Theodore M.
No. There's a direct relationship. But it didn't spring full-blown in Senate
Document 97. It came out of the Green Book, for example, and all the other
work of the Federal Inter-Agency River Basin Committee. You remember that
FIARBC set up a Missouri basin inter-agency committee, and one in the
Columbia basin. Then, of course, the Arkansas-White-Red and the New
York-New England and the Southeast River basin committees or commissions,
set up legislatively, were all part of the evolving consensus on river basin
planning. So I don't really see that there's any great difficulty in getting from
the work of the FIARBC down through the ICWR to Senate Document 97 and
the Water Resources Council.
The impetus for Senate Document 97 was to let the Congress know how it was
going to be done. I think the President demanded that they send it up to show
how they were responding to the Senate committee. And the same people were
involved: Henry Caulfield from Interior, Reuben Johnson from the Army
Corps of Engineers, and Harry Steele from Agriculture. They were all involved
with the Inter-Agency Committee on Water Resources and its task forces or
subcommittees, and they were the top staff people in the Water Resources
Council. Of course, there were many others involved over the years.
So you basically had the same people doing essentially the same thing, but
within a different organizational framework. But in the Water Resources
Council they had a mandate to have principles and standards and procedures,
which gave them a much more sturdy peg to hang their hat on because all of
the FIARBC was voluntary, and even the ICWR, while the President had set
it up, had no enforcement powers. No department had ever formally adopted
the Green Book. In other words, they all agreed to publish it, but they never
said, "We will follow the Green Book. They said, "We will follow the Green
Book as long as it doesn't interfere with our statutory responsibilities."
Well, there again is one of the reasons why it would seem, going back to
Senate Document 97, that while you can trace the evolution of that document
back to the Green Book and some other early inter-agency reports, it would
seem like there had to be a catalyst. Obviously a Democratic administration
coming in was important, but it had to be responding to something. Otherwise,
you know, it wouldn't have received that presidential imprimatur and become
executive branch policy. It was not executive branch policy until 1962, even
though you can see the evolution, so something happened, whether it be the
Kerr Committee report, whether it just be just general dissatisfaction with the
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