Audio
Oral History Interview with Nathaniel Reed
Transcript
Abstract: In this interview, Nathaniel Reed talks about the challenges of acquiring the many tracts of land that make up Big Cypress National Preserve and the issues he encountered with the development of the Jetport. He goes on to talk about his work as assistant secretary where he wrote memoranda to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Later on, he explains his role in preventing the jetport from being built, and “saving the Everglades.”
[PART 1]
NATHANIEL REED: —of the land around this airport could be a devastating blow to our combined efforts to enhance and restore the Everglades system. Well this came as a thunderbolt. I went with a letter to the governor. The governor read it. He showed great concern because he admired Bob Padrick and thought Bob Padrick had enormous amount of common sense. And he said, I want you to go down immediately. I want you to look at all the plans, and I want a full evaluation from an ecological environmental standpoint of the proposed jetport and the impact that it could have on the Big Cypress country of the Everglades. So I left almost immediately, went to Miami. I asked Art Marshall, who was our state's most famous ecologist, who I believe had left the Fish and Wildlife Service as their chief ecologist for South Florida, but if not the records will show whether he was with the Fish and Wildlife Service or not. The two of us plunged in and went out and had a look at the site, which bulldozers had arrived, pavers had arrived, draglines had arrived, and thousands of men had arrived. We of course pored over the hydrological maps of the big Cypress and the impact, the potential impact of major development in the Big Cypress, how it would affect water flow going into the Ten Thousand Islands and into Florida Bay. Well it was alarming to say the least. Further, we stopped in at the justice department and learned that they were investigating a series of dummy corporations that were being set up that were acquiring major portions of the Big Cypress around the jetport for a hundred to two hundred dollars an acre, which meant that somebody had foreseen the potential strip development and industrial development around the airport and that major land transactions were taking place. Looked like insider knowledge to us. On top of that, there were some physical constraints to the airport, to the full development of the airport. Nobody could adequately explain to us how you would get from the jetport to Miami. I found that very curious. It seemed to me that would be one of the initial questions that you would solve. The airport authority officials would throw up their hands and said, Don't worry about it. We got it under control. It'll be mass transit. What kind of mass transit? Well [unintelligible]. You're going to have to go across conservation areas. Don't worry, we'll go across Conservation Areas 3 in Tamiami Trail. But that runs into the wrong part of—Don't worry about it. We'll fix that. We'll think that one through. He said, monorail or twin rail? Oh, one or the other. What about a road system? Well roads, yes highly possible. We have to have—We got to be able to get vehicles out there. Tamiami Trail certainly isn't big enough to handle the road traffic. We'll have to have a six- or an eight-lane—Across the Everglades? Well let's not worry about that now. We'll worry about that after we get going. So we wrote a devastating report to the governor, wasn't very long. I find that governors and presidents don't like long memorandums. One of my successes with presidents are—have been that I try to get everything on a page-and-a-half. Nixon loved alternatives. He loved [unintelligible]. That's a good way of working. He liked a statement of what the problem was and what the various alternatives to the problem there were and how much the alternatives cost. Having learned that, I used to use that same model with Governor Kirk, and I found it was very successful with him, and I found after I became assistant secretary it was very successful with both President Nixon and President Ford, even President Carter who I wrote a number of memorandums to, and it certainly has been a great success with various secretaries since then. It's not that they don't read or don't want to read, but the shorter—these are busy men and the shorter, conciser that it is, the more apt you are to get their attention riveted for those all important ninety seconds. [laugh] Well anyway, Kirk said, I'm in a helluva jam. I'm committed to the airport. I've gone down there. I've had a spade in my hand. What am I going to do? Well there had begun the drumbeat from Washington with Secretary Wally Hickel in the Park Service that they were getting deeply concerned about the impact that the development of the airport would have. So Claude and I decided that the best thing to do was to go to Washington and give a briefing to Interior and share the concerns of Marshall, Reed, and Padrick, and find out what the lay of the land was. So best of my memory we flew up on a Sunday and we met at Under Secretary Russell Train's house on Woodland Drive in Washington. Russ told the story at the World Wildlife meeting this past spring. I sat on the floor with a huge hydrographic map of South Florida. The governor and the under secretary sat in two chairs above me with a ruler. I pointed out where the jetport was and what the major flow was in the Big Cypress and how they impacted the Ten Thousand Islands and Florida Bay, and the impact that they also had—that water had, on Everglades National Park and particularly the western part of the park but nevertheless very important part and also a very important part of water circulation in Florida Bay. I probably outdid myself. It was a good briefing, and I was asked to give the same briefing to Wally Hickel the next day which has to be a Monday. So we overnighted—The governor always stayed at the Madison Hotel and we went to see Wally first thing in the morning on Monday and I repeated the briefing. Wally got very excited and said, I knew it. I knew it. This is the environmental victory that I can win. You have to remember that when Governor Hickel was in confirmation hearings he was really beat up on by the environmentalists. The entire environmental community turned against this nomination. They lambasted him as the pro-development governor of Alaska, and his confirmation hearings were simply ghastly. And he was pretty scarred up. And I was actually on a Nixon task force that was headed by Laurance Rockefeller that met at the Pierre prior to President Nixon taking his Oath