Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [146]
“For the first hour I was standing up, resting my hands on the chair of the official reporter. Neilson didn’t even give me a goddamned seat in his pew. Then the committee wanted me to testify about some other projects, and the chairman directed Neilson to make room for me. I went on all afternoon, and they invited me right back the next day. I ended up testifying for a week. The committee publicly reprimanded the Bureau for inexcusable lack of preparedness and unwillingness to provide facts, but they specifically mentioned Dominy as the one exception. From then on, if a Congressman wanted to know anything about Reclamation, he came to me. Before long, they were asking me about the Corps of Engineers projects, too. I became the person they trusted. I wasn’t afraid of any of them, either. I chased one out of my office once.
“What I did on Fred Smith’s farm got me my start in life. What I did in Campbell County got me to Washington. Those hearings made me commissioner.”
“I liked Floyd. I trusted him. I thought he would be loyal to me as secretary.”
“I liked Stewart. He was a bad administrator, but he had marvelous instincts. He also had guts. He wouldn’t bite a chainsaw, but he had guts.”
“Dominy despised Stewart Udall, and Udall regarded him like a rogue elephant. Dominy used to come storming out of Udall’s office and say, ‘Who does he think he is?! The Commissioner of Reclamation?’ ”
“Dominy was the most able bureaucrat I’ve ever known.”
“I was amazed by him. He had the constitution of a double ox. He’d be dead drunk at a party at three A.M. and he’d be testifying at eight-thirty the next morning and you couldn’t tell.”
“He was merciless to the people around him. He could be hell on his assistant commissioners. He was horrible to some of the regional directors. If you made a stupid mistake he was all over you and he wouldn’t quit.”
“When we went on tours abroad, Dominy was treated like the President of the United States.”
“He was a magician with Congress. His friends there would do anything for him. They believed every word he said.”
“When he testified he spouted numbers like a computer. He spoke with absolute self-assurance. It was all hogwash. If he didn’t know a number, he made one up.”
“When Dominy was ousted the Bureau of Reclamation fell apart. It will never recover. The disarray over there now is ridiculous.”
“When you worked for Dominy you were always terrified of the page-eight syndrome. If you handed him a memorandum and page eight was missing, he’d call your supervisor and say, ‘Get that ass-hole off the job. Put him in a hole someplace.’ Guys ruined their careers because they stumbled on the rug when they entered his office.”
“Basically, he was a terrorist.”
“All the wives were disgusted with him. Some of them refused to come to parties when he was going to be there, because he’d start propositioning them all.”
“We played a game of golf once. Floyd was a below-average golfer and I’m an above-average golfer, but he beat me with psych. On the second or third hole, I sliced a ball. He spent the rest of the game ridiculing my slice. I didn’t know whether I was madder at him or at myself. He got me all worked up and nervous. Ordinarily, when one grows up and. becomes successful, one learns not to let silly mistakes or ridicule become bothersome. But I was so bothered I felt like a little kid on the verge of tears. He psyched me out. He won the game.”
“He was one of the best gamblers I ever saw. I was on an airplane with