October 11, 1979
Page 27863
THE LEGACY OF LEE METCALF
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the June 1979, issue of the Living Wilderness, a publication of the Wilderness Society, contains a review of Lee Metcalf's effective work in the Congress in behalf of environmental legislation.
His particular concern was forest management and wilderness preservation. But Lee's interest in environmental matters ranged from the early clean air and water laws to strip mining legislation.
It was my privilege to work with him on these and many other bills, including the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. The loss I felt at his death was shared by all who appreciated his keen mind, sharp wit and absolute belief in the value of our air, water, and land.
Those who share the values he championed so effectively know how sorely his legislative talents and wise counsel are missed.
The Wilderness Society's magazine includes not only an article about Lee's legacy, but personal reflections from three people who knew him well. One is by our colleague, FRANK CHURCH, who noted that for Lee Metcalf, "stewardship was no idle word." I ask that the articles be printed in the RECORD.
The articles follow:
[From the Living Wilderness, June 1979]
THE LEGACY OF LEE METCALF
(By Dale A. Burk)
Hope had given way to disillusionment that late April afternoon in 1971 when the half-dozen senators and their aides filed out of the Senate Interior Committee hearing room in Washington.
Long-sought hearings on clearcutting practices in the national forests were about to conclude with less than half the citizen witnesses having had a chance to testify, although the timber industry had managed to get most of its people to the microphone. It appeared that the crusade to improve forest management practices would be stymied at the very hearings called to bring the problem to national focus.
Then, from behind the closed oak doors, a voice boomed loud enough to be heard in the hearing room: "No, dammit, we can't quit now. I can't go back in there and tell my people to go home. They haven't even had a chance to present their case."
There was more arguing and again that booming voice, later likened to the bellowing of an enraged bull elk, demanding that the people be given a chance to "make their case." Lee Metcalf, United States Senator from Montana and a member of the committee's Subcommittee on Public Lands, was on the prod. He won his point. The hearings continued through two more days until every witness had been heard.
It seems a minor victory when measured against Metcalf's other accomplishments during his 17 years in the Senate. But Cecil Garland, now a rancher in Utah but in 1971 president of the Montana Wilderness Association, considers it one of his most significant. "It was important because it was typical of Lee to fight to give the little guy a voice in government decisions." Garland said, "and we'd never have had our say at the clearcutting hearings if it hadn't been for him. He gave us reason to believe that we could take our case to Congress and win."
Contrary to his public image, Metcalf did not thrive on controversy. He was by nature a shy, gentle and sensitive man who struggled to avoid the public spotlight. But he considered the abuses on public lands so outrageous that he saw no alternative but to do constant battle. There could be no politics of consensus for him, no matter how appealing it might have been.
Consequently, he stirred the emotions and paid the price. For more than a quarter of a century he remained at the center of the storm. When he died of a heart attack at the age of 66 on January 12, 1978, after 25 years in Congress, he left both a noteworthy conservation legacy and an outstanding record of high ideals and commitment.
Lee Metcalf quickly established himself as a conservationist in his first term as a Congressman in 1953-54, playing an important role in efforts to block the Echo Park Dam proposal that threatened Dinosaur National Monument and leading successful opposition to the Ellsworth timber exchange bill, which would have permitted the trading of national forest, national park and other federal lands for private lands involved in dam, flood control and other projects.
Beginning in 1956, Metcalf sponsored wilderness preservation legislation that eventually was enacted in the Wilderness Act of 1964. He also supported as wilderness each area subsequently added to the National Wilderness Preservation System. He sponsored legislation that was the forerunner of the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Act of 1974. He was the key congressional figure in the holding of hearings in the early 1970s to scrutinize allegations of mismanagement of the national forests. As an out-growth of this investigation, he became a principal architect of the National Forest Management Act of 1976, which redefined the legal concept "sustained yield" and required a more rational economic basis for selecting cutting sites.
These ventures carried considerable political hazard. Yet he rode the maelstrom surrounding the clearcutting issue — at root he was tackling the entire question of mismanagement of national forest resources — right into and through the 1972 elections, unlike same political figures who ease off on such controversial issues during election years.
