Did Nixon Veto The Clean Water Act

Richard Nixon: Environmentalist?

Past Bill Kovarik
Published in the Daily Climate and Environmental Health News

Richard Nixon would be 100 years former on January. 9, 2022, and on the ceremony of his birth, it's tempting to portray the 37th U.South. president as a major environmental advocate.

That would be a mistake, for it would let modern-twenty-four hour period politics trump an important history lesson.

Nixon said and did things about the environment that seem courageous from today'south perspective:

"Clean air is non complimentary, and neither is make clean h2o," he said in his 1970 State of the Wedlock accost. "Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called."

Such rhetoric has made Nixon's environmental legacy a source of ongoing debate among environmentalists, scholars and reporters. Not long ago, Michael Lemonick of Climate Central said Nixon was "a champion of protecting the environment, like no president before him since Teddy Roosevelt and like no president since."

Just Lemonick and others holding that view displace history with politics. One of history'southward beginning lessons the need to empathize people and events in the context of their times.

Nixon won the presidency in 1968, when environmentalism was ascendant: rivers were catching on fire, lead poisoning was epidemic, skies were choked with smoke and rivers were dangerous to impact. Some xx 1000000 people joined the first Globe Mean solar day protests in 1970. No i doubted the gravity of the bug; there was no serious anti-ecology motility at the time, and the long legacy of Congressional hearings on pollution problems in the 1950s and 60s, especially those chaired by Sen. Edmund Muskie,D-Maine, had built momentum towards ecology regulation and industrial reform.

Nixon, simply by going forth with the calendar, easily crafted a positive record.

Truthful, Nixon did encourage and sign central pieces of legislation, such every bit the National Ecology Policy Human action of 1969. He signed the enabling act consolidating several federal agencies into the Ecology Protection Agency. He extended the Clean Air Act. In all, he inked 14 major pieces of legislation protecting the environs.

Yet these were non terribly significant for Nixon himself. In the context of the times, domestic issues like the environment took a afar back seat to the Vietnam war and the new policy towards Red china. Every bit a result, Nixon'south rhetoric could exist pro-environmental on a full general level without compromising more important foreign policy initiatives.

In his 1970 State of the Union Address, Nixon outlined major environmental concerns and promised activity: "Restoring nature to its natural land is a cause beyond party and across factions," he said. "It has get a common cause of all of the people of this state."

Only when information technology came to specifics, Nixon was hardly the ecology champion of his era.

The Nixon assistants set dorsum the deadline for the automobile industry to develop a 90 pct pollution-gratuitous engine, insisting on a "depression-lead," rather than a "no-lead," auto.

Nixon also supported the Everglades Jetport, a grandiose plan for a mega-airport larger than O'Hare, Dulles, JFK and LAX combined. The jetport was opposed past Earth Day co-founder Sen. Gaylord Nelson and by Nixon'due south Secretary of the Interior, Walter Hickel, among others. Hickel's agency warned the development would "inexorably destroy the south Florida ecosystem."

Besides problematic at the Interior Department was an ongoing controversy over coal mine safety. Interior's mine prophylactic inspectors were, co-ordinate to the United Mine Workers, guilty of "flagrant disregard" of condom regulations, and according to Ralph Nader, interim "exterior the law."

And Hickel's reward for his attempts at reform? A pink slip. Nixon fired him for what the New York Times called Hickel's "increasingly militant defence of the environment."

And let's not forget Nixon'due south veto of the Clean Water Act in October of 1972. He saw it as too expensive. The bill authorized $6 billion for sewage cleanup – less than the $10 billion he outlined in his 1970 State of the Union speech. After Congress overrode his veto, Nixon impounded the funds.

Nixon'southward public rhetoric on the environment and his private behavior were very much at odds, as historian and announcer Rick Perlstein has noted. Nixon's personal opinions were caught on tape during an Oval Role coming together with automotive executives, when he said that environmentalists wanted to "become back and alive like a agglomeration of damned animals."

Throwing conservationists a bone likewise suited some other political purpose, Perlstein observed: The environment was popular amid the same young people enraged at him for continuing the Vietnam State of war. In the end, creating the EPA was "a sort of confidence game," Perlstein said. "The new agency represented non a single new penny in federal spending for the environment. It did, however, newly concentrate bureaucracies previously scattered through vast federal bureaucracy under a single administrator loyal to the White House – the better to control them."

Nixon "wasn't personally gripped" past environmental issues, his EPA administrator, William Ruckleshaus, told the Nixon Foundation. "But he saw that he had to respond to the demand."

Nixon could have used his bourgeois clout to chart a new course in environmental regulation. He did non. The saying, at the time, was that "it took Nixon" to create the opening to Cathay, with the idea that a Democrat might have been also far to the left for such a risky strange policy initiative. But when it came to domestic diplomacy, especially the environment, Nixon never establish his opening. He only responded to demand.

Then on his 100th birthday we tin appreciate Nixon echoing the mainstream ecology back up in vogue at the time. But it would be a mistake to place Richard Nixon in the environmental Pantheon alongside Teddy Roosevelt.

———–

Beak Kovarik is a professor of journalism at Radford University in Virginia, the editor of EnvironmentalHistory.org and a contributor to The Daily Climate and Ecology Health News. A version of this essay appeared on the The Daily Climate.org, an independent, foundation-funded news service covering climatic change. Contact editor Douglas Fischer at dfischer [at] dailyclimate.org

Postscript:

Douglas E. Schoen "Richard Nixon — the last great liberal" on Jan. 9, 2022, for Play tricks News.

"Nixon was non only a fervent supporter of the Clean Air Human action, the showtime federal law designed to control air pollution on the national level; he also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. The cosmos of the EPA represented an expansion of government that would face vehement opposition were it existence debated today. The EPA is as well one of the agencies on Capitol Loma that the business community most detests—forth with the Occupational Rubber and Health Assistants, which polices working weather. OSHA is some other Nixon creation."

Of course, this is ludicrous. Congress created the EPA, OSHA and other reforms. Nixon, at all-time, was an opportunist.

On the web:

Nixon's Jan. 22, 1970 Country of the Union address: http://world wide web.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/alphabetize.php?pid=2921

Rick Perstein blog on Nixon: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/father-epa-environmentalists-bunch-damned-animals

PBS Frontline special on Nixon and the Oval Part meeting with automobile executives: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/rollover/nixon/

William Ruckleshaus quote on the Nixon Foundation Blog: http://blog.nixonfoundation.org/2010/04/richard-nixon-and-the-rise-of-the-environment/http://blog.nixonfoundation.org/2010/04/richard-nixon-and-the-rising-of-the-environment/