Now that I have retired from the government and have a chance to look back objectively on thirty-six years in the federal service, I have a desire to express some of my thoughts about the Congress of the United States. I have a very high regard and deep appreciation for Congress, both the House and the Senate. The members represent a cross section of the people of the United States and are well qualified to make the laws for our country. They are often maligned and referred to as "politicians" as if that were something bad. We are a democracy, and our form of government requires politicians or statesmen—whichever you wish to call them. We, the people, select them and can remove them if they do not serve us well. Consequently I've always felt that derogatory references to them are not fair. A congressman must be prudent, shrewd, artful, expedient, and judicious to survive in political life. These attributes make up the science or art of politics. If he has these qualifications he'll be in Congress for a long time, to the benefit of the country.

As a government employee my direction and responsibilities were derived from the laws of our land, which were enacted by Congress. My actions were subject to review and approval by both Congress and the secretary of the interior. I have been critical of Congress at times because my judgments did not prevail, and I have also criticized higher administrative authority for the same reasons. On looking back, though I think I was right in most cases, I do recognize the possibility that I may not always have presented my thinking effectively and that there is always the chance of an honest difference of opinion. When something positive was accomplished, we in the bureaus of the departments have, more often than not, taken credit for a job well done and neglected to share it with committees of Congress. In many cases, without the backing of Congress, which provided authority and financing, we could not have been successful. Mission 66 is a good example. I say "thank you to the Congress of the United States for the support it has given the National Park Service through the years in carrying out our assigned duties and responsibilities.

In mentioning some of the members of Congress who have been particularly helpful, I know I will leave out some very important friends, not intentionally, but nevertheless unfortunately. I know that the committee and subcommittee chairmen are very important and powerful individuals, but I also know that they derive their power from the members of their committees and that their leadership stems from their statesmenship. Committee members, if they read these pages, should know that my expressed appreciation is in tended for all.

THE HOUSE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE

When I first arrived in Washington in 1928, Representative Louis C. Cramton, of Michigan, was chairman of the Subcommittee on Appropriations for the Department of the Interior. His committee also processed appropriations for the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds and the National Capital Park and Planning Commission. At that time I was an assistant to Lieutenant Colonel U. S. Grant III, engineer in charge of Public Buildings and Grounds and executive officer of the planning commission. In a minor way I helped with appropriation and legislative matters, mostly in connection with the development of the park system of the city of Washington. Cramton along with Senator Arthur Capper, of Kansas, had introduced the bill that would authorize an appropriation for park land acquisition in the District of Columbia and, on a matching basis, for acquisition and development of the park system beyond the district line into Maryland and Virginia. The authorization included funds to buy the land for the George Washington Memorial Parkway. I got to know the congressmen very well.

When I transferred to the National Park Service, I found that Representative Cramton was almost like one of the Park Service family. He was a very good friend of Director Albright's and was included in many of the Park Service social gatherings. His advice on legislative matters, apart from his function as chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee, was highly respected and greatly appreciated. He was defeated when he ran for reelection in 1932, went back to Michigan, and a few years later was elected to the state legislature. He died in 1966, the year the National Park Service celebrated its fiftieth anniversary.

The 1932 election gave control of the House of Representatives of the Seventy-second Congress to the Democrats, and Representative Edward T. Taylor, of Colorado, took over as chairman of the Subcommittee on Appropriations for the Interior Department. Here again we were most fortunate in having a good friend and a strong supporter of the National Park Service. I won't attempt to enumerate the many things Representative Taylor did with far-reaching effect on the responsibilities of the entire Interior Department. He had become a highly respected leader in Congress. He was on the Appropriations Committee as early as 1928 and served as chairman of the Subcommittee on Interior Appropriations from 1933 to 1943. His congressional district took in all of Colorado west of the Rocky Mountains, an area that included two national parks and five national monuments. By 1937, Representative Taylor had become chairman of the Appropriations Committee, but he retained the chairmanship of the subcommittee on the Interior Department through 1942, when he was followed by Representative Jed Johnson, of Oklahoma, who had been a member of the subcommittee since 1935.

House Subcommittee on Interior Appropriations

At the meeting of the Subcommittee on Appropriations for Interior on March 17, 1943, Chairman Jed Johnson welcomed as new members, Michael J. Kirwan, and Ben F. Jensen. Those men, the first a Democrat and the second a Republican, turned out to be two of the best supporters we had on the Appropriations Committee over a period of seventeen years.

Jed Johnson, the Oklahoma Democrat, remained as chairman through to 1948. While I knew Johnson quite well from CCC days, I had practically no contact with him when he was chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee. He served during the difficult war years. In 1945 the total appropriation for the Park Service was only $4,740,000, which is less than the service had in 1930 and $28,800,000 less than in 1940. Representative Robert Jones, of Ohio, followed Johnson as chairman for one session of Congress and in turn was followed by Ben Jensen, of Iowa, for the 1949 appropriations bill. Both were Republicans.

In 1949, Jensen was the ranking Republican on our subcommittee, and Mike Kirwan the ranking Democrat. Whenever the party majority changed in the House of Representatives, one or the other of them became chairman of the subcommittee. During that period, between 1949 and 1965, the Democrats had a majority in the House of Representatives for fourteen years, and consequently the chairmanship fell into Mike Kirwan's hands more often than into Ben Jensen's. Ben and Mike worked together, however, and if they had any disagreements over our budget because of political differences they never displayed them during committee hearings. I am most familiar with this period because it is the period that I was director and appeared before the Appropriations Committee to justify the service's requests for funds.