Debates surrounding any resources issue in Montana, where Lee ultimately had to face the voters regardless of the national or international significance of the issues that concerned him, become intense. He expounded on the wisdom of long term, sustained yield, multiple-use, balanced forestry in spite of massive industry propaganda campaigns aimed directly at him. For example, the timber industry used a letter writing campaign to swamp Metcalf and others in Congress with rhetoric supportive of the industry's position on forestry and wilderness. Metcalf cut right through that rhetoric. "You state that you are not opposed to responsible wilderness legislation and never have been, and then proceed to demonstrate that you do not understand what wilderness is," Metcalf wrote back. "Wilderness is not what you say it is. It is what the framers of the Wilderness Act of 1964 intended it to be. You make repeated reference to 'visual aesthetics.' The Act does not mention visual beauty once in listing the criteria for wilderness."
To constituents motivated solely by economic self-interest, Metcalf spoke equally to the point.
To an industry forester who complained that Metcalf didn't know the intent of his Montana Wilderness Study Bill (S. 398), the Senator replied: "You are a professional forester, skilled in marking trees for harvest, and probably work for a timber operator. If you are like other foresters working in private industry, you regard trees as first and foremost a cash crop. You enjoy their preharvest beauty, recognize their watershed and wildlife habitat value, but still regard them as destined for removal and replacement. If I share this viewpoint, I would never have introduced S. 393. But I do not share it, and it is presumptuous of you to suggest that I have 'misconceptions about the intent' of my own bill. I know very well what I intend."
Metcalf's major aim was to wrest control of the national forest lands from the exploitive grasp of the big timber companies and of their allies in the public agencies. He wanted to keep the public forests for the people. As the clearcutting debate intensified in the late 1960s, Metcalf arranged for a special select committee from the University of Montana to study Forest Service policy in the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana. Considerable controversy had arisen over the Bitterroot after the Forest Service in 1964 adopted clearcutting as the favored harvesting method; indeed, it was soon found that the controversy was nationwide and the Bitterroot only a symptom of a larger problem.
The Select Committee on the Bitterroot National Forest issued a report in late 1970 that became the focal point of the national clearcutting debate. Two major indictments of Forest Service policy struck to the core of the Issue. The report stated that "multiple-use management, in fact, does not exist as the governing principle on the Bitterroot National Forest." And it introduced the term "timber mining" to describe the practice of extracting trees from low-yield sites where other values and regrowth are adversely impacted. Informally tagged the "Bolle Report" because the study chairman was Arnold W. Bolle, then dean of the University of Montana's School of Forestry, the report is a landmark document in the continuing examination of national forest management. Its influence is evidenced by the fact that many of the abuses it outlined have since been corrected.
Metcalf was deeply involved in issues in Montana and neighboring states. These included the Lincoln-Scapegoat Wilderness, Mission Mountains Wilderness, Magruder Corridor (Idaho), wild river designation of three forks (219 miles) of the Flathead River and 150 miles of the Missouri River, Welcome Creek Wilderness, Elkhorn Wilderness Study Act, and the Absaroka-Beartooth (Montana and Wyoming) and Great Bear Wildernesses. His Montana Wilderness Study Act of 1977 requires study of potential wilderness values of 973,000 acres in nine pristine areas in Montana.
From 1961 to 1975, Metcalf served on the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission. He never missed a meeting of the commission, composed of the Secretaries of the Interior, Agriculture and Transportation and four members of Congress. During Metcalf's tenure, the commission purchased 525,000 acres of land and created 43 new refuges, in addition to expanding others.
The former Ravalli National Wildlife Refuge just north of Metcalf's birthplace at Stevensville in Montana's Bitterroot Valley was renamed the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge after his death.
He sponsored and managed on the Senate floor the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, which grew out of the initial congressional hearings on the issue that he had conducted years earlier, and helped shape and extend the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the first major federal aid-to-education legislation since the Morrill Act of 1862. Metcalf introduced the first deep seabed mining legislation and chaired hearings on the subject. In 1956 he instigated a comprehensive study of the effects of pesticides on fish and wildlife, which funded some of Rachel Carson's work that led to her book Silent Spring.
The Air Quality Improvement Act of 1970 incorporated provisions of three Metcalf bills, but earlier he had cosponsored the Clean Air Act of 1963 and the Air Quality Act of 1967. He also cosponsored the Water Quality Act of 1965, the Clean Water Resources Restoration Act of 1966, the Water Quality Improvement Act of 1970, the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1975 and the Resource Recovery Act of 1970.
