Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [207]
Publicly, Carter said nothing. Privately, he was seething. “The only way now is a veto,” one of his aides was quoted as saying. “We’re in a game of chicken.” A quick head count, however, showed that the Senate could muster the two-thirds majority required to override a veto. If he was serious about vetoing the bill, Carter would have to shore up his support in the House. With moral support from the administration, and perhaps some rewards—to his chagrin, Carter was learning that he might have to resort to the pork barrel to win his fight against the pork barrel—the House was a distinct possibility. It would only take one branch of Congress to win.
Carter’s lobbyists, Frank Moore and Jim Free, worked the House furiously, joined by the railroads (which were being undercut by competition from federally subsidized barge traffic), lobbyists from the conservation groups, and every dissident farmer, businessman, rancher, and mayor from a project region whom they could get to come to Washington to help them. Vote by vote, the frailest of margins was stitched together. On the straight head count, Carter would surely lose; the problem was holding Congress’s margin below the two-thirds necessary for an override. Many Congressmen, especially those whose support would take great political courage—South Carolina’s Butler Derrick, for example, who had opposed Richard Russel Dam in his own district, or Philip Burton of California, who leaned heavily on labor support—demanded absolute assurances that Carter would veto the bill. If they voted not to override and he signed it anyway, their embarrassment would be acute. Meanwhile, the administration was fighting insubordination within its own ranks. The Bureau of Reclamation was widely suspected of feeding numbers to Capitol Hill that made the administration’s figures appear suspect. The Corps, which had more than once disregarded the wishes of its commander in chief, was suspected by Carter’s people of doing the same thing. Once, as Jim Free was passing by the Public Works committee room, he noticed several high-ranking officers of the Corps talking with Ray Roberts. Free stopped and eavesdropped long enough to capture the gist of the conservation. “They were laughing about how they were going to beat us at our own game,” he says.
By fall, as the showdown approached (the Senate had already passed a close equivalent of the House bill), Moore and Free were finally convinced they had the votes to stop an override in the House. Tip O’Neill, the House Speaker, who wanted to avoid such an outcome at all costs, was apparently sure of it, too. At the last minute, he decided to play his trump card.“Tip called Ham Jordan,” the President’s top aide, remembers Free, “and made him a bargain. Something would be worked out on Clinch River [the demonstration breeder reactor which Carter wanted to stop even more than the water projects]. A few projects would be deleted, and Tip would help the President get a reform process going.
“It was a nice piece of work,” Free grudgingly admits. “They went right to Hamilton because he was the closest thing we had to a good ol’ boy. He was also in a little trouble for not returning people’s phone calls and things like that. If he worked out a compromise, it would make him look good, and they knew it.”
O’Neill’s offer was actually far less than it seemed. Although he had gotten Tom Bevill to agree to take nine projects out of the 1978 bill, he had not secured a firm promise that he would not put them back in next year. The same applied to Clinch River: the compromise might slow it down, but there was no commitment to stop it, even for a couple of years. Bevill had also agreed to a 3-percent across-the-board cut in funding, but that did not affect the ultimate cost of the projects; if anything,