William E. Warne Oral History Interview

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the William Warne oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened February, 1989
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[1]

JOHNSON: I would like to begin, Mr. Warne, by getting a little background. Would you tell me when and where you were born, and what your parents’ names are?

WARNE: Yes, I was born in a little place, on a farm really, near a crossroads town called Seafield, Indiana, on September 2, 1905. Seafield doesn't exist anymore; it scarcely existed then. It was about 15 or 20 miles north and a little bit east of Purdue University. It was near the Tippecanoe River, about 10 miles west of Monticello, county seat of White County. My parents were William Rufus Warne and Nettie Jane Williams Warne. They were both born in Ohio, in Pike County, Ohio, in the 1870’s. Dad moved to Indiana and helped drain some of the land that eventually became White County, Indiana.

[2]

JOHNSON: Is this a farm?

WARNE: A farm, yes.

JOHNSON: You grew up on a farm?

WARNE: We moved to California when I was eight years old. My dad was a pioneer in the Imperial Valley on the irrigation project that was using Colorado River water in the reclamation of the desert south of the Salton Sea and north of Mexico. So I grew up there. He had a dairy farm. We lived on that farm throughout the rest of my boyhood. I went to a two-room country school called Alamo, and to the Holtville, California, Union High School.

JOHNSON: This was all in the Imperial Valley?

WARNE: All in the Imperial Valley. Holtville Union High School was about eight and a half miles north and west of our farm.

JOHNSON: Do you have brothers and sisters?

WARNE: I have, yes. I have four brothers, three of them older than I, and one younger, but no sisters. One by one, as we graduated from high school, we all went to

[3]

the University of California at Berkeley. There was only one University of California then. My oldest brother matriculated there in 1915.

JOHNSON: What was his name?

WARNE: Merrill; he's still living, now at 92 retired in the City of Burlingame, California. My youngest brother graduated in 1929, so we had a good long stretch at the university. He, J. Milton, is an orchidist of more than 50 years standing in Honolulu, known worldwide among orchid breeders.

JOHNSON: All of you got a degree from the University of California at Berkeley?

WARNE: All except the eldest one, who enlisted in the First World War and got married and never went back to finish his education. He had a couple of years at the university, but the rest of us graduated, yes.

JOHNSON: What was your major at the university?

WARNE: My major was English. Dad wanted us all to get into agriculture and come back to the farm. The other four did study agriculture, but none of them went back to the

[4]

farm in the Imperial Valley. I was the only one who went into the English Department. I wanted to be a writer, a newspaper man.

JOHNSON: How large a farm was this, by the way?

WARNE: Dad had 160 acres, which was standard in those days.

JOHNSON: Was that under the Homestead Act?

WARNE: The land was originally under the Homestead Act, but Dad got there too late to homestead this particular farm.

JOHNSON: Do you have any idea what he paid per acre for that land in those days?

WARNE: Oh, it wasn’t more than $100. It had a crop of alfalfa on it.

JOHNSON: And you had to milk cows?

WARNE: Yes, I milked 17 cows night and morning and went to high school during my senior year. I was 17 years old at that time.

JOHNSON: Hand milked?

WARNE: Hand milked, yes. We didn’t have electricity in the Imperial Valley during my boyhood. Milking machines came

[5]

later. I never had anything but a coal oil lamp to do my homework by until after I went to the university in August of 1923.

JOHNSON: When did they get electricity in that valley?

WARNE: After the Boulder Dam was finished, and the All American Canal. Then the Imperial Irrigation District, under agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation, which built the All American Canal, put power plants in at drops along the canal and electrified the Valley. As a matter of fact, the Imperial I.D. serves power in the Coachella Valley as well. The Coachella Valley is north of Salton Sea. So it's quite different down there now. The Imperial Valley is no longer a desert frontier. Imperial is one of the leading agricultural counties in the country.

JOHNSON: So Boulder Dam, or Hoover Dam, made a real difference, a considerable difference.

WARNS: That it did, and it made a difference to me personally. The first public meeting I ever went to, my dad took me to a Farm Bureau meeting in the Alamo schoolhouse. I must have been ten years old.

JOHNSON: Is it that two-room school you were talking about?

[6]

WARNE: Yes, in the Alamo schoolhouse which was about a mile west of our farm. An old fellow got up -- I remember his name was Mark Rose -- he was a farmer and he was, I believe, running for the Irrigation District Board at that time. He said, "We must have a dam on the Colorado River to prevent the floods and to give us water during the dry summers." I had observed what happened when the floods came. I mean, the Colorado was a treacherous river, you know; it used to scare the thunder out of us during spring high flows. Then, the canals might be entirely dry late in the summer. The speech was very thrilling to me. I think it influenced the direction of my life. One of the great occurrences of my life was that I was in the Bureau of Reclamation when we finished the Boulder Dam. As a matter of fact, I made the first draft of the dedication speech that Franklin D. Roosevelt gave at the dam in September of 1935.

JOHNSON: Do you remember what year it was that this meeting took place at the Alamo schoolhouse?

WARNE: I figure that I was about ten years old, so it must have been 1915 or '16.

JOHNSON: So we still have about fifteen years to go before

[7]

a dam was completed?

WARNE: The dam was authorized in the Swing-Johnson Act which President Coolidge signed on December 22, 1928. They had started the railroad from Las Vegas, Nevada, out to the dam site in Black Canyon in the last year of Hoover's administration. The construction of the dam really got started when the Public Works Administration came into being in 1933 in FDR's first term. The PWA made an allotment to the Bureau of Reclamation of a sufficient amount of money to enable the letting of the major construction contract to the Six Companies, the contractor that built the dam.

JOHNSON: What was the most important lobby, would you say, that did make that dam possible?

WARNE: The most important lobby that made the dam possible was actually Phil Swing, who was the Congressman from Imperial and San Diego Counties at that time. Well, his district was wider than that, since we had fewer people then. The Imperial Irrigation District was deeply involved, and there was an outfit called, I think, the Irrigation District Association. The state engineers, or water resources directors, of the seven Colorado River

[8]

Basin states were advocates. And the City of Los Angeles. They were the main ones, as I remember it. The City of Los Angeles was the principal actor in Southern California at that time. It was interested in a source of power and a future augmentation of its water supply. Los Angeles was a very dynamic, even aggressive city at that time.

JOHNSON: They needed the drinking water, and water for industrial uses, at that time?

WARNE: They were really after power in the City of Los Angeles at that time. But, yes, L.A. and 15 other cities or water agencies on the Southern California Coastal Plain were seeking new water sources. The Imperial Valley farmers needed flood control; the river had broken into the valley in 1905 and formed the Salton Sea. The irrigated lands are all below the elevation of the river, most of them below sea level. Between 400,000 and 500,000 acres are watered in the Imperial Valley.

JOHNSON: Oh, I see. Well, how was Los Angeles getting its water?

WARNE: At that time, Los Angeles was getting water out of Owens Valley to the north, in an aqueduct that the city built in the early 'teens. In 1930 -- that was while

[9]

preliminary work on the dam was being started -- Southern California organized to take water from the Colorado River. The City of Los Angeles and some 15 other cities organized the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which is the dominant regional water agency down there now. The MWD serves about 11,000,000 people in Southern California today. It was the MWD which built the aqueduct to the Colorado River, and signed the contract with the Interior Department for water from Lake Mead, the reservoir created by the dam. I don't know when the contract was signed; it was fairly early; signed by Secretary Wilbur before the advent of Harold L. Ickes in Interior.

JOHNSON: You got your bachelor's degree, with a major in English from the University of California at Berkeley, in what year?

WARNE: In 1927.

JOHNSON: What did you do at that point?

WARNE: I went back to the Imperial Valley from the university and managed to become the news editor of the Brawley News, a little daily paper. Brawley is one of the

[10]

leading towns in the Imperial Valley; it is in the northern part of the Valley. One of my brothers was a teacher in the Brawley Union High School at that time. He spent his entire career in Brawley, eventually retiring as Superintendent of Schools there. He is retired now and living in San Diego.

JOHNSON: And how long were you editor there?

WARNE: Oh, the rest of the year 1927. Then I went to Calexico, which is a border town, as news editor of the Calexico Chronicle, a small daily with a Spanish weekly edition that circulated in Mexicali, the sister city across the border in Mexico. I became the string correspondent for the Associated Press while in Calexico. That's a pretty good news center. The AP didn't have any way of covering northwestern Mexico except by telephone and with me down in Calexico. As a stringer, I think I got ten cents an inch for whatever the AP used, but my pay got significant enough because of many news stories that they thought they ought to take me on their staff. In August of 1928, the AP asked me to come up to Los Angeles to become an editor in the Los Angeles Bureau of the Associated Press. I was with the Associated Press then in Los Angeles for three

[11]

years. I was night manager of the Bureau during the last year. I met my wife there in 1928; we were married a year later in July, 1929.

JOHNSON: What’s her name?

WARNE: Her name was Edith Peterson.

JOHNSON: A Swede.

WARNE: Yes, she is a Swede. Both of her parents were born in Sweden, though they have lived in California since 1894 or ’95.

JOHNSON: So you are living in Los Angeles now, moving from Calexico to Los Angeles.

WARNE: Correct. While in Brawley and Calexico, I followed closely the progress of the Swing-Johnson bill in the Congress and covered local angles on the campaign for control of the Colorado River.

JOHNSON: Quite a change from Calexico to Los Angeles.

WARNE: Yes. I had a room in Pasadena. One of my university friend’s mother was running one of those -- it wasn’t quite a boarding house; you’d call it a motel now -- but

[12]

motels hadn't developed to the extent then of earning a distinctive name. I met my wife in Pasadena.

In 1931 the Associated Press decided to open a bureau in San Diego. San Diego was in many ways much like it is today, except that then it was only about one-tenth as big. I was sent to San Diego to open the new bureau. And again, I did a lot of reporting on the subject of water, as I had in Brawley and Calexico. The Colorado River Aqueduct was going into detailed planning at that time. San Diego had the problem of how it was going to get water that had been allocated to it over the mountains from the Colorado River. I was following the developments pretty carefully.

Then in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt became the President, the whole center of the news world moved from New York to Washington. The moguls of the Associated Press wouldn't leave New York, so they had to beef up the Washington Bureau. Everything was sparking out of Washington at that time. The AP decided to bring into Washington 24 of the young reporters on its staff who had displayed familiarity with their areas, and give them regional assignments. I found myself drawn into Washington. Edith and I got there on September 15, 1933.

[13]

My assignment was to cover everything that happened in the capital that had any special news value to California, Arizona and Nevada.

I quickly found that most of the news of interest to these three states, that wasn't strictly national in character, was originating in the Interior Department or the Navy Department. So I more or less covered the Congressional delegations and those departments. I became well acquainted with Senators Hiram Johnson, of California, and Carl Hayden, of Arizona, for example, and the Congressional delegation from those states. The departmental coverage brought me in contact with [Harold] Ickes, who was then the Public Works Administrator, as well as the Secretary of Interior. It developed that I was the only one on the whole AP staff of 104 reporters who knew anything about western water problems, or irrigation, or actually hydro power developments. So I became the expert on those subjects. I came to the attention of Secretary Ickes and of Mike Straus who was then his assistant and Director of Information for the Public Works Administration.

JOHNSON: You did interview them for information for your newspaper?

WARNE: Always, yes.

[14]

JOHNSON: You went to the top?

