Theodore
That is an example of what I meant when I said I was tight. Another thing is
that we refused to pay overhead on contracts with the universities. They passed
a resolution condemning the practice. I was determined not to waste any
money. One time we had to send Helen Ingram up to Cornell to help David
to finish his report. David always has a lot of balls in the air. He's a very
good man and the contract was being monitored by Helen so she had to go up
and more or less sit on his doorstep-not really his doorstep, but hound him at
his office to keep him working to get that report finished in time for the
commission to consider it. Dave didn't really understand that when we needed
a report for a meeting of the commission in May, they wanted to get that report
in advance and read it. We worked hard on a lot of those reports to get them
finished on time. I mentioned earlier that we had trouble getting a report out
of Gary Hart because he was working as McGovern's campaign manager. We
had to get somebody after him to finish his report, but we got it and he came
to our meeting in Philadelphia to defend it before the commission.
Excuse me, but did it sit well with these staunch Republicans you were talking
about that Gary Hart had been given a contract? It would seem likely to me that
some of those people would say, "Well, gee, this guy's a little bit too far to the
left to really be-"
I remember that some of them joshed Gary at the Philadelphia meeting about
working for a losing cause, but there was never any political comment made
at any of the meetings or at any other time. And one thing that amazed me was
that there was never any political pressure on me to hire anybody. One of the
people that I tried to hire at the very beginning of the project was Ernie
Englebert, out at the University of Southern California. He'd written a lot on
water resources policy, and I've known him for many years and respected his
work. When I tried to get him to come to work in the position in which we
eventually hired Lyle Craine, he said something like, "I'm not going to come
back there. You're going to find that you're going to have to hire every
political hack that the Hill sends down there, and you're not going to be able
to get anything done."
The amazing thing was that, to my recollection, I only had three cal from the
Hill about hiring a staff man.
One of those calls was about a man who had applied for a job wit.h us, and I
had agreed to hire him but we had not yet told him. He went up on the Hill to
Previous Page
