Cadillac Desert (45 page)

Dominy’s Bureau regarded the operation as a “success,” failing utterly to recognize the public relations catastrophe into which it had happily stepped. Even Imperial Valley farmers, who had so much water to waste that some of them applied ten or twelve feet per year to their crops, were opposed to the dredging because they liked to shoot ducks. Ben Avery, a widely read outdoor columnist for the
Arizona Republic
—a newspaper never known to oppose water development unless it was California’s—adopted Topock Marsh as his personal crusade and made a point of savaging the Bureau several times a year. In June of 1966, one of his columns finally caught Dominy’s attention. “I believe we will have to take Avery on,” he wrote to his regional director, Arleigh West, “or face up to the realities [sic] that there is a great deal of truth in what he is saying.” In other words, Dominy
knew
Avery was right. He
knew
that Topock Marsh was pitiful compensation for all the habitat the Bureau and Corps had ruined. He
knew
that the marsh would reappear unless the Bureau continued to spend millions of dollars trying to annihilate it. But which course of action did he choose? The Bureau, he decided, was going to deny everything Ben Avery said and continue demolishing the marsh.

Stewart Udall was upset over the Topock Marsh situation, and since the marsh was being eradicated for the sake of California—not Arizona—he ordered Dominy to do something about it. In typical fashion, Dominy’s response was to try to make an end run around Udall, through the Congress. Though he was nominally Dominy’s boss, Udall didn’t like tangling with his two-fisted commissioner; that was the reason he had John Carver on his staff. Small, tough, and profane, built like a bantamweight prize-fighter, Carver had been hired to be Udall’s all-purpose troubleshooter. Manhandling Dominy, however, was turning into his full-time job.

“The summit meeting was to take place in Udall’s office,” remembers John Gottschalk, who was then the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “It was a good choice—the Secretary was absent, but the trappings of authority would impose themselves. I was a little late in arriving, and as I was walking down the hall I could already hear Carver and Dominy at each others’ throats. God Almighty! Were they screaming at each other! When I walked in they were standing at opposite sides of Udall’s desk just like a couple of football players facing off. They were pounding the table with their fists. Dominy’s face was beet-red. I remember him yelling, ‘What do you want me to do? Resign my fucking job?’ And Carver was shouting back, ‘We want you to get on the
team,
Floyd! We don’t want you to resign. We want you to stop throwing tantrums and get on the goddamned
team
!’

“I just stood there transfixed,” says Gottschalk. “I didn’t know whether to try to break it up or slink out the door. It went on like that for another fifteen minutes until Dominy gave up. I remember exactly what he said. He yelled, ‘You realize you’re asking me to go against every sound precept of water management for a bunch of goddamned birds and fish!’ And then he barged out the door like a Sherman tank.”

By the mid-sixties, Dominy finally had realized that the conservation movement was a serious enough threat to the Reclamation program that he would have to acknowledge not only its existence, but its political power. At first he had paid it as much attention as he would a flea, but now he began to go after the flea with a hydrogen bomb. In one issue of
Audubon
magazine—which had a circulation far smaller than it does today—the magazine’s bird-watching columnist, Olin Pettingill, made a derogatory reference to the Bureau in an article which, for the most part, was about curlews and gallinules. Pettingill remarked that the Bureau’s Nimbus Dam, on the American River east of Sacramento, “has ruined what once were spawning grounds for salmon and steelhead rainbow trout”—an observation that happens to be entirely true. That was the sum total of Pettingill’s criticism: one sentence in a two-thousand-word article about birds. However, as far as Dominy was concerned, the magazine was guilty of delivering “a gratuitous slap in the face.” He wrote to his regional director, “We think it would be opportune and worthwhile to work with the Sacramento newspaper in the development of a feature story on the lengths to which Reclamation has gone... to enhance the fishery and wildlife resources of the Central Valley. An ideal situation would be for such a story to be used in the Bee on the opening day of the Audubon Society convention in Sacramento, to be followed up by an editorial.”

