James Watt, the Reagan administration's sharp-tongued, pro-development interior secretary who was beloved by conservatives but ran afoul of environmentalists, Beach Boys fans and eventually the president, has died. He was 85.
In an administration divided between so-called pragmatists and hard-liners, few stood as far to the right at the time as Watt, who once labeled the environmental movement as “preservation vs. people” and the general public as a clash between “liberals and Americans.”
Watt and his supporters saw him as an upholder of President Ronald Reagan’s core conservative values, but opponents were alarmed by his policies and offended by his comments.
In his 1985 book “The Courage of a Conservative,” Watt wrote that the controversy “actually arose because I was a conservative. Members of a liberal press saw an opportunity to create a controversy by censoring the facts and avoiding the real issues.” He said the initial stories about the rock music ban “only mentioned that the Beach Boys had performed in the past. Yet before we knew what was happening, banner headlines proclaimed that I had banned the Beach Boys. I was astonished.
Watt did spend $1 billion to restore and improve national parks and added 2,800 square miles to the nation’s wilderness system. And his efforts to exploit natural resources made America stronger, he wrote to Reagan in October 1983. “I had outworn my usefulness,” Watt said of his decision, adding that others “wouldn’t get off my case” about his insulting coal advisory panel comment.
He did consulting work after leaving the Reagan administration, at one point turning heads when he agreed to represent Indian tribes in oil operations and hotel developments after previously labeling Indian reservations “the failure of socialism.” He also accepted six-figure consulting fees to represent developers of a federally subsidized housing project.
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