The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift

  Her duties, according to the Chief, called for " maintaining a current and comprehensive knowledge of the thinking and operating methods of the Commissioner," and evidently, she succeeded. When, exactly, their relationship morphed is suggested circumstantially. Through March 1942, she invariably earned an " Excellent" on her annual performance appraisals. After that date, her ratings dropped to " Very Good." It would be just like the proper MacDonald to feel he could no longer give her top marks, lest he be suspected of bias.

  The two betrayed nothing of their affair in public. She continued to address him as " Chief" and signed her notes and telegrams to him with " Fuller" or " CLF." She continued to share an apartment with her spitting-image sister; the Fullers and MacDonald often went about as a trio.

  In July 1951, MacDonald turned seventy, the federal government's mandatory retirement age. The Truman White House asked that he extend his career for at least another year, to which he happily agreed. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram approved: " We think it would have been a costly mistake to dispense with the services of a man of Mr. MacDonald's ability and to lose his valuable experience," the paper surmised, " especially when his physical condition is such as to permit him to remain in the harness."

  A year later, with his attention devoted to the war in Korea, Truman again asked the Chief to stay on. Again, he agreed. So it was that MacDonald was still on the job when, at long last, the interstate system finally received its first dedicated federal check. In the spring of 1952, Congress earmarked $25 million a year for the network in its highways budgets for fiscal 1954 and 1955.

  It was a token amount, too little to get much of anything started, at a time when suburbs were blooming and traffic was worse than ever. The Chief said as much in his annual speech to AASHO, noting " ample evidence that highways today are only fractionally as adequate for today's traffic demands as they were two decades ago."

  But it was a start. The National System of Interstate Highways was moving from blueprint to concrete.

  It bears noting that the man most often celebrated for creating the interstates played no role in any of this. The conception of the system, its routing, its design—all that took place while Dwight Eisenhower was busy elsewhere.

  On the day Franklin Roosevelt called the Chief to his office to draw his six blue lines on the map, the future president was half a world away in the Philippines, serving none too happily as chief of staff to Douglas MacArthur and helping the boss whip the island territory into shape for the coming war. The following year, when Toll Roads and Free Roads made its way to Congress and Futurama wowed crowds in New York, Eisenhower was at Fort Lewis, Washington. In April 1941, when Roosevelt appointed the committee to study interregional highways, Ike was a newly minted colonel stationed in San Antonio. When the committee finished the bulk of its assignment late that year, he was helping to draft the nation's war plans in Washington, D.C.

  As the Chief and Fairbank tweaked their recommendations on urban highways, Eisenhower was leading the Allied invasion of North Africa. The same month FDR submitted the committee's report to Congress, he assumed command of Allied forces in Europe. The very day that the landmark 1944 highway act became law, and the interstate system moved from proposal to legal reality, Ike earned his fifth star while overseeing the Allies' eastward sweep across France. The year after the rural sections were designated, he was telling a reporter that he couldn't " conceive of any circumstance that could drag out of me permission to consider me for any political post from dogcatcher to Grand High Supreme King of the Universe." And at the point that the system received its first paltry handout, the general was the head of the West's cold war alliance in Europe and not yet a candidate for president.

  Eisenhower was a lot of things: an officer who never saw time at the front, but who would be remembered as one of history's great commanders; a middling student at West Point who proved himself a genius for organization and planning; a guy who spent most of his career in frustrated, go-nowhere obscurity, only to rise from major to general of the army in eight years.

  But he was not, by any means, the father of the interstates. Over the years a fable has gained currency that the system was inspired by two events in Eisenhower's life: the 1919 motor convoy expedition, on which the young Ike first grasped the nation's highway shortcomings; and the Allied advance on Berlin in World War II, when he experienced Hitler's autobahns and came to appreciate the promise of modern expressways. He returned from the war with a vision of how America's security, fraternity, and commerce would be bolstered through a vast superhighway grid, it's claimed, and so made it happen as president. It's a satisfying story, one that Eisenhower told himself, and indeed, there's no doubt that Ike was affected by both experiences. But they did not beget the interstates. The system was a done deal in every important respect but financing by the time Ike entered politics.

  He would certainly have a role to play, and an important one, but it would be far more limited than that with which he's commonly credited. As for the system's true paternity—well, by now it should be obvious that it belonged to more than one man, and who they were.

  PART III

  The Crooked Straight, the Rough Places Plain

  10

  WHEN DWIGHT EISENHOWER took office in January 1953, the Interstate Highway System had officially existed for more than eight years, and the Bureau of Public Roads had taken to speaking of it as if the concrete were already poured; bureau reports and press releases often mentioned the " forty thousand- mile" network alongside descriptions of the very solid primary and secondary Federal Aid highways.

  In reality, of course, the system was made of paper. Ike knew little, if anything, of this abstraction. He entered the Oval Office professing an interest in building " a network of modern roads," rating it " as necessary to defense as it is to our national economy and personal safety" but having conducted little, if any, research on the subject. He didn't know that the executive and legislative branches had already worked out the details of the network he sought. He had no idea that the Bureau of Public Roads had produced two reports, more than a decade before, that spelled out its design and approximate footprints. His own views about highways were at odds with those of the government's experts: unaware that the greatest need for expressways was in cities, he favored a strictly rural network; and not knowing that the bureau had concluded that a national program could not be financed with tolls, he favored " self- liquidating" highway projects, or those that generated the revenue to repay their costs.

