Chapter 26
The Unraveling of America, 1968
Whittier High School student Richard M. Nixon was enamored by the majesty of the Grand Canyon. Running for the White House in 1968, Nixon promoted himself as a Theodore Roosevelt–style conservationist.
Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
I
Lyndon Johnson’s stubbornness was on display in early 1968 when Stewart Udall organized a CBS television special broadcast from Ford’s Theatre, where John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Udall considered the renovated Washington landmark a crown jewel of the Johnson administration’s National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. To celebrate the reopening, Udall organized a gala on January 30, hosted by actors Helen Hayes and Henry Fonda. It was a tailor-made opportunity for the administration to garner credit for its beautification and historic preservation work. But many of the entertainers, including Robert Ryan, Harry Belafonte, and the folk singer Odetta, opposed Johnson’s Vietnam policy. At the last moment, the petulant LBJ boycotted the gala, sniping at the peace activists in the cast to a White House aide, “Why shall I honor them with my
There was a much bigger reason for Johnson’s foul mood. Hours before the Ford’s Theatre event, on the Vietnamese lunar New Year, the North Vietnamese Army and the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam had begun the Tet Offensive, a massive assault on South Vietnam. Eighty thousand troops were bombarding dozens of provincial capitals and attacked the US Embassy in Saigon, making a mockery of the administration’s claim that the United States was easily winning the war. Udall thought LBJ’s decision to skip the Ford’s Theatre event was self-savaging. That night, he wrote in his diary, “What [Johnson] desperately needs right now, and wholly lacks, is a little of Lincoln’s ‘with malice toward none’ spirit. A good dose of it might even re-elect him—but he’s a carrier of grudges who can’t forget a
The CBS special received critical raves, and within a few weeks, the theater reopened to the public with a play based on Stephen Vincent Benét’s narrative poem John That success, despite Udall’s hopes, was of little help to Johnson. The Vietnam War, mistaken and unwinnable, had undermined the administration to the point that top advisers were preparing to quit. That February and March, the wounded Johnson regularly lashed out at subordinates. “I was being forced over the edge by rioting blacks,” he later told the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, “demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical
Frank Church, Gaylord Nelson, George McGovern, and other anti-war senators considered President Johnson to be an albatross around the neck of the Democratic Party. The fiercest critic of all was Senator Eugene McCarthy, a Benedictine-trained graduate of Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, who broke with his party’s lack of moral leadership over Vietnam and had already announced his presidential candidacy, aimed at taking down LBJ. Poetic with a mordant sense of humor and baked in contrarianism, McCarthy had served nine years in the House of Representatives and ten years in the Senate, as part of a new farm-labor movement. Declaring that new Clean Air laws represented “an issue that’s better than motherhood,” McCarthy earned an A-plus record from conservation groups keeping
Rumors swirled around Washington that Robert F. Kennedy, following McCarthy’s move, might likewise challenge LBJ for the party leadership. If Kennedy won the Democratic nomination, he planned to tap Udall to be his running “My father adored Stewart,” RFK Jr. recalled. “They were beyond close. I sat in on a meeting at Hickory Hill that my dad had with Frank Mankiewicz and Ted Sorensen. My dad wanted Stewart—it was a visceral thing for him. He loved Udall because he was the physical embodiment of Woody Guthrie’s song ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ And he needed a Westerner on the ticket with
Udall was ideally suited to be RFK’s vice presidential choice. With fancy footwork, he had managed to stay out of the Vietnam morass, thereby securing his standing with anti-war doves. And as the progenitor of both Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s New Conservation environmental agendas, he was a hit on college campuses. Indeed, he was nationally respected as the southwestern conservation hero who had established Canyonlands National Park, fought to get the Wilderness Act passed, drove the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and Fire Island National Seashore into existence, and, at the last minute, after a change of heart, saved the Grand Canyon by relinquishing the twin megadams on the Colorado River.
With the Ford’s Theatre event behind him, Udall accelerated the administration’s efforts to win passage before the November election of four “Forest Bills” being hotly debated in Congress: Redwood National Park, North Cascades National Park, the Wild and Scenic Rivers System, and the National Trails System. It was the same old story. All the bills easily passed in the Senate. To accomplish the ambitious feat of passing in the House, however, would require the support of Representative Aspinall, whose advocacy on behalf of the timber, mining, and oil and gas exploration industries was cemented into his public persona. As Brower quipped, preservationists saw “dream after dream dashed on the stony continents of Wayne
Of the four bills, Redwood National Park was the most troubled, as well as the most urgent. In his 1967 State of the Union address, LBJ had pleaded with the legislative branch to save the coastal redwoods north of San Francisco. Weeks later, in a special message to Congress, he repeated his call to action: “This is a ‘last chance’ conservation opportunity. If we do not act promptly, we may lose for all time the magnificent redwoods of Northern LBJ’s main foe was California governor Ronald Reagan, a Republican, who had said, “A tree’s a tree—how many more do you need to look
Refusing to grapple directly with Reagan, LBJ turned to Laurance Rockefeller, whose family philanthropy in support of the Save the Redwoods League was well known in Sacramento political circles. With his connections to the Republican Party and the business community, Rockefeller met with Reagan on Johnson’s behalf and conducted a shuttle diplomacy between the warring principals. Most of the lumber companies supported, if anything, a compact park at Mill Creek, a site that the Save the Redwoods League and some other conservation nonprofits firmly believed constituted the most valuable forestland. The Sierra Club rejected that position, insisting on an extensive park at Redwood Governor Reagan came out against pulling acreage anywhere from private interests for a national park. In addition, he was perhaps the only governor ever to demand compensation from the Interior Department in the form of an exchange for state parkland that would become a national
The Sierra Club was in full cry, pressing its case to save the redwoods in the midst of the political melee. Taking a multimedia approach, David Brower followed up the publication of The Last Redwoods by distributing an educational film called Zero Hour in the co-producing an Oscar-winning short documentary, The and taking out expensive full-page “battle ads” in the New York The year before, Congress had begun in earnest to craft the Redwood National Park bill. The sticking points were, first, the size; second, the location; and, third, Reagan’s scheme to force an exchange of state parkland for other federally-owned tracts. (Of course, cost was an issue, too, but it cut across the other three.) A cadre of politicians in both houses of Congress considered the “Reagan exchange” to be the most incendiary item on the list. They thought the California governor should have been grateful to have a new national park in his home state—one that was bound to attract legions of tourists to Humboldt and Mendocino Counties.