Two interesting questions are raised by Dominy’s response. One is whether he really had enough influence with the Sacramento Bee to enlist it in an orchestrated campaign to perfume the Bureau’s reputation. One also wonders what he had in mind when he spoke of Reclamation projects “enhancing” fish and wildlife habitat in the Central Valley. By the mid-1960s, nearly 90 percent of the valley’s wetlands habitat was gone, almost entirely because of irrigation farming, and wetlands were by far the most important natural feature in all its five-hundred-mile length; the valley was once the winter destination of a hundred million waterfowl cruising the Pacific Flyway, and now their numbers were reduced to five or six million, jammed onto refuges or forced to scrounge a meal in unwelcoming farmers’ fields. The Sacramento-San Joaquin river system once had six thousand miles of salmon spawning streams, but by the mid-1960s there were perhaps six hundred miles left, and it was the Bureau’s dams, cemented across rivers low down in the foothills, that blocked the salmon most effectively. So what had the Bureau done to “enhance” fish and wildlife resources? At best, it had created a series of slack-water reservoirs that were host to such rough fish as catfish, crappie, and bass, plus some trout and an occasional landlocked salmon. The reservoirs were useless to ducks and geese, which couldn’t feed in their deep waters and would be driven mad by the powerboats anyway.

Those reservoirs, however, were the only thing Dominy could have had in mind, unless he had completely lost touch. To him, it seemed, nothing in nature was worthwhile unless it was visited by a lot of people. If it was a pristine river, accessible only by floatplane or jeep or on foot, navigable only by whitewater raft or kayak or canoe, populated by wily fish such as steelhead that were difficult to catch, then it was no good. But if the river was transformed into a big flatwater reservoir off an interstate highway, with marinas and houseboats for rent—then it was worth something after all.

There was, for example, Lake Powell. Before Glen Canyon Dam had been built, that stretch of the Colorado River was one of the remotest, most inaccessible places in the United States. Only a few thousand people had seen it. Utterly unlike the turbulent reaches of the Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon was a stretch of quiet water drifting sinuously between smooth, rainbow-colored cliffs. Labyrinthine and cool, some of the canyons were as lush as a tropical forest, utterly incongruous in the desert. All of this was drowned by Lake Powell, but to demonstrate how nature had actually been improved, Dominy decided to publish a book called
Lake Powell: Jewel of the Colorado.
He even decided to take the photographs and write the text himself. “Dear God,” he wrote on the inside cover, “did you cast down two hundred miles of canyon and mark: ‘For poets only’? Multitudes hunger for a lake in the sun.” He went on:

How can I describe the sculpture and colors along Lake Powell’s shores? Over eons of time, wind and rain have carved the sandstone into shapes to please 10,000 eyes. The graceful, the dramatic, the grand, the fantastic. Evolution into convolution and involution. Sharp edges, blunt edges, soaring edges, spires, cliffs, and castles in the sky.... Like a string of pearls ten modern recreation areas will line Lake Powell’s shores, with names that have the tang of the Old West.... Feel like exploring? Hundreds of side canyons—where few ever trod before the lake formed—are yours.... You have a front-row seat in an amphitheater of infinity.... Orange sandstone fades to dusky red—then to blackest black.... There is peace. And a oneness with the world and God. I know. I was there.

Dominy’s war against the conservationists may have given him some satisfaction, but, from his point of view, it was hardly time well spent. No public figure would be as hated by the environmental movement until James Watt came along a decade later. His blind insistence on building dams in the Grand Canyon—not just dams, but cash register dams whose purpose was to generate income to build
more
dams—won him the wrath of
Reader’s Digest
and
My Weekly Reader;
his habit of making end runs around federal laws and regulations by begging special relief from Congress did not endear him to those whose laws he was circumventing; and hundreds of well-placed officials in Washington, many within his own building, were laying for him.

Despite all this, in the late 1960s Dominy was as entrenched as any bureaucrat in Washington. The main reason was his relationship with Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the most powerful man in legislative government. It was the relationship of a fawning nephew and a favorite uncle—the kind of relationship young Lyndon Johnson enjoyed with Sam Rayburn—and it gave Dominy an authority, an insolence, an invulnerability scarcely anyone else enjoyed.