Metcalf areas of interest included consumer protection, public education, rural electrification, labor issues, economic development, corporate accountability and governmental reform. The last area included passage of the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972, of which Metcalf was the author. This bill had a profound effect on public resource management because it required open public meetings of advisory committees, as well as membership broader than the commodity interests that generally controlled them.
Another significant law, which a Metcalf subcommittee initiated, was the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. It provided mechanisms for Congress to monitor the federal budgetary process and to prevent executive branch impoundment of federal program funds approved by Congress. Metcalf saw this as a critical resource issue because of funding imbalances brought on by Nixon administration impoundment of some of the Forest Service's funds.
"It is my sincere conviction, born of an overview gained from many years in Congress, that the Forest Service has been transformed by the Nixon-Ford administrations into an arm of the timber industry," Metcalf said in 1975. "The downgrading of recreation and upgrading of timber removal, despite the express mandate of the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of Congress, is the cornerstone of a far-reaching policy of maximum commercial exploitation of our forests." In this, as indeed he was a person and politician, Lee Metcalf was holistic in his approach. He believed in the interrelatedness of things and often spoke his conviction that the public well being was rooted in the proper utilization of natural resources.
He subsequently used national forest and wilderness issues to force appraisal of forest management practices. His Montana Wilderness Study Act (S. 393) of 1977 is an example. The act requires that nine areas in Montana be studied for their wilderness potential. "S. 393 is designed not so much to stop anything as to force Montanans and the Forest Service to step back and take a sober look at where we are going,"Metcalf said. Most often, he related these studies to the economic well being of small communities dependent upon national forest timber, noting that present cutting levels were too high to be sustained.
"If Philipsburg and other small western Montana communities are to have a stable future, some restraint will simply have to be implemented. Timber operators are being forced to reach higher and higher into fragile watersheds to cut their product,"Metcalf said in defending S. 393 in 1975. "Many communities in our state may wake up 15 or 20 years from now to find the timber gone, the mills closed, small trout streams barren and silt-laden, tourists repelled by visually disturbing clear cuts, and erosion and flooding heightened by damage to the watershed."
He insisted that some areas be protected against such possibilities and came to believe that agency promises of resource protection were inadequate because of their susceptibility to the political muscle of the economic/commodity interests. "The commercial onslaught of our national forests pursued by two successive administrations makes it obvious that only those areas designated as wilderness are truly protected," Metcalf said. He also emphasized, repeatedly and in the face of intensive industry propaganda to the contrary, his conviction that wilderness protection represents the practice of multiple use management at its best.
"I do not subscribe to the oft-stated notion that somehow timber exploitation represents 'multiple use' management, but wilderness does not,"Metcalf said in response to a timber industry media blitz in 1977 opposing his Montana Wilderness Study Bill. "Montana's mountains provide a variety of benefits: watershed protection, wildlife habitat, grazing, mining, tourism attraction, recreation and timber harvesting. Of all the items just named, wilderness permits all but motorized aspects of recreation and tree cutting. Yet if logging occurs, especially in the higher elevations where the life cycle of trees exceeds 100 years, many of the other benefits disappear altogether."
He could translate this futuristic vision to the people resource, too, defending a courageous new supervisor of the Flathead National Forest in Montana who dared to question and change the over cutting policy that prevailed there in the 1960s. When need be, he took time to defend those in the public agencies victimized by the bureaucracy. In 1971 when the Nixon administration impounded funds, officials of the harvest oriented Kootenai National Forest in Montana and other forests were ordered to make an across-the-board staff reduction. Here, however, upper echelon officials decided to put the entire burden on lower level employees. Among those receiving termination notices was a man who had worked for the service long enough to need only a few more months to reach retirement. His appeals for reconsideration has gone unheeded.
The man gave up, convinced that his lifelong commitment to the service and its work had been a waste. He hadn't counted on his neighbors, however, one of whom wrote her senator, Lee Metcalf, about the situation.
I was working as environmental reporter for a Montana newspaper then, and Metcalf asked me if I'd check into the situation, if I got a chance to get up to the Kootenai Forest. I did, and found the case as inequitable as the man's neighbor claimed. I can't recall whether I phoned or wrote Metcalf, but I promptly forgot the incident until several months later when the neighbor advised me that the employee had been reinstated and that the Forest Service people were pretty shaken by the fact that Lee Metcalf himself had called several times to check on the situation.
