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By Root 1575 0

In his files he kept lists of the Bureau’s friends on Capitol Hill, arranged in categories: close friends, reliable supporters, occasionally wayward supporters. Those on the “A” list were handsomely rewarded. “Dominy yanked money in and out of those Congressmen’s districts like a yo-yo,” says a former associate assistant Interior Secretary who admired Dominy so much he was assigned to tell him he was fired, and whose name was James Gaius Watt. “If some Senator was causing him trouble, money for his project could disappear mighty fast. It went right into projects for the politicians who were Dominy’s friends.” All Dominy had to do was order his engineering department to say that it simply couldn’t spend the money any faster. A memorandum dated April 10, 1967, from Dominy’s chief of public affairs, Ottis Peterson, put together, at Dominy’s request, a list of Senators whose terms were about to expire and whom, in Peterson’s words, “we should make a particular effort to protect and give as many news breaks as possible.” The list of thirteen names—among which were McGovern of South Dakota, Morse of Oregon, Church of Idaho, and Magnuson of Washington—was for “very special attention and protection,” although “we can fatten our batting average by taking care of everyone to the best of our ability.” Small wonder that George McGovern became so blindly wedded to the Bureau’s Oahe Diversion Project that his constituents voted him out of office thirteen years later when they turned against it.

Dominy’s power and influence with Congress were so extraordinary that all he usually had to do to change his superiors’ minds— whether they were contemplating his dismissal or merely a stretch of Wild and Scenic River where he wanted to put a dam—was make a few phone calls to Congress. At worst, he simply had to threaten to resign.

Talk of resignation was Dominy’s ace in the hole. “Dominy threatened to resign so many times I lost count,” says his onetime regional director in Sacramento, Pat Dugan. Early in the 1960s, Stewart Udall’s Under Secretary, Jim Carr, a voluble pro-Californian who loathed Dominy at least half as much as Dominy loathed him, ordered Dugan to fire his chief of planning, Pat Head, for allegedly causing delays in the preconstruction work for Auburn Dam—delays that Dominy may very well have instigated himself. Dugan was in Washington at the time, and he and Dominy went out to lunch. After they had consumed two big steaks and several belts of whiskey, Dugan told Dominy about Carr’s order, and suggested self-effacingly that maybe he had better resign, since he was Pat Head’s superior. Dominy was enraged. “Hell, let’s both resign!” he boomed in a voice that stopped conversation cold. And, in fact, he made his customary threat, which wouldn’t have worked so well if Udall hadn’t suspected that he was mercurial enough to carry it out. But it did work, and neither Dominy, nor Dugan, nor even Pat Head left his job, and Jim Carr died without watching a bucket of concrete poured for his favorite dam. Small wonder Dominy used the threat of resignation so much—after all, it had made him commissioner.

Floyd Dominy was furious when Dexheimer failed to appoint him assistant commissioner, and he believed in carrying a grudge. After Dexheimer’s designee, Ed Neilson, failed so miserably before the Appropriations Committee in 1955, only to be rescued by Dominy, the chief of the Irrigation Division went to see the commissioner after he returned from watching his atomic bomb blast. “Today I told the Commissioner that in eighteen years on government payroll ... I had never seen an agency perform so ineptly,” Dominy confided in his diary on June 7, 1955. “I went on to tell him that I thought it was a crime to personally absent himself from the City through practically all of the hearings.... I concluded that I was prepared to move up to strengthen the front office ... I had made my speech and if he wished to think it over I would be available. With this I terminated the discussion.” Contempt dripped from every word. Obviously, Dominy no longer