PERSONALITY IN THE NEWS : Bush’s Great Green Hope KOd by Politics : Environment: Reilly’s 1988 appointment to head the EPA was hailed by conservationists, but Washington infighting has wilted expectations.

In the beginning, it seemed like a marriage made in heaven.

President Bush, fresh from the 1988 campaign in which he declared himself “an environmentalist,” named William K. Reilly--a soft-spoken lawyer with impeccable credentials as a conservationist--to head the Environmental Protection Agency, the government’s top anti-pollution enforcement arm.

After years of rebuffs during the Ronald Reagan Administration, it looked as though environmentalists finally were going to have their day.

But Reilly’s influence quickly eroded as conservatives began to complain about the growing regulatory burden. It wasn’t long until Reilly, a low-profile intellectual who previously had been president of the Conservation Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund, found himself increasingly undercut by two formidable opponents, Vice President Dan Quayle and Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, often suffering public embarrassment in the process.

On Thursday, Reilly suffered his greatest indignity yet when White House officials leaked an internal memorandum he had sent the President outlining possible revisions in the proposed treaty on biological diversity for next week’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, without even telling him that his suggestions had been rejected. By Friday, there were rumors that Reilly, humiliated one time too many, might be about to resign.

Although rumors circulated in Rio, there was no other suggestion that the courtly 52-year-old EPA administrator actually would step down from his post as the government’s top environmental official. Friends said late Friday that it would be uncharacteristic for him to resign under fire. If he did so he would doubtless evoke a sharp reaction from environmental groups across the nation, which already are up in arms over the Administration’s stance on the key issues confronting the Earth Summit conference.

David Gardner, legislative director of the Sierra Club, calls the latest flap “only part of a string of anti-environmental decisions that the President has made” in recent months. “I believe the President and his political advisers have come to the conclusion that helping their friends in the business community is more important than doing what is necessary to protect the environment,” Gardner says.

By any measure, William Kane Reilly should have been the ideal man to become the Bush Administration’s chief environmental strategist. A Yale graduate in history, with a law degree from Harvard, he shared the Ivy League background of many of Bush’s close associates. And unlike some committed environmentalists, he shared Bush’s preference for conciliation rather than confrontation with industry.

In 15 years as president of the Conservation Foundation and later its affiliate, the World Wildlife Fund, Reilly won an international reputation as a pragmatist and a problem-solver, pushing for consensus on tough environmental issues such as toxic waste and water supply, and negotiating settlements with corporations and industry groups. Handsome and personally charming, he can easily disarm even the most apprehensive skeptic.

But he wasn’t attracted to the environmental movement until relatively late in his academic life. After graduation from Yale and Harvard, he earned a master’s degree in land planning at Columbia University and took a job working on land-use issues for the Richard M. Nixon Administration’s then-new Council on Environmental Quality, a high-level presidential advisory group.

At the Conservation Foundation, Reilly launched a program called Business and the Environment, designed to bring conservation groups and industry leaders to the negotiating table to forge consensus on key issues. The notion was new--and somewhat suspect to environmentalists--but Reilly persisted, and the concept eventually took hold. Bush tapped him for the EPA job in December, 1988.

To many, the difference he made seemed apparent almost from the start. During Reilly’s first two months in office, the Administration called for a ban on ozone-depleting chemicals, blocked construction of a Reagan-approved dam at Twin Forks, Colo., and dispatched a team of senior officials to report on the Alaska oil spill--all with Bush’s personal backing. The consensus in official Washington was, “Reilly has the President’s ear.”

But it soon became apparent that while Reilly seemed a moderate to those outside the Administration, to Bush’s key advisers he was dangerously close to becoming the house zealot--particularly when the economy began to falter and business began to complain that it once more was being stifled by environmental regulations. Sununu and Quayle’s newly activist Council on Competitiveness began thwarting him at every turn.

Over the past several months, Reilly has lost a string of battles, including proposals to protect the nation’s wetland, to prevent industry from increasing toxic air-pollution, to toughen the Administration’s stand on global warming and for a new forest treaty. Just a few days ago, he lost a similar skirmish over the sale of timber tracts in Oregon in areas inhabited by the endangered northern spotted owl.

It’s been clear for months that it has been increasingly difficult for him to function inside the White House and, perhaps as important, to retain the Administration’s credibility on environmental issues. Says Gardner, the Sierra Club’s chief lobbyist here: “I’m sure that Bill Reilly is as shocked as we are that George Bush has done a 180-degree turn.”