Much of Metcalf's motivation came from intimate knowledge. He had seen that after World War II too many mills were built in national forest communities. The result was mill capacity far exceeding the forest's sustained yield potential, followed by ultimate economic collapse and community upheaval when the cut exceeded the forest's ability to regenerate itself. His "S.O.S." (Save Our Streams) crusade was based on his outrage upon discovering road builders destroying a trout stream in order to cut highway construction costs. His insistence upon higher grazing fees and larger appropriations for public land management was based upon his firsthand knowledge of the social and economic costs of land erosion. Because he never forgot the kinship he'd developed with the earth in his early years in Montana's Bitter-root Valley, Metcalf knew there was a connection between the way land was managed and the public well being. He often used the Bitterroot as an example of how uncontrolled development wreaks havoc on both natural resources and people. His politics were rooted in populism, whatever the issue.
"Sometimes one must get away from Montana to appreciate the magnitude of the changes which have already occurred and have yet to occur," Metcalf said in 1977. "I used to view the Bitterroot Valley, where I was born and raised, with affection. But change came, inexorably, in small increments at first, then with a rush which disfigured it almost beyond recognition." Attempts to stem the rush, he said, were resisted by well meaning people who merely wanted to do their thing without interference from any quarter. "Now they 'do their thing' in a decreasing land base, surrounded by subdivisions, posted lands and clear cuts," Metcalf said.
Yet the Bitterroot Valley, its qualities and, perhaps, its memories beckoned. "I want to go home, I really want to go home," Metcalf said shortly before his death. "For 30 years, except for the war, I have been running for public office in difficult, complex and involved political activities. And I think 30 years is long enough."
Three times in the last few years of his life I appeared before Metcalf at Senate hearings. Each time, after I gave my name and place of residence, he asked me to repeat. "Where'd you say you were from?" he'd grin. The last time this encounter took place was in Billings. Montana, at Senate hearings on the proposed Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness a few months before Metcalf's death. "Where'd you say you were from?" Metcalf asked, once again.
"Stevensville, Montana, in your native Bitterroot Valley, Senator,"I replied.
"Right," he said, as he had each time before. "Right, and I wish I'd had the good sense to stay there, too." And I knew that somehow my decision to stay in the Bitterroot, despite job temptations elsewhere that Lee also knew about, had kindled a relationship that transcended the matter of who or what each of us was. We knew what the Bitterroot meant to both of us. That was one reason I joined the effort to rename the national wildlife refuge in the Bitterroot in his memory. I live on a ranch in the Bitterroot that shares a mile of boundary with that refuge; Lee Metcalf thus is in y thoughts, and conscience, each day of my life.
It was no accident that following his death Metcalf's colleagues passed in his memory both of the Montana wilderness bills with which he had hoped to close out his career. These established the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness on the Montana-Wyoming border and the critical Great Bear Wilderness on the Continental Divide between Glacier National Park at the north and the Bob Marshall Wilderness to the south.
To put Lee Metcalf's wilderness contributions into perspective, consider that he figured strongly in the designating of every acre of wilderness now existing in Montana. The 12 areas total 3.2 million acres and, if the areas in his S. 393 are added along with certain key RARE II areas that he championed, the total will swell to a remarkable 4.3 million acres. Metcalf also played a major role in the designation of thousands of wilderness acres in other states. He had a special interest in Idaho, which adjoins Montana's Bitterroot Valley and reaches to within a few miles of Metcalf's boyhood home. Idaho Senator Frank Church was one of his closest friends in Congress.
Metcalf was the first Senator to sponsor the Alaska national interest lands legislation and had he lived would have been one of its key advocates. The other major conservation items on his calendar of unfinished business were the nine roadless areas in his Montana Wilderness Study Act. Let us hope that his work will be carried on by others. As the Montana Environmental Information Center stated in a tribute following his death: "Senator Lee Metcalf was a great and true friend, not only of the conservationists who worked in partnership with him on these issues, but of unborn generations who will reap the benefits. Those who survive him — who asked so much of him — have a duty to keep the faith with that partnership. So much remains to be done."
