RICHARD LAMM. Born 1935.

Transcript of OH 1395V

This interview was recorded on December 13, 2005, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program and the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum. The interviewer is Hannah Nordhaus. The interview is also available in video format, filmed by Hannah Nordhaus. The interview was transcribed by Sandy Adler.

ABSTRACT: Former Governor Richard Lamm talks about the political issues raised by the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant during his administration, including potential public health dangers of the plant, reasons for closure of the plant, working with the union, the Lamm-Wirth Task Force, and how the Cold War and mistrust in government during that time period impacted Rocky Flats. He also discusses Project Rulison, , the Democratic Party, and national security in the post-9/11 world.

NOTE: Interviewer’s questions and comment appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets.

[A].

00:00 (…the Rocky Flats Oral History Project. I’m interviewing Governor Richard Lamm. It is the 13th of December, 2005. We’re in Governor Lamm’s office at the University of . We’re recording.)

(Governor Lamm, to start with, if you could just give me a little bit about your background, when you were born, where you were born?)

I was born in 1935 in Madison, Wisconsin, grew up in northern Illinois and , Pennsylvania. Came to Colorado in the army in 1957. Went to Berkeley to law school and came back to Colorado after law school not knowing a soul, but we’ve been here continuously since 1961.

(How did you end up being Governor?)

John F. Kennedy—and I was of that generation where John F. Kennedy was a shock of electricity through our society. I was a second-year law student when he was elected President. I know, as your parents probably have told you, it was just simply a jolt of electricity to America to make the world a better place. I can’t convince my kids of this, the people that I teach, but there was a wave of idealism, sort of exemplified by the Peace Corps, that really was dedicated to making the world a better place.

(So you were a practicing lawyer and then you got into the state legislature?)

I was elected to the legislature in 1966, took office in 1967. I spent eight years in the legislature and then ran for Governor in 1974 and was elected and was in office for twelve years.

(What kind of law did you practice?)

I was a CPA before I was a lawyer, so I did a certain amount of accounting, tax, estate planning, but soon got out of that to a more general practice of law. Maybe this is too early to get involved in this, but I, pro bono, meaning—free—started my interest in this whole Rocky Flats-type issue when I was the chief counsel in an attempt to stop Project Rulison, which was part of the Atomic Energy’s Plowshares program—plowshare being that we were gonna turn our swords into plowshares, our nuclear weapons into some better purpose. Well, this Plowshares program had the brilliant idea of making new harbors by using atomic bombs. What they wanted to do in Colorado in Project Rulison is that they wanted to, and did once, explode a nuclear device up in Rulison, Colorado [in 1969], underground to try to loosen up the tight rock formations and produce natural gas. Well, I was part of the lead in a group of attorneys who sued them and tried to stop Project Rulison.

We had a big trial in front of Judge [Alfred A.] Arraj at the Denver district courthouse. It went on for a long time. We lost, but we, I think, started the process of getting the publicity against —Hey, folks, this was a very bad idea.

(And they determined that it was a bad idea after the gas was too contaminated?)

Whether they determined it was a bad idea or it wasn’t economical, one can’t say. One has to be careful.

(This was right before you—?)

As I recall, this was 1970, maybe ‘69.

04:02 (When did you first learn about this place called Rocky Flats?)

Well, I was aware of Rocky Flats for—I suppose maybe even when I was in the army here. Maybe that’s unfair. But anyway, it gradually grew in my consciousness. I guess that I always questioned why we were building atomic triggers upwind from Denver, but I can’t say when it went from curiosity to conviction that this was a bad idea. I really don’t know. But I think it was around the time that—Project Rulison sensitized me to the fact that both business and government had some grandiose plans for nuclear energy that I felt were not fully thought through.

[pause] (I understand that when you were a legislator, people were already talking to you about Rocky Flats and doing something about it. Was that the case?)

I think that there were four or five legislators. I think giving credit where credit is due— Tim Wirth (see interview with Tim Wirth, OH 1398V), when he was elected in 1974, I think really galvanized the support of a number of us. I really do take my hat off to him. When I think back on it, of the people in political office, he deserves far more credit than any of the rest of us.

