totally mis-assigned. Some parks that had no assistant superintendent got an assistant superintendent. He didn’t know a damn thing about parks. He was a planner. Maybe he’d been working on the national recreation plan. And parks that had one assistant superintendent got two more. Olympic [National Park], for example, wound up with three assistant superintendents. What they needed were rangers.

How much support for historic preservation was there at the department level with Secretaries Hickel and Morton and then Assistant Secretaries Stan Cain and Nat Reed?

Well, with Morton there was quite a bit, because Morton is a very historic line in America. [The Morton family] goes back on the business side; the ancestry goes back to the Revolutionary War. And they were very prominent industrialists. The symbol which Pillsbury uses today, of a woman sticking her finger in the Pillsbury Doughboy’s navel, that was Rogers Morton’s creation when he owned Ballard Flour Company which was sold to Pillsbury. Rogers went on to be a member of the Congress and from there he was secretary of the interior. He was a very well rounded, educated man, who was sensitive to historical preservation. So I would say that with Morton it was a substantive concern. Hickel, I don’t think Hickel had any significant appreciation for historic preservation. It wasn’t in his cultural background. He was a builder.

With Stan Cain, I would say that his interest was primarily in the natural area. He graduated and got his Ph.D. out of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He wrote his dissertation on the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. So next to the naturalist whom we had there, he knew the Smokies better than most NPS employees. He was just a perfectly wonderful guy. Nat Reed, I’m not sure Nat had any philosophy outside of his concern for Florida ecology. He very much was interested in that and played a significant role in the preservation of that ecology there. Bill, did you do find any emphasis in your experience with him in historic preservation?

In May 1966 Hartzog appointed a Special Committee on Historic Preservation to recommend ways the Service could reassert itself in the historic preservation movement. He named three distinguished professionals: senior National Park Service historian Ronald Lee; J. O. Brew, director of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, to represent the field of archeology; and Ernest Connally, professor of the history of architecture from the University of Illinois to represent the field of historic architecture.

The Lee-Brew-Connally committee interviewed senior administrators, historians, architects, and archeologists of the Park Service to get their opinions on how the Service could improve its reputation in the area of historic preservation. In June 1966 Lee wrote a draft report. The report recommended that Hartzog create an Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation to supervise the Service’s preservation activities. Lee also recommended that the office be headed by a well-respected historical architect. The office should include a division devoted to historic architecture and the existing divisions of archeology and history. Hartzog accepted Lee’s recommendations in September 1966 shortly before the National Historic Preservation Act was approved.41

Apparently there was a committee made up of Ronnie Lee, J. O. Brew, and Ernest Connally. What was the role of that committee in [historic preservation]? Do you recall?

Yes, that committee was our advisory committee which then went on after we got the legislation. I constituted them as a search committee, to search for the head [of the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation]. It was embarrassing for them, because after they had done all of that searching, they concluded that Ernest Connally was the best qualified guy for the job and he was a member of the search committee. So they had to kick him off of the search committee.

Would you both tell me a bit about the concept and the creation of the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation? How that came about?

Well, that came out of the committee that [was made up of] J. O. Brew and Ronnie Lee, and there was Ernest Connally. It came out of that group that those matters should be put together, together with the matching grants that we were going to administer. We should reconstitute the National Register to make it a more authentic official document than it had been under the 1935 Historic Sites Act. I don’t remember, but I think we still left the National [Historic] Landmarks program there as an integral part of it. I don’t think we moved them out, maybe we did, I don’t know. I don’t have any recollection of that, do you?

G.H.– You’d have to check that, whether we did or not. I just think we kept the landmarks. But they suggested it had to be a different organization structure to implement the powerful provisions that were in that 1966 act.

W.E.– Well, when you talk about the Office of History and Archeology, you’re getting to the Ernest Connally times. And Ernest Connally came in, I think, with the thought that he was going to be up with everybody else. But he still had to fight for his programs. And it came to the fact that the Park Service was forced to look at its own [historic] structures and to see whether they were of importance. Well, the park superintendents were appalled. And George has a story about Udall who had some buildings he wanted protected and the superintendent just … tore them down. The idea, for instance, that along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon there are concessionaire buildings that are now regarded as part of the fabric of this country, because they meet the fifty-year [criteria for significance] and so forth [—that idea produced conflict].

