The rise of the modern environmental movement paralleled Jimmy Carter’s political rise; he ran for president on a platform of clean air and water and an end to the pharaonic dams that impeded the natural flow of America’s rivers and dried up the breeding grounds of hundreds of animal species in its marshes. The older environmental movement of the Sierra Club and Audubon Society, embodied in Teddy Roosevelt, focused on national parks and wilderness preservation and had some victories throughout the early part of the twentieth century and into the Nixon era. But if there was one catalyst for the modern environmental movement, it was Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, which exposed the dangers of the pesticide DDT.7
The revolutionary advance from the traditional conservation movement to a new focus on health and safety was literally ignited on June 22, 1969, when chemical discharges in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River burst into flame. This helped catalyze the modern activist environmental movement, which was marked by the first Earth Day, initiated by environmental and solar power advocate Dennis Hayes and Wisconsin Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson on April 22, 1970. It was inspired by the model of the teach-ins held by the activists opposing the Vietnam War, and developed into a middle-class movement to reverse industrial degradation by oil spills and pollutants of the air, water, rivers, wetlands, and animal habitats, imperiling the quality of life on the planet. Suddenly environmental groups organized to influence politicians to legislate and regulate on a bipartisan basis; many environmentalists were Republicans.8
President Nixon, with his ear to the ground, gave his blessing to Earth Day, and declared in his first State of the Union message: “Clean air, clean water, open spaces—these should be the birthright of every American.”9 While he did not take the lead, he signed the bills creating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. But he eviscerated funding for the EPA and tried to bottle it up.10
As governor of Georgia, Carter took on the development and construction companies, which drained wetlands for their projects, a standard procedure that had never been challenged before he took office. When he assumed office, 535 projects for draining wetlands awaited his signature. As he explained, bulldozers “would take a wandering stream through wetlands, and make a straight ditch out of it, and then the farmer could change that wetland into pastureland and eventually into cropland. And I vetoed all of them, there never was one approved.” A number of Atlanta’s biggest real estate developers also wanted to build shopping centers and homes along the Chattahoochee River—“dig up half of it and put it on top of the other half and then build stores and homes on the top.” He stopped that, too.11
Building dams and other water projects had become a very visible and politically profitable exercise after World War II, and Carter had initially supported them for power production, flood control, and recreation.12 But he slowly grew to realize that the dams came at considerable fiscal and environmental costs. From the governor’s office he learned how the sordid system worked, through a Washington alliance of political convenience between members of Congress, particularly Southern and Western Democrats; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built dams east of the Mississippi and focused on flood control and navigation; and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation, which built them in the West to generate power and irrigate agriculture. As he put it in his antipolitical way, “One of a congressman’s highest goals in life was to have built in his district a notable dam at federal government expense that would create a lake that could be named for him. The process began when a newly elected legislator went in as a junior member of Congress. He would put his name on the list to get a dam built in his district. That dam might be at the bottom of 500 dams to be constructed in America. But as the congressman got re-elected time after time, eventually his particular project would move up to the top of the list.”13
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THE WATER WARS
In his most formative environmental battle as governor, Carter took on the Corps of Engineers, which planned to build the Sprewell Bluff Dam on the Flint River, not far from his native Plains. The dam was strongly supported by the local congressman, Jack Flint, and was officially justified by supposed recreational benefits. But from Carter’s gubernatorial perspective, it would have interfered with the state’s longest remaining free-flowing river, the Flint. Fishermen and environmentalists brought him their concerns about the dam. To get a better idea of the consequences of damming up the Flint River, he canoed down the river twice and fished for shoal bass. He had become an avid canoeist and kayaker on the Chattooga River, the setting for the movie Deliverance.
Carter met with some fifty different groups, from concrete manufacturers to developers of a large recreation center planned in the area. The local chamber of commerce estimated that as many as two hundred construction jobs would be created, and more for services after the dam was built. There was no question about the position of the congressman who coincidentally actually bore the river’s name—and he was furious with Carter for even questioning the dam. But Carter used his powers as governor to stop the dam, and later got the last word. Thinking back on this seminal experience, he wrote in the river’s guidebook, “Lakes and dams are everywhere. But to experience something that is undisturbed and has its natural beauty? You hope and pray that it will be there a thousand years in the future, still just as beautiful and undisturbed.”1
During the presidential campaign Carter captured the spirit and enthusiasm of the environmental movement down to our campaign’s green-and-white colors. He had been explicit in his pledge to halt the construction of unnecessary dams and severely limit the channeling of streams and rivers, earning him the first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate by the League of Conservation Voters.2 Three strands of Jimmy Carter’s unusual political DNA came together to oppose this long-established practice: his environmental consciousness; his flinty habit of carefully watching every penny spent of taxpayer’s money; and his moralistic view of government.