(And when you were running for Governor, you already had a plan for shutting Rocky Flats?)

I think so. I can’t imagine that I didn’t, because I was in a Democratic primary and that was a very big issue in Boulder. I can’t frankly tell you what my plan was other than saying that it—I was one of those that—I understood the need to build nuclear triggers. I mean, I did not argue with the idea that we needed, for deterrence purposes or self- protection or whatever else, some nuclear weapons. A lot of people do, but I didn’t. It was not so much the concept as the place where these were being manufactured.

(Here in the metropolitan area?)

In any metropolitan area, yeah. I don’t know what they were thinking of back in those days. I think with Rocky Mountain Arsenal and Rocky Flats, I mean, those were two things that were—not to confuse these things, but in Rocky Mountain Arsenal they were storing nerve gas, also upwind from Denver, right at the end of a runway. And of course, if you would have a crash into that, smoke and fire would disperse the nerve gas. I think that these were—back in more naive times, I don’t think that this was by any means done deliberately, but I think that it was just public policy malpractice that these things were located where they were.

07:30 (Do you remember the point where the public consciousness evolved to the point where people questioned the fact that they should be here?)

I think that there wasn’t any one major event, but it was a growing awareness. Back in the ‘70s, there was an increased awareness that large-scale things could happen. I’m trying to remember whether Bhopal, the big industrial accident in India that killed a lot of people—I might have my timing wrong.

(It was in the ‘80s.)

That was in the ‘80s? Anyway, I think something happened that did increase the public’s awareness that these things had a potential. It isn’t—it’s very important to understand what we were saying: It isn’t the odds, it’s the stakes. A lot of times in public policy, even small odds are unacceptable. I think that there was an awareness that if anything went wrong out at Rocky Flats—and things did go wrong—but anything that really got away, like a fire almost got away—that the stakes of something like this were such that even small odds were unacceptable.

(Were you aware of the ‘69 fire when it happened?)

I was. Sure. I can’t—that was a public event, wasn’t it?

(Were you in the legislature then?)

Yes. I was in the legislature at the time.

(Do you recall, did the legislature react to it in any way?)

I remember no reaction at all from the legislature. We had a fairly conservative, Republican, support-the-Cold War legislature, and of course, I think on both sides. I think the Democrats had as much to do with forging the Cold War strategy. It was Harry Truman and George Marshall that came up with this whole thing, but I do think, Hannah, now that I think about it, that it was all part of the anti-Vietnam war, too. Now that I think about it, your question is a wonderful one, and my answer immediately has to be amended.

What I think was the growing awareness of this is that the government was not to be trusted—blindly, anyway—and I think that was all part of Vietnam. This was a period of nihilism, antagonism toward the establishment, and I think that people said that the same misjudgment that got us into a land war in Asia, we are gonna start questioning more and more. So I think it was part of the milieu of the time.

10:51 (A few people, when I mentioned I was interviewing you, they always sort of link your involvement with Rocky Flats to the Olympics, your involvement in not bringing the Olympics to Denver. Was that part of a growing environmental awareness?)

Yes, it definitely was. And I think that one of the problems that I suffered from after the Olympics, from which I got sort of a reputation as a giant-killer, was that if you could do this, why can’t you do this and this and this? I’m a man of limited talents [laughs] and I was very lucky, I think. My whole political career is more luck than talent. I do think that what happened to me in particular after I took office, Robert Redford, who did a couple of fundraisers for me, wanted me immediately to come out against all nuclear power. And when I didn’t, he was quoted in the Rocky Mountain News as saying voting for Lamm was like saving your Confederate money. We subsequently reconciled, and he is to this day a friend, but it does show that the Democratic Party—I was the first Democratic Governor in a lot of years, and there were all these built-up expectations. Then I’d been the chief sponsor of the nation’s first liberalized abortion law, followed by the Olympics. So I was a giant-killer. Well, I killed very few giants in my life. [laughs]

(Was it harder once you became Governor—)

Oh!

