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Conflicts with the White House
Q: What was your relationship to the White House?
MR. REILLY: The conflicts with the White House on policy matters started early. Budget Director Dick Darman, at the very first informational briefing that I gave on the Clean Air Act, went ballistic and indicated that Ruckelshaus, as EPA Administrator, had brought an acid rain proposal over to the White House in which fish from the Adirondacks were going to be valued at something like $20 a fish. Now Reilly, if anything, has brought over something that is going to cost twice that much, he said.
I said, "There are a lot fewer fish, you should have taken the deal Ruckelshaus offered you." That was the tone of our exchanges for that period. He startled me because his opposition seemed so fundamental. I had rather assumed that - given the President's very public commitments to a Clean Air Act with three parts, an acid rain title, an ozone-smog title, and an air toxics title - we would all get behind that, get in harness, and produce such a bill.
The Budget Director philosophically disagreed with that and didn't hide it. He did not argue as though he considered that we were bound by those promises. He doubted the seriousness of the air pollution problem in the United States. It was a philosophy that [David] Stockman had also espoused - in fact, I think Stockman had greatly influenced Darman.
Governor Sununu, I think, at the beginning had difficulty knowing quite what to make of me. Obviously the Chief of Staff's job is a terrible job. It involves taking responsibility for a very motley crew of people, whom you don't select, who have relationships with the President, political histories with him, who are valuable for one reason or another to constituencies, and making a success out of all that, getting some serious work out of that diversity. Sununu was quick, bright, and perceptive on a number of issues. He was very helpful to me in the run up to our proposing the Clean Air bill. He asked good questions, knew the utility industry very well, knew pricing policies, and was familiar with the acid rain problem as former Governor of New Hampshire. He paid less attention to other features of the bill and put Roger Porter in to oversee both our development of the legislation and our Congressional shepherding of the law. Porter was very constructive and positive, had endless meetings on the issues - wore people down that way sometimes - and produced with us a very good bill.
I think, looking back on it, it is a model on how public policy in the executive branch ought to be developed. The originating Agency was EPA. That's where the impressive conceptual work was done. The staff that Don Clay had left behind in air had anticipated the need and had prepared themselves very well for the day when clean air would be on the agenda. They had patiently done the analysis, they had all the facts marshaled, and the bill that finally emerged was in large part what they had written. The President was, himself, directly responsible for the alternative fuels part of it. I learned during a visit to Rome with the President how strongly he felt about alternative fuels and the need to promote them.
The pollution rights trading concepts, which are so imaginative and novel in that law, came from a number of sources. It owes a lot, intellectually, to Resources for the Future, work that had been underway there for 20 years. The Environmental Defense Fund had worked with Senators Wirth and Heinz on Project '88 and had advanced those ideas and had played a very important role within the environmental community of giving them legitimacy and credibility in a community that was very deeply suspicious of them. The Council of Economic Advisors, particularly Bob Hahn, were very interested in those approaches and pressed that upon us, and the bill was a vastly stronger bill as a result.
The speed with which we operated we owed to the staff at EPA. They put us in a position to be able to run out so far, so fast. Had we not done that, had we waited until the other agencies were better organized, had their people in place, which by and large they didn't, when we first began moving the Clean Air Act through, I doubt we would have produced as strong a bill. In fact, I used to wonder if ever again in the Bush Administration, had we been given the go-ahead, we could have produced as complex and progressive a piece of legislation as the Clean Air Act. It's one of those things that you get to do, I think, only in the first year, perhaps even the first six months.
We had a very fast start, I remember - partly the consequence of knowing what we wanted to do coming in. We formulated right here in this office the concept - Terry Davies, Dan Beardsley, and I - of having EPA's Science Advisory Board review the major threats to health and ecology and then the degree to which the Agency's programs responded to those problems. We got that started as soon as we got to EPA. We began work immediately on the Clean Air Act. The Regional Administrator for Denver brought in the Two Forks Dam issue to me at my very first briefing. The Acting Administrator during the hiatus between Administrations was Jack Moore, and during those two weeks between Administrators he began the cancellation process for Alar; and that meant that that was on my plate, so we quickly moved to develop new food safety legislation after that, incorporating the lessons I thought I had learned from that experience. We got the Agriculture Department, thanks to Secretary Clayton Yeutter, interested and supportive of that. The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred just about five weeks into my term. That, obviously, took a lot of our time and we then began a follow-up to that. The Oil Pollution Act flowed out of that work and the survey of all the harbors in the United States followed. We also got the President to commit the U.S. to phase-out ozone-depleting chemicals by the year 2000, and we completed a review of Superfund. All in the first six months.
