Talk:George B. Hartzog Jr.

Cause for dismissal from position with National Parks Service

I came across this article via Washington Monument Syndrome, which claims that Hartzog lost his directorship because of the partial closure of popular National Parks (and that "Congress fired" him, which another editor pointed out on the talk page was improbable). The link in this article is somewhat more tenuous, saying only that he "was dismissed in December 1972 after he pioneered the Washington Monument Syndrome political tactic." I've only done a cursory search, but the results suggest that Hartzog's dismissal was unrelated to the Washington Monument issue. The biography on the National Parks Service website, and obituaries from the Washington Post and the New York Times claim that it was due to an incident involving a friend of the president. Here is the NYT's account of the episode:

In the summer of 1972, unbeknown to Mr. Hartzog, the superintendent of Biscayne National Park canceled a permit allowing Mr. Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo to dock his boat in the park. Mr. Rebozo complained to the president, who fired Mr. Hartzog.

“The interior secretary, Rogers Morton, went over to the White House and tried to talk him out of it,” Mr. Utley said. “Nixon refused.”

As an inexperienced editor, I'm not going to mess about with the article myself, but I would suggest that additional research and amendments to this article and the Washington Monument Syndrome article might be in order. I've left similar comments on the other article's talk page as well. Nuns (talk) 04:37, 25 May 2013 (UTC)