(—to do that?)

Oh! It was—I almost disappeared on the polls. Sure. Lots of these reasons were self- imposed, but I think that the expectations—I don’t want to excuse away what was not very skillfull conduct on my part. I was thirty-nine years old. I was just a kid when I was elected Governor. And I think that it was—the expectations built up around a Democratic Governor were just insatiable.

(And you became the giant. Can you describe—when you became Governor, what your role was with regard to Rocky Flats? Besides the Lamm-Wirth Task Force, which we’ll get to in a second. How did your office interface with DOE and the federal government?)

I went out there to look at the place, but I don’t know exactly when this was. Early on, I went out to look at the place. I was impressed by the safety considerations here. There’s another thing that should be talked about here, and that’s the fact that the union movement, particularly the union movement at Rocky Flats—and there were a couple of brothers, the Kelly brothers, who were nice, good Democrats, they were definitely a part of all of our considerations, because they wanted those jobs, understand? They weren’t worried about building nuclear triggers upwind from Denver. I remember some exchanges with them, and I think that I didn’t have near as many as I think Tim Wirth did and some of these other people, but the Kelly brothers were all over me. I think I went out there and then met with the Kelly brothers, and you can’t help but being impressed because you’re put through a programmed visit, and you are—I think it was only later that we really knew the full magnitude of it. Did I ever dream they were burying radioisotopes with half-lives of 26,000 years out there? No. But my visit—I remember my visit out there that I was very impressed at the care they were taking but unpersuaded that—it seemed to me that the Cold War was going to go on forever and that we really ought to move that place someplace else.

15:29 (Can you describe your physical impressions of the plant, the buildings? Had you ever been on an industrial high-security location?)

I guess I never had, no. I never had, and it was—they pull out all the stops on this. I think that it’s only because of courageous journalists here recently, since 9/11, they have really exposed how vulnerable some of these things are that they thought were—and that happened out at Rocky Flats, too. I don’t remember the exactly specifics of the story, but some journalists went out there and found that the security—that they were able to get a lot farther in there [chuckles] than they thought they were going to be able to. So I was impressed. For the Governor, of course, they had all of the bells and whistles out, all of the rapid-response teams and everything else, but—I think—look, a Governor relies on other people. Our health department and the people that are in our health department, we really—you know, you have to—it’s an interesting question, because a Governor is always just a flawed and inadequate human being that has to say, —Well, now, how do we set up a procedure?— It isn’t a decision, it’s a procedure for making these decisions. I found a wonderful guy that I really did have confidence in that could help me navigate these kinds of decisions.

(Who was that?)

I’ll get you the name in a minute. Keep talking.

(He was a staffer for you, or DOE?)

No. He was a member of our health department.

17:27 (Did you go inside the buildings?)

Mm-hmm. Oh, I watched them manipulating—putting their hands in the gloves and in the box and I watched the whole thing.

(What were the buildings like? Some of our funding comes from the State Historical Fund, and we’re supposed to document the history of the buildings. I’m always interested—I get very interesting descriptions from people who hadn’t spent a lot of time there, just the impression of what the physical plant was like there.)

Well, I think one of the issues, as I recall, gosh, I hope I’ve got this right, but there wasn’t a double—in other words, when you’re dealing with something that dangerous, there should be a building within a building. I can’t remember exactly, but I mean—I can remember nothing other than it was a regular industrial building, actually. I don’t recall anything different at all. What I really remember is the handling of those radioisotopes.

(Careful?)

Yeah, because if there’s even a pinhole in the glove, the guy’s exposed. I could see why those people were paid more money and why those were good jobs. And as we found subsequently, we don’t know what kind of damage to their health—uranium miners is a great example. Back in the naive days of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the whole question of people downwind in . A very good friend of mine, a wonderful governor named Scott Matheson, died very clearly from the effects of living and being brought up downwind from the Nevada test site. So I think that this has been a matter of growing awareness. It’s almost like the women’s movement, you know, that you have to raise one’s levels of awareness. I think that’s what all of us were going through back in those times.

