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Walt Walkinshaw | |
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Born | 1917 Seattle |
Nationality | Americans |
Occupation | Lawyers |
Walt Walkinshaw (1917-2010) was an American attorney who "epitomized the Northwest character, old school. He was an outdoorsman, a lawyer with a strong conscience, and a passionate advocate of progressive causes," according to David Brewster in Crosscut. [1]
Walkinshaw was born in 1917 in Seattle into a pioneering family – Mount Walkinshaw in the Olympic Mountains is named after his father Robert B. Walkinshaw, an author and lawyer.
After graduating cum laude from the University of Washington in 1939, he was chosen as one of 40 young Rockefeller Foundation interns in the federal government in Washington, D.C. He worked in various departments and ended up as a staff member in the executive office of President Franklin D. Roosevelt where he wrote reports on the various new agencies of the New Deal.
Walkinshaw's career was interrupted by World War II. He served in the Navy for five years of continuous duty in war zones at sea. He started in the North Atlantic as a deck officer on a cargo ship dodging German submarines. His Asiatic-Pacific Theater ribbon contains three stars – one for Saipan, another for Iwo Jima, and the third for Okinawa. He also received a "special commendation for performance duty in operations" against Iwo Jima. When he was navigator of aircraft carrier USS Windham Bay, [2] his ship was in the first bloody assault of that island. American journalist Ernie Pyle was at one time aboard the USS Windham Bay, and wrote about the importance of jeep carriers in naval battles. Walt retired in 1946 as a commander.
He then became a program analyst and foreign affairs specialist with the U.S. government's Interdepartmental Committee on Scientific and Cultural Cooperation. [3] In this job, he worked with a little-known program of technical aid and exchange of scientific know-how with South America. He worked with a staff of three to get their idea of technical assistance to expand from South America to the rest of the world. In the Mundt bill (P.L. 402), the program was passed by Congress to go worldwide, but no funding was provided. [4] It was not until a friend of Walkinshaw's, Benjamin Hardy, wrote the idea into the inaugural speech of President Harry S. Truman and the president announced this bold new program of aid for the underdeveloped world that it was funded and went worldwide. It was Truman's fourth point in his speech and thus named the Point Four Program.
Point Four was the first time in history that a powerful nation – in this case the industrial giant of the world – was committing itself to assist in the building up of other countries, not in order to gain dominion over them or to profit by their exploitation, but as a means of contributing to the establishment of a world order distinguished by personal freedom and social justice. [5] Helping the world's sick, hungry, uneducated and discouraged to help themselves became a national policy.
In 1950, Walkinshaw was a representative of the United States Department of State on the Griffin Mission that went to Southeast Asia to establish Point Four. The idea of using younger people for overseas technical work was suggested in his final report for the Griffin Mission, and furthered by Lloyd Andrews who became head of Point Four. [6] Andrews later had direct input when President John F. Kennedy founded the Peace Corps. [7] Point Four also laid the foundation for what would later become USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Walkinshaw left Point Four in 1951 for several reasons. During the early 1950s, McCarthyism was at its height and Walkinshaw's boss was accused, and then cleared, as one of ten top subversive members of the State Department. [8] He found that many of the colleagues he respected were being driven out of the State Department. Further, an idea he promoted in Point Four of appropriate technology and small improvements decided upon by the people involved was often being replaced by Marshall Plan types of big industrial projects. He also found that most budget requests had to be tied to the military.
Walkinshaw was deeply tied to the Northwest and wanted to get back to his roots in Seattle. He had earned his law degree from George Washington University while working full-time in the State Department, so he started his new law practice in Seattle and was a lone practitioner for 21 years before joining Riddell Williams law firm.
Not long after moving back to Seattle, he met his future wife Jean Strong at a Quaker meeting. Jean was a graduate of Stanford University and had just returned from Hiroshima, where she worked to build houses of good will. They soon married and had three children: Charlie, Rob and Meg.
Walkinshaw's wife Jean Walkinshaw also had deep ties to the Northwest. Her father was an early civil engineer who built roads including the North Cascades Highway to Marblemount and a portion of the road around the Olympic Peninsula. Mount Henderson in the Olympic Mountains is named after her grandfather. Jean became an award-winning documentary producer and produced for The History Channel; KING-TV, NBC affiliate in Seattle; and KCTS, the public television station in Seattle. She produced more than 50 documentaries. In 1992 she was inducted into the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Silver Circle for 25 years of significant contribution to the television industry and community.
