Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Despite all this, in the late 1960s Dominy was as entrenched as any bureaucrat in Washington. The main reason was his relationship with Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the most powerful man in legislative government. It was the relationship of a fawning nephew and a favorite uncle—the kind of relationship young Lyndon Johnson enjoyed with Sam Rayburn—and it gave Dominy an authority, an insolence, an invulnerability scarcely anyone else enjoyed. When Carl Hayden was in his late eighties, senile, half blind, half deaf, confined to a hospital bed half the time, Floyd Dominy all but served as chairman of the Appropriations Committee when dam authorizations came around. He managed this by telling Hayden exactly what he wanted him to say—by actually writing dialogue for the two of them to recite. He would go to Hayden’s office, sit down with his legislative aide, Roy Elson, and write the questions he wanted Hayden to ask him; then he would go back to his own office and write the answers. It is unclear whether he did the same for other witnesses. The Hayden-Dominy scripts were of dubious enough ethical propriety for Dominy to keep them locked in the Bureau’s sensitive files, their existence known to only a handful of aides. Old, frail, and sick as he was, Hayden was still a man no one wanted to cross, and Dominy, knowing this, basked as long as he could in his failing light. “When you walked into Dominy’s office,” says John Gottschalk...