As president, Carter appointed a dream environmental team, with Doug Costle at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Charles Warren and Gus Speth at the Council on Environmental Quality, and Cecil Andrus, a two-term governor of the conservative state of Idaho who had run on a strong environmental platform and taken on the mining and oil and gas industries.3 They first met in 1970 as freshman governors and helped each other in fighting the oversold projects that damaged the environment.4 Tall, lean, and balding, with a refreshing candor and a quiet, assured manner, Andrus was the embodiment of the open spaces of the West as well as one of my favorite cabinet officers. He ran his department well and was loyal to the president, even when, in a critical battle, his sage advice was ignored. Andrus left no doubt of his policy toward managing the government’s vast landholdings “in a manner that will make the three Rs—rape, ruin, and run—a thing of the past.” He asserted that he was “making sweeping policy changes to end the domination of the department by mining, oil, and special interests.…Our President is canceling the blank check which once went to those who would exploit resources and pollute the environment in the name of progress.”5
The Carter administration could hardly have sounded a clearer battle cry in what became known as the Water Wars. While many worthy projects offered great benefits to local communities by providing everything from electricity to flood control and recreation for families, the process for funding them had degenerated. Carter learned from his Sprewell Bluff experience as governor that the Corps had shifted its goals from making objective cost-benefit analyses to pleasing Congress by computing the benefits of each dam far in excess of its costs—and environmental damage was not part of the calculation. To hide the final cost of a project, congressional appropriators would first devote a small amount of money to study a project; and each year include only the current costs. For example, the Central Arizona Project to siphon off Colorado River water was started with an appropriation of approximately $1.2 million but its full constructi
on cost in today’s dollars was more than $1 billion. And once construction started, the game was over and could not be stopped. Efforts going back to the 1950s to extract water projects from the pork barrel and subject them to rational economic calculations had largely failed.6
Carter was determined to reassert strict criteria to judge water projects and put a lid on the federal pork barrel. Even before his inauguration, the president-elect tried to transpose his experience with the Sprewell Bluff Dam to the hundreds of water projects awaiting funding in the Congress. He was about to learn that he had been playing in the minor leagues with one single dam, and to appreciate New York senator Pat Moynihan’s admonition that in the big leagues, water projects were an “extraordinarily important subject” championed by powerful members of Congress: “You can live without oil and even without love, but you cannot live without water.”7 With his victory over the Sprewell Bluff Dam in mind, he was ready to join battle. As he later wrote, “I began to question those dams. As President, I had the prerogative to veto them, and I began to do that. I wasn’t a dictator, and I have to admit that some of the ill-advised projects were approved. But, overwhelmingly, they were disapproved. It created one of the most difficult confrontations between me and members of Congress of anything I did while I was in office.”8
Carter had an enormous, almost unprecedented opportunity. Although he had barely won, the Democrats in Congress were swelled by the “Watergate babies” elected in 1974 and 1976, many from traditionally Republican districts, still recoiling from the Nixon administration scandals. In the House there were 292 Democrats to only 143 Republicans, one of the most heavily Democratic in modern times. The Senate was a filibuster-proof 62 to 38 Democratic.
But even with a friendly Congress, there are only so many issues a new president can press. Yet in his early months in office he proposed a blizzard of bills. Some were a must, like an economic recovery program. He used his early political capital on enacting a comprehensive energy package, which was highly divisive but critical for the long-term security of the country. But he added welfare reform; a bill to restrain hospital costs; and he was now frittering away precious political capital on the marginal issue of water projects, rather than seeking other long-term priorities of the Democratic Party like national health insurance, which he had endorsed in general terms during the campaign.
But wasn’t tackling water projects a prime example of what Carter had campaigned against: pork-barrel spending that despoiled the environment and cost taxpayers billions? Wasn’t he elected to change the status quo and to shake up Washington? Yes, but the way it was done led to catastrophic results. The president’s head-on attack on an extraordinarily contentious issue exposed every weakness of the new administration. Lacking both his own Washington experience and his staff’s, the new president pressed ahead in the belief that he could act on dozens of water projects at the congressional level in the same way he had stopped the Sprewell Bluff Dam, by refusing to sign off on the Corps’ plan as governor of Georgia. Politically he lost in every way possible way. The senior House and Senate leaders found their cherished water projects under attack. The younger members who joined his crusade climbed out on a limb with him at the risk of their own futures, only to find it sawed off by the compromising old guard. The environmental community backed him only to find he folded at the last minute.
