Introduction:
Rogers C.B. Morton
Patricia Limerick: I want to begin with the Secretary
of Interior Rogers C. B. Morton, under whom Undersecretary
Whitaker served.
Rogers C. B. Morton was appointed Secretary of the Interior
in November 1970, to succeed Walter Hickel. He was nominated
to that position; he was confirmed in January of 1971.
He had had successful careers in business, farming, government
and politics before that. There are many testimonies of Secretary
Morton's affability and congeniality. He was the tallest man
in Congress, when he was in Congress. Disputed reports say
6 feet, 6-and-a-half, or 6 feet-7 — it probably depends
upon the occasion as to which height he assumed.
The term used by many of his friends and acquaintances to
describe him was "the jolly giant."
He had a lightning mind for repartee. He was a first-class
raconteur and he had a magnificent sense of humor, Current
Biography said in 1971. His big brother, Thruston, was a senator
from Kentucky, the state where they grew up. This is a comment
Thruston made about his kid brother: "My kid brother,
Rog, is a hog farmer and he weighs anywhere from 235 pounds
to 275 pounds. When the price of hogs goes up, he sells them;
when the price of hogs goes down, he eats them."
Yes ... there was a lot of griping.
- John C.
Whitaker,
on conflict in the Nixon Cabinet
over emerging environmental policies
Secretary Morton had a lifelong
enjoyment of outdoors experience. He took trips out West.
As a young man, in the summer of 1933, he worked for several
weeks on a ranch near Yellowstone. Growing up in Kentucky,
I think he was seventh-generation Kentuckian. He was an enthusiast
for carpentry, boating and outdoor sports.
He piloted his own plane. He swam, he sailed, he snorkeled,
he hiked, and he hunted. His mother's family had a flour company,
Ballard and Ballard. He was in that company as a young man
and then that company merged with Pillsbury, and he was with
Pillsbury for some time.
He went as an undergraduate to Yale, he was a basketball player
— surprise, surprise. And Current Biography says –
I'm quoting from them – I wouldn't be knowledgeable
enough to make this statement – that once in a Yale-Columbia
game, he scored 30 points against Columbia in the days "when
that was an impressive number."
In the early 1950s, he moved to a farm near Chesapeake Bay
where he could sail, which was a passion of his. It was basically
a cattle-finishing farm. He eventually ran for Congress and
served four terms as a congressman from Maryland's eastern
shore.
In Congress, he was a member of the Interior Committee for
his first years and then he left that committee when he had
a chance to serve on Ways and Means. He had a great passion
for concerns about Chesapeake Bay. He sometimes said the C.B.
in Rogers C.B. Morton stood for Chesapeake Bay because he
was such an advocate for the well-being of that body of water.
In Congress, he drafted the law establishing the Assateague
National Seashore, he was a sponsor of an oil-pollution control
bill and he was an early backer of Richard Nixon in 1968.
He was the floor manager at the nominating convention and
— an interesting achievement — he gave the nominating
speech for Spiro Agnew, who was from Maryland, so there was
solidarity among Marylanders there.
He was Richard Nixon's choice for chairman of the Republican
National Committee in April of 1969. His goal was to transform
the GOP into what he called the "Swinging Action Party
of the day." That meant to him giving a set speech called
"Where the Votes Are," in which he berated fellow
Republicans for "writing off the Negro, writing off labor,
writing off young people, writing off ethnic groups"
and encouraging the Republicans to stop that writing off and
pay attention to those folks.
In 1968, Rogers was under consideration for Secretary of Interior,
but Nixon honored the custom and habit of giving the office
to a Westerner, so after Walter Hickel's departure, then Rogers
Morton was the nominee.
He became the first or second Easterner, depending on how
you define Easterner, to hold the position of Secretary of
the Interior. At the time of his appointment, the New York
Times was pretty darn cheery about having someone from the
Eastern United States take that position.
I'll quote from the New York Times: "Whatever Mr. Morton's
success in the office, we are glad to see the tradition against
an Eastern Secretary of the Interior shattered at last. Only
once in this century has the appointee come from a state east
of Illinois. Usually the post has been considered a plum for
the resource-developing states of the West where there is
frequently strong local resentment against protective controls,
especially when established by outsiders."
This is a quotation from his Senate hearings: "The priority
of our environment must be brought into equity with that of
our economy and our defense. Otherwise, at some point in time
there will be no economy to enjoy and practically no reason
for defense."
We'll hear more about Secretary Morton's activities and the
issues he was involved in when we get to speak to his undersecretary.
He served until 1975. He was a member of the transition committee
after Nixon's resignation. He became a top Ford adviser. He
was Secretary of Commerce briefly and then he, while he was
still at Interior, had a bad patch of ill health, retired
from public life in 1977 and died in April of 1979 at age
64.
Far too young, as Gerald Ford said: "Rogers Morton was
one of the most decent, honorable, constructive, unselfish
and lovable persons I have ever known."
Introduction:
John C. Whitaker
Patricia Limerick: Our guest
tonight is John C. Whitaker, who was undersecretary of the
Department of the Interior from 1973 to 1975.
John C. Whitaker was a Nixon domestic White House staffer
who coordinated environmental, energy and natural resource
policies. He was born in Victoria, B.C., in 1926. He was raised
in Baltimore. The contrast between those two settings was
formative for him in ways that we'll hear soon.
He enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served as a weatherman and
then graduated from Georgetown University in 1949. He received
a Ph.D. in geology from Johns Hopkins in 1953. Having spoken
to him, this is a case where it's clear that he would have
been in environmental studies, if that field had existed.
One of the reasons for having him here is that so many of
his interests preceded the official invention of those kinds
of fields.
He graduated in geology, worked as a petroleum exploration
geologist for Standard Oil of California and later as vice
president of the International Aeroservice Company dealing
with airborne geophysical prospecting and natural resource
aerial photo analysis in Third World countries.
Whitaker read a book about Nixon at a crucial time in his
life and in Nixon's life and then became an advance man for
Richard Nixon in the presidential campaign in 1960. He scheduled
Nixon's campaign coordinating various congressional candidates
in 1966. He coordinated the overall schedule of the Nixon-Agnew
ticket and their surrogate spokespersons in the 1968 presidential
campaign.
In 1969, Whitaker joined the Nixon White House staff first
as cabinet secretary and then as the director of Nixon's nine-nation
world tour in the summer of 1968.
He then coordinated the White House Policy for Natural Resources,
including putting together and synthesizing Nixon's messages
to Congress dealing with environment, energy, rural development
and farm policy. In 1973, he moved over to become Undersecretary
of Interior under Nixon and then Ford.
