Rachel Carson and JFK, Environmental Tag Team

Douglas Brinkley
One of John F. Kennedys favorite books was Henry David Thoreaus Cape Cod, published in
1865. When in Washington, D.C., Kennedy, a yachtsman, always craved the Cape Cod winds and
turbulent Atlantic waves. He restored his health sailing the Nantucket Sound waters around
sandbars and shoals. The elemental forces of the sea helped Kennedy cope with the pain of
Addisons disease and cleared his mind of the clutter of retail politics. Kennedy understood
exactly what Thoreau meant when the naturalist wrote about the Cape that a man can stand
there and put all of America behind him.
On his bookshelf in Hyannis Port, alongside Cape Cod, sat two books by Rachel Carson: The
Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. When it came to conservation, only marine-related
issues regularly caught Kennedys attention. In awe of the millions of shore, sea, and marsh birds
that used the Cape as a stopover during their seasonal migrations, Kennedy, a Massachusetts
Audubon Society supporter, wanted to make sure that the shoreline remained unsullied by
industrialization. In this spirit, on September 3, 1959, Kennedy, then a member of the U.S.
Senate, cosponsored the Cape Cod National Seashore bill with his Republican colleague Leverett
Saltonstall. As a longtime resident of Hyannis Port, Kennedy had no detailed knowledge of the
lower Cape area, but he routinely flew over it in helicopters as the seashore legislation circulated
through Congress.
Running for president in 1960, Kennedy advocated saving seashores as wildlife refuges and
recreational areas. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a New Dealer and close Kennedy
family friend, set the tone and tenor of JFKs burgeoning environmentalism when he intoned at a
Wilderness Conference in San Francisco that the preservation of values which technology will
destroy . . . is indeed the new frontier.
Biologist Rachel Carson, working feverishly on her eco-manifesto Silent Spring throughout
1960, considered July 15when Kennedy delivered his acceptance speech after winning the
Democratic nomination for president and called for a New Frontier to reinvigorate the
progressive, can-do spirit of Americaa gold-starred day. Most political pundits heard only
Kennedys vigorous lines about outfoxing the Soviet Union in the Cold War. But Kennedywho
had championed the Wilderness Bill that would eventually be signed into law by Lyndon
Johnson, supported expanding bird sanctuaries and advocated the creation of new protected
national seashoresoffered a promise Carson found irresistible. He called for mastery of the
sky and rain, the oceans and the tides.
Carson knew exactly what Kennedy meant by mastery: empowering biologists to help rescue
America from environmental degradation. Certainly since 1945, the White House under Harry
Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had been, at the most charitable, uninspiring on the
conservation front, causing environmental activists to hope that another Theodore or Franklin D.
Roosevelt would appear on the political horizon. Between 1945 and 1960 a string of multimegaton thermonuclear detonations, all in the name of weapons supremacy vis--vis the Soviet
Union, had released massive amounts of radioactive fallout in the atmosphere. During the

Eisenhower era, America wasnt just the preeminent superpower, it became the worlds leading
hyper-industrial giant. This brought Americans a lot of economic lifestyle benefits. But it came at
a high cost. The oceans were dying. Rainwater was unsafe to drink. To dispose first and
investigate later is an invitation to disaster, Carson wrote around the time of Kennedys
acceptance speech, for once radioactive elements have been deposited at sea they are
irretrievable. The mistakes that are made now are made for all time.

