The President and the Apprentice by Irwin F. Gellman

Author:Irwin F. Gellman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

What about Hells Canyon? The proposal to dam the Snake River at Hells Canyon, near the Oregon-Idaho border, had been controversial throughout the 1950s for both fiscal and environmental reasons. Eisenhower opposed federal funding of hydroelectric power projects and would likely have vetoed a bill for this one had it come to his desk, but it never did. Legislation to fund the Hells Canyon dam was taken up by the House Subcommittee on Irrigation and Reclamation, part of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, in February 1957, and defeated on a sixteen-to-fourteen vote in mid-July. It never came to the floor of the House. In a front-page story about the vote on July 19, the New York Times quoted Jack Westland, Republican from Washington and a member of the subcommittee, saying that “the nation cannot and should not finance all water resource developments with Federal funds.” The Times did not equivocate about the project’s immediate future: it reported that the House had “killed a bill today for a Federal Hells Canyon dam.”

This was fourteen days before the Senate voted on the southern bloc’s amendment to the civil rights bill, and twenty days before it passed the modified bill. It is hard to believe that any senator—especially one who strongly supported civil rights, as many of the western senators did—would have traded away his vote on such a visible and highly contested moral issue for a project that the House had already rejected. The absence of any mention of such a deal in the primary documents leads overwhelmingly to one conclusion: they didn’t.98

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