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worrying about. “If you even suggested to Dominy that Brower was winning,” says a former Bureau man, “he would have fired you on the spot.” Finally, when even his allies in the Southwest began to have misgivings about Bridge Canyon Dam, Dominy began to take his nemesis a little more seriously. He ordered employees to stalk Brower, showing up at his speaking engagements to report on what he said and get in a little heckling on the side. But Dominy’s men either were poor judges of audience response or were so afraid of their chief that they told him exactly what he wanted to hear. “Mr. Brower’s talk ... was highly emotional,” wrote a Bureau man in a blue-envelope report on a Brower address. “It was completely lacking in any kind of substantiating data, and he appeared a far less formidable opponent than anticipated. It is my opinion from this encounter that the Bureau should encourage face-to-face discussions with Mr. Brower before unbiased audiences because any reclamationist, armed with basic facts, could adequately defend the Bureau’s position against his pure emotionalism.”

In that particular speech, Brower had said that he wouldn’t mind dams in the Grand Canyon as long as the Bureau built a comparable canyon somewhere else. He received a standing ovation—in Denver.

The handwriting was on the wall by March of 1966, when the Reader’s Digest ran an article attacking Marble Gorge and Bridge Canyon dams in a tone that could almost be described as enraged. “Right after the Reader’s Digest article, Life ran a big goddamned diatribe,” remembered Dan Dreyfus. “Then we got plastered by My Weekly Reader. You’re in deep shit when you catch it from them. Mailbags were coming in by the hundreds stuffed with letters from schoolkids. I kept trying to tell Dominy we were in trouble, but he didn’t seem to give a damn. It was kind of surprising, because Dominy could be very flexible when it came to the smaller projects. He made some big concessions here and there and wasn’t bothered by it. On this one he was an utter maniac. In a way you can’t fault the man, though, because even though Dominy was a good liar when he had to be, here he was a prisoner of his own intellectual honesty. A lot of people figured that no one was going to let the Southwest run out of water, and if the time came when it wanted more the country would just pay for it, whatever the cost. I mean, New York City was full of immigrants, criminals, minorities, so who gave a damn if it went bust? But Phoenix and irrigated farmland—that was America! So it may have been a correct assumption. But Dominy said, ‘No way—this project is going to include those dams.’ ”

By 1967, it had become obvious to everyone but Dominy and Carl Hayden that the Grand Canyon dams would have to go. Rescue for the Colorado Basin might never come without them, but the Central Arizona Project would never be built with them. The problem, for Stewart Udall, was how to sneak the amended legislation past Hayden and Dominy. Hayden might not be too much of a problem; he was old and senile and in the hospital half the time, and he was desperate to see the CAP authorized before his death, which might come at any time. It was Dominy—bullheaded, willful, obsessed with defeating Brower—who somehow had to be handled. The opportunity came fairly soon. With the Bureau now helping to build dams all over the world, the commissioner had to make an annual global inspection of projects-in-progress; it was a condition imposed by the Agency for International Development, which was pumping billions of dollars into dam construction, and even as the Colorado River battle raged away Dominy had to absent himself for a few weeks. In early 1967, the commissioner grabbed his hat and was gone. Almost as soon as his plane left the runway at Dulles Airport, Udall was telling his Assistant Secretary, Ken Holum, to take Bridge Canyon Dam out of the CAP legislation and come up with an alternative before Dominy returned. The main objective was to find enough power to pump the water to central Arizona. The means of financing a rescue