Well, when Bob Utley started to go out to get the superintendents to save buildings of that nature, the superintendents said, “Who the heck are you? Those backcountry buildings and ranger structures and so forth are our buildings. And if I want to tear them down, I’m going to tear them down.” Ted Swem and I were up in Alaska. And there was a battle going on in there as one of the structures in, what do they call it now in Alaska?

W.E.– Denali, right. Well, a guy had gone up there and was one of the earliest people to bring back word of what a place it was. So his cabin was still there, and Ted and I were boating on the river that ran through. The remains of that original cabin were off to the side. And Ted said to the superintendent, “Goddamn it. And now you let it fall down, but you’re going to save it.” He said, “Well, why would you want to save it? I took a picture of it for gosh sake. It’s just an old cabin. It’s ours.” The point is it doesn’t [matter if they are] “our” buildings we are talking about if they’re fifty years old or whatever and so forth.

So it took a long time. In fact, I guess it had to take a new generation to come along to really elevate the Park Service concern for history within the parks, and the same way with outside. If they [the old park structures] meet the standards, we’ve got to protect them. But the superintendents and Bob Utley got into the issue of backcountry cabins where superintendents really started to fight, because Bob said, “These cabins meet the criteria.” And the superintendent said, “Don’t tell me what to do with my cabins.”

So you are talking about not only an educational process, but changing a mind-set.

W.E.– It’s a matter of all of those people had to pass on and we needed a new set, I think. And Bob’s irritation with [the old attitude], I think, was why he left the Park Service for another job. It seemed at the time unbelievable that Bob would leave.

Shifting to another topic—something we didn’t get to before, is the subject of crime in the parks. We talked about the new recreation areas and urban parks that came into the system during your tenure. With that came the Park Service’s need to increasingly deal with urban-type crime. Even in some of large scenic parks, because of the large number of people who are visiting, there were more episodes of crime. I would like to get a sense of how you grappled with this. You were able to translate those problems into increased funding for law enforcement and changes in the Park Police.

When I was out there [at Yosemite National Park] on a trip incognito, I asked one young man, “Why are you here?” He just spontaneously said, “Because they ran us out of Haight Asbury.” People in San Francisco got on the police, and every time they [hippies] popped out the door with one of the cigarettes in their mouths, they went to jail. So they just looked around and debated where they could go and have the same good time, and they decided they would go to Yosemite Valley. That’s where they went. That was the most obvious manifestation of the urban scene moving into the parks.

But we had it all over town. We had it here in the District [of Columbia], all kinds of obscene activities in Lafayette Park right across from the White House. The Park Police did a marvelous job in handling those instances and keeping them out of the press. But where they [incidents] usually broke out was when they [lawbreakers] went to the rural parks with the urban problems, like in the Great Smokies and along the Blue Ridge Parkway and its connection to Cherokee, [North Carolina], in the [Cherokee] Indian community over there. Prior to that, the biggest problem you had there was poaching black bear. The Indians were going up on Highway 441 in the park and shooting the bears.

In fact, we had one lady come into the office while I was there as assistant superintendent. She was just in panic. She could hardly talk. She was short of breath. She was just petrified, because here she was feeding the bear and the Indian walked up and shot the bear right out of her hand, threw it in the back of the trunk and away they go down the mountain to Cherokee. Well, it just absolutely floored her that anything like that could happen.

But, you see, my view of the urban crime, we were trying to handle it on an ad hoc basis. We didn’t try a general approach to it until after the episode in Yosemite.42 And that’s when I decided that instead of trying to use a ranger force which had been trained to protect people and to manage resources and not to deal with crime that we were going to use the U.S. Park Police. So I detailed the Park Police to a number of areas, only two of which they still remain, and that’s Golden Gate in California and the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in New York, maybe at Gateway [National Recreation Area] in New York, too. I had them in a number of different parks, because I felt that it’s a special skill which we put the police through…

One other topic that we haven’t gotten to is the creation of the National Park Foundation in 1967. Could you tell me a little about your role in that?