WARNE: Oh, yes. Ickes had a press conference every week and next to the President's, it was the most active one in town. So I was there constantly. One day Mike told me, "Say, you know the Secretary said to me, 'Who is that young fellow who asks all those questions about reclamation?' That's Bill Warne of the AP." The Secretary said, "You get him over here." So they offered me a job with the Bureau of Reclamation.

JOHNSON: I guess you asked good questions then, which indicated you knew the subject.

WARNE: Ickes appreciated it. I got very well-acquainted with Secretary Ickes and Mike. I was with the Bureau in Washington, from June 1, 1935 until April, 1947, except that the Bureau, at Ickes' urging, used to loan me out to other agencies for short or longer periods of time.

JOHNSON: What was your first position?

WARNE: My first position was entitled "Editor." I soon found that the whole country was greatly intrigued by the construction program that the Bureau had underway. This was at the depth of the Depression. Everybody was interested

[15]

in efforts to start development again. I discovered that the Bureau had available, on a monthly basis, progress reports accompanied by good pictures of work in progress, wherever they had a major project. Of course, the construction of Boulder Dam was the biggest, and we had a splendid, an excellent, photographer there, Ben Glaha. I sent pictures to all of the large newspapers; every week at least three or four pictures that showed something going on. Most of them were Glaha's. In those days the major newspapers put out rotogravure sections on Sunday. The New York Times, for instance. Well, almost all of the real big papers did. I think there was scarcely a week went by that we didn't have one or two pictures of some large-scale construction work in the rotogravures, and sometimes a picture would take a whole page. This attracted not only the attention of such people as Harold Ickes but of others. I became the expert on the subject of irrigation in the Department and elsewhere in the Government as well.

JOHNSON: These pictures would be of irrigation projects, dam building...

WARNE: Dam projects, power plants, canals, farmers breaking new land, building new homes, new schools.

[16]

JOHNSON: And these were under the Bureau?

WARNE: Under the Bureau. We were opening some desert land. Some of the pictures would be of farmers out developing land, leveling it and planting their first crops. It was a stimulating work, and the President was much interested in it -- President Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt.

JOHNSON: Did this include the remedying of erosion, erosion problems? Did they deal with that?

WARNE: We in the Bureau didn't deal directly with the erosion problem. Ickes made a grant of Public Works funds to set up a Soil Erosion Service, as it was called at first. It was a separate agency.

JOHNSON: It became Soil Conservation?

WARNE: It became the Soil Conservation Service, and the President moved it over to the Department of Agriculture, which wasn't particularly what Harold Ickes had in mind. But that happened. I went out with Dr. Hugh Bennett, director of SCS two or three times, to some of his projects, because some of the things that SCS was doing were not unlike some of the things we were doing on our irrigation projects in the arid regions.

[17]

JOHNSON: Dr. Hugh Bennett?

WARNE: Yes, he was the director of the Soil Conservation Service.

JOHNSON: Oh, I see. What positions did you go through before you became Assistant Commissioner, or Commissioner, of the Bureau?

WARNE: I was made Director of Information which put me in charge of a relatively small staff, but also a staff that I established in our District offices out in the field. As the Director of Information, I was loaned by John Page, who was then the commissioner, to the National Resources Planning Board, their Water Committee, as a writer and an editor in the preparation of a magnificent report called "Drainage Basin Programs and Problems," under the date of 1936. Then, the next year we put out a revision under the same title, but dated 1937, and this brought me face-to-face with the problems of resource planning in the development of the nation. I got curious about what the Bureau was doing with regard to the forward planning of the next step of such programs as the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project, where we had construction of the Grand Coulee Dam going like the wind, you know. The

[18]

plan included diversion of water to irrigate a vast area in the Big Bend. So I raised the question of how were we going to develop that land. A million acres in the Big Bend area of Eastern Washington is what we were shooting at at first. No one had an answer to my question. It was a bigger job than the Bureau had ever undertaken and our engineers were all more or less wound up in the construction phase of these great projects.

I went to the Commissioner and suggested that we get Dr. Harlan H. Barrows, of the University of Chicago, who was co-chairman of the Water Committee that put out the two reports that I mentioned, and with whom I worked very closely during the preparation of those two reports. I suggested that we set up a joint planning program for the Columbia Basin Project. Mr. Page said, "Well, okay." He would go for that if the White House thought well of it. Mr. Delano was then, I think, the head of the Resources Planning Board. Barrows and Delano talked to the President and he said, "Oh, this is wonderful." His idea was to make the farms of a size graded by the quality of the soil so that each farm would support a family of four and bring in enough income for them to send two kids to college. That was adopted as our planning objective.

[19]

We set up the planning project; Barrows and I were the co-directors of it. I was really the manager; he was the one who presided at our meetings and so forth. A wonderful man. The country's outstanding geographer.

JOHNSON: Advisor, sort of?

WARNE: That's right, an economic geographer of great distinction. And we paid him the munificent sum of $50 a day.

JOHNSON: In those days that was money!

WARNE: And a per diem of $7.50; that's more of a subsistence allowance than I got. So we set up joint investigations of the area; these involved the Department of Agriculture and local planning agencies and everybody. I think we had as many as 52 agencies involved on something like 28 identified problems. We had special committees working on each of them.

I remember that Major Roy F. Bessey, Counselor, National Resources Planning Board, stationed in Portland, Oregon, representing the Northwest Regional Planning Commission, was one of them, for example. He was on the committee that studied Problem No. 2, the task of selecting types of farming for the newly irrigated lands and methods of integrating them into the regional economy. Marion

[20]

Clawson was at that time in the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. He was put in charge of the Agriculture Department's coordinating committee for the joint investigations. I don't know whether you've interviewed him or not, but he has written a book recently called From Sagebrush to Sage, in which he spends a little time describing these studies.

We pursued the studies to a conclusion, and brought the reports out in 1943. The Columbia Basin Project Act of May 27, 1943, authorized the construction of the irrigation features of what theretofore had been called the Grand Coulee Dam Project. This Act embodied the findings and the plans that were worked out through the joint investigations. The war was going on in 1943. The President said, "We'll put that on the back burner, and have the project ready for the returning soldiers at the conclusion of the war." Of course, he didn't live to see that program through, but President Truman supported very strongly the Columbia River Basin Development Project in his term. We started actually executing the plan in about the year 1946.

At the conclusion of the First World War there had been a rush of returning soldiers back to the land. Reclamation projects that were ready for settlement in 1919

[21]

and 1920 were overrun. We expected something like a repeat performance of that to follow World War II. President Roosevelt wanted a maximum number of viable farm units to be planned for the vast new irrigated Columbia Basin Project. In his turn, President Truman supported the program that we devised. Work was begun on the canals and ditches almost immediately at the war's end.

At first there was a fairly lively interest in taking up the new farms when they were ready, but soon there was complaint that the units were too small to produce a level of living that the returning veterans anticipated, and the rush was to the cities and industrial jobs rather than to new farms.

About half of the planned 1,000,000 acres in the development was withdrawn from the project, part of it because the Hanford nuclear complex interdicted it, but most of it because large wheat farmers on the east side of the area did not want to subdivide their lands.

The Bureau proceeded, however, to provide water to new blocks of 50,000 acres, or so, on an annual program of expansion and settlement.

During the Eisenhower Administration, to the chagrin of a few of us who had worked on the planning of the project,

[22]

an amendatory act of October 1, 1962 removed many of the provisions of the 1943 Act that were designed to maximize the number of farm families to be settled and assist them in acquiring lands that had been dry land farms but that were to be purchased and resold by the Bureau in irrigable units of 60 to 180 acres. The 1962 Act substituted for these special provisions, worked out for the Columbia Basin Project, the standard 160 acre provision of the Reclamation Act of June 17, 1902.

I visited the area in 1983 when I went up to Grand Coulee Dam for the 50th anniversary of the start of its construction. The irrigated lands of the project are now well developed. The project is somewhat lop-sided, since the eastern half was not built on schedule. However, it is interesting to note that these wheat lands are gradually tending to come back into the project and new canals are being built to them.

JOHNSON: When did Truman first come to your attention? I suppose it was while he was Senator.

WARNE: Yes. I think he was on the Appropriations Committee, and I used to make presentations before the Appropriations Committee, but I don't think he served regularly on the

[23]

subcommittees that I appeared before most frequently.

JOHNSON: And you didn't have any connection or anything to do with the Truman investigating committee?

WARNE: No, not at any point, though I was aware of it. On loan from the Interior Department; yes, I spent the year of 1942 and part of 1943 on loan to the War Production Board in conducting what we called the War Production Drive. The objective was to get labor and management together and properly motivated for the switchover from civilian to war production. It was a very active program and quite successful, as a matter of fact. Senator Truman was briefed on that.

Ickes called me back from the War Production Board to the Interior Department in 1943. Well, most of the work of the Drive was done by that time anyway. I was then made the Assistant Director of the Power Division. The Power Division was first set up under Abe Fortas and Tex Goldschmidt, Arthur R. "Tex" Goldschmidt, Abe's assistant. Abe was moved to the Under-secretaryship of Interior, and then he went into the Army.

I was brought back to the Interior Department by the Secretary. Ickes always kept a string on me. I never was off the Interior Department's payroll, but I

[24]

worked for many different agencies. He brought me back as the Assistant Director of the Power Division, which Tex then headed. We had a good deal to do with the allocation of the power out of Grand Coulee Dam, including 100,000 KW allocated to "project X." I didn't know what "project X" was. I challenged the idea of dedicating that much power to an unknown project. A couple of colonels pulled out this order that said, "Top Priority, Top Secret." It turned out to be the Hanford nuclear plant, but its identify and purpose were not known to me until much later; after, indeed, we had built a second, redundant, transmission line from the dam to Hanford. The colonels simply said, "This project can't stand a power outage under any circumstances. It must have a second, back-up line." They had the top priority order, so we did it.

JOHNSON: So all you know was that it was "project X?"

WARNE: That's all, until the day after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. I was out there with a Congressional committee at Grand Coulee Dam, and they said, "Okay, now you can visit the project X." I was astounded at what had been done at Hanford.

JOHNSON: It is kind of interesting that electric power for

[25]

both the atomic bombs was drawn from Government sources.

WARNE: Actually, you know, it's almost inconceivable that we could have gotten that big a block of power, except from a new installation, and it was quite fortuitous that we had the Grand Coulee Dam and Power Plant ready to go at that time. It was quite fortuitous.

JOHNSON: Yes, I think that's written up; your involvement is written up in your book on the Bureau of Reclamation.* In other words, we probably don't have time to get into the details of that further.

WARNE: I don't know, yes...

JOHNSON: The Columbia Valley Authority, which became one of Truman's pet projects, something at least he promoted along with the Missouri Valley Authority...

WARNE: Yes.

JOHNSON: President Truman apparently was sold on the TVA idea, and that became, of course, a major issue as to whether there were going to be more TVAs.

WARNE: It certainly did.

*William E. Warne, The Bureau of Reclamation (New York, Praeger, 1973).

[26]

JOHNSON: Were you promoting the TVA-type projects in the Western states?

WARNE: I was promoting coordinated and comprehensive river basin development. As a matter of fact, I mentioned a moment ago, the 1936 report that we brought out. That was the report that changed the directions of not only the Bureau of Reclamation but of the Corps of Engineers, and the thinking of Congressional committees from an individual single-purpose project concept, to a multiple-purpose river basin planning and development program. I was very strong for that. I mean, I thought that was the solution to the ultimate development of our Western states particularly. You know, that was my major interest throughout. To duplicate the TVA at that time in the immediate postwar years -- for example, in the Missouri River Basin -- didn't seem to be possible. You couldn't get the states to permit the establishment of a regional administration. The states were too strong by that time, I think, at least in that area. They had very powerful Senators, O'Mahoney and...

