The most courageous opponent of the water projects was Butler Derrick, a tall, good-looking, South Carolinian with a syrupy Southern accent and a razor-sharp mind, whose district abutted Georgia. He explained that he, like many of his young colleagues, had no ties to the traditional Democratic Party establishment. The recent law permitting political action committees (PACs) allowed members to raise large sums of money independent of the party, and the new class came into Congress with the mind-set, in Derrick’s words, that they “were going to clean out the House and make things honest; everyone was for honesty back then.”52 He even opposed the Richard B. Russell Dam, which had been started in his district before he took office. Just as it was unheard of for a governor to do what Carter had done in blocking the Sprewell Bluff Dam in his state, it was a total break from tradition for a congressman to support a presidential hit list that targeted his own local water project.
To bolster Derrick’s courageous stand, Frank Moore assured him and his colleagues that Carter would veto the public works bill if they could muster enough votes to guarantee that his veto would be sustained.53 Before the climactic vote, Derrick went to the well of the House and delivered a remarkable speech: “I believe I have the credentials to stand before the members on this issue because I have a dam in my district that is going to cost the taxpayers of this country, by the time it is completed, one-half of one billion dollars. You can have it back; we do not want it. The citizens who live in my district and who work in the textile mills—the people who go in every morning and work an eight-hour shift—are going to be paying for these projects for the rest of their lives.”
Derrick was joined by Silvio Conte, a Massachusetts Republican, in cosponsoring an amendment to delete the 19 projects on the Carter hit list from the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill. Conte was a serious but colorful legislator who would occasionally wear garish outfits to make his point. This time it was a uniform like that of the captain of the HMS Pinafore, hat and all, to mock the artificial lakes that many of the projects would create. The emotions were raw on the day of the vote.
Derrick walked into the cavernous House chamber and saw Ray Roberts of Texas, powerful chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee and an avid supporter of water projects (for which he was rewarded by having the Ray Roberts Dam and Lake near Denton, Texas, named for him in 1980). “You boys won’t get a hundred votes,” Roberts said. Derrick replied, “Well, Mr. Chairman, we’ll see.” Roberts called Bob Edgar, an ordained minister and Carter ally, “The meanest minister I ever met.” The confrontations on the House floor became almost violent. Edgar remembers that Phil Burton, a voluble liberal Democrat from California, climbed over chairs to get at him, when “I was going after something in San Francisco he wanted.”54
DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY
To everyone’s astonishment, the Derrick-Conte amendment got 194 votes, more than enough votes to sustain Carter’s promised veto. When the final tally came in, Derrick exulted, “We’ve won this thing! We’ve won this thing!”55 His joy would soon turn to despair and anger because of another rookie mistake by the president. The unexpectedly narrow House defeat of the amendment alerted the Senate Appropriations Committee to move closer to Carter, and they did. The chief concern of the Senate floor manager of the public works bill, the courtly Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi, was to avoid a presidential veto by passing an acceptable bill that could survive in a conference committee with the House. Stennis urged: “Give the President some solid ground to stand on so he can sign this bill.” The bill eliminated funds for nine projects, and followed Carter’s recommendations to reduce and modify three. Finally the committee voted not to fund any new water project starts in fiscal 1978.
That left Carter in a good position for a House-Senate conference. The Senate had come halfway toward him, and he had assembled a veto-proof minority in the House. Now disaster came from inexperience and the president’s idiosyncratic way of making decisions in the early months of his administration. In lobbying for votes on his bills, he would dutifully call everyone on a list provided by the White House lobbying team, but he rarely horse-traded and would sometimes mistake the ambiguity of the standard congressional response: “Mr. President, I’ll do everything I can to help you.”56 And yet he was effective here, and more generally, through sheer force of will and intelligence, and a generally supportive Democratic congressional leadership.
After catalyzing a New Democratic–Republican coalition that stood by him at risk of retribution from their senior members and angry constituents, Carter, in one thoughtless three-minute phone call, threw them overboard without any consultation with his staff or his friends in Congress. I was with him in his private study on another matter when the president received a call from Speaker O’Neill on Friday, July 15. As recorded in the log, it came at 12:22 p.m.57 I could only hear the president’s end of the conversation, but when it was over he told me he had just reached a compromise with Speaker O’Neill on water projects. The House would agree to delete spending on several projects on the hit list, but only for this year, and would fund the rest. In return the president would not veto the public works bill.
