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Career prior to EPA
Q: By what route did you arrive as Administrator of EPA?
MR. TRAIN: By a devious one (laughing)! I was in public life in Washington from the moment I got out of law school. I went directly from law school to work as an attorney on the Congressional staff of the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation. I remained in public service in various capacities until 1965 when I resigned as a judge of the United States Tax Court to become president of the Conservation Foundation. I spent approximately three years doing that until I re-entered government in the Nixon Administration as Undersecretary of the Interior, beginning in 1969.
I guess that early on I became completely committed to public service of one kind or another; a career in government was quite a natural thing for me. However, I didn't have very much exposure to environmental matters in the early part of my government career.
To raise the political aspect, I was identified early as a Republican. However, we didn't have any particular political identification at home. Certainly, my father didn't. Being a Naval officer, he was completely non-political, although he had been a Naval aide to President Herbert Hoover, so he had a loyalty there. I suppose he probably was a Republican.
Nonetheless, after I had been on the staff of the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue for several years, I became Clerk of the Ways & Means Committee for a Republican Chairman, Daniel Reed of upstate New York. That was the last time to this date that the Republican Party controlled the House of Representatives. So, I was identified as a Republican up to that point, although in those days politics in the District of Columbia had not become as active as they are today.
In any event, I went on from there to the Treasury Department during the Eisenhower Administration. I worked for Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey as head of the Legal Advisory Staff, which essentially handled all tax legislation and regulatory matters. From there, I was appointed by President Eisenhower to fill the unexpired term of a U.S. Tax Court Judge who had died in office. Then, I was re-appointed to a full term by President Kennedy. As I recall, I went on the Court in 1957 or 1958 and resigned in 1965.
During that period, I had gone to Africa on a couple of private trips and on a few safaris and became very interested in African conservation. In my spare time, in 1960 or 1961 I started an organization called the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation which still exists here in Washington and has an office in Nairobi. It is one of the principal international organizations involved with conservation in Africa. That got me involved with environmental matters, with conservation issues, and with the people involved in the movement.
Then, in 1965 I agreed to leave the Tax Court and become President of the Conservation Foundation. After I became President, the principal thrust of the Foundation was to develop ways in which environmental values and environmental considerations could be brought into the decision-making and policy-making processes.
About 1967, the Senate Interior Committee, then chaired by Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, was considering environmental issues and how to build environmental considerations into government decision-making. At the Conservation Foundation we had a small advisory board, one of whose members was Professor Lynton "Keith" Caldwell, a political scientist at the University of Indiana, who had been giving a good deal of thought to these issues. The staff of the Senate Interior Committee asked whether the Foundation could finance a consultancy for Professor Caldwell to work with the committee on these issues. We did, and he did, and he became the principal architect of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), as well as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). So, we at the Foundation worked very hard and were personally involved in the labors that eventuated as NEPA. I don't think this is a story and an association that has been particularly well-known.
Toward the end of 1968, following the election of Richard Nixon, I was asked to chair a task force on environmental issues. President-elect Nixon had a very extensive task force mechanism that was put together by Dr. Paul McCracken, who later became Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Nixon White House. McCracken's executive assistant, a man by the name of Henry Loomis, had been head of the Voice of America, and I believe, Commissioner of Education. Loomis also happened to be associated with the Conservation Foundation. He was a close personal friend of mine, as well as director and treasurer of the Foundation. So, Henry called me up after the election (he was already working for McCracken) and said, "We're setting up task forces on just about every conceivable issue; from taxation to space exploration, from public health and education, to defense. Don't you think we should have a task force on the environment? If we do, would you chair it?"
My answer was, "Yes," on both scores; "yes" to the task force, and "yes," I would chair it. I put together a totally bipartisan task force of around 15 to 20 people. Incidentally, I never had the slightest suggestion from the in-coming Nixon Administration as to whom I should appoint to the group. In any event, we came up with a rather short report whose principal proposal was the establishment of a focal point for environmental policy-making in the White House. We did not give a name to it, but eventually it became the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).
Following our report, in the beginning of 1969, I was asked to come into the Nixon Administration as Undersecretary of the Interior. I was an identifiable Republican who already had some distinction in public office and who was considered to be a conservationist; the term "environmentalist" was not yet in common usage at that time. In any event, I became Undersecretary of the Interior at the very beginning of the Nixon Administration. Walter Hickel was Secretary. Unfortunately, Hickel and I had a fairly rough association for the next year, which had an impact on later events.
Meanwhile, the National Environmental Policy Act was under consideration by the Senate Interior Committee. I was the Administration spokesman and testified against the establishment of the Council on Environmental Quality, even though after the election we had recommended it in the task force report. I took this position because the President had established another agency, a Committee on Environmental Quality chaired by Dr. Lee DuBridge, his science advisor. It was made up of the various agency heads who had major interests in the environment, like the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture, and so forth. It represented the White House's initial response to our task force report, and while it was a starter, like most inter-agency committees it wasn't terribly effective. It tended to represent what I would call the lowest common denominator among the existing agencies, rehashing what they were doing already or wanted to do in the future. There was no new cutting edge there.
