Always Right and Ready to Fight

By KURT ANDERSEN

With James Watt in charge, the Interior Department means business

When James Gaius Watt was in the third grade in Lusk, Wyo. (pop. 1,800), his mother organized a club called the Five Rabbits, which consisted of the five Watts. "We'd elect officers," says Lois Watt, now 71, "and the kid that got to be president held office for a month." That formality, Lois Watt says, was the way she and her husband William, now 75, "trained the children how to make motions, make amendments and so on." It was the right of each child, while president, to set the Five Rabbits' agenda. The girls, Elizabeth and Judith, would usually opt to lead family sing-alongs or recite poems. Not James, the serious middle child. "Jim," remembers his mother, "would like to make speeches." Today? "He has high ideals," she says, "and doesn't deviate an inch."

Indeed, Interior Secretary James Watt, 44, has lost none of that astringent seriousness of his Wyoming boyhood. Even more, he still seems powered by youth's missionary energy, the sense of absolute righteousness that maturity usually softens. "It is really very simple," Watt says of his really very complex duties as manager of the Government's 1.5 billion acres of land and water. "America must have abundant energy if we are to secure our freedom and liberty and create jobs." For Watt, that means a rather sudden, gear-grinding tilt toward private exploitation of Government-owned natural resources, toward drilling and mining and away from a supposedly too scrupulous preservation of nature.

Watt is the most controversial member of Reagan's Cabinet (every major conservation group and 40 members of Congress have called for his resignation) and probably the farthest right. Like the President, Watt is, above all, bent on reducing the power of the Federal Government. The anger he incites, however, stems not just from his prodevelopment, "free-market" policies at Interior but also from his preachy, pugnacious style. "Jim Watt just stimulates every single emotion," says Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, one of the Secretary's oldest friends. "People flunk the saliva test when they think of him: there he is, with this great, leering grin . . ." Demonstrators taunt him everywhere he goes.

Even Watt's allies in business and Government think his provocative rhetoric and willful manner are sometimes counterproductive. And perhaps because Watt, as Simpson says, "is convinced that he has God on his side," he can hardly bring himself to make even a pretense of accommodation. "There are some people," Watt says about his huge mob of critics, "who will never be brought around to my philosophy. And I pray I never yield to their positions. They are wrong."

Watt's path from the arid high plains of eastern Wyoming to Washington power was straight and narrow. Rarely are roots so plainly important in shaping values and an outlook. William Watt set up his legal practice in Lusk in 1937; James was born the next year. The Depression was lingering on, but Lusk was lucky: a big oil find 20 miles away created a pocket of prosperity. The influx of oilfield roughnecks made nearby Lance Creek "kind of a freewheeling town," a family friend recalls, and the roustabout carousing might have been a natural source of criminal clients for Attorney Watt. According to the friend, however, "he was so religious that it characterized his business. A lot of people who got in trouble with the law didn't want a lawyer who they thought was a pretty tough cookie himself."

Jim was an exceptionally good boy. He was a Boy Scout (but only a tenderfoot) and always near the top of his class. He was an enthusiastic athlete despite his poor eyesight. He did his chores. "I grew up on a ranch," Watt has said, and he did, after a fashion: for three summers, he shipped out to work on his uncle's 7,000-acre spread. "It was," his father says, "a way to see how the other half lived."

When Jim was twelve, the Watts moved 100 miles to Wheatland (pop. 2,200), a farming town they considered more durably prosperous than Lusk. Their son was the same old Jim. Even on weekend nights, his father remembers, the Wheatland High School valedictorian "would be in there doing his studies while the other boys were out on the town. They used to kid him a lot." When he would join his buddies for a drive, Jim apparently resisted unwholesome peer-group pressure. Says his mother: "If the other kids had beer in the car, he would decide to come home."

Just before his senior year Watt was named Wyoming's "outstanding male high school student"; his female counterpart was another Wheatlander, Leilani Bomgardner. Two years later the pair, both then at the University of Wyoming, were married. Their two children, Eric, 20, and Erin, 22, are today undergraduates at Tulsa's Fundamentalist Oral Roberts University.

Watt's politics, like his ramrod Christian morality, were firmly set before he left home. "You could see the New Deal, the left wing taking over," his father recalls. "We were Republican, rabid Republican."

In college Watt remained diligently on track. He was president of the honor society for three years and an honors graduate. Recalls a fraternity brother: "He was not a hell raiser. He never drank." He still abstains from liquor and coffee.

Watt stayed on in Laramie to get a law degree, went to work for the successful Senate campaign of Conservative Milward Simpson, the current Senator's father, and then to Washington for a four-year stint as Simpson's legislative aide. Says a member of Watt's staff: "It is important to remember that he worked for a western Republican during the formative years of the Great Society. Such people were treated like manure by those in power. Watt hasn't forgotten that." His feelings of resentment, the aide believes account for some of Watt's environmentalist-baiting vigor.

Over eleven years Watt held Washington jobs that honed his expertise and his ideology. As a U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbyist, he worked to defeat all manner of environmental regulation. In the Nixon and Ford Administrations he served a well-rounded apprenticeship: as an Interior deputy in charge of water management, as director of the department's land-buying Bureau of Outdoor Recreation and, finally, as a federal power commissioner. As a result, Secretary Watt's technical mastery of his job is positively staggering.

