Bruce Babbitt

Well, what I tried to do is simply to get out on the land. And when I came to Washington, I think one of the mistakes we made early on was kind of having an ideological dispute up in the Congress. ”

No kidding. That's really true. You're paying your own bills through this. It's not a pleasant experience. ”

It is like living in a wilderness of mirrors. No fact goes unchallenged. ”

They haul you up there for, you know, week after week in this kind of star chamber proceeding. Then at the end of it they say, well, we found nothing, but now it's time for special counsel. ”

We had kind of a rocky start, but I spent a lot of time working with the President and handing him statistics and showing him what we were doing as we went along and kind of saying to him, you know, this is really important. ”

Look, I think by the time my case was over and other ones, everybody on both sides of the aisle in Congress said we can't run a government by this kind of process and they repealed the law and that's good. ”

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process. ”

I wouldn't miss this opportunity for anything. For the chance to work on these conservation issues, to serve my country, to work for this president, I'd do it all over again, every single minute. ”

We've set aside tens of millions of acres of those northwestern forests for perpetuity. The unemployment rate has gone not up, but down. The economy has gone up. ”

This isn't just about today, this about generations to come. And you've got a chance to be the greatest conservation President since Theodore Roosevelt, and I think he's done it. ”