Sure can. There was an existing board called the National Park Trust Fund Board which consisted of the secretary of the treasury, the attorney general, and the secretary of the interior to solicit donations for the National Park Service. It never really amounted to very much for two reasons. One was that the secretary of the treasury managed it and any donation received immediately had to be converted to cash and invested in government bonds. Well, people had the first inclination of not wanting to give to the government after they had just paid their taxes. Secondly, they could see the asset losing value as it was converted to government bonds, so it [the National Trust Fund Board’s effort] was not going anywhere.

Connie Wirth hired a young man named Donald Thurber, who was a very wonderful bright guy, and I believe he was from Detroit, if I’m not mistaken, as a financial consultant, to have a look at this and decide what to do. He came up with the idea that the trust fund board ought to be abolished and in lieu of it we ought to establish a regular foundation that would be managed by private trustees, and that would be the National Park Foundation. We didn’t have any such thing as that.

T hat legislation was pending as a proposal, not as an introduced piece of legislation, but simply as a proposal in the Interior Department when I became director. It finally came to my attention, and I thought it was a brilliant idea. I talked with the committees and the committees agreed, so we introduced it and we passed it, and we were the first ones who had one of these National Park Foundations and it was the genesis, the groundbreaker, for seven more that followed for the Fish and Wildlife and Forest Service. All of the land-management agencies, the Bureau of Land Management, wound up getting these foundations to support their programs. So that’s the background on how we got the National Park Foundation.

Let’s end with this question for each of you: I’d like to know what each of you sees as the most serious threats to the national parks and to the National Park Service both during your administration and also today. What were the greatest threats then and now?

Well, I think “relevancy” is the word that occurs to me most frequently, because unless the National Park System remains relevant to the changes in our society it’s not going to last. [Consider] the history of the Veterans Bureau that was established after World War I and their last great act, the riot that they had when General [Douglas] MacArthur ran them all out of town and that whole bureau was replaced, and it now is the Veterans Administration.43 So that’s what happens when bureaus become irrelevant. So remaining relevant…

That’s why Bill Everhart and I, (and I keep referring to him, because that’s really the way it was; he and Ted Swem44 are the two who are still alive who were a part of that inner group that managed the National Park System) we felt that the Park Service had to be relevant to an urban environment. We had to get urban people involved in the program. It was not enough to have the Sierra Clubbers hiking the trails and using the private campgrounds inside Yosemite. We had to get the little children playing in Lincoln Park, into the park and off the street, if we were going to survive as an institution and as a resource in America. So that was an emphasis of our program, to make it relevant.

I still think that’s an issue, because, you see, we have representation based on population and as our population becomes more urban, the Congress becomes more urban. And if you’re not relevant to Charlie Rangel, then Charlie Rangel is not going to be relevant to you. He’s just not going to be voting for you or for what doesn’t affect his constituents. So you’ve got to make sure that you’re relevant. That’s why we came up with Parks for All Seasons. That’s why we bused the children from Bedford Stuyvesant to Fire Island [National Seashore], so that they had a park experience. That’s why, as I mentioned earlier, we came up with Summer in the Parks through the generosity of Mrs. Hansen adding $275,000 to our budget to start it. That’s where we came up with Living History programs, and Parks for All Seasons, and Summer in the Parks, and other programs to make parks relevant.

That’s why we came up with National Educational Landmarks, which the Park Service abandoned. After I left they had no interest in it and abandoned the program, which in retrospect is ridiculous … when today everybody is saying that the great thing is environmental education. We were the first ones in the field. We even had a landmarks program to go with it.… I don’t know. That is what I think: “relevancy” is the word that most aptly describes it from my standpoint.

