Daily Climate - A Green Richard Nixon? Guess Again.

[hatrack]

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Nixon won the presidency in 1968, when environmentalism was ascendant: Waterways were catching fire, lead poisoning was epidemic, skies were choked with smoke and rivers were dangerous to touch. Some 20 million people joined the first Earth Day protests in 1970. No one doubted the gravity of the problems; there was no serious anti-environmental movement at the time, and the long legacy of Congressional hearings on pollution issues in the 1950s and 60s – especially those chaired by Sen. Edmund Muskie, D-Maine – had built momentum towards environmental regulation and industrial reform. Nixon, simply by going along with the agenda, easily crafted a positive record.

True, Nixon did encourage and sign key pieces of legislation, such as the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. He signed the enabling act consolidating several federal agencies into the Environmental Protection Agency. He extended the Clean Air Act. In all, he inked 14 major pieces of legislation protecting the environment.
Back seat to China

Yet these were not terribly significant for Nixon himself. In the context of the times, domestic issues like the environment took a distant back seat to the Vietnam war and the new policy towards China. As a result, Nixon's rhetoric could be pro-environmental on a general level without compromising more important foreign policy initiatives.

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Nixon's public rhetoric on the environment and his private beliefs were very much at odds, as historian and journalist Rick Perlstein has noted. Nixon's personal opinions were caught on tape during an Oval Office meeting with automotive executives, when he said that environmentalists wanted to "go back and live like a bunch of damned animals." Throwing conservationists a bone also suited another political purpose, Perlstein observed: The environment was popular among the same young people enraged at him for continuing the Vietnam War. In the end, creating the EPA was "a sort of confidence game," Perlstein said. "The new agency represented not a single new penny in federal spending for the environment. It did, however, newly concentrate bureaucracies previously scattered through vast federal bureaucracy under a single administrator loyal to the White House – the better to control them."

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http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/01/nixon-at-100

[pscot]

1. Pearlstein's book is worth reading

Nixon's whole life was a sort of confidence game.