Stewart Udall’s Just Cause

Crew cut, athletic and a war hero, Stewart Udall was a perfect fit with John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. As Secretary of the Interior, he won acclaim for expanding national parks and garnered headlines for leading officials on 50- mile hikes. As a lawyer-lobbyist, Udall stayed in Washington until 1979, when a new cause called him home.

On a stopover in St. George, Utah, the previous year, Udall had heard wrenching tales of death and debilitating illness from cancer afflicting Southwesterners who had lived downwind from the Nevada nuclear-test site from the 1950s to the early ’60s. Victims were convinced their illness came from clouds of radiation. Udall was outraged to learn that a 1981 U.S. Public Health Service survey had found cancer rates five times higher than normal among 15,000 white and Navajo uranium miners in the region but concealed the findings from the victims. He began filing claims against the Government on behalf of both the miners and the “downwinders.”

Udall sold his house in a Washington suburb and moved to Phoenix, where for eleven impecunious years he fought unsuccessfully in the courts to obtain redress. Judges consistently held that the Government could not be held liable, even though it knew of the danger from radiation and kept the victims in the dark. More than 1,000 stricken miners “were sacrificed for cold war nuclear weapons,” says Utah Democratic Congressman Wayne Owens.

Last week Owens told his colleagues that the victims are owed “compensation and an apology.” The House agreed, approving a $100 million fund to aid affected families in five Southwestern states. But even if the Senate goes along, the Justice Department has urged President Bush to veto the measure as “another entitlement program.” Udall, now 70 and practicing law in Santa Fe, is writing a book on Government callousness in the atomic age. The Bush Administration may provide him with another chapter.