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Dominy’s war against the conservationists may have given him some satisfaction, but, from his point of view, it was hardly time well spent. No public figure would be as hated by the environmental movement until James Watt came along a decade later. His blind insistence on building dams in the Grand Canyon—not just dams, but cash register dams whose purpose was to generate income to build more dams—won him the wrath of Reader’s Digest and My Weekly Reader; his habit of making end runs around federal laws and regulations by begging special relief from Congress did not endear him to those whose laws he was circumventing; and hundreds of well-placed officials in Washington, many within his own building, were laying for him.

Despite all this, in the late 1960s Dominy was as entrenched as any bureaucrat in Washington. The main reason was his relationship with Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the most powerful man in legislative government. It was the relationship of a fawning nephew and a favorite uncle—the kind of relationship young Lyndon Johnson enjoyed with Sam Rayburn—and it gave Dominy an authority, an insolence, an invulnerability scarcely anyone else enjoyed.

When Carl Hayden was in his late eighties, senile, half blind, half deaf, confined to a hospital bed half the time, Floyd Dominy all but served as chairman of the Appropriations Committee when dam authorizations came around. He managed this by telling Hayden exactly what he wanted him to say—by actually writing dialogue for the two of them to recite. He would go to Hayden’s office, sit down with his legislative aide, Roy Elson, and write the questions he wanted Hayden to ask him; then he would go back to his own office and write the answers. It is unclear whether he did the same for other witnesses. The Hayden-Dominy scripts were of dubious enough ethical propriety for Dominy to keep them locked in the Bureau’s sensitive files, their existence known to only a handful of aides. Old, frail, and sick as he was, Hayden was still a man no one wanted to cross, and Dominy, knowing this, basked as long as he could in his failing light. “When you walked into Dominy’s office,” says John Gottschalk, “the first thing you saw was a huge framed picture of Hayden and Dominy getting off a plane in Hawaii all decked out in leis. Hayden’s inscription went something like this: ‘As this photograph was being taken I was thinking to myself that Floyd Dominy is the greatest Reclamation Commissioner who ever lived.’

“It was powerful medicine,” says Gottschalk. “There’s no member of Congress today who’s nearly as powerful as Hayden was then. You’d walk in there to complain about something the Bureau did and see that picture and say to yourself, ‘How the hell am I going to go up against this man and win?’ ”

Dominy was, of course, much too canny to put all of his eggs in Carl Hayden’s basket. In the House, he maintained the most cordial of relations with Wayne Aspinall, the chairman of the House Interior Committee Aspinall, a former schoolteacher from Palisade, Colorado, with a nasty disposition and a religious conviction that only the Bureau of Reclamation stood between the West and Armageddon, would say that Floyd Dominy was “not only the best Reclamation Commissioner I have ever known, but the only good Reclamation Commissioner I have known.” Besides cultivating the powerful, Dominy, for the most part, did a marvelous job of concealing his political prejudices from the world. He could get on famously with Frank Church, the liberal Senator from Idaho, and get on just as famously with William Egan, the right-wing governor of Alaska. If a Congressman didn’t get on famously or even politely with him, Dominy had little compunction about taking revenge: a dam project in his district might suddenly become unfeasible, a weather modification program might move somewhere else. “He pulled money in and out of those Congressmen’s projects like a yo-yo.” Loved by some, feared