of Office that met with Secretary Hickel, Secretary-Designate Hickel, to go over what his agenda should be. And among the items in that agenda was the start of the recognition that Everglades National Park was in deep trouble and needed every kind of assistance possible from the secretary's office. So in a sense Wally Hickel had already become a believer in the Everglades issues and was looking to show the environmentalists up. He needed an environmental issue and here was one that was being handed to him on a plate. He turned and he said, Governor, are you going to stand by me on—You've got the biggest problem. It's in your state. It's your Dade County Port Authority that wants to build this. You've been down there with a damned spade and—golden spade in your hand. And Claude stopped and said, Wally, if you and I stand together we can defeat this project. Wally got up and symbolically shook hands. We were in the Treaty Room of the Department of Interior, and a friendship began at that moment that was absolutely terrific. They really liked each other. They were both very flamboyant characters, to say the least, filled with stories, and could drink more than their share the evening of any type of material that was handy. And they were garrulous and could have a lot of fun together. Anyway, then came the preparation of more and more papers and the newspapers in the sense of developing a histoire of why the jetport was a mistake. The national media picked up the jetport, and the environmental community came together as one saying that this was the final blow for the Everglades. I mean, it was one thing to have walled it off with an ill-conceived project of—around the conservation areas with pumps and the development of the huge EAA and the inadequate distribution of water and the mistiming of the water, the mismanagement of the water, before we knew there was any pollution in the water. But the national environmental press and the national environmental organizations—You must remember that the press corps at that time had environmental—it was the beginning of the environmental movement of this part of the century, that every major newspaper had an environmental writer. And the New York Times had one of the great stars in a man named Mr. Kenworthy. I can't remember his first name. We always called him Ken. And he was on the front page probably three days a week. Doesn't seem possible now. Well, the jetport captured the imagination of the country. An airport—nobody knew the difference between the Big Cypress and the Everglades, it was all synonymous—a huge airport and the development around the airport was going to be built in the beloved Everglades and was going to destroy the Everglades, that was the story. And the wicked Dade County Port Authority in conjunction with those wretched members of the FAA, DOT, Department of Transportation, were handing out millions of taxpayer's bucks, which is not actually true, it comes from the airport tax, but that's all right, the airplane tax. It didn't matter. It all got mixed up. It all got mixed up in a wonderful jumbo where you could get the whole thing right with a few pithy statements—Do you want to save the Everglades? Yes I want to save it. Well then be against the jet—I'm against the jetport. And if you were for aviation—Dade County needs a new airport, Miami International Airport is a downtown airport and it can't possibly be the airport of the future. Even Governor Kirk admits that Miami and Dade County is going to be the gateway of the Caribbean and South America, and we need a great big airport to provide for the millions that are coming and the trillions of dollars worth of freight that's coming from these countries, long before we ever thought of NAFTA and free trade. So it's basically preservation versus development. Those are very easy for the American people to understand, they're every easy for politicians to understand, they're very easy for the average citizen to understand. But now we've got [unintelligible]. I'd become assistant secretary of interior in May of 1971 after Kirk was defeated as governor by Reubin Askew. Governor Askew asked me to stay on as the head of the—what is now the Department of Environmental Regulation. And I agreed to serve one more year in Tallahassee, because I really wanted to get back to Hobe Sound. In March of '71 I was conducting the most difficult air quality hearings across northern Florida that industry did not believe—in that part of the world industry did not believe in air quality. They didn't believe in water quality and they didn't believe in air quality. And I had just finished writing a very significant new series of laws that were passed by the legislature that complied with the Federal Water Quality Act that were draconian in the sense of cleaning up industrial waste and human waste from sewage treatment plants. No sooner had I finished that, the air quality law is passed in Congress and I had to go back all over the state and tell these people they not only had to clean up their water and their discharges, had to clean up their air discharges as well. So you can imagine how popular I was. And I was in Jacksonville where I was finishing a two-day—old stinky city Jacksonville. I was finishing a two-day hearing, violent hearing. I mean people shook their fists at me, it was unbelievable, and maintained that all the quail plantations would become extinct because they couldn't burn in the woods which was completely erroneous. The telephone rang and it was my wife saying that I had been invited to go across the Everglades and see the Big Cypress airport with Secretary Rogers C. B. Morton on Saturday morning. This is now Friday afternoon at 3:00 p.m. I don't even know how I'm getting to Hobe Sound, much less Miami. And I said, Tell the White House I can't possibly make it. All I can think of is sleeping Saturday and Sunday. I'm so tired I can't move. And she said, You can't answer the White House like that. I said, All right, it means getting up at five o'clock in the morning to drive to Miami. She said, No the Water Management District has called and they have a float plane and they'll pick you up at the dock and they'll fly you down there. You're going in the president's own helicopter. Oh boy, how exciting. Anyway, I had known Mr. Morton from Republican affairs but not—Well, I was crazy about his wife Anne Morton. We'd been at various fundraisers. He'd been the chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Hickel by now had been fired for exposing a letter that he had written to the President of the United States. I've jumped one sequence too far haven't I?
