Water Resources People and Issues
Q: You also were a consultant for the Conservation Foundation at the same time,
were you not?
A: No, that came later. But first let me tell you how I got to the National
Academy of Sciences. This was another one of these things that just happened
to me. It was all due to Dick Carpenter, who had been one of the people with
whom I had been involved in bringing into the Library of Congress as one of
our senior specialists in science. Before he came to the Library of Congress,
he had not been in the government at all. He had been working as a chemist
with the Callery Chemical Company, or Gulf Oil, or somewhere in industry.
He was called to my attention by Carter Bradley, who was on Senator Mike
Monroney's staff, who told me that he had met a young man from Oklahoma
who wanted to work in the policy area. And that was my introduction to Dick
Carpenter. We didn't usually consider hiring anyone recommended by a
member of Congress, but I agreed to let our search committee interview him.
We were staffing our Science Policy Division and the committee interviewed
him. He was the best candidate so they recommended him. So we did hire him
as one of our senior specialists in the scientific policy area.
That reminds me of another example of where I goofed in 1967 or early 1968.
Bill Van Ness from Senator Jackson's committee came to me and said, "We're
thinking about introducing legislation to require an environmental analysis of
projects before they can be recommended. Bill Van Ness was staff director of
the Senate Interior Committee. He showed me their draft bill and told me he'd
been working with Lawrence Rockefeller and other prominent people in the
environmental movement and asked for my help.
I looked at what he was proposing and concluded that it would slow down the
authorization of water projects and that the Congress would never enact it. So
I think I said something like, "The Congress is never going to pass legislation
like this because it'll essentially bring the water resources program to a halt."
So I didn't agree to work on it with Bill Van Ness but turned the assignment
over to Dick Carpenter, thinking that it wasn't important enough for me to take
on. I was still the senior specialist in engineering and of public works but I was
also the deputy director of the Legislative Reference Service. I just didn't think
that legislation was going to fly.
But Dick Carpenter took on the assignment, working with Bill Van Ness and
others. They set up a colloquium which made a good record in favor of the
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