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By Root 1684 0

state engineer, had corralled him one day in the capitol and implored him to do something about “the water crisis.” Brown, who grew up in San Francisco, said he wasn’t aware there was any. Hadn’t Los Angeles built its Colorado River aqueduct? Hadn’t the Bureau just built the Central Valley Project? Yes, answered Edmonston, and that was precisely the problem. When you added a couple of lanes to a freeway or built a new bridge, cars came out of nowhere to fill them. It was the same with water: the more you developed, the more growth occurred, and the faster demand grew. California was now hitched to a runaway locomotive. At the rate the state was growing in both population and irrigated agriculture, it ought to be developing 750,000 new acre-feet each year. It was developing nothing. It had no major plans. Even if it started today, it would take twenty years to get a big project authorized, financed, and built. By then, California could have another seven or eight million people. “When we finally come to our senses,” Edmonston told Brown, “the biggest bandwagon in history is going to come rolling through with water written all over it. If you want to be elected governor, you jump on it early—now.”

It was a moment of epiphany, Brown told his friends. The thought of all those people arriving to no water, perhaps even to a Biblical drought, suddenly left him staggered. He would never be the same. Edmonston was right—water was worth developing at whatever cost. Nearly twenty-five years later, in 1979, he still believed it. In an interview he granted to the University of California’s Oral History Program, Brown said, “No, I don’t think it [cost] has any validity because you need water. Whatever it costs you have to pay it. It’s like oil today. If you have to have oil, you’ve got to pay for it. What’s the value of oil? What’s the value of water? If you’re crossing the desert and you haven’t got a bottle of water, and there’s no water anyplace in sight and someone comes along and says, ‘I’ll sell you two spoonfuls of water for ten dollars,’ you’ll pay for it. The same is true in California.”

In 1958, after campaigning for and winning the governorship of the state, Pat Brown turned to the task of building his new dream, Edmonston’s water plan, with an energy few of his friends had ever seen. He wheedled, cajoled, and mule-traded like a home-grown Lyndon Johnson, trying to accomplish something which, in its own way, was as daunting as Johnson’s Great Society agenda: uniting a state divided into wet and dry parts, into sophisticated cities and hundreds of mean little farm towns, on a breathtaking agenda of water development. An Irish Catholic, Brown came across like a missionary preaching to the damned when he spoke to Californians of their water crisis. But he was also ruled, at times, by a Catholic’s impulse to confess, and later he would tell an interviewer about his other, more prosaic motivation. “I loved building things,” he blurted in an unguarded moment of candor. “I wanted to build that goddamned water project. I was absolutely determined I was going to pass this California Water Project. I wanted this to be a monument to me.”

It must have been frustrating for Brown that the most implacable opposition did not at first come from northern California, as expected. It came from the corner of the state whose cooperation was essential if the project was ever to be built: metropolitan Los Angeles.

The stubborn resistance of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to a plan that would give it more water, at one stroke, than it had ever received was perfectly understandable from its point of view, even if it was baffling on its face. The water it had been counting on to meet its future growth was water that Arizona felt it rightfully owned, and was at issue in a seemingly endless lawsuit then before the Supreme Court. The Met’s case, which was based largely on Arizona’s initial refusal to sign the Colorado River Compact, was somewhat flimsy; it wasn’t so much a legal argument as a game of chicken with the Supreme