Donald W. Murphy is a
bureaucrat who manages 23,000 federal employees and a $2.4 billion-a-year
budget. He's also a poet who enjoys writing sonnets in praise of
redwoods, swamplands and canyons.
Drop by his office at the
U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., and you could
find the No. 2 executive at the National Park Service (NPS) devising
a plan to improve security at the nation's nearly 400 parks and
public monuments . . . or reviewing maintenance costs for upkeep
at the Lincoln Memorial . . . or preparing testimony on future NPS
needs for the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
 However, Murphy, '75, also
insists on stepping away from his tasks now and then, in order to
spend a day or two meditating on the spiritual side of his vocation
as the top manager for the nation's parks. “At least two or three
times a year, I like to get out of Washington and go hike a mountain
trail in Wyoming, or maybe spend a day at one of our seaside parks
in the Carolinas, or along those amazing Pacific cliffs of Oregon,”
he says. “ Spending some time in a redwood forest or a protected
marshland allows me to meditate on how I can do my job better—while
also recharging my batteries.”
On one of those out-of-office
trips a few years ago, Murphy was touring Redwood National Park
near Eureka, Calif., with former NPS director Roger Kennedy and
Kennedy's wife, Frances.
“We were strolling through
grove after grove of redwoods,” he recalls, “and the setting was
nothing less than awesome. Can you imagine being surrounded by dozens
of 1,000-year-old trees, some of them 300 feet tall? All at once,
Mrs. Kennedy stopped, raised her hands and closed her eyes as if
she was going through some sort of religious experience.
“Of course, her reaction
was easy to understand because everybody feels the power of those
majestic trees. And that includes me. Each time I go over to Capitol
Hill to fight for more resources for the 385 park sites in our system,
I feel like I'm fighting for those redwoods!”
From Genetics to
Politics
Once intent on becoming a
professional biochemist, Don Murphy arrived on the UCSD campus back
in the fall of 1973. He had already spent two years at USC and another
as a volunteer worker among the poor in the Central American country
of Belize.
A thoughtful, endlessly
curious kid whose bookish parents had introduced him to the “splendors
of Yosemite” before he reached first grade, Murphy was already captivated
by the natural world when he hit San Diego. Soon after resuming
his undergrad studies, he signed up for a course in virology. Within
a matter of weeks, he says, he had fallen in love with genetics.
“I remember working in
the lab one day,” he recalls, “and I guess I experienced what you
would call a ‘Eureka moment.' I really liked the challenge of that
virology class, and I was utterly enthralled with the notion that
viruses could infiltrate the nucleus of a cell and take over its
genetic workings.”
Hooked on genetics, he
spent three years studying for a doctorate in biochemistry at UC-Irvine
before finally realizing that he actually preferred the great outdoors
to the laboratory bench.
“I left grad school and
I became a park ranger,” Murphy says. “I wound up driving a Jeep
through the canyons of the Sierra Nevada. My parents nearly flipped;
they thought I'd flipped. But it was the right choice. Deep down,
I knew that I wanted to stay connected to the outdoors, to the natural
world.”
Described by his boss,
NPS Director Fran Mainella, as “a proven manager whose leadership
skills are a great asset for this entire organization,” Murphy climbed
rapidly up the ladder at California State Parks, and then spent
six years directing the statewide system—where he commanded a $200
million budget and 2,700 state employees. From there he took on
another challenge: leading the effort to build a brand-new Department
of Parks and Recreation for the City of Sacramento. After creating
several high-profile programs in Sacramento during the late 1990s,
he was recruited in the summer of 2001 by the new Bush administration
for his current post at the NPS.
Conservative Conservator
Don Murphy describes that
post as “essentially, the COO” —Chief Operating Officer—of the nation's
84 million-acre system of parks, historical monuments and recreation
areas.
Translation: While Mainella
makes the key policy decisions, Murphy is charged with carrying
them out as the 87-year-old agency's top day-in-and-day-out administrator.
His primary assignment is to assess the condition and repair costs
of the huge array of physical assets owned by the NPS, including
10,000 miles of roads, 17,000 miles of trails, 2,200 national campgrounds,
and more than 17,000 buildings located on federal parklands.
Murphy also manages the
tens of thousands of NPS staffers and independent contractors whose
responsibilities range from trash collection to road maintenance.
And like his boss, Mainella, Murphy spends a fair amount of time
on Capitol Hill, trying to nail down the dollars needed to keep
the system's parklands neatly groomed and safe for the 277 million
visitors each year. Relations with Congress are a challenge, and
his role as a manager does not shield him from political controversy.
A low-key Republican, Murphy
takes great pains to keep politics out of his day-to-day decisions
at NPS. Nonetheless, he says he feels “quite comfortable” defending
President George W. Bush's record on funding the aging and increasingly
rundown parks, which may require as much as $5 billion in new monies
during the next decade to repair and refurbish thousands of on-site
roadways and buildings.
Ask Murphy to talk about
the White House's commitment to protecting U.S. parklands, and he'll
tell you the same thing he told a congressional committee on the
Hill last summer: “This president has recently committed more than
$2.9 billion in administration funds for long-overdue maintenance,
and he's also been urging Congress to authorize another $2 billion,
in order to help pay for maintenance costs that lie up ahead.”
But the influential National
Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit public interest
group, doesn't share Murphy's admiration for the current administration's
support of the NPS. According to the association, the White House
has frequently “ignored the annual needs of the national parks,
which continue to operate with only two-thirds of the funds they
actually require.”
However, the politically
savvy Murphy carefully avoids the rancorous debate. A skilled bureaucrat,
he has learned
to choose his words carefully when it comes to the politics of conservation.
“I started my career in
government as a park ranger in California,” he says with a quiet
smile, “and I spent a lot of years doing all the little things
it takes to make sure that Americans have a good experience when
they
visit one of their public parks.” 
Tom Nugent is
a freelance writer. He wrote the book Death at Buffalo Creek
published by W. W. Norton.
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