Theodore M.
It was really peculiar but never got involved in that program. As far as I can
remember, the Legislative Reference Service was never asked to do any work
in that field, which became one of the biggest water resource programs of the
federal government. On the House side the committee that was handling that
program didn't seek any help in that field of its activity, and on the Senate side
it was largely Senator Muskie who carried the ball on water pollution control.
I was never called on to help that subcommittee, although I worked quite a bit
with the staff of the Public Works Committee on other programs. Water
pollution control legislation was handled in a different subcommittee.
Incidentally, talking about Senator Muskie, I mentioned that the Senate Select
Committee had held hearings only in the states where the members were from,
except for Massachusetts and Maine. Senator Muskie asked that a hearing be
held in Maine, and we had that hearing in Augusta on a cold, wintry, blizzardy
day in Augusta. All of the state officials came before the committee and said,
"We don't really have any water problems here. Everything is fine," but the
environmental interests came and complained about the polluted rivers and
other environmental hazards.
We had briefed Senator Kerr and given him questions to ask about East Coast
salmon-there used to be quite a salmon run in the East Coast-and the clam
beds and other water pollution related problems that were not being taken care
of. When he asked about the environmental interests, they told him there was
no salmon because the paper mill wastes had pretty well wiped out all of the
biota in the streams.
When Senator Kerr was asking the state officials about these problems, they
squirmed and gave some rather weak responses, so he continued with some
rather pointed questions. It was like a cross examination, and Kerr was good
at it, and he started boring in on state officials, cabinet officials in the state
government. He was asking the questions that I'm sure Senator Muskie knew
and could have asked but thought it was better not to be too rough on his
state constituents, and so he let the out-of-state senator ask them. In a sense
Kerr was more or less beating the state officials over the head and embarrassing
them because they were not giving him the same answers that he had been
getting from the environmental spokesmen.
The local people in the back were clapping while Senator Kerr was giving their
officials a bad time, and Senator Muskie seemed to be enjoying it. I had the
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