Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [208]
No one knew exactly what had been discussed except O‘Neill and Jordan and Carter themselves. Had O’Neill promised that the projects were out for good, or had Carter simply accepted that on faith? Did he really believe he had stopped the Clinch River reactor? No one who was intimately familiar with Bevill, or with Congress, believed they were in a mood to make such an offer. Andrus and Guy Martin were still urging Carter to veto the bill; now that he had gone this far, they argued, he couldn’t abandon the fight unless he got nearly everything he had asked for. There was no indication from the White House that Carter felt otherwise. “Up until the last moment,” says Free, “I was being told, and was telling everyone, that he was going to veto.” Then, with no advance word to anyone, Carter signed the bill.
Carter’s allies in Congress were thunderstruck. No one had been forewarned. Butler Derrick, according to his staff, was white with anger. Silvio Conte, the one senior Republican member on the House side who vociferously supported the administration, said that he would never trust Carter again on anything. His own lobbyists were furious. Even Andrus, who had opposed the hit lists from the beginning, was mad. Free, a young Tennessean, had had a local-boy-makes-good profile published abut him in his hometown newspaper, which happened to be in the district where Columbia Dam was to be built, and his parents had received so much verbal abuse because he was lobbying against the dam that they unlisted their phone number and took their name off their mailbox. “It hardly seemed worthwhile after that,” Free said dejectedly.
Even though Carter protested that the compromise was a good one—it was still unclear exactly what it meant, and would remain so for over a year—one thing was becoming abundantly clear: Carter was already in a mood to retreat. He had underestimated Congress’s passion for dams and overestimated his ability to move the rest of his legislative program forward. In January of 1977, Cecil Andrus told the New York Times, “Thank God, there’ll be no more hit lists.” A lot of fence-mending was obviously being done. Later that month, Lou Cannon, the Washington Post’s correspondent in San Francisco, could write that “the West’s Democratic governors have been offered unconditional surrender by the Carter administration, [which] has backed away from nearly every position” on water projects. An “options paper” drafted shortly thereafter and leaked, to Carter’s chagrin, to the environmental groups made no mention of several of the main water-policy reforms Carter had spoken of earlier.
Having reversed himself once, however, Carter was perfectly capable of reversing himself again. In October of 1978, his second big challenge on water projects came around. The fiscal year 1979 public-works appropriations bill that emerged from the House and Senate conference committee did exactly what most of Carter’s advisers said it would. To begin with, it restored money for every one of the nine projects deleted the previous year. Carter, in his innocence, evidently believed that the projects had been killed for good, and he was livid. On top of that, the bill contained money for a number of new starts, despite the fact that inflation was well into double digits, interest rates were topping 15 percent, and a balanced budget was slipping out of Carter’s grasp.
Once again, Jim Free began making his rounds on Capitol Hill, urging support of a presidential veto when the vote came—even though the administration’s allies were still seething over Carter’s performance with the previous year’s bill. Whatever doubts they had about Carter’s courage, however, were soon stilled. A few days later, after making a terse, angry statement denouncing it, Carter vetoed the entire appropriations bill.
The timing of the veto, as it happened, coincided neatly with the passage of Proposition 13 in California, a draconian measure which effectively held the annual increase in property taxes to about 1 percent. Everyone knew