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President Bush
Q: You talked a bit earlier about the process by which you became EPA Administrator. Could you describe that in more detail and talk about what qualities President Bush may have sought in an Administrator and any particular sponsors you may have had?
MR. REILLY: Well, you know, that history - I'm not sure I understand it all. I know that in the summer of 1988, Russell Train, who was then Chairman of World Wildlife Fund, hosted the Ruckelshauses at his house in Hobe Sound, Florida, I think in May or June. Not long after that he returned to say that he had had a conversation with Bill Ruckelshaus. He quoted Ruckelshaus as saying, "If our candidate George Bush becomes President, he's likely to turn to you and me for advice about who should be EPA Administrator and my advice would be Reilly. What would you think of that?"
Train, who just three years before had initiated with me a big merger of The Conservation Foundation and World Wildlife Fund, with me then taking over the organization as Chief Executive Officer, and him as Board Chairman, obviously wasn't going to find it convenient to see me run off to government. Nevertheless, he told Ruckelshaus that he couldn't disagree. Upon returning from Florida, he told me of the conversation with Ruckelshaus and he asked, "What would you do if that were offered to you?"
I said I'd say no.
I said I hadn't really completed what I had set out to do with WWF, there was a lot of continuing work necessary to make our two institutions mesh. I really liked what I was doing. I liked the international character of it. And, I just didn't know how serious George Bush would be about the environment, anyway.
So he said, "When a President asks you to do something, it's pretty hard to turn him down. So I'd just like to ask you to think about your succession here, how that would work, should this invitation come."
I didn't hear anything more about it until the day after the election. Ruckelshaus called me up and said, "Would you like to do something in this Administration?" He mentioned EPA Administrator and Interior Secretary.
I said, "No."
He said, "Well, if people were to talk to you, would you agree with me not to turn it down or say no until you get in front of the President-elect because he doesn't talk to enough people like you. If you have that encounter with him, you can probably have some influence on his thinking early on, whatever you do."
I think Ruckelshaus figured that if I ever got that close to the President, it would be pretty hard to say no to him. My wife later told me that she decided the previous June when she heard of the conversation with Train that I would do what the President wanted me to do. She didn't see me saying no.
I remember a lot of our friends would say, "How was it that when hardly any of your colleagues in Harvard Law School ever ended up in the Army, you did?" She would point to me and say, "Patriot." It was true. I thought you should serve. I came out of the Midwest and even though I didn't like the Vietnam War much, I thought one served the country in the military.
And when I finally did get in front of the President-elect, I found it impossible to say no to him. Someone had said to me in the transition - I guess Bob Teeter finally got in touch with me and talked with me about what they were looking for - and said, very frankly, that they were going to tilt one way at Interior and another way at EPA and that I'd come highly recommended by Ruckelshaus. I, however, went through that fall without any formal meetings other than the one Ruckelshaus conversation where he said he thought they would be getting in touch with me. They didn't call for at least a month or a month and a half. Then I began reading that I was one of the two hot candidates under consideration, but still no one had talked to me.
My friend, Phil Shabecoff, called me one day. He was the New York Times environmental correspondent. He said, "I have it on very good authority that you are on a short list of three. Do you know about this?"
"Nothing more than I read in the newspapers," I said.
"That's very strange," he said, "this comes from a good authority. But," he said, "there is something wrong with my EPA list."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Elizabeth Dole is on this list, and she's politically ambitious," he said.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
He said, "Well, you'd never go to EPA if you had any political aspirations. It would be the graveyard for those hopes." He talked about the position, said it was an impossible job. He said that it requires you to master more data and information than any job he'd ever covered. It's a thankless job. You'll make enemies, he said. You'll end up without any friends, probably, in your own community and you won't make anybody else happy. He later changed his mind and said that he had reconsidered and that he should have encouraged me to go there.
