ABSTRACT
As we saw earlier, the Park Service's basic responsibility for the preservation of the nation's history and its nature was never seriously questioned. Questions arose only when it became necessary to resolve this general responsibility into the specifics of policy, priorities, and management decisions so as to give shape and definition to the expanding Park System in the 1960s and 1970s, With urban national parks, there were the specific questions of management and policy, to be sure, but beyond these questions was the more basic one of whether the Park Service should be involved with cities in the first place. In fact, perhaps no question has been so debated within the National Park Service as that of the appropriateness of urban parks in the National Park System. Aside from the use versus preservation question, no issue has been its equal in forcing the agency to ask itself questions about its basic mission or in involving it in controversy. Moreover, it is a policy area in which definitive commitments, rather than settling things, seem only to launch new rounds of dissension and indecision.