When Carl Hayden was in his late eighties, senile, half blind, half deaf, confined to a hospital bed half the time, Floyd Dominy all but served as chairman of the Appropriations Committee when dam authorizations came around. He managed this by telling Hayden exactly what he wanted him to say—by actually writing dialogue for the two of them to recite. He would go to Hayden’s office, sit down with his legislative aide, Roy Elson, and write the questions he wanted Hayden to ask him; then he would go back to his own office and write the answers. It is unclear whether he did the same for other witnesses. The Hayden-Dominy scripts were of dubious enough ethical propriety for Dominy to keep them locked in the Bureau’s sensitive files, their existence known to only a handful of aides. Old, frail, and sick as he was, Hayden was still a man no one wanted to cross, and Dominy, knowing this, basked as long as he could in his failing light. “When you walked into Dominy’s office,” says John Gottschalk, “the first thing you saw was a huge framed picture of Hayden and Dominy getting off a plane in Hawaii all decked out in leis. Hayden’s inscription went something like this: ‘As this photograph was being taken I was thinking to myself that Floyd Dominy is the greatest Reclamation Commissioner who ever lived.’

“It was powerful medicine,” says Gottschalk. “There’s no member of Congress today who’s nearly as powerful as Hayden was then. You’d walk in there to complain about something the Bureau did and see that picture and say to yourself, ‘How the hell am I going to go up against this man and win?’ ”

Dominy was, of course, much too canny to put all of his eggs in Carl Hayden’s basket. In the House, he maintained the most cordial of relations with Wayne Aspinall, the chairman of the House Interior Committee Aspinall, a former schoolteacher from Palisade, Colorado, with a nasty disposition and a religious conviction that only the Bureau of Reclamation stood between the West and Armageddon, would say that Floyd Dominy was “not only the best Reclamation Commissioner I have ever known, but the only good Reclamation Commissioner I have known.” Besides cultivating the powerful, Dominy, for the most part, did a marvelous job of concealing his political prejudices from the world. He could get on famously with Frank Church, the liberal Senator from Idaho, and get on just as famously with William Egan, the right-wing governor of Alaska. If a Congressman didn’t get on famously or even politely with him, Dominy had little compunction about taking revenge: a dam project in his district might suddenly become unfeasible, a weather modification program might move somewhere else. “He pulled money in and out of those Congressmen’s projects like a yo-yo.” Loved by some, feared by many, respected by all, Dominy seems to have had only one enemy of consequence in the whole Congress—Senator Henry Jackson of Washington. But Jackson knew better than to take his enmity too far.

And Dominy could be jovial, amusing, a lot of fun. Reclamation parties were legendary in Washington—hardly what one would expect in a hotbed of Mormon engineers. He could beat the conservationists at their own game. When the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society and others complained bitterly that a finger of Lake Powell would extend to Rainbow Bridge, a spectacular natural arch in Utah, leaving a stagnant, fluctuating, man-made pool of water under one of the nation’s scenic wonders, Dominy went to see the place himself—on foot, with a mule. It was a grueling twenty-mile hike in desert heat to the arch, a trek so tough the mule almost didn’t make it. Later, he flew a bunch of conservationists in by helicopter so they could see it themselves, taking care to ask each one whether he had been there before. Almost none had. Dominy used that fact to great advantage in testimony before Congress. Not only had they never seen what they so passionately wanted to protect, he said acidly, but they wanted him to erect a
dam
to keep the waters out. A dam! After regaling the committee with his story, Dominy got a special exemption from the federal law prohibiting significant man-made intrusions in national monuments. Today Rainbow Bridge is visited mainly by overweight vacationers clambering out of houseboats and trudging up to stare briefly at the arch.

He had a politician’s way with names. On visits to the Bureau’s dams, he greeted maintenance people whom he had met briefly years before, and he even knew the names of people he had never met. When the University of Wyoming awarded him an honorary degree, he was invited to dinner at the home of Gene Gressley, the director of its American Heritage Center. He had never met Gressley, nor his family, but when he walked in the door he knew all of Gressley’s children by name. When, during an interview, I reminded Dominy of the incident and told him how impressed Gressley said he had been, his response seemed somehow predictable: “Who’s he?”