LEE METCALF STOOD FOR STEWARDSHIP
(By FRANK CHURCH)
The Senate comprises only two individuals from each state, yet its 100 members reflect great diversity. Among them for 17 years, Lee Metcalf stood out for his courage and his constancy of devotion to the public interest. His commitment to the prudent management of the public domain and to wise resource stewardship was the centerpiece of his political and personal philosophy.
But it was only the centerpiece. Lee Metcalf had a clear view of the public interest, and he fought tirelessly for it in the Senate, across the wide range of issues we face.
Lee was my friend. We came from neighboring states in the Rocky Mountain West — states which share not only the common backbone of the mountains, but the some resource problems and opportunities as well. Through his years in the Senate, we served together on the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs (now the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources) .
Inside the Senate the influence of individual Senators is measured in ways often missed by outside observers. Senator Metcalf never became the chairman of a standing committee, and he was not the one to be quoted nightly on the evening news. Yet, he was our exclusive guide on numerous resource questions.
Nowhere was his personal influence more clear than in the series of wilderness bills which under his leadership we enacted for Montana. When he brought us the Lincoln-Scapegoat Wilderness bill, or the Absaroka/ Beartooth proposal, or his Great Bear Wilderness bill, he spoke convincingly of his own personal knowledge of these wild lands and of the reasons why Montanans were leading the fight to preserve them.
I remember, for instance, when he came to a meeting of the conference committee on the Endangered Wilderness Act of 1977. We had not included the 30,000-acre Welcome Creek Wilderness in the Senate version of that bill because of a disagreement between Senator Metcalf and the other Senator from Montana. But Welcome Creek was in the House-passed bill. Senator Metcalf personally appeared before the conference committee to argue for preserving the area. In a quiet voice he told us of the many joy-filled days which he had spent in the area as a boy. His voice began to rise as he outlined the reasons why this small area ought to be formally classified as wilderness and not developed for the short-term gains to be had from the sale of a few boards of lumber. He made his case, and he made it well. The Welcome Creek Wilderness is a part of the Wilderness System today chiefly because Lee Metcalf said, "I've been there and it should be protected."
"Stewardship" was no idle word for Senator Metcalf — it was a high ideal of conservation against which he tested and judged new policies. Future generations were not remote to him, but real individual people whose lives he worked to enrich by preserving, in a condition worth inheriting, some of our patrimony of natural treasures.
When our Public Lands Subcommittee learned of the abuses of clear cutting on the national forests, Lee made forest management a national issue. Through his perseverance he brought all of us to see that limits on the use of clear cutting were necessary, and together he and I worked to write those limits into guidelines and eventually into law.
Lee Metcalf is gone now. The Senate goes on, of course, but it is a different place. Missing are that booming voice and the gentle but convincing man behind it. Lee Metcalf lent a flavor to our deliberations which may never be replaced: he brought to the Senate the rugged integrity and courage of the Bitterroot Mountains and a clarity of purpose akin to the pure white water of a raging Montana stream.
THE METCALF ROLE IN FOREST REFORM
(By Arnold W. Bolle)
In November of 1970 a faculty committee of the University of Montana, of whose School of Forestry I was dean, issued a report on timber management practices in Montana's Bitterroot National Forest and, by implication, in the national forests across the nation. Our report grew out of mounting controversy over the impacts of widespread clear cutting.
Responses to the report ran the gamut, from utter delight to fierce hostility. Some of our colleagues at other universities were envious that we had done it first. We were pleased with the delight and the envy and actually expected even more criticism. Most interesting to us were the responses of the unhappy groups and their attempts at analysis. They offered two scenarios.
Either Senator Lee Metcalf, whose request for an expert appraisal of the Bitterroot clear cutting issue had triggered our involvement, had somehow tricked us into writing the report, or we had somehow tricked Senator Metcalf into asking us to do so.
But Lee Metcalf was neither devious nor naive. There was no plot. Our critics just didn't know Lee very well. For he was one of the most trusted men in the Senate, and his Senate colleagues recognized him as a man of commitment whose stands on issues were never founded on political expediency. Fortunately there were also enough Montanans who knew and respected him to keep him in Washington for 25 years,
When he approached me late in 1969 about the Bitterroot, Lee was in no way demanding, In fact, he was almost diffident. He had received many letters from his constituents complaining about the actions of the Forest Service in the Bitterroot Valley. Relationships there were approaching the ignition point. The Forest Service had launched a greatly accelerated program of timber harvest, based heavily on clear cutting. Attempts by the public to question the activity were met with impatience. The official attitude seemed to be, "We know what's best for the Bitterroot and we'll show you who's running this forest."Forest officials considered it their job to get out the wood. Dealing with the public was left to the PR people in Missoula.
