Cadillac Desert (42 page)

“If Dominy were commissioner today, he’d be killed.”

Nominally, the Bureau of Reclamation is a part of the Interior Department. The commissioner is, in theory, directly responsible to the Interior Secretary and the President, and carries out the wishes of whatever administration occupies the White House—whether that administration appointed him or not. Actually, everyone who has watched the Bureau in action over the years knows it doesn’t work that way. The Bureau is a creature of Congress, and most Presidents have not been able to control it any better than they could control the weather or the press. The role of the Bureau vis-à-vis the White House and Congress might be likened to that of a child placed in a foster home by a doting pair of unstable parents. The child may tell lies, throw tantrums, wreck the house, and eat everything in the icebox, but if his foster parents finally decide to give him a thrashing, his real parents materialize out of nowhere and wrest the paddle from their hands. Jimmy Carter lost the momentum of his presidency, and a chance at a second term, through a hapless effort to bring the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers under control. Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all tried to dump or delay a number of projects the Bureau and Corps wanted to build, and failed in almost every case. Congress simply tossed the projects into omnibus public-works bills, which would have required that the President veto anything from important flood-control projects to fish hatcheries to job programs in order to get rid of some misbegotten dams.

The peculiar relationship between the Bureau and the two leading branches of government—in which it can defy the wishes of the branch that supposedly runs it and is largely subservient to the wishes of the other—is something relatively new. Mostly it is a development of the postwar era. In the past, the President often had to champion the Reclamation program
against
the objections of an eastern-dominated Congress, which found the whole idea a waste of money. Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and even Herbert Hoover all fought with Congress over Reclamation dams they wanted built. As the dams octupled the population of the West, however, and as long-lived members of Congress from the South and West rose into important committee chairmanships, the character of Congressional leadership changed, and its attitudes followed. With Wayne Aspinall and Carl Hayden running the Interior and Appropriations committees, Ike could no more enforce a “no new starts” policy than Jimmy Carter could bounce a $40 million Corps of Engineers dam whose sole beneficiary was to be a private catfish farm in the district of an influential Congressman from Oklahoma. As far as public works were concerned, by the 1950s it was Congress, not the White House, that ran the government. We had become a plutocracy of the powerful and entrenched.

No one in government recognized this earlier, or exploited it more brilliantly, than Floyd Dominy. Dominy cultivated Congress as if he were tending prize-winning orchids. Long before he became commissioner, on almost any day you might find him eating lunch with some powerful or promising Congressman or Senator who needn’t necessarily represent a western state. Not only would Dominy have lunch with him, but often Dominy would pick up the tab. If a Congressman broke his toe, he might receive a nice letter of condolence. Dominy sent out reams of condolence letters, often to acquaintances who could only be described as casual, though he didn’t write too many himself; much of his underlings’ work had nothing to do with dams. Favored Congressmen like Mike Kirwan (an easterner) might receive an expensive, custom-crafted set of bookends in the shape of Flaming Gorge and Hoover dams, which they could use to contain the public works bills that were flooding the country in a tide of red ink.

Dominy was a meticulous list-keeper. In his files he kept lists of the Bureau’s friends on Capitol Hill, arranged in categories: close friends, reliable supporters, occasionally wayward supporters. Those on the “A” list were handsomely rewarded. “Dominy yanked money in and out of those Congressmen’s districts like a yo-yo,” says a former associate assistant Interior Secretary who admired Dominy so much he was assigned to tell him he was fired, and whose name was James Gaius Watt. “If some Senator was causing him trouble, money for his project could disappear mighty fast. It went right into projects for the politicians who were Dominy’s friends.” All Dominy had to do was order his engineering department to say that it simply couldn’t spend the money any faster. A memorandum dated April 10, 1967, from Dominy’s chief of public affairs, Ottis Peterson, put together, at Dominy’s request, a list of Senators whose terms were about to expire and whom, in Peterson’s words, “we should make a particular effort to protect and give as many news breaks as possible.” The list of thirteen names—among which were McGovern of South Dakota, Morse of Oregon, Church of Idaho, and Magnuson of Washington—was for “very special attention and protection,” although “we can fatten our batting average by taking care of everyone to the best of our ability.” Small wonder that George McGovern became so blindly wedded to the Bureau’s Oahe Diversion Project that his constituents voted him out of office thirteen years later when they turned against it.