During the campaign Carter had asked Jack Watson to develop policy proposals so he could hit the ground running if he was elected. Watson knew little about water projects but did know of Carter’s experience with the Sprewell Bluff Dam, and Watson’s transition team was loaded with environmental advocates. He asked Kathy Fletcher, a scientist who had worked with the Environmental Defense Fund and later joined my Domestic Policy Staff, to contribute to a briefing book for the incoming Interior secretary that would pull together a list of water projects that were suspect in terms of their environmental impacts and cost. After the election they worked with Don Crabill, a career budget official who had been waiting for a president like Carter for years. He handed them a ready-made list of some fifty suspect water projects compiled by OMB over the years, which failed to meet a cost-benefit analysis.9 His was no lone voice: It seemed that everyone in the field had a list of suspect projects, so there was not just one list but many. One list of thirty-five projects had been compiled by Kathy Fletcher herself, and even the Corps of Engineers knew of thirty-seven that did not meet cost-benefit standards. The lists were so loosely protected that during the transition period the briefing book fell into the hands of a private-sector lobbyist, David Wyman, who passed it on to Andrus’s top policy assistant, Guy Martin, by simply knocking on his hotel room door and handing it to him.10
* * *
It is difficult to imagine a single meeting in which so much political damage was done to an incoming president by his own hand than the one during the transition on December 9, 1976, when we reviewed the transition team’s recommendations for energy and the environment with the president-elect. He compounded the problem of trying to rush the development of a comprehensive energy plan within 90 days of his inauguration by instructing his incoming budget officials to identify wasteful and environmentally damaging projects and to “cut back on the water resources budget” for the coming fiscal year.11 An immediate problem was that we had only one month to change the outgoing Ford administration’s budget proposals for the forthcoming fiscal year. This left no time, even if there had been an inclination, to test congressional sentiment.
His haste precluded a careful decision-making process within the administration and shut out Congress, whose sacred cows were slaughtered in secret. Capitol Hill got information only from news leaks, many based on the multifarious lists. The budget office barons worked furiously together to assemble an authoritative list but decided not to share Crabill’s carefully argued list lest Carter go with this “macho solution,” and try to kill all the projects at once to demonstrate how decisive he was on tough issues. So they whittled it down, but Carter made it clear he wanted more. In a follow-up meeting they reluctantly showed him the whole list and he embraced it.12
There is much blame to go around for all of us involved in this process, but this was not driven by a few in-house environmentalists or long-standing budget hawks somewhere down the pecking order, but by Jimmy Carter himself. Leaks about the water projects were the bane of our existence. The process quickly developed the momentum of a runaway train. A leaked copy of the briefing book with its threatened projects was given to a reporter in Andrus’s home state of Idaho who coined the term “hit list.” That made the early decision to swing for the fences very difficult to back away from, and from the start put the administration in a defensive battle with the press and Congress. Even as we tried to refine the hit list with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Reclamation Bureau, they immediately leaked it to their congressional patrons.13
FIRST SHOTS
Thomas Bevill, a tall, handsome, stoop-shouldered, soft-spoken congressman from Alabama, was the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. Unfailingly courteous, this conservative Democrat was nevertheless fiercely determined to preserve his own and the Congress’s prerogatives of the purse over water projects. Even liberal members felt that there was almost a constitutional right for Congress to approve water projects without interference from the president. Jim Free, one of our best White House lobbyists on the Hill, was passing by the Public Works Committee Room and noticed several high-ranking officers of the Corps talking with Ray Roberts, another powerful congressman who never met a water project he did not favor. He eavesdropped long enough to overhear them laughing about how they were going to beat us at our own game. Battle lines were forming.14 Kathy Fletcher was said to have met with environmentalists and passed out a list of forty-five water projects marked P or F—pass or fail. The president was outraged and asked me to investigate, and although she was exonerated after a thorough review by me and
my two deputies, Bert Carp and David Rubenstein, the leaks continued and made an already complicated problem even greater.15
Andrus meanwhile sent the president a memorandum on thirty-five water projects that he agreed were dubious and deserved to be canceled “if political problems can be overcome”—as he ominously warned. Rather than trying to bundle them all into the administration’s forthcoming budget, he urged the president first to develop a more rational system, with “improved planning, current discount rates, and more equitable cost-sharing responsibly” so that local communities would share the cost of each project—and possibly think twice about whether they were really needed. He targeted four dubious Western projects under his jurisdiction for review, and wrote, “Mr. President, let me stress again what I mentioned in the Cabinet meeting this morning: If we attempt to alter any of these projects for whatever reason, our action will act as a catalyst to create political coalitions in the Congress. I am not arguing against eliminating some of these projects—some definitely merit action—but I want you to know that there will be political retaliation from the Congress when we do.” Andrus urged instead that four or five of the worst projects should be singled out so the attention could be focused only on them. This memo, sent only some three weeks after Carter’s inauguration, was as blunt a warning as a cabinet officer can give. Mondale concurred, but they were ignored, even though Andrus repeated it before the entire cabinet.16 Senate Majority Leader Byrd, who agreed that many were “obsolete and unnecessary,” believed like Andrus that the president should pick out a few of the worst projects and marshal “his forces against the worst excesses of the pork barrel,” rather than take on the whole package, alienating more members than he attracted.17
President Carter Page 31