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By Root 1431 0

been the least surprised. Los Angeles, in the middle of an epic feud with Arizona over Colorado River water rights, saw the Klamath Diversion as a ploy to encourage it to relinquish its claim on the share of the river that it wanted to consider its own. In fact, if any Californian even mentioned the idea of going north for water, Los Angeles came down on him like Thor. When Republican Congressman Richard J. Welch of San Francisco did just that, the Los Angeles Daily News denounced his idea as “the kiss of Judas.” “This San Franciscan,” it fumed, “is trying not to succor but to sucker us.” As Carey McWilliams wrote in California: The Great Exception, “To suggest that Colorado River water was not the only water which might be made available in southern California was, of course, an act of treason, a betrayal.” The Republican Party of the state, with its center of power in Los Angeles and Orange County, went so far as to mount an effort to excommunicate poor Welch, who, as bewildered as the Bureau by then, said he was only trying to help.

The Bureau was flummoxed. Copies of the UWI report were buried in the archives in the regional office in Salt Lake City, where they sat under lock and key. Before he could do more damage, McCasland was transferred to a desk job in Washington, and young Kuiper was left with the job of repairing the wreckage his boss had created. The Klamath Diversion, potentially the greatest engineering scheme of all time, was dumped on the scrapheap of human dreams. “The whole thing kind of backfired on them,” said Kuiper in 1981, still wryly amused after all those years.

The Eisenhower era put transbasin diversions into the Colorado on hold for at least another eight years. Ike’s Interior Secretary, Douglas McKay, a Chevrolet dealer from Portland, Oregon, followed the honorable Republican tradition of using the office as a vending machine for timber and minerals, but recoiled at the idea of an activist government marketing water and power. Ike’s water-development policy, announced shortly after his inauguration, was that there would be “no new starts” during his administration, especially if the production of power was involved. His own Republican allies from the western states would soon make him eat his words, but his immediate problem, after his inauguration, was finding a Reclamation Commissioner who would do his bidding—an exact opposite of Mike Straus. Since the Bureau had been stuffed with liberals, public-power advocates, and super-engineers of the McCasland ilk during the previous twenty years of Democratic reign, he wouldn’t be easy to find within the Bureau—whence commissioners traditionally came. After leaving the post vacant for several months, the Republicans finally came up with Wilbur Dexheimer, the Bureau’s assistant chief construction engineer. Dexheimer was handsome, amiable, and a competent engineer, but he was, as Winston Churchill said of Clement Attlee, a modest man with much to be modest about. He had spent his entire career in the Denver engineering headquarters, and he was an ingenue at politics, which was the breath of life to Mike Straus. Dexheimer was the first to admit that he was the consummately wrong choice for the job. As soon as he was appointed, he called his regional commissioners to Washington, gathered them in his office, and blurted out, “I don’t have to tell you guys that I’m the least likely person in Creation to be sitting at this desk. I’m ignorant as hell about what goes on in this town, but by God they made me commissioner and here I am and now you’ve got to follow my orders even if you and I think they stink.”

To the routed myrmidons of the New Deal, the golden age of water development seemed truly over. But Republican principles would prove to be no match for the stark imperative of the American desert. In 1956, Ike would end up signing the Colorado River Storage Project Act against his better judgment, and the budgets of both the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers would increase dramatically during his administration. In the lower Colorado Basin, however,