I met Bill Ruckelshaus, who died last week, in 1983, or around then, when he came to rescue the Environmental Protection Agency from the criminals that President Reagan had placed in charge of it. Connoisseurs of ancient scandal will recall that the Administrator of the EPA, Ann Burford Gorsuch (the mom of the current SCOTUS justice) and eleven of the twelve most senior political appointees had all been indicted for various forms of malfeasance and crookery. I happened to be writing speeches for the sole survivor, and when Bill returned to the EPA he asked this person to recommend a speech writer and the guy recommended me.

So, if you know anything about Washington DC you know that the most precious commodity in any federal outfit is face time with the chief, and so his scheduler had to squeeze me in, and the only spare minute to be had was a ride back from Washington National Airport. Bill was about to give the first major speech of his new tenure, and it had to be a good one. As I recall he said what he wanted to say and I told him he couldn’t say it in that way, and then told him what I thought he should say. It’s to Bill’s great credit that he didn’t toss me out of the car.

Unlike many Washington political appointees, Bill had no problem getting his point across in public. In fact, Bill was one of the best ex tempore speakers I ever heard, witty, smart and self-effacing, not the usual combo in DC. I once heard him introduced to a convocation of Fortune 500 executives, where the introducing bigwig presented his golden resumé—head of the FBI, founding administrator of the EPA, Deputy Attorney General, Attorney General (“for three minutes,” as he would say) and on an on. When Bill took the podium and the applause died down, he said, “And . . . I am a notary public.”

But speeches by cabinet officers are not just personal expressions. They’re policy-making devices, marching orders for the troops, priority-setters, and messages to stakeholders. In many government agencies the public affairs office writes the speeches, but Bill wanted a policy guy to do his and so I got the job. I became his regular speechwriter, during his stint at EPA Administrator and for some years thereafter, when he was a corporate CEO. The relationship between a speechwriter and the principal is essentially weird, a combination of intellectual intimacy and, on the writer’s part, extreme self-effacement. The speechwriter may get more face-time with the boss than all but the most senior aides, but he can never make political use of it to push an agenda. Despite this, everyone wants to be the speechwriter’s best friend, everyone has an idea about what the big kahuna should say.

Bill understood all this and thought it was amusing. He occasionally accused me of slipping anarcho-syndicalist ideas into the speeches. In fact, I think he enjoyed having a somewhat lefty speechwriter in the midst of the Reagan administration. He was not himself an ideologue. As far as I could tell his political philosophy was based on patriotism and pragmatism. He thought America was the place that the big problems got solved and he thought the agency he led twice was capable of solving one of the biggest—how to run an advanced economy without destroying the basis of human life and health.

He thought polluting capitalism could be reformed via intelligent regulation and his major effort at EPA was focused on corralling corporate titans into sharing that belief. He thought the future belonged to the clean, that economic development had to be environmentally sustainable. I imagine he was frustrated by the inability of his fellow Republicans to see it that way, although he was always pointing out that conservation was a conservative invention, that both the National Park system and the EPA itself were Republican creations. He often complained that corporate America was all for the environment until a right-wing government came along, in which case they would lobby like mad to be as filthy as possible. Despite this, he retained an abiding faith in the ability of opposing forces to hammer out deals, and he did so hammer, both on the national level and locally, when he returned to the Puget Sound region.

One reason why he could bring to the table people who had been fighting each other for years was his personal integrity. He was the classic honest broker, but beyond that he sort of radiated decency. I’m sure a Marxist would have something to say about the social damage done by classic conservatism, but that didn’t seem relevant where he was concerned. He’d famously walked away from one of the most prestigious jobs in Washington rather than do something he thought wrong. Do we still have people like that?

Sometimes he seemed antique, even in his own time, like a fictional character from a Jimmy Stewart movie, a kind of American ideal. I once asked him if he would ever write his memoirs, but he never did. He did pick a title, though, “Night Thoughts of a Hoosier Gentleman,” which says something about how seriously he took himself. Another time I asked him why he wasn’t in office, suggesting that he would not be out of place in the Senate or the White House, and he said he just couldn’t stand spending most of his time on the phone asking people for money., which is another indication of the kind of person he was, and a partial explanation of why the country is in its current state.

When he was Administrator, he had a reproduction of Holbein’s St. Thomas More, the “man for all seasons” hanging outside his office door. I always thought it was aspirational, the public servant as martyr, at least potentially. It seems to me now that if our nation is to survive in anything like the form we’ve known it, it’s going to need a lot more people like Bill Ruckelshaus. His passing left a big hole in many lives, mine included, and maybe an even bigger one in the national fabric