Theodore M.
After Kerr had made the decision that the staff report would become the
committee report, the consultants were brought in, Ed Ackerman, Abel
and Gilbert White, and we evolved some rather basic
recommendations that we all could agree on. We had quite a number of
recommendations in the first draft. Generally they were all of the nature that
you just mentioned, for more scientific research and so forth. But they were all
for accomplishment by the federal government in cooperation with the states.
But some of the members of the committee, Clair Engle, Phil Hart, Gale
McGee, and Ted Moss, were not happy. You can see their supplemental views
in the back of the committee report. They just didn't think that this report
achieved what they had hoped to achieve. So when the committee met to
review and approve the report, they wanted to change it.
Senator Kerr had a way of handling that. He said, "If you don't like this
report, we will be glad to consider any changes that you want to make." And
his technique for doing that was to read the report page by page. And so he
started reading the report at page 1.
In a few minutes, they all folded. They had been pushed by staff people who
wanted to use this report to beat the administration, the Eisenhower
administration, over the head on water; I'm pretty sure that was the reason they
wanted changes made. But when they sat there in a committee meeting, it was
up to them, and they didn't really care. Anyway, they did write, or their staff
wrote, supplemental views, which the committee had voted to permit them to
include at the end of the report. And the primary thrust is for things that would
have been considered if we had gone on with phase two of the study, as
originally contemplated.
One thing in Senate Resolution 48 that was very hard for me to come to grips
with is the part of the resolution that called for the committee to make studies
of the extent to which water resources activities in the United States are related
to the national interest. This goes to the point you raised a few minutes
ago-what should the states do, and what should the federal government
do--but it's even a broader question. it in the national interest that we
provide flood control for everybody, that we provide all the water to everybody
that they want, at cost?
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