The next day Carter’s inclination toward confrontation when challenged on a principled stand was reinforced by a letter from sixty-two members of the House, and twelve senators, supporting his water reforms.18 Then he called me from his small study to ask me to work with the budget specialists on a statement for Congress to “delete money for all water resource programs.”19 We came up with several options in a February memorandum to the president, intentionally leaving blank the total number of projects to be killed until we met the next day. They ranged from green-lighting all water projects that had already been funded and stopping only new projects for a review; slowing down all of them but not killing any; killing only all the new ones permanently; allowing most to continue but stopping a few of the worst as a shot across the bow; and, most radically, killing all water projects that had not been completed, and stopping any new ones. In our memo, we also warned that “the more projects chosen for deletion, the more political heat we will face from Congress.” More likely, we said, Congress would approve them all, including those on his hit list, and that he had to be prepared to stand up to one of Capitol Hill’s most favored programs, and face down many of his own Democratic supporters with a veto. We offered Andrus’s preferred outcome as an “Option B”—kill two or three of the outright worst and delay or reduce funding for the rest of the questionable projects pending a policy review.20
But fatally, and incorrectly, we concluded on the basis of advice from our chief lobbyist, Frank Moore, that “this option would seem to raise almost as much potential heat as deleting funds for those 35 projects.” This was cosmically bad advice, in which I fully implicate myself for not objecting more strongly. In Moore’s defense, he had never asked for his job as congressional liaison, was new to it at the time, and admitted that he did not know Congress had any voice in the president’s water projects budget.21 Over the years he redeemed himself, with the help of talented young, Hill-savvy aides.22 Carter eventually matched the record of any modern president in winning congressional passage of his legislation. But this record never caught up with the bitterness that arose from the fiasco of the water projects in the formative months of the administration.
* * *
The key officials met on February 17, less than a month after the inauguration. The heavy snow of that unusually cold winter was still on the ground of the Rose Garden. In the Cabinet Room the banners of major battles hung from the American flag, along with the personal flag of the president of the United States. The fireplace crackled with a newly made fire, but the historic room also radiated with political tension.23 At the meeting with the president were Secretary of Defense Harold Brown; Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander, to whom the Corps of Engineers reported; two Corps generals; Bert Lance, just starting out in office; and the staffers like myself who had worked on this issue. Notably absent for such a crucial political decision was Ham Jordan and Jody Powell. Even though government-supported water was the lifeblood of the American West, the president was about to be seen as declaring war on the West. It mattered little that there were an equal number of projects in key states east of the Mississippi.24
The president began by declaring that he wanted to be a partner with the Corps but that he nevertheless wanted to delete thirty-five projects from the Ford budget and quickly undertake a study to assess them under “new priorities.” A generation ago, he said, no one raised any environmental concerns, but “I am concerned now.” Andrus intervened forcefully to argue against deleting all thirty-five projects, only some of which were bad. He prophetically warned of a congressional coalition against Carter, once again recommended picking out several projects as bad examples so that “the rest of the Congress will side with you and we can get rid of some of the big dogs, and that will mark a change in the way we do business in the future.”25 Mondale agreed; Army Secretary Alexander urged the president to start by developing criteria to measure the effectiveness of the water projects and only then decide which ones to delete from the budget. “Otherwise,” he said, “it will appear that the thirty-five were arbitrarily chosen.” Andrus agreed: “Don’t take the heartburn while you are looking at the projects.” On the question of money already appropriated by Congress, Carter said he did not simply want to rescind funding; he wanted a total stop to new projects.26
So the heavy hitters—Mondale, Lance, Andrus, Alexander, Brown—all came down urging a cautious, incremental approach. Hearing their persuasive arguments, I also recommended against listing such a large number of projects and urged sending a short list to Congress. The president should have listened to this advice but did not, showing his inflexibility on what he considered a matter of principle. He could have made his point by starving a few of the worst projects and setting in motion a policy process with Congress to develop more honest criteria for the rest. This would have avoided the firestorm that would soon engulf us. Instead the president agreed to take fewer than thirty-five but decided to pick out all those that could not be justified on a cost-benefit basis, and ones where work had just started. Where heavy construction was already under way, the projects should not be put up for review. But he ordered, “Stop the ones without large contracts,” and his last, fateful directions were to “put as many as possible to delete” and not just sidetrack them for study.
As the president left, the happiest person in the Cabinet Room was Crabill, who spent his career at OMB overseeing egregious water projects he was not powerful enough to kill on his own. But Andrus had a different view. When the president asked him to come up with a list of the worst of the worst, Andrus was happy and went home that night to tell his wife, “We just averted disaster.” He planned to send Carter a short, slimmed-down list the following week. But the next morning he flew home to Idaho, and when he landed a reporter shoved a microphone in his face and said, “What’s this hit list?” Andrus was dumbfounded and told me later he did not know what the reporter was talking about. He grabbed the wire-service story out of his hands, saw that it contained the full list of suspect projects, and assumed someone at the meeting had leaked the list to the press. We did cut almost by half the number of targeted projects to 19. But now, as Andrus put it, “The fat was in the fire, the hit list came out and then we were fighting a defensive war.”27 Andrus was unfairly blamed for the hit list, and the New York Times reported he “is popular with most environmentalists, but in much of the West, environmentalists are as popular as a social disease.”28 This was Jimmy Carter’s decision through and through, and he had to live with the consequences.
