Engineer Memoirs
Mrs. Morris," and I added "Congratulations, Mr. President, I'm the Chief of the Army Corps
of Engineers He said, "I know who you are. I never will forget that, "I know who you are."
All these other things I've mentioned follow that.
So that was an early highlight, very important to our first goal of staying in business.
The next event involving President Carter personally occurred in the fall of 1977 when the
Dam failed in Georgia. You may recall that Senator Stennis, years before, had
sponsored successfully the dam safety inspection program [$lOO million]. It'd never been
implemented. So when the dam failed down in Georgia, there was another meeting in the
president's conference room on the subject of inspecting the dams and implementing this
legislation.
The Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture very much wanted that program
and made strong proposals. The program was in the Corps' bill and budget, so we had a leg
up on it. General [Charles I.] McGinnis, then director of Civil Works, was with me this time.
The president asked if the Corps could undertake the dam safety inspection process. I
indicated we were ready. He then asked when we could start. As I remember, that meeting
was conducted about the middle of November. I said, "We're looking to start around the 1st
of April, beginning of the second quarter of the next calendar year. All of our people are
busy, and we must issue contracts or we have to take people off of other things." That's when
he said, "Well, I wish we could start a little quicker." I responded that we would start the 1st
of December.
Back in the office I asked General McGinnis to inspect one dam in each state during the
month of December. Why? I didn't want any governors calling us up and saying, "You did
somebody else's dams, you didn't do ours. Besides, we couldn't do more than in the first
month anyhow. That's what we did and it worked nicely. There were no political
ramifications and we did get the program going. Turned out we had a lot bigger job than we
thought we would. There were liability issues but we worked through those, and as far as I
could tell, the president was satisfied with the program.
The Corps as an institution gathered a lot of international attention from the dam safety
program. The chairman of the International Committee on Large Dams
asked me
to write the protocol for a permanent
committee on dam safety. I formed an ad hoc
committee of international engineers and went to work. After two years we finished the job.
By then I was retired. I hoped and expected to become the chairman of the international
committee on dam safety once it was made permanent; however, the chairman said, "You're
retired now and don't have anything to do with dams any more, so we're going to find
somebody else to be president." I was surprised and disappointed.
I was invited to the White House to dinner one evening in honor of the president of Nigeria,
who was visiting the United States. President Obasanju was an engineer, and he wanted to
make the Niger River navigable up to where a new capital would be built. The United States
had been asked to help in the navigation project, so I was invited to the White House for
dinner and we spent some time discussing the matter. The project did not materialize.
My last event with President Carter occurred when I was about to retire. I asked my secretary
to call the president's appointment secretary and schedule a farewell visit. The lady said
she'd take it down but she didn't think there was any chance. Word came back that President
Carter would like to see me before I left the service and we set the visit for the 17th of
September. This time I told the Secretary of the Army I was going.
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