Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

It wasn’t his blindness, his stubbornness, his manipulation of Congress, his talent for insubordination, his contempt for wild nature, his tolerance of big growers muscling into the Reclamation program—in the end, it wasn’t any of this that did Dominy in. It was his innate self-destructiveness, which manifested itself most blatantly in an undisguised preoccupation with lust. His sexual exploits were legendary. They were also true. Whenever and wherever he traveled, he wanted a woman for the night. He had no shame about propositioning anyone. He would tell a Bureau employee with a bad marriage that his wife was a hell of a good lay, and the employee wouldn’t know whether he was joking or not. He preferred someone available, but his associates say he wasn’t above paying cash. “The regional directors were expected to find women for him,” says one former regional director. “It always amazed me how he carried on in the light of day. He was opening himself up to blackmail, but somehow he always seemed immune.” The Bureau airplane was known, by some, as the “Winged Boudoir in the Sky.”