Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [209]
One of the people who realized this right away was Larry Rockefeller, the nephew of Nelson and son of his elder brother Laurance. Rockefeller, who was then a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, was thirty-six, almost neurotically shy, and a strikingly gifted propagandist and politician. Almost single-handedly, he pieced together the Alaska Coalition, the vast umbrella organization that was responsible, two years later, for passage of the Alaska Lands Act—which created, in an instant, as much federal parkland as the country had set aside in more than a hundred years. The full-page advertisements run by the Alaska Coalition were written and often paid for by Rockefeller, and they were astute; mostly, they talked about how much resource development and fabulous economic growth the Alaska Lands Act would still allow.
The Alaska campaign was based on persuasion. To make Congress sustain Carter’s veto of the appropriations bill, however, a campaign would have to be based on fear. There was too little time to try any other tack, and fear seemed to be the one universal motivator on Capitol Hill. At that particular moment, Rockefeller reasoned, Congressmen feared no one more than Howard Jarvis.
Getting Jarvis’s cooperation was surprisingly easy. Although the value of real estate in his hometown, Los Angeles, depended entirely on aqueducts bringing water from three directions, they were already built. Besides, an opportunity take on Congress was more than the feisty old man could resist. Rockefeller recalled some of Jarvis’s speeches, shut himself in his office, and imagined what sort of advertisement Jarvis might write. When he finished a draft, he read it to him over the phone. Jarvis was stunned. “That’s just what I would have said,” he answered.
On the morning of October 5, with a vote to override Carter’s veto just hours away, four hundred-odd members of the House opened their copies of the Washington Post and the New York Times and saw the scowling visage of Howard Jarvis staring back at them. “IT’S AN OUTRAGE,” he croaked. “THE PUBLIC WORKS APPROPRIATIONS BILL IS THE BIG TAX, BIG GOVERNMENT, BIG SPENDING, BIG WASTE BILL OF THE YEAR.” During the debate that day, the “spirit of Howard Jarvis” was invoked several times. When the vote was taken, the attempt to override Carter’s veto had barely failed.
As the dam saboteurs in Carter’s Administration were to discover, however, victories over the Congressional pork-barrel system tend to be short-lived. They are especially short-lived if they come thirteen months before an election year.
In July of 1979, a group of California’s wealthiest irrigation farmers, many of them from the Westlands Water District, played host to Rosalyn Carter at a big Democratic fund-raiser in Fresno. Soon thereafter, a number of big growers from the nominally conservative San Joaquin Valley were making hefty campaign contributions to the Carter-Mondale reelection campaign. Their reward was a new water contract obligating them to pay only $9.10 an acre-foot—well below cost, and a subsidy worth $60 million over the term of the contract.
Westlands, which the Bureau had illegally expanded back in the 1960s at the behest of the farmers, was the one place where Carter could put one of his most ballyhooed reforms, realistic water pricing, to work, because the illegal expansion had technically voided the original contract. He not only failed to do that, but, by caving in on an issue he could easily have won—Westlands had no other source of water except groundwater, which was running out, and therefore had little choice but to accept the administration’s terms—he sent a signal to Congress that he was prepared to do business