Cadillac Desert (58 page)

As Carter had by then come to expect, the decibel level was highest from within his own party. Republicans, of course, stood up for their own threatened projects, but the Minority Leader in the House, Congressman Robert Michel of Illinois, said privately—and sometimes not so privately—that he thought the hit list was a pretty good idea. It was the Democratic leadership, their values and spending habits unchanged since the New Deal, that gave Carter fits. In a lectern-thumping floor speech, Jim Wright said that Carter was carrying his environmental ideas so far he threatened to become “a laughingstock.” Then, to show that he, too, was an environmentalist, Wright help up a glass of water to extol its goodness. Public Works Committee chairman Ray Roberts said Carter was a captive of “environmental extremists and budget hackers.” House Speaker Tip O’Neill took the highly unusual (and, for Carter, embarrassing) step of arranging a meeting with the New York
Times
to complain that Carter was “not listening” to Congress. Senators Gary Hart and Floyd Haskell of Colorado began to pepper the administration with Freedom of Information Act requests, ostensibly to learn how their projects were selected. (“They implied that we were practicing some kind of secret skulduggery,” a Carter staff member complained bitterly later on. “The skulduggery was when the Bureau justified those dams, not when we reevaluated them.”) Even Mondale began undermining Carter’s effort—whether he knew it or not—by going around the country privately assuring Democrats that it was all a phase, that Carter meant well, of course, but that he was certainly subject to reason.

On June 13, the House Appropriations Committee, studded with Democrats, reported out its own version of the 1978 Public Works Appropriations bill. If Carter had hoped it would heed his request and delete the eighteen projects, he was mistaken. The committee bill represented not only outright but vindictive defiance of his wishes. Only one of the projects he wanted to abandon—Grove Lake in Kansas, which lacked firm support even in the district where it was to be built—was omitted. Everything else was generously funded, some with minor conditions attached (Auburn Dam wouldn’t receive more money until there was a better idea whether or not an earthquake would destroy it). On top of that, money was included for a dozen new projects nowhere to be found in the administration’s budget. And on top of that, there was a section of the bill that rejuvenated the Cross-Florida Barge Canal, which was anathema to environmentalists, and which Richard Nixon himself decided to halt in 1971.

Publicly, Carter said nothing. Privately, he was seething. “The only way now is a veto,” one of his aides was quoted as saying. “We’re in a game of chicken.” A quick head count, however, showed that the Senate could muster the two-thirds majority required to override a veto. If he was serious about vetoing the bill, Carter would have to shore up his support in the House. With moral support from the administration, and perhaps some rewards—to his chagrin, Carter was learning that he might have to resort to the pork barrel to win his fight against the pork barrel—the House was a distinct possibility. It would only take one branch of Congress to win.

Carter’s lobbyists, Frank Moore and Jim Free, worked the House furiously, joined by the railroads (which were being undercut by competition from federally subsidized barge traffic), lobbyists from the conservation groups, and every dissident farmer, businessman, rancher, and mayor from a project region whom they could get to come to Washington to help them. Vote by vote, the frailest of margins was stitched together. On the straight head count, Carter would surely lose; the problem was holding Congress’s margin below the two-thirds necessary for an override. Many Congressmen, especially those whose support would take great political courage—South Carolina’s Butler Derrick, for example, who had opposed Richard Russel Dam in his own district, or Philip Burton of California, who leaned heavily on labor support—demanded absolute assurances that Carter would veto the bill. If they voted not to override and he signed it anyway, their embarrassment would be acute. Meanwhile, the administration was fighting insubordination within its own ranks. The Bureau of Reclamation was widely suspected of feeding numbers to Capitol Hill that made the administration’s figures appear suspect. The Corps, which had more than once disregarded the wishes of its commander in chief, was suspected by Carter’s people of doing the same thing. Once, as Jim Free was passing by the Public Works committee room, he noticed several high-ranking officers of the Corps talking with Ray Roberts. Free stopped and eavesdropped long enough to capture the gist of the conservation. “They were laughing about how they were going to beat us at our own game,” he says.

