The Babbitt legacy at the Department of the Interior: a preliminary view.

• Author: Leshy, John D.
• Position: Bruce Babbitt

Bruce Babbitt was perhaps the most qualified individual to ever hold the post of Secretary of the Interior. He combined experience, enthusiasm, and a commitment to environmental protection and restoration to pursue the radical improvement of public land management. He willingly tackled some of the most complex, controversial, and problematic issues in public land management, resulting in long overdue reforms to mining, grazing, and endangered species law, and protection of millions of acres of federal land from development through the designation of several national monuments. He used his skills as an effective public advocate and teacher to counter the inevitable criticism from political opponents, and he was instrumental in defeating the environmental rollback propositions of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America. This allowed him to become the Clinton Administration's most prominent spokesperson on a wide range of environmental issues including federal fire policy and coral reef protection. Mr. Babbitt also worked effectively with a Republican Congress by fighting off unacceptable appropriations riders and trying to reach bipartisan compromises on issues whenever possible. When Congress and the Administration were hopelessly deadlocked, he still achieved many successes by using executive power to achieve reform--the most significant being Endangered Species Act reforms promulgated after Congress could not agree on reauthorization measures. All these achievements added up to a fundamental reorientation of federal land management from a general policy of resource extraction enjoyed by a few to one of resource conservation for the use and enjoyment of all.

1. INTRODUCTION

   If journalism is the first rough draft of history, what I want to do here is try a second but still rough draft (informed as it is by a scant few weeks of hindsight) of Bruce Babbitt's impact as Secretary of the Interior.(1) I will leave others to put forward a detailed compendium of accomplishments of the Babbitt-led Interior Department.(2) Instead, I want to offer a more impressionistic overview of where and how he left his personal stamp on the Department's missions and on American life. I make no claim to objectivity; that goal, elusive enough even with distance, is plainly impossible when one works as closely and as long as I worked with him. But I hope that I can make this more than a hagiography. Perhaps, too, my long involvement with the Department's programs, from both inside and outside, will add some credibility to my observations.

   Let me offer an apology and a dedication up front. Like any good politician, Babbitt absorbed like a sponge ideas from throughout the Interior bureaucracy and beyond. A number of the Department's nearly 70,000 employees can rightfully claim credit for originating things that made his successes possible, as well as doing the hard work necessary to bring them off. I dedicate this essay to all of them. They know who they are.

2. SETTING THE CONTEXT

   Bruce Babbitt became Secretary of the Interior in January 1993 at the age of fifty-four, after a distinguished career as a public official in Arizona. He was elected to statewide office on his first foray into elective politics at age thirty-six and served as Attorney General for nearly four years before fate thrust him into the Governor's chair. (Jimmy Carter appointed Governor Raul Castro as ambassador to Argentina, and Castro's successor, the Secretary of State, died suddenly.) He was twice elected to that office and served nine years in all. He stepped down in early 1987 and after a run for President in

   1988, practiced law and served as head of the League of Conservation Voters before President Clinton named him the forty-seventh Secretary of the Interior.

   He came to the job with a set of talents and experiences that made him perhaps the best-qualified person ever to become Secretary of the Interior. He grew up amidst one of the nation's highest concentrations of public lands and Indian reservations. His family had long been in the ranching business on federal lands and had operated trading posts on Indian reservations and concessions in national parks. His backyard was almost literally the Grand Canyon, one of the most outstanding features in the natural world. He had been schooled in the natural sciences, including graduate work in geology, before becoming a lawyer. He had headed large executive branch governmental institutions--three years as Attorney General and nine years as Governor of Arizona--and a national conservation organization. He was intimately familiar with the history of the West, with Indian policy, with the natural world, and with the political process. Many of his predecessors had come to office with some of this background, but no one arrived with such a complete package.