(I’m wondering what you think has happened to that awareness now? Does it go in cycles?)

It definitely goes in cycles. I think that the—to me, that’s a complicated problem. And this is hopping ahead a little bit, but one of the issues in public policy is, how clean is clean? How adequate is adequate cleanup? I spent $16 million cleaning up mill tailings in Grand Junction that might have caused one death every ten years. Now, you give me $16 million to buy health for Colorado, I would immediately cover all of the uninsured people in Colorado. So I do think that I separate from some of the environmentalists these days in that I think cost-benefit ratios are questions that public policy has to ask. I recognize I’ve leaped ahead for you. But that does relate to this, because I’ve sort of been there and back. One of the things that I think—when I went into government, I would look at a place like some of the clean-up of our hazardous waste sites up in Leadville and things like that and recognize that I really wanted those places clean. I thought those companies had been irresponsible about the way they had dealt with their toxic and hazardous wastes.

I have come to see that there’s a Praeto principle involved in cleanup, where you get ninety percent of your benefit for ten percent of your costs, and the remaining ten percent will cost ninety percent of your money. So I think that at some point, I would have been—Rocky Flats as I remember it, there were two different issues, one of which is, should it be accessible to people, and what parts should be accessible to people? I was actually willing to close down part of that place and just simply declare it a national sacrifice area.

(Not even clean it at all?)

I would have wanted it clean. I wanted it clean. But again, one of the things that we’ve learned about radioisotopes in the water system is—this is what happened out at Rocky Mountain Arsenal—they put gunk under things that took a long time, but that in fact was a—this is just sweeping things under the rug. So out at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, I was able to see something that was put down in the ‘40s that was gradually working its way towards Broomfield’s water supply of the people up there.

In Rulison, one of the things that we argued is that radioisotopes, particularly—that the radioisotopes can move even through stagnant water by an exchange of molecules, so when you get a heavy hydrogen, for instance, water being that. So I was very worried about the water system out in that area, but I was less worried about the fact that if we had some contamination out there, if we could take two or three acres that we would want to clean up but maybe not to the same standards to, say, if people were going to picnic on the place, I was willing to fence off part of that area if that had to be done.

(That’s what happened.)

That’s what happened.

(But the environmentalists weren’t happy with that approach?)

The environmentalists—I can’t say specifically on this, but I think that generally the idea of cost-benefit ratios, generally the idea that you should force industry and/or government to clean up to a hundred percent is mistaken. I have lots of needs out there. I have lots of people without health insurance. I have lots of kids without adequate vaccinations, and everything else. And I think that to govern is to choose, and I at least am willing to say that it doesn’t make sense to spend in some cases the billions of dollars to get a marginal increase in safety. It’s not unthinkable to me to, as they’ve done, to simply block some of those places off.

(Is this a view that you developed over time, or did you feel that way from the beginning?)

No. I didn’t. I was probably [sighs]—I was—[pause]—balancing a budget and seeing that to govern is to choose and that you had to make some priorities, the experience in that Grand Junction mill tailings, mine tailings, the uranium mine, when I asked myself could I really justify—is that the best way I could buy health for Colorado? It was a political problem. It’s easy for me to say. I don’t live in Grand Junction. I mean, that’s the dilemma on something like that. But I do think that there’s got to be some sort of rule of reason on this stuff, because we live in a society with infinite needs and finite resources.

25:50 (Let’s talk about the Lamm-Wirth Task Force now. If you could tell me a little bit about its formation, who was appointed and—?)

I can’t tell you who was appointed on the thing. I think that this was on both of our radars for some time. I think that the idea of a task force was negotiated by Tim and I personally and then left to other people to fill in the blanks.

(Who made the appointments?)

I think both of us did.

(Did you feel that it was a balanced array of interests regarding Rocky Flats?)

I’m sure that the industry would say no. I know that the Kelly brothers felt no. But we felt that that’s the people we wanted on it.

(They were on it?)

