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Excerpt of Upcoming Bill Moyers Interview with Stewart Udall, Former Secretary of the Interior

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Bill Moyers

Former Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, joins Bill Moyers in conversation on NOW, Friday, November 14, 2003 at 9pm on PBS (http://www.pbs.org/now/sched.html).

Stewart L. Udall represented Arizona's second district in the U.S. Congress from 1954 until 1961, when President John F Kennedy appointed him Secretary of the Interior. During his four terms as a Congressman and eight years of service as Interior Secretary, Udall worked tirelessly to promote just labor laws, cooperation with Native American communities and environmental conservation. Udall is also the author of The Quiet Crisis (1963), To the Inland Empire (1987) and The Myths of August (1994).

As Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Udall was instrumental in the passage of The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the creation of The Land and Water Conservation Fund. Udall talks about his latest book, The Forgotten Founders, a book which counters the popular myth of how the American West was settled, the impact of the current administration's environmental policies, the influence of money on politics, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Read an excerpt from the interview taped for NOW with Bill Moyers:

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BILL MOYERS: You wrote a book in 1963, best seller, The Quiet Crisis, that was both a love song to the west and a call to conservation. You were a hopeful idealist in those days, as I think many of us were, about preserving and protecting our natural resources. I mean this was an ethic of stewardship that you had laid out there. Are you an optimist -- now?

STEWART UDALL: Well, it's hard some days to be optimistic when you look at what's happening in Washington. I'm filled with a lot of sadness. You know, we had a big tent, Bill, for 20 years. We had a big tent on the environment. And Republicans and Democrats -- we all worked together. Nixon was a good President on the environment. Gerald Ford was good.

We didn't have these stupid quarrels now. We didn't attack each other. We all worked together. And that was the glory of that period, to me. I never called anybody names, an environmental extremist. We didn't make it a partisan issue. We all worked together.

BILL MOYERS: So what's happened?

STEWART UDALL: What happened was that they dismantled the tent that we operated from.

The attitude today -- the ideology that is driving people in Washington-- is that we have too many environmental laws, some of them are too strict, we ought to relax them, we ought to recognize that businesses are being harmed by activities that regulate them. And it's a sad picture-- to see the consensus that we had developed break down and-- and have the kind of political arguments made over environmental issues. It didn't exist -- didn't exist for 20 years.

BILL MOYERS: It's harder and harder in the West, isn't it, to get elected without the support of business, without a lot of money from that side in to your campaigns?

STEWART UDALL: You know, it almost seems sometimes in Washington that they appear and say, "Well, now, what can we do for you, if you will make big contributions to our political campaign?"

Washington's a cesspool of money, Bill. I was there 49 years ago. It has changed so drastically it makes me sick every time I look at it.

BILL MOYERS: Because?

STEWART UDALL: Of money. Of money.

BILL MOYERS: Money driving policy.

STEWART UDALL: Money driving policy. Money driving politics.

Bill, I want to say something to the business community. The business people that I knew in the '60s and '70s and worked with them on projects were -- had a sense of integrity. That they owed duties to the country, duties to the community. The element of honesty was very strong.

This breakdown that we've seen in the last three, four years in corporate America. The greed that we see -- and the shocking thing to me is that nobody's shocked. There's no indignation in Washington anymore.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

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Watch the complete interview on NOW with Bill Moyers on Friday, November 14, 2003 at 9pm on PBS (http://www.pbs.org/now/sched.html) or read the transcript of the interview after broadcast on www.pbs.org/now.