After he left office, he wrote and published a book "Striking
a Balance: Environment and Natural Resource Policy in the
Nixon-Ford Years" dealing with environmental issues including
the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
When he left professional service, he was vice president of
the Union-Kampf Forest Products Company; he was on the board
of directors of the National Audubon Society. He was an adviser
to President Reagan's Commission on Americans Outdoors and
he was appointed by the Secretary of Interior to a panel dealing
with the Garrison Diversion Project, a congressionally mandated
study of a controversial North Dakota Irrigation Project.
After he retired, John Whitaker became chairman of the board
of directors of a group called "Rebuilding Together with
Christmas in April," a nonprofit organization which each
year repairs about 8,000 homes of low-income, elderly homeowners
in all 50 states with more than a quarter-million volunteers.
He also volunteers serving the poorest of the poor at the
Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity Home in Washington,
D.C.
He has performed many important tasks, has had many important
achievements and I would have to say the achievement that
comes to mind as we bring him up here is his great achievement
in making me finally practice the gospel that historians are
supposed to recognize is that human beings are complex and
we do them a disservice when we try to force white hats and
black hats, good-guy and bad-guy characterizations.
As a person who started college in 1968, I had strong and
I thought unchangeable, feelings about Richard Nixon and John
Ehrlichman. For the kids in the room, John Ehrlichman was
a figure in the Watergate conspiracy. John Ehrlichman was
crucial, as you'll hear more, in the cause of bringing environmental
issues to President Nixon's attention and getting his support
and action for that.
Here is a quotation from Undersecretary Whitaker on Ehrlichman:
Putting Ehrlichman in charge of environmental policy with
Whitaker reporting to him "gave the system clout. Ehrlichman
saw the president regularly and came back with firm yes or
no answers. Probably equally important, Ehrlichman was pro-environment."
This was a recognition I was slow to come to in my own life.
Next, President Nixon – I think I had hints of this
– but President Nixon was like all of us – a complicated
person. This is a quotation from John Whitaker that I have
spent some time pondering in anticipation of his visit. "Much
of the credit belongs, in the author's opinion, to Richard
Nixon. Nixon was there at the right moment. He grasped the
issue quickly and presented a comprehensive and broad legislative
agenda."
The issue is Earth Day and environmental passions.
"A number of ingredients, including a public outcry to
stop pollution, a talented and dedicated group in the executive
branch to put forth legislative proposals, a Congress whose
majority was ready to act, and a president ready to accept
comprehensive recommendations that often ran counter to the
wishes of his cabinet officers, all of this combined to produce
the best conservation and environmental record since Theodore
Roosevelt."
It is my great pleasure and honor to present Undersecretary
John C. Whitaker to you.
John Whitaker (recording begins
in the midst of an anecdote):
"… Johnny, where did you come from today?"
And I said, "Well, Mildred, I came from Washington."
And she said, "Where is Washington?" And I realized
right away that she really didn't know where Washington was.
The rest of the conversation was more or less to keep from
embarrassing Mildred. Mildred lived in a setting in the wilderness
of Nova Scotia. She'd never been to Boston; she'd never been
to Halifax. She had never been anywhere. She's out in the
middle of this wilderness.
To try to get it going, I said, "Well, Mildred that's
where President Nixon is. Just like you have Prime Minister
Trudeau in Ottawa." No recognition. I said, "Well,
we have a Congress down there just like you have a Parliament."
No. She looked up at me and said, "Johnny, how many people
live there?" And I said, "Oh, about three million."
And she looked at me and said, "Think of that. Three
million people living so far away from everything."
We're all a little egocentric like that when we get a job
inside the Beltway. All of the wisdom is, of course, supposed
to be east of the 100th Meridian. So when Rog Morton from
Maryland, who was the first Secretary in living memory to
be an Easterner, got the job and then Nixon nominates me,
well, these Senators were getting a little nervous down there
on the Interior Committee about whether they were going to
confirm two Easterners.
I went through the nomination process and went down there
on the Hill to do my best. I was told to think like a Westerner,
which I soon discovered meant high subsidies for water and
low prices for grazing fees.
I was all right when I got there, but I was trying to put
a little levity into this thing at the very end. At the opening
of my confirmation hearing, I had these stony Republicans
and fairly loose Democrats, but the Republicans that were
supposed to be on my side were kind of stony.
I said to the senators, "Well, I realize you feel you've
got a problem here with two Easterners. Rog and I have talked
about this and we've talked about moving the department west."
I paused and then I said, "How about Pittsburgh?"
All the Democrats laughed, but the Republicans just ground
their teeth and I started the meeting and it went on from
there.
Two seminal events
Only one thing to start this off. The world I lived in when
I was at the White House and was Undersecretary of the Interior
really had two seminal events, and the first one was of course
the environmental revolution that came upon us as a hurricane.
When Nixon and Humphrey ran for president, neither one of
them for practical purposes ever mentioned the environment.
It just wasn't on the radar screen: The economy, Vietnam,
things like that were on the radar screen.
That was kind of funny. Eighteen months later, a hurricane
arrived called the environmental movement. We can discuss
later how that happened and why that happened. But that was
the one seminal event.
The other seminal event was the Arab embargo. When the Arab
embargo came after Nixon backed the Israelis and the reaction
of the Arabs was to cut off oil. In one week, the price of
energy tripled in this country.
Frankly, at the Department of Interior
So the pendulum swung from doing all these good things we
thought we were doing environmentally, and then having to
find the energy to do them, which seemed to be such a contradiction.
We worked very hard to get environmentally modern leasing
laws and things like that. We can discuss in general. I just
wanted to mention those two things because those were the
parameters that we dealt with when we start this discussion.
Environmental Revolution
Charles Wilkinson: Let's start out with the
environmental hurricane you mentioned. During the first three
or four years of the Nixon administration, we had an upswelling
of laws and policies that really is unequalled, I think, in
terms of building the foundation for modern environmental
and resources law.
The president delivered a major message in '70 – the
Clean Air Act is passed, the Clean Water Act is passed, the
Environmental Protection Agency is established; and actually
several other initiatives were either enacted then –
the National Environmental Policy Act was passed.
Tell us about those times. Take some time doing it and ramble
a bit about the personalities involved; about the back and
forth between the White House and the Congress. The spine
that different people had, or didn't have, in terms of getting
that historic package of policies adopted.
Richard Nixon and John Ehrlichman
JW: I guess you'd better start with the main
character in the program, the president. Richard Nixon was
pretty much what you would call a traditional Republican.
He wasn't eager to start out with his constituency knocking
him around and getting involved in some environmental battle,
so to speak. That's the reality of life. But he did see this
political hurricane coming and to calibrate that hurricane.
