Water Resources People and issues
congressional staff members of the committees got help from the Corps' staff
to get the Corps' program through, even if it was in opposition to the Bureau
of the Budget's view.
One of the Corps' generals that I remember very vividly was Jack Person, who
was director of Civil Works. He had come in, or maybe he went out to, the
Ohio River Division. I always associate him with the Ohio River somehow. He
had a very strong personality. One of the irreverent things I remember about
him is when he would come in for a hearing, he always made a beautiful
presentation because he had been educated in what we called Joe Tofani's
"college." Then we would go to lunch with Jack and Jack would indulge
himself in two double Martinis before lunch and Joe and I would kind of
weakly follow on with singles. When we went back to the hearing Jack was
right on the ball, the true Army general, and continued the presentation, and
you never could see any trace of any influence of imbibing.
Some people could drink like that. My brother is one who could. He just could
really hold his liquor and you never could tell he'd had a drink. He gave me
my first drink of straight whiskey when I was about years old. It made me
feel so good that I
want to have a chaser.
So I had very good recollections of Jack Person and I was awfully sorry he had
a heart attack. He had to kind of change his lifestyle somewhat, but he was a
wonderful person, and we got along well. But my primary recollection, though,
was with Joe Tofani who really held the whole budget of the Corps together
and we knew we could count on him.
Now, with the Bureau of Reclamation we had a number of people whom we
dealt with, and we were always fighting with them. Always arguing with them.
Why is that?
A: Largely because the Bureau of Reclamation was primarily oriented toward
irrigation at that time. They looked on power only as a source of revenue to
subsidize irrigation. And at the same time in another part of the government,
we were financing programs to restrict production and still the country was
producing vast surpluses of crops. The Bureau of Reclamation refused to face
up to the fact that this was a dichotomy in the federal programs. It was a
bureaucratic agency fighting for its life. And the clash between the Bureau and
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