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Early life
[SESSION 1: July 26, 1993, World Wildlife Fund Headquarters, Washington, D.C.]
Q: Mr. Reilly, would you please describe for me your upbringing, your early life and your education?
MR. REILLY: I was born in Decatur, Illinois, into a very close-knit, very religious, and very conservative family. My father was in business for himself. He sold steel - bridge materials, reinforcing bars, and metal culvert through his own Highway Supply Company. And my mother worked very closely with him. She was his bookkeeper, accountant, and partner. I had one older sister, four and a half years older than I, who is now a teacher outside of Chicago.
I lived for 10 years in Decatur, Illinois - downstate, Illinois - a city then of about 80,000 population; it's not too much more now. I grew up surrounded by Lincoln memorabilia and memories. My father sort of rode the circuit, just as Lincoln did, but for a different purpose. He traveled to county lettings - auctions - and state lettings and township lettings to sell his materials. Whenever we would pass a Lincoln marker we would stop. The Lincoln-Douglas debates took place in that area. Every single courthouse had its Lincoln memorabilia because he, typically, argued cases in those courthouses, or their predecessors. It's farm country and we had a farm. I spent some time on that. I went to parochial schools there, Catholic schools.
When I was ten, we moved to Texas, southern Texas, largely because a big steel strike in 1949 pretty much put my father's business on hold for four or five months - he didn't have anything to sell. We relocated to the Rio Grande Valley. My father was, for a little while, working for Dow Chemical. Then he went to work on his own as a contractor and did some construction. I remember that was the time when I became familiar with some of the problems that we now call colonias - these unsewered communities without any services at all, typically of undocumented aliens, or first-generation Mexican-Americans, along the border.
My father employed some undocumented workers. In fact, he got in trouble with the local construction contractor establishment because he paid them too much. I remember that we used to drive out in the country to pick them up in the morning and then drive them back out in the evening. I saw the abject poverty that they lived in. I got to know some, one became a good friend. Neither of us had many friends then in Texas. He was in his twenties, I was then probably 11. His name was Dom Juan Garza. Whenever he was picked up by the Bureau of Immigration and taken to Mexico, he would reappear within a few days, having walked all night, if necessary, and ready to do anything - pick grapefruit or work at the motel where I first met him and where he was a worker. I developed some limited knowledge, but a lot of affection and respect and sympathy for Mexicans. I think that affected my later priority on some of those issues at EPA. One of the proudest things I did was to help get $50 million for colonias in the last Bush budget - and a lot of money for the border. I worked hard on the North American Free Trade Agreement, too.
I lived in the Rio Grande Valley for two years. It didn't really work too well for my father economically there. We finally then moved to northern Illinois. By that time he was quite ill; he had serious ulcers. After another two years, when I lived in St. Charles, Illinois, he had one of the first operations to remove most of his stomach. To recuperate from that, he went back to live with his sister in Fall River, Massachusetts. By that time my sister was off in college and my mother and I went with my father. When he was finally recovered and ready to go back to Illinois, I just stayed behind because I had started high school and was doing well there. He left me there in the care of my aunt. So, I went to a large public high school in Massachusetts for four years, Durfee High. I'd go out and work, drive for him, in Illinois in the summertime. When I finished high school, I went to Yale. I spent my junior year in France and then after that went to Harvard Law School, followed by half a year or so in law practice, two years in the Army, and then another year and a half in school, at Columbia, studying urban planning.
So, I've had somewhat of a wandering up-bringing in various parts of the country, which I must say I never minded. I always thought that the moves we made were pretty interesting, the parts of the country I lived in, the Middle West and its prairie and farm country and the German-Irish settlement influence, and Texas, which was very heavily Hispanic - even then, the city I lived in, Harlingen, was about 50 percent Hispanic. Then, up to the northeast, to Fall River, which had the only French daily newspaper in the United States at that time, had twenty-some French-speaking Catholic churches and another twenty-some Portuguese-speaking churches and a lot of Italian-speaking churches! A very large ethnic population - Syrians, Lebanese, Jews; a really fascinating melting pot to be exposed to - very different from the Midwest where I had begun life. So, I thought each of those moves was enriching in one respect or another. The Fall River era was the time I came to love the sea and came to know Cape Cod and Newport, Rhode Island, Providence, Mount Hope Bay, and some of those areas. My family vacationed there, and most of my aunts and uncles and cousins lived around there.