As a step forward in the heated process, characterized by one compromise after another, Senators Scoop Jackson and Thomas Kuchel cosponsored a Redwood National Park bill that specified a 64,000-acre park. That was 21,000 acres larger than Laurance Rockefeller’s proposal, which Johnson and Udall, as well as the Save the Redwoods League, had already accepted. But it was 33,000 acres smaller than the park the Sierra Club wanted. The bill specified Mill Creek as the site. A hard push by a group of senators for an amendment precluding any kind of exchange of lands failed, and the bill passed the Senate by a wide margin.
In the spring of 1968, the same fights emerged in the House hearings. Representative Aspinall, who had delayed action on a Redwood National Park for five years, was a lightning rod for the squabbles. That fact exasperated David Brower and his followers. When Aspinall attended hearings in Eureka, a gateway city of the proposed park, he sided with the angry citizens who claimed that timber industry jobs would be severely reduced if 64,000 acres of redwood groves were saved as a jumbo federal park. Brower feared that with the November 1968 presidential election on the horizon, all hope for Redwood National Park might evaporate, especially if the Republican Richard Nixon won the White House. The possibility of a new president may or may not have troubled Aspinall. But it certainly made him cognizant that his control over the high-profile Redwood National Park bill could slip away if Nixon won. Ultimately, he allowed his Interior Committee to authorize a bill. That alone was reason for New Conservationism to cheer after so much time in deadlock. The bill called for a park consisting of a Redwood Creek unit and a Mill Creek unit. It didn’t provide for Governor Reagan’s land exchange. And then there was the shocker: the negotiated size was only 28,400 acres. The Save the Redwoods League deemed it insulting.
The punishing outcry over the reduced acreage in the bill surprised Aspinall. In fact, he received more angry mail for the half-loaf Redwood National Park proposal than for any other initiative in his twenty-four years in Congress. The syndicated columnist Drew Pearson mocked “molasses-moving Aspinall” for seeing dollar signs instead of God’s majesty when it came to redwood groves. On Capitol Hill, seventy-three congressmen signed a petition protesting the pathetically small acreage, most of which consisted of nothing more than the three state parks already marked for
The wily Aspinall had a plan, though, and the even more wily LBJ appreciated his cunning. In the 1950s, Johnson had exploited the same arcane, complex, and even strange rules during his years in the House and Senate. He wanted an expansive Redwood National Park badly but couldn’t help admiring the way Aspinall had wielded power over the Interior Committee by slowing the pending legislation to a standstill; once that occurred, the Coloradan had shaped a bill that suited his overall plans. Other major conservation bills were also maneuvering through the Interior Committee in 1968, and that, too, worked to Aspinall’s advantage. It was left to LBJ to pressure Aspinall on Redwood National Park through a revolving door of intermediaries. “He let us know all the time,” Aspinall recalled of the atmosphere surrounding the
Aspinall proved his power-broking abilities by forcing first his committee and then the whole House to vote for his small-park/no-exchange bill by tacitly threatening to delay a vote on a Redwood National Park indefinitely—a fate that, members knew, might doom it to oblivion. Aware that he was playing for high stakes, with other deals and compromises awaiting passage of the Redwood National Park bill, Aspinall promised his colleagues that the size could expand “in conference,” when the House and Senate would reconcile their versions. Against every inclination and with Brower fuming in the background, the conservation-driven representatives John Saylor of Pennsylvania and Mo Udall of Arizona voted “yes” on the Aspinall version. The final vote was 389–15.
Afterward, the conference managers kept the two-part location, allowed the exchange, and, as Aspinall had predicted, expanded the size, ultimately to 58,000 acres. No one was completely happy with the final bill. But the grief, at least, was distributed quite equally among the many nonprofits, timber companies, government officials, and citizens taking a strong interest in the fate of the giant trees. For LBJ, the main thing was that the Redwood NP would be established before election day. After the bill passed with voice votes in both houses, former NPS director Horace Albright wrote to Udall, “You are clearly at the top now, and I don’t see how any successor can reach the pedestal on which you are
On March 6, 1968, President Johnson, for the first time in American history, delivered a message to Congress devoted solely to Indian affairs and to the people: their plight and goals, education, programs, and plans to improve their living conditions. Over the decades, other presidents had been asked to address Native American equality concerns—only LBJ did. In an unprecedented move, he established by executive order a National Council of Indian Opportunity to review federal programs for Native Americans. “I propose a new goal for our Indian programs,” Johnson said. “A goal that ended the old debate about termination of Indians and stressed
Matching money to his rhetoric, LBJ recommended that Congress appropriate a half billion dollars for programs aimed at Native Americans—about 10 percent more than in fiscal year 1968. In addition to establishing three federal fish hatcheries on Indigenous lands, LBJ sought to improve education and provide health care benefits on reservations—environmentalism wasn’t in the mix. Instead, LBJ boasted that under his leadership almost 130 manufacturing plants began operations on reservations, providing employment for four thousand people. These included the General Dynamics Corporation missile parts plant at Fort Defiance, Arizona, and the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation transistor-assembly facility at Ship Rock, New Mexico (but on the Navajo reservation). Johnson also sent US government biologists to work on the restoration of wildlife habitats in six states with Indian reservations to help hunting and fishing opportunities.