We had good polls in those days, that were paid for by the
White House. One percent of the United States thought that
the environment was the most important issue on inauguration
day; 17 percent did on Earth Day. Now when I say important
issue, I'm saying 17 percent of the people thought that the
environment was more important than jobs, more important than
peace and war and foreign policy, the traditional two top
issues on any poll. Nixon understood that this was a tidal
wave and that he had to do something about it.
I would like to give credit
to John Ehrlichman, and we all know about Watergate and
all that. But John was a land-use lawyer and he was my boss
when I got on the Domestic Council. John did a great job
of walking through these things. He was passionate about
one part of the thing: the open spaces and the environment
and parks. He was passionate about that. I'll get to the
why in a minute.
[Nixon] was not passionate, or almost bored, by the arcane
Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act — all the science and
things that went with that. He more or less trusted that
to John or me to work our way through.
Parks for the People
Parks was kind of a different thing with him. As a poor
boy from Yorba Linda, I guess, he recognized that many of
his neighbors and people like that could not afford a two-week
vacation and had never seen Yosemite, even though they were
from California. Had never been to Yellowstone. So he became
quite an advocate for parks for the people.
You may remember we created in those days, the two gateways
East and West. The New York Harbor and the San Francisco
Harbor national parks at that time. The Park Service folks
didn't particularly like that in those days. They were pretty
leather-britchers. It's got to be traditional and it took
quite a bit to get that around.
The other thing he did – you talked to Secretary Hickel
a month ago – Wally got the president's attention
very much by saying, "Mr. President, all these parks
– these parks are going to be bought and are for generations
to come. We ought to buy parks like we mortgage them."
This meant a great deal more debt for the federal government
if that policy passed. All of Nixon's advisers were adamantly
against this.
The thing was in deadlock on the afternoon that before the
State of the Union address was due. When I saw the last
draft of the State of the Union address, there was nothing
about parks in it. I'm down there on the congressional floor
the next day and there's Nixon talking on television saying,
"We have a unique way we're going to finance parks."
Uh-oh. We had no unique way to finance parks. But he had
stuck it in the message, his own handwriting and everything.
He bought Wally's idea and overruled all of the rest of
the bureaucracy, but what were we going to do about it?
Well, we solved the problem in a simple way – we took
the land away from the Defense Department, for the most
part — other agencies, too – and we made postage-stamp
parks all over the country. As a matter of fact, we made
something like, I've forgotten the numbers, but something
like 600 parks in all kinds of little places like that.
It really was parks for the people. We did the traditional
national parks, new parks as well.
Nixon should get a lot of credit, I believe, for all these
things that happened because they were against the traditional
Republican approach but there was a wind blowing and a convergence
there. We had an administration who wanted to do it, Congress
wanted to do it — there were a lot that didn't but
a majority that wanted to do it, and the public did.
A lot of good things happened. It was a frantic day. I remember
the day of the 37-point message to Congress. We discovered
about 4 o'clock in the morning that there were only 36 points
in the message but we didn't change it because there were
no mimeographs or nice machines in those days and the press
never did discover it. That's to begin to give some climate
of what it was like, Charlie, in those days.
CW: Was there a lot of broad sense of collegiality
among people working in the White House on these issues?
Earth Day
JW: Oh, no. God, no. Never that. I was
the bad guy among many of the people on the White House
staff for being too "pro-environment" on this
thing.
We had ridiculous things, like a guy would come up to me
and say, "This Earth Day, that's the same as Lenin's
birthday. That's why these environmentalists are doing this
to us." Crazy stuff.
At the same time, Nixon wouldn't demagogue Earth Day. He
refused, in spite of my efforts, to try to have a National
Earth Day. What we did — the White House went out
and cleaned up — I organized a thing and we cleaned
up a piece of the Potomac River that day and got a good
photo op out of the thing.
You know what we declared on Earth Day? National Archery
Week. It was really depressing. You probably know there
's more national weeks and days than any president can put
out —but we were silent on Earth Day when all of this
was going on. And it was really because he would not demagogue
the issue.
What I am going to say now is important: He had a real sense
that there was no free lunch in the environment and he was
willing to take a lot of criticism for, not the question
of regulation, but the intensity of the regulation: How
clean is clean?
He would preach you that little story. You've all heard
it. "This room can hold 100 cubic feet of water, and
it only costs $100 to clean up 99 cubic feet but it costs
you, dammit, another $100 dollars to clean up the last cubic
foot with zero discharge."
He rightly, in my opinion, did a lot to, and took a lot
of heat for, moderating some of those regulations which
people now understand there is no free lunch. I remember
Senator McGovern saying in those days, that the clean-up
of the environment might cost the country, I think he said,
almost $200 million dollars in 20 years.
Well, it cost more than that in the first 10 years after
that. Everybody was underballing, or low balling, what we
were talking about in those days. He took a lot of heat
and, I think in the end, we had better regulations for it.
CW: Talk a little bit about your relationships
with Congress, because with the exception of EPA and the
message, they all went through Congress. Who was easy? Who
was difficult? Who was obstinate? Who were leaders in favor
of those initiatives?
Relationship with Congress
JW: I would say the air, the water, the
toxic things, were kind of East Coast-driven, for the most
part, through the Public Works Committee. Senator Muskie
was the key person on the Public Works Committee, led the
Public Work Committee at that time.
The land-use issues were more Western in their orientation.
In the early days, it was a little tough with the western
Senators. They really didn't want to go along with a lot
of this. I think that changed after a few elections and
some of them lost. They were a little slow, I thought, picking
up on the environmental revolution. That was part of it.
It kind of shocked me — we might get to Native Americans
later but trying to transfer land back to Native Americans
for religious, sometimes religious rights like Taos Blue
Lake, if you know that legislation. We got a lot of fight
because the senators' chain was being pulled by ranchers
who were saying, "This is the nose of the camel under
the tent. If you take a little Forest Service land and give
it to them and take it away as a place where we can do grazing
fees, it's only going to get worse."
It was tough and surprising to me as an Easterner. That
was kind of the climate at the time. But in general, it
was quite cooperative. Because anybody could look at the
polls. It was a rush to pass a lot of things, and a lot
of things got passed.
CW: Were there any people in particular
who really made, who've made significant turnarounds. Who
were obstacles to you and who effectively changed?
JW: I don't know about turnarounds. We
had some good leaders, like Sen. Scoop Jackson, was a very
good leader. The idea of a council on environmental quality,
the idea of a national environmental policy act, came out
of his staff. And we changed it and negotiated with it.
