Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [163]
When Dominy was himself relieved, he retired to his cattle ranch in the Shenandoah Valley, leaving his twenty-five-year Reclamation career behind him as if it had never occurred. “When I quit something,” he said, “I really quit it.” Once in a while he could be enticed into a lucrative consultancy—in 1981, he was hired by Egypt to help draft a solution to the grotesque drainage problems created by the Russian-built Aswan High Dam—and he drove to Capitol Hill now and then to testify against the likes of a Hells Canyon National Monument (which would preclude more dams on the lower Snake River); mostly, though, he preoccupied himself with enshrining his reputation and with his cows. In 1979, he was named Virginia Seed Stockman of the Year, a fitting title: he had been proclaimed the state’s preeminent stud expert.
Dominy’s reputation and legacy are more problematical—at least as complex as the man himself. In Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee portrays him as a commissioner who led Reclamation on a terrific binge, plugging western canyons as if they were so many basement leaks. His reputation, even today, is outsize; he is often talked about in Washington, and in the conservationists’ annals of villainy he remains a figure as large as, if not larger than, Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, the same James Watt. Watt, however, hopped around so much with his foot in his mouth that he didn’t really have a chance to do much that the environmental movement regarded as awful. But Dominy presided over Glen Canyon Dam, over Trinity Dam, over a dozen other big dams, over the federal partnership with California in that state’s own water project, which dammed the Feather River and allowed Los Angeles’ explosive growth to continue, and with it its appetite for even more water. Those enamored of such giant engineering works were at least as sorry to see Dominy go as the conservationists were thrilled; no successor, they believed, could ever hope to equal him as a master tactician in Congress, as a fiercely committed believer in the cause of reclaiming the arid West.
On balance however, Floyd Dominy probably did the Bureau of Reclamation and the cause of water development a lot more harm than good. That, at least, is Daniel Dreyfus’s assessment. Brilliant and hardheaded, the Bureau’s house intellectual—and a native New Yorker—Dreyfus was the only person it had who could sit down with an influential Jewish Congressman from New York City, trade some urban banter and rabbi jokes, and convince him that he ought to vote for the Central Arizona Project. He left, in part, because of Floyd Dominy. “You could take so much of him,” Dreyfus remembered one day in 1981, sitting in his office at the Senate Energy Committee, where he had gone to become staff director. “He got to be like a stuck record. The same damn stories about himself, the same fights with the same people over and over again. The mood of the country was changing, but Dominy refused to let the Bureau change. You got the feeling that you belonged to the Light Brigade.” The loss of Dreyfus was especially ironic, because the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee was Henry Jackson, Dominy’s one powerful enemy from a western state. In Dreyfus, Jackson had acquired the one person on earth who knew as much about the Bureau and its work as its commissioner.
Jim Casey, the Bureau’s deputy chief of planning, worked under Dreyfus and also left in disgust.