JOHNSON: Now are you talking about Missouri Valley?

WARNE: I'm talking about the Missouri Valley.

[27]

JOHNSON: We had about eleven states, I suppose.

WARNE: Yes, eleven states in the arid region. So we got the principle established of regional development in our authorization of the Missouri Valley program.

President Truman's suggestion of a Missouri Valley Authority in the image of the TVA came after a similar coordination and development plan, lacking regional administration, had been authorized by approval of the Pick-Sloan plan in the Flood Control Act of 1944, which was signed by President Roosevelt on December 22, 1944. The so-called Hayden-O'Mahoney amendment was included in that Act as Section 9 calling for Comprehensive development of the Missouri River Basin and approving the House Document 475 and Senate Document 191, 78th Congress, second session, as revised and coordinated by Senate Document 247, 78th Congress, second session, which embodied the Pick-Sloan plan. I had worked on the coordination agreement, Senate Document 247, and was deeply involved in the negotiation that led to the Hayden-O'Mahoney amendment.

There has been a lot of derision thrown by some at the so-called Pick-Sloan Plan for the development of the Missouri Basin. Well, the Pick-Sloan Plan may have

[28]

been, as one of its critics said, "a loveless shotgun marriage of the Corps and the Bureau." But it nevertheless provided the framework for regional development.

Again, as a result of my work in the Columbia Basin Irrigation project, I was put in charge of trying to get the Missouri River Basin Program going. We established, again, joint commissions. We got the Governors of the basin states each to appoint someone to work on a conjoined plan. I never really got the Corps [of Engineers] to participate fully in our Missouri Basin Field Committee, but we got all of the Interior agencies and the agencies of the Department of Agriculture to participate. We set up the field committee in Billings, Montana. It had as its purpose the general coordination of the program.

At that time, less than 10 percent of the households in North Dakota and South Dakota and eastern Montana had available electricity. The people out there were getting along as I did as a boy in the Imperial Valley, without electric lights or power. The Missouri River Basin project has involved the construction of the power systems and the negotiating of the power service contracts by the Bureau and the Interior Department. The Corps always avoided getting involved in anything as controversial as electric power. The Flood Control

[29]

Act of 1944 put Interior in charge of marketing the power from all Corps dams, not just the great flood control dams on the Missouri River. Today, as a result of the Missouri Basin project, over 90 percent of all households in that area are electrified. I considered that a pretty good achievement. The Corps great flood control dams on the main stem of the Missouri River provide most of the power.

JOHNSON: And that's an outgrowth of the Pick-Sloan Plan?

WARNE: Absolutely, the result of it, yes.

JOHNSON: The building of the dams on the upper Missouri?

WARNE: The building of the dams, yes, and the marketing of the power from those dams. The Bureau has interconnected the Missouri River plants with the dams that eventually were built in the upper Colorado River Basin. They have a network now that covers the entire West, though part of that grid is by interconnection through other systems.

JOHNSON: It's a blend of private and public power?

WARNE: Part of it, yes.

JOHNSON: On that Missouri Valley Authority, did that go as far as Truman wanted it to go?

[30]

WARNE: No. No, I'm sure that it didn't.

Senator James Murray of Montana -- I believe that he and Mr. Truman had been good friends and had associated in many activities while the President was in the Senate -- introduced a bill to create an MVA, an authority patterned after the TVA, to conduct the Missouri Basin Development program. I do not remember now whether or not he had an MVA bill in the Senate when the 1944 Flood Control Act and its Hayden-O'Mahoney amendment were under consideration He either introduced his bill or reintroduced it, however, after Mr. Truman became President.

JOHNSON: President Truman wanted it more comprehensive?

WARNE: He wanted a more comprehensive one, yes, with a regional administrator. What we had may not have achieved all the objectives, but it did achieve the objectives of improving the quality of life, and improving the recreational and other amenities available to what really was a very depressed region.

JOHNSON: And then there was, of course, the flood control for the lower Missouri...

WARNE: That was achieved, yes, and the improvement of navigation below Fort Randall.

[31]

JOHNSON: ...which came a little late because of the '51 and '52 floods. Did you get involved in those problems?

WARNE: I was out here; I flew over the flooded area, but all you could do was wring your hands at that point. No, I don't think you could have expected to have achieved the flood control result as early as 1951. That didn't give enough time.

JOHNSON: Of course, that was mainly floods from Kansas or water from Kansas.

WARNE: It came right out of the Blue and the Kansas Rivers, much of it did, but the Missouri was high too.

JOHNSON: In '52 it was the upper Missouri I guess that flooded and that came down river. Those dams were built after '52, weren't they? We're talking about the late '50s, maybe.

WARNE: Fort Peck was built early, but it was so high up it couldn't control floods originating downstream. We had some of the new dams started, but we didn't have them finished at the time of those floods. I remember the Republican River in Nebraska went out of bounds and flooded everything in sight. I think that's the same time that you got it here in Kansas City.

[32]

JOHNSON: If we can get back to the Northwest again, which was one of your areas of expertise, I notice in our interview with C. Girard Davidson...

WARNE: I knew Jebby well. He and I worked together. He and I were Assistant Secretaries together under Krug for several years.

JOHNSON: He says here that so many agencies were involved, that is in the Northwest, that programs either bogged down or were constantly involved in jurisdictional disputes. Did you see that as a problem in the Northwest -- jurisdictional disputes?

WARNE: Well, in the planning of the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project, we didn't have jurisdictional disputes. Now, I'm not sure which programs Jebby was talking about there. He had one-half of the Department and I had the other at that time. And I don't know whether he felt that, as I'm pretty sure the Secretary did, that the Bonneville Power Administration was a pretty important element in our Northwest regional development, and might have been taken together more effectively with our Bureau of Reclamation programs. I was in charge of the Missouri River Basin, the coordination of the programs

[33]

there. Jebby was in charge of the Columbia River Basin for the upper level work. I mean the fact that I did the work on the irrigation project, and at one point was responsible in part for the allocation of the power out of Grand Coulee Dam, doesn't mean that I had charge of the program endeavoring to make a Columbia Valley Authority.

My work on the Columbia Basin Project was in a period earlier, largely, than when Jebby came into the Department as Assistant Secretary under Secretary Krug, which was in 1946 or thereabouts. Let me see, I was appointed Assistant Secretary by President Truman on May 15, 1947. Secretary Krug had succeeded Mr. Ickes about a year earlier, and as I recall it Jebby became an Assistant Secretary almost immediately. I was Assistant Commissioner of Reclamation from 1943 until Mr. Krug tapped me to succeed Warner Gardner as Assistant Secretary.

JOHNSON: Well, he apparently blames the defeat of the Columbia Valley Authority proposal on what he called "old line agencies" in the Departments who did not want decision-making transferred to the regions as well as lobbying by private power companies, especially of Senator Dworshak of Idaho.

WARNE: Yes. That could have been a reference to the Bureau

[34]

of Reclamation as well as others. I knew Dworshak very well. The Senator was an advocate of the reclamation programs, but not of public power. He fought rather successfully to keep the Bonneville Power Administration from extending its jurisdiction into southern Idaho. The BPA was Secretary Ickes' effort to gain regional power development in the Northwest. Jebby had been with the BPA. Certainly the Bureau of Reclamation bucked turning the Grand Coulee Dam power over to Bonneville. While the Bureau remains the operator of the power plants at the dam, and reserves an allocation of power to operate the pumps that provide irrigation water to the Columbia Basin Project, it was not otherwise successful ultimately in that contest with BPA.

JOHNSON: He also felt that Oscar Chapman did not like controversy and favored centralized authority in Washington, D.C., so there was both in the Department, as well as in the private power lobbies, resistance to the CVA.

WARNE: Yes, I'm sure that's true. As I say, Jebby was much more intimately connected with the CVA than I. Now I knew Dworshak very well, and worked with him on getting some development started on the Snake River. But, I

[35]

also recognize the fact that he was one of the ones who strongly opposed a regional authority. I mean he didn't even want the Bonneville Power Administration sticking its nose into Idaho. I'm not sure that it does yet, although I think Idaho participates in the power planning program now for all of the Northwest, including Idaho.

JOHNSON: Is the private power lobby in Idaho very strong?

WARNE: Very strong at that time, and I think still.

JOHNSON: They still elect Senators and Congressmen?

WARNE: I'm not sure. I don't believe [Senator Frank] Church was so strongly influenced by the private power lobby, but Dworshak was pretty...

JOHNSON: Well, I suppose he would consider himself "anti-big-Government." Was that the way that he would describe his position?

WARNE: Well, he wasn't very consistent in his descriptions.

JOHNSON: I guess Davidson even claims that Secretary Ickes and Reclamation Commissioner Michael Straus did not push CVA as they could have, or should have perhaps, because that would have been independent of the

[36]

Department of the Interior. It would have been an independent agency, and they would not have had jurisdiction over it.

WARNE: Well, I'm sure that Ickes was opposed to an independent regional authority. He even advocated having the TVA report through the Interior Department, you know. But I don't think he was opposed to the idea of a regional administration, provided it had an Interior Department flavor. Of course, when he insisted on that, he lost the support of a lot of other agencies. Now Mike Straus -- Mike was a program driver. I think he just brushed off the suggestion of a CVA and went ahead with his program. I was Assistant Commissioner under Harry Bashore and part of a year under Mike.

JOHNSON: But officially you had to support this CVA idea didn't you, because the President was promoting that Columbia Valley Authority?

WARNE: I'm sure that officially it was supported. But the leadership for a CVA was not in the Bureau of Reclamation, which had a large and dynamic program in the Northwest and elsewhere in the arid West at that time. I do not now recall any very strong pressures being applied from

[37]

above on Bashore or while I was with him on Mike Straus with respect to the CVA.

JOHNSON: But privately were you supporting CVA?

WARNE: In the Missouri. As I say, I didn't have any responsibility in the Columbia. In the Missouri I did my best for a Missouri Valley Authority, but I really thought it was better to salvage the program that we had worked out than to take a licking on the issue. I don't think President Truman ever held it against me or the Department; we did succeed in the Missouri in a major way with a coordinated and comprehensive program of development.

JOHNSON: Did you ever get to talk to President Truman?

WARNE: On that subject, not at all, no.

JOHNSON: On any other subject, did you ever get to meet him and talk to him at any time?

WARNE: I met him on several occasions, but I don't think I ever met him alone, as we are here, just across the desk. I think there was always someone else there, most of the time several others, and I didn't direct the interview.

[38]

JOHNSON: So you weren’t able to talk to him about the Missouri Valley Authority?

WARNE: No, although I sent memos on it.

JOHNSON: I guess Davidson also describes you as more "traditional, old-line Department."

WARNE: Well, I think he was right about that. I came up through the ranks. I was the first one at that level in the Department who had come up through the ranks. I would object to "traditional" if it were meant to exclude innovation. I think I introduced many changes and altered the directions of many activities.

JOHNSON: How about Secretary Krug? What’s your estimate of him as administrator and policymaker?

WARNE: I thought Krug was a good administrator. He was pretty careful on outlining his delegations and he delegated more authority than Ickes had before him. He had a pretty good system of review. He brought new blood in at an advisory level in his own office, and his program staff made some progress in eliminating bureaucratic controls over policy. With regard to his policies, I thought he was quite good on the public power issue and

[39]

on the 160-acre issue, which were two of the most controversial, and the two that absorbed most of my attention. Ickes was better on Indian matters.

JOHNSON: Public versus private power and the 160-acre limit, you say were the most...

