Bruce Babbitt

This is the Los Angeles Dodgers Radio Network.

[trumpet music] This is Bruce Babbitt.

Stick with the home team, the Sun Devils, on News Radio 620 KTAR Phoenix.

Here's Dusty Baker at bat, Dusty hitting .258.

He tr- he offered the Supreme Court seat twice to Mario Cuomo, the governor of New York, and he turned it down.

He tried to appoint Bruce Babbitt, who had been the governor of Arizona and was the interior secretary.

He tried to appoint him, and that nomination got messed up because of a fight between environmentalists and, and land owners over who would be the next interior secretary or something like that.

And, and, uh, for a time, he wanted to appoint George Mitchell, who was, you know, who negotiated the Good Friday Accord, the former Senate majority leader.

In large part, I think it's that the press reporters are generally not folks who you would expect to be – in this country, not generally subject to that type of violence.

Bruce Babbitt, who was attorney general at the time, said there's an unwritten rule you know, with the mob that, you know, reporters and judges and cops are off limits and, you know, that rule was violated.

So I think, you know, in large part, it kind of resonates because that's such an unusual event to happen in this country.

Other countries, unfortunately, you see, you know, that type of violence here, you know, as a reporter shows up for a meeting with a source, you know, gets into his car in a hotel parking lot, turns the key and, you know, A bomb explodes under them.

Third, number 12.

This is Bruce Babbitt.

Stick with the home team, the Sun Devils, on Newsradio 620, KATAR Phoenix.

Here's Dusty Baker at bat.

But if you went back, I was at the bottom of the heap.

I mean, Burton Barr, John Kyle, Barry Goldwater, Bruce Babbitt.

I mean, these were people that were unbelievable leaders in terms of moving forward public policy.

sometimes regardless of their partisan position.

Yeah.

Even though Tom's friend, our friend Steve Boudinet from Channel 3 was one of the first people to get to go in, and of course Bruce Babbitt was the one who got to make it to State Bar, and I still haven't

gone.

One of my students when I worked at NAU was a police officer for Phoenix, and he was a Karchner.

And I launched into that legal world where I love the interaction between the law and actually society, an important issue for health and environment, et cetera.

And then very importantly, I had the opportunity to go into the federal government working for Bruce Babbitt, who was the Secretary of the Interior.

And my eyes and my horizons really broadened as I was working for a land management agency that It deals with land, water, wildlife, indigenous issues, managing over a quarter of the landmass of the United States and offshore waters.

And that just hooked me into the environment writ large.

Yeah.

So I think it was a series of things that pulled me in.

One of the episodes in reflecting on this podcast, JB, that I recall very clearly was those early days when I was in the Interior Department working with Bruce Babbitt, the Secretary of the Interior, who was and is a fantastic guy and former governor of Arizona, science background, lover of the West and lands, etc.

And he was super interested in GIS mapping at an early time and worked with the United States Geological Survey, the science agency of the Interior Department, to develop GIS-based mapping resources.