Cadillac Desert (46 page)

One of his former aides said Dominy liked people the way we like animals—we like them, but we eat them. His employees laughed at his antics, admired his guts, profoundly respected his abilities, and were scared half to death. He could be sadistic, and he would carry a grudge to his grave. As soon as he became commissioner, he tried to fire all of his regional directors—not on the basis of incompetence, necessarily, but because they had been appointed by Dexheimer. But he couldn’t dislodge the one whose head he wanted most, Bruce Johnson in the Billings office, because Johnson had strong political support. The reason he wanted to fire Johnson so badly is that he had refused to arrange a “date” for Dominy with his secretary, whom Johnson was courting himself. Unable to depose him, Dominy tried to hound Johnson out—ridiculing him mercilessly, intimidating him, humiliating him. Johnson took it for several years and finally quit.

He hated weakness, but he needed a weak person to serve as his whipping boy, and he had one in Arleigh West, his regional director in Boulder City. “Arleigh was his Sancho Panza,” says Pat Dugan, one of the few whom Dominy didn’t cow. “He had a rough life. He brought out everything that was sadistic in Floyd.” When West was in Washington, Dominy commandeered his hotel room as his trysting spot, and there were evenings when poor Arleigh found himself out window-shopping, waiting for Dominy to finish. He had someone in Denver—another weak man, a top-level aide—whom everyone referred to as the “Official Pimp.” His responsibilities went beyond procurement. When a public relations flack leaked the story of how Dominy had gotten Congress to give him a new airplane, thinking he was doing Dominy a favor—after all, he was always telling those kinds of stories on himself—the Commissioner was beside himself. He was in the middle of a meeting with some Colorado bureaucrats at the time. “You fire that son of a bitch,” he yelled to the Official Pimp in the presence of the astonished bureaucrats. “We can’t fire him,” said the Pimp, “he’s civil service.” “You fire him,” roared Dominy, “or I’ll can your goddamned ass, too!”

It wasn’t his blindness, his stubbornness, his manipulation of Congress, his talent for insubordination, his contempt for wild nature, his tolerance of big growers muscling into the Reclamation program—in the end, it wasn’t any of this that did Dominy in. It was his innate self-destructiveness, which manifested itself most blatantly in an undisguised preoccupation with lust. His sexual exploits were legendary. They were also true. Whenever and wherever he traveled, he wanted a woman for the night. He had no shame about propositioning anyone. He would tell a Bureau employee with a bad marriage that his wife was a hell of a good lay, and the employee wouldn’t know whether he was joking or not. He preferred someone available, but his associates say he wasn’t above paying cash. “The regional directors were expected to find women for him,” says one former regional director. “It always amazed me how he carried on in the light of day. He was opening himself up to blackmail, but somehow he always seemed immune.” The Bureau airplane was known, by some, as the “Winged Boudoir in the Sky.”

As he bullied weak men, Dominy preyed on women whom he considered easy marks. According to one regional director, Felix Sparks, the head of Colorado’s Water Conservation Board, was married to a woman who occasionally overindulged, so Dominy went right after her. In time, an indignant Mary Sparks refused to attend any party where Dominy threatened to show up. Sparks, one of the most decorated veterans of World War II, might have been expected to punch Dominy in the jaw. Everyone, however, seemed to humor him. “He’s just being
Floyd,”
they would say. “You know how
Floyd
is.” “He’s just a little drunk. Ignore him.”

Alice Dominy must have known. Her life was insulated, she rarely went with him on trips, but for years everyone suspected that she knew. And there came a day when she had to find out for sure. She drove into town to the hotel where according to the rumors, he liked to conduct his trysts. She took the elevator upstairs, mustered her courage, and knocked on the door. A woman opened up. Floyd Dominy, her husband, was in the back of the room. “He just told her to go home and mind her own business,” says one of Dominy’s confidants. “And she was of that era where that’s what women did. I don’t know how he rationalized it. He probably said, ‘Well, lots of people commit adultery.’ He had a talent for rationalizing anything.

“Alice was sweet. She was a dear lady. It broke your heart to see her treated that way.”

Dominy did not even aspire to discretion. He bragged about his exploits. He taunted his assistants with remarks about their wives. He ordered them to find him women. It seemed as if he simply couldn’t help himself. He could testify before Congress on a half bottle of bourbon and two hours of sleep, he could throw Representative Clair Engle out of his office, he could learn more about the Reclamation program than any person alive—he was tough, ferociously disciplined, indomitable. But he was also compulsive, addicted, a fool for lust—and exposed himself quite recklessly to full view. “I’m not sure what Dominy is better remembered for,” says one Washington lawyer who knew him well, “having been Commissioner of Reclamation or having been the greatest cocksman in town.”

