[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.''
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