Yeah, but they wanted—this is—the power to appoint a task force, you see this in President Bush, the power to appoint a task force is a power to get an end result. So on the Social Security task force, he didn’t appoint anybody that didn’t agree with his opinion. We did have very strong Rocky Flats supporters on that task force, but I think that they didn’t—they were very suspicious of some of the people that we put on it that they thought were “hysterical”— quote-unquote—about the health of the public of Colorado.

(Did you feel that you appointed the task force in order to get a result?)

No. I really didn’t—I really felt that the process was necessary, that we wanted a balanced bunch of people, but I didn’t want them to be the handmaidens of the union out there, and/or the industry and/or the government.

(Did you feel political pressure in terms of who to appoint or how it would be configured?)

I don’t recall it that way.

(Were you surprised by its conclusions?)

No, I really wasn’t. I think that they did an immensely conscientious job.

(Do you think anybody ever seriously considered closing the plant or that it would be possible to close the plant?)

I think it came as a surprise to a lot of us. Certainly we went into this thinking that the main question was, how do we keep it as safe as possible? And by the way, there was another thing here, too, and that’s the transportation of these nuclear triggers up and down I-25. It’s not only the plant itself, but it was sort of the attractive nuisance theory, that once they had these things, then they had to get ‘em back and forth, and there was a whole untold story about how many of those things were going up and down our highways at who knows what risk.

29:16 (Did you think the ultimate decision to close the plant had anything to do with the public pressure against it, or was it just about the Cold War?)

[pause] Great question. Great, great question. I think it had something to do with it, but I think the major driving force was the Cold War, yeah.

(And had the Cold War been in—?)

We might still have it. I don’t know. I mean, I would respect Tim Wirth’s opinion on this. He knew more about the dynamics. Or or some of these other people. But I certainly—that was not by any means a state-of-the-art plant, so maybe by this time they would have recognized that a combination of the inappropriateness of being upwind from Denver—the fact that they should be doing things like that in a remote location—but mainly I’m sure there’s a number of these things that could be automated. So I suspect that the plant would be closed down now even if the Cold War was continuing, now that I think about it, because I think the efficiencies—it doesn’t pay to run very many processes today with a 1940s technology.

(Did you notice when you watched the guy handling the plutonium in the plant, did it seem like antiquated technology at the time?)

It didn’t. It didn’t. I was not that sophisticated, and remember, this was back in the ‘70s. But it did—you know, they had to mill this stuff in a way that I don’t think that I was aware that technology could have solved that problem.

31:08 (Did you have any frustrations with the legal limitations of your office?)

Sure, you bet I did. You bet I did. Yeah, that brings up a whole bunch of other things. I wanted to know how many nuclear devices were in Colorado. The Governor is personally responsible—you see this in the Katrina thing, the Louisiana Governor. We run the emergency response systems here. And so here the biggest threat to the health of Colorado, one of the biggest ones—again, it’s not a matter of the odds, it’s a matter of the stakes—would be some nuclear event of some sort, not an explosion, but a weapon that would be subject to a fire and spread and things like that. We had no idea. We had no idea how many—if any—nuclear devices. We didn’t even know—I couldn’t even know how many missiles we had stationed in Colorado. These were all things that—the has the responsibility but not the authority to really be able to fully protect the people of Colorado. That was very frustrating to me. And they’d pat you on the head and say—Don’t worry. We’ve got it handled.

(Did you—could you find that out if you were able to get a clearance, or that was information that you never—?)

No, I don’t think that they were—they were not willing to clear me. I think we made an issue of that. I’m a little vague. This is a long time ago. [chuckles] I wanted to know how many nuclear devices there were in Colorado. Cause it isn’t only Rocky Flats. There’s a whole bunch of other things that were potentially—they were also, of course, talking about building the MX missile system. That was a system of underground trains and things. And the feeling on the part of the Department of Defense was that governors did not have a need to know.

(And there was no way you could persuade anybody in the federal government otherwise?)

I couldn’t—I know of no governor in the US that had access, even close, to any of that information.

(That never even occurred to me. Wow. Did you—you had mentioned the public health department employee who was so helpful.)

Jim Linz [?], I think his name was.

(Was he able to get onsite—)

Mm-hmm.

