Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [151]
Nineteen years later, Weinberg was still shaking his head. “No one could believe it,” he said. “George Dewey Clyde sat there like he’d been hit by a Buck Rogers ray. Dominy just stood up there smiling serenely. I’ve never known such nerve. It took the audience thirty seconds to decide whether it dared applaud him at the end of his speech.
“You’d probably have to go back to Andrew Jackson’s administration,” said Weinberg, his tone full of wonder, “to find another instance where a bureaucrat attacked a sitting governor like that.”
Going after a sitting governor was one thing. Going after an entire profession was another, especially if it was a fraternity to which 95 percent of your immediate colleagues belonged. But Dominy was quite capable of that, too.
When the American Society of Civil Engineers held its annual meeting in 1961, they asked Stewart Udall to be the keynote speaker. Udall had a prior engagement and had to decline, and the natural person to speak in his stead was Floyd Dominy. This was the same society, however, whose president had twice written a letter to the President asking that Dominy not be appointed Commissioner of Reclamation—first when Eisenhower appointed him, then when Kennedy reconfirmed his appointment. The reason was both simple and gratuitous: Dominy was no engineer. “When Udall said I should speak in his place,” Dominy remembers, “I told him, ‘The hell I will!’ I wasn’t going to speak to a bunch of people who didn’t think I deserved my job. I told Stewart, ‘You make them send me a personal invitation to give the address. Then I will consider whether my schedule permits me to appear.’ I didn’t think they’d invite me, but damned if they didn’t.”
When he was introduced and took the lectern, the assembled engineers should have known what was coming. “I’m never fully at ease before so large a group,” Dominy began, “but in this one instance I am at ease. I’m at ease because I know that you know that I know that I would never have been appointed commissioner if two Presidents had listened to your organization’s advice. Be that as it may,” Dominy went on, “I’m here to offer you gentlemen a little edification. I think that both you and your honorable president should go back and read the Reclamation Act, the document that has provided so many of you with jobs. I’ve read the act many times, and nowhere do I see evidence that it was set up as a job security program for engineers. The act is a land settlement program, and if land settlement were left solely to engineers I think we would still be hunters and gatherers, because it’s a lot sexier to design a better mace than it is to plant a garden.
“I’ll make you a solemn vow here tonight,” Dominy concluded after another few minutes of this. “I promise never to refuse to promote anyone in the Bureau of Reclamation just because he happens to be an engineer.”
A few weeks after his speech, Floyd Elgin Dominy was inducted as an honorary member into the American Society of Civil Engineers.
If attacking the governor of Utah took nerve, if taking on the entire engineering profession took gall, then waging ceaseless war against one’s superiors would have to be regarded as slightly nuts. But Dominy continually attacked and defied all three of his immediate superiors in the Interior bureaucracy—the Secretary, Under Secretary, and Assistant Secretary—and won nearly every time.
Stewart Udall, who served as Interior Secretary during the Kennedy-Johnson reign, was an enigmatic man. A jack Mormon—a lapsed member of the faith—who hailed from a desert state but assumed office on the threshold of the conservation era, he spent his entire term trying to reconcile his conflicting views on preservation and development, especially when it came to water projects. A smooth politician, handsome, vigorous, and diffident, he was a favorite of Jack Kennedy and a darling of the press; he was continually getting his picture