How’s with Watt?

James Gaius Watt, Secretary of the Interior, is a survivor. This is no small feat, considering that Watt spent July and August on a wheel of fire, when hardly a day passed that some politician (notably Messrs. Udall, Cranston, and Kennedy) or some environmental group did not call for Watt to resign or for the President to sack him. During these months his Department was tense and jittery, morale low. Thanks principally to Watt’s equanimity under stress and his tenacity of purpose, the bureaucrats hung tough, and Interior still serves the Republic.

In September the situation began to stabilize for Watt, and since then his fortunes have been slowly but steadily climbing, despite one of the crudest, best organized, and most prolonged onslaughts in recent memory. The current wisdom is not only that Watt will make it but, indeed, that he may be engineering one of the more dramatic publicimage turnarounds we have seen. Already Watt is one of the three top GOP fundraisers (including Reagan himself), and is probably not number three.

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James Gaius Watt, Secretary of the Interior, is a survivor. This is no small feat, considering that Watt spent July and August on a wheel of fire, when hardly a day passed that some politician (notably Messrs. Udall, Cranston, and Kennedy) or some environmental group did not call for Watt to resign or for the President to sack him. During these months his Department was tense and jittery, morale low. Thanks principally to Watt’s equanimity under stress and his tenacity of purpose, the bureaucrats hung tough, and Interior still serves the Republic.

In September the situation began to stabilize for Watt, and since then his fortunes have been slowly but steadily climbing, despite one of the crudest, best organized, and most prolonged onslaughts in recent memory. The current wisdom is not only that Watt will make it but, indeed, that he may be engineering one of the more dramatic publicimage turnarounds we have seen. Already Watt is one of the three top GOP fundraisers (including Reagan himself), and is probably not number three.