INTERVIEWER: Well—
REED: Let me back up. We've got to back up because—We've got to back up now. We'll take a break and we'll fit this back in at the proper sequence. We'll go back to where I described the briefing between Kirk, Hickel, and the shaking of the hands. We'll insert his piece in there, okay. Editor have you got it?
INTERVIEWER: Okay.
REED: Following the deal that Hickel and Kirk made, the national press, and I think I spoke at that at some length, had made this into a national issue. Nixon decided to have a full-scale meeting at the White House to discuss the ramifications of pulling federal support from the jetport. And both Hickel and Kirk had been widely quoted in the national press—on TV, newspapers, magazines, as saying they were opposed to the development of the jetport and that it was John Volpe, Secretary of Transportation and former governor of Massachusetts, who was hanging on and keeping this project alive, plus the very bad actors in Dade County who were involved in trying to make millions off the land. The Dade County Port Authority was filled with suspicious characters who were up to no good and couldn't be counted on to protect the Everglades and the Everglades System from the development of a full jetport in the Big Cypress. So we flew to Washington, and the meeting was held in the Roosevelt Room which is a particularly beautiful conference room. And the president came in looking very dark and not happy, sat down. The meeting was with Volpe, Hickel, Kirk, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, head of the FAA, two or three of Nixon's personal aides, other personal aides. Nixon thumped the table and said to Volpe, John, I've decided that I'm going with Wally and Claude on this issue, going to pull the plug on the jetport. And Volpe said, No Mr. President, I'm in a helluva jam. I've got millions of dollars of contracts outstanding, I've got agreements with the Dade County Port Authority, I'm quite a ways down the trail. Nixon said, I don't care how far down the trail you are. I'm pulling the plug John. Now what do you need? Volpe swallowed very hard and said, Well I'll tell you what I really need, Mr. President. Claude and Wally are giving me fits in the newspapers, on TV, on radio, in every bit of written material in the United States. They're making my life absolutely miserable by claiming that I'm the guy who invented this project and I'm not. I am responsible for the FAA, and I've got to get my own crew together and I got to get my ducks in line. But what I really need is to have the rest of the week in peace so I can go down to Miami and tell the Dade County commissioners that the deal's off. And I got to tell the FAA the deal's off. And I got to cancel millions of dollars worth of contracts. And I got to explain it to the congressional supporters. And I got a lot of work to do. If I could just have silence for the rest of the week I could get a heck of a lot more done. The president said, All right. All right everybody in this room. I want everybody to put their hand in the air and take an oath with me right now that there are going to be no leaks to the press corps by any one of you. And he looked across and he said, Wally, Claude—Nat—Nat, you keep an eye on those two. I said, Well Mr. President, I can only keep an eye on the governor. I can't keep an eye on—He said, Keep an eye out. They're close as thieves. Everybody take the oath. We're going to give John the time he needs to get this matter straightened out. You bet Mr. President. So we walked down the [unintelligible]. I don't know whether we had a limousine or not. But if we did Volpe said, I haven't got—beg your pardon, Hickel said, I haven't got anything to do for a few minutes Claude. Let's drive out to the airport together. We were at the private part of the Washington National Field. And it was a great big government issue Cadillac with a driver and secret service man in the front seat. I got in the jump seat. The two of them sat side by side in the back seat. In between them was the telephones that all the secretaries have, the hotline to the White House and an outside line. We hadn't driven—I promise you, we hadn't driven a half a mile, probably not more than a quarter of a mile—We hadn't gotten to the Jefferson Memorial when Wally said, with a big nudge in Kirk's ribs, who's going to do it? I sort of turned around and looked over my shoulder and said, What? And they said, Mind your own business. And Claude went, odd or even? And Hickel said, Even. And Claude said, Ah my turn. Wally said, You cheat Claude. Claude said, I didn't cheat. All I had was one finger underneath there. So he said, Nathaniel, give me Kenworthy's telephone number. I said, You guys—you guys, you can't do this. Get me Kenworthy's telephone number. I took the telephone and I punched into Washington—New York Times number and handed the telephone. Give me Mr. Kenworthy. Ken? Claude Kirk. Governor. How are you? I'm just fine. I'm just leaving the White House with Wally where we've had a titanic struggle over the jetport. We've finally been able to persuade the President of the United States to pull the plug on the jetport. It won't be announced