WARNE: The two most controversial issues in my area. I was water and power assistant. Now, I don't recall "Cap" [Julius Krug] ever jumping up and down and hollering about we aren't pushing MVA hard enough. As a matter of fact, the MVA had already been pretty well pushed to the back burner before he came on as Secretary.

JOHNSON: But how was he as a public relations type, or a lobbying-type person?

WARNE: Well, I don't think he was as good as -- certainly not as good as Ickes.

JOHNSON: How does he compare with [Oscar] Chapman?

WARNE: In my view, Cap was a better administrator by far than Chapman. I think Chapman was much more adept as a political animal. And Chapman was very careful about his relationship with the President. He was better on the Hill, too. Cap was not uncareful but, for example,

[40]

if Cap were going to be out of town and they had a Cabinet meeting, he'd send Chapman to it. Oscar was his Under Secretary. When Chapman became Secretary, if he were out of town, he'd dash back. He never let anybody represent him at the White House.

JOHNSON: Was Krug what we call a hard worker? I think there is an impression that he was not a hard worker.

WARNE: I don't think that's true. I think Krug was a pretty hard worker. When he was in the field, he relaxed. I did not like to travel with him, and very seldom did.

JOHNSON: Always stuck to the job?

WARNE: As a matter of fact, yes, in Washington. I thought Krug did a pretty good job. Now his emphasis was far different from that of Ickes, for example. Ickes was much more devoted to the social and philosophical phases of the work. Cap was more interested in getting the ore out of the ground and...

JOHNSON: A pragmatic type.

WARNE: Very pragmatic in his administration.

JOHNSON: He came out of TVA...

[41]

WARNE: He came out of TVA. When I first met Cap, he was the Power Coordinator in the War Production Board, when I went back to Interior in the Office of Power. I think he was on loan from TVA at that time. Then he went down to TVA after WPB folded at the end of the war and he was in charge, I think, of the power program and operation down there. I don't know what influenced Truman to pick Krug as Ickes' successor, but his selection was quite a surprise in the Department.

JOHNSON: Would they have expected you, do you think, to succeed Ickes?

WARNE: No. No, I didn't have any ambitions in that regard. It never crossed my mind. So far as I know, no one ever suggested it.

JOHNSON: Were you Civil Service?

WARNE: I was Civil Service at that time. I was Civil Service until I was appointed Assistant Secretary, and I had re-employment rights as a Civil servant, even after I went overseas. I never for a moment thought I would ever go back to my previous Civil Service status once I left it.

[42]

JOHNSON: So they didn't have anyone especially in mind as a successor. It came kind of unexpectedly, I suppose, didn't it, the resignation of Ickes?

WARNE: Okay, I'll tell you what I recall. As I say, though at that time I was in the position of Assistant commissioner of Reclamation, I was one of the people on whom Ickes called from time to time to do special problem work within the Department. I remember I was over there in his office talking with him one time, and he was rubbing his jaw and deliberating. He said, "Warne, I think I've been Secretary of the Interior about long enough." I said, "Oh, no, Mr. Secretary, we can't get along without you here." And he said, "I don't know, someone else might do it better. It's been more than twelve years. I think maybe I've been here long enough."

I knew the Secretary well. He did what I expected him to do. He immediately started building up a controversy with the President. I've forgotten what the final issue was. It wasn't earth-shaking. It got to the point where President Truman said something, or sent him a note that was a little nettling. So he called a gigantic press conference in the auditorium of the Interior Building. He read his resignation. It went out over

[43]

the wires like a nine-day wonder; the sensation only lasted a short time. He chose the time, the place and occasion for maximum effect. I know that it was unexpected to the President, and that...

JOHNSON: Wasn't it the appointment of Edwin Pauley that precipitated that?

WARNE: I guess it was, yes. In any event, that was the time he went out, and it surprised the Department very much. Krug came in.

JOHNSON: Did Krug take hold then right away? You've indicated that he was a good administrator.

WARNE: He brought in two or three people and he set them up as a program staff, as sort of a review staff -- Al Wolfe, Walt Seymour -- It was a very small staff. They met a hell of a lot of resistance in the Department, I know; and not only in the Bureau of Reclamation, which really thought it was running the Department by that time, and probably was.

JOHNSON: Michael Straus.

WARNE: Mike was then commissioner, and I was Assistant

[44]

Commissioner, under Mike at that moment, though I’d been Assistant Commissioner under Harry Bashore since 1943. But Cap, I thought, was pretty intelligent about it. He had his staff meetings every week, and he had all of his bureau chiefs there and most of the rest of us. I had had only this passing acquaintance with him when he was down at the WPB and then, when he used to come up to see us now and then when I was Assistant Director of the Office of Power.

One day, just out of the blue -- Warner Gardner was going to leave the Department in a few months since he had agreed to stay only one year -- and Cap called me and asked me to take over the Assistant Secretaryship of Water and Power. He said he’d discussed my appointment with the President and the President thought that would be all right, but the President wanted me to get the endorsement of the California Senators, who were Sheridan Downey and Bill Knowland at that time. I got into a terrible controversy with Sheridan later over the 160-acre issue, but we were pretty good friends then. I got the endorsements, and the appointment went through. On July 1, 1947, I took the office of Assistant Secretary.

[45]

After that I was very close to Cap. Probably in the Department, I was the closest of any of the people.

JOHNSON: As I say, Jebby Davidson thought highly of Krug, but Davidson did resign, I think in late 1950, because he thought he was being shunted aside, that he was being given responsibilities that were not really part of his background or interest. What was the perception of Davidson in the Interior Department?

WARNE: I thought Davidson was, in the early days, a little arrogant. Now, Jebby and I got to be pretty good friends, too. My recollection is that he didn't resign until after Chapman became Secretary, and it was Chapman who cut the rug out from under Davidson, not Krug.

JOHNSON: Yes, right.

WARNE: I think it wasn't that Oscar wanted to get rid of Davidson, but he wanted to put someone else in that job. But Oscar had a habit of making the work so uncomfortable that he got the resignation of anybody he wanted to get out of the Department. Now, Krug wouldn't have acted that way. If he wanted to replace someone he would have replaced him, face to face.

[46]

JOHNSON: Was Davidson perceived as an agitator?

WARNE: No. You mean by the old-line?

JOHNSON: Right, yes, by the old-line.

WARNE: I guess I would classify myself as an old-line man. No, I don't think of him as an agitator, although I don't think he had near the influence with his line people that I had, for example.

JOHNSON: Mentioning administrative style, I notice a memo that you wrote to Secretary Chapman on January 18, 1950, in which you start out by saying, "For the sake of an orderly procedure that will permit your immediate staff to be of greater assistance to you, I suggest," and then you go into such ideas as "calling close advisors into the office regularly at 9:15 each Monday and Thursday, and that you hold the hours from 4 to 6 p.m. each day without any other appointments, strictly for Departmental business; that your Under Secretary and your Assistant Secretaries and your personal assistants should have the privilege on their own motions of interrupting your regular schedule of phone calls with urgent matters, so long as the privilege was not abused; and that you hold

[47]

a one-hour departmental staff meeting at 9 a.m. each Wednesday morning." Does this mean that these weekly, or even twice weekly staff meetings, that were held under Krug, had been discontinued under Chapman?

WARNE: Yes, they had been abandoned. And not only had they been abandoned, but if you read between the lines there, you will see that if you'd call up Chapman and ask for an appointment, because you had something urgent that you wanted to discuss with him, his secretary would give you a time, about an hour or two hours away, and then you'd go over there and sit waiting for an hour often while he more or less entertained someone, either on the telephone or in his office.

JOHNSON: Visiting dignitaries would take up his time?

WARNE: Yes, or he'd allow any Congressional or...

JOHNSON: Lobbyist?

WARNS: Not lobbyists, I don't believe they were often lobbyists. I never thought Chapman was a gull for lobbyists, unless they were someone he knew had a connection at the White House, on the environmental stage or something of that sort.

[48]

JOHNSON: In other words, did he see his job as sort of a public relations job rather than primarily administrative?

WARNE: He operated that way. I don't know whether that's the way he perceived it, but that's the way he operated.

JOHNSON: Did he adopt these suggestions?

WARNE: No. No.

JOHNSON: So it was business as usual, even after this memo?

WARNE: Well, I'm surprised that I was quite that ornery in writing that memo, but he didn't follow my advice.

JOHNSON: He took his own counsel, I guess, and as long as President Truman felt good about him, he felt good about himself.

WARNE: I think that's true. Well, he had other standards too, but he was not nearly so interested in program, as Ickes or as Krug, and it didn't seem important to him that some vital decision, at least as seen from an administrator of a program, was kept waiting two or three days, or indefinitely postponed.

JOHNSON: Did he get into this jurisdictional dispute with

[49]

the Corps of Engineers? Did he ever have to get into one of those disputes and do anything about it?

WARNE: I don't think so. That would have been pretty controversial for Chapman.

JOHNSON: He did try to avoid controversy then?

WARNE: Yes. Even to the point of compromising program at times, I thought.

JOHNSON: Well, did the Corps of Engineers get any advantages over the Bureau of Reclamation as a result of that kind of management style?

WARNE: I don't think so. Mike Straus was Commissioner of Reclamation, and he was...

JOHNSON: Was he the one that was promoting the interest of the Department of Interior then, more than even the Secretary?

WARNE: Oh, yes, at least as much. Yes, I think that's right.

JOHNSON: And the programs were largely his, his initiative.

WARNE: The programs were largely in his area, and at his initiative.

[50]

JOHNSON: Now you mentioned that 160 acre limit, and I think in your book you say that it had become outdated. I guess there was some modification up in the Northwest, where...

WARNE: Later, under Eisenhower.

JOHNSON: In Colorado and the Imperial Valley, there were exemptions to that rule too, but wasn't there a long-standing tradition of promoting the yeoman farmer republic?

WARNE: Yes, and that tradition was adhered to during that period, but almost exclusively by reason of Straus' obstinancy and maybe I contributed something to it, too. But on that kind of problem, Chapman would delegate pretty carefully to someone else.

JOHNSON: What was Chapman's position on that issue?

WARNE: Well, he never lacked support of it, but if he were asked to go make an appearance before a Congressional committee or a speech somewhere on the subject, it was either Warne or Straus who did it.

JOHNSON: You had to support or defend the 160 acre limit, or challenge it?

[51]

WARNE: No, we were always defending it.

JOHNSON: You are defending it because it was part of the law?

WARNE: Part of the law, and also because it was part of the policy.

JOHNSON: The philosophy of...

WARNE: The philosophy certainly of Franklin Roosevelt, very strongly, and also of Harry Truman. There's a very famous letter that he [Truman] wrote to Senator Downey. Downey wanted him to get rid of Straus and Krug because they were supporting the 160 acre law out in California and the public power phase of the program. President Truman wrote a letter to Downey saying, "I will not. It's just a case where you can't get the policy changed, so now you want to change the administrators. I support these two gentlemen." As a result of that, Downey didn't run for Senate that year, and Richard Nixon was elected over Helen Gahagan Douglas, who was a very strong supporter of the 160 acre law in California.

Downey was so mad that he resigned his Senate seat in December so that Nixon could be appointed in order to give him a little added seniority in the Senate over others elected at the same time.

[52]

JOHNSON: You say they were representing the corporate interests, the corporate farmers, of California against the family farmers?

WARNE: Yes. They, meaning Downey.

JOHNSON: Yes.

WARNE: At that time, yes.

JOHNSON: And Nixon, too.

WARNE: And Nixon, well, yes, he never did anything else.

