1919–2010 · Governor of Alaska (1966–1969, 1990–1994) & U.S. Secretary of the Interior
Walter J. “Wally” Hickel was an Alaska construction magnate turned politician who served two non-consecutive terms as governor and, in between, spent some 22 months as Richard Nixon’s Secretary of the Interior before being fired in November 1970 for publicly breaking with the president over Vietnam. He was known for blunt, off-the-cuff aphorisms that his longtime aide Malcolm B. Roberts collected ↗ on “the backs of envelopes, airplane napkins and whatever else I could lay my hands on.” “You can’t just let nature run wild” is the most famous of them — a line his critics treated as self-refuting and his defenders read as pragmatism about active wildlife management.