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Other mentors
Q: Would you say that you had any other mentors?
MR. REILLY: I certainly had another mentor in a man named John Bross, John Adams Bross, who was a CIA official and member of The Conservation Foundation Board from 1974 on. He was thoughtful, very modest, and very cultivated in an unassuming way. He had a wry, twinkly, humorous attitude towards a lot of things and particularly was able to be funny about the things that a lot of people would be pompous about - things that he knew and had experienced. He knew Shakespeare and he knew art and he knew government and politicians and he knew people, he'd known the important ones who'd come through Washington over the last 25 years or so. I can recall many a fine lunch with him where I just soaked up the kind of wisdom he tossed off nonchalantly. I remember, in fact, I went directly from my announcement as EPA Administrator at the White House with President Bush to his hospital room and talked to him about everything. He'd seen it on television. He had a bad case, then, of cancer. It had him in the hospital, but he recovered for another couple of years and died, just about two years ago, now.
My father, of course, has been a very important figure in my life, too. Very strong, very generous, capable of being severe but also quite compassionate to people who need help. Very religious. I often think how much easier I've had it than he had it. He was a child of the Depression. As a teenager he worked on the Fall River Line on a boat that went back and forth from Fall River to New York. He was also a dining car steward on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Then he went out on his own to Illinois, very bravely, without any health insurance or benefits or retirement or any security or clear prospects at all. It took him two or three years before he made any money at all. He pretty much was supported by his brother who was also in the business and would give him an advance for the week.
He finally had a big success at the Illinois State Fair where he sold a big pile of steel culvert several times over, metal culverts, to township commissioners responsible for country roads and drainage who were coming through. He was able to make that the start of his success in business. But he worked very, very hard for what he got and paid the price in his health. He later recovered that and has been a very successful man by any measure. But I think he has the sort of divine discontent that characterizes a lot of artists and perfectionists. He sees a lot of ways that things could have been better. He gave me a great education and obviously valued that tremendously. He also made great sacrifices, not just financial, but in allowing me to stay in Massachusetts where he thought I was going to get a better high school education than if I had moved around with him, which is certainly true.
What he, and I, did was always with the great support of my mother, who is a very warm, loving, tolerant person and who has no rough edges. She just communicated a great love and security to me that probably has a good deal to do with my sense that life would go on and it would unfold in ways that I would probably like - which it has. Successful, confident men tend not to talk much about their mothers. I've noticed, though, more than anyone it's mothers who make for secure sons, I think. Unlike my father, my mother radiated a quiet, reassuring faith in the future, and a sunny optimism. Like my mother, I don't worry a lot.
Q: What would you say you've learned from Mr. Ruckelshaus?
MR. REILLY: Ruckelshaus had a very clear concept of the need not only to ensure integrity in public service, in government, as a government official, but also to communicate to the country what a government agency was doing and why. I saw my job, in very large part in 1989, as one of communication. At that time, and certainly now, we had more diffuse anxieties in the country than we could ever craft policies and programs to address.
The public is very concerned about risk - particularly the involuntary kind, the kind that they believe they're subjected to by chemicals in their food or pollutants in the air or water. They need to have all of that put in perspective and they need to embrace some sense of proportion. People need to have some guidance from a trusted source about what matters and what doesn't, or rather about what matters most and what matters less. That is necessary for EPA to do its job with respect and credibility.
We heard in 1989, as we continue to hear, that EPA isn't doing this or that or it's missing this or that milestone. Of course, it's always true. It's a consequence of so many responsibilities that have been given the Agency without sufficient authority or resources to carry them out. But ultimately, government is accountable to people and it's people who are causing their Congressional representatives to write these bills and to continue to write them, even though the money isn't there any longer. In fact, the EPA budget's gone down this year very substantially from what the last Bush budget was. The only way to do that is to cause people to believe fundamentally that there is integrity in the process - those in government do know what they're doing.
Second of all, some things pose much less risk to people than others and officials need to acknowledge that in their public representations to the Congress and finally in the budgets and priorities that the Agency proposes. The only way that you arrive at that point is through constant communication. I think that Ruckelshaus had a clear sense of that. Certainly at the very beginning of EPA he spent considerable time on it and, when he came back in '83, he spent even more time on that. I believe in that. He was not excessively focused on the Congress or on the internal workings of the bureaucracy, which happens to so many agency leaders. He recognized the broad country out there from which our mandate comes but also whose sense of priorities have shaped the program that needs reform.