On March 8, hoping to shine a spotlight on his environmental policy achievements in order to showcase them in a presidential election year, Johnson delivered the remarkable Special Message to the Congress on Conservation, also known as the “To Renew a Nation” speech. Brimming over with quotes from Theodore Roosevelt, the president minced no words about how concerned he was about industry and technology disembodying the American landscape. “From the great smoke stacks of industry and from the exhausts of motors and machines, 130 million tons of soot, carbon and grime settle over the people and shroud the Nation’s cities each year,” he warned. “From towns, factories, and stockyards, wastes pollute our rivers and streams, endangering the waters we drink and use. The debris of civilization litters the landscapes and spoils the beaches.” It was as if Johnson painted the same dystopian landscapes in words that Rachel Carson had used in her opening fable in Silent It’s not unreasonable to claim that the voice of Carson had melded into that of LBJ. Both were visionary conservation leaders who espoused an American heritage of not only raw wilderness, clean shorelines, and unbroken forests but, as the president put it, “safe environment for the crowded
It’s heartbreaking to read Johnson’s special message. LBJ got it completely right about environmental stewardship but was all wrong about Vietnam, which destroyed his presidency. Whether it was asking Congress for $2 billion for community waste treatment plants or passing a Safe Water Drinking Act, banning surface mining in the Appalachians or cleaning all US waterways so the discouraging sign POLLUTED WATER, NO SWIMMING would not be posted anymore, LBJ was an exemplary conservation leader. It wasn’t just that he talked a “green” game. In a noble way he backed his rhetoric with decisive legislative action. In his “To Renew a Nation” special message, he called for seven new national wilderness areas, to be created from existing national forests: Mount Baldy (Arizona), Desolation (Washington), Pine Mountain (Arizona), Ventana (California), and Siccane (Arizona). “We are now surveying,” he exclaimed, “unspoiled and primitive areas in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Florida as further possible additions to the wilderness system.” In coming years he hoped an Eastern Wilderness Act could be passed to save uncultivated lands from Maine to Florida.
But Johnson couldn’t win over Democratic liberals to praise his New Conservation achievements because saying anything praiseworthy about the Tet-beleaguered president was akin to being pro–Vietnam War. In 1964, LBJ had considered Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota as his vice presidential running mate but had instead chosen Hubert Humphrey, an AFL-CIO favorite. On Great Society domestic issues, including conservation measures, McCarthy was a blue-dog Democrat. But he was fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War on moral principles, and thus, after he launched his presidential campaign, he became the high-profile leader of a movement to dump Johnson. On March 12, 1968, he came within a few hundred votes of defeating Johnson in New Hampshire, the first primary of the campaign season. Determined anti-war college students knocked on doors for McCarthy in snowy cities such as Hanover and Nashua. Many hippies cut their long hair, shaved, and, as the slogan went, got “Clean for Gene.”
White House aides would later recall how fatigued and tormented Johnson had been after New Hampshire. McCarthy became the bane of his Vietnam had boxed him in politically, and there was no escape. On March 31, in quiet tones, he told a prime-time evening television audience that he wasn’t going to seek reelection. Udall watched the abdication, which he’d been given a heads-up about, at his McLean home along the Potomac and gasped in frustration. For a president to yield and admit folly wasn’t an easy thing to do. Johnson had the look of a ruined adventurer: drained, run down, out of cards to play and clearly beaten. “There wasn’t an iota of his signature swagger visible,” Udall recalled. “I spoke to Bobby Kennedy shortly after, and he told me he, [too,] was caught by
Driving to West Virginia days later, Udall stopped at a cliff overlooking the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. The undulation of blue ranges in the distance held him transfixed, and the fresh air was an elixir. He resolved then to continue avoiding the dove-or-hawk politics of the war. Instead, in the months leading up to the presidential election, he’d focus on getting the quartet of important forest bills—Redwood National Park, North Cascades National Park, National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, and National Trails System—through Congress and signed into law by his lame-duck boss. From time to time, he shared moments of good fellowship with LBJ, only to be treated days later with a studied and inexplicable detachment. Perplexed, his pride wounded, Udall took such flashes of coldness as personal affronts. In conversation with former LBJ speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who was working for Bobby Kennedy, he resolved not to let the “Johnson treatment” hinder progress on his agenda in the six months he had left at Interior. In a letter to the president and First Lady the day after the announcement, Udall wrote, “Your leadership has given the nation a new outlook on conservation—a new concept of land stewardship for the future. I believe you have elevated the aspirations of the American people to new horizons—and history will surely honor both of you for your
Just as Udall was starting to plot a big conservation finale before November, a catastrophe rocked the country: on an ill-omened April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. In 1964, at the age of thirty-five, King had won the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest person ever to do so. Perhaps the greatest moral leader America every produced, he was in Memphis to help striking sanitation workers when a white supremacist shot him. An overlooked aspect of King’s career is his tireless activism for underserved families; he sought more urban parks, cleaner communities, mold-free public housing, preventive health care, and outdoor recreation facilities. He had championed the banning of lead paint in Atlanta, Memphis, and Chicago. In 2004, Udall said, “King was an environmental justice leader before the term was even