I should explain that it is customary in the National Park Service for the director and the assistant director for administration to defend the service's request for appropriations and legislation before the committees of Congress. It is the responsibility of the service's Branch of Administration to collect the necessary data for preparation of the budget request. All branches and offices of the service cooperate in reviewing and making recommendations concerning items that pertain to their respective operations in the field as well as in the Washington office. The responsibility for preparing the budget for the service, however, belongs to the assistant director of the Branch of Administration subject to the final approval of the director. When the director and assistant director of the Branch of Administration attend the congressional appropriation hearings, they are usually accompanied by fiscal and other technical staff people who can help justify the request.

Hillory Tolson was the assistant director in charge of the Branch of Administration while I was director, as he had been for a number of years. Tolson was a good administrator and had handled the preparation of budgets under the directorships of Cammerer, Drury, and Demaray. He had developed a very efficient staff, and the two on that staff that I most often dealt with were Clarence Montgomery and Harold Smith, both outstanding men.

During the dozen years that I was director of the National Park Service, the two key members of the House Appropriations Subcommittee were Ben Jensen, the Republican, and Mike Kirwan, the Democrat. They, and in fact the whole committee, were most considerate and favorable toward our Mission 66 program, and it can certainly be said that without their help and understanding Mission 66 could not have succeeded. But I am also certain that a lot of the confidence and support that we received resulted from the way in which our budgets were prepared, justified, and presented to Congress. Many times we were complimented on this by the Congress and the Bureau of the Budget, and I know that much of the credit for this was owing to Hillory Tolson and his boys, whose aim in their work was perfection.

I must relate an incident involving Mike Kirwan that illustrates his character. (I have told the story about the first money we got for Mission 66 in Chapter 9 on that program.) After I retired in 1964 I wanted in some way to show Congressman Kirwan my appreciation for all he did for the service while I was its director. On Laurance Rockefeller's suggestion I took Mike and his wife to Virgin Islands National Park. The three of us had a very enjoyable time at Caneel Bay for a little over a week. The last night there, while I was getting ready for dinner after having cocktails in Mike's room, he came in and sat down and said, "What can I do for you Connie?" I told him absolutely nothing, that the purpose of this trip was to express thanks for all he had done to help me while I was director and that Laurance had made this trip possible. He repeated several times, "Are you sure there is nothing I can do for you?" I said no. He then said, "I'm glad to hear you say that, because when you are a congressman most people are nice to you because they want something, but you have never asked for anything except those things in line with your government responsibilities." Then he said that he never had received much schooling because his family was very poor. He had had to go to work when he was still a young boy 7 and he knew what it was to be hungry and knew the value of money. He was interested in the parks because they brought a lot of people enjoyment that they could not get in any other way. That tied right into his reasoning expressed during committee hearings when he kept wanting us to put in more picnic and camping areas so that the low income people would have places to go and enjoy themselves.

Mike Kirwan was a good representative of the people who elected him. As far as I know he never went back to his district to campaign for office; but it seemed that in every succeeding election he would get a larger percentage of the vote. He said that if he went back to campaign he would have to promise the people a lot of things he couldn't deliver.

THE SENATE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE

The Constitution requires that all appropriation bills originate in the House and then go to the Senate. Often disagreements are resolved in conference between the House and Senate committees. Bureaus that suffer budget cuts in the House usually try to get them restored in the Senate. As far as the Park Service is concerned, I would say we were successful in this maneuver 75 per cent of the time, although whenever the House and Senate committees go into conference to iron out their differences it seems that more often than not the House view prevails.

In 1928 Senator Reed Smoot, of Utah, was chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on the Interior Appropriations. I really never knew him. He was chairman until 1934, when one of the great men of the Senate, Carl Hayden, became chairman. Hayden was chairman over a period of thirty-one years, from 1934 through 1968, with only two breaks of two years each—in 1947 and 1948, when Kenneth S. Wherry, of Nebraska, was chairman, and in 1953 and 1954, when Guy Cordon, of Oregon, held the chair.

Once when Mission 66 was under way and Hayden was chairman, we had several requests for funds to restore some of the old Civil War battlefields and to establish visitor centers to help interpret the engagements. Most of the battlegrounds are in the southern states, and four or five southern senators came in to urge that the appropriations be granted. Chairman Hayden was the only member of the committee present; perhaps it was just as well because, even though the other members relied almost entirely on his judgment, when they were present the hearings took a great deal longer. After the southern senators had left, Hayden said, "Off the record, Connie, I thought the South lost the war between the states." And I replied, "Yes, Senator they did, but they didn't lose a battle."

At one of the hearings when Senator Cordon, also a supporter and friend of the service, was chairman, he asked me a question and before I had an opportunity to answer it, Carl Hayden spoke up with the answer. Whereupon the chairman turned to me and said jokingly, "Connie, I think you'd better let Carl Hayden defend your budget; he knows as much about parks as you do." I answered, "I'd be very glad to let our case rest with Carl Hayden any time, providing it had the chairman's approval also." Carl Hayden retired at the end of the session of Congress in 1968. He had been in Congress first as a representative and then as a senator ever since Arizona had become a state in 1912, a total of fifty-six years.

The senator who followed Hayden as chairman was Alan Bible, of Nevada, who retired at the end of the 1974 session of Congress. I never had an opportunity to appear before the committee while he was chairman, but I know him well. He also served for many years on the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, the legislative committee of the Senate, and helped to pull our irons out of the fire many times. We always found him to be an upright, thoughtful, pleasant, intelligent, helpful senator, and a gentleman.

Senate Subcommittee on Interior Appropriations