Ernest Graves
I'm afraid I've always been pretty cold-blooded about that. When you're selecting
people for positions, I tend to bring in somebody good from outside, if he's better than
the people who are there. I don't feel too much obligation to promote somebody in
place. You have to be loyal to the people that are working for you. But when you're
picking the top positions, you have to pick the best men you can find. That's what I did.
Also, some of the district engineers did better than others. Of course, they were turning
over all the time. To an extent, I was blessed with getting new ones because when a
new man comes in, he's willing to make a bunch of changes. If you have a guy who's
been in a tour for two years already when you come in new, he's much less inclined to
want in his third year to redo everything. If he's not doing as good a job as he might,
possibly because his bosses haven't set a high standard, it's hard towards the end of his
tour to get him to change.
I definitely went to work on the problem of making plans as to what we were going to
do with our money. I was confronted with that right off the bat because I started work
out there the first week in January. I had to come in and testify before the committees
of Congress on the program.
My recollection is that occurred in March. I had very little time to get ready for that.
I came in and was put through the wringer before the committee of [Representative
Joseph L.] Joe Evins, which was the public works subcommittee of the House
Committee on Appropriations.
I did reasonably well in terms of knowing my program. But I got a lot of questions
about what we had done with the money they had given us the preceding year. The
truth was, we hadn't done much. In construction, they'd built the things. But in areas
like planning and design, they'd spent the money, but there was very little to show for
it.
So I instituted a series of reviews with my district engineers. We set up what they were
going to do. I believe the first series was semiannual. I guess the first one was just
where they stood and said what they were going to do. They had to have plans and
schedules.
The second one was how they'd done. The second one was bloody because they
announced all these plans, but then when they came in, they hadn't done anything. So
they got the word that that wasn't acceptable.
Then the third one, things began to get better because they knew that if they came in
not having done something, they were going to get wiped out. They began to get the
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