I will always say he was my friend, because when they were
going to nominate me, Nixon picked up the phone and called
Scoop, and Scoop said, "OK, I can live with this."
He was from Washington and he knew better than I did, what
we were up against. Jackson's always been my hero.
National Environmental Policy Act
CW: NEPA seemed, I think, to a number of
people, to be almost a policy statement and without teeth.
And it's become much more elaborate. Environmental impact
statements can be very burdensome, can be lengthy and detailed.
Did you ever have a conversation with the president or Ehrlichman
or others who later on had some regrets about the way NEPA
played out?
PL: We have some quite a number of young
people who might not know what NEPA is.
JW: The National Environmental Policy Act.
That's the one that said you have to do an environmental
impact statement when you take a significant federal action
that affects the environment. That's NEPA.
First of all, NEPA was signed on Jan. 1. It must have been
slow day on the news because it made headlines. I think,
Mr. Berry who is here from OMB, will remember those days
very well. I don't remember anybody saying to me when we
did the option paper ... that it had a legal implication,
and the government would end up being sued and this would
be kind of a cottage industry for the lawyers and this was
really going to change the world.
Maybe somebody in OMB knew. I certainly didn't know. The
president didn't know. John Ehrlichman didn't know. On the
other hand, I'm certainly glad we signed it. I think the
National Environmental Policy Act and the exercise of going
through and writing environmental impact statements has
been a very salutary worthwhile thing.
It is the one thing you can hang your hat on right now to
deal with these tough issues like you're dealing with right
now: Whether you should drill up in the Alaska wildlife
range or whether we should drill the Rocky Mountain Front
or down in Utah. With NEPA, you have to do a good EIS before
you can even intelligently debate the issue whether you
should go forward or not.
But yes, Charlie, there was a lot of griping. The
Secretary of Commerce would call every couple of days and
say the world is falling apart and this thing was just going
to ruin the world. And we didn't know how to write an environmental
impact statement very well. We got sued a lot and we lost
a lot. The judge saying the facts we had unearthed in writing
the environmental statement were not adequate to make a
decision whether you should or should not go forward with
a certain development project.
It was a good exercise for the whole government and incidentally,
BuRec [Bureau of Reclamation] and the Army Corps of Engineers,
kind of the bad guys, can probably write the best environmental
statements in the federal government because they learned
how to do it well.
PL: How did you get to know Richard Nixon
in the first place?
Meeting Nixon
JW: I had nothing to do with politics. I was going to Ocean
City to the beach with my wife and I'm not a big fan of
the beach, sitting on the beach all weekend, so I brought
a book about Richard Nixon along. I was kind of like St.
Paul getting knocked off a horse. It really was.
I went to my boss of the aerial survey company I was working
for. To make a long story short, he gave me a leave of absence
for three months, paid my salary, which probably was illegal
at the time or certainly is illegal now, to be on the staff
of a campaign and be on a corporate payroll. I was making
$12,000 a year and was doing pretty well.
Nixon spoke. Then I had to figure out how to meet him. I
knew this gal who worked over at the White House for Eisenhower
and I sent to see her. She and her boss introduced me —
eventually I got introduced to a guy named Bob Haldeman
who said, do you want to be an advance man? He took me out
and taught me how to advance. All these friends of mine
went to jail later, as you know. But they're still good
friends.
When the trip was over, Nixon came out to the plane and
we flew back and he gave me a perfunctory brief shake of
hands. I was thinking to myself I was not that impressed
with what the then-vice president of the United States had
said. It was the standard GOP fund-raiser, give them hell,
give them some red meat kind of speech you do at fund-raisers.
He came up to the front of the plane and gave them an interview.
It was just three guys, I'll never forget them. It was ABC,
CBS and a guy from the New York Times. The subject was underground
testing and seismology and how we could find out whether
the Soviets were cheating on us on underground nuclear explosions.
I knew damn well with a Ph.D. in geology, and I didn't care
that this guy was vice president of the United States, I
knew I knew more about seismology than he did. And he never
made a mistake. It would be like one of you were a doctor
and I pretended I was a medical doctor and we got into an
intense discussion on how to take an appendix out. I would
make a mistake somewhere and you would figure out I really
didn't know much about it. That was the beginning of the
intellectual relationship that I had with Nixon that went
on for many years. He sold me right there on the spot and
that's how I got to know him, work for him, scheduling for
him and all that.
PL: I think we have to ask you about your
appraisal: How are we supposed to think about Richard Nixon
given his complexities?
JW: Well, I guess the public is —
it's just like any president. Nixon: China, Watergate. Clinton:
Monica Lewinsky. These are not fair things to say, I don't
think, about any president. I think, for example, Clinton
did a damn good job as president. He had some girlfriend
problems that didn't work out so well there. But anyway,
he did.
The Personal Nixon
Nixon was a brilliant person. He was a very kind person.
You wouldn't think that. He had a good sense of humor, but
his sense of humor always dealt with some public official
he was making fun of so you couldn't use it. But he had
a good sense of humor.
He was a very ungraceful conversationalist. He was the worst
small-talker in the world. If you would talk about the relative
throw rates of Russian versus American missiles, he would
relax immediately and go into it in great detail. But if
it was small talk, he was a disaster.
The classic small-talk story about Nixon where he had so
much trouble, and he was really very compassionate. We were
going down a street in Kansas City in the motorcade, and
the policeman wipes out on the motorbike. He's smashed up
in the middle of the street. He's bloody and under this
motorcycle. The president says, "Stop the car."
We all get out and we all get around this poor guy down
there, with the press behind Nixon. Nixon looks down at
this guy and says, "How do you like your job?"
See what I mean? He had a terrible time with people and
being a politician, that was something. Anyway, that gives
you an idea.
PL: That's a very remarkable story. How
about the bottle-return story?
Federal Bottle Return Bill
JW: The federal bottle return bill. Where
you put another dime down on your Coke bottle and then you
bring it back and it's recycled again. We did a long option
bill on this and he'd read it because I got it back with
his squiggles all over it with some more questions. The
buzzer rings and he brings me in there with Ehrlichman to
go over it and the conversation is about like this. There
may be a tape recording so I hope I haven't embellished
it too much.
He says, "John, how many jobs are lost on this thing?"
I said, "Well, Mr. President, about 60,000 people lose
their jobs because they'll be making a lot less bottles
and cans. But 60,000 people get new jobs cleaning the bottles,
cans, and taking them to the supermarket and all the things
that are necessary to recycle."
[Nixon] "John, the 60,000 who lose their job, am I
going to tell them or are you going to tell them?"
