Cadillac Desert (57 page)

“We are a tyranny presiding over a democracy,” says Edgar. “Congressman Floyd Fithian of Indiana has a water project planned for his district which he doesn’t want. He wants it out of the bill, deauthorized. I don’t know whether a majority of his constituents support him or not, but that should be his problem and their problem. He should be able to take a project out of his own district and if his constituents don’t like it they can vote him out of office. But he hasn’t been able to remove the project from the appropriations bill. Congressman John Myers sits on the Appropriations Committee and its Energy and Water Development Subcommittee. He has some big construction people in his district, which is next door to Floyd’s, who would get some big contracts if the project is built. So every time Fithian tries to remove the project, Myers puts it back in.

“It’s pathetic to watch what can happen to grown men here. One guy had a good project—I thought it was good—in the 1978 appropriations bill, but Ray Roberts yanked it out because he was upset over a couple of votes the guy had cast. He had the poor Congressman crawling up to him on his hands and knees for a year. He finally got his project back. Ray jerked him around like a beaten dog.”

It was against this system that Jimmy Carter, a rube from Georgia who had never been elected to public office outside the state, decided to declare war.

Carter’s appointments alone probably got him off on the wrong foot; in their own way, they were like Ronald Reagan’s chemical-industry people taking over the EPA. His Interior Secretary, Cecil Andrus, had been governor of Idaho and, before that, a sawmill owner; but Andrus was a stranger to Washington, and he had made a reputation in Idaho as an unusually conservation-minded governor from a state full of millionaire sheep ranchers and irrigation farmers. Andrus’s Assistant Secretary, Guy Martin, looked like a bearded logger, but he was a lawyer and made a reputation as a politically canny resources director under another conservationist governor, Jay Hammond of Alaska. The first head of Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality was Charles Warren, probably the most active conservationist in the California legislature. One of the other members, later chairman, was Gus Speth, a lawyer from the archconservationist Natural Resources Defense Council. Speth was a Yale-educated Rhodes Scholar from Orangeburg, South Carolina, who had a dense drawl, resplendent southern charm, and Carter’s ear on water projects and nuclear energy, which he had fought relentlessly at NRDC. Katherine Fletcher, a scientist with the equally archconservationist Environmental Defense Fund, became a natural resource specialist under Stuart Eizenstat, the head of Carter’s domestic policy staff. In the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department were a dozen more high- and middle-level appointees pulled off the environmental organizations’ staffs. All of the conservation groups were, of course, beside themselves with glee to lose so many people to Carter. In view of the astonished anger that greeted the appointments among the entrenched committees in Congress, however, they may have been one of the worst mistakes Carter made.

Long before the inauguration, Carter’s domestic policy staff, under Eizenstat, was working up alternatives to the Ford budget it had inherited for fiscal year 1978. Since Carter’s most dramatic campaign promise had been to balance the federal budget by the end of his first term, he needed to make substantial cuts right away; besides that, like many new Presidents, he wanted to inaugurate his term by doing something bold. In a series of memoranda, Eizenstat gave him his options. There weren’t many. Most of the budget was soaked up by defense and the entitlement programs, and it seemed impossible to touch the discretionary part of the budget without ruffling the feathers of some large interest group. In February of 1977, on a working weekend, Carter flew to Georgia for the first time aboard the “Doomsday plane”—the jet from which the President is supposed to run the country, or what is left of it, in the event of a nuclear war. His reading material was the Eizenstat issue paper on water projects. Sitting there, imagining himself running an incinerated nation from an airplane, Carter worked himself into a negative mood. As he flipped through Eizenstat’s memo, which was written largely by Kathy Fletcher, Carter began to smolder. “There is no coherent federal water resources management policy,” he read. “... extensive overlap of agency activities ... several million acres of productive agricultural and forest land and commercial and sport fisheries [have been ruined] while [other] large expenditures have been made to protect these resources ... overlapping and conflicting missions ... large-scale destruction of natural ecosystems ... ‘the pork barrel’ ... obsolete standards ... self-serving ... pressure from special interests.” By the time he returned from Georgia, according to one of his aides, he knew how he was going to make his big splash. He called up his chief lobbyist, Frank Moore, and told him to put Congress on notice that he wanted to cut all funding for nineteen water projects. That same day, Cecil Andrus, who knew nothing of this, stepped on a plane and flew off to Denver for a western governors’ conference on that year’s severe drought.