until next Monday. Volpe fought like a tiger to keep it going, but we pushed him down and shoved him aside, and this is a great environmental victory for Wally and myself and for the people of America. We're going to save the Everglades after all Ken. I'm telling you this is big time news and you've got an exclusive. We're giving it to nobody else but you. Ken said, Claude, you're putting me on. No, I'm not putting you on. I'm telling you the honest truth. I'm driving back from the airport right now and this is the biggest news of the day, probably of the year, and I just can't tell you how much—how important the New York Times has been to this whole histoire and this great victory, and Wally and I are just glowing, glowing with the support we've had from the press. Is Wally there? Yes, Wally's here. Wally? Ken wants you. Ken? Wally. Wally? Is this—Is what the governor telling me true? Oh of course it's true. I'm telling you it was a vigorous battle. The governor and I sat shoulder to shoulder. We had to take on that darned Volpe, fought every inch of the way. I want you to know the president listened to us, heard the ecological, environmental consequences that the jetport would cause on the whole Everglades system, and we're committed to Everglades enhancement if not restoration, and we have sunk the jetport. It's going to be announced next Monday but we thought you'd like to get a little background material in so that you're all set for next Monday. Thank you gentlemen. [unintelligible]. We're now approaching Washington National. I mean, I'm in a state of complete utter shock. I don't know what to say. So I don't say anything. The two men embraced each other. We got on the jet. We fly back to Tallahassee. I go and have a good, stiff drink because I know that all hell is going to break loose. And sure enough, at eight o'clock in the morning my desk telephone rings in the governor's office. White House calling. Oh God. Sure enough John Ehrlichman. John Ehrlichman looking for Nathaniel Reed. Speaking. Nathaniel have you seen the front page of the New York Times? No John, I'm in Tallahassee. The New York Times doesn’t come to Tallahassee until 11:30 a.m. What's of interest on the front page of the New York Times John?
REED: Dammit Nat you know damned well what's on the front page of the New York Times. There's a complete expose of those two rogues, Hickel and Kirk, pulling the plug on the jetport, persuading the president to pull the thing, and slamming John Volpe chapter and verse, and you know that John's trying to do the right thing and didn't need this. He needed time. I said, John, I guarantee you I had nothing to do with that interview. Who was the interview with? He said, Don't give me any of that stuff. You know damned well it was with Kenworthy. And you know damned well it was either one of the other or both of them. I said, John, all I will attest to is that I am innocent. He said, That's not good enough. I said, That's all I'm going to attest to. I'm going to take the Fifth Amendment right now. He said, That tells me everything. Those two goons have been at it again. So the two of them achieved a great victory. And everything went smoothly until 1970—the plug was pulled, lawsuits all over the place. Congress supported the president. We paid up God knows how many bills, claims, bills, claims, passed paid for the equipment that had to be taken away and the amount of work—The runway was basically finished. The control tower had been built. And they called it—To make some use of it they decided to call it a training field. I know why it was called a TNT but I think it was called a TNT. And fuel was cheap. So pilots came to train landing procedures and would shut off engines on final approach to practice landing with less than all engines going. And some dazzling feet, like fifty feet, they'd turn an engine off on takeoff and they'd stagger into the air. All of these things—maneuvers were done. Within a comparatively very few years, the state of art changed and instead of running an airplane [unintelligible] multi-million dollar airplane out on a runway in the middle of the Big Cypress taking off and landing and turning off engines and turning on engines and having near disasters, he went to a simulator. He did the whole darned thing in a simulator on electricity without using any fuel and without endangering lives and a multi-million dollar airplane. I mean, I know somebody looking at this film fifty years from now or a hundred years from now will find this absolutely bizarre, but I'm telling you the governor and I actually flew into Miami International Airport one morning and watched a 727, a three-engine jet plane, take off on a practice mission going east over Miami that shut down two of the three engines at 300 feet. If that isn't insane—I'm telling you, the governor was such an activist that he got out and told the chief of operations at Miami that if he ever hard of another airplane practicing going due east over Miami shutting down engines, he'd close Miami [laugh] International Airport. He didn't have the authority to do it, but it never bothered Claude Kirk whether he had authority to do it or not.
