Theodore
to build the project, so therefore it would be something that Congress would
favor doing that way.
Let me ask you about-about Maass' argument, and then you can elaborate a
bit about it. You know or are familiar with Muddy Waters?
A: Of course, Arthur Maass and I were at Johns Hopkins together. We were both
in the class of 1939. He was taking a liberal arts course, and I was taking
engineering. We were not great buddies at the time, but we were both involved
in the student council and various campus activities. Arthur was on the social
committee to arrange the dances and so forth, and I was on the student council
trying to regulate the way that group operated.
Arthur was, in my view, quite liberal. And I was more or less a conservative
engineer. Some of the engineers looked on Arthur as being a kind of a flaming
liberal on campus, not quite as liberal as Murray
who was in the
same class, or Walter Schlesinger, who was actually, admittedly, a member of
the Young Communist League, right on campus. This was in the mid-`30s.
Arthur came down from Harvard one summer to work in the Department of the
Interior for the Hoover Commission. I gave him a lot of information about the
Pine Flat flap, because I was deeply involved in it through my role as
coordinator with the Corps of Engineers. And you remember, Section of the
`44 Flood Control Act required the Bureau to get some reimbursement for the
irrigation. I think they finally settled on a million reimbursement, which
the Bureau didn't think was enough and the Corps thought was too much.
So I had a lot of information on the controversy, which, as I recall, went into
the Pine Flat chapter of Muddy
Arthur, of course, is much more
scholarly than I am. Of course, he was involved much earlier when he was
working for the National Resource Planning Board. My recollection is that
Maass covered the fact that Roosevelt decided in favor of the Bureau of
Reclamation but that the Corps, with the assistance of the Congress, overrode
him. And Roosevelt was probably one of our strongest Presidents.
I don't have any problem at all with what Maass has said about that. I would
certainly agree, although I haven't reread it recently.
Previous Page
