The tiny island dock that may (not) have transformed the National Park Service
Large organizations, culture wars, and Trump’s surprising “Bebe Rebozo problem”
The guy who lives downstairs from me has spent 40 years as a technician for the phone company. At a wedding a couple of summers ago, I met a friend of a friend who’s a telecom CEO—and I realized that among her conglomerate’s recently-collected assets was this local phone company. When I told my neighbor that I’d met his boss’ boss’ boss’ boss, he shrugged. “Never heard of her.”
The company has been sold so many times that he no longer pays attention, so this is a natural story of a man doing his job despite continual pointless intrigue in the executive suite. Amid today’s intrigue in Washington, as the Trump administration seeks to gut or repurpose the National Park Service, it’s also a helpful reminder about the so-called deep state.
As any CEO would privately admit, changing corporate culture is hard. It’s easy to talk to shareholders about customer service or frugality or entrepreneurialism. It’s harder to embed those principles in employees’ hearts.
In the generous interpretation, that’s what Trump is trying to do. He sees the Park Service, like other agencies, as too woke, too anti-capitalist, and too profligate. (To be clear, I sharply disagree.) So he’s using his available tools—executive orders, DOGE, the bully social pulpit, and budgets—to try to change that culture. But it turns out to be really hard to do.
In Trump’s first term, the resistance slogan was “Don’t normalize him.” In many ways, it remains true in his second term: his actions have been ill-advised, extremist, thoughtless, and cruel at a scope that’s impossible to compare to any previous actions.
Yet denormalization has in some ways been playing the game of a man who sees himself as distinctly not normal. And it sets up the warlike attitudes that can derationalize both sides (for an example, see the second item here). So—at least as a thought experiment—what if we try to normalize Trump? What if we compare him to Charles “Bebe” Rebozo?
Those who remember the 1970s Watergate scandal may be chuckling. Bebe (pronounced bee-bee) Rebozo was a Key Biscayne banker and businessman occasionally accused of shady dealings. Indeed, when investigating covert payments associated with Watergate, a journalist called him "Nixon's bagman.” The Florida connection and the whiff of corruption make for entertaining Trump comparisons, if not normal ones.
But Bebe’s biggest recorded policy influence came in regards to the National Park Service. In 1972, NPS director George Hartzog signed some paperwork associated with rehabilitating a termite-infested house on an island called Adams Key in Florida’s Biscayne National Park. The guy living in the house, Howard Bouterse, had to move out. It was a weird situation: Bouterse had been living there when the Park Service acquired the land, and received special permission to spend the rest of his life there—he was dying of cancer. But the cancer kept forgetting to kill him. Meanwhile, the Park Service was paying Howard an tiny caretaking wage, and he patrolled Adams Key in a mail-order ranger uniform, occasionally denying members of the public the right to dock there.
Bebe was Howard’s brother-in-law. Bebe was part of the group that had sold the land to the Park Service. And Bebe seemed more upset than Howard at the eviction. Bebe liked to dock on Adams Key while on excursions with his friends, who of course included Nixon. Now his privilege was threatened.
In retaliation, Nixon fired Hartzog, the Park Service director. This went against all other advice: A Park Service historian once called Hartzog "the greatest director in the history of the service.” In eight years on the job, Hartzog helped establish 62 new parks, including “nontraditional” ones focused on urban sites, historic preservation, or environmental education. Park Service employees couldn’t see how Hartzog deserved to be fired over such a petty issue. Furthermore, for much of the agency’s history, the President couldn’t have fired him.
When the Park Service was established in 1916, all of its employees were covered by civil service protections. They were professionals rather than political appointees. So they couldn’t be replaced by any incoming President; they couldn't be fired for any trivial reason. Steve Mather had been appointed by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, but Republicans Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover left him in place. Sure, Mather occasionally worried about whether he would get along with a new Interior Secretary, or whether their budget requests would match his ambitions. But he didn’t have to worry about his job. His agency was professional.
When Mather suffered a stroke in 1929, there was no doubt that he would be succeeded by his longtime assistant Horace Albright. The President didn’t get much of a voice. When Albright moved to the private sector in 1933, his successors mostly continued to be career Park Service employees. They knew the agency and its personnel; a big part of their job was to maintain morale and a sense of mission. This lack of intrigue in the boardroom made the Park Service a well-functioning and greatly admired organization.