I can certainly see that if the Service isn’t relevant it doesn’t get the funding it needs. Funding its needs is a function of relevance. If those members of that committee believe that it’s important to their constituents, they fund it. Why else do you think farmers are floating in money? As they farm less and less they get more money, because the powerhouses on the Appropriations Committee all are from the farm and that’s their constituents and these lawmakers are going to make sure they’re financed.

Do the two of you feel that you left behind a different Park Service than the one you joined?

W.E.– Wait a minute. You’re saying from the time we joined until the time we left or from the time we joined until now?

From the beginning to the end of the Hartzog administration. It sounds like there were changes in so many ways, and over the last few sessions we’ve talked about those changes. I’m wondering if when you left the Park Service, Mr. Hartzog, and you, Mr. Everhart, looking back (I know you left later, Mr. Everhart), but looking back on that span of years, those nine years, whether you felt like the Park Service was a different agency than before.

W.E.– It’s like when some of the noted people in the Park Service retire and somebody says, “Will we ever have another one like that?” And somebody else says, “Well, we always have.” But I think things are different. I could say I think one of the problems is—and it’s a problem which was inevitable—the Park Service has become a bureaucracy. It had to, because when George and I were there, as I recall, it was in the vicinity of 7,000 employees. It’s now double that and more. And the areas [the Service has] taken on [are more diverse]—imagine having a performing arts center, but I guess that was still in George’s time. Take the Women’s Rights National [Historical Park]. Those are things that even George Hartzog would have said, “Women’s rights?”

Left to right: Newton B. Drury, Horace M. Albright, George B. Hartzog, Jr., Conrad L. Wirth. Director Hartzog gathers with three former directors at the dedication of the Stephen T. Mather Home in Connecticut, a Registered National Historic Landmark, July 17, 1964. Jack E. Boucher, photographer. (National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.)

So the whole difference in that, and so forth, is such that this is something that nobody can put their fingers on, but I think it has gone from a small, wonderful, compact, highly motivated [organization to a bureaucracy]. All of those [good points] are still present in a different way, but it’s a bureaucracy. So I would say that is what has changed, the organization itself. I don’t know how you prove it.

G.H.– I think it’s a product of all of those handbooks. Anytime you have staff reading a handbook to determine what to do instead of thinking with their head, that they spend seven, eight, or ten years going to college to learn how to do, they basically vegetate into a bureaucracy.…

I thought we wound up with a much more creative organization than we started with. I say it was because I abolished fifty-six volumes of handbooks, and I had those three little policy manuals, and that was it. If you didn’t find it there, you were supposed to have a solution in your head, not that somebody was going to write it up from Washington. I said to them, “Hell, if I’ve got to write down everything you’re supposed to do, I might as well stop the education level at the sixth grade because by the sixth grade you ought to be proficient in reading and the English language. So I don’t need Ph.D.’s.”

You provide the architecture of the structure, the overarching guidance, and let people think through the rest.

But the hell of it is, you see, they don’t want mistakes. If you’re going to run that kind of organization, you’re going to have mistakes, so you have to have a high tolerance level for mistakes.

We have covered many topics, and this seems like a good place to end. I just wanted to thank you. It’s been a real pleasure to spend time chatting with you.

1 George B. Hartzog, Jr., Battling for the National Parks (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell Limited, 1988). For an interesting portrait of Hartzog, see also John McPhee, “Profiles,” The New Yorker 47 (September 11, 1971): 45-88.

3 The headquarters of the National Park Service was relocated from Washington, D.C., to the sprawling Merchandise Mart building in Chicago from 1942 to 1947 to free up scarce office space during World War II.

4 Eero Saarinen (1910-1961) was the renowned architect who had won the international competition to design the Gateway Arch.

5 George B. Hartzog, Jr., “Supplemental Remarks,” memo to interviewer, September 21, 2005.

6 Secretary Lane issued a policy memo on management of the National Park Service on March 13, 1918, and Secretary Work issued his policy memo on NPS management on March 11, 1925.

8 The pledge was printed on one side and “goals” printed on the reverse side of wallet-size plastic cards distributed to every employee.