(—and monitor—?)

He said that he had found a large degree of cooperation, as I remember. If you track him down, he would be the best one to respond. He felt that there was a new degree of openness out there when we took over. I don’t think they were doing this other than the fact that they realized that the game had changed, that governors, local officials, were really going to be—it wasn’t only myself. A lot of local officials were starting to ask, — What’s our risk?—

(So it was a PR strategy?)

Yes. I think that—right, I do think it was a PR strategy, yes.

(So you never had to intervene to get more access for him or more information for any of your other staffers?)

Not that I recall.

34:47 (You discussed your relations with the union. I wonder if you could describe the various pressures that came to bear from the union, from the protesters, from the federal officials.)

My memory of this is never being resentful, and this was at a time when resentment was at least one of the options I had. [chuckles] I really was respectful of the Kelly brothers and the way they tried to handle this. They recognized that there was a problem, and they were very constructive trying to help us solve it without losing those jobs. I think there were other members—if I’m not mistaken, they might’ve even had a challenge within their union about not being militant enough. I mean, those were very attractive jobs out there. They were very high-paid jobs. I think that when we started being a threat to their continuing livelihood, there were some real problems in the union. But the Kelly brothers, my memory of it is that they were people of balance and judgment. I really always appreciated that. In other words, I never had them into my office. I had other union officials come into my office. I mean, the one thing about being a Democratic governor, there are various interest groups that helped elect you, and some of these were fairly militant. They’d say, “You gotta do this,” and that always used to get my back up. The great thing about being governor of Colorado—if you’re in Wyoming, you’re in bed with the cattle industry. If you’re in Utah, it’s the church, and things like that. In Colorado, there’s no one group that really elects you. So you can tell anybody to stick it in their ear because you’re not dependent on any one group. But nevertheless, there have been other members of the union movement that came into my office pounding the desk. The Kelly brothers never did that.

(That must have been very difficult. I mean, these are two very important constituents for you, unions and environmentalists, and in this instance they are completely at loggerheads. How did you try—?)

You know, I don’t even really remember that being much of an issue. I was certainly sold, and I think that the union movement was never—I was never their first choice. I think that they always had questions about me because I was an environmentalist. So I think that they—I would come down on the side of the environmentalists virtually all the time, and the union members recognized that I was in the way of Colorado becoming a right-to-work state. They might have not liked me. They might have thought I was a way far-out environmentalist at times, but the fact is, they had to deal with me, because—and I wanted to do that. I did not want to see, and they didn’t want to see Colorado become a right-to-work state. So always we had a bottom line of respect between us. But I think that I was anti-growth. I don’t want to see Colorado become 16 million people. I wanted to do more land use planning. I fought the Olympics. So I was never very high on the union’s list of favorite politicians.

(But there was a respect there?)

They knew—oh, yeah, with the Kelly brothers, I think we liked each other. I liked them, anyway. [chuckles] I thought that they were just—yeah, delightful people.

38:46 (I think we’re wrapping this up. I guess a few questions. I’m wondering if your official role with regard to Rocky Flats ever conflicted with your personal view? And also how you think those roles changed over the years, with respect to _____?)

[sighs] [pause] I think that the Rulison—I have a very strong feeling that my generation was the generation that was disillusioned with what government was telling us. And so in 1966, when I was elected to the legislature, the idea that the government would be lying or trying to hide relevant facts, that it would be trying to cook the books in any way never entered my mind. Four years later, it was completely different. I think the Vietnam war had a very powerful effect on increasing all of our awareness that government was also a flawed vessel. So my personal feelings had a lot to do with that. And I think that the rest of the people, Gary Hart and Tim Wirth, , all of us, I think, were impacted by this, because we were much more reluctant to take government, what they said, at a total face value. Their assessment of the risk to Denver was something I wasn’t about to take blindly.

(And then of course there was Watergate as well, right when you were elected Governor. In terms of the environmental risks, it sounds like you have had a deviation of personal— ?)

Sure. I’ve come to very strongly believe that cost-benefit ratios are inevitable in public policy.

