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Contrast between Nixon and Ford
Q: Could you contrast the environmental views of President Nixon with those of President Ford?
MR. TRAIN: Nixon made a decision early in his Administration that the environment was important politically. He was supported and encouraged in that view by John Ehrlichman. I have no doubt about this whatsoever. I can illustrate with an incident which happened about January 1969. It happened in New York, before Nixon was inaugurated, when his transition office was at the Pierre Hotel. I mentioned earlier that I had chaired a task force on the environment for the President-elect. As thanks, he gave a dinner at the Pierre Hotel early in January of 1969 for all of his task forces. There were a lot of people; many of these task forces had 15 to 20 on them, and there must have been at least 20 such panels altogether. In fact, we filled the Grand Ballroom of the hotel. Nixon invited the various chairmen and chairwomen to sit at the head table with him, up on a platform. By the luck of the draw, I was seated on his left. I had discovered I was going to sit next to him about two hours before the dinner.
When I finally got his attention - diverting it from the guy on his other side who headed the Space Exploration Subcommittee and was spinning visions of moonshots and space probes - I knew I had a lot to compete with. When Nixon turned to me, I said, "I learned about two hours ago that I was going to be sitting next to you at dinner. I've spent the last two hours thinking this may be the only opportunity I will have to get a message across to the next President of the United States. I asked myself what I should talk about, what I should say; it seemed terrible to approach a dinner conversation in this way." Nixon said, "Not at all. That's exactly the way you should have approached it." Then he said, "What was your conclusion? What did you decide to tell me?" I said, "I decided to talk to you about the politics of the environment, why I feel it is politically important."
I had his immediate attention, and he listened to me without interrupting. He was an unusual politician in that regard. He would actually listen - at least at that time. Later on, as a defensive measure, he tended to talk a lot. In any case, I talked to him about the importance of the environment, a concern which involved every geographic region of the country, which involved all kinds of people and interests, and which could be used to help unify the nation and bring people together. He nodded his head and indicated that he understood. He said, "that sounds pretty good. But, what about the poor and the blacks living in the inner cities?" Of course, he had instantly put his finger on an extremely important aspect of what I had been saying, one which was very often overlooked, and is still overlooked. So I discussed the relationship between poverty and the environment with him, about lead paint, about the fact that people in the cities suffered more from air pollution than others.
I tell this story to underline the fact that from the beginning, Nixon had a keen appreciation of the political importance of the environment. I think it clearly influenced the first three years of the Nixon Administration. It certainly was a great help to us in achieving our agenda at CEQ. President Nixon issued an annual environmental message to the Congress, and to this day I am absolutely amazed at what we got away with! Absolutely amazed! At the same time, Nixon ran a tough White House, due to people like Ehrlichman and Haldeman. They were tough operators and ran a very disciplined ship; a taut ship, in Navy parlance. Also, a very political ship. But that was a side I saw little of.
President Ford, on the other hand, was a much more relaxed human being than Nixon. He was not a driven man in any sense at all. He became President of the United States more by happenstance than anything else, and the people he brought in reflected that. It was a much more relaxed White House, much more tolerant of a diversity of viewpoints within the Administration. I always had a feeling with Ford that if I really needed to take something to the President, I could. More than that, he probably would come down on my side. I felt I had that sort of relationship with him. With Nixon, it was a much tenser sort of a situation. But they were a tense crowd; all of them! (laughing)