Engineer Memoirs
A:
This is a political issue, and the government has been more or less effective in deciding
these things. The State Department, generally, if they have decided that a particular
government is to be supported, then they want to supply them arms. There is an image
that the Pentagon is pushing arms and the State Department is holding back.
The actuality is the opposite. The Pentagon generally is not pushing arms. If you are
into an El Salvador situation where the Pentagon is charged with trying to win a war,
then they are pushing arms. But if there aren't hostilities, the State Department is
usually much more enthusiastic about arms sales than the Pentagon.
Q:
That's a good point, and I guess the way the arrangement is, with a flag officer at
DSAA, it perpetuates the appearance that it's a--
A:
That's right. But you know, they have this guy there to deal with all the different
people. He has all the foreign representatives to deal with. The President has his
appointees deal at the political level, but they have to have somebody to deal at the
bureaucratic level. There are many levels of interchange. But you have three top levels.
You have the political level. Then you have a level of the Chiefs of Staff and the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs. There is a lot of liaison at that level. But then, when they
want to get down to the nitty-gritty, who do they talk to? The Director of the Defense
Security Assistance Agency. While the top guys go sightseeing, he does the work.
Q:
You surprised me when you observed that you had always wanted to be Director of
Civil Works and that you were very happy doing that. I would have thought that with
your background and expertise in nuclear power, you would have found civil works
frustrating and maybe a necessary evil.
A:
Not really. Of course, I grew up on civil works as a boy. My father was involved in it.
That was when they had the 1927 flood on the Mississippi River, my father participated
in drafting the 1928 Flood Control Act, and they launched the major program for flood
control on the Mississippi River.
With the Depression and the New Deal, there was a very strong motivation for public
works. That's when the whole civil works program grew from a simple interest in
navigation to a comprehensive water resource program. The principles which had been
established in the 1928 act on the Mississippi River were extended nationwide in the
Flood Control Act of 1936.
I watched all this as a boy and heard about it from my father. I was fascinated in the
program. It's true that I became involved in nuclear energy, but my interest there was
198
Previous Page
