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By Root 1432 0

was Eliot Porter; he had wealth and social connections, too. While typical Bureau of Reclamation families spent their vacations on houseboats cruising the reservoirs that Daddy built, Straus went to the family retreat at Spruce Head Island, on Maine’s Penobscot Bay. It was their island—all of it. Straus could have spent his life clipping coupons, safari hunting, or writing the hyperventilating prose that was his second love. But there was nothing on earth that gave Mike Straus quite as much boyish, exuberant satisfaction as erecting dams. In eight years as Commissioner of Reclamation, he would become responsible for as many water projects as any person who ever lived.

Straus had been selected at the close of the war by Harold Ickes, himself a newspaperman, after the Roosevelt administration had endured twelve years of relatively plodding Bureau leadership under Elwood Mead, Harry Bashore, and John Page. Straus was Ickes’s alter ego—a newspaperman, a liberal, a fighter, a curmudgeon. Franklin Roosevelt, who equated wealth with energy and idealism, heartily endorsed the appointment. It was a brilliant stroke. For all his man-of-the-people reputation, FDR felt paranoia about the common man. His secret fear was that the Depression would begin anew after the war, and the returning veterans would be unable to find jobs; ultimately, they might revolt. In the Bureau of Reclamation, FDR had a vast job-creating engine, an agency that remade the western landscape into a place where the dispossessed could go. In Mike Straus, he had a commissioner who would stoke the engine until the rivets began to pop.

Like a lot of people who inherit or marry wealth, Straus viewed money abstractly. A million was a number, budgets were a nuisance, feasibility reports were a waste of time. And, having abandoned a career that asked for a constant objective adherence to facts, he soon acquired an easygoing way with the truth. “Facts,” said one of his successors as commissioner, Floyd Dominy, “didn’t mean a goddamned thing to him.”

Straus was a spectacle. He was shambling, big as a bear, a terrible dresser, and a slob. “The characteristic Mike Straus pose,” remembered Dominy, “was for him to plant his feet on his desk, almost in your face, and lean back in his swivel chair flipping cigarette ashes all over his shirt. At the end of the day, there was a little mound of ash behind his seat. He was an uncouth bastard! He carried one white shirt with him on trips. I remember one night when Reclamation was throwing a party, and a cub reporter came by and asked me where to find Mike Straus. I just said, ‘Go upstairs and look for the guy who reminds you of an unmade bed.’ ”

There was something else about Mike Straus: his arrogance. Once, in the very early 1950s, he got on a plane without reconfirming his reservation, which one was required to do in those days. The plane turned out to be overbooked, and since Straus had not reconfirmed, he was the one who was supposed to be bumped. The flight attendants invited him off the plane, but Straus refused to budge; he pretended not to hear. As a whole plane full of passengers cursed him under their breaths, Mike Straus sat there like a pig in goo. Finally, the captain had to ask for volunteers to bump themselves so that the plane could take off. There weren’t a lot of flights in the early 1950s, and the passengers would have to wait a long time for another one. But Straus appeared unmoved; he wasn’t even embarrassed. “It didn’t faze Mike a bit,” said a Reclamation man who was with him. “He thought he was performing the greatest work in the country, and he felt like the holiest bureaucrat in the land.”

Cavalier, arrogant, mendacious, and whatever else he was, Mike Straus was also an idealist. A good stalwart liberal in the New Deal tradition, he believed in bringing the fruits of technology to the common man. He bore a ferocious grudge against the private utilities of the West, who denied reasonably priced power (or power at all) to rural areas struggling against adversity on every side, and who bought space in magazines