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By Root 1591 0

Reclamation were dull, pious Mormons—or, if not Mormon, and pious, then at least dull. Floyd Dominy was a two-fisted drinker, a gambler; he had a scabrous vocabulary and a prodigious sex drive. In interviews, Bureau men tend to be careful, guarded, and obviously suspicious of reporters. Dominy was candid and amazingly open. Most commissioners like to operate within carefully defined parameters, always going by the book. Dominy was freewheeling and reckless, racing yellow lights and burning rubber in three gears. He could be methodical, he worked incredibly hard, he always did his homework—those were the qualities that sustained him through four successive administrations. But he had a self-destructive impulse, a violent temper, and a compulsion to tempt fate. He could, for example, make a lifelong enemy of a very powerful politician over lunch.

The governor of Utah during the early 1960s, George Dewey Clyde, personified, as far as Dominy was concerned, the hypocrisy of conservative Mormons—a faith he privately detested—where the Reclamation program was concerned. Clyde wanted the government to build as many dams as there were sites in his state, but he wanted private utilities to be able to sell the power. Dominy knew the Bureau needed the power to make the projects appear feasible, and besides, he was a Harry Truman Democrat—a warm, if not quite passionate, public-power man. At the National Reclamation Association’s annual convention in Portland in 1962, Clyde gave a ringing speech calling for unity among the western states in support of the Reclamation program. He deplored the fact that 40 percent of the members of Congress from the seventeen western states had failed to vote for two big projects the Bureau wanted built. However, Clyde said, the West had a duty to veto “counterfeit” reclamation projects—dams whose purpose was not irrigation but public power. He then went on to single out “a current example in a state neighboring Utah, where a project continues to be pushed by public-power interests which has no reclamation values, whatever.” The project which he alluded to, but did not name, was the Bureau’s Burns Creek Project in Idaho, which would occupy a hydroelectric site that the company of which Clyde was a puppet, Utah Power and Light, wanted to own itself.

Clyde might as well have impugned the morals of Dominy’s daughter. Edward Weinberg, the Interior Department’s solicitor, was sitting with Dominy as Clyde spoke. “Dominy just turned maroon,” Weinberg recalls. “He said, ‘Eddie, you keep me out of jail, but I gotta attack this guy.’ Over lunch, he hunkered in a back room redrafting his prepared speech. He showed it to me after lunch, and I said, ‘Jesus Christ, you can’t say that! They’ll crucify you!’ ‘Let them try’ was all he said.”

By the time Dominy was scheduled to give his speech, the three thousand conventioners already had an inkling that something portentous was likely to occur. “The title of my speech is ‘Crosses Reclamation Has to Bear,’ ” Dominy began in a sarcastic voice. After making some desultory remarks about the Bureau’s routine difficulties, he turned with relish to the subject at hand. “Only yesterday, my good friend, Governor Clyde of Utah, preached the gospel of unity to this association. He warned the West that if it did not unite, the cause of reclamation was in danger. I want to underscore the governor’s warning. It is timely and it is true, but apparently the governor’s warning fell on some deaf ears. Among those deaf ears, I regret to say, were those of Governor George D. Clyde of Utah.” Dominy then tore into Clyde for attacking the Burns Creek Project—“a counterfeit reclamation project,” he said acidly, “that was first proposed by those well-known foes of private power, Dwight Eisenhower and his Secretary of the Interior, Fred Seaton.” As Clyde sat in the audience red-faced, Dominy’s attack became more and more bitter. The delegates were absolutely stunned. “This is the Burns Creek Project which Governor Clyde considers false and a masquerade,” Dominy was now shouting. “Is it any wonder