Assistant editorial director, The Dallas Morning News · wrote the 1971 version of the quip
Quote Investigator identifies Jim Wright as an assistant editorial director for The Dallas Morning News, and “tentatively” credits him with the earliest located version of the joke — a March 1971 column taking aim at the counterculture bestseller The Greening of America. He is a newspaperman, not the Texas congressman of the same name. Even so, Wright owns the idea rather than the sentence: the polished wording that circulates today first shows up eight years later, in a joke compilation, with no author attached to it.