Bully in the Pulpit
When Teddy Roosevelt was president in the early 1900s, he declared that the office of the president was a “bully pulpit” from which to speak out for causes he supported. From this position of power, Roosevelt believed that the opinions he voiced carried more weight with listeners than the same comments coming from someone not in such a position.
The tradition of using high public office as a bully pulpit from which to speak out has continued over the years, usually by honorable men and women supporting worthy causes — remember President John F. Kennedy declaring that we could put a man on the moon? — but also for less-than-honorable causes such as Sen. Joe McCarthy's attempt to brand opponents as Communist sympathizers in the 1950s.
Wildland fire has occasionally been the subject of speeches from a bully pulpit, both in the United States and abroad over the past few years. Barristers in Australia have been very vocal in some of the coronial inquests dealing with fatal bushfires, and U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, himself a former wildland firefighter, talked at length about wildfire and forest health conditions throughout the 1990s.
Most recently, the world of wildland fire has been exposed to a real bully, one who has used his position of public office in a most inappropriate manner. I'm ashamed and embarrassed to report that it was none other than Sen. Conrad Burns from my home state of Montana who used his position to verbally abuse a group of U.S. Forest Service Hot Shots at the Billings, Mont., airport in July. As they were awaiting a flight back to their home base in Virginia, Burns approached them and told some crew members that they “had done a piss-poor job” of battling the wildfire they had been working on.
Rather than stoop to his level of name-calling, the Hot Shots told him to have a nice day and then called back to the incident base camp to report the comments. A fire information officer was dispatched to the airport to speak with the senator, who told her that the Hot Shots “hadn't done a God-damned thing.… It's wasteful; you probably paid that guy $10,000 to sit around.”
Burns also approached a member of an incident management team who was at the airport and asked, “Are you from Boise?” When the IMT member answered that he was not, the senator replied “Good. Your life has been saved.” Apparently Burns believes that the National Interagency Fire Center at Boise, which allocates scarce resources across the country, is the root of all evil, and that folks from there should not continue living.
None of us believe that wildland firefighters should be exempt from scrutiny, either by the public we serve or by the officials elected to provide oversight to our operations. It's all an essential part of the system of checks and balances called “accountability.” But for an elected official, one of only 100 in a country of nearly 300 million people, to verbally attack and threaten ground-level firefighters in an airport is, in my opinion, totally unprofessional and unacceptable. There are many more suitable ways that a person with his power and position could express his concerns about fire suppression operations without personally attacking individual firefighters.
Wildfires are getting larger and more expensive to suppress, and we can only expect a greater level of visibility with the public, the media and, of course, the politicians who fund our operations. Let's hope that others who choose to comment on our activities show more class.
International Assn. of Wildland Fire
P.O. Box 261
Hot Springs, S.D.
57747-0261
ph: 605-890-2348
fax: 206-600-5113
iawf@iawfonline.org
To join the IAWF, visit www.iawfonline.org
Send them to:
Wildfire Magazine
330 N. Wabash Ave.
Suite 2300
Chicago, Ill. 60611
Attn: Lisa Allegretti lisa.allegretti@penton.com