I then realized that I had been an inside-the-Beltway mega-economist
talking about the mega-economy and not what life is all
about. He said, "Do you think this thing will go?"
I said, "Yes. You won't get the Democrats on it but
you'll kind of get the garden club vote. You'll get some
moderate Republicans you'll like, you'll pull over a few
Democrats. This thing is very popular to get these bottles
back here." He said, "Yes, you're probably right."
I wanted him to go for the bill so I thought I was winning
this conversation.
He said, "You know, these ladies who are driving their
cars and picking up their kids from school and bringing
them back with their bottles in their car. John, you know
what I'm talking about. I'm talking about these girls with
these anti-gravity hairdos." And I thought, "Anti-gravity
hairdos? What the hell is he talking about?" I don't
know if any of you ladies are young enough to remember the
beehive hairdos of the '70s? Well, they were anti-gravity.
The ladies had to go to the hairdressers because the gravity
would pull their hair down all the time.
So I'm thinking, "Why are we talking about anti-gravity
hairdos? He said, "Well, you know those girls are driving
those cars and the mothers" – it was kind of
the generation before the soccer moms – "you
know, they're picking their kids up at school and they'll
have those bottles in the back of the car, right? Because
they're going back to the supermarket and they have to take
them." He said, "Those bottles will be rattling
around in the back of the car, won't they?" I said,
"Yeah."
He said, "Do they clean those bottles or are there
flies still in there?" He said, "Flies. Noisy
bottles. Goddamn it, we're not going to do it." He
nixes it. That's how the federal decision was made.
PL: Could you contrast what your role on
environmental issues was while you were in the White House
and then the move to Interior and the difference between
the White House role and the Interior role.
From the White House to
Interior
JW: Well, substantively it wasn't that
much different for me because I had the job of coordinating
what you would call the natural resources of the departments
of the government, meaning everything at Interior. The civil
branch of the Corps of Engineers, the Soil Conservation
Service; over in Agriculture, the Forest Service and all
that. I was pretty familiar with what the hot issues were
and, of course, knew them because I had worked on these
bills.
What was new going to Interior was first of all, working
for Rog. Morton was a fabulous guy. He really was a wonderful
person, who prided himself, and I think walked a fine line
between the preservationists and the developers built into
the Department of the Interior.
It was a scientific department store over there, a little
bit of everything. And walking that line is important in
keeping your credibility with both sides of this argument
and Rog was very good at that.
Incidentally, he had a wonderful partner in his wife Anne.
Anne was into wolves in a big way. I can remember Rog talking
about Anne was somewhere up in the tundra of the Yukon,
the Auyuittuq Valley. He said, "Anne's chasing some
wolf and the terrain is so bad both of them have to pack
a lunch to get across the terrain."
Anne was a very good partner
and Rog was a very good guy to work with. He got sick. He
had cancer later, so he was gone for a long time. We did
all the decision-making pretty much over the phone. He was
good. Sometimes he wouldn't agree with me and we would do
it his way and not my way. That was his job and he was good.
The other big difference, frankly, was what was thought
to be the hated bureaucracy. You all hear about the fossilized,
intangible bureaucracy. The intractable bureaucracy. I found
the leadership of the top level civil servants to be admirable.
Really good. Really hard-working people over at Interior.
While I'm mentioning it, another agency that's practically
never mentioned by the public, is the OMB, the Office of
Management and Budget. That is one sterling group of people
over there. Because they are really the only people in town
who don't have a constituency pushing them. Their only constituency
is the president. They have a constituency when it comes
to budget. But they're wonderful people, too.
But I just wanted to remark how the stereotype of the lazy
bureaucrat and all is just not the way it is.
One more thing, while we're on low-ranking people. Nixon
would say, "Well a cabinet officer doesn't know about
this issue, get me a GS-14 who knows what he's talking about
in here." And we'd get some GS-14 and some of them
were great and other ones just fell apart. They'd never
met a real live president of the United States before and
it was too much for them.
But he had a way of bringing in specialists when he became
convinced that the people on his own White House staff hadn't
already asked the right questions and time was running out.
He'd call up some GS-14 out of the middle of nowhere and
drag him into the Oval Office and it was quite a thing to
see.
'Striking a Balance'
PL: The title of the book you wrote about
these experiences was "Striking a Balance." Why
that title and how does that title characterize what you
and Rogers Morton were doing at Interior?
JW: Well, "Striking a Balance"
was the comfortable balance between the preservationists
and the developers in the Department of the Interior and
I think we did that quite well.
Sometimes it was almost a comic opera. For example, when
we were building the Alaska Pipeline, there was no question
we were going to build it. I remember being in a meeting
with Nixon and Wally Hickel and Nixon sent Wally back to
– he had been governor of Alaska – to give a
speech on Earth Day to say that we were going to build the
Alaska Pipeline, which was very popular in Alaska and not
popular at all in the lower 48. Which, as Secretary of Interior
put him in a middle kind of ground.
Alaska Pipeline
Let me go back to the Alaska Pipeline and why striking a
balance can be a comic opera. The way we ran the pipeline,
we bypassed all of the departments because we knew they
would fight with each other and Alaska, and the decision-making
would get slowed down.
Every morning there was a phone call from Gen. Andy Rawlins,
who ran the pipeline, to my assistant, Jared Carter, and
sometimes I'd get on the phone and we would make decisions
on things right and left.
It kind of got to the point where we'd make some deliberately
on the environment side and some deliberately on the development
side, just so we would look like we were fair arbitrator
to the people out there in this environment. I'll never
forget I made Charlie Bahr of Standard Oil of California
move the pipeline over to get around a peregrine falcon's
nest and it cost about $400,000. Charlie never forgave me
for that.
That's the kind of striking the balance thing that we did.
And as I said earlier, I think doing things in an incredible
environmental way but not a way where you screw up the economy
is Nixon's legacy of doing. That's a fairly common practice
now.
He started something called the "quality of life review."
There were objections from Congress when we were doing this
because Congress felt the mandate of EPA was that they would
propose a regulation, and they had that right to propose
a regulation, and nobody else had anything to say about
it.
Nixon made us convene meetings so the developers were in
the room, the conservationists were in the room, and a pattern
developed when we were looking at the cost of regulations.
Almost all the time EPA underestimated or came in with a
low-ball figure about the financial implications of the
regulation they were proposing. Almost all the time the
Commerce Department would come in with a high number and
it was just like throwing at a dartboard.
We really didn't know any better. We'd pick a number in
between and we'd say that's it. That's how we governed then.
Things are a lot better now. EPA has built in to it now
a lot better understanding of how to figure out what things
are going to cost. We struck a balance that way, the best
we could do at the time.
