Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [255]
The Bureau, inflated by a sense of its own accomplishments, must have asked itself the same question. Steve Oriel, the most senior and diplomatic of the four USGS scientists, would later observe that “we got no feedback at all from the Bureau” after the Survey’s letter was sent. The earliest evidence of a reaction—any reaction—from the Bureau was a confidential note by one of its geologists, J. D. Gilbert, concerning a telephone conversation he had with Oriel in October, seven months later. Regarding some continuing investigations at Teton by Hal Prostka, Oriel’s colleague, Gilbert wrote, “Steve said that Prostka had found numerous recent faults on the Snake River Plain in the general Teton area, but Steve had no information on the right-abutment ‘fault’ at Teton. [Even though the Survey strongly suspected it had found a hidden fault right at the damsite, Gilbert was inclined not to believe it.] ... Steve said that a ‘Sierra Club’ type individual [one of the Idaho Environmental Council people] involved in the Teton litigation had looked him up in the field to discuss the USGS work in the area.”
What really had Gilbert worried, it seems, was the fact that “the Washington office [of the Survey] has published (or will publish shortly) the material contained in the USGS letter to the Bureau on Teton ... in their ‘Short Contributions.’ Several other reports of a preliminary nature will also be published shortly on this portion of the Snake River Plain.” Gilbert had gone back and underlined those last two sentences. Hand-scrawled next to them was a margin note which read, “We better develop our ideas on points in the GS ‘prel.’ rpt. and present some constructive criticism and make effort to get some hard data on ‘rt. abutment’ fault.”
In the mind of a good Bureau man, the first priority was to attack—“constructively”—anyone who questioned his agency’s judgment. The second priority was to see whether there was some truth in what he said.
In the opinion of Steven Oriel, the Bureau’s response was “disappointing.” The Bureau would not listen to the Survey, he was to tell a Congressional committee, “because they were already committed to the project politically.” Bob Curry agrees. “You could have told them that they were building a dam on top of an active volcano,” he says, “and they would have had a hundred guys out there trying to prove you wrong. I tried to get some more information out of them and eventually I gave up. All I got was Mickey Mouse. No one was listening.”
It is irrelevant, but irresistible nonetheless, to point out that while Curry was getting what he called “Mickey Mouse” out of the Bureau, its acting director of dam design and construction was named Donald J. Duck.
Meanwhile, for an entirely different set of reasons, the Nixon White House was beginning to take a closer look at Teton Dam. It wasn’t so much the cost—compared to, say, the Central Arizona Project, Teton was beer money—as it was panic over the OPEC-spawned inflation that had suddenly exacerbated the Vietnam-spawned inflation that already was. Also, an organization called Trout Unlimited, made up substantially of rich Republican fly-fishermen who had donated to Nixon’s reelection campaign, was quite audibly upset about the loss of yet another blue-ribbon wild trout stream. Nixon’s Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency were similarly upset about the project, and their skepticism had partially infected the closest approximation of an environmentalist in the inner White House, Presidential adviser John Erlichman.
The strongest official opposition came from Nathaniel Reed, a wealthy Floridian whom Nixon had appointed Assistant Interior Secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. Reed, tall, intense, and witty, a blazered social lion from the Gold Coast, was to clash repeatedly with the prosaic engineers upstairs in the Interior building, and for a while rivaled Dave Brower as the Bureau’s public enemy number one. “They took me on a tour of