Anyway, after Harvard I went to practice law for a little while in Chicago, but had a commitment to go in the Army so I took the bar exam in both Massachusetts and Illinois, and then went into the Army. I went to the Infantry Officers School in Ft. Benning, Georgia; Intelligence Officers School in Baltimore, Maryland, Ft. Holabird; and had orders to Vietnam much of that time. Then, at the last minute, my orders were changed and I was sent to Germany with a little group of sixteen or seventeen - the first intelligence officers' class in two or three years to have been sent to Europe, because by that time we were depleting our intelligence officer numbers in NATO with everyone going to Vietnam. My responsibility was to help plan the quick departure of our forces, or at least the Army Intelligence component of them, from France after de Gaulle gave the U.S. forces 90 days to get out. My knowledge of French and being a lawyer had a very practical advantage: it resulted in my being assigned very interesting work in Europe. I did that and then went to German Language School as part of my Army experience in Europe.
When I had fewer than 13 months to serve, less than the standard Vietnam tour of duty, and thus could no longer be sent there, I came home to get married to Elizabeth Buxton, a woman I had met at Harvard. We were married at St. Thomas More Chapel at Yale, where her father was a professor and chairman of the Psychology Department. After another year in Germany, I came back to a different country, really, in early 1968. The place was very different from what it had been when I left. The anti-war movement was going strong, there was a lot of anti-authority feeling in the schools - in fact, I was scarcely at Columbia a few months when Mark Rudd and the Students for a Democratic Society shut it down, beginning with the school I was in, the Architecture School where I was an Urban Planning student. For a few days I was annoyed about that, but then I realized this was a marvelous education. So, I used to go up to the Columbia campus every day and just listen to the speeches, whether they were by Mark Rudd and his colleagues in SDS, or Black Panthers, or whoever was holding forth that day. I went to Columbia because of Charles Abrams, a really great man who had written Man's Struggle for Shelter in An Urbanizing World. He was an architect of the 1968 Housing Bill with Senator Percy and with the HUD Secretary. I did three semesters there, after which they awarded me a Masters degree.
I spent a summer working on a regional planning project in Turkey, on which my wife accompanied me. She had worked for the City Planning Department of New Haven and had more experience than I had. I thought at that time I wanted to be some kind of international urban planner and consultant. But in Turkey we experienced very strong anti-American feeling. Our new ambassador was fresh from the Vietnam pacification program Ambassador Komer, and his car was turned over and burned on his first visit to the university with which we were affiliated, Middle East Technical University. That summer's experience indicated to me that it wasn't a good time for Americans to be going around the world telling other people how to behave. So I came back and ended up going to work for something called Urban America, Incorporated, which I thought I would just do for a year or so before going back to my law practice in Chicago. As it turned out, I never went back. Urban America, Inc. merged with the National Urban Coalition. Then, the President's Council on Environmental Quality, which was setting up and looking for a land use lawyer, went to my old law firm for advice about whom to pick. They suggested me.
So, I found myself one of the Council's first staff members under Russell Train and was given the job of helping draft the regulations - they were then guidelines - implementing the National Environmental Policy Act and the Environmental Impact Statement procedures. I also drafted a National Land Use Policy Act. That was the only one of the big legislative proposals on which we worked in the early 1970s that did not make it into law. The Coastal Zone Management Act is essentially the same bill that I had drafted, based on the American Law Institute's Model Land Development Code. So, we got a piece of it, a grant incentive program for the coast but not for the whole country.
After two years there, I was invited to direct a task force on land use for the President's Commission on Environmental Quality, chaired by Laurence S. Rockefeller. We produced a report in 1973, The Use of Land: A Citizen's Policy Guide to Urban Growth, which went through three printings and sold 50,000 copies. I accepted an invitation then to become President of The Conservation Foundation. In 1985, it affiliated with World Wildlife Fund and later merged completely. In 1985, I became President of both institutions. That's where I was when President Bush asked me to become EPA Administrator. That's probably more than you wanted to know.