“I’ve tried to psychoanalyze him,” says Pat Dugan, “and I don’t think he ever believed that his playing around would get him in real trouble. He got away with so much that after a while he must have decided he was immune.”

But he wasn’t.

The man assigned to tell Floyd Dominy that he was fired was a young, intense, middle-level Interior bureaucrat barely thirty years old, a fire-breathing evangelical Christian from Wyoming named James G. Watt. The order came directly from the newly inaugurated President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. At Nixon’s behest, the FBI had run its customary investigation of top federal officials to look for improprieties and had come back with a file on Dominy that was inches thick. (“The FBI knows every woman I’ve ever fucked,” Dominy once confessed to me.) “He didn’t act surprised when I told him,” Watt remembered. “I think he knew it was coming. We had decided to let him stay on a while longer so his pension could vest, and he acted grateful about that. I was in awe of this man. Everyone was. I was half his age. But he took the news very mildly. I can remember feeling very, very relieved.”

When Dominy was himself relieved, he retired to his cattle ranch in the Shenandoah Valley, leaving his twenty-five-year Reclamation career behind him as if it had never occurred. “When I quit something,” he said, “I really quit it.” Once in a while he could be enticed into a lucrative consultancy—in 1981, he was hired by Egypt to help draft a solution to the grotesque drainage problems created by the Russian-built Aswan High Dam—and he drove to Capitol Hill now and then to testify against the likes of a Hells Canyon National Monument (which would preclude more dams on the lower Snake River); mostly, though, he preoccupied himself with enshrining his reputation and with his cows. In 1979, he was named Virginia Seed Stockman of the Year, a fitting title: he had been proclaimed the state’s preeminent stud expert.

Dominy’s reputation and legacy are more problematical—at least as complex as the man himself. In
Encounters with the Archdruid,
John McPhee portrays him as a commissioner who led Reclamation on a terrific binge, plugging western canyons as if they were so many basement leaks. His reputation, even today, is outsize; he is often talked about in Washington, and in the conservationists’ annals of villainy he remains a figure as large as, if not larger than, Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, the same James Watt. Watt, however, hopped around so much with his foot in his mouth that he didn’t really have a chance to do much that the environmental movement regarded as awful. But Dominy presided over Glen Canyon Dam, over Trinity Dam, over a dozen other big dams, over the federal partnership with California in that state’s own water project, which dammed the Feather River and allowed Los Angeles’ explosive growth to continue, and with it its appetite for even more water. Those enamored of such giant engineering works were at least as sorry to see Dominy go as the conservationists were thrilled; no successor, they believed, could ever hope to equal him as a master tactician in Congress, as a fiercely committed believer in the cause of reclaiming the arid West.

On balance however, Floyd Dominy probably did the Bureau of Reclamation and the cause of water development a lot more harm than good. That, at least, is Daniel Dreyfus’s assessment. Brilliant and hardheaded, the Bureau’s house intellectual—and a native New Yorker—Dreyfus was the only person it had who could sit down with an influential Jewish Congressman from New York City, trade some urban banter and rabbi jokes, and convince him that he ought to vote for the Central Arizona Project. He left, in part, because of Floyd Dominy. “You could take so much of him,” Dreyfus remembered one day in 1981, sitting in his office at the Senate Energy Committee, where he had gone to become staff director. “He got to be like a stuck record. The same damn stories about himself, the same fights with the same people over and over again. The mood of the country was changing, but Dominy refused to let the Bureau change. You got the feeling that you belonged to the Light Brigade.” The loss of Dreyfus was especially ironic, because the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee was Henry Jackson, Dominy’s one powerful enemy from a western state. In Dreyfus, Jackson had acquired the one person on earth who knew as much about the Bureau and its work as its commissioner.

Jim Casey, the Bureau’s deputy chief of planning, worked under Dreyfus and also left in disgust. Like Dreyfus, Casey had become cynical about the whole Reclamation program, but he couldn’t help retaining his loyalty to the Bureau. Once, in the early 1970s, when a friend sent a young engineering graduate over for job advice, Casey suggested that he apply at the Bureau, and the young man made a sour face. “He told me that the Bureau of Reclamation was a disgrace,” Casey remembered. “And I got mad at him for saying that, but here was a guy fresh out of one of the top engineering schools—the kind of guy who once would have loved to work for the Bureau—and he said it was nothing but a bunch of nature-wreckers out to waste the taxpayers’ money. It was Floyd Dominy who gave it that reputation. You couldn’t convince him that the Bureau’s pigheadedness about things like Marble and Bridge Canyon dams was turning the whole country off. After he’d told me his Rainbow Bridge story for the seventh time and how he’d licked the conservationists, I said, ‘Well, you won that one, but you haven’t won too many others lately.’ He said. ‘What haven’t I won?’ And I said, ‘Well, they licked you pretty good on Marble and Bridge Canyon.’

