Cadillac Desert (80 page)

“I think it was about 1966 when I went out to give my speech,” Casey says. His voice, after twenty years in Washington, is still thickly gravied with West Texas drawl. “You wouldn’t believe how many bankers there are in Lubbock. I said to them, ‘Look, you’re all riding high out here and it’s a great thing and we all like to pretend that great things are going to last. But no aquifer can sustain this rate of pumping. I don’t know when you’re going to run out of water, but I’d bet you’re going to run out at about the same time you start running out of oil and gas. If that gets too expenseive the farmers won’t be able to pump, anyway. There goes your whole economy. This corner of the world is going to be an Appalachia without trees unless you get off your fannies and try to save it. I don’t know if you can save it; I frankly don’t know if it makes any sense for the nation to invest billions of dollars in a rescue project to keep a few million acres irrigated and a few hundred thousand people employed out here. I don’t know where the water would come from, but you’d better start thinking about it now, because it will take forty years to get a rescue project this big authorized and built, and you haven’t got a lot of time left.”

The effect of Casey’s speech was remarkable. “I gave them religion. A few months hadn’t gone by before I heard they were setting up a big new lobby to fight for a rescue project. They called it Water, Incorporated.” Ambitious, perhaps even incredible, as its goal was—a project to rescue even a modest portion of the irrigated plains would be a project more grandiose than any yet built—Water, Inc., had a number of things going for it. California’s voters had just approved the most ambitious and expenseive public-works project ever attempted by a single state in order to save its own agricultural industry. Would
Texans
countenance that upstart state building something they lacked the nerve to attempt themselves? In the mid-1960s, the age of limits had not yet dawned; a high-plains rescue project was seen by many people as the next logical step in “orderly” water development, something that might even capture the fancy of the nation at large. The generation of politicians then running the country had been suckled and reared on public works. And an astonishing number of them came from Texas.

The President of the United States, for example. As Robert Caro demonstrated in the first volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson,
The Path to Power,
Johnson owed his political career largely to the Marshall Ford Dam. Begun under an emergency appropriation during the Depression—begun, just like Grand Coulee and Garrison dams, before it was even authorized, and built on land the government didn’t even own—the dam was to make a reputation and ultimately a huge fortune for a couple of struggling small-time contractors named Herman and George Brown. At the time, however, it was just a big Bureau of Reclamation dam on Texas’s Colorado River a few miles from Austin, a project which had run through its emergency appropriation before it was half built. To anyone else this didn’t matter much—no one doubted that the dam would be completed someday—but to the brothers Brown it was a calamity. They had invested every nickel they owned and scraped together all the collateral they could in order to purchase one and a half million dollars’ worth of construction equipment they needed and didn’t have. (Until then, most of the Browns’ contracts had been for road-paving jobs; what they owned in construction equipment didn’t amount to more than a few fresno scrapers.) If more funds were not approved immediately, they would go bankrupt. But everyone was crying for relief funds, and an unauthorized project with a serious land-title problem in a remote corner of Texas was at a distinct disadvantage among its competition. In desperation, Herman Brown, the fiercely archconservative entrepreneur, pleaded for help from the district’s most important politician, a newly elected twenty-nine-year-old liberal New Deal Congressman whose name was Lyndon Baines Johnson. Using his connections among the White House inner circle and his absolutely shameless flattery of FDR, Johnson managed to get Herman and George Brown a formal authorization, a resolution of the land-title dispute, and another $5 million to finish the dam as their lenders were about to smash down their barricaded door. Profoundly grateful, the brothers Brown poured enough money into Johnson’s subsequent campaigns to catapult him into the Senate at a tender age. Their company, Brown and Root, was to grow into one of the largest construction firms in the world, mining the government just as Johnson mined the profits of their work—a symbiotic relationship that not only transcended ideology but subverted it, as public works are wont to do. And it all began with a dam.

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 in a pinstripe suit. George Mahon, subjected to merciless lobbying by Water, Inc., enjoyed the power of the purse by virtue of his being chairman of the Appropriations Committee; it was unthinkable that he would give East Texas and South Texas dozens of dams if West Texas got nothing in return. As a result, Connally, as governor, pointedly disregarded the Brown Commission’s report and decided to draw up a proposal of his own. Its title was to be the Texas Water Plan.

