James G. Watt, who battled environmentalists during a rancorous term as interior secretary under President Ronald Reagan and offended even some allies with the uninhibited rhetoric that ultimately drove him to resign, died May 27 in Arizona.
His family announced his death in a statement but did not cite the cause or specific location where he died.
William Turnage, the director of the Wilderness Society, declared Mr. Watt the “worst thing that ever happened to America.” Another environmental activist remarked that making him interior secretary — the steward of hundreds of millions of acres of federal land and the country’s national parks — was “like hiring a fox to guard the chickens.”
In Mr. Watt’s description, the organization was established “to fight in the courts those bureaucrats and no-growth advocates who challenge individual liberties and economic freedoms.” Among other efforts, he and his colleagues pushed to open public lands to energy exploration and sought to limit the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Mr. Watt thrilled parts of the political right with his unstinting pursuit of his mission, even as he upset some fellow Republicans, as well as his many critics on the left, with his inflammatory remarks. By his own admission, Mr. Watt went “from flap to flap.”He declared that there are two categories of people in politics — liberals and Americans — in what he later said was merely “a good one-liner.
Mr. Watt drew widespread ridicule, and the disapproval of Vice President George H.W. Bush and first lady Nancy Reagan, when he moved to ban rock music from the 1983 Independence Day celebration on the National Mall in Washington, saying that rock bands attract the “wrong element” to what should be a wholesome family event.
Mr. Watt was a talented athlete, class valedictorian and prom king at his high school; he married his prom queen, Leilani Bomgardner, in 1957, when he was 19. They had two children, but a complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
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