Cadillac Desert (41 page)

In his new position, Dominy had an opportunity to learn anything he wanted about the three-hundred-odd Reclamation projects in existence. He read every project history, reserving for special attention the “bad elements”—the projects that were failing. “Half of our projects were insolvent. I was fascinated: why some and not others? I said to myself, ‘Whoever figures this out and starts to haul Reclamation out of this financial ooze is going to be the next commissioner.’ The reasons were complicated. In the early days, Reclamation made some bad mistakes—we miscalculated water availability, we laid out canals that didn’t work right, we had drainage problems that we should have anticipated. Soil, altitude, crop prices, markets—they all made a difference. On top of that, there were practically no requirements. Straus and Warne let any idiot get into a Reclamation project. You didn’t have to demonstrate that you had capital, farming skills, anything. Any fool could sign up and get on a Reclamation farm and use whatever intelligence he had cheating the government. When the projects began to go bankrupt, Straus and Warne were afraid to expose them. They covered the goddamn things up and that got us in a hell of a lot of trouble with Congress. We were illegally delivering water all over the place. Payments were way in arrears and no one was doing a damn thing about it. I think we were violating the law at least as often as we were not violating it.”

Dominy approached the problem in a somewhat schizophrenic way. Privately, he was appalled by the lassitude of the Reclamation program, by the indifference of the engineers to its problems, and by the hypocrisy of members of Congress who voted for bad projects as special favors to colleagues and then griped about the money they were losing. At the same time, he was, in public, the program’s most belligerent defender after Mike Straus. His defenses were so eloquent he even came to believe them himself.

Once a prominent Senator from South Dakota, Chan Gurney, sent Straus a copy of an article that was witheringly critical of the Belle Fourche Project in his own state, implying that he agreed with it. For years, Belle Fourche had been perhaps the Bureau’s preeminent fiasco. Streamflow calculations and reservoir carryover capacity were based on nine months of gauging during a wet year; when the drought of the 1930s came, the reservoir was dry within months. No investigation had been made of the need for drainage, which was turning out to be a terrific problem the farmers could not begin to pay to solve. Farmers settling the project were not selected on the basis of character, aptitude, or available capital, and the vast majority of them were bankrupt within a few years. Even with the Bureau forgiving almost all their obligations, many of the farmers were going broke. They were still receiving water, however, so the project was technically in violation of the law. Congressmen hostile to the Reclamation program loved to crucify Belle Fourche at appropriations time; it was like stoning a flightless auk. Even blustery Mike Straus was going to send Gurney a milquetoast letter in response. When he reread the draft that had been prepared by an aide, however, he couldn’t bear to do it. So Dominy volunteered.

Of course the project was in deep trouble, Dominy wrote. It was planned at the turn of the century, one of the first large-scale irrigation ventures since the Fertile Crescent. There was hardly any experience to go on. Records of North America’s climate scarcely existed. But it was Congress, not the Bureau, that had been especially anxious to get the Reclamation program underway—that was the main reason Belle Fourche was undertaken on such a paucity of data. It was Congress, not the Bureau, that had established impossibly short repayment periods, that had failed to appropriate funds for demonstration projects. It was Congress that demanded projects in areas where the value of agriculture wasn’t worth the cost of irrigation, making subsidies inevitable. The point was the project was there. Thousands of South Dakotans depended on it; they had helped feed the country when the state’s dryland farmers were utterly ruined. What would the Senator do? Shut it down? Tear down the dam? Kick defaulting farmers off their lands and onto the relief rolls? Or would he help the Bureau come up with solutions to put the Reclamation program on a sound foundation? After all, if anyone was embarrassed by the Belle Fourche Project, it was the Bureau. Did the Senator believe that the greatest amalgamation of professional talent in the government was glad when its projects became financial disasters? “Straus read that letter and loved it so much he read it twice again,” Dominy chuckled. “He didn’t change one word. I was in thick with him from that point on. We really blew smoke up that Senator’s ass.”

