Cadillac Desert (43 page)

By the time Dominy was scheduled to give his speech, the three thousand conventioners already had an inkling that something portentous was likely to occur. “The title of my speech is ‘Crosses Reclamation Has to Bear,’ ” Dominy began in a sarcastic voice. After making some desultory remarks about the Bureau’s routine difficulties, he turned with relish to the subject at hand. “Only yesterday, my good friend, Governor Clyde of Utah, preached the gospel of unity to this association. He warned the West that if it did not unite, the cause of reclamation was in danger. I want to underscore the governor’s warning. It is timely and it is true, but apparently the governor’s warning fell on some deaf ears. Among those deaf ears, I regret to say, were those of Governor George D. Clyde of Utah.” Dominy then tore into Clyde for attacking the Burns Creek Project—“a counterfeit reclamation project,” he said acidly, “that was first proposed by those well-known foes of private power, Dwight Eisenhower and his Secretary of the Interior, Fred Seaton.” As Clyde sat in the audience red-faced, Dominy’s attack became more and more bitter. The delegates were absolutely stunned. “This is the Burns Creek Project which Governor Clyde considers false and a masquerade,” Dominy was now shouting. “Is it any wonder that Reclamation’s position in the Congress is threatened when the Governor of one of our own Western States attacks a project not even located in his state?”

Nineteen years later, Weinberg was still shaking his head. “No one could believe it,” he said. “George Dewey Clyde sat there like he’d been hit by a Buck Rogers ray. Dominy just stood up there smiling serenely. I’ve never known such nerve. It took the audience thirty seconds to decide whether it dared applaud him at the end of his speech.

“You’d probably have to go back to Andrew Jackson’s administration,” said Weinberg, his tone full of wonder, “to find another instance where a bureaucrat attacked a sitting governor like that.”

Going after a sitting governor was one thing. Going after an entire profession was another, especially if it was a fraternity to which 95 percent of your immediate colleagues belonged. But Dominy was quite capable of that, too.

When the American Society of Civil Engineers held its annual meeting in 1961, they asked Stewart Udall to be the keynote speaker. Udall had a prior engagement and had to decline, and the natural person to speak in his stead was Floyd Dominy. This was the same society, however, whose president had twice written a letter to the President asking that Dominy not be appointed Commissioner of Reclamation—first when Eisenhower appointed him, then when Kennedy reconfirmed his appointment. The reason was both simple and gratuitous: Dominy was no engineer. “When Udall said I should speak in his place,” Dominy remembers, “I told him, ‘The hell I will!’ I wasn’t going to speak to a bunch of people who didn’t think I deserved my job. I told Stewart, ‘You make them send me a personal invitation to give the address. Then I will
consider
whether my schedule permits me to appear.’ I didn’t think they’d invite me, but damned if they didn’t.”

When he was introduced and took the lectern, the assembled engineers should have known what was coming. “I’m never fully at ease before so large a group,” Dominy began, “but in this one instance I am at ease. I’m at ease because
I
know that you know that I know that I would never have been appointed commissioner if two Presidents had listened to your organization’s advice. Be that as it may,” Dominy went on, “I’m here to offer you gentlemen a little edification. I think that both you and your honorable president should go back and read the Reclamation Act, the document that has provided so many of you with jobs. I’ve read the act many times, and nowhere do I see evidence that it was set up as a job security program for engineers. The act is a land settlement program, and if land settlement were left solely to engineers I think we would still be hunters and gatherers, because it’s a lot sexier to design a better mace than it is to plant a garden.

“I’ll make you a solemn vow here tonight,” Dominy concluded after another few minutes of this. “I promise never to refuse to promote anyone in the Bureau of Reclamation just because he happens to be an engineer.”

A few weeks after his speech, Floyd Elgin Dominy was inducted as an honorary member into the American Society of Civil Engineers.

If attacking the governor of Utah took nerve, if taking on the entire engineering profession took gall, then waging ceaseless war against one’s superiors would have to be regarded as slightly nuts. But Dominy continually attacked and defied all three of his immediate superiors in the Interior bureaucracy—the Secretary, Under Secretary, and Assistant Secretary—and won nearly every time.

