THE TOWNSGAPE 97 



will avoid the terror of public error. The interest of the President 

 and the First Lady is a great inspiration to him. 



I think another problem is that men in public position who are 

 concerned with design are not elevated or protected by their political 

 employers. If they are not good administrators, give them an ad- 

 ministrative assistant to take care of the paperwork. If they are not 

 good budgeters, get a budgeter who has a little taste. If they are 

 not willing to innovate, then they are really obsolete. 



We in the Federal Aviation Agency are primarily concerned 

 with public safety, but I think it must be dynamic safety. We 

 got a man to design the control tower for future years. We did not 

 get a man who is a mechanical engineer, to build the least costly 

 tower, but we got I. M. Pei to build the most perfect functionally. 

 My predecessor, General Quesada, chose Eero Saarinen to design 

 a system of safety and convenience around the airport. I do not 

 agree with where he located the airport, but I do agree with two 

 very important things. He chose top quality and gave them free- 

 dom to assist and design all the way from the access roads to those 

 80 steps from the seat of your car to the seat of your plane. That 

 is what can be done if there is courage in the public trust. 



I think well of the idea of getting double duty out of some of 

 our public places. The Union Station here and I hope Mr. 

 Hamilton in Los Angeles will agree would be an ideal spot when 

 roofed over for a heliport. We are going to have metroports in 

 a society of 225 million in 1975, beset with perhaps 110 million 

 automobiles. 



Finally, it seems to me that we can do a great deal about 

 noise and ugliness at airports. Mr. Eckbo and other landscape 

 architects are just as important to the Great Society as the me- 

 chanical and civil engineers. With their brothers in the architectural 

 business, they can build hush parks around airports, beautify the 

 approaches, attenuate the noise and make some real improvements. 



Mrs. JOHN M. KENNEDY. Two years ago we organized a beautifi- 

 cation council in southeastern Michigan comprised of Oakland, 

 Macomb, and Wayne County, and including Windsor. 



I am going to submit a copy of the bylaws to the panel. 



We met monthly on what our cities can do to promote pro- 

 grams to better their communities. However, we feel that in the 

 two years we have been organized that we have missed our big- 