JOHNSON: California is noted for having huge corporate farms, but apparently that was not on Reclamation land then, or what accounts for that?

WARNE: I have been the director of the Department of Water Resources in California during the period since I was in the Federal Government. My experience is both Federal and State in the water resources field in California. California lobbied for and got the Federal Central Valley Project, but in 1933 it had passed an initiative in California for the State to build the Central Valley Project. The State tried to finance the project with revenue bonds. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation

[53]

wouldn't buy the revenue bonds and there was no other market at that time. So they took the project over to Ickes, trying to get a Public Works Administration allotment for the State to build the project, using these revenue bonds as a guarantee of repayment. This was in the year 1935, and I was still a newspaperman with the AP at that time. I know because I helped write the application to the Public Works Administration for the sake of getting a good story. So the project went over to Ickes' PWA, and Ickes said, "It sounds like a good project, but it ought to be built by the Bureau of Reclamation." So he took the project over, made an allotment to the Bureau, and got the public law authorization of the CVP afterward. That brought the project under the Reclamation law, but already the lands were being farmed, and most of them were not as small as 160 acres. So what we were doing there was trying to apply what amounts to the Homestead Act to previously improved lands, which is a duce of a lot harder than it is to apply it to raw desert.

JOHNSON: Was that dry farming they were doing?

WARNE: No. They had been irrigating with inadequate systems, and pumping the ground water below them to the extent that some of them had to abandon their lands. We said in the

[54]

Bureau, and were thoroughly backed by the Administration at all times in this, that the water users were going to have to sign contracts that would say that they would reduce their holdings to 160 acres, and sell the excess lands at unimproved land appraisals without reference to the value added by the project. The water users, through their irrigation districts, just insisted they weren't going to participate on that basis, many of them. Finally we broke through and did get one district to sign. Then, they all signed, but they resisted, and still to this day are resisting that 160 acre law, which hasn't been repealed, and only sometimes ineffectively enforced. In 1982, the Reclamation law was amended to make the limit 960 acres instead of 160.

JOHNSON: Nine hundred and sixty?

WARNE: Yes. And many of the water users can't comply with that. If they don't comply, then they have to pay double the cost of the water.

JOHNSON: Okay, so they are able to farm these large holdings...

WARNE: Provided they pay an extra fee.

[55]

JOHNSON: I see. So that was the way many of them did it then; they decided to pay the extra fee rather than...

WARNE: I don't think so; they haven't started paying it yet.

JOHNSON: Did it break up very many corporate farms, then?

WARNE: Yes, it did. I've made some study of that. We didn't break up all of them, but the middle-sized ones were reduced in size, for the most part. So if you go down to the Central Valley Project today -- the project area is about a million acres in the Southern San Joaquin Valley irrigated by the Federal project -- you will find that the average size of the farm is 100 acres less than the average size of the farm in non-project lands.

JOHNSON: So that means broader ownership.

WARNE: Yes, and better development, really.

JOHNSON: Not so much absentee landlordship?

WARNE: That's right; and more apt to have permanent crops, and to use better farming practices. However, the Valley is still settling down to something like a thousand acres as an operating unit. And in this day, just between you and me, if you were passing the Homestead Act today, you

[56]

wouldn't pass a 160 acre law. President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862. If you were starting the Reclamation Act today, it wouldn't adopt a 160 acre standard; it would be some other figure, perhaps the 960 acre compromise in the so-called Reclamation Reform Act.

JOHNSON: Of course, there are economies of scale, but one wonders if we haven't gone beyond some of those scales.

WARNE: Oh, I think so. I think some of those big irrigated farms down there are not profitable, and are not socially acceptable. As a matter of fact, some of them in these difficult years, just this decade, have been abandoned. Many of them subsist on subsidized cotton farming.

JOHNSON: I notice that in February 1947, the Yakima-Teton Irrigation District celebrated the payment of its debt to the Government; it claimed to be the first Reclamation District to pay its complete debt to the Government. Do you remember that?

WARNE: Yes.

JOHNSON: Did that become a problem for districts, to pay

[57]

back their debts?

WARNS: Not in the period we're discussing here. There was a sharp agriculture depression in 1920, and for a decade after that, the Congress passed moratoria that postponed the repayments. However, under the adjustments that were made in the Reclamation Project Act of 1939, we pretty well cleaned that up, and as I remember repayments are pretty well on schedule now, and have been for decades.

Now, the truth is that a lot of these projects could have been paid out long before this, but they found it best to go back to the Government and get rehabilitation loans or an additional dam or some other improvement, so that they acquired new debt under the reclamation law and extend their repayment periods.

JOHNSON: This Water Resources Policy Commission that put out a report in December 1950, that really comes kind of at a peak of the reclamation activity, I guess, because employment reached its peak in the Bureau of Reclamation in 1950.

WARNS: That's about right.

[58]

JOHNSON: At any rate, was that report a basis for planning of future programs? Are they more concerned now about things like sediment reduction, recharging depleted ground waters, and...

WARNE: As a matter of fact, the Bureau of Reclamation has about run out of opportunities, of the style that we had in the '30s, '40s and '50s. There aren't many places left in the West where that kind of project is attractive any more. Certainly, the public power agencies in the Northwest and the irrigation districts in the State of California have got enough resources to do their own projects these days and get out from under the heel of the Federal Government. The Bureau is going to have to get some new type programs. It's pushing now, right now, trying to get set up to do water reuse and water cleanup for reuse nationwide. I don't think it's going to succeed. It needs a new responsibility, a new program or it may perish.

JOHNSON: In other words, its success helped not to put it out of business, but reduced the business that it would have.

[59]

WARNE: That's right. It hasn't had any new project authorized, I think, in twelve years.

JOHNSON: I wonder if they got into water pollution control. In fact, I notice the 80th Congress did pass, apparently passed, a law on water pollution and you reviewed the membership on that Board, the Water Pollution Control Advisory Board.

WARNE: Yes.

JOHNSON: And you had recommended that there shouldn't be any change in the current membership.

WARNE: As a matter of fact, I served on that Board much later, under an appointment by President Kennedy.

JOHNSON: Does the Bureau of Reclamation have responsibilities for water pollution control?

WARNE: No, never did. Well, that isn't quite the case. On their projects they did, but not generally. When they moved the Water Pollution Control Board out of Health, Education and Welfare to the Interior Department, they set it up as a special activity, not under the Bureau. None

[60]

of the new programs were assigned to the Bureau, such as desalinization...

JOHNSON: Oh yes, I was going to ask you about that. You didn't get involved in desalinization?

WARNE: I probably was responsible for introducing it. In 1950 I made a trip out to Guam. Carl Skinner was the Governor of the Island at that time, the Marianas, and I went out there to help him inaugurate the first elected legislative body for the Island. On the way back -- I came back on a military plane -- we stopped at Johnston Island. The gentleman who was in charge, an admiral, had time on his hands, so he took me out to see his desalting plant. The Navy had a 50,000 gallons-a-day desalter at work there on the Island. The Navy had desalters on shipboard, but I was unaware that during World War II they had brought them ashore. I had not seen a desalter of that size before. This impressed me. I called the staff together on returning to Washington. I said, "Let's get going on this desalting business. It looks to me like it's going to be a significant program and it would be applicable in the West." We got some legislation together in '51, but it was not enacted until '52. I was in Iran by that time. I did appear before

[61]

one of the committees in support of the bill. They set the program up in the Interior Department, but not at that time under the Bureau.

JOHNSON: It hasn’t become economically feasible, has it, in comparison with other methods?

WARNE: Not for agricultural purposes. However, in instances, many instances in Florida, for example, and some in Tidewater, Virginia, and in some instances in California, it’s being used to supplement domestic water systems today. In my judgement, in the future it’s going to be a major source of potable water.

JOHNSON: They got started in 1951 you say, the first attempt to...

WARNE: The inspiration was at that time, and the first legislation was in ’52.

JOHNSON: How about synthetic fuels, did you get into that?

WARNE: I didn’t get into synthetic fuels, no. I think Jebby worked on that.

JOHNSON: But there was interest in shale oil?

[62]

WARNE: Shale oil, yes.

JOHNSON: That's likely to come back again.

WARNE: That Rifle, Colorado project out there. I went out to review it one time at Krug's request.

JOHNSON: Rifle, Colorado?

WARNE: Yes. Where we had the first demonstration project on shale oil recovery. Secretary Ickes had sponsored it as I remember it. There was some concern about the possibility of contaminating the water of the Colorado River.

JOHNSON: Well, that was back then in, what...

WARNE: That would. be in about 1948.

JOHNSON: Let's go ahead and deal with Alaska.

WARNE: I've jotted down some things I thought we might miss.

JOHNSON: How about Alaska, since you were involved with that? For one thing again, in the Davidson interview, he indicates there was some kind of contention between the Northwest or the agencies of the Northwest, and the

[63]

commercial interests of the Northwest, and Alaska, and that the Seattle Chamber of Commerce somehow had a hold on Alaskan commerce.

WARNE: They really did. Well, let me go ahead and develop the subject as it devolved so far as I was concerned. Krug, unlike Chapman later on, assigned programs to his Assistant Secretaries. So that's why I had the Missouri River Basin, and Jebby had the Columbia River Basin, and I had the Central Valley Project. So, Secretary Krug took me with him to Alaska, shortly after I became Assistant Secretary in July and August of 1947. We went over the territory pretty thoroughly. He came up with the idea -- I don't know how much this had been discussed in the Cabinet or with the President -- that we ought to start the development of Alaska. Here was a gigantic resource-laden area that was being held absolutely in colonial status, not altogether, but largely by reason of the Seattle shipping interests. Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington was the absolute dictator so far as the transport of goods to or from Alaska was concerned. He sat on the proper committee, I think he was the chairman.

So the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, or more particularly

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the shipping interests in Seattle, had these provisions written into the law that all shipments to Alaska had to originate in Seattle. You couldn't get a ship directly from San Francisco to Alaska at that time. You couldn't ship goods up there, unless you unloaded them in Seattle and reloaded them.

Well, when we got back to Washington, Cap said, "The President's interested in the possibility of bringing Alaska up to a status where it could achieve statehood. Obviously, that can't be done if we don't get enough economic development up there to support a government." I think we sent [Ernest] Gruening up there about that time as Governor. I was put in charge of a Federal Interagency Alaska Development Committee. We tried to get all agencies of the Federal Government -- which included at that time the Justice Department because they had prisons in the Justice system in the Territory -- to work toward decentralizing their activities out of Washington and strengthening all of their operations in Alaska so that the Territorial Government might become strong enough to carry on as a state.

I spent a good deal of time, many trips up there, working with Gruening, working with everybody, all the

[65]

way from the Pribolof Islands to Barrow, even to Prudhoe Bay, though at that time it was just a boom town called Umiyat. We commenced to develop certain legislation and get regulations modified. We sought and got increased appropriations. We got the Bureau of Land Management untracked so it could go ahead and let some lands out of Federal control. We got the Forest Service to permit some development in the forests. We got the Fish and Wildlife Service to take some control of the salmon fishery, trying to get rid of some of the fish traps that were obstructing the salmon runs. And we set up a road system.

We started the rehabilitation of the railroad, which was owned by Interior and was badly deteriorated. We got the first of the hydro projects started; the Bureau of Reclamation got the Eklutna Project going. Things started moving.