Sickened by the rot and refuse in degraded slums, King had defended poor people whose health was damaged by pollution and subpar sanitation. “Certainly Martin should be considered a leader in bringing public awareness to environmental degradation in Black communities,” Georgia congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis recalled in 2010. “Blacks in the back of the bus were sitting where the gas fumes engulfed them. That’s where you smelled the gas. There was no air-conditioning in buses when Martin was alive. Black passengers got sick and dizzy. You can consider the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which King led, as environmental justice act to a certain
Unlike the wealthy and upper middle classes, poor people, King would say, couldn’t just flee big cities for a long weekend on the Snake of Idaho or Allagash of Maine. “White flight, gentrification, the decay of urban neighborhoods, and interstate highway construction, which flattened minority communities,” Andrew Young recalled, “were routinely addressed by the Southern Christian Leadership King’s City on a Hill was a community where children weren’t poisoned by acrid smoke and asbestos. Representative Ron Dellums, a California Democrat who represented Berkeley and Oakland, and who would cofound the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971, went so far as to nominate Brower for the Nobel Peace Prize because the activist was a Martin Luther King–styled “publicist for a revitalized environment,” “protector of an endangered planet,” and “public conscience to the delicate balance of life on
Just four days after her husband’s death, Coretta Scott King flew to the accursed city of Memphis, sick at heart, and led a people’s protest herself. Three weeks later, she orated against the Vietnam War in New York’s Central Park, standing in for her slain Over the summer of 1968, she fled with her four children to New Hampshire to give them all a chance to heal. Craving the solitude of nature, the grief-stricken family hiked the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee near Wolfeboro. During those weeks, Mrs. King spoke often with Norman Cousins about keeping the anti-nuclear movement alive.
II
Roughly coinciding with King’s assassination was Mrs. Johnson’s “Crossing the Trails of Texas” tour. A small retinue of reporters accompanied her. While she was in Texas, neighborhoods in northwest Washington were burning as a result of rioting in the aftermath of King’s death. Around 115 American cities had erupted in spasms of violence following the killing of King. In Texas, Mrs. Johnson was visibly troubled by the sudden unraveling of America: Secret Service personnel were on high alert owing to serious threats on her life.
The high point of Mrs. Johnson’s visit was San Antonio’s Hemisfair, a world’s fair that had just opened. Most impressive was the extension of the San Antonio River by a quarter mile to connect with the fairgrounds. The city’s Conservation Society had rehabilitated twenty historic buildings, funded in part by the National Preservation Act of 1966. “Will Rogers once remarked that the two towns in America with the most personality were New Orleans and San Antonio,” Lady Bird reflected of her Hemisfair experience. “Today both towns enjoy a booming tourist trade. At various points in their past, they refused to let their personalities be devoured by the onslaught of so-called progress—the metro dollars increased as a result. Commerce capitalized on the natural gift of waterfronts and natural heritage of many
Accompanied by George Hartzog, Lady Bird also enthused about history-tourism while visiting the Battle of Goliad site, where Texas settlers had attacked the Mexican Army in 1835. And she spoke affectionately of the Big Thicket bayous and forests near her childhood home. Texas senator Ralph Yarborough referred to the East Texas cypress wilderness as the “biological crossroads of Mrs. Johnson praised Yarborough for introducing legislation in 1966 to protect Big Thicket, as well as the ecologically rich Big Cypress tract in A national park at Big Thicket would be within a hundred miles of 3 million people, most of them in Houston; such proximity fit well with the administration’s Parks for People agenda.
Five months before his wife’s tour, LBJ had signed a bill establishing the National Park Foundation (NPF), a nonprofit that allowed the National Park Service to obtain tax-deductible In coming years, corporations such as the Walt Disney Company and Union Pacific Railroad would become annual sponsors. “Here is another adventure in partnership between government and concerned private citizens—designed to serve the common good,” LBJ While Mrs. Johnson was in Texas, she met with some of the first big-dollar donors to NPF. She crafted her message to appeal to them, recommending that the IRS and Texas tax laws reward the preservation of a handful of Houston’s landmark buildings on the recent model of Old San Juan in Puerto Rico. Though some urban planners were swooning over recently planned satellite cities such as Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland, Mrs. Johnson preferred the restoration and greening of urban
Lady Bird swooned over the new Padre Island National Seashore at the southern tip of Texas’s Gulf Coast. She had been invited to dedicate it. Political life was strange: her husband had opposed the seashore park in 1961, but, seven years later, the Johnsons claimed credit for its existence. Rolling up her pants to walk along the sandy beach, enjoying the tides, Lady Bird felt her anxiety dissipate under the cloudless blue Wearing a beach hat to block the sun at the ceremony, Mrs. Johnson noted that her husband called Padre Island a pearl in the “necklace of national seashores” and praised the weather-worn beauty of driftwood on the shifting Gulf dunes. At her side were Udall and Hartzog. “Legends of early Indians, of shipwrecked Spanish galleons, are part of Padre Island, and I hope, Mr. Hartzog, there will be occasions when some gifted story-teller could bring them to life as part of the regular program here,” she said. “I’ve been to so many national parks, and that is one of the great things they do. They weave in the history of the island, the history of man and nature—the whole ecology—sitting around the campfire or in the visitors To her point, though “National Parks” conjures up romantic images of wide-open, wild places, in truth, nearly two-thirds of the United States’ 423 national park units are historical or cultural sites.