Arab Oil
PL: Could you tell us a little about the
Arab oil boycott and the sense of urgency around energy
that you saw coming out of that?
JW: As I said in the introductory remarks,
the Arab oil boycott was the other seminal event in my time.
I can't tell you how I have relived the urgency of that
thing. There was a period when there was only 90 days of
oil left in this country, and 60 days of that oil were still
at sea, coming in from Venezuela or the Middle East.
Things were really desperate. We kind of played god and
we had this allocation program forced on us by Congress.
The public thought allocation meant there was going to be
enough for everybody and allocation meant that we had to
play god and figure out the scarcity and allocate to each
state the amount of fuel they would have.
It was crazy. Colorado was going to get a certain amount
of fuel because they have a certain number of tourists in
the ski season and such, and everything is going to be fine
so we'd give Colorado this much oil and gas that year. Well,
Colorado has a bad ski season. Sun's out, there's not much
snow. The tourists stop coming. Colorado's got more oil
and gas than they know what to do with. Some other state's
in trouble. That was the kind of problem we had.
We really had to work hard to get that energy crisis over.
That's when all the impact came, in Rog Morton and my time,
to modernize the leasing programs for oil and gas, the offshore
oil. The coal laws. All that. We can get into more detail
if you want.
Frankly, at the Department of Interior until the energy
crisis came, if you wanted a coal lease you just pretty
well had to apply for it and pro forma, you got it.
As a result, there was all kinds of coal leases on public
lands that were there for speculation and the companies
were just sitting on it with very minimal work levels waiting
for the price to go up so they could do something about
it. We had to design a whole new leasing program. We did
a whole kind of advance things. Secretary Udall probably
talked about the oil shale. We did an oil shale leasing
program, and that didn't work out.
We did a geothermal thing, kind of a Buck Rogers new energy,
and then we tried to modernize – we did modernize
– all our leasing pretty well, with the exception
of the mining act, which is still, to my knowledge, still
the old 1872 act.
Nixon tried to build in build in competitive bids for mining
claims and royalties for mining claims. The tradition of
the West, and factually is pretty well true, that most of
the discoveries of minerals have been made by a small-time
prospector who then sold out to the bigger company. We didn't
want to take that incentive away from the prospector. That's
been a sacred thing. In my view, a sacred cow, but anyway
that's been a sacred thing in the West. For that reason,
and to my knowledge, the mining law has never really been
modernized. I may be out of date on that.
CW: No, that's basically right.
PL: I have just one question. The story
that you told about predators and your meeting with the
sheepherders over what you were going to change in predator
control. Could you tell that story?
Predator Control Policy
JW: I don't know if you remember; it may
still be a big deal out here. The question of coyotes and
lambs, the coyotes killing the lambs. Nixon put out a message
that basically said the day of the only good predator is
a dead predator is over.
We had an Endangered Species Act at the same time. The sheepherders
were really alarmed because we banned the use of certain
poisons on public lands which were being eaten by the coyotes.
Then coyotes would die, and then other predators were feeding
on the coyotes and they were messing up the food chain.
We stopped that. Wally Hickel stopped that. He had the right
to do that under his – he didn't have to go to Congress
to do that. I think Patty brought it up as an example.
I'll never forget sitting around the table and seeing the
gnarled hands of these Basque sheepherders who were coming
in from Utah, Colorado, Idaho and all, and how unhappy and
bitter [they were.] They felt we were ruining their world.
We were killing their sheep. We'd give them statistics "Only
these many of your sheep are dying, it's not really that
big of a deal." I only bring that part of it up to
say that your job at Interior was to spend a lot of time
in meetings with people like that. Here I am 30 years later
and I remember those men's gnarled hands. That didn't mean
that I changed my position, but it was a kind of feeling
that it was good democracy to make sure you saw all of these
people. The sheepherders thing was tough. I don't know if
any of you lived through that one.
Native American Issues
CW: Another area where policy was changing
quite rapidly during this time was Indian affairs.
JW: Yes.
CW: The Udall administration had done some
work in self-determination. Then President Nixon had his
major address in 1970 announcing as a presidential statement,
the policy of self-determination.
While you were there, and I think you had fairly significant
contact with these events, there were a number of activist
actions taken by Indian people. The first one was at Alcatraz,
which received quite a bit of public sympathy. Some opposition,
but it seemed to be – the majority of the people took
it sympathetically.
But then two much more difficult events: the takeover of
the BIA building and a lot of destruction done by the occupiers
in 1972, and then the next year, the Wounded Knee standoff.
Talk about how the administration and maybe, recognizing
you have both Interior and the White House and the Justice
Department and a few other agencies working on this, how
that was handled and what it was like, and whether you feel
that it might have poisoned the well of some goodwill that
was developing for Indian people or did it help them or
did it end up being neutral?
JW: Well, first of all, Nixon's Indian
message did give self-determination and reversed a policy
that had gone on from the Eisenhower years of terminating
the reservations, trying to mainstream Native Americans
into the larger American culture, which wasn't working.
He devised something that did become law, which basically
took a lot of federal decisions out of the BIA and from
thence on, they were made by the tribes. That was very good.
It was positive and going well, and he'd done a lot to help
certain tribes get their lands back. Some for religious
reasons and things like that and all was going well.
In the middle of all this came this, I can only use the
term radical militant – AIMs – American Indian
Movement. That was kind of political theater when they took
over at Alcatraz. They took over the old prison there. Prisoners
were no longer at Alcatraz there. But they took over the
place and had a sit-in there that went on for several months.
The law-and-order pieces of the White House and the Justice
Department were saying, "Come on, Mr. President, you
have to kick these people out of here. They're not law-abiding
and all that, etc." Well, then it got worse. They came
down and they trashed the Bureau of Indian Affairs building
and that was really a dangerous ...
CW: In Washington, right? The central headquarters?
JW: Yes. The central headquarters of the
BIA.
Wounded Knee
JW: Then
came Wounded Knee. I was involved in that last phase quite
a bit. Wounded Knee was the Oglala Sioux reservation in
– was that North or South Dakota?
CW: South.
JW: South Dakota. It's a pretty sad place
if you've been there. The white folks over the couple of
centuries haven't done a very good job for the Native Americans.
They stuck them on reservations in places where the natural
resources weren't very good for the most part. There are
exceptions, but certainly the Pine Ridge Indians had a place
with virtually nothing in the way of natural resources.
It was ripe. It had high unemployment, high alcoholic rates.
It was really a tough situation.