So now we got to jump to my flight with Rogers Morton over the Big Cypress in March of '71.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, so the jetport has [unintelligible]?
REED: The jetport as a full development is out. It is a training field only. The Congress has paid the bills for all the claims. The land transactions have ended. The monorail would have bankrupted [unintelligible]. One of the last laughs of the whole thing is the preliminary study showing how you would get to the Big Cypress jetport and back by rail, by road, by helicopter, by hovercraft, whatever, would have totally bankrupted Port Authority. They hadn't thought—We would have had a major airport without any way of getting east or west. Well the next thing that happens is that Morton and I fly over the Everglades Country in the president's helicopter, Saturday morning, believe it or not, at 8:00 a.m. with a superb naturalist from Everglades National Park. And it was a—we had to refuel. I'm not sure we didn't—We refueled in Naples. We had a great day—flew over the jetport and Rogers got a really good feeling of the Big Cypress. I think we landed at the jetport [unintelligible]. And we flew over the waterways within—the natural waterways within the park and then took our time flying backwards and forwards over the Big Cypress country. And I pointed out to him that just as Lake Okeechobee and the conservation areas are the arteries and the heartbeat of Everglades National Park, the Okaloacoochee Slough is the heart of the Big Cypress to a large degree. The Okaloacoochee Slough is a critically important piece of land. Because that—The reason I bring that up now is that comes up later in the story. We saw a great sight over the park, one we never—we always remarked on. We were hovering over one of the great sailing lakes in the park which was covered with waterfowl. And the helicopter wind got the ducks to fly. And unknown to us, above us in the sun, was a bald eagle. And he zipped by us, wings folded, talons out. And he took a duck right out of the air. And he flew up to the helicopter and he showed us the duck and then banked and flew away as if he had said, Thank you. I was trying to figure out how to catch that duck and thank you very much for getting that duck to fly. It was a knockout experience. Anyway, we came back to Miami International Airport about 5:00 in the afternoon, he had a six o'clock plane back to Washington. We had a press conference together. We told the TV corps and the press corps what we'd seen and how optimistic we were for more water for the Everglades—that optimism certainly didn't come true—and our concern for the eventual fate of the Big Cypress and that something had to be done with the multitude of private ownership and the continued threat of development even though the jetport had been sealed off as now only a training facility. After the press conference he asked me to come upstairs to a private room and he told me—he brought me a letter from President Nixon asking me to become assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife and National Parks. And I said I would respond to him the moment I asked my wife whether she wanted to move from Tallahassee and Hobe Sound to Washington. And I flew home and broached the subject immediately and was able to call Rogers later that evening at his house in Washington and say, Yes, yes, yes, we're dying to take on that assignment. I don't suppose anybody, in a sense, was better prepared because Florida, like California, had all the problems in the world. I mean, you can't think of a problem that Florida doesn't have that another state has. [laugh] And all of my interests resolved around fish, wildlife, and national parks. Gosh, several other presidents have asked me to do other deeds for them and I've always said, I'm birds and bees and water and green trees and parks, and I know I'd be hopeless as an [laugh] NRC director. I don't know how a nuclear power plant works. Jimmy Carter wanted me to become a nuke regulator. Anyway, that spring after confirmation in the middle of May, I began to put together a small staff to begin to think about what to do about the Big Cypress. And I sent a paper to the White House with alternatives, everything from, Let it be, to acquire it adjacent and include it within Everglades National Park. And it came back with a recommendation that I meet with John Ehrlichman and discuss—John had been a land use lawyer of great renown in Seattle, had done major work on land use planning in Seattle, and was enormously interested actually in a comprehensive national land use policy act. [unintelligible] to the right wing of the Republican party. But there was a growing sense in the country that somehow comprehensive land use planning left at the local level was not succeeding, that our communities were all beginning to look an awful lot alike, and this strip development, car [unintelligible] were all too frequent. We haven't made much progress on that, have we? Anyway, John wrote—We met, wrote a very important memorandum giving his ideas of a major study that would take place using the Big Cypress as a model of virgin land, admittedly with an airport in the middle of it, at least only a training airport but nevertheless, already a man-made intrusion in the middle of it, plus a road—the Alligator Alley on the north and Tamiami Trail to the south, adjacent to a great national park that was in danger, responsible for a tremendous amount of the water flow into our most valuable bay, productive bay, Florida Bay. So I puzzled this out and went to see Morton. Morton asked me who the most respected ecologist was in