Letting go of a trope and seeing a human

In my youth, my environmentalism was less encumbered by knowledge than now. Passion outweighed perspective. In that time, Ronald Reagan's Interior Secretary James Watt was a symbol of everything wrong with governmental environmentalism.

I cannot say I have ever come around to his view but I have, perhaps, a moderately more balanced view.

Watt's career came to an end in late 1983, not for anything to do with the environment, but for a crude observation; from Wikipedia.

A controversy erupted after a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in September 1983, when Watt mocked affirmative action with his description of a department coal leasing panel: "I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent."

A man out of step with the times.

And as happens so often with people in government, he subsequently made his career lobbying government.

In 1983 after leaving the Department of the Interior he lobbied the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Ten years later, Watt was indicted on 25 counts of felony perjury and obstruction of justice and accused of making false statements before a federal grand jury investigating influence peddling at the Department of Housing and Urban Development at that time. On January 2, 1996, Watt pleaded guilty to one count of misdemeanor of withholding documents and perjury. On March 12, 1996, he was sentenced to five years' probation, and ordered to pay a fine of $5,000 and perform 500 hours of community service.

This was long after I was paying any further attention to Watt. Stuff that I became aware of but did not focus on.

Without any investigation of the circumstances, the perjury and obstruction of justice charges sounded fishy. Not only am I an enthusiastic environmentalist but I also am an enthusiastic fan of good governance and prosecutorial overcharging should have no role in good governance but it is so often the standard operating practice.

It looked to me like Watt got crosswise with someone in the Deep State or in a position of power and they went after him with everything they had. But apparently there wasn't much there, there. All they got was a miserable misdemeanor. And in the way these things work, it is not unlikely that Watt wasn't even guilty of that but he did a simple trade-off calculation of fighting the government and bankrupting himself or giving them a fig leaf to cover their own abuse of power.

Today I became aware of a further coda. Back in 2005, Bill Moyers apparently told a whopper of a lie about Watt and got tasked with the lie. From Bill Moyers Smears A Better Man Than Himself by John Hinderaker, February 6, 2005.

Well . . . I am still not a fan of Watt's environmental policies from long ago but I have also become jaded about Moyers whom I once respected more than I do now.

Apparently Moyers made the claim back in 2005:

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn’t know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious.

Apparently, based on the reporting from Hinderaker, none of that ever happened. There was no such congressional testimony. The only Congressional records of Watt's testimony was in fact the very opposite of the position Moyers described.

Moyers just made it up. Or more likely, Moyers simply assumed that since it was plausible in his own mind, it must be true.

And yet it was not.

Hinderaker describes in 2005 his response to Moyers' then topical accusation.

I read Moyers’ piece after several readers pointed out to us how over-the-top it was. I knew that Moyers’ claims about Watt couldn’t possibly be true, for two reasons. First, the concept of stewardship is so fundamental to Christian theology that the claim is laughable on its face. Second, I remember the Reagan administration. James Watt was a controversial figure; but one thing he was not controversial for was advocating environmental pillaging, on the theory that Jesus would be back any day now. That would have been quite a news story in the early 1980s, had it been true.

I did some quick Google searches without finding anything noteworthy; in particular, I couldn’t find Mr. Watt’s Congressional testimony online. I put the matter aside, not having time to pursue it further.

Hinderaker goes on to recount James Watt contacting him and then correcting the record to reflect what was actually said before Congress versus what has been incorrectly alleged.

It is interesting as another example of the legacy mainstream media continuing to get basic facts wrong.

But at a personal level,

Mr. Watt is retired now, and has been out of public life for many years. He is a kindly gentleman who, with the aid of his grandson, enjoys surfing the web and keeping up on the news of the day.

humanizes Watt in a way I discover I should have done long ago and made me realize I have been using a straw man figure for too long a time. Policies are one thing and should be argued passionately. People - well that is where we all need to extend more grace. Even to those with whom we disagree.