Dominy’s power and influence with Congress were so extraordinary that all he usually had to do to change his superiors’ minds— whether they were contemplating his dismissal or merely a stretch of Wild and Scenic River where he wanted to put a dam—was make a few phone calls to Congress. At worst, he simply had to threaten to resign.

Talk of resignation was Dominy’s ace in the hole. “Dominy threatened to resign so many times I lost count,” says his onetime regional director in Sacramento, Pat Dugan. Early in the 1960s, Stewart Udall’s Under Secretary, Jim Carr, a voluble pro-Californian who loathed Dominy at least half as much as Dominy loathed him, ordered Dugan to fire his chief of planning, Pat Head, for allegedly causing delays in the preconstruction work for Auburn Dam—delays that Dominy may very well have instigated himself. Dugan was in Washington at the time, and he and Dominy went out to lunch. After they had consumed two big steaks and several belts of whiskey, Dugan told Dominy about Carr’s order, and suggested self-effacingly that maybe he had better resign, since he was Pat Head’s superior. Dominy was enraged. “Hell, let’s both resign!” he boomed in a voice that stopped conversation cold. And, in fact, he made his customary threat, which wouldn’t have worked so well if Udall hadn’t suspected that he was mercurial enough to carry it out. But it did work, and neither Dominy, nor Dugan, nor even Pat Head left his job, and Jim Carr died without watching a bucket of concrete poured for his favorite dam. Small wonder Dominy used the threat of resignation so much—after all, it had made him commissioner.

Floyd Dominy was furious when Dexheimer failed to appoint him assistant commissioner, and he believed in carrying a grudge. After Dexheimer’s designee, Ed Neilson, failed so miserably before the Appropriations Committee in 1955, only to be rescued by Dominy, the chief of the Irrigation Division went to see the commissioner after he returned from watching his atomic bomb blast. “Today I told the Commissioner that in eighteen years on government payroll ... I had never seen an agency perform so ineptly,” Dominy confided in his diary on June 7, 1955. “I went on to tell him that I thought it was a crime to personally absent himself from the City through practically all of the hearings.... I concluded that I was prepared to move up to strengthen the front office ... I had made my speech and if he wished to think it over I would be available. With this I terminated the discussion.” Contempt dripped from every word. Obviously, Dominy no longer thought he should be assistant commissioner; he thought he should be commissioner. Over the next several months, he lobbied assiduously on his own behalf with Congress. He was only forty-five, and he had been in the Bureau less than half as long as others who were eminently qualified to replace Dexheimer. Not that this was about to deter Dominy—after all, they were merely engineers.

The campaign worked. Dominy fastidiously made a notation in his diary every time he won a Congressman over. Once, after going to see Congressman Keith Thomson of Wyoming only to find him preparing to pay a visit to Interior Secretary Douglas McKay, Dominy wrote approvingly, “His purpose in seeing McKay was to urge the appointment of Floyd E. Dominy as Commissioner.” By 1957, Fred Seaton, who had replaced McKay as Secretary, was so besieged with requests to make Dominy commissioner that he had to do something. Seaton’s solution was to appoint Dominy “associate commissioner”—a position that, as Seaton conceived it, would be about as meaningful as Vice-President. It had never before existed in the Bureau, and it has never existed since. Seaton, however, thought Dominy would be satisfied with a fancy title, and there he badly misjudged the man. Dominy wanted power. When, after several months, he still didn’t have enough of it to suit him, he began making his wish plain to his friends in Congress—and threatening to quit. Fortunately, his wish was their wish, too. One day, Seaton called Dominy into his office for a chat. “The Secretary ... advised me that he had been getting almost unanimous demands from Senators and Congressmen that I be put in charge of the Bureau’s budget presentation and other works with the Congress,” Dominy typed in his diary. “He went on to make it plain that he desired to carry out these changes in the Associate Commissioner role with as little discomfort to Commissioner Dexheimer as possible. He asked me to guard against any reaction that would tend to belittle the Commissioner.... I assured him that I would be as careful as possible in that connection.”