The AIMs Indians came in there and they took hostages at
a trading post called Wounded Knee. As Charlie and I were
discussing here earlier, I was – one of the dumbest
things I did in that time. We were sitting there looking
at a map in my office. The BIA police were in my office
and were saying they were going to attack the Pine Ridge
Reservation where Chief Wilson is. That movement was not
just the white man versus Indians, it was Indians versus
Indians, that whole thing that went on there.
We're all sitting there looking at the map and we're talking
about them attacking Pine Ridge. Just a few inches over
from my eye, is this little town called Wounded Knee. Well,
it would only take a weak-minded public relations man to
know that's where they were going to go, but I missed it
and everybody else missed it and that's where they went.
In a matter of days, we were looked into a hostage situation
with the U.S. Army surrounding these radical Indians and
it went on for seventy-some days.
CW: Just to mention explicitly, although
I think most people know, that's where a massacre occurred
back in the 19th Century.
JW: Sure. That's why they – the Wounded
Knee symbolism. Excuse me. I should have said that. There
was a stand-off that went on for 70-some days. Every one
of those 70 days, I had a meeting over in the Justice Department
with my counterpart the deputy attorney general dealing
with this issue. Our strategy in the end was no better –
and it worked – than to take the heat of the law-and-order
people who were telling the president to go in there and
take these radical people doing this, and to bore the media
and have them leave.
They finally folded their cameras and went away. That left
the Indians no audience and they then started to negotiate
with us in a way that you could negotiate something and
kind of solve the problem.
Of course, what they wanted was South Dakota back and we
couldn't give them that. It wasn't possible. And they wanted
to see U Thant, the head of the United Nations. They really
didn't want to see the Secretary of the Interior. Just bring
us U Thant or the President of the United States. Kind of
unreal theater. But it was dangerous. One Indian was killed,
one federal marshal was paralyzed for life.
CW: Talk a bit about the amount of military
equipment that was in there.
JW: They had half-tracks. It was overkill.
I remember one time being in a meeting over in Justice,
and they had a general in there from the 82nd Airborne who's
briefing us on, not how we can do a parachute drop, but
we can bring all these troops in here. Hey, get out of here.
This is crazy. Leave this thing alone. Somebody is going
to get killed. Our policy really wasn't much different than
to take the heat from law and order and do our best not
to kill anybody and it finally went away.
PL: Can we take a moment to talk about
the role of religion in all this? With our other secretaries,
we've had interesting conversations about how growing up
in a Mormon community gave Secretary Udall a sense of how
people lived with nature. Actually, it's sort of more personal
background than just religion. Walter Hickel is a very religious
person, and his background as the child of a tenant farmer
has been important. Could you talk a little bit about your
personal background?
JW: I was born in Victoria, B.C., in this
beautiful and very pristine environment of Vancouver Island.
I am sure many of you have been there. My mother and father
were divorced and when I was 8 years old, I moved to Baltimore.
That was the first time I had ever seen the grime. I had
never seen a muddy stream in my life. All of the things
that were going wrong with the environment. I can't say
that I decided I was going to do something about it when
I was that young but I do remember having the notion
that I certainly hoped I could grow up and wouldn't have
to explain to my children how come there was an automobile
tire in the stream down the road.
That kind of gave me an environmental bent. I loved the
outdoors and I'm a geologist. My main motivation to become
a geologist was to be outdoors. That's the kind of ethic
I brought to the table when I got involved. I wouldn't exactly
call it religious, but that was the tilt of my own background
when I got into all of this stuff.
PL: Your optimism is really remarkable.
Your capacity to go through the practicalities of real-life
politics and to continue to pursue your goal and then to
watch the changes in Interior and national politics since
then and to remain so optimistic. Why are you so cheery?
Energy Policy
JW: I feel there are a lot of good institutions
in place to fight out these decisions we have to make. I
have real concerns about energy. We don't have a lot of
time left. I believe, for example, that we should have nuclear
power, which won't be very popular with many people in this
audience. The Japanese and the French, for example, went
down that road a long time ago. The French, under Charles
DeGaulle, because they realized there was all this unrest
in North Africa and they realized they were going to be
cut off and the Japanese because they were getting their
oil out of Sumatra and they had just been through World
War II. They recognized their vulnerability even though
OPEC didn't exist at those times. We should go, we need
to go nuclear.
I remember being with Rog after the – while the oil
embargo was on. We had a meeting with Zaki Yamani. Zaki
invented OPEC. Zaki was the Minister of Petroleum for Saudi
Arabia. We were trying to get out from under this oil embargo.
We would say to him, "Let us up. If you don't, we're
going to find alternate sources. We're going to go nuclear."
Zaki would smile at us and say, "No, you're not. The
environmentalists will never let you." Of course, he
was absolutely right and Rog and I knew it, but we were
all playing bluff games with each other trying to get the
Arabs to back off.
Patty's question was about optimism. We have in place a
lot of wonderful institutions: EPA is a perfect example
of that. To move forward and solve some of these tough problems
and to just keep going. I have a lot of optimism. I worry
about energy, that we'll make it. We're not doing nearly
enough on conservation and energy. We need to increase those,
I think they call them café standards for mileage
on cars, for the fleet mileage, that's a big thing. We're
not doing a good job on doing electrical efficiency on appliances
and things like that.
Opening ANWR and the Rocky Mountain
Front
I'm not one of those who believes we can drill our way out
of this problem but I do believe that we have to keep drilling
to give us time to solve it. Specifically I think there
is good possibility, given good EIS's, that we can do some
drilling in the sensitive, ecologically sensitive overthrust
belt of the Northern Rockies. I do believe that the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge should be drilled.
Many in this audience won't agree with that. You can say
it's only a 40- or 50-day supply of oil, but that's the
way it works. Worldwide. When you're trying to find oil.
We would have been in trouble if the Alaska Pipeline had
not been built when the Iranians took the Americans hostage
in Teheran. That was about the same year, 1979, the same
year the first million barrels a day came out of the Alaska
Pipeline. If we hadn't have had that to replace what we
were losing in Iran that very day, we would have been in
trouble.
My experience has been very much seared by this energy crisis
I went through and I see it looming up again and we still
have a long way to go. This energy bill, I haven't seen
it yet, but I hope it helps. For the first time, they're
talking about subsidizing nuclear power. Never done that
before. I think that's going to pass. I know people will
think Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but I think it's
a way we have to go.
Hopefully, hydrogen will come on one of these days soon.
There's a lot of push on that now. The windmills have kind
have been a disappointment as far as I can tell. Maybe,
I'm not up to speed on that but they're not a significant
– it doesn't look like they're ever going to be a
significant piece of the energy problem.