Stewart Udall, who served as Interior Secretary during the Kennedy-Johnson reign, was an enigmatic man. A jack Mormon—a lapsed member of the faith—who hailed from a desert state but assumed office on the threshold of the conservation era, he spent his entire term trying to reconcile his conflicting views on preservation and development, especially when it came to water projects. A smooth politician, handsome, vigorous, and diffident, he was a favorite of Jack Kennedy and a darling of the press; he was continually getting his picture in the papers. There was Stew Udall rafting rivers, Stew Udall climbing Alaskan peaks, Stew Udall and his sometime friend Dave Brower trekking through one of the National Parks. This was the same Stew Udall who wanted to build a nuclear-powered desalination plant off Long Beach to slake Los Angeles’ giant thirst; the same Udall who secretly plotted aqueducts carrying water from the Columbia River to the Southwest; the Udall who gave his official, if not private blessing to plans to dam the Grand Canyon. However, what was to Udall a delicate reconciliation of divergent instincts was to Dominy—who held the conservation movement in contempt—a Hamlet-like ambivalence or, even worse, outright capitulation to “posy-sniffers.”

To make a strained relationship worse, Udall appointed as his Under Secretary James Carr, a brash, opinionated young Irish Catholic from California who could not help inflaming the ire of a brash, opinionated, and older Floyd Dominy, who happened to be a Celtic-Irish Protestant. To make matters still worse, Udall appointed as his Assistant Secretary for Water and Power a big, dour South Dakota Norwegian named Kenneth Holum, a man whose very essence and style found their exact opposites in Floyd Dominy.

Dominy’s battles with Udall were, for the most part, due to disagreements on issues; personally, when neither had the other’s goat, they liked each other tolerably well. On the other hand his battles with Holum and Carr had more to do with the fact that Dominy despised them both as much as they loathed him. Carr had been the legislative assistant of someone else Dominy hated: Congressman Clair Engle of California, who tried repeatedly to get him removed from his job for not favoring California enough. (When Engle died of brain cancer, Dominy told his inner circle, half seriously, that he was responsible. “That cancer in his head was something I put there. He got it arguing with me all the time.” Twenty years later, the commissioner still loved to tell about the time he booted the Congressman out of his office.) Personal dislike soon escalated into all-out war: Holum was trying to prevent Dominy from giving a speech; Carr was ordering him not to make a trip; Carr and Holum were trying to give the commissioner a new secretary who Dominy suspected was their personal spy. By late 1962 or 1963, the feud had grown so intense that it kept the denizens of the Interior building coming to work just to see what would happen next. Before long, Dominy, to the amazement and exasperation of Udall, had established a firm policy on dealing with Holum: the commissioner would no longer walk downstairs to speak with the assistant secretary. If the big dumb sonofabitch wished to speak with the commissioner, he could walk upstairs to see him. “As his superior I simply had to rein him in from time to time,” muttered Holum during a telephone interview, and declined to discuss the subject further. The truth was, however, that Dominy made a fool of Holum much more frequently than Holum made a fool of him. The one time he did—when he and Carr managed to freeze the commissioner off the Presidential airplane during one of Kennedy’s western tours—Udall returned to his office only to find powerful Congressman Wayne Aspinall on the other end of the telephone, waiting to chew off his ear. After that, Dominy not only got to ride on Air Force One, but he had his
own
fancy aircraft—and his own building.

For years, the world’s great amalgamation of engineering talent had been housed in a complex of warehouses, military depots, and glorified barracks outside Denver known today as Federal Center. Then, it was simply known as the Ammo Depot. Thrown up hastily during the war, the Bureau’s headquarters, a two-block-long hangar called Building Fifty-six, had neither air conditioning nor many windows. The only source of heat was some undersized radiators spaced many yards apart. Chunks of ceiling calved like icebergs; water dribbled from a hundred leaks. The plumbing sounded as if a team of Russian weight-lifters were banging wrenches against the pipes.

Mike Staus and Dexheimer had tolerated this travesty of a headquarters, but Dominy would not. He wouldn’t keep his cows in there. He was going to get Congress to appropriate money for a new building—a new building that would, in time, become known as the Floyd E. Dominy Building. Under his tutelage, the Bureau’s public relations department produced a picture book called
Inside Building Fifty-six.
In it were photographs of rusting pipes, of rotting ceilings suspended over bowed heads, of huddled secretaries typing in overcoats. Accompanying the pictures was a text that might have described the Sheraton Maui. It was, especially from engineers, a high-class piece of wit. The results, however, were negligible. Udall was frightened of a new building’s cost; a few Congressmen even wondered out loud why such a brochure should be produced at public expense. That was enough to make Dominy mad, but not half as mad as he was when he learned that the General Services Administration, run by a close friend of James Carr—the same Jim Carr who had told Dominy that the Bureau’s headquarters were adequate—erected a new building next door to house the complex’s garbage cans.

