[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 44 (Monday, March 22, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1786-S1787]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       REMEMBERING STEWART UDALL

  Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I rise to speak about a great American 
who has inspired me and countless others with his leadership and 
commitment to public service. That great American is Stewart Udall.
  At the outset, I extend my condolences to my friend and colleague, 
Stewart's son, Tom Udall, and his wife Jill; his nephew, my friend and 
colleague, Mark Udall, and his wife Maggie; and all the Udall family 
for this enormous loss. In several conversations I had with Stewart in 
recent years, it was clear that Tom's own exemplary public service and 
I'm sure Mark's as well, were a source of great pride for him.
  Stewart Udall is best known for his lifetime of service in 
preservation of our public lands. His accomplishments as Secretary of 
the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson are legendary. Those 
accomplishments were recounted yesterday in the New York Times. It 
said:

       . . . he presided over the acquisition of 3.85 million 
     acres of new holdings, including four national parks 
     Canyonlands in Utah, Redwood in California, North Cascades in 
     Washington, and Guadalupe Mountains in Texas--six national 
     monuments, nine national recreation areas, twenty historic 
     sites, fifty wildlife refuges and eight national seashores.

  I ask unanimous consent that the obituary from the Times be printed 
in the Record, after my comments.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  [See exhibit 1.]
  Mr. BINGAMAN. His commitment to and achievements in conservation and 
preservation are unequaled in our country. He was a moving force behind 
all of the landmark environmental legislation of the 1960s, including 
the Clean Air Act of 1963, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 
1965, the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Land and Water Conservation Act 
of 1965, the Endangered Species Act of 1966, the National Trails System 
Act of 1968, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968. Long after 
leaving public office, he was instrumental in securing the enactment of 
the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 which I was proud to 
support.
  But his commitment to our public lands was part of a larger lifetime 
commitment, a commitment to public service.
  With all the rancor and heated rhetoric that surround us in 
Washington today, it is easy to lose sight of what is good about our 
system of government. And one of the very best things about our great 
country, and our system of government, is that it has attracted to 
public service many of the best among us to devote their lives to work 
for us all.
  Stewart Udall was one of those people. He devoted his life to 
pursuing the common good the greater good and left this Nation a better 
place because of it.
  Stewart cared deeply about the people of this great country and that 
caring was evident in each encounter that he had. My wife Anne has fond 
memories of heartfelt conversations she had with Stewart where he spoke 
forcefully about the challenges we face. I myself was fortunate to 
always hear from him words of encouragement and constructive advice 
whenever we would visit.
  Stewart Udall set the highest standards for public service and for 
decency as a human being. As Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, ``he was 
not of an age, but for all time.'' Stewart Udall had, as he urged his 
grandchildren to have, ``a love affair with the wonder and beauty of 
the earth.'' We are all the richer for it.

                               Exhibit 1

                [From the New York Times, Mar. 20, 2010]

Stewart L. Udall, 90, Conservationist in Kennedy and Johnson Cabinets, 
                                  Dies

                          (By Keith Schneider)