While I testified against some aspects of NEPA in the Senate, by the time the bill was under consideration in the House (before John Dingell's Subcommittee of the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries) we managed to turn the Administration around and I was able to support the legislation. When the NEPA was passed at the end of 1969, I suggested to the White House that I be appointed the first Chairman of CEQ. Given my increasing difficulty with Secretary Hickel (and to be fair, his increasing difficulty with me), that seemed like a good arrangement all around. The White House bought it, and I did become the first Chairman of CEQ in early 1970. Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act on January 1, 1970 as his first official act of the decade and I remained at CEQ until I went to EPA in September 1973.
Of course, CEQ began a year before EPA came into existence. EPA resulted from a recommendation by a presidential commission on government reorganization, known familiarly in those days as the Ash Council. It was chaired by Roy Ash who later became the first Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). There was a good deal of debate within the Administration about an organizational home for environmental concerns; not about whether there should be some new institutional arrangement in the government to deal with the environment, but just exactly what that institution should look like, where it should be located, and how it should be organized. I think the White House leaned towards establishing a major new Department of Natural Resources and the Environment. I am not quite clear as to how it was to be put together. Of course, talk of a Department of Natural Resources has persisted ever since.
By the time I testified before the Ash Council, I had reached the conclusion that it was much better to start off with a clearly defined, independent agency with a clearly defined mission than have an environmental structure tied to a much bigger natural resources organization. There it would be subject to bureaucratic entanglements, a loss of identity, and a fuzziness of mission. I said at the time that what we needed - and what the public wanted - was an organization with a clearly defined mission: to be the sharp, cutting edge of environmental policy in the government, and at the same time be clearly identifiable and understood by the public. I like to think that I had something to do with moving the decision in that direction. Today, of course, the effort is being made to make EPA a department, which I think it should be. But at that time (1970) I think we reached the right answer.
So, EPA came into existence on December 2, 1970 as a result of Reorganization Plan Number 3. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) came into being at the same time under Reorganization Plan Number 4. As Chairman of CEQ, I was the principal Administration witness - one might say lobbyist - for these reorganization plans on the Hill. I visited all the various committee chairmen whose jurisdictions were going to be affected, ranging from Agriculture, to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, to the Interior, to Public Works, and all the rest. Finally, the reorganization plans went through, and EPA came into existence.
CEQ then continued on its own course. We saw ourselves in those days as the principal policy development arm of federal environmentalism, while EPA was the principal implementing, regulating, and enforcing arm. During the next three years, CEQ was responsible for bringing together an enormous range of new policy recommendations to the President and the Congress, relating to clean air and water, toxic substances, safe drinking water, surface mining, endangered species, and other areas. There was an extraordinary outpouring of public and political response to the environmental crisis, a sense that we were coming to grips with a major problem in our national life. I think that in those years, the legislative and regulatory responses and the Executive Orders relating to the environment represented the most comprehensive set of initiatives produced in any domestic area in the history of the country.
In any event, we worked very closely with EPA all through that time, and the more EPA matured, the more it became the principal environmental player. By 1973 or so, it was pretty hard to find any policy initiatives to suggest to the President that hadn't already been put forward. There were some initiatives we recommended that were never acted on, such as the National Land Use Policy Act. But I think it is fair to say that by 1973, the action had pretty well begun to switch from CEQ to EPA, which was quite natural. Then, of course, the Nixon Administration - particularly President Nixon himself - ran into the Watergate fiasco. Bill Ruckelshaus, the first Administrator of EPA, left the Agency in May 1973 to become head of the FBI. He then became Deputy Attorney General under Elliott Richardson.
That is where I came in. Following Bill's departure from the EPA, which was pretty sudden, I began to give some thought to my own position and decided that I would like a shot at the EPA Administrator's job. As I have said, by this time (1973) the emphasis was less and less on the development of new policy and more and more on making things work; implementing programs that had been put into place and enforcing them. Clearly, EPA seemed to be the principal arena for all such environmental activities.
To promote my candidacy, I talked to some of the members of Congress with whom I had developed close working relationships. Certainly, I also talked with people in the White House. I remember at least one conversation with Alexander Haig, who by that time was Chief of Staff, having taken Haldeman's place. There were not many other candidates. One was John Quarles who became Deputy Administrator with me. I think Henry Diamond was a candidate.
At any rate, the White House, in its mysterious way, decided to give me the nod, and I was nominated later that same spring, in May 1973. My confirmation hearing was held in June 1973 by the Senate Public Works Committee (which, at that time, hadn't added "environment" to its title). But Senators Scott of Virginia and Hanson of Wyoming put a hold on my nomination, and it remained in limbo until September, when the objections were removed, and I was confirmed, either unanimously or with one or two votes dissenting.
I then became the second Administrator, sworn in that month by Elliott Richardson. I had originally asked President Nixon if he would swear me in. He and I had a conversation about the job in the Oval Office about this same time. I assumed it probably would be a politically shrewd thing for me to be sworn in at EPA by the President. President Nixon was quite a bit shrewder politically than I. He was in the middle of Watergate at that time, and said something like, "that could probably be just about the worst thing I could do for you." He was always extremely pragmatic about himself and his own value in politics (although I must say other events would not necessarily bear out the statement I just made). In any case, I was not sworn in by him, but by my friend Elliott Richardson. His Deputy Attorney General, Bill Ruckelshaus, stood with us. Of course, both Richardson and Ruckelshaus fell victim to the "Saturday Night Massacre" not long after that. Anyway, that's the devious route whereby I got to head the EPA.