Dominy had the instincts of a first-rate miler. He could pace himself beautifully, moving on the margin of recklessness but always with power in reserve. He knew when to cut off a runner, when to throw an elbow, when to sprint. He also knew that there was nothing like a grudge to make him run harder.

If Dominy harbored a lifelong grudge, it was against engineers. Away from their drafting tables, he thought, engineers could be inexcusably stupid. On the other hand, they had a mystical ability to erect huge structures along exact lines, using bizarre formulas he could not even read. They could map a river basin, analyze some abutment rocks, measure the streamflow, and build a dam of precisely the shape, size, and structure to suit it. They had labored through the trigonometry, the calculus, the chemistry, the topology, and the geology that he had backed away from—the one time in his life he had given up on anything. The problem was, they couldn’t explain their own work or its importance, couldn’t understand human relations, couldn’t see a political problem about to smack them in the face. He could do all of that—brilliantly. Dominy needed them, and he knew it, and they needed him—and didn’t know it. It made him furious. In the mid- 1950s, after mastering Operation and Maintenance and Repayment and Irrigation, Dominy felt he should move on to the second most important job in the Bureau—the assistant commissioner for legislative liaison. He should be the one working Congress—explaining new projects, justifying the problem ones, tantalizing members with grandiose plans, horse trading, cajoling, threatening. After all, if the Republicans held to their “no new starts” policy, the Bureau would soon have nothing to do.

The position, however, had never gone to a non-engineer, and the person Commissioner Wilbur Dexheimer wanted to appoint was Ed Neilson. Dominy had warned Dexheimer about Neilson. He was, he told Dex, just like him: good-natured, somewhat bumbling, uninterested in politics, and therefore inept. Neilson was the last person who should be sent up to explain the Bureau’s work to Congress. “He had already admitted that he didn’t even know the names of most of the projects, and if someone mentioned one to him he wouldn’t be able to say what state it was in. For Christ’s sake!”

The Public Works Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, which authorized every penny the Bureau spent, had been reorganized after the 1954 election in a way that was profoundly inauspicious for the Bureau. Only two Congressmen sympathetic to Reclamation still sat on it, and one of them, Mike Kirwan, was from Ohio, whose farmers were beginning to raise hell about subsidized competition from Reclamation lands. Everyone else on the subcommittee was hostile or indifferent to the Bureau.

The Appropriations Committee hearings began in April of 1955, and, as Dominy had predicted, the roof caved in. “Dexheimer had gone off for two weeks to watch an atomic bomb test in Nevada. It was utterly inexcusable. The assistant commissioners, Neilson and Crosthwait, and the regional directors were all there, but they were the most tongue-tied bunch of engineers you ever saw. They muffed answers to the simplest questions. It was the biggest fiasco. But Neilson and Crosthwait kept telling me my presence ‘wasn’t required,’ because the subcommittee was only allowing five witnesses to be present at one time. Actually, they were scared I would upstage them. On the tenth day, I was invited to lunch by Senator Gale McGee of Wyoming. Word was getting around about how unbelievably inept Reclamation’s witnesses were, and like every other member from the West, he was concerned. He said, ‘Floyd, can you do something?’ See, I already had a reputation as the most knowledgeable person in the Bureau. After lunch, I called in for my messages.

“My secretary told me I’d gotten a telephone call from Neilson up on the Hill. ‘He needs you desperately,’ she said. I was madder than hell. I stalked into that hearing room and went up to Neilson and said, ‘You got your chestnuts burned pretty good and now you want me to pull them out of the fire.’ You should have seen the look on his face. He said, ‘Are you being insubordinate?’ I said, ‘Hell, no, I’m being loyal. I’m here to save your can. But you introduce me first.’