The federal code stated things plainly enough: the construction of new federal edifices, unless Congress voted otherwise, was left to the discretion of the GSA. Dominy asked his lawyer, Eddie Weinberg, to give him the exceptions to the rule. There were none, Weinberg said—except that, obviously, the GSA had no say-so over the Bureau’s dams. “Well, then, it’s simple,” he told Weinberg, “we’ll get the goddamned thing authorized as a dam.”

It was a quintessential Dominy solution, brilliant in its simplicity, splendid in its insolence. The building would be authorized as a dam. The Senate Appropriations Committee—Carl Hayden, chairman—would approve money for Dominy Dam, and the dam would metamorphose into a building. Then it was only a matter of getting the House to agree.

Fascinated by the outcome of this thing, Weinberg was finally persuaded to go along. Later that year, there was Dominy, with Hayden’s blessing already in hand, testifying before his counterpart on the House Appropriations Committee, chairman Clarence Cannon of Missouri. Dominy was eloquent in his blunt Harry Truman style. “I’ve got a building where icicles practically form in winter,” he complained, “and a plane where ice
does
form, right in the carburetor. My people need a decent place to work, and I need a plane that isn’t going to fall out of the sky so I can live to see them enjoy it.”

Cannon asked, “Do you have any idea when your plane might fall out of the sky?”

“Probably on the very next flight,” said Dominy.

“Well, you let me know, then, when you plan to arrange it,” said Cannon. “I’ve got a list of passengers for you.”

Then, without further questioning, Cannon approved both of Dominy’s requests.

When Carr’s friend, the GSA administrator, found out that Dominy had sneaked a new building into a bill that nominally authorized only dams, he was apoplectic. When Carr found out soon thereafter that Dominy had immediately signed a $250,000 design agreement without his approval,
he
was beside himself. Carr forgot, however, that Dominy had been clever enough to make a friend in every strategic place; and there was no more strategic place in the Interior Building than the mailroom.

Stewart Udall was out of town, making a speech, but he was indignant when he learned from Carr how Dominy had operated behind his back. With the Secretary’s approval, Carr wrote and signed a letter agreeing to hand the $250,000 back to the Treasury. “When I found out about that,” says Dominy, “I called my man in the mailroom. I said, ‘I’ll take the rap and you’ll keep your job—don’t you let that letter out of the building.’ He promised me he wouldn’t. Then I called up Udall that night in his hotel room. I dialed him every fifteen minutes so he wouldn’t get away from me. When I got through to him, I said, ‘Stew, dammit, you can’t do that. It’s not $250,000 cash. It’s $250,000 credit with the Appropriations Committee. I promised them I’d save that amount of money in the rest of the program. It’s their money, not yours. You do this and you’re going to run smack into Senator Carl Hayden and Congressman Clarence Cannon.’

“That did it,” Dominy chortled. “There was nothing he could do. I got my building. I got my airplane, too. When the GSA chief found out the building was going to be a high-rise, he really squeaked. He sent me three letters of complaint. I didn’t bother to answer one.”

For years, the Dominy Building—a name it has not yet officially received—was the only high-rise anywhere around Denver. You could see it from far across the Platte River, rising significantly behind the thrusting skyline of downtown. Without knowing what it was, you knew it was a monument to something or someone powerful. “I want it functional, dammit!” Dominy barked at his architects. “I want a building like a dam.” What he got is a lot worse. Square as a cinder block, thuddingly banal, it is done in the Megaconglomerate style of the 1960s and 1970s—a J. Edgar Hoover Building without the grotesque semicantilevered overhangs. Despite the cold, the heat, and the feeling of marcescence, Building Fifty-six had a refreshing air of purposefulness, a MASH-like crisis atmosphere. The Dominy Building, by contrast, is fixed, solid, and sealed, as impervious to a rose’s scent as to a typhoon—rather like a dam. When it was finished, thousands of Bureau engineers could leave their climate-controlled suburban homes, climb into their climate-controlled cars, and drive to their climate-controlled, windowless new offices, never once encountering the real world.