Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [162]
It wasn’t his blindness, his stubbornness, his manipulation of Congress, his talent for insubordination, his contempt for wild nature, his tolerance of big growers muscling into the Reclamation program—in the end, it wasn’t any of this that did Dominy in. It was his innate self-destructiveness, which manifested itself most blatantly in an undisguised preoccupation with lust. His sexual exploits were legendary. They were also true. Whenever and wherever he traveled, he wanted a woman for the night. He had no shame about propositioning anyone. He would tell a Bureau employee with a bad marriage that his wife was a hell of a good lay, and the employee wouldn’t know whether he was joking or not. He preferred someone available, but his associates say he wasn’t above paying cash. “The regional directors were expected to find women for him,” says one former regional director. “It always amazed me how he carried on in the light of day. He was opening himself up to blackmail, but somehow he always seemed immune.” The Bureau airplane was known, by some, as the “Winged Boudoir in the Sky.”
As he bullied weak men, Dominy preyed on women whom he considered easy marks. According to one regional director, Felix Sparks, the head of Colorado’s Water Conservation Board, was married to a woman who occasionally overindulged, so Dominy went right after her. In time, an indignant Mary Sparks refused to attend any party where Dominy threatened to show up. Sparks, one of the most decorated veterans of World War II, might have been expected to punch Dominy in the jaw. Everyone, however, seemed to humor him. “He’s just being Floyd,” they would say. “You know how Floyd is.” “He’s just a little drunk. Ignore him.”
Alice Dominy must have known. Her life was insulated, she rarely went with him on trips, but for years everyone suspected that she knew. And there came a day when she had to find out for sure. She drove into town to the hotel where according to the rumors, he liked to conduct his trysts. She took the elevator upstairs, mustered her courage, and knocked on the door. A woman opened up. Floyd Dominy, her husband, was in the back of the room. “He just told her to go home and mind her own business,” says one of Dominy’s confidants. “And she was of that era where that’s what women did. I don’t know how he rationalized it. He probably said, ‘Well, lots of people commit adultery.’ He had a talent for rationalizing anything.
“Alice was sweet. She was a dear lady. It broke your heart to see her treated that way.”
Dominy did not even aspire to discretion. He bragged about his exploits. He taunted his assistants with remarks about their wives. He ordered them to find him women. It seemed as if he simply couldn’t help himself. He could testify before Congress on a half bottle of bourbon and two hours of sleep, he could throw Representative Clair Engle out of his office, he could learn more about the Reclamation program than any person alive—he was tough, ferociously disciplined, indomitable. But he was also compulsive, addicted, a fool for lust—and exposed himself quite recklessly to full view. “I’m not sure what Dominy is better remembered for,” says one Washington lawyer who knew him well, “having been Commissioner of Reclamation or having been the greatest cocksman in town.”
“I’ve tried to psychoanalyze him,” says Pat Dugan, “and I don’t think he ever believed that his playing around would get him in real trouble. He got away with so much that after a while he must have decided he was immune.”
But he wasn’t.
The man assigned to tell Floyd Dominy that he was fired was a young, intense, middle-level Interior bureaucrat barely thirty years old, a fire-breathing evangelical Christian from Wyoming named James G. Watt. The order came directly from the newly inaugurated President