Water Resources People and Issues
While he was still a staff member?
A: Yes, he was a staff member on the Senate Interior Committee for several years.
I don't know whether Scoop had any idea that Tom was going to go on and be
the majority leader or anything like that, and I certainly didn't. Tom was just
a very nice guy. And Bill Van Ness was very nice and stayed on to be staff
director of the committee.
And then on the other side, Tom Kuchel had brought Steve Horn back to work
for him, and I did the same thing; spent some time briefing him on water
resources because I could give them a briefing about the committee from a
different viewpoint and the senators were a little too busy sometimes to break
in a new staff member.
So I had a good rapport with Scoop Jackson, but I never talked to him about
the commission more than once or twice during the course of the five-year
study.
When Mr.
offered me the job after another unrecorded meeting of the
commission I agreed to take it and started work on the next to the last day of
1968, bringing with me a secretary from the Library of Congress. I was
working in a building at 1016 Sixteenth Street across from what I still call the
Statler Hotel, now the Capital Hilton Hotel. The government had a small
building there, an eight-story building with just a few offices on each floor that
they used for temporary commissions. I had the office on the second floor at
the front of the building and planned to meet there with Mr.
on the first
Saturday after I started work.
I had to use a key to get in the building on Saturday and was up there working
when I kept hearing something that sounded like hail on the window, a tapping
noise. I looked out the window, and there was Chuck
down on the
sidewalk throwing pebbles up against the window because he couldn't get in.
And I thought, "My god, if the police come along and found the chairman of
Consolidated Edison Corporation down there throwing pebbles up there, they'd
probably want to lock him up."
I went down and let him in and we started to talk about what we should do. As
I think back on it we certainly didn't "hit the deck running. We had talked a
little bit about what should be done in the interview, when he had asked me
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