Besides sounding the Paul Revere alarm about the pesticide DDT in Silent Spring, Carson also
promoted nuclear non-proliferation, even dedicating the book to Albert Schweitzer, who had won
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his efforts to end the atomic arms race. Carson, one of the best
marine biologists alive, feared the oceans would be poisoned beyond redemption in the coming
decades, and that a point of no return was fast approaching. The thought of Kennedy in the White
Housea new Rooseveltlifted her hopes that aboveground nuclear testing would be banned.
(Her dream came true in August 1963, when Kennedy signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty with the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union.)
In the spring of 1960 Carson, even while struggling with breast cancer, viral pneumonia, and
ulcers, had signed up to be a New Frontier foot soldier in solidarity with the Kennedy family and
Justice Douglas. Only her assistant Jeanne Davis understood how debilitating her health
problems were. This was Carsons big secret. As Linda Lear stressed in Witness to
Nature, Carson had to conceal her illness, even wearing a wig when her hair started falling out
during chemotherapy, for fear of the chemical companies attacking her Silent Spring research by
saying, Shes dying of cancer and wants to blame the pesticides.
Propped up on pillows at her home in Silver Spring, Maryland, trying to heal, working away on
her Silent Spring manuscript, Carson managed to find time to volunteer for Kennedys campaign.
In the weeks leading up to Kennedys nomination, Carson served on the Natural Resources
Committee of the Democratic Advisory Council. She hoped that in late 1962, when Silent
Spring would be published, Kennedy would occupy the White House, leading a mainstream
effort to slay the dual dragons of pollution: radioactive and chemical contamination of the
environment. The advisory council embraced Carsons anti-pollution ideas. Her dear friend Pare
Lorentz, a film producer, wrote the councils far-reaching report on pollution control, with input
from Carson. They recommended that Kennedy, if elected, create a Bureau of Environmental
Health within the U.S. Public Health Service. Carson envisioned this prototype for the
Environmental Protection Agency wielding regulatory jurisdiction over our one imperative
resource: the environment in which all of us live. Kennedy received the Lorentz reporttitled
Resources for the Peoplethat October.
In the fall of 1960 most outdoors enthusiasts considered themselves conservationists. But
Carson, using the advisory council as a bully pulpit, turned the public debate toward a new
environmentalism, one properly informed of the perils of mass chemical usage. The
monumentalism of Theodore Roosevelt (who protected such American wonders as the Grand
Canyon and Crater Lake) and the conservation ethos of FDR (who planted trees and expanded

wildlife refuges) were great accomplishments. But Carson wanted to connect the movement to
public health. No longer would conservation be a cult of birdwatchers, fair-chase hunters, and
outdoor recreationalists. The new ecological awareness would extend to every mom and dad
striving to protect their childrens precious health. Nobody wanted to give their child cows milk
containing dangerous levels of strontium-90 or serve fish contaminated with toxic mercury.
Ecology became the new buzzword.
That October, while Kennedy read the councils report, his wife, Jacqueline, invited Carson to
join the Womens Committee for New Frontiers. Not only did Carson accept, but she also met
with the future first lady at the Kennedys Georgetown home. This wasnt a garden club Carson
was joining; it was the brain trust of the smartest women in the Democratic Party. Word spread
among the liberal Washington doyennesincluding Evangeline Bruce (wife of the famed
diplomat David K.E. Bruce), former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and former Secretary of
Labor Frances Perkinsthat Carson was writing about how the residue of insecticides and
pesticides had been discovered in soil and water all over America. Mrs. Kennedy was pregnant
with John, her baby due in December, and the mere thought that pesticides might have a genetic
effect on her unborn child would have been harrowing to her.

On November 4, Kennedy beat Vice President Richard Nixon and was elected the 35th U.S.
president. Carson was overjoyed. It heartened her that Kennedy, shortly before winning, issued a
statement saying, We must restore our own woodlands as a source of strength for the Nations
future. . . . The Nation should set aside shoreline recreational refuges, and ranges must be
protected to serve the purposes to which they are dedicated without interference by commercial
exploitation. Perhaps now the federal government would address her crusade against pesticides
and nuclear fallout in a more pronounced, regulatory way.
For most of 1961 Carson continued slaving away on Silent Spring. She was ecstatic that
Kennedy, the lover of the great Atlantic Ocean, had pushed to create new national seashores at
Cape Cod (Massachusetts), Padre Island (Texas), and Point Reyes (California). In June of 1961
Elbert N. Carvel, the Democratic governor of Delaware, tried to hinder the creation of the Prime
Hook National Wildlife Refugeconsidered one of the preeminent stopover sites for migratory
shorebirds in the fall and spring. Kennedy wrote him a threatening letter, demanding that he
retract his objections. In 1963, under the authority of the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, the
president established Prime Hooklocated on the west shore of Delaware Bayas a national
wildlife refuge.
After Carson completed Silent Spring in early 1962, she once again hitched her wagon to the star
of the New Frontier. With The New Yorker slated to run the first excerpt of Silent Spring in its
June 16 issue, Carson went on a pre-publication alliance-building charge. She attended a White
House conference on conservation convened at President Kennedys request. Still receiving
cancer radiation treatments, Carson asked two key female allies to accompany her to the
conference: Ruth Scott (a Pennsylvania conservationist and friend) and Nicki Wilson (an Interior
Department publicist). This is not an easy book to tell people about, Carsons editor at

Houghton Mifflin had warned. We are going to have to work up something of a crusadeon a
local levelif we are to reach a really wide audience.
Carson could have brought anybody with her to meet the Kennedys. The fact that she chose a
publicist and a tireless Democratic Party networker shows how Carson was gearing up for the
inevitable blowback that Silent Spring was bound to receive from the chemical industry,
agribusiness behemoths, and other deep-pocketed polluters. Scott made sure that Carson
interacted with Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and Sierra Club Director David Brower at
the White House. Justice Douglas, Kennedys number one unofficial adviser on all things
conservation, had read an advance galley of Silent Spring just before the White House
conference. Carson was getting her high-powered advocacy ducks in a row. On May 27, shortly
before The New Yorker excerpt ran, Paul Knight, a close adviser to Interior Secretary Udall, met
with Carson to strategize on how the Kennedy administration and Carson could work in tandem
to bring maximum publicity to Silent Spring.