There was no easy banter between Mrs. Johnson and Stewart Udall on the Air Force One flight back to Washington. Intuitively, Lady Bird knew that Stew’s allegiance was to Bobby Kennedy. “I felt there was a withdrawal of his enthusiasm for the Johnsons,” she wrote in her diary. “I would not be surprised if he got out of the Cabinet. But there is still a real dedication in him for all the work of conservation and I think he gives credit to Lyndon for all his effectiveness in that field. He talked about the things that might be done in the next months to nail down further the conservation program. I was very, very tired. And it was, somehow, a sad conversation that left much
Udall was indeed bonded to RFK, though when the New York senator announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president on March 16, 1968, Udall felt that he couldn’t publicly endorse him. He was, of course, entirely supportive.
The core of RFK’s following were blue-collar workers, poor whites, and people of color. Cesar Chavez began a fast on February 15, 1968, both to promote the NFWA and to unite warring factions within the organization. RFK, with ties to the Latinx community, cheered him on from New York and Washington. By week two of the hunger strike, reports emerged that Chavez was dying. His nurse, Marion Moses, urged him to take vitamins and sip some soup and grapefruit juice. Moses had grown up in West Virginia. She earned a BS degree in nursing at Georgetown University in 1957. After bouncing around a few hospitals, she became head nurse in the medical and surgical unit of Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Francisco. In Berkeley one afternoon, in 1966, she saw a sign on a campus bulletin board about Chavez’s farmworkers’ union needing medical workers. Immediately, she drove to their headquarters in Delano, California, and for the next five years worked pro bono at the very humble health clinic on the NFWA’s Forty Acres retreat. In addition, she became Chavez’s personal health care provider.
Over time, Moses became an authority on the chemicals used in agriculture and the ways they were making migrant pickers seriously Few people, in fact, knew more about the toxicity of pesticides than Moses. In coming years, she would write such important books as Harvest of Sorrow: Farm Workers and Pesticides (1992) and Designer Poisons: How to Protect Your Health and Home from Toxic Pesticides
RFK sent Chavez a telegram urging him to break his fast, insisting that his death wouldn’t benefit the cause of the farmworkers’ union. Chavez asked Kennedy to visit him. By the time RFK arrived in Delano, Chavez had lost thirty-five pounds. After twenty-five days—one more than Gandhi’s longest fast in India—he was ready to end his fast. Just holding his head up had become difficult. With Moses overseeing the historic moment, RFK handed Chavez a piece of Mexican bread and declared him “one of the heroic figures of our
When Chavez had started connecting labor rights and environmental health, the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club withheld their support, deeming Chavez too radical a figure. They didn’t back the NFWA’s grape boycotts or get involved in its agenda on environmental health. There was a heavy taint of racism in their rejection of him. When Bill Douglas led hikes to protest dams and Dagmar Wilson organized anti-nuclear demonstrations, they were embraced as environmental leaders by the establishment. When Chavez observed that low-income people and communities of color were disproportionately affected by environmental dangers, virtually all of the blue-chip conservation groups refrained from backing his action.
A promoter of organic farming, Chavez would spend the rest of his life crusading against pesticides, promoting clean air and water, and insisting that produce should be grown without harming workers. At his home in Keene, California, he grew an organic garden including grapes and pears. Having adopted the French system of intensive farming, he dug deep beds and mastered composting techniques. “His yields were phenomenal,” his son Paul Chavez recalled. “His fruits and vegetables were world class, and he used less water. My dad was thinking about both environmental justice and sustainable agriculture. He was an all-around big By the time Chavez died in 1993, he was still far ahead of his time, trying to awaken the American public to risks of growing food without respect for the overall ecosystem and public health
Robert F. Kennedy broke the twenty-five day fast of Cesar Chavez on March 10, 1968. Together, they were early voices on behalf of environmental justice.
Bettmann / Getty Images
On June 5, 1968, the forty-two-year-old Bobby Kennedy won the California and South Dakota primaries in his quest for the presidency. It looked as though he was going to surge past McCarthy and Humphrey. Then, after delivering a victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he was shot by a Palestinian terrorist. A busboy named Juan Romero held RFK’s head and placed rosary beads in his hand. Kennedy asked him, “Is everybody okay?” and Romero replied, “Everything’s going to be The entire tragedy was broadcast live on television. Ethel Kennedy, three months pregnant, rushed to her husband’s side and prayed. The journalist Pete Hamill recalled that Kennedy had “a kind of sweet accepting smile on his
Twenty-six hours later, Robert Kennedy was dead. Seeing him buried next to his brother in an evening service at Arlington National Cemetery was too hard for Udall to bear. The cord that had bound his political and personal life together had been irrecoverably cut. “After Bobby died, I couldn’t work for a few weeks,” he said later. “I eventually realized that he would have wanted me to forge forward with the conservation bills like Redwood and North Cascades and the wild and scenic river systems. He had gotten involved with the whole Scenic Hudson cause. I continued to push those forward as my way to honor Bobby, my friend, my hero, and to help the Johnsons secure their own conservation
Robert Kennedy, Jr., was fourteen years old when his father was murdered. Until then he had planned to be a veterinarian. In the summer of 1968, he went on safari in Africa with Lem Billings (JFK’s closest friend) and determined that wildlife conservation was his true calling. In the fall he enrolled in Millbrook School, a boarding school for boys in duch*ess County, New York, attracted to it because of its ornithology program. To heal from losing his father, he and a friend took up falconry and captured raptors with snares. “We flew wild red-tails, falcons, and goshawks and pioneered many of the game-hawking techniques still used by American falconers,” RFK Jr. recalled. “We talked about hawks every spare moment at meals, between classes, and after chapel.”