  How to explain this? Well, the thirty-fourth president wasn't much of a reader and couldn't sit still for long briefings; he preferred information delivered via terse reports from subordinates to whom he delegated the complicated business of actually running the government. Oddly, incredibly, it seems none of them mentioned to the boss that such a system was on the books—or so he later claimed.

  This is what he did know, and perhaps it's all he needed to know: That building new highways would supply jobs to homecoming soldiers when the Korean conflict ended, and a ready source of employment and spending whenever the economy required it. That modern expressways could provide a long-lasting boost to interstate commerce, promote tourism, reduce the cost of goods and shipping. That they might put a dent in the automotive death toll. And that they would ease congestion, at a time when vehicles continued to multiply and the daily commute was lengthening for millions of Americans decamping from city to suburb.

  So Ike got started on a program even before he moved to Washington, asking a golfing buddy and New York securities broker named Walker G. Buckner for his thoughts on how a highways program might be approached. Buckner's thirteen-page response, delivered just days after Ike took up residence in the White House, roughly outlined a new grid of self-liquidating turnpikes that would augment those already open or contemplated in the various states: one from Washington, D.C., to Jacksonville; another from Chicago to New Orleans; a third from Chicago " to the neighborhood of San Francisco by Sp
ringfield, Kansas City, Salt Lake City." Buckner appended a gas station map marked with those and other routes he favored: San Diego to Seattle, Kansas City to Houston, and an extension of the West Virginia Turnpike north to Cleveland and south to a junction with the Washington-Jacksonville route near Charleston, South Carolina.

  Most bore little resemblance to the interstate routes already mapped out by the Bureau of Public Roads. In fact, though the report opened by noting that Buckner had consulted " men who have participated in at least seventy percent of all existing toll bridges, roads, parking facilities and arterial highways," it offered no evidence that its author was any more aware of the existing interstate program than the new president.

  But Eisenhower didn't know what he didn't know. Buckner's report prompted the president to ask Gabriel Hauge, his administrative assistant, to launch, " with interested departments of government," a more formal study of the highway situation; he was convinced, he wrote, that any initiative should be part of a " constructive program that will be designed to meet, in a well-rounded and imaginative way, the constantly increasing needs of a growing population.

  " Our cities still conform too rigidly to the patterns, customs, and practices of fifty years ago," Eisenhower observed. " Each year we add hundreds of thousands of new automobiles to our vehicular population, but our road systems do not keep pace with the need. In the average city today, many of our streets become almost useless to traffic because of the necessity of home owners for using them for parking.

  " While this entire subject of vehicular traffic is but a small segment of the great program that must attract our attention, there is nevertheless no reason why we should not proceed to its thorough study so as to have it ready for inclusion into a broad plan to be developed later."

  He further told Hauge that he would " like to have plans crystallized and developed so that significant parts of it could be initiated without completion of the entire plan, but with the certainty that the part started will fit logically and efficiently into the whole." His sign-off was very much in character: " From time to time, please give me an informal report of progress."

  That February 4, 1953, memo signaled the Eisenhower administration's official entry into the interstate highway saga. Hauge passed Buckner's paper on to the Commerce Department, where it apparently was filed away; nothing came of it.

  The administration's second highway-related undertaking came a little more than a month later, when Eisenhower's commerce secretary, Sinclair Weeks, summoned the Chief to a meeting. The bureau had been shifted into the Commerce Department during Truman's presidency; MacDonald knew his new boss, with whose father he'd worked thirty years before, in his first days at the bureau—John W. Weeks had been secretary of war during the development of the Pershing Map.

  But trouble had been in the air. Just after taking office, the new secretary had created the post of undersecretary of commerce for transportation, with the power to change or assume the bureau's responsibilities as he saw fit. It was difficult to take the development as anything but a vote of no confidence; the Chief had been knocked down a rung in the federal hierarchy and replaced as the secretary's principal adviser on highways. He wouldn't be representing the administration before Congress, either, unless it was with the blessing of this new undersecretary.

  Exactly what was said in Weeks's office has been lost, but not so the gist. The time had come, Weeks announced, for MacDonald to pack his bags. His service would not be extended. After thirty-four years as the country's top highway man, as the longest-serving head of any major government agency to that time, as trustee of more public spending than any federal official in peacetime history, he was done.

  Several theories emerged as to why he wasn't allowed to simply serve until his birthday rolled around again that summer. They generally fell under two headings: Weeks wanted firmer control of the biggest budget in his department; and Eisenhower wanted to jump-start the country's response to burgeoning congestion and highway disrepair, and figured new leadership, loyal to his administration, was key to making it happen.