Carter then formally announced a major review of water resource projects and threw down the gauntlet to Congress by announcing that his budget would cut off funds for nineteen that “now appear unsupportable on economic, environmental and/or safety grounds,” and they would be reviewed with a view to saving $5.1 billion. He told Congress he would work closely with members “to develop a coherent water resource policy,” but the horse was out of the barn. The hit list had been developed without a moment of consultation with Congress and no opportunity for the champions of the 19 deleted projects to make their case.29
One particularly sensitive project not on the list was an obvious sore point for environmentalists and fiscal conservatives, because it carried what looked like a political exemption. The Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway, or TennTom as it was called, ran through Bevill’s district and would connect the Tennessee and Tombigbee Rivers, offering a shorter route for Ohio River valley coal and other commodities heading to the Gulf of Mexico for export.30 Even the president recognized the political problems of trying to kill it. Representative Bob Edgar, a Pennsylvania Democrat allied with Carter in the Water Wars, described the project as “moving more dirt than was moved to build the Panama Canal.” And they were just justifying it because they were going to move more coal than existed in Kentucky and Tennessee and rerouting the Tennessee River.31
Even worse, keeping it off the hit list did not in the least soften Bevill’s intense opposition, because his
power depended upon being able to deliver projects for other members of his subcommittee and not just himself as its chairman. By the time the White House started to notify members whose districts and states were directly impacted by the projects on the hit list, they had already read about it three days before the president’s announcement in the Washington Post under a banner headline, no less inflammatory because it was slightly inaccurate: “Carter Will Ask Hill to Halt Aid to 18 Major Water Projects.”32
The reaction from the key members of Congress who focused on public works was one of outrage, which was only intensified by the way the White House formally delivered the bad news.33 Jim Free, the lead White House lobbyist in the House on the water projects, was given a list of congressmen whose projects had been dropped from the president’s budget and told to call them. Admitting he was green and did not appreciate the gravity of his message, he recounted that he telephoned Arizona Republican Mo Udall and announced: “Hi, I’m Jim Free from the White House and I’m calling to let you know that the president is eliminating the Central Arizona project.” And Udall said, “What is your name?” And for years after that Mo Udall would have fun at dinner parties recounting the story and saying, “I never forgot Jim Free’s name.”34
Bevill maintained his support for the completion of the TennTom project, a boondoggle that took twelve years and cost $2 billion of taxpayer money to complete.35 Today there is a Tom Bevill Lock and Dam, one of four such structures, and a nearby Tom Bevill Visitors Center at Pickensville, Alabama. Carter had inherited a deficit of $73.7 billion, until then the largest in history, and wanted to reduce it by curtailing pork-barrel spending. If all 19 projects had been deleted, the savings during his first fiscal year would have amounted to a grand total of $289 million, and $5.1 billion over the life of their construction cycle.36
If Carter had applied any sort of cost-benefit analysis to the political price of these relatively piddling savings, he might have realized he would come out a huge loser. But he did not, and he lost big. At one meeting about a hundred congressional Democrats told Andrus that this was the worst political development of their careers.37 At a presidential briefing of congressional leaders, they told him he simply did not understand what a threat this was to them.38
We held frequent meetings as we scrambled to develop a strategy. As March began, Carter, Mondale, Lance, Jordan, Moore, Bowman Cutter of OMB, and I held the kind of all-hands meeting that should have been called before any decision was made. But the president was in a feisty mood, calling me the next week to say we should go public with the worst four or five water projects on the list and explain the difficulty of balancing the budget unless we took this on: “I don’t want to back off,” and “I want to make a public fight of it so Congress sees they can’t push me around.”39 He got the fight he wanted.
