Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
almost like a supporter sometimes when he was down there, he was so smooth--but he got it
straight from us just like the rest.
By the same token, Congressman Bevill, a supporter, would throw out tough questions,
which would be making certain points to other people or really wanting to make sure we
were staying abreast of the issues. The only way was dealing with it all straight. We didn't
participate in getting them there or getting them home. They would usually fly in on the
Chief's plane to, say, Muscle Shoals. We would have flown down from the Ohio River
Division and Nashville in a chartered aircraft--the division didn't have an aircraft. I'd bring
some of my staff and we would fly into the same airfield. General Ellis would fly up from
Atlanta the same way and then the district engineer from Mobile would be in charge of all
the logistics.
He would bring the helicopters and the headsets and everything else. We would assemble
there an hour or a half an hour before the Chief's plane arrived. They'd typically be running
late because they got off late from Andrews, so we'd pile them all in and we'd roar down the
TennTom Waterway talking about the project. Then we'd land and visit the area office and
handle all these questions very directly, then fly on down to the other office, have probably a
box lunch or something like that. We'd be tossed questions, and we'd all be sitting with our
area engineers and the party in a group. Then we would hustle them out to the airplane so
they could fly back to Washington. It was a rapid-fire day. Then we would hop aboard our
charter aircraft and fly back to Cincinnati--so it was just another day in the life of a division
engineer. [Laughter]
I mean, we would prepare our notebooks, you know, so that we could flip to pages and have
the right map to show whoever wanted them, with the facts at the right place, anticipating
questions and that sort of thing, but most of the time we got so we could wing it because
we'd done it so many times pointing out the project features.
Q:
It's a lot of high visibility. It probably means that the congressmen know more of the names
on the lists of generals to be promoted from the Corps than they know from any other branch,
probably. They knew you personally.
A:
Well, probably, but we're talking about a few handfuls of congressmen total that went down
through all that. I mean, certainly Bevill and Whitten, and John Myers from Indiana, the
ranking minority member, were perennials. They knew the Corps' generals from all of this,
from their testimony and the other contacts.
Q:
Does congressional testimony get to be routine too? Or is that different?
A:
No, it never got routine. I think I got better at it, but I don't believe it ever got routine. Of
course, we were dealing with a tough staff. I mean, Hunter Spillan's not the easiest person to
deal with, but I think he was pretty straightforward. As long as we were dealing with him
straightforward, things were all right. So, it was like anything else. I mean, you just ought to
be forthright and straightforward. You really want to do your homework. You can't go in
there blind.
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