Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [204]
Whatever the case, the timing was miserable. It was 1977 and California was in the midst of its driest year on record—the year before had been the third-driest—and Auburn Dam was on the hit list. Though Auburn’s existence would hardly have helped the state a bit, no one was about to notice that during a drought. Colorado, whose mountains were so bereft of snow that many of the ski slopes were closed in February, had three projects on the list, the most of any state. None of them would have helped much, either, but reason is the first casualty in a drought. The Central Arizona Project was already half-built, but it, too, was on the hit list. The western governors, who saw, by Andrus’s own embarrassed and baffled reaction, the hopeless disarray of the Carter administration, milked the incident for all it was worth. Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado had to plumb the depths of his emotions to convey properly his deep and profound sense of outrage and shock. “We’re not going to be satisfied,” Lamm shouted at a huge crowd of scribbling reporters, “until we get our projects back.” Governor Raul Castro of Arizona was “stunned and angry.” The ever-opportunistic Jerry Brown of California, who had won over the state’s powerful environmental community by publicly opposing the only two federal dams then being built in California—Auburn and New Melones—made one of his deft about-faces and said, “We want to build more dams.”
The reaction from Congress was even stronger. Congressman Morris Udall of Arizona immediately dubbed the incident the “George Washington’s Birthday Massacre,” a term that stuck. Interestingly, Udall was one of several dozen Congressmen who had written a much publicized letter to Carter only five days earlier, saying, “During your campaign you stated many times that as President you would halt the construction of unnecessary and environmentally destructive dams ... We support ... your efforts to reform the water-resources programs of the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation.” Reminded of this, Udall was gracious enough to admit that “one man’s vital water-resources project is another man’s boondoggle.” His colleagues were not so gracious. Words like “infamous,” “dastardly,” “incredible,” “incomprehensible,” and “mind-boggling” peppered the pages of the Congressional Record.
If Carter was counting on help from anyone, it was the press. After all, newspapers had been criticizing other regions’ public works projects since the nation’s founding, and the national press was nothing if not cynical about Congress. The press, however, found Carter a better target than the projects themselves. Even principled David S. Broder wrote in the Washington Post, “That Carter would let something like the Red River Project put him at odds with the man [Senator Russell Long] whose cooperation is essential for passage of all the vital economic, energy, health, and welfare legislation on the administration’s agenda is so unlikely that some observers conjured up a theory that made the President seem much shrewder.” Evidently Broder couldn’t fathom a stand of principle on something as inconsequential as a new $900 million artificial waterway a few jumps away from the Mississippi River. Newsweek and Time made a desultory effort to explain the projects to their readers, then implied that people, not surplus crops (as was the case), were using most of Arizona’s water. Time unquestionably accepted Morris Udall’s prediction that without the CAP, “Tucson and Phoenix