"Get Off"

In his eleven months in office, Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall has not proved himself the best, the worst, or even the most indifferent, member of the Kennedy Cabinet. But he is surely the damnedest.

Like an old-curmudgeon predecessor named Harold Ickes (1933-46), Interior's Udall has made lots of news--much of it unwelcome. As an Arizona Congressman, he earned John Kennedy's gratitude--and, presumably, his present Cabinet position--by his effective 1960 preconvention work for Kennedy in the Southwest. No sooner had he taken over his Cabinet office than he allowed as how Democratic Congressmen had better go along with the Kennedy Administration's effort to liberalize the House Rules Committee or lose their bite at the Interior Department's pork-barrel appropriations; this sort of talk annoyed all kinds of Congressmen. Next, Udall sent out a letter to oil and gas men, many of whom were doing business with the Interior Department, dunning them for contributions to a Democratic fundraising dinner; for this, President Kennedy found it necessary to rebuke Udall at a press conference.

And so it has gone. Udall decided--with considerable cause--that much of Washington's statuary was awful; as a step toward remedying the situation, he shipped a bronze statue of William Jennings Bryan back to Bryan's birthplace in Salem, Ill. This raised a ruckus from Washington's Bryan fanciers. Later, a Potomac, Md., innkeeper exploded when Udall, on a hiking trip along the banks of the Potomac River with, among others, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, marched into her place in a rain-soaked poncho. "Get out of here!" she cried. "You look like a bum."

Last week, Udall once more got booted from private premises. On a helicopter tour of the Interior Department's proposed Prairie National Park in northeastern Kansas, he plopped down onto a knoll where hard-eyed Rancher Carl Bellinger was grazing 140 head of cattle. "Get off this land!" ordered Bellinger. "You're trespassing."

Udall left--seemingly in high good humor and only after shaking Bellinger's hand. But the incident really rankled. Later that day, appearing at a meeting in Westmoreland, Kans., Udall listened while Bellinger and other property owners explained why they did not want their 57,000 acres of bluestem grassland taken over as a national park. Said Stewart Udall, with memories of his experience that morning: "It's too bad when a member of the President's Cabinet tries to take a walk on a hill, he is told to get off," Concluded Udall: "But the National Park will remedy that."

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