Guy Brandborg, former supervisor of the Bitterroot then retired and living in Hamilton, was critical of the forest's management and became the leader of citizen opposition. Dale Burk, reporter on the Missoula paper, the Missoulian, wrote a series of articles. As a result, the regional office of the Forest Service in Missoula had started an investigation of the Bitterroot forest.
Lee Metcalf generally had a high regard for the Forest Service. The complaints from his constituents put him in the position of arbitrator between them and the Forest Service. He didn't retreat from that position at all, but he wanted more information before stepping into the fray. "Frankly," he told me, "I don't feel that I can go back to Stevensville until I have some better answers for my people there."
Lee believed that he should be able to turn to the university for an objective and honest answer.
But he realized, too, that he might be putting us on the spot. He asked me to select a committee of faculty members to consider his request. Our committee considered the matter carefully for several months. We took field trips and talked with many people representing all sides. It was a hot issue. We didn't just want to add fuel to the fire. We didn't want to become involved unless we were convinced that we could help clearly to identify the problem and contribute to the solution. We fully recognized that our report would put us in the crossfire. The internal report of the Forest Service regional office was an excellent one, but just because it was internal local people tended to reject it as a whitewash. We supported most of it and helped its acceptance. But it was and could be only internal. It could not, for instance, criticize Congress. We could. We decided to go ahead.
Lee had courage. He displayed it many times. We knew courage also was required of us. The usual conclusion that "further study is strongly recommended," considered bold in some academic circles, just would not do. Nor could we equivocate with the kind of "on the one hand, while on the other hand" conclusions which inspired Maine's Senator Edmund Muskie to ask for more one-handed scientists.
Lee gave us total freedom. He never tried to influence our study or its conclusions, nor did he add or delete anything after we gave the report to him. So that it could not in any way become involved in the election campaign that fall, we delivered it to him the day after the election. We did not get any funding from Lee, or from anyone else, and when we submitted our report to Lee it was with no strings. It was Lee's, for his information and whatever use he might want to make of it. As far as we were concerned it was a private answer, and if he wanted to keep it to himself, that was his business.
He didn't, of course. He put it in the Congressional Record and held a news conference. It seemed to us that every newspaper in the country and many abroad put it on their front pages with inflammatory headlines. That startled us. Lee also had it printed as a Senate document, and the 20,000 copies disappeared in a few weeks. Newspaper stories and headlines emphasized our criticism of the Forest Service, but we criticized Congress at least as much. It was congressional funding which was underwriting the heavy emphasis on timber and making sound multiple use management virtually impossible Congress got the message and acted. We cannot and do not take full credit, but we were part of the activity which led to the Senate hearings on clear cutting, the Church guidelines, the Renewable Resources Planning Act and, with the help of the famed Monongahela decision, the Forest Management Act of 1976 which requires the regulations now in preparation. Lee was in the middle of all of it.
There is some belief that Lee was against industry, that he was against government in general and the Forest Service in particular. Perhaps a certain amount of evidence can be presented to support such beliefs. Certainly he didn't hold back criticism of all three. But it wasn't dislike or fondness for criticizing that lay behind his attacks. Lee was concerned about people, not just because they were voters but because he was committed to the idea that democracy is concerned with the rights of people. He was a populist in the old-fashioned and best sense. He felt that the role of industry and government in a democracy is to serve people. He deeply believed that the national forests should be managed for the "greatest good for the greatest number," and to him that meant direct benefit and not a trickle-down theory which would favor industry because it created wealth that eventually reached many people. He believed that the business of government is people, not business as Coolidge put it. Lee believed that we needed a sound and stable timber industry. But he believed that all other uses of the forests that people wanted should also be fully recognized.
Lee was happy with our report. He also was surprised that a group of college professors had the guts to write it. We were, too, and we were startled and a little scared by the results. But we also felt satisfaction at having met an important challenge. There were also unanticipated benefits. We suddenly had more status with our students than we had ever experienced before. They listened intently to what we said. The level of candidates for Forestry School faculty positions went up several notches. Teaching and recruiting both became more pleasurable.