Florida and I told him it was—without doubt it was Dr. Arthur Marshall who was Mr. Florida Environment, and it would—It needs to be a researched whether in 1971 Arthur had left the Fish and Wildlife service—I think he had, in a dispute because he didn't feel like the Fish and Wildlife Service was doing enough to counterbalance the Corps of Engineers' desires to canalize and dike and ditch all of South Florida. And he was a preacher, farsighted individual, enormously aeriodite. Unknown to most people he had been a real war hero, Second World War, tank commander under Patton. He had one of the most analytical minds of anybody I ever worked with—superb writer, excellent speaker, a gentle man, but a man of extraordinary brilliance. One of the most fun things in life in the years I was in the governor's office was when we were at a conference that Art Marshall was at after the speechmaking we'd go to the bar and light a cigar, maybe order another drink, and sit and listen to Art Marshall explain the ecology of Florida. He knew every inch of it, he and Archie Carr are the only two men who knew every inch of the state. He was mesmerizing. He was—He was a messiah to us who had conviction, interest, fascination, but we didn't know how it worked, and he knew how it worked. So he gave us the ammunition for our daily battles and our weekly wars. He was a great man. Anyway, Morton felt that a national study should be headed by somebody of national prominence. And now Marshall was extremely well known in the Southeast and particularly in Florida, he did not have a national following. So he called upon Dr. Luna Leopold, one of Aldo Leopold's sons, brother of Starker Leopold, who was my chief environmental advisor for years and years and years. Even when I was in the governor's office my weekly call to Starker and Berkeley was one of the delights of my life, and my six years in Interior, I probably talked to Starker three or four times a week. We fished for a week every year together in the fall. He was a giant among men, as was his brother, Luna.
INTERVIEWER: Change tapes. Have a drink of water and [unintelligible].
[end]
[PART 2]
NATHANIEL REED: …Leopold [unintelligible] United States Geological Survey. He had been chief hydrologist at the University of California, Berkley. And at that time I believe he was heading the USGS's geological survey's work at Menlo Park, California. Anyway, we called him on the speaker phone. Rogers and I explained the mission. [unintelligible] and we took on the assignment. I staffed it in my office with a brilliant young man named George [unintelligible] who would come with me from Florida. George was working on Everglades issues, Big Cypress, and soon-to-become defunct [unintelligible]. And the contract was signed between Leopold and Marshall [unintelligible]. And by the fall I began to plug myself in, had a long, hard look at the outline, and agreed upon how the chapters would fall and how they would relate to each other. Typical of Marshall there was a giant overview at the beginning almost as a [unintelligible]. Then you went through series of descriptions of hydrology, botanical, animal, vegetable, fishes, reptiles, birds, the whole thing that makes up the essence of the Big Cypress that proved positive that the Big Cypress was the remaining piece of the untouched Everglades [unintelligible]. And [unintelligible] and it came. And we would have a series of alternatives, everything from outright purchase to some forms of development structured mostly on the roads out of wetlands and [unintelligible] controls over privately owned land within the privately owned areas of the Cypress, the known federally or state-owned lands within the Big Cypress. I liked it. I sent news to Ehrlichman in the White House that we were on target. Looked to me like we would be ready in January for the presentation to the president and then he could announce it in his State of the Union speech, and then we would have cost figures to match whatever alternative he chose, a heck of a lot of people working on this. The National Park Service threw itself at it as well as the [unintelligible] and I kept sort of an overview. I had so many problems in '71 from Alaska to [unintelligible] to a terrible poison called 1080 which was used to control coyotes on the public lands. I had my hands full, probably the busiest and most controversial year of my life. I remember that '71 was the year before the presidential election year of 1972. And although Nixon was favored at the polls by a large margin, nevertheless, he began running in '71 in a big, big, way. And he was intent upon getting as much of the environmental vote to show the Democrats that they didn't own the environmental vote, they didn't own the environmental issue. And he'd put together the most remarkable team in the environmental—across the environmental ranks. By '71 Mortin was secretary of interior, Russell Train was the head of EPA, Bill Ruckelshaus was a justice. I guess Train might have moved to CEQ and Ruckelshaus might have been in EPA, I might have that reversed. And at the assistant secretary level the deputy assistant secretary level, the administrator level, you probably had the strongest group of Republican environmentalists ever assembled or ever have been assembled since then, one of the most extraordinary moments that it coincided with this tremendous interest in America as the environmental revival movement began, had been sort of dormant since Teddy Roosevelt. Well, you can imagine my surprise when our senior senator, Senator—I guess he was our junior senator, Senator Lawton Chiles, our present governor now in 1997, great