As a lawyer, Walkinshaw drafted many state laws that established the direction of health care, including patient bill of rights, right to die, and licensure of health care professionals.[ citation needed ] He was also the attorney for the architects who designed SeaTac and the Washington State Convention Center.
Walkinshaw is listed in Men of Achievement (1973), and in several editions of Who's Who in the West.
Walkinshaw served as founding secretary for ACT Theater, and remained its secretary, attorney and advisor for 35 years. He helped start the Seattle chapter of Amigos de las Americas, an organization that sends teenagers as volunteers to Latin America. He served on many others boards including Northwest Kidney Centers, Municipal League, United Nations Association and City Club.
As an avid fly fisherman, he crusaded to preserve and maintain habitat and recreational areas. As attorney for the owners of the Nisqually Delta wetlands near Olympia, Washington, he steered his clients to sell their land to the government, which resulted in the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge on the delta. [9] He was an officer and director of the Washington Wildlife and Recreation Coalition. He was a member of the Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee, of the U.S. Department of Commerce from 1980 to 1983. And he was an officer and director of the Washington Fly Fishing Club.
His law partner Stimson Bullitt, remembering their long-time friendship, wrote of Walkinshaw, "You are the only person I have known for whom I thought ethical decisions were not hard – that on coming to a moral fork in the road, you would take the right one without breaking stride."
Walkinshaw died in Seattle on April 16, 2010, at age 93. [10] In a tribute to Walt, [11] national correspondent Joel Connelly of the Seattle P-I wrote that Walt "became one of the self-effacing, credit sharing 'Greatest Generation' activists who shaped the postwar city and region."
Harry R. Truman was an American businessman, bootlegger, and prospector. He lived near Mount St. Helens, an active volcano in the state of Washington, and was the owner and caretaker of Mount St. Helens Lodge at Spirit Lake near the base of the mountain. Truman came to fame as a folk hero in the months leading up to the volcano's 1980 eruption after refusing to leave his home despite evacuation orders. He was killed by a pyroclastic flow that overtook his lodge and buried the site under 150 ft (46 m) of volcanic debris.
KCTS-TV is a PBS member television station in Seattle, Washington, United States, owned by Cascade Public Media. Its studios are located at the northeast corner of Seattle Center adjacent to the Space Needle, and its transmitter is located on Capitol Hill in Seattle.
Mary Margaret Truman Daniel was an American classical soprano, actress, journalist, radio and television personality, writer, and New York socialite. She was the only child of President Harry S. Truman and First Lady Bess Truman. While her father was president, during the years 1945 to 1953, Margaret regularly accompanied him on campaign trips, most notably the 1948 extensive countrywide train-borne 'Whistle-stop' campaign trip, which lasted several weeks; she also appeared often at important White House and political events during those years. She was a favorite with the media.
Chief Leschi was a chief of the Nisqually Indian Tribe of southern Puget Sound, Washington, primarily in the area of the Nisqually River.
The Point Four Program was a technical assistance program for "developing countries" announced by United States President Harry S. Truman in his inaugural address on January 20, 1949. It took its name from the fact that it was the fourth foreign policy objective mentioned in the speech.
Fort Nisqually was an important fur trading and farming post of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Puget Sound area, part of the Hudson's Bay Company's Columbia Department. It was located in what is now DuPont, Washington. Today it is a living history museum located in Tacoma, Washington, USA, within the boundaries of Point Defiance Park. The Fort Nisqually Granary, moved along with the Factor's House from the original site of the second fort to this park, is a U.S. National Historic Landmark. Built in 1843, the granary is the oldest building in Washington state and one of the only surviving examples of a Hudson's Bay Company "post on sill" structure. The Factor's House and the granary are the only surviving Hudson's Bay Company buildings in the United States.
The Yakima War (1855–1858) was a conflict between the United States and the Yakama, a Sahaptian-speaking people of the Northwest Plateau, then part of Washington Territory, and the tribal allies of each. It primarily took place in the southern interior of present-day Washington. Isolated battles in western Washington and the northern Inland Empire were sometimes separately referred to as the Puget Sound War and the Palouse War, respectively. This conflict is also referred to as the Yakima Native American War of 1855.