Falconry led RFK to become an environmental lawyer determined to save hawks and kestrels from DDT poisoning and habitat destruction. Four ecosystems, the Shawangunks, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, and the Hudson River, had found a militant, lifelong environmental protector in Once he earned his law degree from Pace University, he crusaded to ban polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from being released by industries along the Hudson River and elsewhere. PCBs were used in the 1960s and later by power companies as dielectric (electrically nonconductive) fluids in transformers and capacitors. They were carcinogenic to humans and wildlife. Much like DDT, they were persistent in the food chain and remained in the environment
III
In early August 1968 the Republican Party, as anticipated, nominated Richard Nixon for president. Since losing to Kennedy in 1960, he had struggled and scrapped his way back to the top of the GOP heap. During the campaign, he styled himself as a Theodore Roosevelt reclamationist and wildlife conservationist. With subtlety and skill, he courted Izaak Walton League members in the Midwest, Conservation Fund members in the Northeast, and even Ralph Nader’s young consumer activist coalition. Far more than Governor Reagan, Nixon championed the National Park Service. “The grandeur of California’s quaint redwoods, like the immense horizon of California’s ocean, for my father growing up was a part of California’s mystique of limitless opportunity for a young man,” his daughter Tricia Nixon Cox recalled in 2020. “Like his love of swimming in the Pacific Ocean, he never tired of visiting California’s redwoods
Odd as it might seem, in 1968 Nixon admired the thrust of Nader’s consumer advocacy work. Not that he would have said it in public. Nader had artfully broadened his focus from his initial critique of auto safety and was pressuring American corporations on many fronts, including pollutants and their effects on a workforce and its surrounding community. As the 1968 presidential election heated up, Nader, in a sobering New Republic article, blamed West Virginia and Ohio coal-mining corporations for causing black lung And these mining companies responded by attacking Nader as a radical opposed to capitalism. The United States had the world’s biggest coal reserves and a longtime problem with miners contracting respiratory Nader’s fact-based exposés against Big Coal contributed to both houses of Congress passing the monumental Occupational Safety and Health Act of
Nixon’s daughter, Tricia, who was twenty-two in 1968, believed that environmental protection was an urgent concern of the sixties generation, just as Nader contended. “My future husband, Edward Cox, took time off from his summer work with Ralph Nader to attend the ’68 convention,” she recalled. “He attended my father’s presentations to large groups of delegates and came away impressed with my father’s frank talk about the need for federal environmental regulations. Edward thought it brave politically since he knew the core philosophy of the delegates was instinctively against more federal
Nixon’s key adviser on environmental issues at the time was the razor-sharp conservation-driven attorney John D. Ehrlichman, whose law firm had been involved with Puget Sound’s ecological issues for years. An only child, Ehrlichman was born on March 20, 1925, in Tacoma, Washington, but moved to Santa Monica, California, with his family after the Great Depression hit. Surfing in the Pacific and hiking mountain trails of the San Gabriels were his favorite teenage pastimes. A dedicated Boy Scout, he won the Distinguished Eagle Scout award and at eighteen joined the army air corps to serve in World War II, even though his father had died in 1940 while flying for the Royal Canadian Air Force. As a chancy lead B-17 navigator in the Eighth Air Force, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross. After the war, he attended UCLA on the GI Bill and graduated in 1948. Drawn to a career in land and water use law, he attended Stanford University Law School, graduating in 1951.
Moving to Seattle, Ehrlichman and his uncle Ben became perhaps the top land and water use lawyers in the Pacific Northwest. As a partner in Hullin, Ehrlichman, Roberts & Hodge from 1952 to 1968, his legal expertise in urban land use and zoning was legendary. In the mid-1960s, he garnered local press by blocking the development of an aluminum plant on Guemes Island, in a case that eventually went to the Supreme Court. The Ehrlichmans lived in Hunts Point, on the east side of Lake Washington. Alongside the plainer citizenry he regularly swam, boated, waterskied and fished in their backyard. Nobody worked harder to clean up Lake Washington from pollution than the bookworm Ehrlichman. In the late 1960s, he represented homeowners in Port Susan in suing Snohomish County over its approval of housing subdivisions on property owned by the Atlantic Richfield Company, which was remiss in procuring the permits needed to construct a refinery on the
Ehrlichman was also an angler extraordinaire. Whenever the opportunity arose, he went fishing all around King County, Puget Sound, and south to the Columbia River when salmon ran. “He and mom took us five children camping often as they could in the Cascades, the Olympics and the Canadian Rockies,” his daughter Jan Ehrlichman recalled. “Dad taught all of us to fish on these camping
In 1960, Ehrlichman worked on Nixon’s presidential campaign. Even though Nixon lost, it was the beginning of a fast friendship between the two politically driven men. The level-headed Ehrlichman was also close to Henry Jackson and shared the senator’s desire to protect salmon runs, have safe drinking water, and promote sustainable development. When an effort was needed to clean up gorgeous Lake Washington, adjacent to downtown Seattle, Ehrlichman took the lead, studying grassroots movements in the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay areas to mobilize citizens.
