When Richard Nixon travels to Anchorage, Alaska, whom would he pick to mount a reception for him? Why, naturally, his former Secretary of the Interior. So Wally Hickel happily agreed to throw open his house to Nixon and entourage for a gala party featuring pate of moose.
The last time the two men saw each other was a far less convivial occasion in the White House on Nov. 25, 1970. The President looked across the Oval Room and said: "Wally, you're a strong man, and I'd like to be just as strong when I tell you what I'm going to tell you." Then Nixon fired Hickel. "I got up to leave," Hickel recalls. "I did not shake hands with the President, but not out of bitterness. I didn't think of it. I felt so clean and totally free."
Wally Hickel tells the story in his book, Who Owns America? (Prentice-Hall; $6.95), which is being released this week in Alaska and next week in the rest of the U.S. It is partly a definition of his two years as Interior Secretary, partly an exhortation for sweeping environmental reform, partly a popular politician's blunt view of the Nixon Administration. Its hallmark: an exuberant confidence in the wisdom of the American people, provided that their elected leaders present to them issues stripped of partisan politics.
Looking Up. The book has the quaint fascination of an Horatio Alger tale. Walter Joseph Hickel was born at Ellinwood, Kans., in 1919, the son of a German-American tenant farmer. As a four-year-old, he scrambled to the top of the farm's windmill to get a better view of the world. Rushing to rescue Wally, his father shouted, "Keep looking up! Keep looking up!" The advice stuck.
Hickel finished high school with "something below a C average," won a Golden Gloves championship, and left to seek his fortune. Penniless but self-confident, he arrived in Alaska in 1940. By 1953 he was a respected businessman (real estate and construction) and a leading proponent of Alaskan statehood. Though politics at first did not appeal to him ("I never was much of a joiner"), a California Republican named Richard Nixon did. Hickel worked for Nixon during the 1960 campaign and before the one in 1964. Taking time off from the national scene, he surprised everyone but himself in 1966 by being elected Alaska's first Republican Governor. Two years later, after helping Nixon win most of the West, he was rewarded with his appointment as Secretary of the Interior.
As far as anybody could see, Hickel had never shown much interest in protecting the environment. But he quickly confounded his critics. He acted to save endangered species (Florida alligators, eagles, whales), defended threatened areas like the Everglades, tried to better the lot of coal miners. Idealistic youth loved him for his disregard of party politics, and environmentalists saw him as an inspirational leader.
Of his many accomplishments, Hickel seems proudest of his successful efforts to give Indians top positions in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He fought for the return of the Blue Lake area sacred to the Taos Pueblo tribe of New Mexico. When the Indians were finally summoned to Washington to receive title to the land, one grateful elder asked: "Where's the Secretary?" Wally Hickel by then had been, in his word, "terminated."