John W. Morris
little to do with that. I'm talking about deepening, fixing the bypasses, and installing the
communications and navigation control facilities.
Ours was a good team which did valuable work for Egypt and for U.S. business. We were
there when President Nixon resigned. The reason I remember that is because he made the
headlines, and our little group was mentioned elsewhere in the same Cairo newspaper.
Then I was sent to Russia twice-once as part of PIANC and later in conjunction with a
program dealing with housing and other construction. HUD [Housing and Urban
Development] took the housing and the Corps took other construction. The other construction
was a much bigger piece of the pie than just the housing because it included all the dams,
waterways, power, and everything else.
While you were director of Civil Works, didn't the Corps begin to think more seriously about
nonstructural solutions to water resources problems?
A:
Yes, the accumulated effect of the absence of support for new dams, the problems of Lock and
Dam 26, the incessant oversight by the environmental communities all led to a belief that if
we are not going to be allowed to solve problems by building something, maybe we can solve
them some other way.
It turned out that there was an authorized project in Littleton, Colorado, to build a floodway
General Morris with the head of the Suez Canal Authority, Mr. Mashour Ahmed Mashour, in the
summer of 1974. The canal is in the background.
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