though Nixon’s critics have pointed out that he vetoed the Clean Water Act, the president generally supported the goals of that law. He vetoed the bill when it came to his desk because he objected to the $18 billion price tag the Democratic Congress had put on it, which he viewed as a budget buster. Congress passed the bill over his veto in 1972, but Nixon’s objections later proved to be valid: the $18 billion wasn’t even spendable within the time frame for which it was intended, and the cost of the act was in reality closer to Nixon’s lower estimates. It is likely that the Democrats set the cost deliberately high to force Nixon into a politically unpopular move. His veto had nothing to do with his views on the issue.
But the Clean Water episode is a good illustration of how Nixon approached environmentalism in true Republican fashion, in the best sense of that term—that is, he endorsed the role and capacity of government to address a public problem, while at the same time insisting that these government efforts should not be so prohibitively expensive or counterproductive to economic growth that they would wind up doing more harm than good. The Nixon administration’s rigorous cost-benefit analyses of every environmental proposal infuriated ardent members of the Green movement, who felt that price tags should be irrelevant. The most extreme among them tended to confirm Nixon in his views that environmentalists could be broken out into two groups: antimarket or promarket. The antimarket Greens wanted the most sweeping reforms passed without regard to economic impact, whereas the promarket Greens recognized the need to harmonize environmental protection with economic growth. As Nixon thought of it, when given a choice between “smoke and jobs,” he would take jobs. This approach, which movement environmentalists saw as being hopelessly compromised, is responsible for the most important set of environmental regulations ever written in America.
Under Nixon, the federal government joined the environmental movement and gave the force of law and regulatory muscle to controlling industrial pollution and monitoring air and water standards. He passed much of his environmental program with bipartisan cooperation.71 Nixon’s environmental record—“yet to be improved upon by any president,” wrote Tom Wicker72—is one of his most enduring legacies.
Some environmentalists, however, did appreciate what Nixon had given to the movement. “I doubt seriously whether Richard Nixon ever envisioned the way the environmental movement would develop when he assembled the EPA from a federal hodgepodge of diverse offices,” James F. Ryan wrote for the American Chemical Society. “Although Nixon was presumably motivated by politics, he undeniably did a good thing. Meanwhile, you wonder how succeeding presidents will be judged on their environmental records.”73
Indeed, few presidents have matched Nixon’s achievements in this area. For a time, Nixon also inoculated the Republican Party against charges of environmental sensitivity. He provided a template, as he so often did, for how to claim the positions of the center and even some of the Left on an environmental policy issue and use them to strengthen Republicans’ stance against unpopular proposals of Democratic opponents. As late as 1988, for instance, George H.W. Bush was able to attack his Democratic opponent for president, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, for the polluted condition of Boston Harbor. Moreover, the Republicans were able to paint Democrats, often, as too liberal and extreme on environmental issues—such as in the late 1980s, when Democrats wanted to stop logging in Washington state in order to save the spotted owl. With so much mainstream environmental ground already covered by the Republicans, moderate American voters found these Democratic positions too extreme.
Since then, however, the Republican Party has lost almost all of its ground on environmental issues. Republicans have become the party of climate change denial, and this position has cost them in public perception. Even Republicans on the Senate Environment Committee have indicated their scorn for climate science. Senator James Inhofe called climate change the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” while Senator David Vitter described talk of climate change as “ridiculous pseudo-science garbage that’s so common on the left on this issue,” adding that, “I think there is beginning to be a serious reconsideration of the science of this.”74
It’s difficult to imagine Richard Nixon taking such positions. More likely, he would have acknowledged the reality of climate change, pushed for serious but reasonable efforts to combat it, and ensured that such measures did not hamper American economic competitiveness. That type of pragmatic approach squared with most Americans’ positions on the issue in the early 1970s—and the ones most hold today as well.
The “Warmonger” Who Ended the Draft
Finally, there is the remarkable story of the Republican president whose political adversaries never tired of branding him a warmonger—even though he was actually the one who ended the draft. Nixon, with his fine-tuned political antennae, sensed that abolishing the draft was not only in the public interest but also smart politics. In 1968, he ran, in part, on a promise to bring an end to the draft and transition the US military to an all-volunteer service while also pledging to be the candidate who could conclude the war in Vietnam. “It is not so much the way they are selected that is wrong, it is the fact of selection,” he said.75 In his ever-agile mind, Nixon saw multiple rationales—and multiple benefits—to ending the draft.
One of his reasons was pragmatic. In 1967, during his run for the Republican nomination, Nixon hired as his research director Martin Anderson, a conservative thinker who made an economic case against the draft. Anderson argued that an all-volunteer service would be good for national security, as there were “a high number of trainees and inexperienced men who must constantly be replaced.” The research director told Nixon that the reason the draft had been necessary in the first place was “simply that we have not been willing to pay even reasonably fair wages to our men in the military.”76
Not long after being inaugurated, Nixon set up a commission to explore the idea of a volunteer army. The commission developed a number of compelling proposals, but it is best remembered today for the debate that broke out between two men who came to testify before it, resulting in an all-volunteer army in the United States. The debate was between Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago professor and founder of monetarist economics, and General William Westmoreland, the former commander of American forces in Vietnam. After listening to Friedman argue for the merits of an all-volunteer army—which Friedman believed would both advance personal freedom and national security, Westmoreland replied: “Professor, everything you say makes so much sense, but I’m not sure I’d like to command an army of mercenaries.”
“Would you rather command an army of slaves?” Friedman shot back.
When Westmoreland replied that he didn’t like hearing patriotic draftees being compared with slaves, Friedman said that he didn’t like hearing patriotic volunteers being compared with mercenaries.77 The exchange showed the strong feelings that existed on both sides of the issue. The commission eventually reported back that, in its view, the United States could maintain its military strength without conscription. The last draft call took place on December 7, 1972. Since then, the US military has been all volunteer.
Nixon’s decision to end conscription was hugely popular, and any move to bring back the draft—as some have suggested in the years since—never gets very far. Still, in its forty-plus years, the all-volunteer army has had its critics. Some, like New York congressman Charles Rangel, say that the draft should be reinstituted, because the burden of fighting America’s wars has fallen disproportionately on poor and working-class citizens who enlist in the military. Rangel’s criticism is not without merit, though it is also ironic: this same criticism—that the poor and working class were doing most of the nation’s fighting in Vietnam—contributed to the move to end the inequitable draft system in the early 1970s, on the basis that more privileged Americans could avoid service by obtaining college deferments.
Another criticism of the volunteer army is political. Some say that since only a small proportion of Americans fight the nation’s wars,