   He served the full eight years of the Clinton presidency, tying Stewart Udall (who served the entire Kennedy-Johnson term) as the second-longest serving Secretary of the Interior in history, outdistanced only by Harold Ickes who served as Secretary for more than thirteen years (FDR's entire term plus a year in the Truman Administration). Although quite different in personality and style, the three shared many characteristics--enthusiasm, energy, an activist bent, and a belief in the ability of government to improve the quality of American life. Length of tenure is not always a guide to performance and impact, of course, but there seems little question that, at least among the twentieth century Secretaries, history will regard these three as the standouts.

   From its founding in 1849, the Department of the Interior had generally been viewed as a sideshow on the national scene. The strong westward tilt of its responsibilities led it to be characterized as the only regional agency in the President's cabinet. Throughout the twentieth century, however, the Department gradually extended its influence over the entire country. Today there are units of the national park and wildlife refuge systems in practically every state, the Endangered Species Act(3) gives the Department regulatory responsibilities on private land across the country, and the Department administers oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico and regulates coal mining in Appalachia.(4) Furthermore, even though managing federal lands in the west remains a core responsibility, mobility and other features of modern life have made people in other parts of the country interested, even intensively so, in what happens on these lands.

   While most Interior Secretaries have hailed from the West (Ickes, reared in Pennsylvania and a long-time Chicagoan, was a prominent exception), the days are long past when truly effective Secretaries could operate with only a regional vision. In that regard, a strong case can be made that, with the possible exception of Ickes, Babbitt has been the most nationally focused of them all. From the Flagstaff of his youth, his world view was leavened by years at Notre Dame and Harvard, by graduate school in England, by much travel around the country and abroad, and by an inquisitive mind and voracious reading on many subjects.

3. KNOWLEDGEABLE, ENERGETIC, FOCUSED, AND ENGAGED

   Energy, focus, and perseverance were hallmarks of Babbitt's eight years in office. Ickes and Udall had these qualities too, but there is no question that Babbitt traveled more miles and met more people in more public and private settings than any of his predecessors. My informed guess is that during his eight years he was working on the road half the time, including well over one hundred separate visits to California and nearly as many to Florida and Colorado. Usually he was squeezing his lanky flame into a coach class seat, and often he found himself waiting out connections to less accessible places like Grand Island, Nebraska, Augusta, Maine, or Burns, Oregon.

   The bulk of this travel was not for feel-good, ceremonial events that allow politicians to bask in the glory of delivering good news. More often, they required immersion in nitty-gritty details, and roll-up-the-sleeves meetings with a wide array of interests on an enormous range of issues. But Babbitt hardly ever hesitated to go the extra mile, to the extra place. This was a Secretary who was fully engaged in his job.

   Focus and perseverance were especially valuable because Babbitt endured more than his share of vilification while in office. It is something of a puzzle as to why such a generally reasonable, open-minded, and mild-mannered person provoked such strong feelings of opposition, but he did. Part of it, I suppose, stemmed from the strong feelings aroused by the issues with which he dealt; part of it was displaced enmity felt for his boss, the President; part of it was his effectiveness; and part of it was that some, especially his political opponents, saw him as an inflexible ideologue--a zealot. That is, as I will explain in a moment, a much oversimplified view.

   Whatever the reasons, there is no doubt he was seen by many as a controversial figure. Many of his trips were tinged with conflict: "I could find my way across the West by the fires of my being burned in effigy," he once said. He endured some hard times under much scrutiny, formal investigations, aggressive oversight that sometimes crossed the line to simple harassment, and congressional retaliation in the budget process. Numerous episodes during his tenure illustrated the mean-spirited culture of the nation's capital, which everyone decries and no one seems to know how to fix. But such things rarely fazed him. In pop jargon, he "compartmentalized" well--retaining an ability to see beyond the controversy of the moment and to engage constructively even some of his most fervent critics.

   All these qualities do not by themselves make a good Secretary, of course. For all I know, Albert Fall of Teapot Dome infamy(5) (Harding's Secretary of the Interior, and the only Cabinet Secretary until...