However, for some reason that I'm not sure of even now -- although I suspect that it had to do with the rising expectations of statehood in Hawaii -- we commenced to de-emphasize the Alaska program. I know I went over

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the Alaskan program with Oscar Chapman shortly after he became Secretary. He suggested that I go to the Bureau of the Budget. I went over and had a hell of an argument with Frank Pace, who was Budget Director. He said that it was a White House decision, to de-emphasize the Alaskan program; that we wouldn't put so much money as I had advocated into it for the next year. I was greatly disappointed; I never learned whether the President was fully informed or whether he personally participated in the decision.

Well, as a result, we didn't get statehood during the Truman administration. But the Eisenhower administration came along and worked Alaska statehood in with a proposal for statehood for Hawaii, and they got both of them. Now it's possible that we could have gotten them while Mr. Truman was President, if we'd gone after the two simultaneously. Without the Truman administration Alaska Development program, I am sure Alaska could not have become a state when it did.

JOHNSON: Was there any reclamation work being done in Hawaii, as well as Alaska, any work at all?

WARNE: I went over to Hawaii, too. The Department had the

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Eklutna in Alaska. The Bureau had done a good deal of work up there; studies and investigations.

JOHNSON: Irrigation work?

WARNE: No, no, it was hydropower that mainly interested us in Alaska. A source of low-cost energy was needed to stimulate development.

JOHNSON: Was there any irrigation work in...

WARNE: No irrigation work in Alaska.

JOHNSON: Or in Hawaii?

WARNE: In Hawaii, we proposed a project that would have has some irrigation involved in it. It never got off the ground.

JOHNSON: How about power then? Did they have power projects in Hawaii?

WARNE: It never got off the ground as a project. That was the so-called Molokai Project, on the Island of Molokai, which has a dry side.

JOHNSON: Well, now power had to sort of the other side

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of the coin, I guess. You had to justify your projects on the basis of reclamation first, right? Irrigation, and then power might be what you'd call the "paying partner."

WARNE: The paying partner.

JOHNSON: Did it always have to be secondary in order for you to justify the program?

WARNE: Well, in theory that was true. Of course, when you were operating in the West -- the arid and semi-arid western United States -- it was pretty easy to tie water development and power development together on any project that was worth considering. But the Eklutna was strictly a power project. It is at the head of the Mantanuska Valley; it's up the Valley and on the north rim of the mountainous escarpment. So, what we did was to tap a lake on the top of this escarpment and drop the outflow through a penstock to the valley floor to generate power.

JOHNSON: And that provided power, you say?

WARNE: Power.

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JOHNSON: For what area?

WARNE: For the Anchorage area.

JOHNSON: For Anchorage, I see. Was that your major project in Alaska?

WARNE: When I was the director of the Alaskan program? No, I didn't think that was the major one. It was an important one, but I thought rehabilitation of the railroad and jarring the Bureau of Land Management loose so that it could permit some homesteading out on the Kenai Peninsula were more important.

JOHNSON: But you didn't break the hold of Seattle on commerce?

WARNE: Never succeeded in that. Maggie prevented that. I'm not sure it's done yet, either. I don't know for sure. You can ship from San Francisco now, but I don't know how thoroughly they have dealt with that problem.

JOHNSON: Of course, we have Iran here to deal with, Point IV, and we certainly can't get away without getting into that to a brief extent.

Is there anything else that you would like to talk

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about or mention before we get to Point IV?

WARNE: Well, there is a little anecdote that might be of interest to you. I've described how Secretary Ickes went out with a great flare of publicity at the time of his retirement. When the '48 campaign started to warm up, the President said he would like to have Ickes come in and help him a little. So Charlie Ross, Truman's press secretary, gave me a telephone call one day. I was known to have been persona grata with the Secretary, with Ickes. Charlie said, "Warne, how about going over and talking to the old curmudgeon and seeing if you can get him to come in and support the President in this campaign?"

I said, "Holy smoke, you remember that great flare-up?" He said, "Oh, but that's forgotten here." I said, "Well, okay, I'll give it a try." I knew that Ickes was following his same old habit of having a face-to-face luncheon in his office with somebody almost every day. He had an office in a loft down in Georgetown, overlooking the Potomac River. I called him up and said, "Mr. Secretary, I'd like to come talk with you." "Okay, come tomorrow;" he was always short and gruff.

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So I went. He never served very much for lunch -- some soup and crackers and that was about it. I opened by saying, "You know, Mr. Secretary, you were given a lot of credit for the defeat of Tom Dewey when he tried to run against Roosevelt. You said, 'Now, Tom Dewey's throwing his diaper in the ring."' Ickes chuckled about that, and said, "That fellow's running again." I said, "You know, this is pretty tough. Truman's got a big job on his hands. This guy Dewey thinks he's going to win this time." Ickes said, "You can't let that fellow win." I said, "Well, how would you like to come back on the team during this campaign?" He said, "Hmmmm." He waited a long time and then said, "You know, we've had quite a quarrel, Mr. Truman and I." I said, "Well, it's forgotten over at the White House. If you forget it too, they'll welcome you. I think the public has forgotten it too." He said, "Could I pick the states that I campaign in?" I said, "I'm sure you could pick the states to campaign in." He said, "Can I pick .the occasions and prepare the speeches?" I said, "Well, I'm pretty sure they'll be willing to have you do both." He said, "Oh, Illinois, I want to get out to Illinois."

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After a moment he said, "Montana, I want to get out to Montana." With increasing enthusiasm he said, "Washington, I want to get out there. California," he said, "I want to get out there too."

I said, "Well, what can I tell them? He said, "You tell them to give me a ring; start setting up some engagements. How can I get some help on my speeches?" I said, "You don't have to worry about that. I'm sure Mike or I will help you out, if needed." He didn't need any help on his speeches anyway. If he had the time he could do a splendid job himself, better than any of us who had assisted him in Interior.

So I got hold of Charles and said, "Hey, all you need to do is to tell Ickes that you want him in Illinois, Montana, Washington, and California, and he'll go." So that's how Ickes got into the campaign. He did a pretty good job in Illinois, and he helped in other places.

JOHNSON: I don't think it's known that he might have been one of the factors that helped elect Truman.

WARNE: Yes, that's right. I'm sure he made a lot of hay in Illinois, particularly; that was his old home.

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JOHNSON: Any others you can think of to put on the record?

WARNE: During that same period, Dean Acheson was Assistant Secretary of State. We had what we called the "Little Cabinet," which was loosely organized at the Assistant Secretary level from each of the departments. We would meet from time to time. Dean called a dinner meeting at the State Department and President Truman came over; he didn't attend all of these little Cabinet meetings, but he attended a few of them. He attended one I had in the Interior Department a little later. But he came over to this one of Dean's. It was in 1948, just when the campaign was getting real tough. Things were not going very well. He didn't think he was getting enough support out of this group of appointees. Many of them were jittery. So the President made a pretty fiery and feisty little speech to us. And one of his punch lines was, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

JOHNSON: So he used that.

WARNE: He used that on us.

JOHNSON: He was already known for that saying, I suppose, by that time.

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WARNE: I'm not sure when he used it first, but that was the first time it came to my attention.

JOHNSON: He got that from a local judge here.

WARNE: Out here?

JOHNSON: Yes.

WARNE: Okay, but he sure used it to good effect on that occasion and on a group of his own people who needed that kind of stimulation.

JOHNSON: About that Little Cabinet, was that a useful procedure? Did that help the Government run better?

WARNE: I think that it did. I think it was most useful in bringing the President into contact with a level of his Government that he otherwise would have had very little contact with.

Now, as I say, he didn't attend all of the Little Cabinet meetings.

JOHNSON: How often were they held?

WARNE: They were held about once in several months, but

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somewhat irregularly.

JOHNSON: So every second or third month he might show up?

WARNE: I think so, but perhaps not that frequently. I know he came to ours at the Interior Department, and I remember him very well at this one in the State Department.

JOHNSON: And these were interagency, or interdepartmental; all of the departments were represented?

WARNE: All of the departments, and maybe some White House staffers too.

JOHNSON: So, you were acquainted with Charlie Ross?

WARNE: Yes.

JOHNSON: You got better acquainted with him than any of the other White House staff people?

WARNE: No, Joe Short, who followed Charlie, was an old-line friend of mine, from the days when I first got to Washington in 1933. He and I were on the AP staff together. I knew Joe and I knew his wife.

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JOHNSON: This was your chief contact at the White House, the Press Secretaries?

WARNE: Yes, it was perhaps my chief contact with the White House, but Charles Murphy and I had a good many things to do together.

JOHNSON: Did Clark Clifford?

WARNE: I knew Clifford, but I didn’t have many direct contacts with him, no, mostly with Murphy.

JOHNSON: Murphy. Did you consider him very supportive?

WARNE: Oh, yes.

JOHNSON: Of the Interior Department and the Bureau of Reclamation?

WARNE: Yes. Yes, I did.

JOHNSON: Public power?

WARNE: Public power, yes. I remember there was some kind of wing-ding one time on a Saturday afternoon. I was at home -- out in the yard working -- and I got a telephone

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call from Charles to "Come down to the White House immediately; we need your help."

I said, "Hey, can I take time to change clothes?" He said, "No, come right on down as you are; we've got to get this thing done. I've got only 30 minutes." So I went in; I had on a Hawaiian shirt, the wildest looking Hawaiian shirt you ever saw. I went through the back door to Charles' office. When I walked in he said, "What the hell are you doing in that shirt?" I said, "You said for me to come as I was." He said, "If the President comes in here, he's going to raise hell about this. He comes back here once in a while." Well, we disposed of the business in about three seconds, and I got out of there.

JOHNSON: The President liked to wear those down in Key West.

WARNE: Yes, but he was ribbed some about it. And this was a very touchy thing around the office, apparently.

JOHNSON: I suppose we ought to get into Point IV if there's nothing else. If something comes to mind, let's get it on the record.

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WARNE: Okay. Let me tell you one more story about Oscar [Chapman] and Mike Straus and me on the night before the 1948 election. Oscar and I had gone down to the station to greet the President -- who had come back from a whistlestop tour in New England -- down at the Union Station. The President was very upbeat, you know; everything was fine. He was going to win this one. And we assured him that we thought so, too. We went back to the Department. We were sitting around Oscar’s desk; Mike had joined us. We were very good friends for many years. Oscar said, "Okay, let’s put down the states that Truman’s going to win, each one of us separately. So we made three lists. Do you know, you had to put all three lists together to get Truman a victory. No single list would do it. Oscar said, "He’s going to win Colorado." Mike said, "He’s going to win Illinois." And I said he was going to win California. These were our individual home states, and we each thought the President would win our state, but none of the others did.

JOHNSON: And he didn’t win them by much.

WARNE: Didn’t win them by much. But he won.

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JOHNSON: So there was some wishful thinking going on, I suppose. Did you really think he was going to beat Dewey?

WARNE: Well, as I say, it was pretty doubtful. I was hopeful, but not certain. We had a watchout party at Mike's house on the night of election day. I didn't go home until 5 o'clock in the morning, and the result was still in doubt. When I got home, and turned the radio on, I heard the results that put Truman over the top. Illinois had gone Democratic.

JOHNSON: Did you ever get to talk to Truman about the '48 election?

WARNE: No, I never discussed it with him. Not afterward. "If you can't stand the heat" thing was the closest...

JOHNSON: Well, that Inaugural speech in 1949, where he brought up Point IV, did that strike you as an important point at the time?

WARNE: Actually, that was the greatest thrill I can remember in a Presidential Inaugural speech -- that Point IV. The idea was right down the line that I'd been working

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with, you know, trying to get resources development started in areas like the Missouri River Basin and Alaska. And I thought, "You know, that is something."

JOHNSON: Had you known about this before?