By fall, as the showdown approached (the Senate had already passed a close equivalent of the House bill), Moore and Free were finally convinced they had the votes to stop an override in the House. Tip O’Neill, the House Speaker, who wanted to avoid such an outcome at all costs, was apparently sure of it, too. At the last minute, he decided to play his trump card.“Tip called Ham Jordan,” the President’s top aide, remembers Free, “and made him a bargain. Something would be worked out on Clinch River [the demonstration breeder reactor which Carter wanted to stop even more than the water projects]. A few projects would be deleted, and Tip would help the President get a reform process going.

“It was a nice piece of work,” Free grudgingly admits. “They went right to Hamilton because he was the closest thing we had to a good ol’ boy. He was also in a little trouble for not returning people’s phone calls and things like that. If he worked out a compromise, it would make him look good, and they knew it.”

O’Neill’s offer was actually far less than it seemed. Although he had gotten Tom Bevill to agree to take nine projects out of the 1978 bill, he had not secured a firm promise that he would not put them back in next year. The same applied to Clinch River: the compromise might slow it down, but there was no commitment to stop it, even for a couple of years. Bevill had also agreed to a 3-percent across-the-board cut in funding, but that did not affect the ultimate cost of the projects; if anything, it made them more expensive in the long run.

No one knew exactly what had been discussed except O‘Neill and Jordan and Carter themselves. Had O’Neill promised that the projects were out for good, or had Carter simply accepted that on faith? Did he really believe he had stopped the Clinch River reactor? No one who was intimately familiar with Bevill, or with Congress, believed they were in a mood to make such an offer. Andrus and Guy Martin were still urging Carter to veto the bill; now that he had gone this far, they argued, he couldn’t abandon the fight unless he got nearly everything he had asked for. There was no indication from the White House that Carter felt otherwise. “Up until the last moment,” says Free, “I was being told, and was telling everyone, that he was going to veto.” Then, with no advance word to anyone, Carter signed the bill.

Carter’s allies in Congress were thunderstruck. No one had been forewarned. Butler Derrick, according to his staff, was white with anger. Silvio Conte, the one senior Republican member on the House side who vociferously supported the administration, said that he would never trust Carter again on anything. His own lobbyists were furious. Even Andrus, who had opposed the hit lists from the beginning, was mad. Free, a young Tennessean, had had a local-boy-makes-good profile published abut him in his hometown newspaper, which happened to be in the district where Columbia Dam was to be built, and his parents had received so much verbal abuse because he was lobbying against the dam that they unlisted their phone number and took their name off their mailbox. “It hardly seemed worthwhile after that,” Free said dejectedly.

Even though Carter protested that the compromise was a good one—it was still unclear exactly what it meant, and would remain so for over a year—one thing was becoming abundantly clear: Carter was already in a mood to retreat. He had underestimated Congress’s passion for dams and overestimated his ability to move the rest of his legislative program forward. In January of 1977, Cecil Andrus told the New York
Times,
“Thank God, there’ll be no more hit lists.” A lot of fence-mending was obviously being done. Later that month, Lou Cannon, the Washington
Post’s
correspondent in San Francisco, could write that “the West’s Democratic governors have been offered unconditional surrender by the Carter administration, [which] has backed away from nearly every position” on water projects. An “options paper” drafted shortly thereafter and leaked, to Carter’s chagrin, to the environmental groups made no mention of several of the main water-policy reforms Carter had spoken of earlier.

Having reversed himself once, however, Carter was perfectly capable of reversing himself again. In October of 1978, his second big challenge on water projects came around. The fiscal year 1979 public-works appropriations bill that emerged from the House and Senate conference committee did exactly what most of Carter’s advisers said it would. To begin with, it restored money for every one of the nine projects deleted the previous year. Carter, in his innocence, evidently believed that the projects had been killed for good, and he was livid. On top of that, the bill contained money for a number of new starts, despite the fact that inflation was well into double digits, interest rates were topping 15 percent, and a balanced budget was slipping out of Carter’s grasp.

