Theodore M.
Q: Well, can you sort of capsulize the relationship between the Bureau of
Reclamation and both the Corps of Engineers and the Soil Conservation Service
at this time?
A: It wasn't so much the Soil Conservation Service that we dealt with; this was
still the Harry Truman administration, and the fight was with the land use
coordinator in the office of the Secretary of Agriculture. We threw rocks back
and forth at each other. Agriculture was commenting on our reports, and they
would tear them apart mostly on the grounds that we didn't need the production
and they would quibble with the farm budgets and all the technical things like
that, and Michael Strauss would answer them, and it was just like a slugging
match, and I was the one who was writing the letters for Mike Strauss. I'll
never forget going into his office one time with a draft of a letter back to the
Secretary of Agriculture-I believe it may have been on the Colorado River
basin report, which was really little more than a windshield survey, but the
Bureau had been working on some of the projects for years. They had a lot of
projects in the basin plan, including some of the projects I'd worked on when
I was in Denver like the Rifle Gap Dam and a lot of others in western
Colorado. Agriculture just tore it to pieces, and we were arguing back to them
point by point. After Mike Strauss had read my draft of his response he said,
"Ted, How can you write a nasty letter like that without using words like `son
of a bitch' or `bastard' at all. It's all so polite, and yet-" Anyway, he
appreciated that kind of stuff, and I took that as a compliment, because, you
know, you work for an outfit and-whether you think that they're right or
wrong-you express agency policy.
Now, with the Corps, it was kind of different-we were much more restrained.
This was in the days when George Beard was chief of Planning or whatever the
Corps called it at that time. George was definitely one of the most able people
that the Corps has ever had, and he and my boss in the Planning Branch, Jack
Dixon usually met face-to-face to discuss reports. Jack Dixon was an old Corps
hand out of the Rock Island District.
And I had to sit in so many meetings and see George Beard talk rings around
Jack Dixon and just get him completely walled in-this happened most
frequently in meetings of the Subcommittee on Benefits and Costs,
Q: That was under the FIREBRICK?
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