In his personal epitaph on the Kings and Kern saga, written in 1951, Harold Ickes lambasted the Corps as “spoilsmen in spirit . . . working hand in glove with land monopolies.” He called it a “willful and expensive . . . self-serving clique . . . in contempt of the public welfare” which had the distinction of having “wantonly wasted money on worthless projects” to a degree “surpassing any federal agency in the history of this country. . . . [N]o more lawless or irresponsible group than the Corps of Army Engineers,” Ickes concluded, “has ever attempted to operate in the United States either
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