“Rudy Walters, the regional director from Denver, was up there at that moment testifying about the Kendrick Project. I knew all about the Kendrick Project—it was in Wyoming. Rudy was totally tongue-tied. You could read the exasperation on those committee members’ faces. Neilson ran up to the front of the room and said, ‘Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman, Floyd’s here.’
‘Floyd’s
here.’ No introduction, no last name, nothing. I was mad as a bull with a spear in his back, but I know how to channel anger. I walked to that witness dock and said, ‘Mr. Chairman, my name is Floyd Elgin
Dominy
. I am not an engineer. I’d be happy to tell you about the Kendrick Project. In the first place, the Kendrick Project would never have been built if it hadn’t been for Senator Kendrick. If our engineers had been left solely with the decision, they probably wouldn’t have built it.’ That kept them from dozing off. Then I told them everything they wanted to know.

“For the first hour I was standing up, resting my hands on the chair of the official reporter. Neilson didn’t even give me a goddamned seat in his pew. Then the committee wanted me to testify about some other projects, and the chairman directed Neilson to make room for me. I went on all afternoon, and they invited me right back the next day. I ended up testifying for a week. The committee publicly reprimanded the Bureau for inexcusable lack of preparedness and unwillingness to provide facts, but they specifically mentioned
Dominy
as the one exception. From then on, if a Congressman wanted to know anything about Reclamation, he came to
me.
Before long, they were asking me about the Corps of Engineers projects, too. I became the person they trusted. I wasn’t afraid of any of them, either. I chased one out of my office once.

“What I did on Fred Smith’s farm got me my start in life. What I did in Campbell County got me to Washington. Those hearings made me commissioner.”

“I liked Floyd. I trusted him. I thought he would be loyal to me as secretary.”

“I liked Stewart. He was a bad administrator, but he had marvelous instincts. He also had guts. He wouldn’t bite a chainsaw, but he had guts.”

“Dominy despised Stewart Udall, and Udall regarded him like a rogue elephant. Dominy used to come storming out of Udall’s office and say, ‘Who does he think he is?! The Commissioner of Reclamation?’ ”

“Dominy was the most able bureaucrat I’ve ever known.”

“I was amazed by him. He had the constitution of a double ox. He’d be dead drunk at a party at three A.M. and he’d be testifying at eight-thirty the next morning and you couldn’t tell.”

“He was merciless to the people around him. He could be hell on his assistant commissioners. He was horrible to some of the regional directors. If you made a stupid mistake he was all over you and he wouldn’t quit.”

“When we went on tours abroad, Dominy was treated like the President of the United States.”

“He was a magician with Congress. His friends there would do anything for him. They believed every word he said.”

“When he testified he spouted numbers like a computer. He spoke with absolute self-assurance. It was all hogwash. If he didn’t know a number, he made one up.”

“When Dominy was ousted the Bureau of Reclamation fell apart. It will never recover. The disarray over there now is ridiculous.”

“When you worked for Dominy you were always terrified of the page-eight syndrome. If you handed him a memorandum and page eight was missing, he’d call your supervisor and say, ‘Get that ass-hole off the job. Put him in a hole someplace.’ Guys ruined their careers because they stumbled on the rug when they entered his office.”

“Basically, he was a terrorist.”

“All the wives were disgusted with him. Some of them refused to come to parties when he was going to be there, because he’d start propositioning them all.”

“We played a game of golf once. Floyd was a below-average golfer and I’m an above-average golfer, but he beat me with psych. On the second or third hole, I sliced a ball. He spent the rest of the game ridiculing my slice. I didn’t know whether I was madder at him or at myself. He got me all worked up and nervous. Ordinarily, when one grows up and. becomes successful, one learns not to let silly mistakes or ridicule become bothersome. But I was so bothered I felt like a little kid on the verge of tears. He psyched me out. He won the game.”

“He was one of the best gamblers I ever saw. I was on an airplane with him once and watched him play a game of high-stakes bridge. He won $1,200 in a couple of hours. He took the money and bought himself a tractor.”