Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [186]
“Jerry Mander and Howard Gossage were both geniuses,” Brower would later reminisce. “We did a split run of one ad. I wrote one, which went, ‘Who Can Save Grand Canyon—An Open Letter to Stewart Udall.’ Jerry Mander’s said, ‘Now Only You Can Save Grand Canyon from Being Flooded for Profit.’ We arranged to have a split run because I thought my ad was saying the right things and he thought his ad was. The upshot of it all was that Jerry Mander’s ad outpulled mine two to one. The Sistine Chapel line was suggested by a Sierra Club member from Princeton. I wasn’t sure about it. Jerry Mander jumped at it. He was right. That ad was dynamite. It was the ad the Internal Revenue Service cited when they revoked our tax-deductible status.”
Who persuaded the IRS to revoke the Sierra Club’s tax-deductible status is a question still debated today. Brower is convinced that Congressman Morris Udall, Stewart’s brother, was behind it. He insists Udall even confessed to him once in an unguarded moment. Others suspect Stewart. Everyone wanted to lay the blame with Dominy, but private memoranda from Dominy’s files suggest that he was as perplexed as everyone else; he wanted to locate the culprit so he could congratulate him. It was, obviously, a purely political strike. Other tax-deductible groups were at least as active in trying to influence legislation as the Sierra Club, and nothing happened to them. Whoever was responsible, the Sierra Club suddenly found itself tilling fund-raising soil as dry as the West’s, and had a close brush with bankruptcy. Brower, for his part, would soon find himself without a job, fired by the club’s board of directors for fiduciary irresponsibility. But, in the end, none of it was to make much difference. The ads had been published; the public was outraged; the Grand Canyon dams were doomed to defeat. Everyone knew it except Floyd Dominy, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Colorado Basin states.
At the same time that Lyndon Johnson was telling himself and anyone who would listen that the opponents of his war in Vietnam were a handful of draft-dodgers, the proponents of the Grand Canyon dams were telling themselves that their opposition was limited to the Sierra Club. The real problem, Wayne Aspinall, Carl Hayden, and Floyd Dominy would fume, was Dave Brower’s “lies.” Once people understood that Bridge Canyon Dam would only flood Grand Canyon National Monument, and not the park itself, they would come around and support the dams. They believed, in other words, that the fate of the dams hinged on a technicality. They couldn’t fathom that a sea change in public feeling toward the natural world was taking place, one of those epochal shifts that guarantee that things will never be the same. But it was, and people didn’t care whether the dams flooded the monument or the park, or whether they drowned a mile or a hundred miles of the canyon, or whether they submerged the bottom fifty feet or the entire chasm. They wanted no dams—period.
In 1966, the National Reclamation Association held its annual meeting in Albuquerque, and Brower, to his considerable surprise, was invited to speak. To the NRA’s surprise, he showed up. So did Wayne Aspinall, the chairman of the House Interior Committee, and when a photographer spied them twenty feet apart he tried to arrange a picture. Aspinall glared at Brower and shouted, “No picture of mine is being taken with that liar!” When a reporter asked the Congressman how Brower had lied, he responded that the dams would in no way flood the national park. They would merely flood 120 miles of the Grand Canyon. As far as Aspinall was concerned, that was a distinction of the utmost significance.
As for Dominy, facing the prospect of a major defeat for the first time in his life, he not only believed that Brower was a liar—he was convinced he wasn’t worth