Questions and Answers:
Establishing EPA
Q: Undersecretary Whitaker, why wasn't
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency established within
the U.S. Department of the Interior rather than as an independent
agency?
JW: If I had had my way, it probably would
have been. I was there at the birth of EPA. The president,
when he came into office, had a study done by the –
it was called the Ash Commission, named after a fellow named
Roy Ash, who was president of Litton Industry. All kinds
of environmental options were put on the table. One was
pretty much what is now the EPA. Another one was the Department
of Energy and Natural Resources. Another one was the Department
of Environment and Natural Resources. These were all exercises
in moving the boxes around between the departments.
To answer your question, I think in the end that Nixon decided
for EPA – first of all, Ash recommended it. I personally
had recommended the Department of Environment and Natural
Resources because I really thought the best way to solve
these problems, the best way to strike a balance, was to
keep it under one cabinet officer. If you wanted to call
it still Interior Department, Interior would still have
a lot of the EPA pieces in it and more environmental advocacy
but it would still have the development pieces in there
so the Secretary would be forced to make the kind of decisions,
instead of sending all these problems over to the White
House to be made.
Anyway, he (Nixon) decided on EPA and I think the reason
was Ash recommended it, plus Congress was going to pass
something that didn't look a lot different than the EPA
that we now have. We had big fights for the cabinet office.
You should see a cabinet officer when he's told you're going
to take a piece of his department away. He's not a happy
camper. We had a lot of problems that way.
Another reason we did it was we took advantage of something
called a reorganization act which existed at that time.
It allowed the president not to propose a new department,
which my Department of Environment and Natural Resources
would have been, but it allowed you to propose something
smaller called an agency or an administration and you could
do that and send that plan to Congress. Here was the hooker:
If in 90 days Congress didn't object to it, it became law.
That's how we got EPA and how we got NOAA. The two of them.
Bang. Bang. Right in a row. That law is now gone. The president
doesn't have that right any more. So that's how we got EPA.
Present
balance
Q: Undersecretary Whitaker, you wrote a
book called "Striking a Balance." Can you comment
on your views on present governmental policy towards balance?
JW: I hear that question. You're saying
Republicans aren't strong enough on the environment. That's
what I'm hearing the question says, right?
PL: That's a possibility. That might be.
JW: Well, I think it will – it will
almost always be that way. You'll find that Republicans
in general are going to be more pro-business and the Democrats
are going to be more pro-environment. I think the Nixon
years were probably an anomaly in that extent because of
the timing of all the convergence of forces that took place
at that time. But there will be good initiatives and lots
of good things done and good institutions in place and I'm
an optimist that we can go forward.
One last comment on the political clout of the environment:
I'm not sure that it determines in the end how many people
— I suspect not a lot of people vote for a president
because of their environmental record. There may be many
other reasons they vote, certainly foreign policy and jobs
are rated much higher.
People will say, "The environmental movement has lost
its clout. It's nothing like it was on Earth Day."
The polls show that that's pretty well true, that it doesn't.
But here's the hooker, I think: I think the environment
is so embedded and institutionalized that it's kind of like
Social Security. You don't hear people talking about Social
Security in a poll but if you ask them, if you want to reduce
it or mess around with it, it shoots right to the top of
the poll. I think the same is true of the environment. If
you want to do something that maligns the environment, people
will flare up right away. That's good. That's institutionalizing
something, I think. That's my politics of the environment.
Q. Mr. Undersecretary, what do you see
as the greatest accomplishment of the Nixon administration?
JW: I guess you'd have to go along with
China as being big. I can't name one. I think his record
in doing things, fairly liberal things that surprise people,
is quite good. He was very good on civil rights. He got
the Southern schools, the segregated Southern schools, unsegregated
without bloodshed. He did it by being very quiet, having
committees, not rubbing the Southerners' noses in it. He
did things like that.
He created a program for minority business. I think that
was a big thing forward. The draft. There would be a draft
going on right now if there was not a volunteer armed services.
That was a big thing. Quite different. He did quite a few
liberal things like that. Another thing, he found a lot
of young people that were in his administration in one form
or another that you may have heard of lately: Dick Cheney,
Colin Powell, four or five Secretaries of State. He came
up with a talent bank of people that was enormous. It really
was.
He had a very credible record, for the time, on women in
government. Most presidents, one after the other, have done
better. But he worked hard at it. There was a lady named
Barbara Hackman, she later became George Bush's Secretary
of Commerce. She was in the White House and her job was
to get women in government. She went around and annoyed
everybody and all these chauvinistic old cats like us and
got some things done.
Q. Undersecretary Whitaker, can you name
a few corporations that are doing a good job for the environment
today, and what can we do to pressure certain corporations
to do more?
JW: You can use things like boycotts and
things like that. We were talking about that at lunch. I'm
not sure I'm up to speed enough on corporations to say that.
For example, I have a sense in the oil industry that Shell
and BP have been maybe a little better citizens than some
of the other ones. I can't back that up. I know it's in
their advertising program and all that so I'm not sure it's
as real as it sounds. That's about the best I can do. I'm
not that current on what corporations are doing what.
Q. Speaking of Shell and BP, can you give
an estimate regarding the amount of oil we have on the planet
and what we can do for our future energy use?
Future Energy Policy
JW: I get the impression we're running
out and we've better get something done in the 15 or 20
years. I think hydrogen, nuclear or alternatives, and keep
doing a lot of drilling and doing it in an environmentally
sound way. Hopefully, we can muddle out of this problem.
I'm scared of water, too. I heard somebody say that we're
in pretty good shape on water in Colorado, but I have the
feeling that our conservation record on water is not very
good and not very good on energy either. We have a long
way to go to solve those problems.
I don't see desalinization coming in. The Israelis, I think,
are pretty much ahead of the world on that. Water is the
price of a bottle of scotch in Israel. But they're willing
to pay for it and do it to support the biggest civilization
in a desert climate. We've got a long way to go. Two big
problems out there, I think.
PL: I wonder if I might ask you as we close
about your sense about what it was like to hold those offices,
to be in a position where you could do things. Where you
could have hopes and ideas and act on them. Your feelings
about having played the role that you did play in federal
office.
JW: It was an accident. All I can say about
it was that it's a privilege. Don't ever be cynical about
government. You've heard me talk about how good the civil
servants are. I don't think there's a president that I've
ever seen, Monica Lewinsky or Watergate aside, that didn't
think they were doing the damnedest job and working as hard
as they could for their country.
I've very proud of our system. It was a privilege to be
part of it. It was just an accident in my life that it happened
in my life. Don't be cynical about Washington. And remember
those sheepherders' gnarled hands when you're talking to
them.
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