That was hardly the way it was to be. “The whole thing was pathetic to watch,” says an old Interior hand who was there. “Dexheimer was like an old bull who’s been gored by a young contender and has lost his harem and is off panting under a tree, licking his wounds.” The associate commissioner was now in substantial charge of the Reclamation Bureau—Dominy knew it, Dexheimer knew it, nearly everyone in the Bureau could see it. But Dexheimer had nowhere else to go. His whole life had been dams, and now he had reached the pinnacle of the dam-building profession. Any move would have been a step down, a terrible loss of face. One could hardly blame the commissioner for absenting himself as much as possible to deal with “important business” abroad. It was during one such trip—a month in Egypt—that Dominy decided to make his move. The day Dexheimer returned, Dominy walked into his office and demanded all the authority he had been asking for. If he didn’t get it, he would resign. Dexheimer said he would “think about it,” and in the weeks that followed he continued to hedge and waffle, relinquishing as little power as he could but relinquishing it anyway, afraid that his popular associate commissioner would really deliver on his threat. Dominy was effectively in command when Congress put poor Dex out of his misery. A number of higher Reclamation officials—Dexheimer included—had been moonlighting at consulting jobs, and when the news reached Congress some members were furious about it. (These were the days when Cabinet members still resigned over ethical transgressions which, today, would be considered almost innocent.) When the commissioner refused to produce a list of offenders, Congress demanded that Eisenhower force him out. On May 1, 1959, Dexheimer, “for personal reasons,” announced his resignation as Commissioner of Reclamation. “My decision was not arrived at easily,” he said. Floyd Dominy landed in his seat a few days later with a terrific thump.

M
ost Commissioners of Reclamation were dull, pious Mormons—or, if not Mormon, and pious, then at least dull. Floyd Dominy was a two-fisted drinker, a gambler; he had a scabrous vocabulary and a prodigious sex drive. In interviews, Bureau men tend to be careful, guarded, and obviously suspicious of reporters. Dominy was candid and amazingly open. Most commissioners like to operate within carefully defined parameters, always going by the book. Dominy was freewheeling and reckless, racing yellow lights and burning rubber in three gears. He could be methodical, he worked incredibly hard, he always did his homework—those were the qualities that sustained him through four successive administrations. But he had a self-destructive impulse, a violent temper, and a compulsion to tempt fate. He could, for example, make a lifelong enemy of a very powerful politician over lunch.

The governor of Utah during the early 1960s, George Dewey Clyde, personified, as far as Dominy was concerned, the hypocrisy of conservative Mormons—a faith he privately detested—where the Reclamation program was concerned. Clyde wanted the government to build as many dams as there were sites in his state, but he wanted private utilities to be able to sell the power. Dominy knew the Bureau needed the power to make the projects appear feasible, and besides, he was a Harry Truman Democrat—a warm, if not quite passionate, public-power man. At the National Reclamation Association’s annual convention in Portland in 1962, Clyde gave a ringing speech calling for unity among the western states in support of the Reclamation program. He deplored the fact that 40 percent of the members of Congress from the seventeen western states had failed to vote for two big projects the Bureau wanted built. However, Clyde said, the West had a duty to veto “counterfeit” reclamation projects—dams whose purpose was not irrigation but public power. He then went on to single out “a current example in a state neighboring Utah, where a project continues to be pushed by public-power interests which has no reclamation values, whatever.” The project which he alluded to, but did not name, was the Bureau’s Burns Creek Project in Idaho, which would occupy a hydroelectric site that the company of which Clyde was a puppet, Utah Power and Light, wanted to own itself.

Clyde might as well have impugned the morals of Dominy’s daughter. Edward Weinberg, the Interior Department’s solicitor, was sitting with Dominy as Clyde spoke. “Dominy just turned maroon,” Weinberg recalls. “He said, ‘Eddie, you keep me out of jail, but I gotta attack this guy.’ Over lunch, he hunkered in a back room redrafting his prepared speech. He showed it to me after lunch, and I said, ‘Jesus Christ, you can’t say that! They’ll crucify you!’ ‘Let them try’ was all he said.”