11 Charles Eames (1907-1978) was a distinguished American designer, architect, and filmmaker, as well as Saarinen’s partner and friend.

12 The Park Service had had two female superintendents. The Adams family recommended Wilhelmina Harris to administer Adams National Historic Site. Previously, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed Gertrude Cooper as superintendent at Vanderbilt Mansion. Not until 1971 were women appointed from within Service ranks to become park superintendents.

13 Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts, authorized in 1966, marked the beginning of National Park Service involvement in cultural parks.

14 James M. Ridenour, director of the Service during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, argued that the addition of sites of less than national significance was “thinning the blood” of the National Park System.

15 An Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities, 34 Stat. 225 (June 8, 1906); Historic Sites Act, 49 Stat. 666 (August 21, 1935).

16 Historian Ronald F. Lee came from the University of Minnesota to Shiloh National Military Park with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) program in 1933. He served from 1938 to 1951 as chief historian for the National Park Service and later as regional director in Philadelphia. He was instrumental in the creation of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In 1959 he proposed a program of designating nationally significant properties outside the parks as national historic landmarks. Historian Herbert E. Kahler also came from the University of Minnesota to Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park through the CCC program. As chief historian from 1951 to 1964, he oversaw implementation of the national historic landmarks program.

17 The secretary sent a memo to President Roosevelt designating Jefferson National Expansion Memorial on December 20, 1935. The president issued an executive order the next day.

18 James A. Glass, The Beginnings of a New National Historic Preservation Program, 1957 to 1969 (Nashville, TN) American Association for State and Local History, 1990), 10.

19 According to historian James A. Glass, Laurance G. Henderson and Carl Feiss approached the Ford Foundation.

20 The administrator of the General Services Administration agreed to participate. The panel also included politically influential individuals: Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, Representative Widnall, Governor Phillip Hoff of Vermont, former St. Louis mayor Raymond R. Tucker, and Gordon Gray.

23 Early in his administration, Stephen T. Mather, the founder and first director of the National Park Service, was incapacitated for a prolonged period due to illness, leaving management of the new agency to his assistant director, Horace M. Albright.

24 On April 9, 1933, Horace Albright and others accompanied President Franklin D. Roosevelt on a visit to Shenandoah National Park. During the ride back to Washington, Albright mentioned his desire to acquire historical areas that were currently under the administration of the War Department. Roosevelt agreed and directed Albright to prepare an executive order for the transfer.

26 President Nixon replaced Hartzog with Ronald H. Walker, a former White House assistant. Hartzog was apparently forced out after the Service revoked a special use permit allowing President Nixon’s friend, Bebe Rebozo, to dock his houseboat at Biscayne National Monument [now Biscayne National Park], Florida. See Battling for the National Parks, 247-248.

27 The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, 85 Stat. 688 (December 18, 1971), directed the secretary of the interior to withdraw from selection by the state or Native groups, or from disposition under public-land laws, up to eighty million acres of public land that he deemed suitable for national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, or wild and scenic river systems.

28 Rep. John P. Saylor (R-PA) served on the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Senator Jackson (D-WA) was the powerful chairman of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Senator Bible (D-NV) chaired the Parks and Recreation Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and was the chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies. For an account of Senator Bible’s influential role regarding National Park legislation and his dealings with Director Hartzog, see Gary E. Elliott, Senator Alan Bible and the Politics of the New West (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1994).

29 Unable to secure sufficient congressional support, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create the C & O Canal National Historic Monument in 1961. Throughout the 1960s, Rep. Aspinall, chairman of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, refused to fund the development of the park to send a message that such actions must first be sanctioned by Congress. President Kennedy declared only two national monuments: Russell Cave (Alabama) and Buck Island Reef (Virgin Islands).

30 A. Starker Leopold chaired an advisory board on wildlife management appointed by Secretary Udall. In 1963 the board produced a report “Wildlife Management in the National Parks” (known as the Leopold Report) that defined a basic management philosophy for national parks and transformed policy priorities related to wildlife.

