Crusading for Conservation

"Everybody has talked about conservation but, as Mark Twain said about the weather, nobody has done very much about it." This wry remark was made last week by James Schlesinger in an interview with TIME, just before he was put in charge of the Carter Administration's energy policies. Schlesinger, the intellectual James-of-all-trades for the Nixon and Ford administrations, repeated the line at Carter's press conference and, untypically, botched it slightly.* But he still made his point about the energy crisis: "We are going to try to do something about it."

Talking with TIME Correspondent Don Sider, Schlesinger described his job as a crusade. Said he: "If we can define the challenge to Americans, we will have a strong response, providing something we as a people have lost--the sense of our common destiny and purpose."

Top Priority. Schlesinger will serve in the West Wing of the White House as an assistant to the President. Eventually, Carter intends to put him into the Cabinet as Secretary of a new Energy Department that would consolidate the functions of the Federal Energy Administration, the Energy Research and Development Agency and some now filled by the Interior Department. Congress must approve the new department, however, and the House may resist attempts to truncate Interior.

As Atomic Energy Commission chairman, Schlesinger was an advocate of nuclear power. Carter maintains that Schlesinger shares his view that nuclear power should be used only as a last resort In any event, Carter said, "his No. 1 priority will be to conserve energy."

Among other things, Schlesinger said, the U.S. will have to move toward more efficient appliances, automobile engines and power plants. U.S. energy efficiency, he said, is now "about half that of Sweden and Germany, which have comparable levels of per capita income." Schlesinger views this prodigal waste as providing the U.S. with some short-term benefits. He explained: "The fact that we have been that wasteful provides us with impressive opportunities for improvement."

Great Challenge. The job as energy czar will be Schlesinger's fifth Government post in a career that has been spent mostly as a specialist in defense economics. A lifelong Republican--but one who nonetheless considers himself an apolitical technocrat--he joined the Nixon Administration in 1969 and served as assistant budget director, AEC chairman, CIA director and, finally, Secretary of Defense. His trademarks were an ever-present pipe, an ever-flapping shirttail, a rumpled suit and a heavy-handed sarcasm that made him many enemies. Ford fired him last year, because of both his abrasiveness and his skepticism about detente.

Having lost out for Defense Secretary, which he wanted badly, Schlesinger may offer Carter advice on defense on an ad hoc basis. Schlesinger professes to have no reservations about taking on the energy job. Said he: "It is a very great challenge and, given public and congressional support, I think we can make sizable progress. That kind of opportunity is only rarely to be discerned in matters of Government policy."

* The quip is also attributed to Charles Dudley Warner, who was editor of the Hartford Courant in the late 1890s.

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