friend of mine, announced that he was going to hold hearings, land use hearings, on the Big Cypress in Miami, I believe in January of 1972, for Senator Scoop Jackson, Henry Jackson of Washington, who was a well-known hawk on defense and yet had an enormous social conscience and had one of the great environmental voting records of the United States Senate as he chaired the Senate Natural Resources Committee, served on the Armed Forces Committee, served on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Jackson was one of the superstars of American politics and a fascinating, fascinating man. Scoop wanted to be president, and there were a great many people who thought that he would make a great president. So Lawton called a hearing in Miami to expose Senator Scoop Jackson to the people of Florida, and the issue that he picked was what to do with the Big Cypress. Now you can imagine, I was kind of excited. And while I was mulling this over I thought, I think I'll fly down and catch this hearing, see how it fits in with my study for Nixon. But at the last moment I couldn't go. But I had all the newspapers on my desk the next day. And to my surprise Jackson announced, If I'm elected president, I'm going to seek authorization for the acquisition of the Big Cypress, and I will pledge to do my bit to enhance if not restore the Everglades system and get more water back into Florida Bay, get it away from those users who are misusing Florida's precious water supply. I could have written that speech last week. There was good stuff and it made all the national newspapers and it picked up the debate on the Big Cypress again. So I had a team meeting over the Big Cypress report the following week and the chapters were beginning to fit together and there was some editing to do, and the question was how many reports to write and how to get the president to sign off on which alternative did he want? Speechwriters were being contacted and so on and so forth. And I sent over sort of a conclusive final draft with the alternatives in it to force the Domestic Council to come to some conclusion as to which alternative were they going to recommend to the president with the various costs involved. Morton all of a sudden became very interested because the White House became interested, and Morton threw himself into this thing and looked over the alternatives, wasn't certain which alternative. He once mentioned, You know, it's possible to hit a home run here by buying the Big Cypress and making some kind of a preserve out of it. And everybody said, Well that's good stuff Rogers. That's an interesting alternative, expensive one but it's an interesting one. Well, Ehrlichman got the alternatives, must have discussed it with the president. A few days later the telephone rang and it was John Ehrlichman on the telephone rather excited saying, What's the status of the Big Cypress report? I said, Well John, I said, I just sent you over the draft. He said, I got the draft outline. What's the status of it? I said, Well it's waiting for Nixon to pick—the president to pick which one of the alternatives he wants to run with and then it's going to be printed, and then it's going to be made into a report to Congress [unintelligible]. Hopefully the president's speechwriters will put something about it in the State of the Union address. Stop all the work. Break the contracts. Hide the document. What? [laugh] We're coming out tomorrow morning with we're going to buy the Big Cypress, Scoop Scoop. Well that's a helluva lot of work [unintelligible]. He said, The work is actually what we got to have. We got to change the report now. Fix the report so that it shows that the Big Cypress is the most important area for Florida Bay and the Everglades National Park, and its development would be the most destructive thing possible for the well being of the birds, the bees. He said, Come on Nat, get on with the birds and the bees and the beasts of South Florida. I said, I got it John. So I called up Art Marshall and said, Hey guess what? Tomorrow they're going to come out with a purchase. We got to turn the plan around, get rid of the alternatives and just support one alternative which is acquisition. Marshall said, Hooray, hooray this is one of the great days of my life. We called Leopold and Leopold said, Well it's an expensive decision. Leopold was always mindful of money. It's an expensive decision but I'm not sure that in the long run that it's the wrong decision. He said, If you look at these kinds of decisions you must look in the frame of five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. You must look at the broader picture. Well now [unintelligible] it got done. It got done while I was assistant secretary. I was lucky—I was the one chosen to testify before Congress, Art Marshall sat on my side. The national enthusiasm of our congressional delegation was terrific, stood together. Jim Haley, who was the congressman from Southwest Florida, who was destined to be chairman of the Interior Committee in the House for just a couple of years before his untimely death, was enthusiastic. The majority of the landowners wanted out. They knew they were never going to get to their property. The unresolved issues that probably will come back to haunt the Preserve for a few years were obviously the mineral rights which were not acquired, which were not considered worthy of acquisition, to be very expensive, and the amount of oil and gas to be found underneath the Big Cypress was considered to be very limited and expensive to get out. And remember the world—this is before the Arab embargo and the world was awash in oil. As you know