Water Resources People and Issues
A: I can't really say for sure how that evolved, but I think that the Congress was
responding to the studies of the Water Resources Council. Remember, the
Water Resources Council was created in 1965 and the staff was appointed early
in 1966, so they had been working several years on this, producing what I
referred to as the salmon-colored books and the blue-colored books, as they
went through several stages of review. I think the reason that the Congress put
that provision in the law is that the Bureau of the Budget didn't like the four
objectives. They were called "objectives" at first. The Bureau of Budget never
really liked anything that the Water Resources Council did as far as I know.
And the Bureau of the Budget wouldn't accept anything but the national
economic objective. I'm sure that somebody from downtown went up to the
committee staff and told them that the Bureau of the Budget was opposing
multiobjective planning, and so that provision was put into the 1970 act. I'd
have to look at that to see whether it was applied to all agencies or just to the
Corps because it was the Corps' authorization.
Q: It was the Corps' act, that's true.
A: But you have jumped ahead of the time when I had an important career change.
And again it happened to me in a very embarrassing way. In 1965 I was at an
Engineering Foundation Research Conference for a week, at a small college
someplace in New England. It was a conference on the subject of solving
difficult problems. There were all kinds of people there, including General
"Weary" Wilson from the Corps. Whether he was still Chief of Engineers then
or whether he had retired, I don't remember. This was a conference patterned
after the Gordon Research Conferences, where you have a session in the
morning and then you interact in the afternoon among your participants, and
then you have a session in the evening. So you really put in a full day, but it's
divided into morning and evening, and the afternoon is this informal reaction
around a swimming pool or on the golf course.
While I was up there, the director of the Legislative Reference Service, Lester
called, trying to get me, and he was told that I was out playing golf.
He called again the next day, and I was again out playing golf. So when he
finally got through to me, he said, "What are you doing up there? I didn't send
you up there to play golf. You're supposed to be learning how to solve
problems." Well, it kind of put me off my guard, so when he told me that Ed
Wenk, who by that time had left the White House staff to serve as chief of our
Science Policy Research Division, was wanted at the White House to direct the
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