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President Nixon
Q: Did President Nixon ever give you directions about how he wanted your office or the agency to be run?
MR. RUCKELSHAUS: No. No. He was very uninvolved. Most of the presidential pronouncements that Nixon made about the environment, many of which were quite good, originated in his Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ); that is, from Russell Train and his people, including Al Alm, who was later my Deputy at EPA, and Bill Reilly, who is now the EPA Administrator. Train had a number of people like that who were very good, very bright, and had been active in the environmental movement as it unfolded in this country. Under Train's direction, they were the final authors of much of what the president said about the environment in those days.
But in terms of Mr. Nixon's own involvement in structuring the agency, the White House suggested I work with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). They were of some help. John Ehrlichman was quite helpful to me in the White House. He was the main person I worked with there, and in the early days of EPA, often kept the agency's business out of range of the president. Ehrlichman realized Nixon would react negatively to anything that smacked of regulation, that would interfere with the economy, or, in a narrow sense, would arouse some of the captains of industry, whom the president admired tremendously. Nixon did not feel this way because they were contributors to the party or because they exercised some evil influence over him. He really admired those who had accomplished a great deal in the corporate world. So when they complained to him from time-to-time about regulatory infringement on their activities, he would become quite agitated.
But I didn't really get any help from him. Every time I'd meet with him, he would just lecture me about the "crazies" in the agency and advise me not to be pushed around by them. He never once asked me, "Is there anything wrong with the environment? Is the air really bad? Is it hurting people?" President Reagan was much more curious about that than President Nixon. Nixon thought the environmental movement was part of the same political strain as the anti-war movement; both reflected weaknesses in the American character. He tied the threads together. During the 1960s, when the Vietnam War protests were so powerful and so dominated his thinking, he observed that some of the same people involved in the environmental movement were also associated with the anti-war movement. So he tended to lump all of them together.
He created EPA for much the same reason Reagan invited me to return to the agency in 1983: because of public outrage about what was happening to the environment. Not because Nixon shared that concern, but because he didn't have any choice. People have often said, isn't that a terrible motive! But that's the way democracy is supposed to work. The president feels he's got to respond to something the American people feel is very important or he's going to get into political trouble. I think President Bush did this last week with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. I think it's the exact same phenomenon. He also did it with the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and with the Louisiana Senate campaign of David Duke. He had to do something or would get tarred with the brush of that crazy guy Duke. I think that's okay. I think that's the way democracies work.