Engineer Memoirs
them was to have no rules. Then nobody could write any studies because they wouldn't
know what rules to follow. And they practiced that deliberately.
There was a lot of effort on the part of Congress to get this sorted out. But there just
wasn't the sort of coalition there had been in earlier times to cut through all this.
Q:
I talked to Lew Blakey, and I told him what you had told me about how hiring him had
been the smartest thing you had done there in Chicago, and he was really flattered. He
said he had applied for the job at Missouri River Division in 1970, which was open
when General Morris was out there. And he went out there, and he said as soon as he
got out there, he knew he wasn't going to be picked because he didn't fit the image of
a chief of engineering.
He was 37 and not 57--that's what he told me--and he'd never been chief of
engineering in a district. So he knew it was a pro forma thing, and he left there knowing
that Lloyd Duscha was going to get the job.
A:
Yes, Lloyd's a very good man.
Q:
Oh, yes. That's not the point, of course. He said when he went to Chicago later to
interview with you after General Dunn had had personnel put him on the list, he said
he didn't know why you hired him. But he said he thinks it might be that because you
had been a 19- or a 20-year-old senior at West Point, you understood that someone his
age would not necessarily not be able to do the job.
A:
I thought age was in his favor. But more important, I thought that he would bring a
fresh view, and they very much needed that. That place really needed work. I think we
discussed that earlier.
Q:
Yes, we did.
A:
I think the fact that Lew was young was in his favor, so far as I was concerned.
Q:
Well, apparently that wasn't a conventional Corps of Engineers' view at the time.
A:
Maybe it wasn't. I haven't thought about it.
Q:
I just talked to him today, and he thought that was worthy of note. So I had to bring
it up.
A:
That got him away from military construction and into civil works, where he's been
ever since.
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