Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [146]
Jackson ordered the investigation but allowed the vote, and Redford, says Claybrook, “fell apart” when Hathaway won by four votes. “I had those bastards,” Redford told Claybrook. “They promised me and they lied to my face.” Claybrook told him not to be discouraged: “It’s a game, and that’s the ethic, that’s how two-faced it is. Just remember, You don’t always lose.” Redford used those words, verbatim, five years later in a scene about institutional corruption in the movie Brubaker.
Even today Redford winces at his naïveté. “I did not want to contemplate the extent of the vested interests on the Hill. Neither could I believe the level of bait switching and duplicity. Joan taught me about ‘the yellow walk,’ where the guy disappears to the bathroom just as the vote is called. On one hand, this was childish, kindergarten stuff. On the other, it was devastating because I realized how much the checks and balances are needed, how little we can trust.” As it turned out, he and Claybrook were rewarded for their efforts when, four months after Ford appointed Hathaway, the investigative committee documented the malpractices in Wyoming. Soon afterward Hathaway suffered a breakdown and was forced to resign. “I was completely indebted to Joan for showing me how, in the cliché, power corrupts,” says Redford.
The lessons in Washington fired him up for the power plant fight in Utah. Utah had been an easy target for developers servicing the ever-growing California. Southern California Edison—Cal Edison—had an-nounced that its biggest single enterprise, the coal-burning Kaiparowits plant, would be built in eastern Kane County, an area of spectacular natural beauty ringed by the Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon and Zion national parks. The Southern Utah News, the Deseret News, The Salt Lake Tribune and the regional television affiliates supported the plant, which, it was advertised, would render full employment at top dollar to traditionally underadvantaged towns like Kanab. Cal Edison had further joined with four other major energy providers in California, Utah and Arizona to plan for a total of eleven power plants throughout the West.
Applying what he’d learned from Claybrook and others, and with the support of NRDC and EDF, Redford went into battle, first forming a pressure group, Southwestern Energy Alliance, with a view to holding public hearings. When that failed, he accompanied Cal Edison’s public relations man, Howard Allen, on a helicopter tour of the national parks in order to take the opportunity to press home the inevitable environmental losses. Simultaneously he locked horns with every journalist and Cal Edison surveyor who would face him. Two prime supporters joined him in the fray: former secretary of the interior Stewart Udall and Salt Lake City mayor Ted Wilson, the only local politician to get involved.
“It was my first major conservation issue,” says Redford, “and what I discovered very quickly was the mass of ignorance out there. It’s not just the greed of industrialists. It’s a lack of fundamental awareness, a mind-set created over 150 years that says Manifest Destiny allows us to do what we will with the land. My passion came from the pages of Wallace Stegner, who prided himself on his attachment to the land. We flew over the Escalante Red Rocks, this paradise that has been untouched for millennia, and I thought about what Stegner has written: that here is a place where the silence allows you to hear the swish of falling stars. I told Howard, ‘The last thing southern Utah needs is a behemoth to break the silence and pollute the water and the air.’ ”
But Allen was the least of