The president belatedly recognized the political damage and tried to develop a rationale behind the list, and we held numerous meetings trying to come up with one that fit. Lieutenant General John Morris reported that the experts at the Corps he led had tried to pass 55 projects through a screen using the new and more realistic criteria; but there was no way to get down to just five of the worst. He came up with about 30 and pointed out that a number of projects were already well under way and could not realistically be cut out of the budget. I wrote a marginal note: “Shows the problem of barreling ahead w/o thinking through the consequences.”40
True to his principles, Carter even wanted to continue to keep a water project memorializing the esteemed late Georgia senator Richard Russell on the hit list. He finally agreed to issue a statement late in March that 337 water projects had been reviewed and 305 had been approved for future funding, while the other 32 would be assessed in the future. He instructed us: “Word it positively, but in a businesslike fashion.”41
Even so, the hit list landed in Congress like a small atom bomb. The gravamen of their complaint was that the president had usurped their congressional prerogatives: Making decisions on local projects was not his business. Bevill, California’s Harold “Bizz” Johnson, and Majority Leader Jim Wright, the titans of the Appropriations Committee, went berserk. As Jim Free witnessed, it became a “real mud fight.”42
I personally got a taste of the raw emotions involved when I was summoned to meet Wright in his magnificent Capitol office with some constituents who would be disadvantaged by cuts in the water projects. The elegance of the setting was quickly forgotten during the tongue-lashing applied to me and the White House for our peremptory action. Wright, a Texan, had a reddish complexion that seemed to turn to beet-purple, with the veins in his neck bulging as he leaned over and sharply criticized our lack of respect and consultation in trying to take away a congressional prerogative. And on the procedure, he was right.43
Russell Long, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, through which much of our domestic legislation would have to pass, was apoplectic. One of the threatened water projects was in his state of Louisiana, and when he met with Carter, Long went so far as to threaten to put the president’s economic stimulus package into a “deep freeze.”44 Another of the angriest senior senators was Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, a strong environmental champion and principal author of the Clean Air and Water Acts, who intimated he would hold up consideration of the budget resolution to save a project in his state.45 “No President should have the right, unilaterally, on his own, to frustrate a policy that has been made a part of the law of this land, in accordance with constitutional processes,” said Muskie. “When the executive aborts established procedures, I, as one member of the Senate, am going to look for anything I can fire back.” Senate Majority Leader Byrd went ballistic, saying that the president’s attempt to suspend projects that had already gone through environmental-impact statements, engineering studies, and cost-benefit analysis “rubs a raw nerve.” He was also aggravated by the absence of any prior consultation with senators.46
To show that this was not simply a war of words, the Senate on March 1 voted 65 to 24 to rebuff the president by supporting all nineteen water projects on his list that had previously been approved by the Congress. The anger rippled into other complaints—appointing Republicans to key posts in the administration without prior notice to Democratic senators, severely limiting access to the White House, and failing to notify Congress of pending appointments. To further retaliate, the Senate delayed confirmation of Guy Martin, Andrus’s key policy aide at the Interior Department. Even his friend, Senator Floyd Haskell from Colorado, withheld his vote until the administration would support the Narrows water project in his state.47
All this was particularly painful for Mondale, who had served in the Senate with them for a decade and had to bite his tongue over the amateur behavior of the inexperienced White House. As we tried to contain the congressional fallout, the president reluctantly agreed to exempt cuts from already contracted projects but grumbled, “It makes me sick to waste this kind of money.”48
The entire episode underscored all the weaknesses of the new president’s approach to his job: By compartmentalizing decisions he failed to make connections to other priorities, and this was compounded by his refusal to appoint a chief of staff to help him sort them out. He was leaping off a precipice without considering the political costs and too often stubbornly refused to listen to good advice. In Washington everything is connected. It does not mean that tough decisions should be avoided, but that their effect must be weighed against other goals, and only so many can be pursued at the same time. His decisions also highlighted what my deputy David Rubenstein called the president’s moralistic bent: “He just thought things were morally wrong. It wasn’t just economically or environmentally bad; they were morally wrong and I think he just thought people who were supporting these pork-barrel projects were corrupt people.”49
* * *
As we moved into May, the president asked me to develop a legislative strategy with the vice president to salvage the water projects initiative.50 The strategy was clear, but
it would be difficult: to create a sufficiently large coalition of young, reformist Democrats and budget conscious Republicans in the House for a veto-proof minority to block the entire $10 billion public works bill, of which the water projects were just a fraction. And then to use this to put pressure on the Senate committee to cut as many projects as possible. Now that the president had jumped into the water with alligators, we had to win to show he could mud-wrestle even the establishment of his own party early in his presidency.
He had natural allies in the newly elected Democrats from the post-Watergate classes, who, like Carter, were bent on changing the traditional ways of congressional politics. After the 1974 election, they had forced through major changes in the House of Representatives, most dramatically by ending the established principle that committee and subcommittee chairmen were selected by seniority and demanding they be selected by a vote of the whole Democratic caucus. This unseated five committee chairmen. Many came from traditional Republican districts and were, like the new president himself, New Democrats—fiscally moderate and socially liberal reformers.
Carter reached out to the Democratic young Turks and fiscal conservative Republicans, inviting them to the White House, where they affirmed their support for the hit list of water projects. They left the meeting energized and ready to work with their fellow reformer. They knew they could not get a majority to support Carter, but needed at least 144 votes in the House to sustain a veto and believed they could prevail if he actually did so, sending the bill back to Congress to reopen and examine the barrel of pork buried in the legislation.51
President Carter Page 32