       Stewart L. Udall, an ardent conservationist and a son of 
     the West, who as interior secretary in the 1960s presided 
     over vast increases in national park holdings and the public 
     domain, died Saturday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. The last 
     surviving member of the original Kennedy cabinet, he was 90.
       Mr. Udall had been in failing health after a fall last 
     week, according to a son, Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico.
       Though he was a liberal Democrat from the increasingly 
     conservative and Republican West, Stewart Udall said in a 
     2003 public television interview that he found in Washington 
     ``a big tent on the environment.''
       The result was the addition of vast tracts to the nation's 
     land holdings and--through his strong ties with lawmakers, 
     conservationists, writers and others--work that led to 
     landmark statutes on air, water and land conservation.
       President Obama said in a statement Saturday night that Mr. 
     Udall ``left an indelible mark on this nation and inspired 
     countless Americans who will continue his fight for clean 
     air, clean water and to maintain our many natural 
     treasures.''
       Few corners of the nation escaped Mr. Udall's touch. As 
     interior secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson 
     administrations, he presided over the acquisition of 3.85 
     million acres of new holdings, including 4 national parks--
     Canyonlands in Utah, Redwood in California, North Cascades in 
     Washington State and Guadalupe Mountains in Texas--6 national 
     monuments, 9 national recreation areas, 20 historic sites, 50 
     wildlife refuges and 8 national seashores. He also had an 
     interest in preserving historic sites, and helped save 
     Carnegie Hall from destruction.
       ``Republicans and Democrats, we all worked together,'' Mr. 
     Udall said in a television interview with Bill Moyers. But by 
     the time of that interview, Mr. Udall added that Washington 
     had been overtaken by money and that people seeking public 
     office fought for contributions from business interests that 
     viewed environmental protection as a detriment to profit at 
     best.
       In his years in Washington, he won high regard from many 
     quarters for his efforts to preserve the American landscape 
     and to educate his fellow Americans on the value of natural 
     beauty, points he made in his 1963 book ``The Quiet Crisis.'' 
     The book, whose aim, he wrote at the time, was to ``outline 
     the land and people story of our continent,'' sold widely.
       It was Mr. Udall who suggested that John F. Kennedy invite 
     Robert Frost to recite a poem at Mr. Kennedy's inauguration. 
     Mr. Udall accompanied Mr. Frost to the Soviet Union in 1962, 
     a trip meant to foster better ties with Premier Nikita S. 
     Khrushchev.
       Mr. Udall also held evenings at the Interior Department 
     with the poet Carl Sandburg and the actor Hal Holbrook. In 
     addition, he invited the Pulitzer Prize-winning author 
     Wallace Stegner to be the department's writer in residence. 
     It was Mr. Stegner's presence that prompted Mr. Udall to 
     write ``The Quiet Crisis.''

[[Page S1787]]

