Walter Hickel, Nixon Interior Secretary, Dies at 90
Walter J. Hickel, who as governor of Alaska, United States secretary of the interior and then governor again of the nation’s last frontier state confounded critics by ricocheting from pro-business stalwart to ardent environmentalist and back again, died Friday in Anchorage. He was 90.
Mr. Hickel died of natural causes at an assisted-living facility, according to Malcolm Roberts, his longtime assistant.
A self-made millionaire, Mr. Hickel was governor of the 49th state from 1966 to 1968; interior secretary in the Nixon administration in 1969 and 1970; and then — after running as the nominee of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party — governor again from 1990 to 1994. He later reregistered as a Republican and disavowed the idea that Alaska should secede.
It was an ardor for Alaska’s vast wilderness — its craggy peaks, blue coastal ice sheets and rolling tundra, and its caribou herds, musk oxen, wolf packs, moose and millions of migratory birds — and a longing to tap into the oil and gas riches below the surface that propelled Mr. Hickel’s contradictory and sometimes quixotic quests.
In his prose, he was prone to what became known as Hickelisms:
“You can’t just let nature run wild,” he wrote in a 1994 book, “The Wit and Wisdom of Wally Hickel.”
“A tree looking at a tree really doesn’t do anything,” he once told a television interviewer in Anchorage....
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Mr. Hickel died of natural causes at an assisted-living facility, according to Malcolm Roberts, his longtime assistant.
A self-made millionaire, Mr. Hickel was governor of the 49th state from 1966 to 1968; interior secretary in the Nixon administration in 1969 and 1970; and then — after running as the nominee of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party — governor again from 1990 to 1994. He later reregistered as a Republican and disavowed the idea that Alaska should secede.
It was an ardor for Alaska’s vast wilderness — its craggy peaks, blue coastal ice sheets and rolling tundra, and its caribou herds, musk oxen, wolf packs, moose and millions of migratory birds — and a longing to tap into the oil and gas riches below the surface that propelled Mr. Hickel’s contradictory and sometimes quixotic quests.
In his prose, he was prone to what became known as Hickelisms:
“You can’t just let nature run wild,” he wrote in a 1994 book, “The Wit and Wisdom of Wally Hickel.”
“A tree looking at a tree really doesn’t do anything,” he once told a television interviewer in Anchorage....