Water Resources People and Issues
people and been more sociable. But Kerr was determined to avenge himself,
and he never was able to. I guess I never knew how to win friends and
influence people by letting them win.
Kerr was really a good bridge player. We were just playing for fun, and the
cards were running against him. It was just a friendly rivalry, and it was
relaxing. I still like to play bridge because it gets your mind intent on
something other than things that you may not like to think about.
So I got along very well with Senator Kerr, and he had a great respect for me
and what I was doing. When he got the draft of his book, Land, Wood and
Water, he had a lot of technical questions, but he didn't ask me to help review
it. He said, "Ted, you just can't take time. You've got too much to do." So I
found someone else well versed in water resources that he contracted with to
review that book for accuracy. It was a paid contract. Kerr was not at all
stingy; when he asked somebody to help him, he was willing to pay them.
Q: Well, who actually, then, wrote the final book?
A: It was autobiographical, but he gave credit to Malvina Stephenson and Tris
Coffin, as editors.
Now getting back to the Select Committee studies. Let me tell you one other
thing about how Kerr operated. We wanted the Census Bureau to break down
their population projections by river basins and by states because we needed
them to work on the water demand side of water. The head of the Census
Bureau was Conrad Taeuber, and we met first with staff and then with him to
tell them what we wanted. They finally said they couldn't do it, that it would
be very time consuming, and that they never did it that way, and if we wanted
it done, we'd have to sign a contract that would probably cost about ,000
or ,000.
When I reported that back to Senator Kerr, I told him that I didn't think we
could spend that much money, and if we started to pay one agency, we'd have
to pay the others. And he said, "Who did you say was the head of that
agency?" and I said, "Conrad Taeuber." And he said, "That's under the
Department of Commerce, isn't it?" And I told him that it was.
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