In 1962, Ehrlichman invited Nixon to boat around Lake Washington to fundraise and strategize for his campaign for California governor. Nixon was delighted to discover that Ehrlichman had become a conservation folk hero in Seattle for blocking the aluminum plant on Guemes Island. During their boat outings, Ehrlichman explained to Nixon the fundamentals of the Spring landscape of environmental policy in
The environment wasn’t Nixon’s “thing,” as Ehrlichman put it, but the Lake Washington adventure would prove to be consequential in US history. In 1968, Nixon chose Ehrlichman, considered by the Democratic triumvirate of senators Henry Jackson, Ed Muskie, and Gaylord Nelson to be a “covert green,” to be his chief domestic adviser and point man on all environmental quality policy
Ehrlichman was instrumental in selecting Russell Train as Nixon’s undersecretary of the interior. Train, a lawyer by education, had served in several government posts, but his true calling was the protection of global wildlife. Over the years, he was among the founders of several nonprofit groups dedicated to that pursuit, including the American branch of the World Wildlife Fund. He regularly went on African safaris with family and friends to study lions and rhinos. He was a refined, bighearted gentleman, at work or away from it. Believing that the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966 was too weak, he prepared reports for Ehrlichman that made the case for species and habitat protection. John McPhee interviewed Train for Encounters with the “Thank God for Dave Brower,” Train said. “He makes it so easy for the rest of us to be reasonable.” When Brower heard that, he responded, “Thank God for Russell Train. He makes it so easy for anyone to appear
As a California politician, Nixon knew in 1968 that the Sierra Club had a growing membership and media clout. And he had many longtime friends in the Save the Redwoods League. At times he took a genuine interest in marine mammal protection. Nevertheless, he had a special loathing of Bill Douglas, who, he fumed, had somehow received a free pass from the press for his blatant conservation-related conflicts of interest. According to Nixon, it was as if Douglas flaunted his lack of judicial restraint and the New York Times cheered him on because he made colorful copy as the “green”
By 1968, the Sierra Club was surging in influence and militancy. Senator Jackson even allowed club lawyers access to his Senate office to work on the North Cascades National Park campaign. Venturing into urban preservation, Brower published Central Park Country: A Tune Within which included nature-themed poems by Marianne Moore had her own heavy-duty bone to pick: she blamed LBJ for the bombing campaign that was destroying Vietnam’s The Sierra Club once so loyal to Jack Kennedy, eviscerated Johnson for his Vietnam policies, especially the spraying of defoliants such as 2,4-D and 2,3,5-T. With an unquenchable thirst for global peace, Brower called the Southeast Asia war “technological colonialism” that poisoned US soldiers as well as Vietnamese people, supposedly in the name of
From August 26 to 29, 1968, the Democratic Party gathered at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, for a convention that was, as the novelist Norman Mailer later described it, “martial, dramatic, bloody, vainglorious, riotous, noble, tragic, corrupt, vicious, vomitous, appalling, Disheartened by the assassinations of King and Kennedy and horrified by the party’s unwillingness to end the Vietnam War, protesters stormed Chicago. To thwart them, barbed wire ringed the Amphitheatre and six thousand men from the Illinois National Guard, along with eleven thousand city police officers, turned the city into a battleground. Todd Gitlin, one of the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an anti-war organization, paraphrased a lyric from the hippie anthem “If You’re Going to San Francisco”: “If you’re going to Chicago, be sure to wear some armor in your
In the Amphitheatre, away from the chaos outside orchestrated by Mayor Richard Daley’s police, the Democratic Party chose Hubert Humphrey as its nominee with Edmund Muskie as his running mate. That was a dream team from the perspective of conservation, but the candidates’ refusal to commit to an immediate end to the Vietnam War caused many liberal Democrats to sit the election out.
There was an environmental plank in the 1968 party platform, but it was a laundry list of lame generalities. Throwaway lines such as the need to “work toward abating the visual pollution that plagues our land” and “focus on the outdoor recreation needs of those who live in congested metropolitan areas” hardly inspired youth But perhaps nothing related to ecology could have fast-tracked in that year of the Vietnam War, Black Power, women’s rights, and the assassinations of MLK and RFK.
In 1968, the Democratic Party, headed by Humphrey, was slow to understand that a year after the Environmental Defense Fund had been founded, conservation had a new “Sue the bastards!” aggressiveness about it. The folksy days of Carl Sandburg lobbying to preserve the Indiana Dunes by telling homespun yarns had given way to urgent plans of eco-action with no room for compromise against philistines. Just as dunes shifted with the winds, the idea of what constituted conservation was changing as it came to embrace more ways that human activity posed a threat to the earth. A growing number of young people considered themselves environmentalists. Many were impatient to the point of desperation. Environmentalism was no longer a mere issue; it was fast becoming a political identity and a way of life.
In 1968, the Ecological Society of America asked the three presidential candidates, Humphrey, Nixon, and George Wallace (running for the American Independent Party), to put into writing their views on what constituted proper White House environmental leadership. Nixon ignored the request; Wallace wrote a few lines of pablum. Humphrey, by contrast, provided an adept three-page response calling for a prototype of the Environmental Protection Agency. “We need not only more ecologists,” he said, “but a new breed of professional ecologists who are prepared to act as broad-ranging ‘environmental specialists’ in ecology, planning, political science, sociology, engineering, and other disciplines which relate to the totality of our
That summer saw the formation of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minneapolis. Founded by Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and Clyde Bellecourt, AIM was ready to challenge government policies that hurt their tribes. Armed and militant, AIM said that the federal government had robbed Indigenous people of their lands, exploited sacred religious sites such as New Mexico’s Blue Lake (Taos-Pueblo) and Monument Valley (Navajo), and treated Native Americans like third-class citizens. Another valid point concerned the New Conservation movement. When land was saved in the form of a park or preserve, it was never placed under the management of its original stewards. Native American nations contended that they knew from centuries of experience how to best preserve their lands and waters but were ignored by the Interior Department.
