Nixon and the Environment.

By J. Brooks Flippen. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Pp. [xii], 308. $24.95, ISBN 0-8263-1993-9.)

In this first systematic discussion of the Nixon administration's environmental policy and the major environmental reforms of 1969-74, probably the most crucial period in the development of U.S. environmental policy, Flippen helps to fill a shocking gap in historiography. He convincingly argues that the Nixon administration's major environmental accomplishments have been unjustly overlooked by historians as he describes the plethora of environmental issues Nixon faced: overpopulation, offshore oil drilling, the Alaska oil pipeline, the 1970s energy crisis, the Supersonic Transport (SST), DDT and other pesticides, national forest policy and the alleged "timber famine," park and wilderness preservation policy, air pollution, water pollution, solid wastes, urban sprawl, the creation of the EPA and reorganization of federal environmental policy, the Miami jetport proposal that threatened the Everglades, and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, among others. Flippen provides illuminating commentary on all these topics in a concise, interesting, and readable book that draws extensively upon archival material from the administration and congressional leaders, along with recent interviews with numerous significant actors inside and outside the administration.

Probably the book's greatest flaw is that Flippen pushes his thesis too far by portraying Nixon as an actual environmental leader in 1969-70 who thereafter dropped the issue in frustration when he saw no resulting political payoff. Flippen makes clear that environmental reform was for Nixon a political gambit to try to steal a popular issue from leading Democratic senators, that Nixon showed no personal interest or commitment toward the environment, and that Nixon's team regularly relied on media management over substance to create a pro-environment image during its brief flirtation with environmentalism in 1969-70. Nevertheless, Flippen defends Nixon's environmental leadership by sometimes exaggerating the strength or novelty of the administration's policy proposals, when these proposals were Usually weakened, derivative reflections of what Congress was already almost certain to enact even without presidential cooperation. In 1969-70 Nixon could not have stopped environmental reforms even had he wished to, and he was politically savvy enough to try to capture some credit for the inevitable. Yet such reaction, poll-watching, and media manipulation were far from the long-demonstrated record of environmental leadership of congressional Democrats, though Nixon's environmental advisers clearly deserve credit for their courage and persistence.

Among the book's many strengths, it offers interesting insight into the development of organized anti-environmentalism. Already by 1971, business interests demanded, and Nixon increasingly allowed, the administration's economic and budgetary advisors to exercise veto power over environmental initiatives. Though Nixon still offered deceptive rhetorical lip service to environmental goals after 1970, his private statements of hostility toward environmentalists and experimentation with blocking funding or enforcement of environmental programs were a dress rehearsal for the more overt acts of the Reagan administration.

SCOTT DEWEY
California State University at Los Angeles