Word: interior
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Interior bureaucrats also expect the glare of public attention on the department to soften under Clark. Watt's public remarks got in the way of gaining broad support for his policies. As one department official puts it: "He's a great fella, but why did he have to shoot his mouth off like that?" Though Clark may be far less vocal, Interior aides expect him to be an aggressive boss, despite his inexperience with environmental issues. On the other hand, no radical shifts in policy are expected. Says one department veteran: "Reagan and Watt didn't have...
...Janet Brown, executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund: "Maybe it's better he start with no opinion than the opinions James Watt started with." One thing seems certain: Clark may have been fatigued at NSC, but he will not be able to rest, free of controversy, at Interior...
...resignation: long before his crack about "a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple," Watt had said that the electorate is composed of "liberals and Americans" and that Beach Boys fans are riffraff. But Watt did more than just make inflammatory pronouncements. He pushed through radical changes in Interior policy, most of which are likely to endure at least as long as Ronald Reagan is President. And some elements of the Watt legacy are irrevocable...
Watt's policies broke dramatically with those Interior had pursued under both Democratic and Republican Administrations. He veered hard to the right, away from unalloyed concern for environmental preservation, and toward commercial use of the Government's vast land holdings. Remarkably, he wrought deep changes mainly without changing laws; his tools were budgetary finesse, regulatory manipulation and personnel shifts. "He was a consummate bureaucrat," says National Wildlife Federation Executive Lynn Greenwalt, an erstwhile Watt colleague at Interior. "He knew how to make a big, sprawling agency do what he wanted." Watt's trouble was that he tended...
DIED. Wayne Aspinall, 87, crusty Democratic Congressman from Colorado who during twelve terms (1949-72) fought for Western development, dominating the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee for 14 years; of prostate cancer; in Palisade, Colo. Although instrumental in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 1965 Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, he drew fire from environmentalists for his multiple-use policies that kept open public lands for mining, grazing, timbering and oil exploration...