WARNE: No, I had not, though I think Tex Goldschmidt, whom I mentioned earlier as being in the Power Division, had done some work on it. I've forgotten who is credited with having proposed it.

JOHNSON: You weren't acquainted with Benjamin Hardy then?

WARNE: No, not at that time. Well, I didn't actually meet him at all. I'll tell you about that. He was killed near the airport in Tehran.. He was coming there to meet with me in December of 1951 with Director Henry G. Bennett. They never got there. The plane crashed.

In any event, I thought the President's Point IV was about the brightest idea yet. We were familiar with the Marshall plan, but it seemed to me that in the underdeveloped countries the introduction of advanced technologies was a deuce of a lot better than simply trying to pour money into them. So, as soon as Dr.

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Bennett was appointed director of the program, I went over to see him. He set up his office in a ramshackle temporary building that stood at that time next to the Interior Building. Maybe he came to see me, but I think I went to see him. I told him that the Interior Department and the Agriculture Department -- both of which I had worked with in Alaska, and the Missouri River Basin, the Columbia Basin Project and the Central Valley in California and other places, on programs that might be comparable -- probably had a monopoly on the kind of people that he was going to need to direct country technical assistance programs.

Si [E. Reeseman] Fryer, who earlier was out on the Navajo reservation, and then had gone with Nelson Rockefeller down to Latin America when he set up that -- what did they call it -- the Institute of Inter-American Affairs -- the precursor of the Point IV type program, in Brazil -- came back at that time and became one of Bennett's staff. Well, first Fryer came to Interior again, and was an assistant in my office for just a few weeks, and then he went over as the Regional Administrator for South Europe, Middle East and North Africa, for Dr. Bennett.

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Si used to come to see me about every two or three days, wanting to know what in the world they could do about setting up a Point IV mission somewhere. I called a conference of high middle-level administrators in the Agriculture Department and in the Interior Department at a luncheon, which we set up at one of the restaurants on 19th Street. Dr. Bennett made a little pitch, and we started an active campaign to recruit people. I helped him recruit Will from Agriculture to go to Pakistan, John Nichols to go to Egypt, and Clifford Willson to go to India.

JOHNSON: You mentioned a Mr. Will...

WARNE: I don't have Mr. Will's first name.

So we came to October of 1951. I went out to Billings to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Missouri River Basin Field Committee. The papers were full of stories about "old, weepy Mossadegh" getting ready in Iran to come to the United States. We had gathered the major staff of all of our agencies that were participating in the Missouri Basin Program. It went very well, a nice deal. We were going

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out to spend Saturday evening -- it might have been Friday evening -- at a fish hatchery, which was out of Billings about 15 miles. They had a guest house out there. When we got there, it started to snow, a blizzard-type storm. We got snowed in. But that evening, out there, in this terrible place, I got a telephone call from Si Fryer. He said, "You know, Mossadegh is going to come here next week, and we have to have a Point IV program in Iran." He said, "We need a country director." I said, "Oh, my God, Si you know we've given you names of many of our best people. I'm fresh out. I don't know who could go to Iran." He said, "How about you?" I said, "Oh, now, wait a minute." I said, "Me?" He said, "How about you? We've got to have somebody right away." I said, "Only if I get a call from the White House, and only if Oscar Chapman says that it's okay with him at Interior." I thought that would end that.

About 20 minutes later, I got a call from the White House, and it was Charlie Murphy. I think it was Charlie; I can't remember for sure. He asked, "Will you go to Iran?" There were few preliminaries. He said, "Mossadegh

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is coming. We've got to have someone to take care of him when he gets here, and whoever that is has got to go to Iran; to be there and to start the Point IV program there." I said, "I'll call you back."

So I called Oscar and he said, "Okay, Bill; if the President says so, it's all right." So I called my wife and said, "How would you like to go to Iran?" She said, "Will we be back at Christmas?" We never did get back to live in Washington.

JOHNSON: So you left and lived in Tehran for...

WARNE: More than three years. It was a tough time.

JOHNSON: There's an informative account here -- your book.* But there are a couple of angles, I suppose, we could explore. The critics in Iran appeared to be the Tudeh, the Tudeh party, the Communist, pro-Communist group?

WARNE: Yes, you might also reference Jack Bingham's book. He dealt with some of these matters.**

JOHNSON: Those concerned you a lot, but how about the Mullahs, now that we have a chance to look back?

*William E. Warne, Mission for Peace: Point 4 in Iran (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956).

**Jonathan B. Bingham, Shirt-Sleeve Diplomacy: Point 4 in Action (New York: John Day Company, 1954).

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WARNE: Thinking back to that day, they had a Mullah named [Seyed Abdul] Kashani, whose home was in Kashan, which is just south of Qum, in the desert on the central Plateau. Kashani was elected to the Majlis, the lower house of their Assembly, and he immediately assumed the role of the Speaker. I don't recall how they designated him as the Speaker. He lived up on the hill at Shimron, and he never went to the National Assembly at all. But he had people coming back and forth to him and commanded great power in some ways rivaling that of the Prime Minister.

One day my assistant, Ardeshir Zahedi, came to me and said, "I think you ought to get acquainted with Ayatolla Kashani." So I asked the Ambassador, Loy Henderson, what he thought. He said, "Nobody ever sees Kashani." I said, "Well, I can go see him." The Ambassador said I should go. I went to Kashani's house. Ardeshire was with me as an interpreter. I felt a sense of real power there in Kashani. He was sitting on cushions -- there was no furniture in the tent that he used as an office. We were sitting cross-legged at his feet. You can only take so much of that if you're not used to it, and

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I began to ache long before the interview was over. People would come in and bow several times to Kashani. He would clap his hands and that would be that. The decisions were made, whatever they were, and the men would back out bowing again.

JOHNSON: These were Mullahs that were coming in?

WARNE: They were all Mullahs but they apparently had a connection with the Government, too, with the Majlis. At least I thought they were transacting government business. Pretty soon, Kashani said, "It's lunch time." So we went into a tent next door, just across a little breezeway, and there was the lunch set out on carpets, magnificent carpets, on the ground. There were cushions but no chairs. It was the only time I've ever been served without any utensils at all. I mean you had to reach out and grab the food. That was the way that the ten or twelve Mullahs who ate with us did it. I mean Kashani was right back to the old traditional Iranian ways.

However, Kashani never got the kind of control that Khomeini has achieved. I don't think Kashani would have been able then to have mustered the kind of power

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necessary to have a revolution. He was not a Khomeini.

Kashani asked what the purpose was of Point IV and what my mission was doing. He listened attentatively to my answers -- but I do not think that he understood English -- and to Ardeshir's translation. Sometimes he would ask Ardeshir for more explanation and Ardeshir, who knew the program well, would give him additional detail directly. Despite frequent interruptions by the turbaned messengers, or flunkies, or assistants or whatever they were, Kashani seemed to follow my presentation without losing the thread of it. I thought he approved and was satisfied.

JOHNSON: Well, now the Majlis apparently didn't really have much legislative power, did it?

WARNE: It had this kind of power -- that it was a forum at which Mossadegh, at least, was able to stir up enough public support so that the Shah had to sign the decrees that he was advocating.

JOHNSON: Including nationalization?

WARNE: Including nationalization of the oil.

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JOHNSON: Was there an upper house that was...

WARNE: There was a Senate, yes.

JOHNSON: Appointed, or elected?

WARNE: They were not elected, but I think most of them got there more or less like the British House of Lords.

JOHNSON: Hereditary, I suppose.

WARNE: Almost hereditary, though I believe the Shah made the selection, but once in the Senate, they stayed in it. It was a sanctuary. Even when one finally opposed Mossadegh, as General Fazlollah Zahedi did, he could remain within the Senate chambers, continue his opposition, and not be touched by Mossadegh's police.

JOHNSON: It appears that a lot of work was done in agriculture and health and...

WARNE: We had programs that really started...

There's one more thing that perhaps I ought to tell about the Iran assignment. When I got out there, I found that working with Mossadegh was fairly easy. I thought

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he was sincere in his approach to our cooperative program. I used to write home, and Joe Short, who succeeded Ross as Truman's Press Secretary, was one of my correspondents. I'd write him letters about how things went and what it was like, and he was much interested. I finally got a letter from him that said, "I've been reading your letters to Mr. Truman." He said, "He's much interested in what you're doing out there, so keep them coming."

JOHNSON: So these were to Joe Short.

WARNE: Yes.

JOHNSON: They'd be in his papers?

WARNE: Well, they might be in his papers. They were personal letters to Joe. We served together on the Regional Staff of the AP in Washington. I knew Beth Short, also an AP reporter, before she and Joe were married. Joe and Beth built a house near ours in Beverly Hills in Alexandria, Virginia. We were neighbors and good friends.

JOHNSON: Are the letters in your papers?

WARNE: They aren't in my papers, no.

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JOHNSON: You made carbons of these letters to Short? Your papers are at the University of Wyoming?

WARNE: University of Wyoming, yes, but I don't think they're there. I don't think my personal papers exist anymore. We moved all around the world and most of them were lost.

Then when I was in Korea later on -- this was after Truman was no longer in the White House -- I sent him a copy of that book [Mission for Peace]. In acknowledging it, he said that he was interested in what we were doing in Korea, too.

JOHNSON: You went to Korea after Iran?

WARNE: First I went to Brazil; spent a year, 1955-56, in Brazil, and then went to Korea. I was in Korea from July 1956 until March 1959.

JOHNSON: Doing Point IV work?

WARNE: Yes. In Korea our job was a little expanded. There's a whole series of modifications of our basic authorization acts in the interim and also of our program. It hardly remained the Point IV that Mr. Truman envisaged.

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JOHNSON: In Iran it was health...

WARNE: Health, agriculture, education and general...

JOHNSON: Transport maybe?

WARNE: Not so much on transport -- a little bit, but resources development and public administration. We set up a public administration project.

JOHNSON: Do you think you had enough money to do what you would have wanted to do in Iran, or do you think you were able to do an effective job there with what you had to work with?

WARNE: Speaking now of the period when Truman was President, the answer is yes, I think I had enough. But when the new administration came in, we had an allotment of $23,450,000 I believe, for that year 1953, fiscal year. The amount was the same as the allotment we'd had the year before. It looked to me as though our needs were going to be more demanding than that. So I set up a program and sent it in to Washington. I didn't know whether I was going to be the Director anymore when Foster

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Dulles became Secretary and Harold Stassen took over TCA and changed its name. Dulles and Stassen changed its name, and changed the direction of the program. I think we had three or four different names in the space of six weeks; didn’t have time to print stationery.

The worst of it was -- Dulles and Stassen made a trip around the world. They were going to stop at all of the significant missions and try to straighten things out, which meant cutting the throats of everyone of the Truman group that they could reach. They did not enter Iran; things were too delicate. So they had Ambassador Henderson and me come down to Karachi [Pakistan] and we met them down there. Mind you, my Point IV program hadn’t been approved yet. It had been pending in Washington for months, but we had received no money.

JOHNSON: This would be for the fiscal year of ’53 or ’54.

WARNE: It was the fiscal year ’53.

JOHNSON: The first year of the Eisenhower administration.

WARNE: Yes, the first year. I couldn’t even get projects approved on the unspent monies of the current fiscal

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year. I didn't get a nickel allotted. I found out in Karachi that this was a planned part of an operation. They were going to starve Mossadegh out of office.

When I went out there, and consistently under Truman, we had a basic policy of non-interference in the affairs of the host government, in its operations and its politics. We didn't undercut them, but dealt with them openly with all of the cards face up. But here was a deliberate, announced intent to force the issue of Mossadegh in Iran. I asked what I was to do. "Go ahead," I was told. "Work your projects out, but we're not going to allot any money until this fellow goes."

