The speech took six months to prepare. Its content was so important and complex that key Administration officials including Foreign Affairs Adviser Henry Kissinger, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Ruckelshaus and Treasury Secretary George Shultz spent long hours contributing their expertise to it. Despite all the time and talent expended, however, President Nixon's special message on energy was somewhat disappointing. For a nation that has only 6% of the world's population, yet consumes one-third of the global energy production, it simply did not go far enough.
Critics in Congress and elsewhere lost no time in pointing out the glaring deficiencies in the...