Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

On December 15, 1964, less than a year after the Pacific Southwest plan was revealed, a four-hour-long meeting quietly took place at the regal new offices of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. (Built on a hill at one end of Sunset Boulevard, the MWD headquarters had a splendid view of the immense sprawl and traffic congestion it had helped create—four freeways converged right below its windows—but it was walled off from same by a forest of fountains and, fittingly, a moat.) The participants in the meeting were Udall, Dominy, Interior solicitor Edward Weinberg, Los Angeles Congressman Chet Holifeld (whose twin passions were water diversion and nuclear power), and seven carefully selected members of the MWD. Officially, this was a meeting that never took place, but as the chairman of the MWD, Joe Jensen, enthused in a “Confidential Report to MWD Directors,” it was “one of the most constructive conferences we have attended.” Udall, he reported, “expects to discuss with Senator Jackson of Washington a feasibility study and the eventual taking of ten to fifteen million acre-feet of water from the Columbia River. He would hope to have Senator Jackson lead off with the statement that the export program would be possible according to such guidelines as Jackson felt necessary for such an export program.”