Hartzog saw that in personal terms. “Anytime you have staff reading a handbook to determine what to do instead of thinking with their head, that they spend seven, eight, or ten years going to college to learn how to do, they basically vegetate into a bureaucracy,” he said. Instead, Hartzog made sure that underlings understood how he and his predecessors thought, and relied on their ambition to move up in the organization to ensure that the agency functioned around a culture of responsibility and action rather than a bureaucracy following dictats from above.
That Park Service had a great culture. The problem, however: did it match the wider culture? Doesn’t an agency have to be accountable to the voters? In the early 1950s, the Eisenhower administration removed civil service protections from the director and several other top jobs. The President, Eisenhower believed, should have more power over national park policy than a bunch of unelected bureaucrats.
Private-sector influencers Horace Albright and John D. Rockefeller, jr., complained to Eisenhower about meddling with “these old professional, technical, and scientific bureaus.” Eisenhower responded that he had no problem with then-director Conrad Wirth, who was grandfathered in anyway. This was simply about good management structure, and would not change anything on the ground. (Thanking Rockefeller for his letter, Albright wrote, “You have saved the day for this fine bureau.”)
Thus when Hartzog replaced Wirth in 1964, he gave up the civil service status that had protected his career to date. By law, he was a political appointee, serving at the President’s whim. Thus when Bebe got Nixon to fire him, Hartzog fumed, but took no legal action.
Then Nixon replaced him with a 35-year-old who had previously coordinated Presidential travel. In other words, not a Park Service veteran, not someone well suited to lead a group of independent professionals. The old guard claimed that morale decreased. Two years later, President Ford returned to the tradition of internal appointments, but by that point a precedent had been established.
Post-Bebe, Park Service directors have been both good and bad, both experienced agency veterans and outsiders with fresh perspectives. But they’ve all been—and been perceived as—political appointees. To preserve its culture, the agency has come to rely more on handbooks, arguably devolving into more of a bureaucracy.
I suspect that such change is inevitable. It happens in any large organization—a telecom as much as a federal agency. But those of us who love the traditional values of the Park Service have a nostalgia for the pre-Bebe era. We long for professionalism instead of politics.
Yet politics are what govern a democratic society. Indeed, politics provides a different way to tell the story of Nixon and Hartzog. Aligned with the priorities of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Hartzog’s Park Service had sought to save important landscapes before they were “lost,” to make the system relevant to an urban society, and to open positions to minorities and women. For example, Hartzog named the first black, female, and American Indian park superintendents. I find that admirable, but some voters of the time found it too (to use a word they wouldn’t have) woke. After the voters replaced Johnson with Nixon, and then reelected Nixon in a landslide, Nixon felt he had the right to steer the agency back to the values of the wider American populace.
Like Trump, Nixon was vulnerable to accusations of corruption. Like Trump, Nixon held positions that I personally loathe. But like Trump, Nixon appealed to voters who were not ready to move as quickly on social issues as the educated professionals wanted to.
Yes, this is a culture war. Yes, Trump’s positions are extremist rather than normal. But I take heart in the idea that, like a telecom CEO, Trump today has a Bebe Rebozo problem.
Because in the long run, firing Hartzog didn’t restore Bebe’s exclusive dock. Bebe’s brother-in-law didn’t get to move back to Adams Key (although, good news, he lived another 13 years). Moreover, the culture of the Park Service didn’t change. Trump’s complaints about the bureau’s values today are basically the same as Nixon’s in 1973.
Meanwhile the valiant frontline Park Service employees resemble my downstairs neighbor. No longer paying attention to pointless intrigue in the executive suite, they thankfully continue to do their jobs.
Discussion:
The Bebe story often gets mis-summarized as Rebozo “getting a ticket” while parked at an administrative dock. The fuller version is here: https://npshistory.com/publications/bisc/adhi.pdf
I quote Hartzog from https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/director/hartzog.pdf. I quote historian Robert Utley at https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/guide-to-the-george-b-and-helen-c-hartzog-papers.htm. I quote Albright and Rockefeller from Worthwhile Places: Correspondence of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Horace Albright.
The employee-morale discussion gets good treatment in Wirth’s memoir at https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/wirth2/chap13.htm
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A friend retired from the Forest Service writes to me that there's a similar story at his agency. Indeed, I suspect there's one all of "these old professional, technical, and scientific bureaus.” If so, a perhaps-overlooked trend.
Again, John, I'm rather astounded by your National Park Service history. Never gets old! Really enjoyed this piece.