In 1977 Watt returned West to become the first president of the Denver-based Mountain States Legal Foundation, a "public interest" law firm underwritten by conservative Western businessmen. Under Watt, Mountain States went to court to fight against discount utility rates for elderly and disabled people in Colorado, federal strip-mining regulations, a plan to designate part of a Wyoming oilfield a protected wilderness area and a National Park Service ban on motorized rafts in the Grand Canyon. "When Jim believes he's right, he's a man of action," says Lawyer William Mellor III, who worked for Watt in Denver. Another Mountain States lawyer, Kea Bardeen, explains Watt's rationale: "He believes that if you make a decision and it's a mistake, you can always go back and fix it."

In the conservation vs. development debate, the impact of today's policies will not be fully apparent for decades. It is that very uncertainty that has led Interior policymakers to err on the side of preservation and caution. Because Watt's radical course carries with it the risk of irrevocability--lands cannot be unsold, offshore oil wells undrilled nor sullied wilderness made virginal again--his department is no longer a quaint political backwater. For better or worse, Watt's Interior stewardship may be the century's most significant. Among his controversial moves:

Offshore Oil Leasing. Watt is opening up to oil companies nearly all 1 billion acres of U.S. coastal waters, 25 times that offered since the program began in 1954. Critics say that the risks of oil spills and other environmental damage will be grave and that the massive enterprise is beyond the oil industry's technical and financial means.

Land Leasing. Under Watt the federal acreage leased for oil exploration has more than doubled; land leased to coal companies has quintupled. Conservationists worry, for example, about the lease hastily granted last fall for drilling beneath New Mexico's Capitan Wilderness. Critics also say it is unwise to auction coal properties during a market glut.

Wilderness. Under current laws, the 80 million acres of pristine U.S. wilderness will be permanently closed to any new mining and drilling leases after next year. Watt has proposed modifying the ban: in 18 years all wilderness lands would become available for exploitation. (Last week the House unequivocally rejected Watt's plan. It voted 340 to 58 to outlaw most wilderness leasing immediately and the remainder on schedule, in 1984.)

Opposition to these initiatives is loud and occasionally overwrought. "James Watt is sneaky and malicious," says William Turnage, executive director of the Wilderness Society. "He's the worst thing that ever happened to this country." On a few other issues, the criticism is less vituperative, and Watt's defenses are more solid and more temperate. Some people oppose his moratorium on the Government purchase of new land for parks, for example, but Watt believes it is more urgent to remedy the "deplorable" conditions of existing facilities. Indeed, Interior's budget for park improvements has nearly doubled under Watt: the sewage system at Yosemite is being rebuilt at a cost of $4.6 million, and Yellowstone tourist facilities are undergoing a $7.6 million renovation.

But such bits of unassailable work are usually lost amid the Watt bombast and anti-Watt bombast. He claims to wish that opponents would "sit down and intellectually discuss a subject with me instead of screaming." Yet in fact, Watt's antipathy for environmentalists, whom he dismisses as "left-wingers," practically precludes any such sober give and take. "Jim Watt did not make an honest attempt to come to terms with our concerns," says Jay Hair, executive vice president of the largely Republican National Wildlife Federation. "He kicked us out and slammed the door behind us."

Watt admits as much. After all, he says, "I have never had criticism from anybody I really respect." The problem is that for Watt, criticism and respect seem almost mutually exclusive. But even some allies have lost patience with Watt's combative bent. They regret, among other things, the political costs of Watt's proposal that snowmobiles and motorbikes be more widely permitted in national parks.

For his part, the Secretary contends that the truculence has been necessary to beat back an "inherited program that was so far in left field, I had to shock the staff" -- if not the public -- "to bring about the changes we wanted." He smiles. "Some time I hope to write a book: 'The Theatrics of Management.' " Some of his theatrics have given pause to Administration political advisers, although apparently not to Reagan, and Watt says the White House has never told him to shut up.

Watt still enjoys widespread support and even adulation in most of the West, where indeed Interior policies have their greatest impact. Ranchers, who often graze their herds on federal lands, are pleased that Watt has given more authority to local bureaucrats, who they feel administer grazing rights most sympathetically.

Senator Simpson thinks Watt will keep his job as long as he wants it. But he understands his friend's central problem: inflexibility of almost heroic proportions. "He has never been in [electoral] politics," Simpson explains. "He has never been through the forging process when you're getting your hide torn off, and you have something you really believe in. He has never learned how you compromise on an issue without compromising yourself."

Another Republican, a former senior Interior official, is less charitable. He agrees that "Watt is a bright, articulate, God-fearing man." But each virtue has a dark side: "He is also narrow, vindictive and arrogant." Unfortunately for Watt, it is the latter qualities for which he has become best known; it looks as though his antagonists will have James Watt to kick around for some time to come. And he them.

-- By Kurt Andersen.

Reported by Steven Holmes/ Los Angeles and Gary Lee/ Washington

With reporting by Steven Holmes, Gary Lee

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