The idea was for several million acre-feet of water to be diverted from the Mississippi River below New Orleans—a point from where, presumably, Louisiana wouldn’t mind its being taken—and moved across the marshlands and swamp forests of the state in an aqueduct built to the dimensions of an airplane hangar. A river approaching the Colorado in size, running in reverse, the water would climb up to Dallas and Fort Worth, which sit at an elevation of 750 feet, by way of a series of stairstep reservoirs. A generous portion would head toward those two cities in a spur aqueduct; some of it would to to South Texas; but most of it would head toward Amarillo and Lubbock in the Trans-Texas Canal. There would be seventeen pumping stations en route lifting the water up the imperceptible slope of the plains; there would be nine terminal reservoirs waiting to receive it, Nearly a million acre-feet a year would be fed into the Pecos River; another half million would head toward Corpus Christi; 6,480,000 acre-feet would arrive on the Texas high plains, having climbed thirty-six hundred feet and traveled twelve hundred miles since New Orleans; 1.5 million acre-feet would perhaps go on to New Mexico. Two million acre-feet, the consumption of New York City and then some, would evaporate en route. It would take 6.9 million kilowatts of electricity to run it—about 40 percent of the electricity consumption of the entire state.

As a politician from a neighboring state put it after hearing the plan, “If those Texans can suck as hard as they can blow, they’ll probably build it.”

Without knowing anything but the vaguest outlines of the plan—without knowing whether the farmers could afford the water, whether its acid character was compatible with the plains’ alkaline soils, whether Texas water law didn’t exempt the farms from paying a dime once the water had percolated to the aquifer, whether the powerplants to move it could be financed and built, whether Louisiana had any intention of parting with one molecule of it—the voters of Texas suddenly found themselves, in August of 1969, being asked to appropriate $3.5 billion toward the Texas Water Plan’s construction. Actually, the question was couched much more circumspectly than that. The proponents of the measure, which became known as Amendment Two, insisted that the voters were merely being asked to guarantee $3.5 billion in bonds to establish a “repayable loan fund” which any city or region in the state could tap in order to meet its water needs—an argument which was greeted by the referendum’s opponents with cat-calls. The fact was, they said, that the Texas Water Development Board, which could arbitrarily and peremptorily decide who got how much of the money, was deeply committted to a rescue project for West Texas. Governor Preston Smith, who was trumping Amendment Two up and down the state, was a native of West Texas. If the hidden agenda wasn’t to build, or at least begin (since the $3.5 billion would never complete a project of such magnitude), the rescue project, why had the referendum been scheduled for August in an off-year election, when voter turnout was certain to be light, and organized elements behind the measure could affect the outcome much more dramatically than during a regular election year? The one place where turnout was likely to be heavy was in West Texas, because the farmers would be at home, busy with their crops, while a lot of East Texans would be off on vacation, escaping the humid heat. Why were the backers trying to distance themselves from the Texas Water Plan when that was the only plan that could absorb such a stupendous amount of money? This was, after all, 1969; in 1987, its equivalent would be more than $11 billion.

“We were being sold a bill of goods,” recalls Ronnie Dugger, the publisher of the
Texas Observer,
virtually the only newspaper in the state that opposed Amendment Two. “It was actually $7 billion, not $3.5 billion, when you factored in the interest. Seven billion for what? No one was saying. No one knew. It was the biggest blank check in the history of the United States.”

All such objections notwithstanding, the proponents of the measure had managed to amass as formidable a group of sponsors as Texans were ever likely to see. The backers included nearly everyone who was anyone in the state. Three former governors—John Connally, Allan Shivers, and Price Daniel—served as cochairmen. The editors or publishers of the San Antonio
Light,
the Austin
American-Stateman,
the Houston
Chronicle,
the Dallas
Times Herald,
the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Wichita Falls
Times-Record-News,
the Lubbock
Avalanche-Journal,
the Corpus Christi
Caller-Times,
the Beaumont
Enterprise-Journal,
the Port Arthur
News,
the El Paso
Times,
and the San Angelo
Standard-Times
were on it, not to mention dozens of smaller papers like the Bonhom
Favorite
and the Waxahachie
Times.
The mayors of Midland, Dallas, Bay City, Corpus Christi, Austin, San Antonio, Laredo, Dallas, Lubbock, Fort Worth, and Arlington were on it. Presidents, chancellors, and regents of Texas universities were represented: Baylor, Texas Tech, the University of Texas, Texas A and M, Southern Methodist University. A hundred and forty-three of the 150 members of the Texas House of Representatives were on it. Twenty-eight of the thirty-one members of the Texas Senate were on it. The head of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission; lobbyists for railroads and manufacturers and municipalities; grocery-store magnates; retired Congressmen; Texas kingmakers such as Robert Strauss (later the head of the Democratic National Committee) and Leon Jaworski (later the Watergate special prosecutor)—the list read more like the sponsors of the United Way than a plan that appeared likely to end up dumping the Mississippi River on the expiring plains.