I told the president he could not do this to our allies on the Hill; they would be outraged, and the supposed compromise would not actually kill any of the projects. The president had literally grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory. His young New Democratic allies and some moderate Republicans would feel they had been sold out, while the press and public would see him caving in to pressure from the establishment. I was stunned. When I told Frank Moore about it, he was also dismayed, having made a commitment to Derrick, and felt it was a mistake for Susan Clough, the president’s personal secretary, to put through the Speaker’s call without having others listening in on it.58
At my urging, and in order to ensure that Derrick would not read about it on the wire services first, the president called him at 12:27 p.m. for a seven-minute conversation. Derrick related to me his sense of shock when the president told him he would withhold his veto. He told Carter: “Mr. President, I don’t believe that. You know Frank Moore told me you would veto the bill.” And Carter replied, “I made a sort of arrangement with Tip that has something to do with the [Clinch River] nuclear plant.” A shaken Derrick repeated: “Mr. President, I don’t believe that. You know Frank Moore told me that you would veto the bill.” He told Carter he was making a “bad mistake, and I think that it will hurt you in your dealing with the Congress for the rest of your administration.” Derrick reflected years later that he had been right, and that after this fiasco Carter “did not enjoy the kind of relationship he should have had with Congress.”59 And Derrick’s colleagues, who had gone into the trenches with the president, full of what Derrick called “vim and vigor” to end the old order, had bucked the system and came away with nothing to show for it.
Derrick was so angry when he called Moore, he was “sputtering,” reminding him of his unfulfilled promise of a presidential veto. Now a dam would be built in his district over his objection and he would get no credit.60 Derrick gave Moore’s assistant Jim Free a tongue-lashing unlike any he ever received before or since61 and vented his anger to the Washington Post.62 For good measure, Free said that Conte “went even more berserk.” The president’s environmental allies issued a blistering statement against the compromise he made with the Speaker, calling it a “complete cave-in.”63 Andrus was also mystified, since everyone in his Interior Department and the environmental community had worked so hard to round up enough votes to support the president’s position.
Free later pieced the story together from the Speaker’s end: Majority Leader Wright had told the Speaker that the president would be able to sustain a veto and urged O’Neill to persuade Carter to back down and accept a deal that would stop a project known as the Clinch River Breeder Nuclear Reactor, which Carter opposed. O’Neill called the president, played on the fact that Carter was new in town, and said something to the effect that they had to work
together on many issues but right now there was already blood in the water. He continued: “And you, Mr. President, do not need to veto this.” Free concluded that Carter “fell for the story that [it] would be good in the long run for him not to get in this head-on fight with these guys the first quarter he was in town. So he took the deal.”64 O’Neill himself had other fish to fry: He needed federal money for a huge tunnel known as the “Big Dig” to sink an interstate highway underground and revive the Boston Waterfront, and he required the support of Bevill and the other public works appropriators.65
But Congress and the press saw the compromise as a sign of weakness, and Moore sadly concluded: “In his first major legislative initiative he caved; everyone saw that he could be pushed around; and after that they said this guy can be rolled.”66 So in his initial confrontation, the president blinked, and let the old politics he had come to change defeat the new politics of the broader public interest he wanted to embody.
There were broader ramifications. Free believed that a new bipartisan coalition had been formed in this battle, and that the president could have deployed it again—including the young Democrats plus Republicans like Conte, David Stockman of Michigan (who would later become President Reagan’s budget director), and even future vice president Dan Quayle, all of whom wanted to rein in wasteful spending and change the old ways of Washington. It also opened a gap between young, reform-minded Democrats and the entrenched Democratic leadership. Free felt it confirmed a congressional suspicion that Carter and his Georgia coterie could not be trusted: “They’re not one of us; they didn’t understand the politics of what they had in their hand, when he just pulled the rug out from under us.”67
The Senate-House conference report did not permanently kill any of the projects, only delayed funding for one year. To rub it in, one of the nine water projects still funded was the Richard B. Russell Dam. When Carter signed the bill on August 7, he said he did not consider the battle finished. The whole bloody battle would have to resume again next year, sucking out more political oxygen.
LESSONS LEARNED AFTER THE BATTLE
Jimmy Carter does not accept defeat easily, and learned lessons from his retreat. We began early to try to pick up the shattered pieces of our package. It was not easy, given the initial sense of betrayal. And yet, so great was the initial debacle that the steps he took the following year, which had long-term positive environmental and budget benefits for the country, are hardly remembered today—something that might be said of so much of the Carter presidency.
The basic approach in our next budget was to recommend funding only those projects that met our economic and environmental criteria. We warned Carter that the Russell dam was so strongly supported in the Senate that we could not succeed in deleting it without vetoing the entire public works appropriations bill in an election year. We gave him several options, and he chose the most draconian: “Delete all projects funded by Congress against our recommendation”—but he wrote in by hand “with some exceptions.” He decided to take an uncompromising approach once again, and when he met in June 1978 with the House and Senate members who had supported him on water projects, Carter conceded he had made a mistake in not vetoing the previous year’s appropriations bill. 68
A series of events at the White House were organized to build pressure on Congress. Recognizing that we were gaining the upper hand, Johnston, Tom Bevill, and Wright asked the president to consider a compromise on the Public Works Appropriations Bill to be sent to Congress in 1978. We told the president that we now felt we were sufficiently strong and advised him not to move far from his position and offer at most a limited compromise, and only after consulting with our House allies.
