The Firing of a Fighter

A certain bureaucratic politesse muffles most premature departures from an Administration. By mutual agreement, Cabinet officers make their exits murmuring about personal reasons or the completion of their assignment. The President protests his deep regret. No such charade disguised the exit last week of Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel.

The Secretary was attending a budget-making session in the Executive Office Building when White House Aide John Whitaker informed him of a presidential summons. When Hickel left the room, Whitaker told the others: "The Secretary won't be back." Presidential Assistant John Ehrlichman sat in for most of the 25-minute meeting in the Oval Office. Nixon dislikes such confrontations. For months the President and other members of the Administration had subjected Hickel to almost systematic pressures and slights designed to make him feel sufficiently unwelcome to resign. Now Nixon, after the briefest pleasantries, came to the point: he wanted Hickel's resignation, "effective immediately." Hickel did not protest. He recited what he judged to be his accomplishments in his 22 months at Interior, then took a frosty leave. Later the White House summarily fired six of Hickel's ranking aides.

Not since Harry Truman jettisoned his Secretary of Commerce, Henry Wallace, in 1946, had there been such a publicly bitter parting in a presidential family. Back at Interior, Hickel summoned reporters and announced tensely: "The President personally terminated me about two hours ago." His unapologetic explanation for his career at Interior: "Trying to do a job for the President and for all Americans, and still survive as an individual. I had to do it my way." Nixon left it to Press Secretary Ron Ziegler to report his reasons: "The President feels that the required elements for a good and continued relationship--which must exist between a President and his Cabinet members --simply do not exist in this case."

Last Is First. Wally Hickel. Golden Gloves champ in Kansas, self-made millionaire and first Republican Governor of Alaska, came to Washington with the reputation of a truculent and provincial booster, about as salubrious as an enzyme detergent. Conservationists winced at what became known as "Hickelisms." There is not much point, he said then, in "conservation for conservation's sake." Or: "If you set water pollution standards too high, you might hinder industrial development." When he became the last member of the Cabinet to gain confirmation, Nixon said heartily: "The last shall be first as far as this Administration is concerned."

Hickel soon proved that he possessed the "extra dimension" that Nixon ascribed to all his department heads. Only days after he took office, an oil blowout began fouling the waters of the Santa Barbara Channel. Hickel refused to order the drilling stopped, then visited the scene and reversed his decision. Later he prompted costly lawsuits against the Chevron Oil Co. after oil fires along the Louisiana coast. Said Hickel: "I found the man who pulled the plug." At Hickel's instigation, the Justice Department also sued eight companies accused of contaminating navigable waters with mercury. Despite a parochial interest in seeing a trans-Alaska pipeline laid to the North Slope, Hickel delayed the project for nearly a year, demanding that oil companies devise a pipeline system that would do minimum damage to the fragile Alaskan tundra.

Pure Alaska. It was only two days before he was cashiered that Hickel became the first Secretary of the Interior to use the official Endangered Species List before--not after--a species was virtually extinct. By putting eight species of whales on the list, Hickel banned imports to the U.S. of nearly all whale products (meat for pet food, oil for cosmetics, shoe polish, margarine). "Hickel has chosen to make the list preventive rather than commemorative," said Roderick Cameron, head of the Environmental Defense Fund. Two days after Hickel was fired, the White House rescinded the order.

Some suspected that oil interests offended by Hickel had pressured the White House. But there is no evidence of that. If anything, oil companies would have preferred to have Hickel stay for the time being, since he was on the verge of reaching an accommodation on the Alaskan pipeline.

Hickel's trouble with Nixon, the issue that led to his firing, had to do with politics, personality and style. Hickel's manner is pure Alaska --up front, assertive, raw. As a Governor, he was used to command, and the role of Nixon's subaltern did not suit him. Whatever his initial political stereotype, Hickel shattered it last May 6 when, in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings and the Cambodian expedition, he wrote to Nixon--having failed to gain a private hearing--to criticize the President for alienating himself from the young. No one has admitted leaking the message to the press, but it was doubtless a mistake, striking Nixon from behind at a moment when he was troubled and vulnerable.

Saint or Pariah. Abruptly, the letter made Hickel a sort of Establishment saint to many students and a pariah at the White House. Nixon did not object to the criticism, but to the fact that it was leaked to the press even before it arrived in the Oval Office. Says one White House aide: "The President thought it was an effort to embarrass him personally, and he never got over it. He never trusted the man after that."

The Nixon-Agnew style during this fall's campaign further estranged Hickel. He campaigned for Republican candidates in 15 states, but he did not bother to disguise his contempt for what he privately called the G.O.P.'s "polarizing" tactics. After Democrat Edmund Muskie made his nationally televised election-eve speech, Hickel wrote him a letter of congratulation. On election night, Hickel joined other Cabinet members at Spiro Agnew's Washington apartment to watch the returns. By Hickel's account, Agnew listened to the news about candidates he had successfully worked against and paced back and forth, crowing: "We killed that son of a bitch. We killed that son of a bitch." Says Hickel: "When I got home from that, I was physically sick. I was nauseated."

Hickel persists in believing that he was done in not so much by Nixon's animosity as by the men who surround the President, for example, Political Adviser Murray Chotiner and Presidential Assistant H.R. Haldeman. Complains Hickel: "Small men get around big men. I never hire down. I hire up." But Nixon obviously believed that Hickel had long since crossed a Cabinet officer's line of loyalty by trying to establish for himself an unacceptable degree of independence and a personal constituency. Says Hickel on that point: "I guess I was looking too good. It's like what Kipling said: 'Don't look too good nor talk too wise.' " Assessing Nixon, Hickel declares: "The President is brilliant as an analyst: he can run any problem through quickly. He's like a computer, but he lacks that heart with an antenna. He lacks the touch." Nixon's choice as Hickel's successor was Republican National Chairman Rogers C.B. Morton, a four-term Maryland Congressman whose politics are not unlike Hickel's. Though he was much less demonstrative about it, Morton found Agnew's flailings this fall repellent. Morton enjoys at least some reputation as an environmentalist. In fact, Arizona's Representative Morris Udall, whose brother Stewart was a conservationist's paragon as Interior Secretary under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, suggested last week that Nixon should have appointed Morton in the first place.

Another of Nixon's personnel arrangements seemed up in the air last week. No sooner was Hickel dismissed than Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a presidential Counsellor, decided that he would return to Harvard after all, rather than accept the ambassadorship to the United Nations. Moynihan agreed to take the post several weeks ago in private; the news was leaked, to the considerable embarrassment of the current ambassador, Charles Yost. Says Moynihan ruefully: "Charlie Yost found out about it as he walked into a General Assembly meeting. A reporter walked up and told him he'd been fired. I just felt that was something you couldn't allow to stand." For that, and other quite genuine "personal reasons"--principally his family's strong desire to live in Cambridge rather than Manhattan--Moynihan changed his mind. In leaving, Democrat Moynihan--unlike Republican Hickel--had only praise for the President.

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