Lee's courage was infectious.
AN INTIMATE SIDE OF A SENATOR
(By Teddy Roe)
Lee Metcalf was more complex than his public image. That is not to say that he was not true to his public image. Few elected officials have been so open in word and deed. He hated posturing, spoke bluntly and could not abide self-important people. He was not a "hundred-percenter"in elections, contenting himself with 50 percent plus one vote; he never lost an election, although the contests were always close. He did not even carry a press secretary on his Senate staff in his final years. He was true to the populist tradition, championing the "little man" in a wide range of legislative initiatives.
This public image of a battler against special interests was a correct one, but it masked a gentler side of the man which was less well known. He was generous with his staff. He had an open-door policy and encouraged his lieutenants to interrupt him at any time. He not only permitted but encouraged his advisers to say "no" to him if they felt he was in the wrong. He delegated authority well, leaving the details to the staff and reserving for himself the major decisions. There was no time-clock to be punched, and no excuses were demanded for absences; his former staff members, now scattered to the winds, will tell you that the decency of this treatment elevated what might have been a mere "job" to a labor of love.
Ill health plagued the last years of Lee Metcalf's life, adding to his considerable burdens. But few visitors to his office were aware that his robust greeting and warm smile masked great discomfort. Physical problems included sight, hearing and heart, but what plagued him most were bad knees. As soon as seniority permitted, he acquired an office opposite the elevator which carried him to the rooms of his two committees. Bowing to the inevitable, he finally took to using a cane. He often penned a postscript to constituents who wrote supporting wilderness that he regretted being unable to get out on the land which he was seeking to preserve. During prolonged hearings, particularly those dealing with the national strip-mining bill, the pain in his knees became so excruciating that his legs were in constant motion, seeking a position which would bring relief. Yet his face and posture betrayed none of the discomfort, and the parade of witnesses went on routinely, its participants unaware of anything but the urgency of their message.
Lee Metcalf sought relief from Senatorial labors in simple ways. He loved to go home to Montana to "charge his batteries." When he could not manage a trip of that magnitude, he escaped to the pleasures of the soil. His office, his Capitol Hill home and his small farm in nearby Maryland brimmed with living plants which he grew himself. He was especially fond of flowers, conversation and humor. His puns, often clever but often bad, still elicit groans from his ex-staffers and others who heard them. Lee was a master of the English language, a skill sharpened during his six years as a justice on the Montana Supreme Court. He was an excellent writer, and did much of his writing on the manual typewriter he kept by his desk. He also knew what he did and did not want in office writing style. He flatly prohibited the use of the verb "contact," meaning to communicate with another person. "Contact," according to Lee Metcalf, meant physically touching an object or had to do with starting an airplane. When a Housing and Urban Development Department official wrote with bad news and suggested that the Senator "contact" him later, Lee wrote back that he wouldn't "contact" the official with a 20-foot pole.
Above all, Lee Metcalf was a decent man. He did constant battle with certain of his colleagues yet retained their respect. He counted even conservative Republicans with whom he engaged in frequent philosophical debates as close personal friends. A mark of his skill as a legislator and leader was the vote by which the old Senate Interior Committee approved the original national strip-mining bill: despite months of often bitter debate, the measure was reported to the Senate floor by a 15–0 vote. This unique ability had earlier led to his election as first chairman of the House Democratic Study Group — a potent bloc of liberal members created to offset the influence of the then-dominant Southern representatives.
It also led to a sense of frustration for Lee Metcalf and the principal regret of his life. In the last interview which he was to grant to the presses, he made public his longstanding personal regret that he had ever left the House. Some felt that, in time he might well have risen to Speaker. His frustration stemmed from the presence of Mike Mansfield in the Montana congressional delegation. Mansfield already was Majority Leader, and by custom only one Montana Senator could rise to a leadership position. Metcalf enjoyed an outstanding relationship with Mansfield, who nearly always accepted his advice on matters relating to natural resources. And Mansfield, both aware of and sympathetic to Lee's frustration, strove to alleviate the problem. "He was the best partner I ever had," Mansfield said in his eulogy to Lee, "such a good and intelligent man.'