In early 1981, Interior Secretary Jim Watt telephoned me in my office at the other end of the two-block Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C. Ron Arnold was headed my way to research his book “about what we’re doing here,” Jim reported. “Tell him everything you know.”

In January 1982, At the Eye of the Storm: James Watt and the Environmentalists was published by Regnery. It was a comprehensive and in-depth examination of why Watt’s commitment to implement President Ronald Reagan’s policies caused such a furor and made Watt a lightning rod. In Arnold’s view, it was nothing short of a “religious war.” It came as a surprise to Watt, whose born-again Christian bona fides were well known and the subject of ridicule inside the Beltway. “I did not know that,” Watt told me, “not until I read Ron’s book.”