Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
We were typically responding to the congressional side, "This is the new policy of the
administration and we follow it." It was pretty obvious that they needed to deal with the
person in the administration who knew something about the policy formulation, that being
Secretary Gianelli.
Later on--as I explained when I talked about Section 202 before--that project became
distasteful to Secretary Gianelli, and he felt he was being put under too much pressure by the
Congress, in this case Senator Byrd. He felt we ought to have deflated Senator Byrd's
expectations and taken the pressure off of him.
Well, that was a rather unrealistic expectation of the secretary. Senator Byrd certainly knew
that he couldn't drill us to change administration policy, so, being a very astute senator, he
was going right to the point of influence. He wasn't even putting pressure on the Director of
Civil Works or the Chief of Engineers because he knew the place he had to go was the place
where the policy was made, that being Assistant Secretary Gianelli. So, the secretary got a lot
of phone calls from Senator Byrd.
Q:
Well, it's really a case of a new administration that is pretty confrontational with Congress,
or at least the House of Representatives, but also a new assistant secretary who is a little
more assertive than some other assistant secretaries had been, I think too. It was a period of
adjustment in lots of dimensions there. A lot of that, I guess, had impact at headquarters, but
it obviously had impact in the field as well, on particular projects.
A:
I guess we always felt that Secretary Gianelli never had a feel for a very large organization or
for the people part of it. He was an engineer with a lot of activity in water resources. The fact
was that large organizations move slowly, not always by edict but by consensus and by
passing ideas down and by bringing people aboard and that sort of thing. Valuing people and
their views seemed to escape him.
So, it got to where he was saying things about the Corps in a negative sense, and he would
say things about Corps people in a negative sense, and they heard about it and didn't like it.
They were proud of what they were doing.
He somehow put all these things in his manner in the sense of, "These folks are disloyal
because I'm not getting what I want (by edict)," even though he had this problem with the
Congress. The Corps was still following the law and regulation as existing. He wasn't
changing them, the laws or regulations. He was just talking, but he was talking about, and
against, the Corps and still had to achieve what he had to achieve: that was the political
reckoning, the changing of policies at the top.
I think the people in the Corps felt ill-served by him, that he owed some loyalty downward as
well as upward. He was always speaking of loyalty, but it was always in the negative sense.
He asked me once specifically, "Why aren't you loyal to me?" It had to do with the Section
202 project. He was always speaking of loyalty in the sense that we weren't giving it to him.
By the same token, though, he was besmirching and smacking down the people that he was
expecting loyalty from as he expressed it to other people.
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