TIME
MAGAZINE RED RIVER GORGE EXCERPTS
July 22, 1966 Vol. 88 No. 4
Milestones
Segment of interest:
Married. William O. Douglas, 67, U.S. Supreme Court Justice; and Cathleen Curran Heffernan, 23, a senior at Portland, Ore.'s Roman
Catholic Marylhurst College, he for the fourth time; in Encino, Calif., just three weeks after his divorce from his third wife,
Joan Martin, 26, and three days after Joan announced her own remarriage, to Roger Nicholson, 27, director of an exclusive Rocky
Mountain boys' camp.
July 29, 1966 Vol. 88 No. 5
September Song
Entire Column:
Jul. 29, 1966
"Oo, la, la!" exclaimed Oliver Wendell Holmes to a startled aide who was attending him in his study one wintry day. "Young man,"
explained Mr. Justice Holmes, then a redoubtable 93, "I was thinking about walking down the street with a pretty lady and holding
her hand behind her husband's back." And oo, la, la, generally speaking, was Washington's reaction last week to news that one of Holmes's
most libertarian successors on the Supreme Court, William O. Douglas, 67, had taken as his fourth bride blonde, blue-eyed Cathleen
Heffernan, a 23-year-old senior at Portland's all-girl Marylhurst College.
Within hours of the week's first session, members of the House had introduced four resolutions calling for an investigation of the
thrice-divorced Justice's "moral character." Kansas Republican Robert Dole charged that Douglas had not only used "bad judgment from
a matrimonial standpoint, but also in a number of 5-to-4 decisions of the Supreme Court." Democrat Byron Rogers of Colorado suggested that
the romantic Justice might be retired under a law allowing for the removal of a judge "permanently disabled from performing his duties."
The resolutions and half a dozen floor speeches probably were an embarrassment to Douglas, but were hardly likely to lead to an investigation,
let alone the first successful impeachment of a Supreme Court Justice in the nation's history. Nor were they likely to persuade the ruggedly
individualistic Douglas—who has served 27 years on the court—to repeat a half-serious offer to resign from the bench, tendered to President
Kennedy after his second divorce in 1963. His first marriage, to Mildred Riddle, ended in 1953 after 30 years and two children; his second, to
Divorcee Mercedes Hester Davidson, lasted nine years; his third, to Joan Carol Martin, 26, broke up last December after two years, four months.
On to Peking. Douglas met his latest, the boyishly bobbed Cathleen, at a party in Portland last summer, and on a return visit in December asked
the host for "the name, telephone number and address of that terrific gal I met at your party." In May, he stopped in Portland again—to see
Cathy and his dentist, "in that order of importance"—and later invited her to join a party at Prairie Lodge, his remote cabin in Gooseprairie,
Wash., in the heart of the Cascade Mountains. Invited to a banquet in Los Angeles earlier this month, Douglas once again invited Cathy along,
just in time for her to be stranded by the airline strike. Said Cathy: "I stayed over three days and I got married."
Back at Prairie Lodge last week, under the peaks of Baldy and Old Scab, Douglas and his bride appeared blissfully unconcerned by the
headshaking on the Potomac. "We don't get much news around here," drawled Douglas. "On the short-wave radio we can listen to the broadcasts
from the Bureau of Reclamation and Peking." The latter, at least, should be worth listening to if Peking approves the Justice's plans, sanctioned
last week by the State Department, to visit Red China with Cathy this September.
December 1, 1967 Vol. 90 No. 22
People
Segment of interest:
White thatch bobbing like an anchor buoy, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, 69, strode off into the middle of another conservation
fight—this one to save Kentucky's Red River Gorge from the Army Corps of Engineers, which proposed to dam up the river at that point.
The Justice led 300 lung-sprung hikers on a brisk five-mile walk through the superscenic gorge, which he called "one of the great wonders of
America." Only marcher not left pooped in Douglas' wake was his 24-year-old fourth wife Cathy, who skipped on ahead explaining "I used to
be a tomboy before I came to Washington and became a lady." Not to be outmaneuvered, hundreds of local residents met the Justice with a
sign-waving, DAM-the-gorge demonstration of their own, arguing that the Red River's visual splendor was small consolation for the havoc of
its yearly flooding.
April 11, 1969 Vol. 93 No. 15
Entire Column:
The Nation
Daniel Boone's River
Apr. 11, 1969
It is no wonder that Kentucky's Red River Gorge, a 15-mile stretch of primeval beauty bordered by 600-ft. limestone cliffs, is known as the
Grand Canyon of the East. Daniel Boone is supposed to have holed up there, and the surrounding national forest bears his name. Carved out
of the Cumberland Plateau, it is an almost otherworldly wonderland of castle rock formations, soaring pinnacles and natural arches. It is also
a refuge for some 50 species of mammals and 275 species of birds.
Had the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had its way, the Red River Gorge would now be earmarked for submersion. But last week, yielding to
unusual pressures, the corps disclosed that it was abandoning plans to build a dam there. To control seasonal floods and store water for
fast-growing Lexington, 50 miles to the west, a dam will be built 5.3 miles downstream from the original site, thereby saving the most
spectacular two-thirds of the gorge from flooding.
Great Obsessions. The cement pourers have been thwarted on dam projects before, but rarely—if ever—on such ecological and esthetic
grounds. What rescued the Red River Gorge was frenzied activity by the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, an outpouring of statements
by Kentucky biologists, and most important, intervention by some high-level Republicans, including Governor Louie Nunn, Senator
John Sherman Cooper and President Richard Nixon.
As in so many crises of the environment, plans for the $11.2 million dam went unprotested until nearly too late. In 1967, the conservationists
went to work. That archchampion of the wilderness, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, led hikers through the gorge to publicize its
impending fate. "The building of dams is one of the great obsessions of America," he said, "but engineering values are not what we live by."
In victory, the conservationists are wary. Concerned that the gorge may yet be despoiled by speculators who might scar it with roads, cabins,
camp sites and motorboat docks, University of Kentucky Agricultural Economist Carl M. Clark warned: "We saved the gorge from the water.
Now we have to save it from the people." Moreover, the conservationists are well aware that many more of America's remaining wild rivers
are ticketed for daming. Among some 70 dams on the corps' boards or under construction are projects that would affect the Sangamon in
Illinois (the tributary taken by Abe Lincoln in leaving the backwoods), the Big Walnut in Indiana, the Snake in Idaho and the St. John in Maine.
August 7, 1989 Vol. 134 No. 6
Video
Star Power
Diane Sawyer, with a new prime-time show and a $1.6 million contract, is hot. But are celebrity anchors like her upstaging the news?
By RICHARD ZOGLIN
Segment of interest:
After graduation she got a job as a weather girl at a TV station back in Louisville. Too nearsighted to see the western half of the map
from the East Coast, she made jokes on the job. "I had no interest in the weather," she says, "and it showed nightly." Later she did
reporting; her first assignment was to follow Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas on a hike through Kentucky's Red River gorge.
Toting the camera and recording equipment herself, she fell backward into the gorge while trying to get a shot.
The Justice's comment: "Are you new at this, dear?