The incident demonstrated a characteristic that was to plague the Carter administration for the rest of its term—a capacity for mind-boggling political naivete. That the news of the hit list got out before Andrus was even notified was soon attributed to a “leak” within the White House, and the culprit was identified, by sly innuendo, as Kathy Fletcher. According to one of Carter’s own legislative aides, however, the source of the news was none other than Carter himself. “He told Frank Moore to put the Hill on notice that he wanted those projects cut,” says the aide. “The projects had been selected at a meeting attended by Andrus, but he didn’t know they were actually going to go ahead with the idea. He was opposed to it from the start.”

Whatever the case, the timing was miserable. It was 1977 and California was in the midst of its driest year on record—the year before had been the third-driest—and Auburn Dam was on the hit list. Though Auburn’s existence would hardly have helped the state a bit, no one was about to notice that during a drought. Colorado, whose mountains were so bereft of snow that many of the ski slopes were closed in February, had three projects on the list, the most of any state. None of them would have helped much, either, but reason is the first casualty in a drought. The Central Arizona Project was already half-built, but it, too, was on the hit list. The western governors, who saw, by Andrus’s own embarrassed and baffled reaction, the hopeless disarray of the Carter administration, milked the incident for all it was worth. Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado had to plumb the depths of his emotions to convey properly his deep and profound sense of outrage and shock. “We’re not going to be satisfied,” Lamm shouted at a huge crowd of scribbling reporters, “until we get our projects back.” Governor Raul Castro of Arizona was “stunned and angry.” The ever-opportunistic Jerry Brown of California, who had won over the state’s powerful environmental community by publicly opposing the only two federal dams then being built in California—Auburn and New Melones—made one of his deft about-faces and said, “We want to build more dams.”

The reaction from Congress was even stronger. Congressman Morris Udall of Arizona immediately dubbed the incident the “George Washington’s Birthday Massacre,” a term that stuck. Interestingly, Udall was one of several dozen Congressmen who had written a much publicized letter to Carter only five days earlier, saying, “During your campaign you stated many times that as President you would halt the construction of unnecessary and environmentally destructive dams ... We support ... your efforts to reform the water-resources programs of the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation.” Reminded of this, Udall was gracious enough to admit that “one man’s vital water-resources project is another man’s boondoggle.” His colleagues were not so gracious. Words like “infamous,” “dastardly,” “incredible,” “incomprehensible,” and “mind-boggling” peppered the pages of the
Congressional Record.

If Carter was counting on help from anyone, it was the press. After all, newspapers had been criticizing other regions’ public works projects since the nation’s founding, and the national press was nothing if not cynical about Congress. The press, however, found Carter a better target than the projects themselves. Even principled David S. Broder wrote in the Washington
Post,
“That Carter would let something like the Red River Project put him at odds with the man [Senator Russell Long] whose cooperation is essential for passage of all the vital economic, energy, health, and welfare legislation on the administration’s agenda is so unlikely that some observers conjured up a theory that made the President seem much shrewder.” Evidently Broder couldn’t fathom a stand of principle on something as inconsequential as a new $900 million artificial waterway a few jumps away from the Mississippi River.
Newsweek
and
Time
made a desultory effort to explain the projects to their readers, then implied that people, not surplus crops (as was the case), were using most of Arizona’s water.
Time
unquestionably accepted Morris Udall’s prediction that without the CAP, “Tucson and Phoenix are going to dry up and blow away.” There was good coverage in
Science, National Journal,
and
Congressional Quarterly,
but those were publications few read.

The intensity of the reaction from Congress and the affected regions was so white-hot that Carter had to move much more quickly than he had reckoned toward conciliation. In a letter to Congress, he chastised its members for authorizing projects that made so little sense, but promised regional hearings on every project in question and invited the leadership to the White House for a talk. It was hardly the kind of talk he had in mind. “All they did was tell him what an idiot he was for doing this,” said Carter’s House lobbyist, Jim Free. “It was like a lynch mob. He was the sheriff throwing calm facts back at them, but they kept yelling at him to release the projects. One Congressman kept banging his fist on the table. They compared him to Nixon—the Imperial Presidency line. They were rude. They interrupted him. And most of them belonged to his own party.”