Harry S. Truman was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. A lifetime member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as a US Senator from the State of Missouri from 1935 to 1945. He was chosen as incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate for the 1944 presidential election. Truman was inaugurated as vice-president in 1945 and served for less than three months until President Roosevelt died. Now serving as president, Truman implemented the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy of Western Europe and established both the Truman Doctrine and NATO to contain the expansion of communism. He proposed numerous liberal domestic reforms, but few were enacted by the Conservative Coalition that dominated the Congress.
The Puget Sound War was an armed conflict that took place in the Puget Sound area of the state of Washington in 1855–56, between the United States military, local militias and members of the Native American tribes of the Nisqually, Muckleshoot, Puyallup, and Klickitat. Another component of the war, however, were raiders from the Haida and Tlingit who came into conflict with the United States Navy during contemporaneous raids on the native peoples of Puget Sound. Although limited in its magnitude, territorial impact and losses in terms of lives, the conflict is often remembered in connection to the 1856 Battle of Seattle and to the execution of a central figure of the war, Nisqually Chief Leschi. The contemporaneous Yakima War may have been responsible for some events of the Puget Sound War, such as the Battle of Seattle, and it is not clear that the people of the time made a strong distinction between the two conflicts.
The Battle of Seattle was a January 26, 1856 attack by Native American tribesmen upon Seattle, Washington. At the time, Seattle was a settlement in the Washington Territory that had recently named itself after Chief Seattle (Sealth), a leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish peoples of central Puget Sound.
Walter Charles Crowley was an American historian and activist from Washington state. He first entered the public sphere in Seattle through his involvement with the social and political movements of the 1960s, especially the underground press. He later became more widely known as a local television personality and for his pioneering work as a local historian, including co-creating the website HistoryLink.org, which he considered to be his crowning achievement.
Crosscut.com is a nonprofit news website based in Seattle, Washington, United States. Its content is mainly news analysis rather than breaking news like other online newspapers or blogs.
Billy Frank Jr. was a Native American environmental leader and treaty rights activist. A Nisqually tribal member, Frank led a grassroots campaign for fishing rights on the tribe's Nisqually River, located in Washington state, in the 1960s and 1970s. As a lifelong activist and the chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission for over thirty years, Frank promoted cooperative management of natural resources.
David Clark Brewster is an American journalist and the founder, editor and publisher of the Seattle Weekly and the Northwest news website Crosscut.com. He is also the founder, creator and former executive director of the nonprofit cultural center Town Hall Seattle.
The Fish Wars were a series of civil disobedience protests in the 1960s and '70s in which Native American tribes around the Puget Sound pressured the U.S. government to recognize fishing rights granted by the Treaty of Medicine Creek. A series of fish-in demonstrations in the Pacific Northwest, that started in 1963, grew to attract celebrity participation and national media attention before the US Federal Government intervened to sue the state of Washington. The 1974 decision in United States v. Washington was upheld by the supreme court in 1979.
Jean Walkinshaw is an American television producer. She has produced content for The History Channel, KING-TV, and KCTS. In 2019 Walkinshaw was inducted into the Northwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Gold Circle for 50 years of significant contribution to the television industry and community.
The Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, also known as The Pearl Harbor Committee, was a committee of members of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives formed during the 79th United States Congress after World War II to investigate the causes of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, and possible preventive measures against future attacks. The resolution for the formation of this committee passed in the Senate on September 6, 1945, and in the House on September 11, 1945. The final report of the committee issued on June 20, 1946.
Joseph-Thanh Nguyen is an American politician who is a member of the Washington State Senate from the 34th district. Nguyen, a second-generation Vietnamese American, was raised with his three siblings in White Center, Washington, by his mother. He was a candidate for King County Executive in 2021 but was defeated by Dow Constantine 56 percent to 44 percent.
The 2021 Seattle mayoral election was held on November 2, 2021, to elect the Mayor of Seattle. It was won by former Seattle City Council President Bruce Harrell, who defeated then-current President Lorena González; both candidates had advanced from a nonpartisan primary election on August 3.
Maia D. Bellon is an American attorney and former government official from the State of Washington. She served as Director of the Washington Department of Ecology from 2013 to 2020. A member of the Mescalero Apache, Bellon was the first Native American to serve as a member of the Washington cabinet.
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