• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1538 0

streamflow, and build a dam of precisely the shape, size, and structure to suit it. They had labored through the trigonometry, the calculus, the chemistry, the topology, and the geology that he had backed away from—the one time in his life he had given up on anything. The problem was, they couldn’t explain their own work or its importance, couldn’t understand human relations, couldn’t see a political problem about to smack them in the face. He could do all of that—brilliantly. Dominy needed them, and he knew it, and they needed him—and didn’t know it. It made him furious. In the mid- 1950s, after mastering Operation and Maintenance and Repayment and Irrigation, Dominy felt he should move on to the second most important job in the Bureau—the assistant commissioner for legislative liaison. He should be the one working Congress—explaining new projects, justifying the problem ones, tantalizing members with grandiose plans, horse trading, cajoling, threatening. After all, if the Republicans held to their “no new starts” policy, the Bureau would soon have nothing to do.

The position, however, had never gone to a non-engineer, and the person Commissioner Wilbur Dexheimer wanted to appoint was Ed Neilson. Dominy had warned Dexheimer about Neilson. He was, he told Dex, just like him: good-natured, somewhat bumbling, uninterested in politics, and therefore inept. Neilson was the last person who should be sent up to explain the Bureau’s work to Congress. “He had already admitted that he didn’t even know the names of most of the projects, and if someone mentioned one to him he wouldn’t be able to say what state it was in. For Christ’s sake!”

The Public Works Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, which authorized every penny the Bureau spent, had been reorganized after the 1954 election in a way that was profoundly inauspicious for the Bureau. Only two Congressmen sympathetic to Reclamation still sat on it, and one of them, Mike Kirwan, was from Ohio, whose farmers were beginning to raise hell about subsidized competition from Reclamation lands. Everyone else on the subcommittee was hostile or indifferent to the Bureau.

The Appropriations Committee hearings began in April of 1955, and, as Dominy had predicted, the roof caved in. “Dexheimer had gone off for two weeks to watch an atomic bomb test in Nevada. It was utterly inexcusable. The assistant commissioners, Neilson and Crosthwait, and the regional directors were all there, but they were the most tongue-tied bunch of engineers you ever saw. They muffed answers to the simplest questions. It was the biggest fiasco. But Neilson and Crosthwait kept telling me my presence ‘wasn’t required,’ because the subcommittee was only allowing five witnesses to be present at one time. Actually, they were scared I would upstage them. On the tenth day, I was invited to lunch by Senator Gale McGee of Wyoming. Word was getting around about how unbelievably inept Reclamation’s witnesses were, and like every other member from the West, he was concerned. He said, ‘Floyd, can you do something?’ See, I already had a reputation as the most knowledgeable person in the Bureau. After lunch, I called in for my messages.

“My secretary told me I’d gotten a telephone call from Neilson up on the Hill. ‘He needs you desperately,’ she said. I was madder than hell. I stalked into that hearing room and went up to Neilson and said, ‘You got your chestnuts burned pretty good and now you want me to pull them out of the fire.’ You should have seen the look on his face. He said, ‘Are you being insubordinate?’ I said, ‘Hell, no, I’m being loyal. I’m here to save your can. But you introduce me first.’

“Rudy Walters, the regional director from Denver, was up there at that moment testifying about the Kendrick Project. I knew all about the Kendrick Project—it was in Wyoming. Rudy was totally tongue-tied. You could read the exasperation on those committee members’ faces. Neilson ran up to the front of the room and said, ‘Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman, Floyd’s here.’ ‘Floyd’s here.’ No introduction, no last name,