In trying to break through to unleash environmentalism, nature writers, it might be said, were also becoming more aggressive. At the front of that pack in 1968 was Edward Abbey, whose book Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness galvanized environmentalists with a call to action to save the Southwest wilderness from hyperindustrialization. Abbey anchored his nonfiction book on his two seasons as a ranger in Utah’s Arches National Monument during the late Eisenhower era. The result was a perfectly rendered hybrid of transcendental joy, coyote humor, in-your-face wrath, field science data, philosophical righteousness, and moral clarity. After a rave review in the New York Times that January, the memoir became a weapon of resistance, a polemic against despoilers of
Raised in the Alleghenies of western Pennsylvania, Abbey, entirely self-assured, had the scraggly beard of an Old West prospector and the iconoclastic poise of a Beat Generation bohemian. In Desert he called the 76,000-acre Arches National Monument, which would be upgraded to national park status in 1971, “the most beautiful place on He described the region, with its burnt orange cliffs, corroded monoliths, and natural bridges, in lively, eloquent prose. “Everything is lovely and wild, with a virginal sweetness,” he wrote. “The arches themselves, strange, impressive, grotesque, form but a small and inessential part of the general beauty of this
Abbey’s detailed journals and notes from his time in the unfenced Utah backcountry formed the basis of Desert When he was on his rambles as a park ranger, he felt intoxicated, as if time were suspended. Awed by the eternal beauty all around him, mirthful and full of delight, he melted into the landscape, living in rustic simplicity and natural fellowship with the desert’s wildlife and learning the ways of desert ecology. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s dictum “Resist much, obey little,” Abbey became a fierce watchdog of Arches and surrounding Utah terrain held sacred by the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, and Pueblo of Zuni. Patrolling in a Park Service pickup, often in uniform, he came to revile the bulldozers, hydroelectric dams, paved roads, and industrial tourism that defined Southwest development in the 1960s. He channeled that revulsion into ferocious, and at times anarchistic, prose.
In Desert Abbey denounced large-scale uranium mining in Utah’s salmon pink tableland, and he reminded a cynical and distrustful public that the mission of the National Park Service was to preserve treasured landscapes in an “unimpaired” fashion. “Wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment,” he warned. “For my own part I would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a
Abbey’s Desert Solitaire was beloved by nature lovers, inasmuch as it mainly preached to the choir. The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, on the other hand, was a Cassandra sensation. A biology professor at Stanford who specialized in butterflies, Ehrlich had already documented the bay checkerspot butterfly editha which was facing annihilation on the West Coast, largely because of changes in its microclimate. In 1967, Brower heard Ehrlich lecture at the Commonwealth Club of California and was unnerved. He persuaded Ehrlich to turn the lecture into a book, the subject being the scientific and behavioral challenges pertaining to overpopulation. Brower also introduced him to an editor at Ballantine. Within three weeks, Ehrlich had a draft of The Population Bomb ready for publication.
Ehrlich’s primary concern was that ever-growing numbers of humans couldn’t be fed without causing major planetary environmental damage. Ever since he had read William Vogt’s 1949 book Road to he had fretted about the havoc that hom*o sapiens were wreaking on the world’s ecosystems. The Population Bomb warned that the natural world had a finite carrying capacity and that since World War II, it had been breached. “Basically, there are only two kinds of solutions to the population problem,” Ehrlich wrote. “One is a ‘birth-rate solution’ in which we find ways to lower the birth rate. The other is a ‘death rate solution’ in which ways to raise the death rate—war, famine, pestilence—find He saw the United States as the major culprit, because with only 7 percent of the world’s population, the country used 35 percent of its natural resources.
Selling more than 2 million copies, The Population Bomb triggered massive popular interest in the idea of zero population Ehrlich appeared as a guest on NBC’s Tonight Show and was a highly effective spokesperson on the causes of On the book’s fortieth anniversary, he wrote, “It introduced millions of people to the fundamental issue of the Earth’s finite capacity to sustain human More than any other US senator, Frank Church was alarmed by the book’s grim data. Speaking in southeastern Idaho, he warned, “Every 24 hours a city the size of Salt Lake is being added to the population of the world.” That “swarming human horde,” as he put it, would lead to global ecological
The other writer who put environmental ethics front and center before the American reading public was N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa, whose novel House Made of Dawn (1968) won a Pulitzer Prize for Thanks to Momaday, at long last, Native American environmental heroes like Chief Seattle, Standing Bear, Black Elk, Lame Deer, and Hyemeyohsts were put on the pedestal with Thoreau for their wisdom on the interrelationship with man and His novel is credited with sparking the Native American Renaissance. Superb writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich have ascribed Momaday with inspiring them to focus on Native American topics in their literature. In his essay “An American Land Ethic,” Momaday wrote that his Kiowa ancestors knew to regard the earth, sky, and waters as sacred treasures. This fine essay was included in Ecotactics: The Sierra Club Handbook for Environmental Activists
One other book related to the environment was published in 1968 that captured the public imagination in a futuristic way, just as the sixty-nine-year-old Henry Beston, author of The Outermost House (1928), died at his Chimney Farm in Maine. Twenty-nine-year-old Stewart Brand published the inaugural Whole Earth Catalog in a print run of only one thousand copies. In an oversized, magazine-like format, it offered alternative ways to think about planetary living, linking techno-utopianism, environmentalism, and the counterculture. Brand stitched together such disparate subjects as Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes, NASA, LSD, the Jefferson Airplane, and organic farming in a surprisingly coherent way. In the mid-1960s, he had been one of the novelist Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and had participated in the parties about which Tom Wolfe had written in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Amazed by satellite photos of lonely Earth floating in the dark, Brand imagined a world in which computer technology, space exploration, and green thinking would work in cosmic
