The Environmental President
“I hope that you become known as Mr. Clean,” Democratic senator Edmund Muskie, a leading environmentalist, told William D. Ruckelshaus at his 1970 confirmation hearing to become the first head of the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which Nixon had announced the creation of earlier that year.61 “It was not long,” Jack Lewis wrote, “before the media were portraying William Ruckelshaus as a knight in shining armor charging out to do battle with the wicked polluters of America.”62
Today, Democrats and Republicans eagerly tout their environmental credentials, though Democrats, with their more favorable attitudes toward regulation, enjoy, by far, a stronger public identification with proenvironmental “green” policies. Few today realize the irony of this association—most do now know that it was Richard Nixon, not the any of the Democrats, who first forged a strong environmental record for the White House, and it was Nixon who put in place the framework of the modern environmental regulatory apparatus.
As recently as the early sixties, the environment was barely on the American radar screen as a political issue. But in 1962, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s powerful bestseller Silent Spring, awareness increased and momentum built for environmental legislation. An oil spill in Santa Barbara in 1969 had been the largest in American history up to that point and caused public outrage.63 In 1970, Wisconsin Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day, putting environmentalism onto the national agenda.64
Unlike welfare and health care reform, where past personal experience motivated Nixon, he did not come to the environmental issue with any real passion. He had not regarded the environment as a pressing issue before it came onto the public agenda. As the movement gained momentum, he was slow to become receptive to its message—and, in fact, in private conversations in the Oval Office, was heard calling environmentalists “kooks” and “enemies of the system.” It was John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s counsel and assistant for domestic affairs, who did the most to get the environment onto the Nixon agenda. Ehrlichman, despite his Watergate infamy, had a progressive side: he had specialized in land-use law, and one forest preservationist even called him “the most effective environmentalist since Gifford Pinchot,”65 referring to the head of the US Forest Service under Theodore Roosevelt. Ehrlichman’s advocacy finally woke up Nixon to the issue’s importance, though to Nixon, the importance was political more than anything else. Showing his lack of genuine conviction about the cause, he once told Ehrlichman, “Just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.”66
And yet, in 1985 the EPA Journal conceded Nixon’s achievement in turning his initial reluctance on environmental policy into “a show of visionary statesmanship.”67 The president declared that “our national government today is not structured to make a coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land that grows our food.”68 Thus in 1970, Nixon created the EPA, installed Ruckelshaus as administrator, and also created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).69 Eventually, Nixon also supported and signed the Clean Air Act, which required that the EPA establish national air quality standards and set deadlines for reducing automobile emission target levels.70
Even though Nixon’s critics have pointed out that he vetoed the Clean Water Act, the president generally supported the goals of that law. He vetoed the bill when it came to his desk because he objected to the $18 billion price tag the Democratic Congress had put on it, which he viewed as a budget buster. Congress passed the bill over his veto in 1972, but Nixon’s objections later proved to be valid: the $18 billion wasn’t even spendable within the time frame for which it was intended, and the cost of the act was in reality closer to Nixon’s lower estimates. It is likely that the Democrats set the cost deliberately high to force Nixon into a politically unpopular move. His veto had nothing to do with his views on the issue.
But the Clean Water episode is a good illustration of how Nixon approached environmentalism in true Republican fashion, in the best sense of that term—that is, he endorsed the role and capacity of government to address a public problem, while at the same time insisting that these government efforts should not be so prohibitively expensive or counterproductive to economic growth that they would wind up doing more harm than good. The Nixon administration’s rigorous cost-benefit analyses of every environmental proposal infuriated ardent members of the Green movement, who felt that price tags should be irrelevant. The most extreme among them tended to confirm Nixon in his views that environmentalists could be broken out into two groups: antimarket or promarket. The antimarket Greens wanted the most sweeping reforms passed without regard to economic impact, whereas the promarket Greens recognized the need to harmonize environmental protection with economic growth. As Nixon thought of it, when given a choice between “smoke and jobs,” he would take jobs. This approach, which movement environmentalists saw as being hopelessly compromised, is responsible for the most important set of environmental regulations ever written in America.
Under Nixon, the federal government joined the environmental movement and gave the force of law and regulatory muscle to controlling industrial pollution and monitoring air and water standards. He passed much of his environmental program with bipartisan cooperation.71 Nixon’s environmental record—“yet to be improved upon by any president,” wrote Tom Wicker72—is one of his most enduring legacies.
Some environmentalists, however, did appreciate what Nixon had given to the movement. “I doubt seriously whether Richard Nixon ever envisioned the way the environmental movement would develop when he assembled the EPA from a federal hodgepodge of diverse offices,” James F. Ryan wrote for the American Chemical Society. “Although Nixon was presumably motivated by politics, he undeniably did a good thing. Meanwhile, you wonder how succeeding presidents will be judged on their environmental records.”73
Indeed, few presidents have matched Nixon’s achievements in this area. For a time, Nixon also inoculated the Republican Party against charges of environmental sensitivity. He provided a template, as he so often did, for how to claim the positions of the center and even some of the Left on an environmental policy issue and use them to strengthen Republicans’ stance against unpopular proposals of Democratic opponents. As late as 1988, for instance, George H.W. Bush was able to attack his Democratic opponent for president, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, for the polluted condition of Boston Harbor. Moreover, the Republicans were able to paint Democrats, often, as too liberal and extreme on environmental issues—such as in the late 1980s, when Democrats wanted to stop logging in Washington state in order to save the spotted owl. With so much mainstream environmental ground already covered by the Republicans, moderate American voters found these Democratic positions too extreme.
Since then, however, the Republican Party has lost almost all of its ground on environmental issues. Republicans have become the party of climate change denial, and this position has cost them in public perception. Even Republicans on the Senate Environment Committee have indicated their scorn for climate science. Senator James Inhofe called climate change the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” while Senator David Vitter described talk of climate change as “ridiculous pseudo-science garbage that’s so common on the left on this issue,” adding that, “I think there is beginning to be a serious reconsideration of the science of this.”74
It’s difficult to imagine Richard Nixon taking such positions. More likely, he would have acknowledged the reality of climate change, pushed for serious but reasonable efforts to combat it, and ensured that such measures did not hamper American economic competitiveness. That type of pragmatic approach squared with most Americans’ positions on the issue in the early 1970s—and the ones most hold today as well.
The “Warmonger” Who Ended the Draft
Finally, there is the remarkable