Our public works strategy was to set strict terms blocking the revival of any projects terminated in the first year, use the administration’s new selection criteria for future projects, and under no conditions accept extremely bad projects—without creating any kind of politically explosive hit list. We would discuss specific projects only if firm agreement was reached first on an acceptable cap on total spending. That meant Congress could no longer open a federal tap and expect it to flow unhindered. The sophistication of this strategy showed how far we had come in our appreciation of how to achieve results. But it still took continuing presidential pressure to establish a new and more economical paradigm for public works: He also had to veto the 1978 public works bill. He did so, and his veto was sustained. While the once-burned Derrick congratulated the president in an October 1978 letter on his “stunning victory,” the lingering bitterness of the 1977 episode would not go away. Years later Derrick told me he barely remembered the successful 1978 veto.69
* * *
The storm-tossed two-year journey over water projects proved to be an early metaphor for the Carter presidency: In the short term it seriously damaged his relationship with Congress and underscored for a skeptical press corps and Washington establishment that the president did not have a first-class White House team to augment his own inexperience. Success eventually came only in the most politically maladroit way.
Yet Carter’s vision proved true in the long run. “Ultimately,” he noted, “I was able to block many ill-advised projects, as well as bring significant reforms to the system.”70 And the policies he planted bloomed with the help of former representative Stockman when he became Ronald Reagan’s budget director. Reagan built on Carter’s accomplishments but helped the medicine go down in his own disarming way. Adopting a Carter proposal, in the 1986 Water Resources Development Act, he implemented local cost sharing, which stopped many projects dead in their tracks. Reagan would say, in effect, “I love water projects. I am from the West and I know their importance. But fellas, we just can’t afford them all. You understand?”71
After all the smoke had cleared, the environmental activist Brent Blackwelder concluded that Carter had achieved a major accomplishment even at a huge political cost. He felt that Carter legitimized the criticism of dams and other environmentally damaging water projects and “unleashed a giant new vision in which the U.S. is number one in the world in protecting its most outstanding rivers.”72 With the veto of the second public works bill, Carter brought rationality to the consideration of new water projects, eliminated a number of costly ones, and saved taxpayers billions of dollars.73 But there was an even-longer-term benefit, because Carter’s battle over water projects was the opening shot at the practice of legislators earmarking local projects that were sacrosanct from review; this ended when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2011, a ban that continues to this day.
Jimmy Carter gets the last word. Years later, he wrote that when he and Rosalynn stopped in Thomaston, Georgia, where the Sprewell Bluff Dam would have been built, “many people come up to me and confess that they cursed me profoundly when I vetoed the dam. But now they are thankful for my having done it. They are glad that the Flint River was saved. Those people have—we all have—a precious possession along that river.”74 What Jimmy Carter reflected on in later life about saving the river in his own backyard can be extrapolated to many places around the United States.
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ALASKA FOREVER WILD, DESPITE ITS SENATORS
Nothing better demonstrated how far President Carter’s legislative and political skills had been honed since the fiasco of the Water Wars than what he accomplished by negotiating, securing passage, and signing into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. And he accomplished it in 1980 as a lame duck president after his loss to Ronald Reagan, with one foot out of the Oval Office door. Without exaggeration it is one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation in the nation’s history. Its scope was breathtaking. It added more than 157 million acres of national parks, national wildlife refuges, national monuments, wild and scenic rivers, recreational areas, national forests and conservation areas, created ten national parks and preserves; two national monuments; the huge Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and nine others; two national conservat
ion areas; and twenty-five wild and scenic rivers. But it was balanced legislation, opening 95 percent of the state for unrestricted oil and gas exploration.
Before he could achieve this historic environmental legacy, however, he was faced with a challenge that would have left it stillborn two years earlier. More than eighty million acres of land were set aside for conservation under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, passed in the Nixon administration to clarify the land rights of the indigenous people after the discovery of oil off Alaska’s coast at Prudhoe Bay. An additional forty-five million acres were set aside by Nixon’s interior secretary, Rogers C. B. Morton, but would be reopened for development if Congress did not act by December 18, 1978.
Multiple efforts to resolve the outstanding issues foundered in Congress, and in the autumn of 1977 Representative Mo Udall, a committed environmentalist from a pioneer Arizona family, introduced a bill with sweeping conservation provisions designed to protect what he described as the “crown jewels of Alaska.” It brought out in full force Alaska’s political and business leadership and energy companies, fearing that passage would limit their access to the area’s vast natural resources. The state’s two senators, Republican Ted Stevens and Democrat Mike Gravel, united against the bill, although they bore both political and personal grievances against each other arising from an airplane crash in 1978 that took the life of Stevens’s wife and almost killed him, for which, rational or not, he blamed Gravel for delaying his departure with dilatory action in the Senate. The two rivals joined to write their own limited bill designed to drag out the legislative process until some provisions of the Settlement Act expired, returning the land to eligibility for development. With only two months to the December deadline, Stevens met with Carter in October 1978 to indicate he was willing to negotiate with the White House and blamed Gravel for the impasse. The best the president could obtain was Stevens’s commitment to work out a compromise in early 1979, too late to protect the huge area.1 Carter knew the clock was ticking and thereupon took one of the boldest domestic decisions of his presidency.
President Carter Page 33