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By Root 1454 0

in the papers. There was Stew Udall rafting rivers, Stew Udall climbing Alaskan peaks, Stew Udall and his sometime friend Dave Brower trekking through one of the National Parks. This was the same Stew Udall who wanted to build a nuclear-powered desalination plant off Long Beach to slake Los Angeles’ giant thirst; the same Udall who secretly plotted aqueducts carrying water from the Columbia River to the Southwest; the Udall who gave his official, if not private blessing to plans to dam the Grand Canyon. However, what was to Udall a delicate reconciliation of divergent instincts was to Dominy—who held the conservation movement in contempt—a Hamlet-like ambivalence or, even worse, outright capitulation to “posy-sniffers.”

To make a strained relationship worse, Udall appointed as his Under Secretary James Carr, a brash, opinionated young Irish Catholic from California who could not help inflaming the ire of a brash, opinionated, and older Floyd Dominy, who happened to be a Celtic-Irish Protestant. To make matters still worse, Udall appointed as his Assistant Secretary for Water and Power a big, dour South Dakota Norwegian named Kenneth Holum, a man whose very essence and style found their exact opposites in Floyd Dominy.

Dominy’s battles with Udall were, for the most part, due to disagreements on issues; personally, when neither had the other’s goat, they liked each other tolerably well. On the other hand his battles with Holum and Carr had more to do with the fact that Dominy despised them both as much as they loathed him. Carr had been the legislative assistant of someone else Dominy hated: Congressman Clair Engle of California, who tried repeatedly to get him removed from his job for not favoring California enough. (When Engle died of brain cancer, Dominy told his inner circle, half seriously, that he was responsible. “That cancer in his head was something I put there. He got it arguing with me all the time.” Twenty years later, the commissioner still loved to tell about the time he booted the Congressman out of his office.) Personal dislike soon escalated into all-out war: Holum was trying to prevent Dominy from giving a speech; Carr was ordering him not to make a trip; Carr and Holum were trying to give the commissioner a new secretary who Dominy suspected was their personal spy. By late 1962 or 1963, the feud had grown so intense that it kept the denizens of the Interior building coming to work just to see what would happen next. Before long, Dominy, to the amazement and exasperation of Udall, had established a firm policy on dealing with Holum: the commissioner would no longer walk downstairs to speak with the assistant secretary. If the big dumb sonofabitch wished to speak with the commissioner, he could walk upstairs to see him. “As his superior I simply had to rein him in from time to time,” muttered Holum during a telephone interview, and declined to discuss the subject further. The truth was, however, that Dominy made a fool of Holum much more frequently than Holum made a fool of him. The one time he did—when he and Carr managed to freeze the commissioner off the Presidential airplane during one of Kennedy’s western tours—Udall returned to his office only to find powerful Congressman Wayne Aspinall on the other end of the telephone, waiting to chew off his ear. After that, Dominy not only got to ride on Air Force One, but he had his own fancy aircraft—and his own building.

For years, the world’s great amalgamation of engineering talent had been housed in a complex of warehouses, military depots, and glorified barracks outside Denver known today as Federal Center. Then, it was simply known as the Ammo Depot. Thrown up hastily during the war, the Bureau’s headquarters, a two-block-long hangar called Building Fifty-six, had neither air conditioning nor many windows. The only source of heat was some undersized radiators spaced many yards apart. Chunks of ceiling calved like icebergs; water dribbled from a hundred leaks. The plumbing sounded as if a team of Russian weight-lifters were banging wrenches against