Inside America's Most Beloved Agency: Part III

A Legendary Sage Reflects On A Current Threat: “The Whole Process is Upside Down”

By Todd Wilkinson, 12-07-05

	George B. Hartzog, Jr.

Editor's Note: The re-writing of boilerplate protective language for the National Park Service by political appointee and Deputy Assistant U.S. Interior Department Secretary Paul Hoffman should cause broader public analysis of the climate of fear that exists inside America's most beloved government agency. This is the third in a series of dispatches from Todd Wilkinson who was written about the National Park Service for the last 20 years. Click here to read the first two installments.

Despite denials from the National Park Service that there is a problem; and in spite of assurances from the agency's public affairs office in Washington D.C. that rank-and-file rangers across the country support changes to the Park Service operating manual being expedited in lone-wolf fashion by Deputy Asssistant Interior Secretary Paul Hoffman, everything I'm hearing suggests that just the opposite is true.

Never before in the history of the Park Service have such a large number of retired employees banded together and risen up to challenge what they perceive to be the undoing of their much-beloved public agency. What would cause them to do that?

Senior level managers, who collectively have thousands of years of professional experience overseeing our national parks on behalf of we citizens, are in an uproar over the changes that Mr. Hoffman, still, to this day, is trying to implement.

On Tuesday, the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, representing the most esteemed veteran park managers dating back to the 1960s took the unprecedented bold action of calling upon the Park Service to scrap the management plan rewrite and either start over or halt it altogether.

Over the weekend, I heard from some well-placed agency employees who said that Mr. Hoffman, while still determined to implement the changes, is becoming increasingly concerned about the revolt launched by retired agency employees who also tell me morale is spiraling. Downward. I've also heard from a number of Park Service employees at national parks in the West. People who wear the uniform of a U.S. government agency are afraid to let me mention their names because they fear they will be punished by senior public servants, in this case political appointees in the Bush Administration.

Is it right that the very people who the public has enlisted to tell them the truth about how parks are being managed are instead fearful of speaking up?

One agency employee describes Mr. Hoffman this way: “Deeply ideological. Devious. Vindictive. Still very thoroughly engaged in the policies process. Any suggestion to the contrary is a lie.�

To obtain a reality check, I called upon one of the most respected former Park Service directors of the last 50 years. George B. Hartzog, Jr, who is 85-years-old, and served as the agency’s seventh director from 1964 to 1972 under both Presidents Johnson and Nixon. For younger readers of New West, Johnson was a Democrat, Nixon a Republican.

It was during Hartzog’s tenure as director that the Park Service underwent its largest expansion in history, adding 70-plus units. While he oversaw one of the most aggressive programs aimed at upgrading national park infrastructure, he also held the line against over-zealous engineers who wanted to cover many fragile park areas with more asphalt and concrete.

Moreover, Hartzog was -- and still is -- widely admired by those on both sides of the political aisle, by Great Society lefties as well as Teddy Roosevelt conservatives. Again, to younger readers who were not yet born, it was actually during the Nixon years that many of the vanguard environmental protection laws were put on the books. So esteemed is Hartzog that there’s an environmental award named after him that has been presented to some of the Park Service’s most committed defenders.

Former Secretary of Interior Stewart L. Udall, writing in 1988, described Hartzog as "one of the most inspiring leaders I worked with during my years in the federal government … In a decade when a president of the United States seeks out opportunities to denigrate the institution we call the federal government and belittle the work of its dedicated civil servants, George Hartzog reminds us of the glories of public service and the legacies our best bureaucrats leave to future generations … Everyone who saw him in action remembers the sense of mission, and the zest and drive, he transmitted to his co-workers … He was a consummate negotiator; he enjoyed entering political thickets, and he had the self-confidence and savvy to be his own lobbyist and to win most of his arguments with members of Congress, governors and presidents … He exuded reasonableness and goodwill. His signature was the greeting he invariably extended to ordinary citizens and senators alike: ‘Hello my friend, what can I do for you?’ As an administrator, he set an exemplary standard for commitment, for candor -- and for fair play.�

I’ve never heard Mr. Hoffman’s leadership style, or current Park Service Director Fran Mainella’s, compared to Hartzog’s. Hartzog is respected because he was unabashedly unashamed to call himself, as a civil servant, an advocate for protecting the integrity of national parks, monuments and historic sites. He was green because he still believes that the Park Service demands that its ranger corps' priority is protection.

Mr. Hoffman, meanwhile, has tried to alienate and isolate these kinds of Park Service employees as being extreme and radical and captive to environmentalists. He apparently fails to understand that the principles of modern conservation descended from the ethic handed down by agencies like the Park Service. While Mr. Hoffman may believe the Park Service is a bastion for radicals, millions upon millions of Americans who respect it more than any other in government, recognize that, in this day and age, it takes a strident devotion to core principles to avoid the erosion of a sacred institution under constant threat from commercial exploitation.

Here’s what yet another longtime Park Service veteran told me: "The revisions {being made by Hoffman} are all about serving the recreation interests, providing opportunities for contractors, converting parks to a 21st century version of the old royal reserves of Europe by pricing ordinary folks out of the market and moving the public face of the agency out of the public eye. The last is the least noticed and most insidious element."