It was an extremely busy, productive, exciting time. There was also the international work. We made a commitment within those few months to embrace a framework convention on climate change - something that Governor Sununu and I worked out late at night in his office after we learned that yet another negative story would appear the next day on the Administration's slowness to appreciate this problem. The President was becoming impatient and concerned and we made that commitment.
On the one hand, one could say that there was conflict, certainly between me and Dick Darman and, not infrequently, between the Chief of Staff, Governor Sununu, and myself. But, I felt it was a productive period and particularly credited Governor Sununu in that phase for accommodating the priority the President had committed to and probably the Governor didn't really sympathize with. He once said to me, "I wouldn't do this, but we're not doing it for me, we work for him." I always respected that about Governor Sununu. I think, despite our frequent encounters and differences of opinion, we respected each other.
I, in fact, felt some affection for Sununu. I used to joke with him, he had a sense of humor. Not many others did joke with him. I recall going to a gas station with him where we were dedicating a new methanol pump with the President. I was concerned with trying to get more publicity for this aspect of our program so I asked the Governor if he could step over so I could pour some methanol on his shoe. I said that it would serve two advantages. One, it would guarantee we got attention to the event - it would put us on the evening news. And two, it would clarify to the country that methanol was, in fact, safe - that is, if his shoe didn't erode off.
Well, that's sort of a rambling answer to your question, but anyway, that characterizes, I think, the first six to nine months of it - at least within the White House itself. There also, I should point out, was a very good early relationship with the President himself. I remember when I learned about the Exxon Valdez accident, I called Governor Sununu and said, "I'm going up there."
He said, "I'll get back to you." He found Sam Skinner on a golf course down in Florida and Sam agreed to cut short his Easter vacation and go up there with me. The Coast Guard, which had legal responsibility under law for the spill, was under him, as Secretary of Transportation. We went up and I can recall having a somewhat different reaction to the experience than Sam did, partly because I think he felt more need to defend the Coast Guard. From our initial overflight I thought the response to the spill was woefully inadequate and ineffective. All the protective booms were broken around the key rivers and streams. The sea had been high the night before I got there. We had been told that a dozen skimmer ships were at work. I only saw two and neither one was working. They weren't suited to a major spill on open, turbulent water.
When we came back, I chose to tell the President exactly what I thought. It occurred to me not to - I thought, he is an oil man, this is going to be distressing to him. But I had remembered that I had reviewed the environmental impact statement on the Alaska pipeline for the Council on Environmental Quality in 1971 or '72, and there had been predictions made that there would be this kind of event. It didn't take a genius to realize that, statistically, one ship would eventually founder. Given all the money that had been made on oil by both Alaska and the oil industry, it seemed to me inexcusable that the capability to respond and control such a spill was so poor. So, I said so and described the history and what I had seen. I later learned that after leaving the room - I learned from Richard Breeden who later became SEC Chairman but who was then a staff member for the White House - the President turned to Governor Sununu and said, "We're lucky to have him over there; that's one of the best things we've done."
Knowing that helps to explain why my relationships were as good as they were with some other White House staff. The President not only liked and respected me, but he made known to others that he did. So, whatever resentments people may have felt about having an environmentalist on the team, and after all, many of these people were veterans of the Reagan administration where the environment was not taken seriously, it helped me both not just to stick around but to be effective.
The President did any number of other things that were generous and kind to my wife and me. He had us to dinner at the White House, to watch movies, to some State Dinners - I think over the period I was in office I went to five; I'm not sure any of my predecessors had been to one. I know my immediate predecessor had not. We were at Camp David a few times. The President was just very generous, particularly to someone who had no history with him, who had not been involved in the campaign, who had not been a party stalwart, who didn't have a Republican constituency or certainly a White House staff or insider constituency. That mattered a great deal. It particularly mattered when the going got rougher later. I think he probably knew that. Jim Cicconi, who was Assistant to the President and managed the paperflow, told me that he felt that some of those personal invitations were efforts by the President to compensate for what he knew were very stormy relationships with others of his aides.
We did, however, make some enemies in work on the Clean Air Act and got the reputation for being very aggressive and moving quite fast. Rosenberg bore the brunt of that. He consistently played the role of flak-catcher for me, which was useful to me. But, he accumulated scar tissue in the process.
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