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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Tired of losing battles with far-right adversaries, Christine Todd Whitman hands in her resignation.
May 22, 2003 | It was pretty clear to Hazel Gluck, a friend and former New Jersey campaign official close to Christine Todd Whitman, that the woman in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency had grown "exhausted," in part because of her long-standing battles with pro-growth conservative forces in the administration -- forces that almost always won.
But it was with characteristic loyalty and abject refusal to admit anything but sheer delight with the Bush administration that Whitman finally resigned Tuesday, writing to President Bush that she wanted to "return to my home and husband in New Jersey, which I love just as you do your home state of Texas."
The letter, released Wednesday morning, claimed "significant improvements to the state of our Nation's treasured environment" and announced a departure date of June 27. In a statement, President Bush called Whitman "a trusted friend and advisor" and "a dedicated and tireless fighter for new and innovative policies for cleaner air, purer water, and better protected land."
Inside the Beltway there was talk -- based upon conjecture and Whitman's losing battles with conservatives in the administration -- that Whitman was shown the door; Whitman, meanwhile, has maintained that the president had tried to talk her out of her decision and others backed this account. "I don't believe she was in any way pushed out," said Rep. Jim Greenwood, R-Penn., a moderate and No. 2 Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on the environment and hazardous materials. "The information I have is that the president tried to get her to change her mind" and that Whitman quite simply misses her husband of 29 years, financier John Whitman.
Keith Nahigian, a friend and former aide, said that from her first day at the EPA she was talking about how much she missed her husband and the home where she grew up. She spends so little time with her husband, Whitman has jokingly complained that "it felt like they were dating again. They'd go out and it was like, 'So, what's going on with you? What are your interests?'" She also missed the family's 230-acre estate and farm in Oldwick, in northwest New Jersey, known as Pontefract, where she grew up.
Gluck also says Whitman was excited to be returning to the Garden State. But she described her as "tired and exhausted," and the exhaustion was not only due to how hard Whitman has worked and how far she's traveled since taking office at the beginning of the Bush administration. "Some of the right wingers in our party really make it difficult for [Secretary of State] Colin Powell and for anybody who's a moderate in this administration, and Christie was no exception," Gluck said. While Whitman enjoyed a "great" personal relationship with the president, the "pressure from the right wing" wore on her.
"The pressures of the job are enormous," Gluck says, "but this particular one with all the philosophical tugs, had to be part and parcel of what makes one tired." Asked to elaborate and describe conversations she'd had with Whitman to illustrate the point, Gluck demurs.
Another GOP moderate, Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., says: "This was not unexpected.
"She did her best to be true to her principles and to serve the president," Shays said, "but the bottom line is that the president makes the environmental policy."
Whitman's departure is the second such notice announced this week by a high-ranking Bush administration official, following the notice. Monday by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. Whitman told White House chief of staff Andy Card two weeks ago that she was mulling this decision, and Tuesday she told the president she had decided it was time to go.
Both Whitman and Fleischer are Bush loyalists, but the job always came much easier to the latter, who apparently never disagreed with one thing the president has ever done. Whitman, conversely, was constantly seeing her moderate environmentalism overruled.
From the beginning of the Bush administration, it was clear that Whitman stood in left field on Bush's team. And it was there -- alone and isolated -- where she often found herself.
After a Senate hearing on Feb. 27, 2001, Whitman said that "there's no question but that global warming is a real phenomenon, that it is occurring." Flooding and droughts "will occur" as a result, she declared. "The science is strong there." She suggested administration support for laws to cap the emission of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. In a confidential memo to the president on March 6, 2001, Whitman urged the president to address the issue of global warming since it "is a credibility issue for the U.S. in the international community" and "we need to appear engaged" in negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Many conservatives, however, think of global warming as quite a question, doubt the science, and oppose such a cap -- even though on the campaign trail in 2000 President Bush had promised to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from domestic power plants. By the Bush administration's first Earth Day, in April 2001, the president had broken his campaign pledge about carbon dioxide, had signaled that the government would withdraw from the Kyoto accord, suspended cleanup regulations for mining companies, and suspended the regulations on arsenic in the drinking water that were signed into law in the 11th hour by the outgoing Clinton administration. Whitman was given the task of announcing the suspension of the arsenic regulation, then was sent out to reverse the decision once it was used as shorthand, sometimes unfairly, by the media as a symbol of an administration hostile to any environmental concerns. Long before 9/11 changed everything, Bush's environmental record was a major subject of discord, and Whitman was in the thick of it, usually to her detriment.
After some Clean Air Act laws were relaxed last November to benefit coal-fired power plants, for instance, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., called for her resignation, and angry messages were issued by the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Lung Association, among others.
Whitman was generally perceived as one of the more out-of-the-loop and impotent Cabinet officials. In June 2002, the EPA sent to the United Nations a "Climate Action Report" that blamed human activity for global warming. President Bush said he disagreed with the report, which he dismissively described as having been "put out by the bureaucracy." A week later, Bush rolled back "New Source Review," a provision in the Clean Air Act requiring some industries to embrace sometimes costly cutting-edge environmental technologies. Whitman had embraced "New Source Review" as governor of New Jersey, so the move was seen as a direct rejection of her views. "This decision is a victory for outdated, polluting power plants and a devastating defeat for public health and our environment," said Sen. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt.