       Mr. Udall was also an early supporter of Rachel Carson, the 
     biologist whose book ``Silent Spring'' brought attention to 
     the environmental hazards of pesticide use.
       Mr. Udall stepped onto the national stage in 1954, when he 
     was elected to Congress from Arizona. In the hotly fought 
     Democratic presidential primary of 1960, he urged his fellow 
     Arizona Democrats to support Kennedy. When Kennedy won the 
     White House, he nominated Mr. Udall as interior secretary.
       After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Mr. Udall was kept 
     on by Lyndon B. Johnson.
       ``I think probably part of that was Lady Bird,'' Mr. Udall 
     said, referring to Mr. Johnson's wife, with whom he 
     collaborated on beautifying the nation's capital and similar 
     projects. ``She treasured me, and we were wonderful 
     friends,'' he added.
       Roger G. Kennedy, who was director of the National Park 
     Service in the 1990s, said Mr. Udall ``escaped the notion 
     that all public land was essentially a cropping opportunity--
     the idea that if you cannot raise timber on it or take a deer 
     off it, it wasn't valuable.'' On the other hand, Mr. Kennedy 
     said, Mr. Udall understood that public lands like parks 
     enhanced the economic value of privately held land nearby.
       This lesson was sometimes communicated with difficulty. For 
     example, in the 1960s, when the Kennedy administration, with 
     Mr. Udall in the lead, began efforts to establish the 
     nation's first national seashores, people in regions 
     including Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Cape Hatteras in North 
     Carolina, and Point Reyes in California objected that taking 
     coastal land out of private hands would ruinously inhibit 
     economic development.
       Instead, the parks have been beacons for lucrative tourism.
       On this and other fronts Mr. Udall pushed with a formidable 
     combination of political acumen and political allies--
     including his younger brother Morris K. Udall, who succeeded 
     him in Congress and in 1976 ran for president in a campaign 
     that his older brother managed. Many of the significant 
     environmental and land-protection statutes that became law in 
     the 1970s and '8os, including the Endangered Species Act, 
     bore their stamp and influence.
       ``That was a wonderful time, and it carried through into 
     the Nixon administration, into the Ford administration, into 
     the Carter administration,'' Stewart Udall said. ``It lasted 
     for 20 years. I don't remember a big fight between the 
     Republicans and Democrats in the Nixon administration or 
     President Gerald Ford and so on. There was a consensus that 
     the country needed more conservation projects of the kind 
     that we were proposing.''
       Stewart Lee Udall was born on Jan. 31, 1920, in St. Johns, 
     Ariz., a small community in Apache County in the northeast, 
     into a family with strong ties to the Mormon Church. His 
     mother, Louise Lee Udall, was a granddaughter of John Doyle 
     Lee, who was executed in 1877 for his involvement in the 
     Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah, in which a wagon train of 
     California-bound migrants were killed in 1857.
       Mr. Udall served as a Mormon missionary in Pennsylvania and 
     New York. During World War II, he was a gunner in the 15th 
     Army Air Forces, serving in Europe.
       He received bachelor's and law degrees from the University 
     of Arizona. After graduating from law school in 1948, he 
     started his own law practice in Tucson, where he and Morris 
     later became partners.
       After leaving Washington, he taught at Yale, practiced law 
     and wrote several books, including ``The Myths of August,'' 
     an account of the effects of uranium mining and nuclear 
     weapons work in the Western desert.
       That grew out of his representation of thousands of uranium 
     miners, nuclear weapons industry workers and citizens exposed 
     to radiation from atomic weapons manufacturing and testing in 
     the West.
       Though he won the first case in 1984 in Federal District 
     Court, an appeals court overturned the ruling and the United 
     States Supreme Court declined in 1988 to hear arguments. Mr. 
     Udall then turned to Congress, working with lawmakers of both 
     parties, particularly Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of 
     Utah, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of 
     Massachusetts, who died in August.
       In 1990, President George Bush signed the Radiation 
     Exposure Compensation Act. The law, administered by the 
     Justice Department, provided up to $100,000 for those 
     sickened by radiation exposure, and issued a formal apology 
     for harm done to those who were ``subjected to increased risk 
     of injury and disease to serve the national security 
     interests of the United States.''
       Throughout his life he relished physical challenges. He was 
     an all-conference guard on the University of Arizona 
     basketball team and he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, in East 
     Africa, and Mount Fuji, in Japan, while heading American 
     delegations to both regions. When he was 84, at the end of 
     his last rafting trip on the Colorado River, Mr. Udall hiked 
     up the steep Bright Angel Trail from the bottom of the Grand 
     Canyon to the south rim, a 10-hour walk that he celebrated at 
     the end with a martini.
       Mr. Udall's wife, the former Irmalee Webb, died in 2001. 
     Besides his son Tom, he is survived by his other sons, Scott, 
     Denis and Jay, and his daughters, Lynn and Lori, as well as 
     eight grandchildren.
       At his death, Mr. Udall was a senior member of one of the 
     nation's last and largest political dynasties--in the West it 
     was often said there were ``oodles of Udalls'' in politics. 
     His grandfather David King Udall served in the Arizona 
     Territorial legislature; his father, Levi Udall, was for 
     decades an elected judge in the Arizona Superior Court and 
     later a justice and chief justice of the Arizona Supreme 
     Court; Morris Udall was followed to Washington by his son 
     Mark Udall, elected in 2008 as a senator from Colorado, the 
     same year that Tom Udall was elected.
       But Tom Udall said that in recent years his father had 
     become greatly concerned over the state of politics in the 
     country, worrying ``we were losing the bipartisanship in the 
     environmental area.''
       He added that Mr. Udall had recently written a letter to 
     his grandchildren, urging them to focus on ``trying to 
     transform our society to a clean energy and clean job 
     society.''

                          ____________________