Ruckelshaus, William Doyle, 1932-2019

William Doyle Ruckelshaus was born July 24, 1932, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was Deputy Attorney General of Indiana from 1960 through 1965, and a member of the Indiana House of Representatives and its majority leader from 1967 to 1969.

In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon appointed him Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division for the Department of Justice. He became the Environmental Protection Agency's first Administrator when the agency was formed in December 1970, and served until April 1973. In April 1973 he was appointed acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and in the same year was appointed Deputy Attorney General of the Department of Justice. In a 1973 event known as the "Saturday Night Massacre", Ruckelshaus and Attorney General Elliot Richardson, famously resigned their positions at the Department of Justice rather than obey an order from President Richard M. Nixon to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who was investigating official misconduct on the part of the president and his aides. After leaving the Justice Department, he returned to the private sector and the practice of law, serving for a time as the Senior Vice-President of Legal Affairs of Weyerhaeuser.

In 1983, with the Environmental Protection Agency in crisis due to mass resignations over the mishandling of the Superfund project, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to serve as administrator, a position he held until January 1985. From 1983 to 1986, he served on the United Nations' World Commission on Environment and Development. In 1985, he joined Perkins Coie, a Seattle, Washington, based law firm.

From July 1997 to July 1998, President William J. Clinton he served as the U.S. envoy in the implementing of the Pacific Salmon Treaty and in 1999 he was appointed by Washington Governor Gary Locke as Chairman of the Salmon Recovery Funding Board for the State of Washington. He was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve on the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, mandated by the Oceans Act of 2000 (Public Law 106-256).

Ruckelshaus died at his home in Medina, Washington, on November 27, 2019, at age 87.[4][40]