This insider says the Park Service is held in high public esteem because people {read citizens} have had personal and positive interaction with the uniformed service. "Hand the friendly, visitor services stuff over to volunteers, convert the rangers to hard-ass cops, and we’ll destroy that image. Once the public loses touch with the friendly Smokey-the-Bear in green and grey, their affection will soon erode, too."

There’s an internal struggle occurring inside the Park Service for the very soul of the agency -- its identity, its place in American culture, and its connection to citizens. The agenda of the Bush Administration, critics say, is to create a Trojan Horse that on the outside masquerades as an argument for better efficiency, more accountability and a smaller bureaucracy, but is really about privatizing the services and operations of national parks, allowing sweetheart commercial profiteers to set the agenda for what is construed as “publicly beneficial� and what is not.

Political appointees who favor privatization know that once new kinds of uses become established by watering down the protective language that currently keeps them out, and the argument can be made that jobs and economies are dependent upon those kinds of uses persisting and growing -- even if they are ultimately destructive to the essence of the park itself -- it is almost impossible to rigidly regulate those uses or make them go away.

Hartzog says that over a single generation, the essence of national parks could be eroded away until they are indiscernible from theme parks. The slippery slope to that outcome begins with the wording the proscribes what park managers can do and what they can’t, or, better yet, how their politically connected superiors can interpret the language any way they like.

How influential was Mr. Hartzog in protecting the pure ethic of our park system? The Secretary of the Interior’s Executive Advisory Board on the National Park System, which over the years has included prominent politicians, business leaders, academicians, and philanthropists, declared of Hartzog’s deeds: “There will never come an end to the good he has done.�

I recently had an opportunity to interview Mr. Hartzog by phone at his home in Virginia. I have been blessed over the years to have had several lengthy chats with him.

TODD WILKINSON: Why, and how can the Park Service continue to try and shrug off the growing level of concern coming from the most distinguished group of employees to have ever worked for the agency? We have people who served as Park Service directors, assistant directors, regional directors, assistant regional directors all down the line who say that Paul Hoffman’s overhaul of the Park Service operating manual represents one of the greatest threats to the federal park system in U.S. history. Yet Mr. Hoffman and a few senior level Park Service careerists continue to discount the seriousness of it all, including a few deputy directors who were once the students of the old sages who are most worried. What do you make of it?

GEORGE HARTZOG: I don’t know. It puzzles me. Until they recast the policy statement, which Hoffman gutted, and restore the historic language that makes preservation again an unequivocal priority, then there is going to be a huge point of conflict and controversy. It is simply unsatisfactory the way the Park Service is approaching it. The same conclusion was reached a few weeks ago by members of a Senate Committee in a hearing that addressed this issue. They {the senators} think preservation ought to be given priority, too and we’re talking about people who are not known for being ardent conservationists but they know what is at stake.

TW: How rare is it to have an Assistant Secretary like Mr. Hoffman take it upon himself to do a rewrite of the operating manual?

GH: It is unheard of. Historically, the first rewrite occurred in 1918 {two years after the Park Service was founded} and it was carried out by Horace Albright (then Park Service director and former Yellowstone Superintendent). Since then, as with Albright, rewrites have always originated within the career service of the National Park Service, carried out with public involvement, and then brought to the Secretary of the Interior for approval. In recent years, the Interior Secretary’s executive advisory board has provided input. Not in the history of the Park Service has an assistant secretary ever dictated policy and then sent a draft to the Park Service for its review after the fact. Not ever, until now. The whole process is upside down.

TW: How would you describe the morale of Park Service employees based upon chats you are having with friends in the agency?

GH: It is not good. There has been a lot of concern generated because of the policy rewrite, which I consider to be a major contributing factor to the not enthusiastic morale.

TW: What is it that most disturbs you?

GH: A cataclysmic change such as this wouldn’t ever have been proposed in the past without a recommendation coming from the Executive Advisory Board of the National Park Service, which has had some extremely knowledgeable and distinguished leaders sitting on it. As best as I can tell, Hoffman initiated all of this himself.

TW: What about those in the Bush Administration who claim you and others are overreacting?

GH: I say they are misguided and misinformed. This is the most serious threat to the system I have seen in my experience with national parks. {Hartzog’s association with the Park Service dates back to 1948}. What they are doing, by design, is aiming to treat national parks as generic public lands without offering recognition of their special character as part of the heritage of America. The National Park Service is the one agency, overseeing the special places in our society, where there is an opportunity to restore a sense of common community and allow interpretation and reflection without any partisan politics. Parks represent the one place you can go and feel yourself in contact with the larger environment to which all of us report and behold the man-built places of history that are treasures and foundational to our heritage. What they are doing is stripping away the protection.

TW: In your mind, what should the public do about it?

GH: They should get in touch with their representatives in Congress and tell them they need to put a stop to it. Congress is where important decisions about national parks should be made. One individual with a personal agenda shouldn’t be allowed to have so much control and influence, unchecked.

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