Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [147]
“If Dominy were commissioner today, he’d be killed.”
Nominally, the Bureau of Reclamation is a part of the Interior Department. The commissioner is, in theory, directly responsible to the Interior Secretary and the President, and carries out the wishes of whatever administration occupies the White House—whether that administration appointed him or not. Actually, everyone who has watched the Bureau in action over the years knows it doesn’t work that way. The Bureau is a creature of Congress, and most Presidents have not been able to control it any better than they could control the weather or the press. The role of the Bureau vis-à-vis the White House and Congress might be likened to that of a child placed in a foster home by a doting pair of unstable parents. The child may tell lies, throw tantrums, wreck the house, and eat everything in the icebox, but if his foster parents finally decide to give him a thrashing, his real parents materialize out of nowhere and wrest the paddle from their hands. Jimmy Carter lost the momentum of his presidency, and a chance at a second term, through a hapless effort to bring the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers under control. Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all tried to dump or delay a number of projects the Bureau and Corps wanted to build, and failed in almost every case. Congress simply tossed the projects into omnibus public-works bills, which would have required that the President veto anything from important flood-control projects to fish hatcheries to job programs in order to get rid of some misbegotten dams.
The peculiar relationship between the Bureau and the two leading branches of government—in which it can defy the wishes of the branch that supposedly runs it and is largely subservient to the wishes of the other—is something relatively new. Mostly it is a development of the postwar era. In the past, the President often had to champion the Reclamation program against the objections of an eastern-dominated Congress, which found the whole idea a waste of money. Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and even Herbert Hoover all fought with Congress over Reclamation dams they wanted built. As the dams octupled the population of the West, however, and as long-lived members of Congress from the South and West rose into important committee chairmanships, the character of Congressional leadership changed, and its attitudes followed. With Wayne Aspinall and Carl Hayden running the Interior and Appropriations committees, Ike could no more enforce a “no new starts” policy than Jimmy Carter could bounce a $40 million Corps of Engineers dam whose sole beneficiary was to be a private catfish farm in the district of an influential Congressman from Oklahoma. As far as public works were concerned, by the 1950s it was Congress, not the White House, that ran the government. We had become a plutocracy of the powerful and entrenched.
No one in government recognized this earlier, or exploited it more brilliantly, than Floyd Dominy. Dominy cultivated Congress as if he were tending prize-winning orchids. Long before he became commissioner, on almost any day you might find him eating lunch with some powerful or promising Congressman or Senator who needn’t necessarily represent a western state. Not only would Dominy have lunch with him, but often Dominy would pick up the tab. If a Congressman broke his toe, he might receive a nice letter of condolence. Dominy sent out reams of condolence letters, often to acquaintances who could only be described as casual, though he didn’t write too many himself; much of his underlings’ work had nothing to do with dams. Favored Congressmen like Mike Kirwan (an easterner) might receive an expensive, custom-crafted set of bookends in the shape of Flaming Gorge and Hoover dams, which they could use to contain the public works bills that were flooding the country in a tide of red ink.
Dominy was a meticulous list-keeper.