(Are you still an environmentalist?)

Absolutely. I think when the history of these times is written, that that’s going to be one of our great mistakes. I think that global warming is most likely a reality. I think that your generation and your kids are going to suffer because my generation didn’t listen enough to the environmental issues that were raised at the time. It’s a little bit of a different issue. In other words, it always seemed to me that on issues of population, on issues of—on some of the bigger issues that I felt were facing the environment, the environmentalists didn’t speak up enough on those issues, and on other issues, like, how clean do we clean the Yak tunnel in Leadville, that they didn’t have enough give. But no, absolutely. It’s the environmentalists that were the chief—politics is the art of energy. What’s the new energy that is coming into a political party at any given time? We’re seeing this in the Republican Party right now. The energy is coming in from the Christian right. And the only new energy that’s coming into the Democratic Party is the gay community. So you’ve got sort of the ho-hum constituencies, of which environmentalist is one, with due respect, but it’s not a new energy that’s coming to revitalize the party. I think back in the ‘60s, the women’s movement and the were two of the ones that elected me, clearly, but they brought so much of the new energy and passion into the Democratic Party. A sense of idealism, a sense of change, a sense that the status quo was unacceptable, and I think that was very heady stuff.

I know—this is not what you’re asking. I haven’t been to a Democratic fundraiser in a long time, but I think it’s just disgusting to see the Democratic Party so in bed with the trial lawyers, the teachers’ unions, and just other special interests. I think that they’re marginally better than the Republican special interests, but they’re still—the Democratic Party to me is a special interest party now. It’s just that our special interests are somewhat better than the Republican special interests.

(And was that not the case?)

No, that was not the case at all. My God, I grew up in a Democratic Party that was filled with nothing but idealists. I never saw a Trial Lawyers Association person. I did see the teachers’ union, but the teachers’ union had a whole—to my mind, that was a different organization back in those days. I think what you had was environmentalists, you had the women’s movement, you had the antiwar people, I mean, it was really a yeasty time in the Democratic Party. And so they were—I think that the chief energy in the Democratic Party came from idealists, maybe naive idealists, but they were idealists, as opposed to now, where they’re sort of people who want something, not for the public good, but for their own good.

44:12 (This is sort of unrelated, but in terms of population growth and sprawl, do you feel that—and I know your involvement with the and the board elections recently with immigration, is the environmental movement fracturing, do you think?)

I find very few environmentalists of the normal environmental organizations that will have anything to do with immigration, no, and I think that’s a tragedy. I think it’s an absolute tragedy. I think that one of the great issues—if the Census Bureau is right, and I think they’re understating it—by the year 2100, there will be a billion people in America. And if you have a billion people in America, you’re going to have at least 16 or 20 million people in Colorado. You do not want to have 16 or 20 million people in Colorado. We live in a desert. You go a hundred miles from where we’re meeting today, and you see the wagon wheels of the Trail laid down in the 1840s. I think that there’s a new issue that the environmentalists are blind to, and that’s sustainability. We’ve got to live more—we’ve got to have fewer people in America, not more, and we have to in fact have much more modest lifestyles.

(And do you feel that the environmental movement has stayed away from—?)

Political correctness, yeah, I think they know it.

(—these kinds of issues because of racism?)

I think that the charges of racism—environmentalists have lost their backbone. They were able to take on everything except the charge of racism. My position on immigration is the same as Barbara Jordan’s. I think that you’ve got—they refuse to show any courage on this issue because of the charge of racism.

(I guess there’s a political calculus there in that they have to form coalitions with other groups.)

Obviously that’s one of the things they’re saying, but a vast majority of whites, blacks, and Hispanics believe we’re taking too many immigrants. I think that they lack courage. It’s less of a strategy. I think that they’re intimidated by the charge of racism.

(It’s a tough charge to counter. OK, well, that was off-subject. I think we’re pretty much done. Just quickly, if we could talk about the cleanup and what you think of it. Last week, DOE certified that Rocky Flats is cleaned up. Are you happy with the level to which it’s—?)

