Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [149]
The campaign worked. Dominy fastidiously made a notation in his diary every time he won a Congressman over. Once, after going to see Congressman Keith Thomson of Wyoming only to find him preparing to pay a visit to Interior Secretary Douglas McKay, Dominy wrote approvingly, “His purpose in seeing McKay was to urge the appointment of Floyd E. Dominy as Commissioner.” By 1957, Fred Seaton, who had replaced McKay as Secretary, was so besieged with requests to make Dominy commissioner that he had to do something. Seaton’s solution was to appoint Dominy “associate commissioner”—a position that, as Seaton conceived it, would be about as meaningful as Vice-President. It had never before existed in the Bureau, and it has never existed since. Seaton, however, thought Dominy would be satisfied with a fancy title, and there he badly misjudged the man. Dominy wanted power. When, after several months, he still didn’t have enough of it to suit him, he began making his wish plain to his friends in Congress—and threatening to quit. Fortunately, his wish was their wish, too. One day, Seaton called Dominy into his office for a chat. “The Secretary ... advised me that he had been getting almost unanimous demands from Senators and Congressmen that I be put in charge of the Bureau’s budget presentation and other works with the Congress,” Dominy typed in his diary. “He went on to make it plain that he desired to carry out these changes in the Associate Commissioner role with as little discomfort to Commissioner Dexheimer as possible. He asked me to guard against any reaction that would tend to belittle the Commissioner.... I assured him that I would be as careful as possible in that connection.”
That was hardly the way it was to be. “The whole thing was pathetic to watch,” says an old Interior hand who was there. “Dexheimer was like an old bull who’s been gored by a young contender and has lost his harem and is off panting under a tree, licking his wounds.” The associate commissioner was now in substantial charge of the Reclamation Bureau—Dominy knew it, Dexheimer knew it, nearly everyone in the Bureau could see it. But Dexheimer had nowhere else to go. His whole life had been dams, and now he had reached the pinnacle of the dam-building profession. Any move would have been a step down, a terrible loss of face. One could hardly blame the commissioner for absenting himself as much as possible to deal with “important business” abroad. It was during one such trip—a month in Egypt—that Dominy decided to make his move. The day Dexheimer returned, Dominy walked into his office and demanded all the authority he had been asking for. If he didn’t get it, he would resign. Dexheimer said he would “think about it,” and in the weeks that followed he continued to hedge and waffle, relinquishing as little power as he could but relinquishing it anyway, afraid that his popular associate commissioner would really deliver on his threat. Dominy was effectively in command when Congress put poor Dex out of his misery. A number of higher Reclamation officials—Dexheimer included—had been moonlighting at consulting jobs, and when the news reached Congress some members were furious about it. (These were the days when Cabinet members still resigned over ethical transgressions which, today, would be considered almost innocent.) When the commissioner refused to produce a list of offenders, Congress demanded that Eisenhower force him out. On May 1, 1959, Dexheimer, “for personal reasons,” announced his resignation as Commissioner of Reclamation. “My decision was not arrived at easily,” he said. Floyd Dominy landed in his seat a few days later with a terrific thump.
Most Commissioners of