Zealous Lord of a Vast Domain

(2 of 3)

In his wood-paneled office last week, with his favorite oil painting of a bald eagle on the wall, Watt still seemed like the raw boy from his windy prairie country of southeast Wyoming. Long-legged in his gray plaid suit, he ambled down the hall and pointed out the huge office where Harold Ickes used to work in F.D.R.'s day and remarked that he could never be comfortable there. Back in his own much smaller suite, he stretched out and began talking about his job, about his goals, about himself. As he spoke, he gradually became more emphatic, some times doubling his fist as he stressed his points. "If I don't come down hard on these things," he said, "nothing will move." He said he wasted little time listening to the attacks of his critics. "These people are committed to destroying what I want to achieve and that means destroying me," he said, with the air of a man who will not let it happen.

He is supported strongly, he stressed, by a powerful religious faith. His own born-again experience, he said, had taken place in 1964 at a gospel meeting of businessmen in Washington. "My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures," he says, "which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns." Those biblical admonitions, Watt explained, require a balance between utilization and preservation.

He stressed America's need to break its dependence on foreign resources, to search now for oil and minerals in order to prevent the inevitable panic rush on lands later if those resources were shut off. He insists that regulatory interference has blocked such development, that the Interior Department has been arrogant and offensive, a poor landlord. Watt has already cut way back on enforcement and investigative personnel, and conservationists are frankly worried. Says one: "Now the environmental reviews and other checks simply won't get done. That's how these developers will get past the regulation barricades."

Talking about his opponents, Watt sounded combative, and his hide showed patches of thinness as he talked of a meeting he had just held with environmentalists. His temper had spilled over, and he had accused the others in the room of deliberately poisoning his reputation. The men present were so astonished at his fury that one of them, Bill Butler of the Audubon Society, warned his staff that Watt was too hostile to deal with right now. There were a couple of wildlife representatives at the meeting, and at one point, during a discussion about predators, Watt made no effort to conceal his strong feelings that coyotes should be largely killed off. "Maybe we can get Mrs. Reagan to wear a coyote coat," he said in a clumsy effort at a joke, noting that trappers and bounty hunters would get more business. The wildlife men winced.