Water Resources People and Issues
and Ed Ackerman as consultants, and I think we were able to pay them 0
a day.
That gave me a lot of intellectual power. I don't think we could have done
what we did if it hadn't been for those three gentlemen helping me. We met
several times, and they met with the committee as a group once or twice and
with the chairman and me individually several times.
I started with the Ackerman program and developed it into something that I felt
would be easier for the senators to understand-a little bit more practical
covering federal programs in the first phase and problem areas in the second
phase. Most of the studies were done by federal agencies in response to
requests made by the committee, or I should say, by the chairman. At one
point, Senator Case had an assistant that he wanted to get involved with us, and
so we did have a gentleman named [A. M.] Eberle, from South Dakota help
us with a report on weather modification. Later-I don't know whether the
Corps put him up to it or not-1 was asked to appoint Herb Gee, a former
Corps of Engineers officer who had left the Corps with a lot of publicity
because he couldn't get promoted, or something like that. He had a consulting
firm down in Palm Beach, or West Palm Beach. He was named as a consultant,
I think, on the recommendation of Allen Ellender.
Is that G-e-e?
A: Yes. But Gee and Eberle were kind of on a different level than the first three
consultants that I mentioned. They came to some meetings but didn't get
involved with the overall program, which had already been adopted by the
committee. We went through that whole list of studies one by one. I won't
enumerate them now because they were all published as committee prints. We
made a special effort to get the Government Printing Office to change their
standard format for committee prints which was
We had to pull a few
strings to get the Joint Committee on Printing to agree that we could get those
printed up in a larger format,
x 11. You just can't believe how much red
tape had to be cut just to make that one little decision. It was almost as if we
were undermining the foundations of the Capitol to make that change. I think
Senator Kerr had to take it up with Carl Hayden. There have been other
paper committee prints that have been on that format.
Q .. Why were you so interested in getting the size changed?
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