The new frontier was now fully behind the Carson environmental zeitgeist. President Kennedy
himselfafter reading The New Yorker excerpt along with the first ladywanted Carson
defended from the onslaught of abuse that Big Chemical would hurl her way. The administration,
in fact, was helping to publicize Carsons work while simultaneously creating a buffer for the
president if her research didnt hold up under peer review. Justice Douglas took the New
Frontiersman lead, declaring Silent Spring the most revolutionary book since Uncle Toms
Cabin. Since the 1950s Douglas and Robert F. Kennedy, the presidents brother, had hiked
together all over the world, from the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal in Maryland to the outback of
Siberia. Justice Douglas was practically an auxiliary member of the Kennedy family. Writing in
the Book-of-the-Month Club News about Silent Spring, Douglas threw down a gauntlet
impossible to ignore. This book, he wrote, is the most important chronicle of this century for
the human race. This book is a call for immediate action and for effective control of all
merchants of poison.
What companies like American Cyanamid, Velsicol, and Monsanto would soon learn was that the
Kennedy administration was setting up Big Chemical as the culprit of the planets worse
environmental desecrations. The New York Times published its first pro-Silent Spring editorial
Rachel Carsons Warningon July 2, 1962. A few weeks later the Times ran a supportive
story about Carson called Silent Spring Is Now Noisy Summer: Pesticide Industry Up in Arms
Over a New Book. The die was cast for a king-daddy fight. At a White House news conference,
which coincided with Douglass endorsement of Silent Spring in the Book-of-the-Month Club
News, President Kennedy offered Carson his imprimaturto a degree. While too smart a
politician to embrace all of Carsons research, Kennedy made clear that his administration
took Silent Spring seriously. Because of Miss Carsons book, Kennedy said in a televised press
conference, the Department of Agriculture and the Public Health Service had launched a fullblown investigation into whether pesticides caused illnesses in humans. What a daring thing for
Kennedy to do, the equivalent of Theodore Roosevelt embracing muckraking novelist Upton
Sinclairs The Jungle (a searing indictment of unsanitary Chicago meatpacking plants that led to

the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act). Kennedy was using Silent Spring to help push
the Democratic Advisory Councils 1960 agenda to combat pollution by connecting old-style
conservation to the new-style environmentalism that called for the protection of earth, air, and
water (and all creatures dwelling therein).
The day after the White House press event, Kennedy announced the establishment of a special
panel of the Presidents Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), headed by the highly respected
Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner, to study various health and environmental questions about pesticide use.
The hullabaloo over Silent Spring allowed Kennedy to go on the offensive against chemical
polluters. Most other presidents would have gone into duck-and-cover mode because of Carson.
But Silent Spring served Kennedys goal of saving wetland habitats along the Atlantic coast and
having the U.S. government regulate the toxic pesticide sprays beloved by huge agricultural
concerns. Although Kennedy didnt want to be an alarmist, he didnt mind a fellow New Frontier
intellectuallike Carsonleading the gallant charge.
When Silent Spring was at last published in book form on September 27, 1962, the chemical
industry went ballistic. Kennedy instantly became Public Enemy No. 1 for propping up Silent
Spring as worthy of serious attention. The National Agricultural Chemicals Association rushed
its propaganda booklet Fact and Fancy into print. The nub of the counterattack was that Mr.
Fancy (a.k.a. Kennedy) was an East Coast elite who yachted frivolously around Cape Cod, his
treasured national seashore, while allowing DDT manufacturers to be unjustly vilified. The
association warned that factory shutdowns would mean thousands of lost jobs. When Kennedy
awarded Dr. Frances Oldham Kelseya Food and Drug Administration scientista public
service gold medal for discovering that thalidomide (a sedative frequently prescribed to pregnant
women) caused deformities in babies, the pharmaceutical industry likewise felt blindsided. It is
all of a piece, Carson told The New York Post, thalidomide and pesticidesthey represent our
willingness to rush ahead and use something new without knowing what the results are going to
be.
In June 1962, National Audubon Society President Carl Buchheister had read a galley of Silent
Spring just as The New Yorker installment was running, and decided to back Carson. Lawyers
from Velsicol lobbed veiled threats at John Vosburgh (Audubons editor) and Charles Callison
(assistant to the NAS president) over lunch, warning them to beware of associating with Carson.
Big Chemical was gearing up to blast her out of the water. Bravely, Vosburgh and Callison
ignored the Velsicol bullying, though they were fearful of lawsuits. Audubon published an
excerpt of Silent Spring and criticized, in an editorial, Velsicols pesticide programs (though it
didnt entirely endorse Carsons argument).
Furthermore, Audubon Society branches in different cities and states banded together to serve as
refuges for Carson throughout the summer and fall of 1962. Fighting a kind of guerrilla war
against Big Chemical, Carson spent time at the Audubon Camp in Maine and attended a book
signing at the Audubon Society in Washington, D.C. Roland Clement, vice president of Audubon
and a staff biologist, publicly embraced Carsons Silent Spring research; others at the nonprofit,
more timid, expressed varied doubts. In September 1963, Audubon courageously reprinted a
Carson lecture about New England wildflowers as Rachel Carson Answers Her Critics. But