31 Rep. Julia B. Hansen (D-WA) chaired the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies.

32 Ronald F. Lee, Family Tree of the National Park Service (Philadelphia, PA: Eastern National Park and Monument Association, 1972); Freeman Tilden, Who Am I?: Reflections on the Meaning of Parks on the Occasion of the Nation’s Bicentennial (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1975).

33 In the 1950s, the Service had proposed to preserve portions of three rivers in Missouri (Eleven Point, Jacks Fork, and Current) as a national monument. This proposal faced strong opposition from the USDA Forest Service, which already managed much of the land along Eleven Point River, and from locals who did not want to lose the ability to hunt and fish in the area. Although the Jacks Fork and Current rivers later became part of Ozark National Scenic Riverways, Hartzog was not able to incorporate Eleven Point River.

The Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, administered by the USDA Forest Service, was established in March 1972.

34 The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, 82 Stat. 906 (October 2, 1968), identified eight rivers and adjacent land in nine states as the initial components of a national wild and scenic river system, which was to be administered variously by the secretaries of agriculture and the interior. The act names twenty-seven other rivers or river segments to be studied as potential additions to the system.

35 The National Trails System Act, 92 Stat. 919 (October 2, 1968), provided for national recreational trails accessible to urban areas to be designated by the secretary of the interior or the secretary of agriculture according to specific criteria, and for national scenic trails, generally longer and more remote, to be established by Congress.

36 The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, originally chartered in 1856, purchased George Washington’s Virginia estate with the goal of restoring and preserving it as a historic shrine.

37 As amended in 1968, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, 78 Stat. 897 (September 3, 1964), set aside revenues from visitor fees, surplus property sales, motorboat fuel taxes, and offshore oil and gas leasing for the acquisition of federal and state parkland. The fund was administered by the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, a new Interior Department bureau that had been established in 1962. This bureau took away the Park Service’s responsibilities for recreation planning and assistance along with some of its staff and funds. The new bureau, which took over responsibility for the National Register of Historic Places, the natural and historic landmarks programs, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund, did not function smoothly. In 1978, the Carter administration reconstructed the BOR as the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service and reassigned some of these functions to the Park Service. In 1981 Secretary James Watt abolished the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service and returned these functions to the Park Service.

38 In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed two executive orders transferring a number of parks and monuments from the the War Department and Forest Service to the National Park Service, as well as the National Capital Parks in Washington, D.C., then managed by a separate office. With the addition of forty-four historical areas, the Service’s involvement in and responsibility for historic sites increased dramatically.

39 Robert M. Utley served as chief historian for the Park Service from 1964 to 1972. He then became director of the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation and assistant director for park preservation. Utley played a key role in implementing the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and advancing preservation policies. In 1977 he left the Service to become deputy director of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.

40 The George Wright Society is a nonprofit association of administrators, educators, and other professionals who promote excellence in natural and cultural resource management, research, protection, and interpretation of parks, historic sites, cultural landscapes, and other protected areas.

42 During the summer of 1970, young people from the San Francisco area poured into Yosemite National Park. Their unruly behavior disrupted other visitors and alarmed park rangers. During the July 4th weekend, several hundred hippies gathered in Stoneman Meadow, a grassy area at the center of Yosemite Village. When rangers tried to disperse the crowd, violence erupted, resulting in dozens of injuries and arrests. The incident highlighted the need for a professional law enforcement program for park rangers.

43 The Veterans Bureau was established in 1921 and consolidated into the newly created Veterans Administration in 1930. In May 1932, thousands of veterans of the World War American Expeditionary Force descended on Washington, D.C., calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, to lobby Congress for an early cash payment of a war service bonus due them in 1945. A number of the veterans camped out around the capital and refused to leave. In July, President Herbert Hoover ordered the secretary of the army to evacuate them. Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur led infantry troops with swords drawn and pursued the Bonus Forces into their main encampment on the other side of the Anacostia River, where a fire erupted. Americans were outraged at the spectacle of the army attacking unarmed citizens with tanks and firebrands, and the episode became a symbol of President Herbert Hoover’s indifference to the plight of the unemployed.