Water Resources People and Issues
Ben Fair-less was the chairman or maybe by that time the ex-chairman of U.S.
Steel and was a member of the Hoover Commission and I'm sure he was a
staunch Republican. One day we got word from the White House, down
through the staff, that we should relax the single user policy for the Upper
Delaware project. One of my very astute staff members brought me a
newspaper clipping the next day showing that Ben
had been a dinner
guest at the White House the night before we got that directive.
So, the feeling was that he was the one that had influenced the President. We
took this as a definite order from the President to the Bureau of the Budget to
the Corps of Engineers. So when the Upper Delaware project was cleared by
the Eisenhower administration, they put some language in the Chief of
Engineers' report to the effect that, even though the only use of the project at
the present time is for the steel works, eventually it will attract other traffic and
will be used by other shipping, and therefore it should be carried out fully at
government expense.
The staff argued against it on the grounds that it didn't make sense, because
U.S. Steel was paying for dredging the Orinoco River for bringing the ore out
of Venezuela. They were actually going down there and dredging the Orinoco
River, but they wouldn't dredge their own.
Dredging the upper Delaware River was expensive, because it was digging into
rock to get that extra feet, so it was a very substantial amount. I don't
remember how much, but it was tens of millions of dollars that local people
would have had to put up.
This is just one example of how the Eisenhower administration was willing to
liberalize their philosophy when it was necessary to bend it to achieve some
political end. I like to think that Taft wouldn't have done that if he had been
the Republicans' choice for President,
Well, Eisenhower did organize his own water commission, as I recall.
Well, it wasn't a commission. We called it
the Presidential
Advisory Committee on Water Resources, or something like that. It consisted
of three secretaries, the secretary, I think, of Defense not of Army, Interior,
and Agriculture. We called it
because it took on such a broad
mission and tried to cover all the bases. I was not directly involved because by
106