“You know what his answer was? ‘My Secretary turned chickenshit on me.’ The man was blind. He went completely blind.”

These are mere opinions, but the record speaks for itself. The Central Arizona Project which Dominy finally managed to build is a medium-sized dwarf compared with the Pacific Southwest Water Plan he had planned, and he had to sacrifice the last years of his career to the effort to get it authorized. Today, few of the other grand projects conceived under him exist. There is no Devil’s Canyon Dam on the Susitna River, no Texas Water Plan, no Auburn Dam, no Kellogg Reservoir, no English Ridge Dam, no Peripheral Canal, no additional dams in Hells Canyon on the Snake River, no Oahe and Garrison diversion projects. Dominy wanted to move the Bureau’s activities into the eastern United States, because he came to believe that irrigation often makes better sense in wetter regions than in emphatically dry ones, and also because he wanted to invade the Corps of Engineers’ domain in order to retaliate for the Corps having encroached on the Bureau in the West. But all of those plans—for irrigation projects in Louisiana, for a series of reservoirs in Appalachia set around new industrial towns—came to naught. The legacy of Floyd Dominy is not so much bricks and mortar as a reputation—a reputation and an attitude. The attitude is his—one of arrogant indifference to sweeping changes in the public mood—and it is probably the foremost obstacle in the Bureau of Reclamation’s way as it tries to play a meaningful role in the future of the American West.

Actually, there is one more legacy, one of flesh and blood. In Dominy’s office at his Shenandoah farm, next to his huge commissioner’s desk, is a photograph of him with his son on a boat speeding across Lake Powell, arms around each other. Remove the film of thirty years and Floyd could be Charles Dominy’s twin—they look that much alike. In the 1980s, Charles was the chief of the southeastern district of the Army Corps of Engineers. He was turning the Savannah River into a continuous reservoir, channelizing countless miles of meandering streams and creeks, draining the last wild swamp and forest lands of the wet Southeast for soybean farms. He was also plotting to revive the cross-Florida barge canal—a casualty of the same administration that deposed his father.

A couple of hours earlier Dominy had been lambasting the Corps, saying it “has no conscience.” As he saw his guest look at the photograph, however, he broke into a proud grin. He said, “That boy is going to be Chief of Engineers someday.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

An American Nile (II)

N
ineteen twenty-eight, the year the Hoover Dam legislation was passed, was a milestone year in Arizona in another sense. The population went past 400,000—the largest number of people who had lived there in approximately seven hundred years.

The original 400,000 Arizonans (that is an outside estimate; the number may have been somewhat smaller) were, for the most part, members of the Hohokam culture, a civilization that thrived uninterrupted near the confluence of the Gila, Salt, and Verde rivers for at least a thousand years, until about 1400, when it disappeared. The confluence of Arizona’s only three rivers occurs in the hottest desert in North America, a huge bowl of sun now occupied by modern Phoenix and environs. Average summer temperature is 94 degrees; average annual rainfall is just over seven inches. There are far more hospitable places in the state, such as the cool Ponderosa-clad Mogollon Rim, but archaeologists surmise that the inhabitants of Arizona’s higher and wetter regions drifted down to join the Hohokam in the latter days of their realm; something about the desert proved irresistibly attractive. The lure was probably food, which the Hohokam rarely lacked. They were the first purely agricultural culture in the Southwest, if not all of North America. Midden remains, well preserved by the desert’s dryness and heat, suggest that the Hohokam rarely hunted, or even ate meat; their copious starch and vegetable diet was supplemented only occasionally by a bighorn sheep, antelope, raven, or kangaroo rat. Sometimes they ate sturgeon. That sturgeon bones have been found amid the Hohokam ruins suggests a Gila River considerably fuller and more constant than the ghost river whites have known—a river that, even before its headwaters were dammed, usually ran underground. And this, in turn, suggests a possible reason for the Hohokam’s demise: that the climate was considerably wetter during the centuries their civilization flourished, then turned suddenly dry.