Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [153]
Mike Staus and Dexheimer had tolerated this travesty of a headquarters, but Dominy would not. He wouldn’t keep his cows in there. He was going to get Congress to appropriate money for a new building—a new building that would, in time, become known as the Floyd E. Dominy Building. Under his tutelage, the Bureau’s public relations department produced a picture book called Inside Building Fifty-six. In it were photographs of rusting pipes, of rotting ceilings suspended over bowed heads, of huddled secretaries typing in overcoats. Accompanying the pictures was a text that might have described the Sheraton Maui. It was, especially from engineers, a high-class piece of wit. The results, however, were negligible. Udall was frightened of a new building’s cost; a few Congressmen even wondered out loud why such a brochure should be produced at public expense. That was enough to make Dominy mad, but not half as mad as he was when he learned that the General Services Administration, run by a close friend of James Carr—the same Jim Carr who had told Dominy that the Bureau’s headquarters were adequate—erected a new building next door to house the complex’s garbage cans.
The federal code stated things plainly enough: the construction of new federal edifices, unless Congress voted otherwise, was left to the discretion of the GSA. Dominy asked his lawyer, Eddie Weinberg, to give him the exceptions to the rule. There were none, Weinberg said—except that, obviously, the GSA had no say-so over the Bureau’s dams. “Well, then, it’s simple,” he told Weinberg, “we’ll get the goddamned thing authorized as a dam.”
It was a quintessential Dominy solution, brilliant in its simplicity, splendid in its insolence. The building would be authorized as a dam. The Senate Appropriations Committee—Carl Hayden, chairman—would approve money for Dominy Dam, and the dam would metamorphose into a building. Then it was only a matter of getting the House to agree.
Fascinated by the outcome of this thing, Weinberg was finally persuaded to go along. Later that year, there was Dominy, with Hayden’s blessing already in hand, testifying before his counterpart on the House Appropriations Committee, chairman Clarence Cannon of Missouri. Dominy was eloquent in his blunt Harry Truman style. “I’ve got a building where icicles practically form in winter,” he complained, “and a plane where ice does form, right in the carburetor. My people need a decent place to work, and I need a plane that isn’t going to fall out of the sky so I can live to see them enjoy it.”
Cannon asked, “Do you have any idea when your plane might fall out of the sky?”
“Probably on the very next flight,” said Dominy.
“Well, you let me know, then, when you plan to arrange it,” said Cannon. “I’ve got a list of passengers for you.”
Then, without further questioning, Cannon approved both of Dominy’s requests.
When Carr’s friend, the GSA administrator, found out that Dominy had sneaked a new building into a bill that nominally authorized only dams, he was apoplectic. When Carr found out soon thereafter that Dominy had immediately signed a $250,000 design agreement without his approval, he was beside himself. Carr forgot, however, that Dominy had been clever enough to make a friend in every strategic place; and there was no more strategic place in the Interior Building than the mailroom.
Stewart Udall was out of town, making a speech, but he was indignant when he learned from Carr how Dominy had operated behind his back. With the Secretary’s approval, Carr wrote and signed a letter agreeing to hand the $250,000 back to the Treasury. “When I found out about that,” says Dominy, “I called my man in the mailroom. I said, ‘I’ll take the rap and you’ll keep your job—don’t you let that letter out of the building.’ He promised me he wouldn’t. Then I called up Udall that night in his hotel room. I dialed him every fifteen minutes so he wouldn’t get away from me. When I got through to him, I said, ‘Stew, dammit, you can’t do that. It’s not $250,000 cash. It’s $250,000 credit with the Appropriations Committee.