Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [288]
Johnson was not the only local politician who had climbed to political power up the wall of a dam. There was Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, one of the princes of the United States Senate until he died in 1963. Besides unabashedly using his Senate seat to make himself rich—he was a cofounder of the Kerr-McGee Corporation—Kerr helped authorize a number of very large reservoirs in his native state which kept Oklahoma’s construction industry perpetually busy, not only building new dams, but rerouting major highways around the ever-larger reservoirs that constantly formed in their path. Perusing a map of eastern Oklahoma, one would think that Kerr’s ultimate goal was to put the state under water.
Then there was Jim Wright, who began representing Fort Worth in 1954 and was to become Majority Leader of the House in the late 1970s, a position he used to defy his own party’s President in his attempt to knock off a few billion dollars’ worth of water projects—including Wright’s own favorite, the Trinity River Project, which was to turn Dallas and Fort Worth, sitting four hundred miles from the ocean, into seaports. Wright’s dedication to water projects struck some of his colleagues as fanatical. He took time out in the late 1960s to write a book called The Coming Water Famine, in which he said, “The crisis of our diminishing water resources is just as severe (if less obviously immediate) as any wartime crisis we have ever faced. Our survival is just as much at stake as it was at the time of Pearl Harbor, or the Argonne, or Gettysburg, or Saratoga.... Pure water, when and where you need it, is worth whatever it costs to get it there.”
There was also Ray Roberts, who represented Sam Rayburn’s old district, and whose interest in water projects would elevate him to chairman of the House Public Works Committee. There was George Mahon, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in the 1960s and one of the five most powerful men in Congress, who happened to represent the district around Lubbock. There was John Connally, the governor of Texas, a Johnson protégé whose enthusiasm for grandiose undertakings, big-game hunting, and gigantic limousines made him into an unselfconscious parody of ambitious, superaffluent Texas.
With such men in power during an era of no limits, anything seemed possible—even a project to rescue the southern half of the Ogallala region by rerouting a substantial portion of the Mississippi River.
The origins of the project went back to 1958, when a U.S. commission—chaired by George Brown of Brown and Root—was appointed to come up with a systematic plan for developing the river basins of the state. The proposal called for eighty-three storage reservoirs and some water-conveyance works to be built by the year 2010, all of which, the commission modestly suggested, could be completed for around $4 billion. The great omission in the plan, however, was an aqueduct to West Texas. The reason for that appears self-evident: West Texas sits at an elevation more than three thousand feet higher than East Texas, where most of the state’s water is, and nearly four thousand feet higher than Louisiana or Arkansas, the two states with enough of a water surplus to suggest themselves as the ultimate source. Pumping enough water to rescue several million acres that far uphill, over a distance of a thousand miles or more, would require a fantastic amount of energy. The commission did not say this in those exact terms, but its omission of any proposal to rescue the Ogallala overdraft region spoke volumes.
There followed, however, one of those peculiar metamorphoses in which a plan, as it evolves, conforms less and less to the constraints of nature, economics, and thermodynamics and more and more to the stridency of certain constituents and the desires of certain elected officials. John Connally saw in an Ogallala-region rescue project an opportunity to become a pharaoh