Water Resources
and Issues
When I put in my travel voucher to the Library, with the appropriate papers for
them to get reimbursement from the Corps, they wouldn't reimburse me. They
said, "You don't have authority to travel first class, so we can't reimburse you
for any more than the coach fare. Of course, I responded, "But I
make
the reservations. The Corps of Engineers made the reservations and I just
bought the ticket. They made the reservations, and they're going to reimburse
you, so why don't you just pay me and they'll give you the money and it won't
make any difference. And the reply I got was, "No, positively only the
librarian can travel first class-not even the deputy librarian can travel first
class-and you have to have authorization.
And so I called up whoever had been working with in the Corps of Engineers,
and I said, "How do you guys get to travel first class?" And they said, "Oh,
it was simple. We just wrote that we were traveling with a high official of the
Library of Congress that justified first class travel."
So then I wrote a memo back to the Library's accounting office saying that this
trip was arranged for me to travel with high officials of the Corps of Engineers
and it was deemed appropriate that we travel first class, and so they paid me.
This was just indicative of the kind of bureaucratic approach that the Library
of Congress had. Everything had to be in accordance with the rules.
Well, let me ask you about some specific projects. If they register in your
mind, let me know; if not, we can just pass right over them; but there were
some very, very controversial
being developed or considered during
this time, and I'm wondering whether you had any chance to provide some
input. The Rampart Dam in Alaska. Were you ever asked by a congressional
committee to do any kind of study or report on that?
A: No, I never got involved in Rampart. Let me mention one other thing that was
happening during the rniddle years of the '60s: the enlargement of the federal
responsibilities in water pollution control. There were several very important
acts, under which the program moved up from the and 0 million-a-year
program, which had been first vetoed by Eisenhower and passed over his veto,
into the billion dollar class. They kept the responsibility in the states, but each
state had to get a plan approved and standards approved to get the federal
money.
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