right now in 1997 we're awash in oil again so that I'm suspect if anybody tells me they're going to drill for eighteen dollar barrel oil in the Big Cypress tomorrow when a barrel of oil is selling for not much more than twenty dollars. It's a two-dollar-a-barrel profit. With all the infrastructure you've got to put up, I wish them Godspeed. I don't take it terribly seriously. Furthermore, there's a map. I used to have it in my office in Interior that shows all the dry wells that have been dug in the Everglades, the conservation area of the park, the conservation areas of the Big Cypress, very revealing. It looks like somebody had chicken pox over the entire area. That's how many wells have been dug over the years. Anyway, that will be an issue that will be resolved in years to come. Watchers of this tape may have indeed a hand in solving or satisfying that problem. The hunting problem and access, what kind of wheeled vehicle, the problems with killing deer, being deer hunters and hog hunters in the same habitat that the Florida panther existed and lived off deer and hogs, certainly was not addressed. It was not thought out, it was not well thought out anyway. We were either oblivious to the problem or we pushed it aside in our haste to get the Big Cypress Preserve authorized and acquired. That problem and the problem of misuse of airboats in the tidal wetlands has to be handled now or in the near future, because parts of the Big Cypress are being seriously damaged by half track vehicle use, track vehicle use. But it was a great victory. And now with new techniques to control melaleuca and Brazilian pepper, hopefully in a few years the Big Cypress will get a really decent visitor's center and elevated walkways across marvelous waterways into the great strands and there could be self-guided tours. And the exciting thing for me was in my last years of my fourteen years service on the South Florida Water Management District I helped negotiate the purchase of the Okaloacoochee Slough which had remained in private hands at the time the Big Cypress came in. We were not allowed to include that [unintelligible] in the Preserve [unintelligible], and I had the pleasure of being on the board during its acquisition. And that kind of ended the story on a happy note for me that—it began with a disaster, it ends with a great victory. And it'll be up to our successors to solidify that victory and make the Preserve the great, unique environmental success story that it can be, must be, if we're going to really succeed in enhancing the quality of the Everglades in the next ten or fifteen years. Because that's all the time we've got. I've been warning—Behind you are scrapbooks that my wife has diligently kept over our thirty-four years of marriage where I have repetitively warned that the time clock is running down for the Everglades. I've never been more accurate in that prediction than I am now. There's more people listening, there's more people working, there's more activity, there's more money being spent than ever before. But we've got bigger problems now. We've got, besides water quantity, we've got significant problems with the water quality coming off the Everglades as a cultural area. We've got a lake that's been badly polluted. Okeechobee is now badly polluted. There's phosphorus runoff from the dairies to the north and from back pumping from the Ag areas of the south. Our population is hemmed in right up to the edges of dykes. We haven't had a major hurricane go through a populated area in so long that nobody remembers what a hurricane can do. And when that hurricane or hurricanes come back again in normal sequency the destruction is going to be absolutely awful. So we have very few years left. But in conclusion of the Big Cypress story, there are heroes. The heroes are Kirk, Hickel, Volpe, Nixon, Ehrlichman, Russ Train, Kenworthy and all the press corps that followed it, the environmental movement, the environmental leaders in Florida, unquestionably Leopold and Arthur Marshall for the brilliance of their report. It was a victory for the American people who really cared. And I think that's a terrific story. I feel absolutely graced by God that I could have been a minor player, been a participant and an observer. I certainly learned some good things and some very bad [laugh] things about government during this process. And when the governor's here I'm going to rib him royally on leaking because leaking is a dangerous art. It's a necessary art in government, but it's a—as he will admit it's a dangerous business. [laugh] And as assistant secretary for six years, I learned when a good leak was very advantageous but when to use a leak very, very carefully, very cautiously, and very, very infrequently. But it's a great story. It's a story that complements the creation of Everglades National Park, and I'm thrilled to give you my side of the story this afternoon.
INTERVIEWER: Thank you so much.
REED: You'll have to do that one major bit of editing.
INTERVIEWER: That'll—
REED: That'll work. I think—A good editor—a good sound editor can make that work very—
INTERVIEWER: Now I have a—
REED: Now I have no idea how he's—
[end]
Description
In this interview, Nathaniel Reed talks about the challenges of acquiring the many tracts of land that make up Big Cypress National Preserve and the issues he encountered with the development of the Jetport. Later on, he explains his role in preventing the jetport from being built, and “saving the Everglades.” This interview was conducted on November 7, 1997.
Credit
Big Cypress National Preserve
Date Created
11/07/1997
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