Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [161]
And Dominy could be jovial, amusing, a lot of fun. Reclamation parties were legendary in Washington—hardly what one would expect in a hotbed of Mormon engineers. He could beat the conservationists at their own game. When the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society and others complained bitterly that a finger of Lake Powell would extend to Rainbow Bridge, a spectacular natural arch in Utah, leaving a stagnant, fluctuating, man-made pool of water under one of the nation’s scenic wonders, Dominy went to see the place himself—on foot, with a mule. It was a grueling twenty-mile hike in desert heat to the arch, a trek so tough the mule almost didn’t make it. Later, he flew a bunch of conservationists in by helicopter so they could see it themselves, taking care to ask each one whether he had been there before. Almost none had. Dominy used that fact to great advantage in testimony before Congress. Not only had they never seen what they so passionately wanted to protect, he said acidly, but they wanted him to erect a dam to keep the waters out. A dam! After regaling the committee with his story, Dominy got a special exemption from the federal law prohibiting significant man-made intrusions in national monuments. Today Rainbow Bridge is visited mainly by overweight vacationers clambering out of houseboats and trudging up to stare briefly at the arch.
He had a politician’s way with names. On visits to the Bureau’s dams, he greeted maintenance people whom he had met briefly years before, and he even knew the names of people he had never met. When the University of Wyoming awarded him an honorary degree, he was invited to dinner at the home of Gene Gressley, the director of its American Heritage Center. He had never met Gressley, nor his family, but when he walked in the door he knew all of Gressley’s children by name. When, during an interview, I reminded Dominy of the incident and told him how impressed Gressley said he had been, his response seemed somehow predictable: “Who’s he?”
One of his former aides said Dominy liked people the way we like animals—we like them, but we eat them. His employees laughed at his antics, admired his guts, profoundly respected his abilities, and were scared half to death. He could be sadistic, and he would carry a grudge to his grave. As soon as he became commissioner, he tried to fire all of his regional directors—not on the basis of incompetence, necessarily, but because they had been appointed by Dexheimer. But he couldn’t dislodge the one whose head he wanted most, Bruce Johnson in the Billings office, because Johnson had strong political support. The reason he wanted to fire Johnson so badly is that he had refused to arrange a “date” for Dominy with his secretary, whom Johnson was courting himself. Unable to depose him, Dominy tried to hound Johnson out—ridiculing him mercilessly, intimidating him, humiliating him. Johnson took it for several years and finally quit.
He hated weakness, but he needed a weak person to serve as his whipping boy, and he had one in Arleigh West, his regional director in Boulder City. “Arleigh was his Sancho Panza,” says Pat Dugan, one of the few whom Dominy didn’t cow. “He had a rough life. He brought out everything that was sadistic in Floyd.” When West was in Washington, Dominy commandeered his hotel room as his trysting spot, and there were evenings when poor Arleigh found himself out window-shopping, waiting for Dominy to finish. He had someone in Denver—another weak man, a top-level aide—whom everyone referred to as the “Official Pimp.” His responsibilities went beyond procurement. When a public relations flack leaked the story of how Dominy had gotten Congress to give him a new airplane, thinking he was doing Dominy a favor—after all, he was always telling those kinds of stories on himself—the Commissioner was beside himself. He was in the middle of a meeting with