With James Watt in charge, the Interior Department means business
When James Gaius Watt was in the third grade in Lusk, Wyo. (pop. 1,800), his mother organized a club called the Five Rabbits, which consisted of the five Watts. "We'd elect officers," says Lois Watt, now 71, "and the kid that got to be president held office for a month." That formality, Lois Watt says, was the way she and her husband William, now 75, "trained the children how to make motions, make amendments and so on." It was the right of each child, while president, to set the Five Rabbits' agenda. The girls, Elizabeth and Judith, would usually opt to lead family sing-alongs or recite poems. Not James, the serious middle child. "Jim," remembers his mother, "would like to make speeches." Today? "He has high ideals," she says, "and doesn't deviate an inch."
Indeed, Interior Secretary James Watt, 44, has lost none of that astringent seriousness of his Wyoming boyhood. Even more, he still seems powered by youth's missionary energy, the sense of absolute righteousness that maturity usually softens. "It is really very simple," Watt says of his really very complex duties as manager of the Government's 1.5 billion acres of land and water. "America must have abundant energy if we are to secure our freedom and liberty and create jobs." For Watt, that means a rather sudden, gear-grinding tilt toward private exploitation of Government-owned natural resources, toward drilling and mining and away from a supposedly too scrupulous preservation of nature.
Watt is the most controversial member of Reagan's Cabinet (every major conservation group and 40 members of Congress have called for his resignation) and probably the farthest right. Like the President, Watt is, above all, bent on reducing the power of the Federal Government. The anger he incites, however, stems not just from his prodevelopment, "free-market" policies at Interior but also from his preachy, pugnacious style. "Jim Watt just stimulates every single emotion," says Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, one of the Secretary's oldest friends. "People flunk the saliva test when they think of him: there he is, with this great, leering grin . . ." Demonstrators taunt him everywhere he goes.
Even Watt's allies in business and Government think his provocative rhetoric and willful manner are sometimes counterproductive. And perhaps because Watt, as Simpson says, "is convinced that he has God on his side," he can hardly bring himself to make even a pretense of accommodation. "There are some people," Watt says about his huge mob of critics, "who will never be brought around to my philosophy. And I pray I never yield to their positions. They are wrong."