[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 4] [Senate] [Pages 4476-4477] [From the U.S. 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 [[Page 4477]] book ``The Quiet Crisis.'' The book, whose aim, he wrote at the time, was to ``outline the land and people story of our continent,'' sold widely. It was Mr. Udall who suggested that John F. Kennedy invite Robert Frost to recite a poem at Mr. Kennedy's inauguration. Mr. Udall accompanied Mr. Frost to the Soviet Union in 1962, a trip meant to foster better ties with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev. Mr. Udall also held evenings at the Interior Department with the poet Carl Sandburg and the actor Hal Holbrook. In addition, he invited the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner to be the department's writer in residence. It was Mr. Stegner's presence that prompted Mr. Udall to write ``The Quiet Crisis.'' Mr. Udall was also an early supporter of Rachel Carson, the biologist whose book ``Silent Spring'' brought attention to the environmental hazards of pesticide use. Mr. Udall stepped onto the national stage in 1954, when he was elected to Congress from Arizona. In the hotly fought Democratic presidential primary of 1960, he urged his fellow Arizona Democrats to support Kennedy. When Kennedy won the White House, he nominated Mr. Udall as interior secretary. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Mr. Udall was kept on by Lyndon B. Johnson. ``I think probably part of that was Lady Bird,'' Mr. Udall said, referring to Mr. Johnson's wife, with whom he collaborated on beautifying the nation's capital and similar projects. ``She treasured me, and we were wonderful friends,'' he added. Roger G. Kennedy, who was director of the National Park Service in the 1990s, said Mr. Udall ``escaped the notion that all public land was essentially a cropping opportunity-- the idea that if you cannot raise timber on it or take a deer off it, it wasn't valuable.'' On the other hand, Mr. Kennedy said, Mr. Udall understood that public lands like parks enhanced the economic value of privately held land nearby. This lesson was sometimes communicated with difficulty. For example, in the 1960s, when the Kennedy administration, with Mr. Udall in the lead, began efforts to establish the nation's first national seashores, people in regions including Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and Point Reyes in California objected that taking coastal land out of private hands would ruinously inhibit economic development. Instead, the parks have been beacons for lucrative tourism. On this and other fronts Mr. Udall pushed with a formidable combination of political acumen and political allies-- including his 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.'' ____________________