  On paper, MacDonald's departure was his own doing. On March 9, 1953, he wrote to Weeks that he had continued so long as commissioner " at the request of, and wholly at the pleasure of" the Truman administration. " If it meets your convenience," his letter concluded, " I now request your concurrence in my release from my present position at the end of the current month, March 31 st."

  In truth, there was nothing voluntary about it. At the meeting's close MacDonald chugged back to the bureau's offices and straight to Miss Fuller's desk. " I've just been fired," he reputedly told her, " so we might as well get married."

  Reactions, most of them shocked and saddened, poured in. " Personally, I am awfully sorry that you will not continue at the head of the Bureau," Georgia congressman Carl Vinson wrote the Chief. John A. Anderson, Virginia's highway commissioner, ended a note praising MacDonald's " work well done" with " Honor to you for ever." Engineering News-Record saluted his " unquestioned integrity and unyielding adherence to principle," concluding: " Tom MacDonald brought great honor to the civil engineering profession."

  On March 18, Weeks's office went public with the Chief's replacement: Francis V. du Pont, a fifty-eight-year-old businessman and heir to a chemicals fortune who'd devoted much of his adult life to an inherited passion—building and promoting highways in his adopted state of Delaware.

  His father, T. Coleman du Pont, an early leader of the Good Roads Movement, had built his own hundred-mile highway from Wilmington to the Maryland line and eventually donated it to the state. Francis had followed his father to MIT, where he obtained a degree in mechanical engineering in 1917, then served in the war, spent time in the family business, and worked as a Cadillac research engineer. In 1922, he'd landed a seat on the Delaware State Highway Commission; he spent twenty-seven years on the panel, all but four of them as chairman, and was a central figure in the planning, design, and construction of the Delaware Memorial Bridge linking his state with New Jersey, among the biggest bridges of any kind when it opened in 1951.

  A government job paying $16,000 a year was the last thing Francis du Pont needed; not only did he enjoy a fat inheritance, he was treasurer of several landmark hotels, president of New York City's Equitable Building, and president of the Delaware-based Equitable Trust Company. But the gracious, lantern-jawed millionaire was excited by Ike's presidency and the prospect of building highways on a national scale.

  Du Pont sent a two-page telegram to the Chief, stressing that he was honored to succeed him and planned to continue his policies. MacDonald returned du Pont's cordiality. In the last week of March, he showed the new man around the office, making introductions, explaining bureau procedure. After finishing his last day of government service, MacDonald agreed to preside over a farewell dinner thrown by his closest friends and colleagues at Washington's Metropolitan Club. The next day, he left town for Texas. An old friend there, former state highways boss Gibb Gilchrist, headed Texas A&M University. He'd been after the Chief to retire to College Station for years, offering him a leadership post in a program for the study of transportation. Now he had a taker.

  MacDonald's close lieutenants assumed that they were finished themselves. Many were indistinguishable in outlook and philosophy from their departed boss; they shared the old man's unwavering faith in the certitude of technical expertise over political influence, in the federal-state partnership, in the sacredness of empirical data.

  The new commissioner surprised everyone. He moved into his office without fanfare. He brought a lawyer with him, but no other staff, not even a secretary; he made it clear from his first day that he admired the bureau's past performance and could only hope to do as well, and that he knew he would need the agency's veterans to succeed.

  Du Pont instituted weekly staff meetings, something the Chief had always avoided, and solicited his deputies for their anonymous suggestions on how they would change the place. Then he convened a series of meeti
ngs to find, as he put it, " the common denominator of changes that were desirable." He kept the Chief posted on what he was doing. " I want to assure you," he wrote after six weeks on the job, " that all of your assistants have been most courteous and helpful in our effort to carry on the good name and good will which you created during your administration."

  In short, it was hard not to like the guy. It didn't hurt that du Pont was a solid engineer, that he knew highways as well as anyone in the building, and that he enjoyed friendships and influence in Congress, the executive branch, and industry. Even Herbert Fairbank was won over. " Don't worry about your Bureau or your friends in it," he wrote MacDonald. " Both it and they, I think, are coming through all right."

  The Buckner report having vanished into bureaucratic limbo, highways languished for the rest of Eisenhower's first year in office. Then, on April 12, 1954, Ike again spurred his staff to take up the issue, instructing Francis du Pont, a former West Point classmate named John'S. Bragdon, and Sherman Adams, the White House chief of staff—a gruff, dour, and forcefully efficient former governor of New Hampshire—to come up with a $50 billion highway scheme.

  He stayed on them as much as he stayed on anything, given his rigorous golf and vacation schedule. In a May 11 memo he asked Adams: " Where do we stand on our 'dramatic' plan to get 50 billion dollars worth of self-liquidating highways under construction?" Where they stood was toe to toe. Bragdon, a retired army major general and member of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, was an unabashed fan of toll financing who firmly believed that by using the excess income from busy toll roads to subsidize weaker links, America could build a thirty-thousand-mile superhighway system that wouldn't cost a penny in taxes or debt. If he had his way, it would be built and managed by a National Highway Authority, led by cabinet members, that would replace all existing state and federal highway agencies to wield supreme road-building authority. Adams differed with all that, preferring to stick with the tried-and-true federal-state partnership.