I guess I was finally called in early December. I had a meeting with Teeter and then was to meet with Craig Fuller, but he was ill. Finally, then, I was invited to meet with President-elect Bush. I had about 35 minutes with him with Craig Fuller present. At the end of that, he did not offer me the job. He said he wanted to check a few things first - although in the course of that conversation, he had asked Fuller, "Where do we stand on this?"
"It's ready to go, or," Fuller said, "you can talk to someone else if you want to."
"That won't be necessary," Bush said.
The next day he called me up, he'd been trying to hold the secret, obviously. About ten or eleven he called me up and asked me to be his EPA Administrator and invited me to come over about two and said he would announce it in public and introduce me to the White House press corps. I told him I would work to make him a great environmental President.
I never really knew a lot about his thinking, other than from one evening in the Netherlands when Mrs. Bush and the Queen of the Netherlands were talking at a State Dinner in the Netherlands and I was part of that conversation. Queen Beatrice asked Mrs. Bush where they had found me. She said to the Queen, "'For EPA,' George said, 'I want the best, nothing else. No politics, no partisanship, just the best we can find.' Everybody said, 'Well, if that's what you want, Bill Reilly's the person you want to get.'" That could have been very generous on Mrs. Bush's part, but that's the sum total of my exposure to their thinking about it all.
I remember Train said that he thought I would get on very well with Bush, that our temperaments would mesh well, and certainly they did. He and Mrs. Bush were very generous, very kind, to my wife, Libbie, our children Katherine and Margaret and me through all of that. They communicated even when we had difficulties with the White House Staff. He had a fundamental confidence in what I was doing and when things mattered a great deal to me, he would take them seriously. He always kept his promise to provide access when I needed it to talk to him and kept a promise to ensure that I didn't get anybody I didn't want in any of the key jobs. As some of the current Cabinet are discovering, that is a very valuable commitment to have from the President and very few people get it. But, I got it.
He did say to me at our initial interview, there wasn't any more money for EPA, and that the budget would not be going up. He asked what that would do to my standing in the environmental community and whether I was prepared for that. In fact, we did a lot better than he had led me to expect we would because we increased EPA's operating funds by 54 percent on our watch and the overall budget by about 45 percent. That's a measure of Bush's support for which he didn't get much credit during his term, though the League of Conservation Voters later wrote approvingly of our budget performance.
Q: During that one hour meeting and subsequently, did he or any of the White House staff give you specific advice on what he expected you to do or not to do at EPA?
MR. REILLY: No, and it's interesting that you don't necessarily get that in top jobs. I don't believe my predecessors ever got a clear sense from their President of that. Bush expressed his own philosophy. He said, "I'm not a rape-and-ruin developer and I'm not for locking everything up, either." He said he believed in balance.
That's really my philosophy. It's one of integration and reconciliation of priorities. That's a philosophy I can subscribe to. It's really very close to my own. I'm sure that's the way Ruckelshaus had characterized me to him. He seemed very open to ideas when I talked to him. I remember that I thought, "Well, I don't know if I'm going to talk to him again or if I'm going to be offered or accept this job, but I'm sure going to use my time well."
So, I told him about "Debt for Nature," which I had been working on for two or three years, the concept of forgiving debt or writing down debt in hard currencies, dollars, and having some portion of the forgiven amount being applied to conservation in local soft currencies in the debtor country.
He said, "Well, that's a hell of an idea."
I remember thinking, "I've been working for three years on that and if I'd just gotten the President of the United States to think that it was a good idea, I'd really advanced the ball." Of course, it did reveal to me the enormous potential power in access to the President and in the kind of job he was talking about my taking. That certainly had an impact on me.
We talked about Cabinet status for the Agency. He was very frank and direct and said he didn't support it. He said that he thought there were too many in the Cabinet and he wanted a lean Cabinet, a small Cabinet, but he was open on the question. At one point he said, "Well, if we could do that in lieu of putting out millions of dollars in new budget outlays, that might be a good trade." It was a very congenial conversation.