Theodore M.
Anyway, in the Eisenhower administration, Joe Dodge was the first director of
the Bureau of the Budget and then Roland Hughes succeeded him. They were
bankers, and they liked the idea of government corporations, and so the Bureau
of the Budget never really considered that the Corps should have any role in the
Saint Lawrence Seaway project, which was of an international nature, and we
had to have relationships with the Canadians and the Canadian Seaway
Authority.
So I guess if the Corps thought it was going to run the seaway, it was whistling
Dixie, as they say, because, from my recollection, there was never any real
consideration of the Corps on that.
So the Corps did construct the seaway? I
Well, the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation had a chief
engineer, who was Ellis Armstrong, and he managed that project, not the
corps.
I suppose I was maybe a Johnny-come-lately on the Saint Lawrence Seaway
because originally the responsibility for the Saint Lawrence Seaway was being
handled by the staff of the Commerce and Housing Division of the Bureau of
the Budget. We had our own little bureaucratic struggles within the Bureau of
the Budget, and I felt, of course, that the responsibility should be in Resources
and Civil Works.
We already had responsibility for the TVA, which was a government
corporation, and so when the decision was made to make the seaway into a
government corporation, we fought to get it. We finally got it. I think the basic
decisions had already been made, but Resources and Civil Works handled the
budget each year. Reese
who was an expert on government
corporations, with the GAO [General Accounting Office], became the
controller of the seaway authority, and he was the one that we dealt with on the
appropriations, and on setting the tolls, and all that.
But I never, never-I guess I'd have to go back and look at the record to see
how the Corps fitted into that picture. But let me say that if there was any
problem between the Corps of Engineers and the authority, it was nothing
compared to the fight with the Coast Guard over the aids to navigation. This
was a tempest in a teapot that went on for some time. We had a meeting with
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