Engineer Memoirs
On one occasion, Mr. Veysey accused me of influencing the Congress on a specific item of
legislation. In that particular case we were innocent, but when I told him so, his reaction was
clearly one of disbelief. Well, to me, that was a serious charge because I didn't say one thing
when I had done another. I offered to quit.
Mike Blumenfeld replaced Veysey. Mike understood the requirements for the Corps to be a
good public service organization. He was not attracted to operations. He was attracted to
public understanding. He was a good writer and I think a fine secretary. He retained Jack Ford
and the two made a good team.
Blumenfeld handled himself the way we thought his job should be handled, so much so that
successor directors of Civil Works found him to be a good sounding board. Then in-house
business which ordinarily we would not have shared was discussed openly in the assistant
secretary's office.
That was fine, as long as Mike was there. He was replaced by Mr. William Gianelli, another
engineer from California. He trumped everything Veysey did and, as I learned, really got into
the inner workings of the Corps and slowed down the decision-making process. Mr. Gianelli
was a strong secretary and achieved much. He would often bypass the Chief and the division
engineers and go directly to a district. This brought the Chief more and more into the picture.
As time went on, the Assistant Secretaries of the Army for Civil Works dealt more and more
a regrettable extension of lines of communication because of
with the Chief of
the subtle yet adverse impact on the Chief's attention to his other responsibilities.
I followed General Gribble's procedure. Unless major policy implications were involved, I
just didn't think I should interfere with the director of Civil Works' business. We worked
pretty hard at keeping things in perspective. If all the Assistant Secretaries of the Army for
Civil Works had followed the Veysey and Blumenfeld leads, the situation today would have
been different, and better.
I don't know what else to say about that. Veysey was helpful to the Corps for many major
problems under Lock and Dam 26. He required us to do certain things which, from a political
standpoint, were right because they gave him the knowledge and leverage.
I have spent a lot of your time on that subject, probably more than we should have, but as the
first director to have the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, it's
important to set the groundwork.
If General Clarke asked me today whether I'd like to have one or not, I'm not sure what I'd
tell him. I'd like to be able to say, "The intended purpose of the Assistant Secretary of the
Army for Civil Works has been fulfilled perfectly." Then we'd all be happy. The nature of the
beast is such that if you put an engineer in there, it's not going to happen. Seems to me they
can't resist telling the
how to do his job, and most unfortunately, each new
seems only to add to his predecessor's domain over the civil works program and weaken the
Chief of Engineers' ability to attend to his primary role of supporting the Army's engineering
needs.
Q ..
The Section 404 program was another new problem confronting the director of Civil Works,
wasn't it?
I mentioned the Federal Water Pollution Control Act amendments. That, plus NEPA, put us
A
face-to-face with EPA. Ruckelshaus had been followed by Judge Russell Train, who became
the administrator. He was later followed by Doug Costle, with whom I had considerable
dealings in the late 1970s. The area where we had the most direct interest was implementing
the dredge and fill and the regulatory program for permits. This was truly plowing new
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