2-time EPA leader refused to join in Nixon’s ‘Massacre’
WASHINGTON — William Ruckelshaus, a pragmatic and resolute government official who shaped the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s as its first administrator and returned to the agency a decade later to restore its shattered morale after its watchdog powers had been muzzled, died Nov. 27 at his home in Seattle. He was 87.
The death was confirmed by a friend, Philip Angell. The cause was not immediately known.
In a long career in government and private industry, Ruckelshaus was widely promoted as “Mr. Clean” as much for his uprightness as for his role with the EPA. He cemented his reputation for unshakable integrity when, in 1973, as Richard Nixon’s deputy attorney general, he refused a presidential order to fire the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate break-in.
Decades later, as chief executive of Browning-Ferris Industries, the secondlargest trash-disposal company in the country, he expanded the company’s presence into New York and worked with law enforcement agencies to help break mob control of the city’s trash removal business.
Ruckelshaus, the scion of a prominent Indianapolis legal family, was a moderate, Princeton- and Harvard-educated Republican who rose in the Nixon-era Justice Department before guiding the EPA at its birth in 1970.
Ruckelshaus shepherded several federal environmental entities into a robust regulatory agency and did as much as anyone to mold the EPA’s mission.
During his three-year tenure, he created policies that forced cities to adopt anti-pollution laws, held automakers to strict emissions standards and banned the harmful pesticide DDT.
Around the time Ruckelshaus stepped down from the EPA in April 1973, the Nixon administration was foundering amid accusations that it had obstructed justice by covering up its involvement in the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington.
Ruckelshaus, who had no connection to the scandal, was made acting FBI director and then deputy attorney general.
On Oct. 20, 1973, Archibald Cox, a Harvard law professor appointed by Attorney General Elliot Richardson to investigate the break-in, had requested complete access to Oval Office tape recordings of the time immediately after the break-in. Nixon rebuffed the request and ordered Richardson to fire
Cox. Richardson refused and resigned.
Shortly afterward, Gen. Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff, phoned Ruckelshaus and instructed him to fire Cox.
Ruckelshaus, who had promised the Senate during confirmation hearings that he would protect Cox, refused to carry out Nixon’s order and then resigned. The duties of the attorney general were transferred to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who agreed to fire Cox.
The event became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre” and precipitated the downfall of the Nixon presidency in August 1974.
Of his role, Ruckelshaus later said, “It was not a heroic act.”
Ruckelshaus was serving as vice president of legal affairs for timber giant Weyerhaeuser when President Ronald Reagan asked him to return as EPA administrator in 1983.
In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.