National Audubon never supported a ban on DDT. Instead, the nonprofit simply gave Carsons
defense real estate in its own organ of reform.
Not that Audubon was taking much of a risk. The Great Debate over Silent Spring ended in
Carsons favor on May 15, 1963, when President Kennedys 46-page Presidents Science
Advisory Committee reporttitled Use of Pesticideswas made public. (It might as well
have been called Rachel Carson Wins.) Although the report wasnt definitive concerning any
human health concerns about pesticides, it did contain a bombshell recommendation to increase
public education about the biological hazards of pesticides. It was as if WARNING had been
stamped on every page. Until the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, people were
generally unaware of the toxicity of pesticides, the PSAC report stated. The Government
should present this information to the public in a way that will make it aware of the dangers
while recognizing the value of pesticides.

Carson had three aims in writing Silent Spring: creating an enduring work of literature on par
with The Sea Around Us; alerting the public to the health dangers of pesticides; and forcing the
U.S. government to regulate the chemical industry more stringently. That May she accomplished
all three goals. The wheels of Congress now started turning in her direction. Senator Abraham
Ribicoff of Connecticut demanded subcommittee hearings, which started the very day after the
PSAC report came out. Secretary Udall heralded Carson as a far-sighted and alert writer [who]
has awakened the Nation. Having achieved her goals, Carson headed north to rock-ribbed
Maine for the summer. With her friend Dorothy Freeman she relaxed, watching the advancing
and retreating tides from an oceanfront deck. She enjoyed the diving terns, nesting parula
warblers, and scavenging gulls more than ever before, though radiation treatments had ravaged
her body and shrunken her frame. When summer ended, Carson headed back to Silver Spring.
Awaiting her on her desk was a letter from the National Audubon Society, informing Carson that
it was awarding her its highest honor for conservation achievement. More than 500 dinner guests
attended the award ceremony at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York on December 3, 1963.
Conservation is a cause that has no end, she said in her acceptance speech. There is no point
at which we will say our work is finished.
President Kennedy had been killed in Dallas just 11 days earlier. Carson mourned for months.
But as solace, the New Frontier regulatory attitude toward the use of pesticides and other
chemicals had taken hold of the national psyche. The Kennedy-Carson vision of an America with
mastery of the sky and rain, the oceans and the tides lived on in Lyndon Johnsons Great
Society, igniting the grassroots modern environmental movement that would bring us such
landmark legislation as the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the
Endangered Species Actall signed into law by President Richard Nixon.
Suffering terribly from myriad illnesses, Carson died on April 14, 1964. In the same way
Abraham Lincoln was forever tied by history to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Theodore Roosevelt
to Upton Sinclair, so, too, had Carson been linked to Kennedys New Frontier conservation.
There is no shortage of conflicting opinions about the controversial DDT analysis in Silent

Spring. But no one disputes that by 1964 the environmental revolution was on, and Kennedy and
Carson were among its John the Baptist figures. Their shared love of the Atlantic seaboard
particularly the migratory shorebird areas from Maine to Virginiafused together an alliance
that uplifted outdoors enthusiasts in all 50 states. Kennedy loved marine conservation, Udall
recalled. And Carson was his muse.