Once again, Jim Free began making his rounds on Capitol Hill, urging support of a presidential veto when the vote came—even though the administration’s allies were still seething over Carter’s performance with the previous year’s bill. Whatever doubts they had about Carter’s courage, however, were soon stilled. A few days later, after making a terse, angry statement denouncing it, Carter vetoed the entire appropriations bill.

The timing of the veto, as it happened, coincided neatly with the passage of Proposition 13 in California, a draconian measure which effectively held the annual increase in property taxes to about 1 percent. Everyone knew the public was fed up with government spending; this was the first sign that it was
really
fed up. The main sponsor of the measure, a real estate lobbyist named Howard Jarvis, instantly became something of a celebrity. And though the rest of the country felt that California was more than slightly daft, everything that happened there had an odd way of spreading eastward.

One of the people who realized this right away was Larry Rockefeller, the nephew of Nelson and son of his elder brother Laurance. Rockefeller, who was then a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, was thirty-six, almost neurotically shy, and a strikingly gifted propagandist and politician. Almost single-handedly, he pieced together the Alaska Coalition, the vast umbrella organization that was responsible, two years later, for passage of the Alaska Lands Act—which created, in an instant, as much federal parkland as the country had set aside in more than a hundred years. The full-page advertisements run by the Alaska Coalition were written and often paid for by Rockefeller, and they were astute; mostly, they talked about how much resource development and fabulous economic growth the Alaska Lands Act would still allow.

The Alaska campaign was based on persuasion. To make Congress sustain Carter’s veto of the appropriations bill, however, a campaign would have to be based on fear. There was too little time to try any other tack, and fear seemed to be the one universal motivator on Capitol Hill. At that particular moment, Rockefeller reasoned, Congressmen feared no one more than Howard Jarvis.

Getting Jarvis’s cooperation was surprisingly easy. Although the value of real estate in his hometown, Los Angeles, depended entirely on aqueducts bringing water from three directions, they were already built. Besides, an opportunity take on Congress was more than the feisty old man could resist. Rockefeller recalled some of Jarvis’s speeches, shut himself in his office, and imagined what sort of advertisement Jarvis might write. When he finished a draft, he read it to him over the phone. Jarvis was stunned. “That’s just what I would have said,” he answered.

On the morning of October 5, with a vote to override Carter’s veto just hours away, four hundred-odd members of the House opened their copies of the Washington
Post
and the New York
Times
and saw the scowling visage of Howard Jarvis staring back at them. “IT’S AN OUTRAGE,” he croaked. “THE PUBLIC WORKS APPROPRIATIONS BILL IS THE BIG TAX, BIG GOVERNMENT, BIG SPENDING, BIG WASTE BILL OF THE YEAR.” During the debate that day, the “spirit of Howard Jarvis” was invoked several times. When the vote was taken, the attempt to override Carter’s veto had barely failed.

As the dam saboteurs in Carter’s Administration were to discover, however, victories over the Congressional pork-barrel system tend to be short-lived. They are especially short-lived if they come thirteen months before an election year.

In July of 1979, a group of California’s wealthiest irrigation farmers, many of them from the Westlands Water District, played host to Rosalyn Carter at a big Democratic fund-raiser in Fresno. Soon thereafter, a number of big growers from the nominally conservative San Joaquin Valley were making hefty campaign contributions to the Carter-Mondale reelection campaign. Their reward was a new water contract obligating them to pay only $9.10 an acre-foot—well below cost, and a subsidy worth $60 million over the term of the contract.

Westlands, which the Bureau had illegally expanded back in the 1960s at the behest of the farmers, was the one place where Carter could put one of his most ballyhooed reforms, realistic water pricing, to work, because the illegal expansion had technically voided the original contract. He not only failed to do that, but, by caving in on an issue he could easily have won—Westlands had no other source of water except groundwater, which was running out, and therefore had little choice but to accept the administration’s terms—he sent a signal to Congress that he was prepared to do business with them.