Ex-Interior Secretary James Watt dies at 85

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — James Watt, the Reagan administration’s sharp-tongued, pro-development interior secretary who was admired by conservatives but ran afoul of environmentalists, Beach Boys fans and eventually the president, has died. He was 85.

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

In an administration divided between so-called pragmatists and hard-liners, few stood as far to the right at the time as Watt, who once labeled the environmental movement as “preservation vs. people” and the general public as a clash between “liberals and Americans.”

In that sense, Watt foreshadowed combative Interior secretaries like Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt, who, like Watt, aggressively pushed to grant oil, gas and coal leases on public land, increase offshore drilling, and limit expansion of national parks and monuments.

“While no one’s death should be celebrated, he was the worst of MAGA before it was invented,” tweeted David Doniger, a senior strategic director at the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, referring to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

Watt and his supporters saw him as an upholder of President Ronald 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 seeking Watt’s ouster and criticized such actions as clear-cutting federal lands in the Pacific Northwest, weakening environmental regulations for strip mining and hampering efforts to curtail air pollution in California’s Yosemite Valley.

With his bald head and thick glasses, he became the rare interior secretary recognizable to the general public. He characterized members of a coal advisory panel using 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 had been recent mall headliners, and their fans included President Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan. With Watt’s statement facing widespread mockery, the Reagans invited the Beach Boys for a special White House visit.

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 a controversy by censoring the facts and avoiding the real issues.” He said the initial stories about the rock music ban “only mentioned that the Beach Boys had performed in the past. Yet before we knew what was happening, banner headlines proclaimed that I had banned the Beach Boys.”