Udalls are a political dynasty. Aside from Stewart, there was Mo, who served in the House, Stewart's son Tom, who is a Senator from New Mexico, Mo's son Mark, who is a Senator from Colorado, and Gordon Smith former Senator from Oregon (and son of Jessica).
President Obama said in a statement Saturday night that Mr. Udall “left an indelible mark on this nation and inspired countless Americans who will continue his fight for clean air, clean water and to maintain our many natural treasures.”
Jeff Geissler/Associated PressStewart L. Udall in 2002
Few corners of the nation escaped Mr. Udall’s touch. As interior secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he presided over the acquisition of 3.85 million acres of new holdings, including 4 national parks — Canyonlands in Utah, Redwood in California, North Cascades in Washington State and Guadalupe Mountains in Texas — 6 national monuments, 9 national recreation areas, 20 historic sites, 50 wildlife refuges and 8 national seashores. He also had an interest in preserving historic sites, and helped saved Carnegie Hall from destruction.“Republicans and Democrats, we all worked together,” Mr. Udall said in a television interview with Bill Moyers. But by the time of that interview, Mr. Udall added that Washington had been overtaken by money and that people seeking public office fought for contributions from business interests that viewed environmental protection as a detriment to profit at best.
In his years in Washington, he won high regard from many quarters for his efforts to preserve the American landscape and to educate his fellow Americans on the value of natural beauty, points he made in his 1963 book “The Quiet Crisis.” The book, whose aim, he wrote at the time, was to “outline the land and people story of our continent,” sold widely. It was Mr. Udall who suggested that John. F. Kennedy invite Robert Frost to recite a poem at Mr. Kennedy’s inauguration. Mr. Udall accompanied Mr. Frost to the Soviet Union in 1962, a trip meant to foster better ties with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev.
Edward Hausner/The New York Times
In 1965, Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall, second from left, discussed parks in New York with Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., left, and Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Jacob K. Javits
Mr. Udall also held evenings at the Interior Department with the poet Carl Sandburg and the actor Hal Holbrook. In addition, he invited the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner to be the department’s writer in residence. It was Mr. Stegner’s presence that prompted Mr. Udall to write “The Quiet Crisis.” Mr. Udall was also an early supporter of Rachel Carson, the biologist whose book “Silent Spring” brought attention to the environmental hazards of pesticide use.
Mr. Udall stepped onto the national stage in 1954, when he was elected to Congress from Arizona. In the hotly fought race for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, he urged his fellow Arizona Democrats to support Kennedy. When Kennedy won the White House, he nominated Mr. Udall as interior secretary. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Mr. Udall was kept on by Lyndon B. Johnson. “I think probably part of that was Lady Bird,” Mr. Udall said, referring to Mr. Johnson’s wife, with whom he collaborated on beautifying the nation’s capital and similar projects. “She treasured me, and we were wonderful friends,” he added.
Roger G. Kennedy, who was director of the National Park Service in the 1990s, said Mr. Udall “escaped the notion that all public land was essentially a cropping opportunity — the idea that if you cannot raise timber on it or take a deer off it, it wasn’t valuable.” On the other hand, Mr. Kennedy said, Mr. Udall understood that public lands like parks enhanced the economic value of privately held land nearby. This lesson was sometimes communicated with difficulty. For example, in the 1960s, when the Kennedy administration, with Mr. Udall in the lead, began efforts to establish the nation’s first national seashores, people in regions including Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and Point Reyes in California objected that taking coastal land out of private hands would ruinously inhibit economic development. Instead, the parks have been beacons for lucrative tourism.
On this and other fronts Mr. Udall pushed with a formidable combination of political acumen and political allies — including his younger brother Morris K. Udall, who succeeded him in Congress and in 1976 ran for president in a campaign that his older brother managed. Many of the significant environmental and land-protection statutes that became law in the 1970s and ’80s, including the Endangered Species Act, bore their stamp and influence. “That was a wonderful time, and it carried through into the Nixon administration, into the Ford administration, into the Carter administration,” Stewart Udall said. “It lasted for 20 years. I don’t remember a big fight between the Republicans and Democrats in the Nixon administration or President Gerald Ford and so on. There was a consensus that the country needed more conservation projects of the kind that we were proposing.”
Stewart Lee Udall was born on Jan. 31, 1920, in St. Johns, Ariz., a small community in Apache County in the northeast, into a family with strong ties to the Mormon Church. His mother, Louise Lee Udall, was a granddaughter of John Doyle Lee, who was executed in 1877 for his involvement in the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah, in which a wagon train of California-bound migrants were killed in 1857. Mr. Udall served as a Mormon missionary in Pennsylvania and New York. During World War II, he was a gunner in the 15th Army Air Forces, serving in Europe. He received bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of Arizona. After graduating from law school in 1948, he started his own law practice in Tucson, where he and Morris later became partners.
After leaving Washington, he taught at Yale, practiced law and wrote several books, including “The Myths of August,” an account of the effects of uranium mining and nuclear weapons work in the Western desert. That grew out of his representation of thousands of uranium miners, nuclear weapons industry workers and citizens exposed to radiation from atomic weapons manufacturing and testing in the West. Though he won the first case in 1984 in Federal District Court, an appeals court overturned the ruling and the United States Supreme Court declined in 1988 to hear arguments. Mr. Udall then turned to Congress, working with lawmakers of both parties, particularly Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who died in August.
In 1990, President George Bush signed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The law, administered by the Justice Department, provided up to $100,000 for those sickened by radiation exposure, and issued a formal apology for harm done to those who were “subjected to increased risk of injury and disease to serve the national security interests of the United States.”
Throughout his life he relished physical challenges. He was an all-conference guard on the University of Arizona basketball team and he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, in East Africa, and Mount Fuji, in Japan, while heading American delegations to both regions. When he was 84, at the end of his last rafting trip on the Colorado River, Mr. Udall hiked up the steep Bright Angel Trail from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the south rim, a 10-hour walk that he celebrated at the end with a martini.
Mr. Udall’s wife, the former Irmalee Webb, died in 2001. Besides his son Tom, he is survived by his other sons, Scott, Denis and Jay, and his daughters, Lynn and Lori, as well as eight grandchildren. At his death, Mr. Udall was a senior member of one of the nation’s last and largest political dynasties — in the West it was often said there were “oodles of Udalls” in politics. His grandfather David King Udall served in the Arizona Territorial legislature; his father, Levi Udall, was for decades an elected judge in the Arizona Superior Court and later a justice and chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court; Morris Udall was followed to Washington by his son Mark Udall, elected in 2008 as a senator from Colorado, the same year that Tom Udall was elected. But Tom Udall said that in recent years his father had become greatly concerned over the state of politics in the country, worrying “we were losing the bipartisanship in the environmental area.”
He added that Mr. Udall had recently written a letter to his grandchildren, urging them to focus on “trying to transform our society to a clean energy and clean job society.”
Cornelia Dean and Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting. An earlier version of this article erroneously suggested that Mr. Udall had urged Arizona Democrats to support John F. Kennedy in an Arizona primary contest in 1960. There was no primary election in Arizona that year.
March 20, 2010 - Stewart L. Udall, 90, Conservationist in Kennedy and Johnson Cabinets, Dies
By KEITH SCHNEIDER
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