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By Root 1661 0

like Ronald Reagan’s chemical-industry people taking over the EPA. His Interior Secretary, Cecil Andrus, had been governor of Idaho and, before that, a sawmill owner; but Andrus was a stranger to Washington, and he had made a reputation in Idaho as an unusually conservation-minded governor from a state full of millionaire sheep ranchers and irrigation farmers. Andrus’s Assistant Secretary, Guy Martin, looked like a bearded logger, but he was a lawyer and made a reputation as a politically canny resources director under another conservationist governor, Jay Hammond of Alaska. The first head of Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality was Charles Warren, probably the most active conservationist in the California legislature. One of the other members, later chairman, was Gus Speth, a lawyer from the archconservationist Natural Resources Defense Council. Speth was a Yale-educated Rhodes Scholar from Orangeburg, South Carolina, who had a dense drawl, resplendent southern charm, and Carter’s ear on water projects and nuclear energy, which he had fought relentlessly at NRDC. Katherine Fletcher, a scientist with the equally archconservationist Environmental Defense Fund, became a natural resource specialist under Stuart Eizenstat, the head of Carter’s domestic policy staff. In the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department were a dozen more high- and middle-level appointees pulled off the environmental organizations’ staffs. All of the conservation groups were, of course, beside themselves with glee to lose so many people to Carter. In view of the astonished anger that greeted the appointments among the entrenched committees in Congress, however, they may have been one of the worst mistakes Carter made.

Long before the inauguration, Carter’s domestic policy staff, under Eizenstat, was working up alternatives to the Ford budget it had inherited for fiscal year 1978. Since Carter’s most dramatic campaign promise had been to balance the federal budget by the end of his first term, he needed to make substantial cuts right away; besides that, like many new Presidents, he wanted to inaugurate his term by doing something bold. In a series of memoranda, Eizenstat gave him his options. There weren’t many. Most of the budget was soaked up by defense and the entitlement programs, and it seemed impossible to touch the discretionary part of the budget without ruffling the feathers of some large interest group. In February of 1977, on a working weekend, Carter flew to Georgia for the first time aboard the “Doomsday plane”—the jet from which the President is supposed to run the country, or what is left of it, in the event of a nuclear war. His reading material was the Eizenstat issue paper on water projects. Sitting there, imagining himself running an incinerated nation from an airplane, Carter worked himself into a negative mood. As he flipped through Eizenstat’s memo, which was written largely by Kathy Fletcher, Carter began to smolder. “There is no coherent federal water resources management policy,” he read. “... extensive overlap of agency activities ... several million acres of productive agricultural and forest land and commercial and sport fisheries [have been ruined] while [other] large expenditures have been made to protect these resources ... overlapping and conflicting missions ... large-scale destruction of natural ecosystems ... ‘the pork barrel’ ... obsolete standards ... self-serving ... pressure from special interests.” By the time he returned from Georgia, according to one of his aides, he knew how he was going to make his big splash. He called up his chief lobbyist, Frank Moore, and told him to put Congress on notice that he wanted to cut all funding for nineteen water projects. That same day, Cecil Andrus, who knew nothing of this, stepped on a plane and flew off to Denver for a western governors’ conference on that year’s severe drought.

The incident demonstrated a characteristic that was to plague the Carter administration for the rest of its term—a capacity for mind-boggling political naivete. That the