Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [143]
Floyd Dominy’s rise to power in the Bureau of Reclamation was astonishingly fast. From dirt sampler to waterlord of the American West took just thirteen years, and he might as well have been commissioner during the last three. Like a chess master, Dominy leaped and checked his way to the top, going from Land Development to an entirely different branch, Allocation and Repayment, then sidelong to Operation and Maintenance, then to the Irrigation Division, and finally to assistant, associate, and full commissioner. His strategy was simple. He would settle in a branch with a weak man as chief and learn as fast as he could. Then he would flap up to the ledge occupied by the chief and knock him off. The first to go was Bill Palmer, who headed Allocation and Repayment and was there largely because he was a Mormon and had an influential constituency. “Mike Straus was totally unsatisfied with Palmer,” says Dominy, “so I told Lineweaver that they ought to replace him with me. He said, ‘I can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Well, what can you do?’ Lineweaver said, ‘We can make you acting director and not tell Palmer about it.’ I said, ‘How long acting?’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t know, until we can work something out.’ I said, ‘Let’s make it sixty days.’ Lineweaver mumbled and grumbled, ‘I don’t know, Floyd, that’s awfully short.’ I said, ‘It’s long for me.’ Well, I got him to agree. There I was, ‘acting director,’ and Palmer doesn’t even know it. The first thing he does is start making a fuss about having to train me, because he’d just trained some other guy. So I walked into his office late one day and said, ‘Bill, I think you’ve got a bad attitude. I hear you’ve been complaining about having to train me. Well, you don’t have to. Dominy can train Dominy.’ He looked up at me and said, ‘What do you mean by that, Floyd?’ I looked him cold in the eye and said, ‘I mean I’m about to run this division, Bill. It’s you or me, and I can guarantee you it’s going to be me. So maybe what you ought to do is request a transfer. Maybe you should go out West.’ ” Mimicking his tone of voice then, Dominy sounds like a Mafia shakedown artist running a recalcitrant store owner out of the neighborhood. “Well, he took my cue. Next thing I know Bill Palmer is requesting a move to Sacramento and I’m chief of Allocation and Repayment. It took exactly sixty days, just like I said. I brought him back, though. Ultimately, I made him an assistant commissioner. Bill was a good man.”
In his new position, Dominy had an opportunity to learn anything he wanted about the three-hundred-odd Reclamation projects in existence. He read every project history, reserving for special attention the “bad elements”—the projects that were failing. “Half of our projects were insolvent. I was fascinated: why some and not others? I said to myself, ‘Whoever figures this out and starts to haul Reclamation out of this financial ooze is going to be the next commissioner.’ The reasons were complicated. In the early days, Reclamation made some bad mistakes—we miscalculated water availability, we laid out canals that didn’t work right, we had drainage problems that we should have anticipated. Soil, altitude, crop prices, markets—they all made a difference. On top of that, there were practically no requirements. Straus and Warne let any idiot get into a Reclamation project. You didn’t have to demonstrate that you had capital, farming skills, anything. Any fool could sign up and get on a Reclamation farm and use whatever intelligence he had cheating the government. When the projects began to go bankrupt, Straus and Warne were afraid to expose them. They covered the goddamn things up and that got us in a hell of a lot of trouble with Congress. We were illegally delivering water all over the place. Payments were way in arrears and no one was doing a damn thing about it. I think we were violating the law at least as often as we were not violating it.