Water Resources People and Issues
facilitator to get things done within the bureaucratic system. I think one reason
was that he was willing to use Gilbert White's Quaker method, whereas Floyd
Peterson or Charlie
wouldn't. No, sir. They would stick to their guns,
no matter what. Anyway, I'm just telling you the set up I went into in 1954.
Charlie Warner and Floyd Peterson, between them, had taken on the project
of getting rid of a lot of the district engineers' survey boats. The government
would confiscate these boats from people running drugs or some other illegal
activity. Many of them were fancy
and
cabin cruisers which the
Corps claimed as survey boats and which turned out to be used as a kind of a
district engineer's yacht when he needed it. A lot of that type of thing was
corrected during the Eisenhower administration.
Another thing that happened in the Eisenhower administration was in
connection with use of airplanes. The Bureau of Reclamation was one of the
first agencies to have its own airplane. It had a Lockheed Lodestar, which was
a very nice airplane that Mike Strauss used for travel. I flew out to Phoenix in
it to help write the Central Arizona project report in 1947, so it must have been
acquired shortly after the end of the war.
And the Eisenhower administration decided to get rid of all that kind of
folderol. A government agency having its own airplane! That was unheard of.
So they made the Bureau of Reclamation declare it surplus, to reduce
government expenditures. But that didn't happen. The chief of the Forest
Service decided that he needed a plane, so it was picked up for the Forest
Service, which hired the Bureau of Reclamation's pilot.
Q: The Corps had about three planes, I think, at one time.
A: Yes. The Corps, had a DC-3, which was called the chief's plane. I remember
flying in it on an inspection trip over the lower Mississippi valley when I was
working for the Bureau of the Budget.
Getting back to the way the Bureau of the Budget dealt with the Corps of
Engineers' budget. We had people there who knew a lot about the Corps from
first-hand experience. I had worked for the Corps in the Baltimore District and
the Seattle District and had been the liaison between the Corps and the Bureau
of the Budget. I had been eight years with the Bureau of Reclamation here in
Washington and had had a lot of familiarity with the Corps' programs. So the
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