Despite its best efforts, Congress couldn’t budge Carter. He may have been naive, but he was adamant. Seeing this, Congress, as the
New Republic
remarked, began “breaking out the high-minded rhetoric that Congressmen reserve for their grubbiest and most cynical undertakings.” Majority leader Jim Wright of Texas, for example, wrote a letter to his colleagues urging them “to help defend the Constitutional prerogative of Congress. The White House,” Wright said, “in trying to dictate [budgetary] line items, is reaching for powers never granted any Administration by Congress.” (This was the same Jim Wright who was one of the key backers of the constitutionally dubious Gulf of Tonkin resolution; it was the same Jim Wright who, in defiance of his own constituents—who had decisively rejected a bond issue to help finance the proposed Trinity River Project—kept sticking money for it back into the public-works appropriations bills.) Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine picked up Wright’s Imperial Presidency line in the Senate—the same Edmund Muskie who was pushing the Corps’ $800 million Dickey-Lincoln Dam on the St. John River even as it was opposed by both the president and minority leader of the Maine senate, by Maine’s two U.S. Representatives, by most of the local newspapers, and, according to several opinion polls, by a majority of the people in the state. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia said, “A project is not ‘pork barrel’ to someone who has to shovel black mud ... or see his home swept away.” The most recent flood disaster in Byrd’s state, which killed more than sixty people, was caused by the collapse of a dam, and the West Virginians most immediately threatened by flooding were the homeowners who lived in the valley behind Stonewall Jackson Dam.

Notwithstanding Congress’s threats, Carter continued to move his water reforms along. Simply applying a reasonable discount, or interest, rate of 6¾ percent—still too low, but reasonable—the hit list easily swelled to eighty projects. Vice-President Walter Mondale, who regarded the hit list as a terrible idea from the start, told Carter that a stand against eighty projects would be his last. With reluctance, he and his water-policy staff began a deliberate effort to winnow it down. The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway would devour more money, for a more illusory purpose, than anything on the list, but it had to be left alone; even the NAACP was for it. The Red River Project was also to survive; Carter had evidently read David Broder’s column. Animas—La Plata in New Mexico and Colorado offered something to the local Indian population; it would survive. In most cases, Carter was going against his own deeper instincts when he let a project slip by. Once, in the midst of a string of rank political judgments, he called Charlie Warren of the Council on Environmental Quality over to his office. “He spent the first half hour telling Charlie about how outrageously wasteful and harmful some of the projects were,” says one of Warren’s aides. Then, together, he and Warren reduced the final hit list to eighteen projects.

On April 18, Carter announced his final, unalterable decision on the projects. It was obvious to anyone that the administration had tried to steer around states from where powerful committee chairmen came; nonetheless, it couldn’t help crashing into some formidable egos and interest groups along the way. There were three projects in Colorado—Dolores, Fruitland Mesa, and Savery-Pot Hook—which was home to the second-largest Congressional delegation in the West and a Democratic governor, Dick Lamm, who hadn’t hesitated to attack Carter before. The Dayton, Plainsville, and Yatesville projects were all in Kentucky, a swing state in an election year. There were Cache Basin in Arkansas, Grove Lake in Kansas, The Harbor Project and the Bayou Boeuf, Chene, and Black Channel were both in Louisiana, Russell Long notwithstanding. There was Dickey-Lincoln in Maine; Merremac Park in Missouri; Lukfata Lake in Oklahoma—peanuts as such projects go, but irresistible because the only real beneficiary of a $39 million investment would be a private catfish farm. And then, to make the whole effort financially worthwhile, there were five immense projects, none of them worth less than $500 million, two of them likely to end up costing six or seven times that much, all conceived by the Bureau of Reclamation: Garrison in North Dakota; Oahe in South Dakota; Auburn Dam in California; the Central Utah Project; and then—one could almost sense the administration crunching the bullet between its teeth—the most expensive project the West had ever seen, the rival of Tennessee-Tombigbee itself, the Central Arizona Project. Carter said he wanted all of the projects terminated. Not just unfunded—terminated.