With 'Silent Spring Revolution,' Historian Brings Pivotal Environmental Era to Life

BookShelf: With 'Silent Spring Revolution,' Historian Brings Pivotal Environmental Era to Life

“Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening”
By Douglas Brinkley
HarperCollins. $40.00

Reviewed by Tom Henry

Countless superlatives could be used to describe this fascinating book about how the environmental movement came of age during an era known as the Long Sixties, which began in the late 1950s and continued until the early 1970s. Frankly, I can’t think of many that would be guilty of hyperbole or embellishment.

Yes, Douglas Brinkley’s latest book, “Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening,” is that good.

So at the risk of getting too gushy over a world-class historian who obviously knows what he is doing, I hope the reader will allow me to step back, tone it down a bit and offer a slightly different way of congratulating him for a magnificent piece of work: This book is an opportunity.

By that, I mean it’s an amazing opportunity for environmental journalists, but also anyone who wants an in-depth look at the nexus between science, health, the environment, history, politics and human behavior. Trust me, it will tie together many loose ends and help you better understand how we got to where we are today.

 

Connecting the dots

There are plenty of lessons from the past that can both haunt and inspire us. Yet one thing that separates this book from other must-reads is the captivating way Brinkley threads his narrative in a linear progression.

I’ve been with the Society of Environmental Journalists since 1994 and have, of course, gotten a great education about Rachel Carson and other luminaries, from Ansel Adams to Aldo Leopold.

What Brinkley does, with authority, is connect the dots from the days of early conservationists such as Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir and provide insight into how writers like Henry David Thoreau inspired people along the way.

He dives deep into personalities and shows how the ’60s environmental activism fuse was lit and how, for example, the advent of the atomic bomb and the commercial nuclear age came into play.

The late Coretta Scott King was, of course, best known as an author, civil rights activist and spouse of Martin Luther King Jr. But this book also sheds light on why she was so determined to stop nuclear proliferation.

 

Nixon’s contradictory views on the environment

Brinkley also takes readers into the war room where some of the nation’s top environmental decisions were made.

He examines, for example, how President Richard Nixon’s fear of being opposed for reelection in 1972 by his archnemesis, Edmund Muskie, motivated him as much as anything to embrace the environment, an issue he feared Muskie would benefit from (not to mention the votes of more young people after the voting age was reduced to 18).

That fear of Muskie getting an upper hand probably had something to do with Nixon creating the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as some other pro-environment actions he took.

Brinkley also makes a case for why John Ehrlichman, best known for his role in the Watergate scandal, was a pioneer in environmental law who had Nixon’s ear and did a lot to protect our country’s fragile ecosystems, especially in the Pacific Northwest.

 

Nixon was moved by the Santa Barbara oil spill

and the Cuyahoga River’s infamous 1969 fire.

But he also vetoed the federal Clean Water Act.

 

Nixon was moved by the Santa Barbara oil spill and the Cuyahoga River’s infamous 1969 fire. But as a master politician, he also had a bit of an ego to go along with his cagey, insecure side. He was bothered, for example, that the national media didn’t praise him more for signing the 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement with Canada’s then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
 
But then, six months later, citing its cost, Nixon vetoed the federal Clean Water Act. Congress had overwhelmingly passed the measure by a bipartisan vote, and the desire for the legislation was so strong that his veto was overridden by another bipartisan vote in Congress, something which seems implausible today given the degree of party tribalism in Washington politics.

It’s all part of a narrative that Brinkley weaves about Nixon’s contradictory views of the environment, including several references to Nixon's thinking of the environment as just another passing fad. So while he battled Muskie on air pollution, he seemed especially concerned about shorelines.

 

Earth Day influencer, LBJ and misleading ads

There’s great stuff in the book, as well, about how former United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther was one of the most influential people behind the first Earth Day in 1970, even though he didn’t live long enough to see it. Many labor leaders alive today, not to mention the general population, have no idea.

Brinkley also makes a case for why Lyndon B. Johnson deserves to be remembered as one of America’s most important conservation presidents behind Teddy Roosevelt. But LBJ has a legacy so clouded by the Vietnam War that his environmental efforts continue to go largely unnoticed, not just because of attention drawn by John F. Kennedy before him and Nixon after him, but also because of media notice of his wife, Lady Bird Johnson.

People today hear the buzzword “environmental justice,” but Brinkley offers plenty of examples of how social injustices occurred among our most vulnerable populations long before the phrase came along.

There was misleading advertising, as well, not just by powerful corporations fighting efforts to hold them accountable, either. A group as seemingly wholesome as Keep America Beautiful was behind one of the biggest acts of deception.

Few people knew that Iron Eyes Cody, a TV advertising icon in the organization’s campaign against litter, whose well-timed tear on the famous commercial was shown most often around the time of the second Earth Day in 1971, was not close to being a Native American. He was actually a Sicilian American from Louisiana named Espera “Oscar” DeCorti. He just played the part well.

 

Deep reporting brings personalities to life

Brinkley’s prose is engaging throughout the book, and it keeps building like a sequence of crescendos. But what I found utterly brilliant was the depth of his reporting, something which can offer lessons for many journalists.

Consider that this book has 11 pages of acknowledgments (including SEJ as a group and some individual members), 101 pages of small-print notations and a 12-page bibliography.

 

What’s most impressive are the ways

in which he brings to life many

relationships and personalities.

 

But those are just stats. What’s most impressive are the ways in which he brings to life many relationships and personalities. He shows, among other things, why LBJ and former U.S. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall initially bonded, then went their separate ways and never talked again to one another.

Udall is hailed by Brinkley as “the most successful interior secretary in American history” and one who “elevated the stature of Rachel Carson, Carl Sandburg, and Wallace Stegner into the conservation pantheon. … His environmental reach across the land, once broad and deep, personified what was so inspiring about the environmental movement during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon years,” Brinkley wrote.

Udall encouraged Americans to serve the Earth just as JFK had encouraged them to serve their country, he added. “It had been Rachel Carson’s revolution, but Udall, the last leaf on the tree, emerged in the four decades following her death as the environmental justice steward of her long-ago dreams back in Springdale, Pennsylvania, along the banks of the Allegheny River,” Brinkley wrote.

Tom Henry is SEJournal’s BookShelf editor and created The (Toledo) Blade’s environment beat in 1993.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 8, No. 15. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.