Water Resources People and Issues
such a voluminous job with their salmon-colored reviews and blue-colored
reviews; there were levels of reviews that pyramided one on top of another to
an extent that, to be frank, it was hard for me to follow it, and I didn't have
time because I had other responsibilities at the Library. At one time I found
that I was the only engineer or scientist of any kind in the Legislative Reference
Service, so I had to get involved in all kinds of requests for advice in
connection with the space program, which was not my primary interest.
Then there was another thing that interrupted my work at the Library of
Congress, and I should have mentioned it when we were talking about the
origin of the 1964 Water Resources Research Act. A colleague of mine, Ed
Wenk, who was executive secretary of the Federal Council for Science and
Technology in the early years of the Kennedy administration, was having great
trouble dealing with the problem of water resources research. There was a
Committee on Water Resources Research with members representing all the
agencies which had research programs. The Interior Department was
represented by Luna Leopold from the Geological Survey and by Eugene Eaton
who had just come into the secretary's office. According to
those two
could not ever agree on what the departmental program was or should be. So
every meeting of the Committee on Water Resources Research had erupted into
arguments. Why the Secretary of the Interior had two representatives, I don't
know, but when it came time for the representative of Interior to chair the
committee, it would have been a donnybrook, because the two could never
agree on anything.
So Wenk asked me if I would come down and essentially chair or staff a
committee of which I couldn't be a member because I was in the legislative
branch and it was an executive branch committee. The objective was to get a
report to the President on the subject as a part of the response to the Select
Committee's recommendation for a coordinated research program, necessary
because the Geological Survey's proposal in the FY 1963 budget had been
rejected. This was in the fall of 1962. I'll never forget the time because it was
at the same time that the Cuban missile crisis erupted. I was working day and
night on this project, and my wife said that I was the only person in the United
States who didn't know about the Cuban missile crisis.
We were working against a very short deadline, and I was hard pressed to try
to bring some sense out of the work of this good committee. There were at
least 15 or 20 members, most of whom were easy to get along with and did
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