James Watt, the Reagan administration’s sharp-tongued, pro-development Secretary of the Interior who was beloved by conservatives but clashed with environmentalists, Beach Boys fans, and eventually the president, has passed away. hi what 85

Watt died May 27 in Arizona, his son Eric Watt said in a statement Thursday.

In an administration divided between would-be pragmatists and hardliners, few at the time were as far to the right as Watt, who once labeled the environmental movement as conservation versus people and the general public as a clash between liberals and Americans.

In this sense, Watt foreshadowed combative Home Secretary such as Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt who, like Watt, aggressively pushed for oil, gas and coal leases to be granted on public land, increasing offshore drilling and limiting the expansion of national parks and monuments.

While no one should be celebrating his death, he was the worst of MAGA before it was invented,” tweeted David Donger of the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, referring to former President Trump’s slogan Make America Great Again.

Watt and his supporters saw him as an upholder of President Reagan’s core conservative values, but opponents were alarmed by his policies and offended by his comments. In 1981, shortly after he was appointed, the Sierra Club collected more than 1 million signatures to impeach Watts, criticizing actions such as cutting federal lands in the Pacific Northwest, weakening environmental regulations on mining, and obstructing efforts to reduce air pollution. Yosemite Valley in California.

With his bald head and thick glasses, he became the rare Interior Minister recognizable to the general public, for reasons beyond the environment. He characterized members of a coal advisory panel with derogatory language and in 1983 tried to ban music from Fourth of July festivities on the National Mall, saying it attracted the wrong element.

The Beach Boys have been recent headliners at the mall, and their fans have included President Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan. With Watt’s statement widely derided, the Reagans invited the Beach Boys for a special visit to the White House. Watt, meanwhile, was summoned to receive a plaster model of a foot with a hole in it.

The Secretary of the Interior is trying to rid the US of derogatory place names

In his 1985 book The Courage of a Conservative, Watt wrote that the controversy actually arose because I was a conservative. Members of a liberal press saw an opportunity to create controversy by censoring the facts and avoiding the real issues. He said the initial stories about the rock music ban mentioned only that the Beach Boys had performed in the past. But before we knew what was happening, the headlines proclaimed that I had banned the Beach Boys. I was surprised.

Cutting regulations was his primary mission. Between his confirmation as Secretary of the Interior in 1981 until his resignation under pressure in 1983, Watt implemented an offshore leasing program that provided virtually the entire U.S. coastline for oil and gas drilling and held the largest coal lease sale in history , where 1.1 was auctioned. billion tons

(1 billion tons)

of coal in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming.

Watt tripled the amount of land on land leased for oil and gas exploration and doubled the acreage leased for geothermal resources.

Watt spent $1 billion restoring and improving national parks, adding 2,800 square miles

(7,300 square kilometers)

to the country’s wilderness system. And his efforts to exploit natural resources made America stronger, he wrote to Reagan in October 1983.

Our outstanding track record for managing this country’s natural resources is unparalleled because we put humans in the environmental equation, Watt wrote.

But eight days after writing to the president, he rode horseback into a cow pasture down the road from Reagan’s ranch in California to announce his resignation. He was succeeded by a longtime Reagan aide, William Clark.

I was past my point, Watt said of his decision, adding that others wouldn’t get off my case because of his offending comment from the advisory panel on coal.

Watt was born on January 31, 1938 in Lusk, Wyo, and his family later moved to Wheatland, Wyo, where his father was a lawyer. He attended the University of Wyoming, graduating in 1960 and receiving a law degree two years later.

The Interior Department is adding $103 million for wildfire hazards and land rehabilitation

In 1962, Watt became a personal assistant to former Gov. Milward L. Simpson, and he went to Washington after Simpson was elected to the U.S. Senate later that year. In 1966-1969, he helped develop policies on issues such as pollution, mining, public lands, and energy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, then joined the Nixon administration in early 1969 as Undersecretary of the Interior.

In 1975, President Ford appointed him to the Federal Power Commission.

While Jimmy Carter was president, Watt worked in the private sector as president and chief legal officer of the pro-development Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver.

He did consulting work after he left the Reagan administration, and at one point drew attention when he agreed to represent

Indian Native American

strains in oil operations and hotel developments after previous labeling

Indian native

reserves the failure of socialism. He also accepted six-figure consulting fees to represent developers of a federally subsidized housing project.

He moved back to Wyoming in 1986 and established a law firm in Jackson, taught at his alma mater, and served as a legal counsel and speaker.

But his consulting work with federal housing money came under scrutiny in the late 1980s when an investigation into corruption was launched at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In 1996, he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of withholding documents from a grand jury investigating HUD. He was found $5,000, placed on five years’ probation and ordered to do community service. He said he had made a serious mistake and hoped to play a constructive role in society.

Over the years, Watt expressed fears that radical environmental movements such as Earth First! would convince the cowards of Congress to ban all hunting, ban all logging and ranching on public lands, and further endanger the mineral industries.

He lived in Wickenburg, Arizona, in his later years with his wife, Leilani.

Matthew Daly, Associated Press writer in Washington, DC, contributed to this report.