Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

There was, of course, still the possibility of a presidential veto. If anything, it seemed inevitable. Here in the case of one dam, was everything that was rotten in Denmark: a bad project proposed by a dinosaurian bureaucracy; needless destruction of one of the last wild rivers in the East; usurpation of a quiet valley; and a cynical Congress sneaking around one of its own laws. Guy Martin and Cecil Andrus were both urging a veto in the strongest possible terms. Gus Speth, by then chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, was privately talking of resignation if Carter backed down. Few in Carter’s conservationist constituency even entertained the possibility that he wouldn’t veto the bill. Congress, however, had taken care of everything. Carter was in the midst of negotiating a treaty that would give the Panama Canal back to Panama, and he was meeting stubborn resistance in Congress. The votes were lined up closely enough to put the President in a position of wretched vulnerability. The threats were quite naked. If Carter vetoed the bill, there would be no treaty; his education bill might suffer the same fate. In both cases, his embarrassment would be extreme—worse, perhaps, than if he swallowed the Tellico exemption. The gulp was almost audible. On the night he signed the bill, the President telephoned Zygmunt Plater, the young law professor from the University of Tennessee who handled the case before the Supreme Court, and performed a mea culpa. Plater was taken ...