THE RECREATION ADVISORY COUNCIL 31 



Mr. HAAR. Our question relates to the chairmanship of the Coun- 

 cil. We wonder how effective is this revolving chairmanship? 

 Would it be a better technique to have a permanent chairman, per- 

 haps one appointed by the President directly? 



Secretary FREEMAN. There have only been two chairmen so far. 

 I think Secretary Udall was a fine chairman. 



Mr. WEAVER. I think it has worked out very well so far. There 

 are advantages in that you get an involvement at the various levels 

 of all departments. You have a feeling that this is not somebody 

 else's business, because one day you are going to be chairman. I think 

 this has operational advantages, and finally, where you are coordi- 

 nating as this group attempts to do and coordination is a difficult 

 thing administratively I think it is very well to have the coordination 

 among people who have equal status rather than coordination by 

 somebody who is going to coordinate. 



Secretary CONNOR. Just to amplify that a bit, I think that even a 

 short exposure to government indicates to me that when you have an 

 interdepartmental coordinating agency, that unless you have a 

 rotating chairman, pretty soon the fellow who is the chairman is 

 automatically delegated all the authority with respect to that activity 

 and this becomes the activity of his department with the other 

 departments taking only a peripheral interest in it. Although this 

 is still in the experimental stage, it seems to me that the points Mr. 

 Weaver made are valid, that if all the departments concerned are 

 to be responsible for various aspects of the program it is a good idea 

 to thrust the matter of chairmanship on each one in turn for one 

 go-around and see how it works. 



Mr. PAUL. Mr. Chairman, I should say at this point that Secre- 

 tary McNamara believes in the rotating chairmanship concept, but it 

 is a question of how far it rotates. For example, our feeling at present 

 is that the Department of Defense should not chair the Council. We 

 would like to remove the Secretary of Defense from the primary bur- 

 den of chairing the Council. We feel we should be on the Council 

 we have to be. We think that narrowing the potential numbers 

 of chairmen is probably a good idea, but we are all in favor of the 

 rotating principle. 



Secretary FREEMAN. I might add a personal note that the Council 

 might want to consider. I think if the President saw fit to assign the 

 top staff person in the field of conservation and natural beauty as the 