I really can’t answer that question. I would hate to go on record as saying that I’m happy with it. I would—you know, I would—[pause] before I would answer that, I would really want to get people whose judgment I trust to tell me that it was. I think that the same thing’s happening out at Rocky Flats—I mean, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal—both of these things, the question of “clean” is such a relevant thing. I guess I’m naturally suspicious when I hear an announcement like that. But I don’t want to say that—I would just simply—color me skeptical.

47:58 (OK. I will do that. How do you feel about the nuclear industry and national security issues that involve Rocky Flats in the aftermath of the Cold War, and I guess in the aftermath of 9/11 as well?)

I believe the world has changed dramatically and I think that it is absolutely time to stand down more of these weapons. I can’t believe that the US and Russia can’t accelerate. I think that when the history of these times are written, again, one of the other big issues is that we did not get better control and stand these weapons down more rapidly than we’re doing. I don’t think we have any idea of what might be in process because of the loose nukes issue. I’m very frightened of it. Again, it’s the odds and the stakes. The ability of now—it used to be that you didn’t have to worry about a—that the maximum damage that could be done by a few kooky people was very limited. The Irish IRA, they blew up a subway, and that was a tragedy for a few people. But now, the ability of a few dedicated, but yet pathological, people to do massive harm, it’s just incredible. And I think that the US is not standing down its nuclear arsenal and putting enough pressure on Russia that they should. This to me is not just another issue. It should be seen as an absolute priority issue, here, but particularly in Russia.

(I’ve interviewed people who were out there on the train tracks demonstrating who after 9/11 started for the first time in their lives supporting nuclear weapons as a means of defense against terrorists. 9/11 didn’t change your position?)

I think that this is a whole different war. The biggest thing in public policy is to identify when the world has changed. That comes up with the immigration issue. We’re no longer an empty continent. I think it comes up on this issue, too. I think that we’re fighting a whole different war, and I think that nuclear weapons are almost irrelevant to the war on terrorism. We’re not going be able to use a nuclear weapon to respond to an act of terrorism.

(___.)

Perhaps, perhaps, but I still think that that is—I think it would be a tragic mistake—to me, it’s just like the war in Iraq. I think if you really want to multiply your enemies much more, you do something like try to take our Iran’s nuclear capacities with a bunker bomb. The point being that it well may be that there’s a huge—I’m not trying to say that we would completely disarm. But what do we have, six thousand still-active nuclear devices? Come on! We don’t need six thousand nuclear devices.

51:30 (One question I forgot to ask earlier. Some of the biggest demonstrations, protests against Rocky Flats, happened under your watch. How did your administration respond? How did you personally feel about what was going on outside the gates?)

I guess I understood why people did that, and I guess that I supported it in my heart, I really did. I think that the various—it’s not my style of doing that. I would much rather file a lawsuit, but that’s easy for me to say, I was a lawyer. I guess I really felt that that— it’s pretty hard to argue with any kind of non-violent demonstration. I think that those were—I mean, they got themselves arrested. They took their responsibility. I think that I saw that as an acceptable form of protest.

(Did you have any personal concerns about your health or safety going on plant site or being downwind?)

I guess not, no, no. To me it was a public health issue, not an individual one.

(You had mentioned, did you say the Praeto principle?)

Praeto. P-r-a-e-t-o. Praeto was an Italian mathematician who pointed out that you get ninety percent of your accomplishment in certain areas for ten percent of your money, and then it goes down from there. I think that’s what we’re dealing with in the environmental movement. You can buy an awful lot of clean-up if you’re doing level 1 and level 2. When you get into level 3 and level 4, that’s where your real money is spent. A lot of times, you need to do that. I’m not saying that it’s the end of the argument, but you just ought to recognize that to get the last one percent of clean, it might cost you more than the other ninety-nine percent clean. That’s the principle.

(OK. I knew our transcriptionist would want to know how to spell it. Well, those are all the questions I have. Is there anything else that we’ve neglected?)

Good job, good job. I enjoyed that. When I started talking about this, a lot of it came back.

(It was really interesting. I appreciate your time.)

54:10 [End of interview]