Theodore M.
legislation. By that time we had another more junior young man on our staff
whom we had hired away from the United Nations Development Program in
New York. This was Wally Bowman. He and Dick Carpenter worked with the
congressional committees on both sides providing the kind of assistance that the
Legislative Reference Service used to provide routinely before the exponential
proliferation of congressional staff following the enactment of the Legislative
Reorganization Act in 1970. So Dick and Wally had important roles in the
enactment of NEPA which I think was signed about the first day of 1970. By
that time I was over at the National Water Commission.
Did you ever meet Keith Caldwell?
Yes. Keith
was one of the people who considers himself to be the
prime mover in getting that law through. Keith was a friend of Dick
Carpenter's and Wally Bowman's and was involved with them in the early
stages, maybe before they got involved. Keith later became one of my good
friends. He was a member of the Environmental Studies Board, but before t h a t
I think he did some work for the National Water Commission.
Anyway, my judgment was that the NEPA bill was not going to go anywhere,
and I was so completely wrong that I probably shouldn't even mention it. But
Dick Carpenter did a great job in connection with the NEPA authorization, and
that may well be why he was selected by the National Academy of Sciences to
direct the Environmental Studies Board. So that gets me back to how I got to
the National Academy of Sciences.
In early July I was cleaning out my desk at the National Water Commission
office when I got a call from Dick Carpenter. He was at the point of trying to
get a study for the National Commission on Water Quality organized, and he
wanted my suggestions for the names of people who might be willing to serve
on the academy's committee.
Rockefeller and the other members of the commission had been appointed, and
I believe Ron
had prepared a prospectus for accomplishing the
commission's work. Fred Clarke, who had just retired as Chief of Engineers,
had been appointed as executive director of the commission and Joe Moore was
the study director. They had just started to dicker with the academy for the
establishment of a study committee to provide consultation services to the
commission. Dick Carpenter had not had much experience in the water
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