JOHNSON: This was at that meeting in Karachi?

WARNE: Yes.

JOHNSON: With Dulles and Stassen?

WARNE: Dulles and Stassen. Now, Stassen had fired all of the other mission directors, but he and I got along very well. I had the feeling that the Iran policy was not to his liking. As a matter of fact, I liked Stassen, largely because he was so anti.-Nixon.

[94]

There was a major internal crisis in Iran in August of 1953, and Zahedi, General Fazlollah Zahedi, Ardeshir's father, got a "firman" from the Shah appointing him as Prime Minister to succeed Mossadegh. The Shah fled the country when Mossadegh would not yield the office. You know all about that. Zahedi forcefully took over. Mossadegh was placed under house arrest. He was taken to a small village out in the country and spent the rest of his life there.

JOHNSON: The CIA, it has been reported, of course, organized these demonstrations that brought the Shah back. Can you tell us if you ever got approached by the CIA, or did you get involved at all with the CIA?

WARNE: This seems incredible, I'm sure, probably to you and to anyone who might read this, but I lived through that era, and as you can imagine, was a principle actor on the stage in Iran, but I wasn't aware that the CIA, or that Mr. [Kermit] Roosevelt, was over there until the afternoon of the final push when Zahedi took over. That would be the afternoon of August 19, 1953.

JOHNSON: You were never approached by the CIA you're saying?

[95]

WARNE: Never approached, never informed, didn't know they were there. I knew that we had a CIA office in Tehran, and I knew the man who was in charge of that office, but he wasn't very active in this push, just between you and me. While it may not be politic for me to say so, I don't think Kim [Kermit] Roosevelt was either, but that's neither here nor there. It did happen and Zahedi did succeed, and I knew Zahedi very well. His son was my principal assistant up until a few months before Zahedi took over.

JOHNSON: Yes, I remember reading that. But now, in retrospect, do you think that if Mossadegh had remained on, that this might have been better in the long run, or do you think that we still would have had the Khomeini, Mullah takeover?

WARNE: If we had supported Mossadegh in anything like the degree that we supported Zahedi, he would have succeeded and he would never have had Khomeini.

JOHNSON: Would he have had a kind of middle-class, technocratic type of administration, do you think, rather than a religious establishment?

[96]

WARNE: Yes. And it would have been much better supported by the common people.

JOHNSON: The British were very intransigent, weren't they?

WARNE: They were as intransigent as could be, that's correct.

JOHNSON: Were they part of the problem then, that they would give no ground on the nationalization issue?

WARNE: They were up until the time that Mossadegh departed. We thought -- I thought -- Mr. Henderson thought, as late as November of 1952 that Mossadegh was going to agree to a settlement of the oil issue which would have been agreeable to the U.S. And if he had, if he had acted at that time, what happened later under the Eisenhower administration could not have happened. But the old man got his back up for some reason, even after we thought we had a commitment from him, and it was the cause of his eventual downfall.

I didn't have much to do with the negotiations for an oil settlement under Zahedi. Washington sent Herbert Hoover, Jr. out to Tehran and this fellow Page from

[97]

Standard Oil. All I did was to convince the Iranians of two things. One is that the new Iranian cabinet could rely on us; that is the new officials, all of whom I knew. Some of them had even been active in office at various times in the Mossadegh regime. Secondly, we in Point IV showed them how to organize a national oil company. We set up the organization plan that they finally adopted.

JOHNSON: Was it the Anglo Iranian Oil Company that was...

WARNE: The AIOC.

JOHNSON: Owned by the British?

WARNE: That was the British company that operated the oil fields before nationalization. Mr. Mossadegh always referred to it as the "Ex-AIOC." We set up the NIOC, National Iranian Oil Company.

JOHNSON: When did that happen?

WARNE: It happened in 1954.

JOHNSON: Was that still British owned?

[98]

WARNE: No. No, that was national. The Iranians agreed to let American and British and Dutch Shell come in with technicians and advisors. I think the Iranians were absolutely right in that oil controversy. I mean, if you had seen the way that the British were running that oil deal. It was pure colonialism. I liked the British and we got very well acquainted with a number of their diplomats in Iran before they were kicked out. I went down and waved good-by to them as they took out across the desert going home.

JOHNSON: But the oil revenues weren't really being plowed back into helping Iran?

WARNE: Not at all. I mean it was a pittance. It was just a pittance. But the Iranians; of course, they made their own mistakes, too. Instead of using the oil revenues that they did get to any benefit for the people, they were running the central government with them. So the fat cats in Iran were not paying any taxes; they didn't have to.

JOHNSON: The Shah made a big thing out of transferring control

[99]

over 3,000 villages, the crown lands, to the peasants. They were going to do this in payments over 25 years, which would amount to about what they were paying for rent. Did that ever come off, and if it did why didn't it make the peasants more supportive?

WARNE: Well, of course, his villages were only a small percentage of those that were absentee land-owned, and he never could persuade his fellow fat cats to divide their villages, or to dispense with them. Some mistakes were made even in the execution of the Shah's program. It was slow, dreadfully slow, and they did not work out the social problem of what to do with the non-farming villagers. It turned out that in transferring ownership to the so-called freeholders, they were really benefiting only at most a third of the population of those areas. I went over there several times as a consultant, in the '60s and '70s for the Iranian Government, and one of my assignments was to review their village programs. I found they were trying to modernize the agriculture which was laudable. But they took the so-called freeholders out of the traditional villages and built new villages, separately for them. They put up marketing systems

[100]

and refrigeration, methods of getting produce to town -- all that kind of thing -- but left the rest of the village people absolutely...

JOHNSON: The old village was just left there to...

WARNE: Left them to rot, yes. They didn't have any income anymore. The traditional villages weren't providing any services to these new farmers. The schoolteachers and the mullahs and the little shopkeepers, they didn't have any source of livelihood.

JOHNSON: They didn't have a township kind of organization that we have.

WARNE: They didn't have any, no. That was one of their big problems, there was no local government. The government was all handed down from Tehran. And the mullahs, in the absence of any supervision, the mullahs were the only people...

JOHNSON: The local priests.

WARNE: The local priest was the one who ran the traditional mud-but town.

JOHNSON: It was a theocracy, local theocracy.

[101]

WARNE: A rural theocracy. And the absentee landlord that owned these villages very likely lived in Switzerland, or Monte Carlo, and all he cared about was getting some revenue.

JOHNSON: And he didn't care about the religious establishment?

WARNE: He didn't care about anything except the money in most cases.

JOHNSON: Absentee ownership was the rule?

WARNE: Absolutely. I think there weren't any exceptions to the rule.

JOHNSON: A kind of feudal system.

WARNE: It was a feudal system. It was the last feudal government, the only one I've ever witnessed close at hand.

JOHNSON: And you weren't able to really make very large inroads into that.

WARNE: It takes 30 years to make any inroads into that kind

[102]

of situation. I was only there three and a half years.

JOHNSON: Certainly there were improvements. But population growth probably diluted much of that technical progress.

WARNE: Oh, just take the situation in Tehran as an example. As these villages were modified -- this program went on for 20 years, and it wasn't complete -- I don't think more than one-third of the villagers are affected even now. But they developed a tremendous surplus of young men and young women in these rural areas. The Shah, with our assistance and with his own revenues, after he got oil revenues coming in again, was able to get industrialization started and employment was plentiful in the cities for a time. There was lots of employment in cities like Tehran and Isfahan and even in Shiraz and Ahwaz, so that people would flock there to those cities, far more than could be used in later years.

By the time Khomeini came along in 1978, there was this floating unemployed population. The City of Tehran tripled in size by that time. These people came from the villages; their whole background was one related to the local priest, the mullah, as leader and rule maker.

[103]

JOHNSON: What kind of education did they have?

WARNE: Most of them had none. A few were taught the Koran.

JOHNSON: Or just what the mullahs had preached to them.

WARNE: That's all. We made a survey in 1952. We found an average of one literate person in each village at that time. We helped the villages to establish schools, but even after 20 years the illiteracy rate was dreadfully high.

JOHNSON: Was their language Farsi?

WARNE: Yes. How in the world do we get technical instructions across to people like this? We set up motion picture programs to instruct them. Even now I doubt if more than 20 percent of them are literate, and most of these people who came out of the villages and flocked to Tehran and became Khomeini supporters have absolutely no education except that which was inculcated by the local mullah.

JOHNSON: Now, like the deep well program.

WARNE: We got that started...

[104]

JOHNSON: Did that not have long range benefits?

WARNE: Yes it did. We eliminated some of the waterborne diseases, which is what helped them have these remarkable increases in population.

JOHNSON: Created more problems. In other words, birth control was not part of the program, or even if it had been, it wouldn't have been able to take root?

WARNE: We didn't have a birth control program at the beginning, not while I was there. I'm sure it would have been impossible to get it adopted, in any event, at that time, and perhaps even later it would have been ineffective.

When our Point IV mission was established in Iran the infant mortality rate was 50 percent in the first year after birth and of those who reached their first birthday, half died before reaching their sixth. Once they were six years old, they seemed to survive anything but old age.

Our pure water program, pumping from deep wells located usually in the yard of the village mosque, eliminated the waterborne diseases that killed so many of the babies. Our anti-malarial program, conducted with

[105]

the World Health Organization and the Iranian Ministry of Health, knocked out the nation's number one killer. Vaccination programs against typhoid and diphtheria were very successful and widely sought in the rural areas.

JOHNSON: Kind of a "Catch 22" in some respects?

WARNE: I wasn't so aware of it at the time, but, yes, it proved to be a sort of "Catch 22." I was gung-ho for what we were doing. I think we had a splendid program in Iran. For many years I thought it was the finest achievement I ever had in my career. I wasn't so sure after Khomeini. So many of my old friends and associates in Iran have been exiled and some were shot.

JOHNSON: It obviously helped people, but the increase in population and so on, just created...

WARNE: New problems. If we had been constant in pursuing the objectives and purposes of Truman's Point IV, adjustments would have been made and perhaps the developing problems met. But that was not done.

JOHNSON: Yes, the demographic shifting of population from the rural to...

[106]

WARNE: To the big cities, and making them still bigger, and overrunning their facilities and institutions. And the Shah's increasing arrogance. He actually thought he had done all of this himself. I talked with him in Iran in later years, in 1966, and 1973 or 1974. He thought his White Revolution was getting through to the people, but it was not.

JOHNSON: And all of that opulence contrasted with the poverty?

WARNE: Yes.

JOHNSON: Wasn't there a 40 million dollar celebration of a royal anniversary?

WARNE: Down at Persepolis. The 2,500^th anniversary of the rise of the Persian emperor. The people sort of liked that kind of thing, and I'm not sure that's what inspired the unrest. I mean that was a greater shock to the world than it was to the people of Iran, in my judgment.

JOHNSON: So they didn't mind so much the conspicuous consumption of the Shah, but I suppose the local landlords...

[107]

WARNE: That was different.

JOHNSON: Let's say, the absentee landlords; they were villains to the peasants?

WARNE: Yes, they were in many, perhaps most, instances. Each of these local landlords, absentee, appointed a khadkhada. A khadkhada is a ditch tender; a water master, in other words; he was the one who apportions the water. He was an absolute dictator in the village on who got what and where and when. If he was fair and wise, fine. If he were not, it was simply too bad.

JOHNSON: By controlling the water.

WARNE: By controlling the water. Economically he was the dictator. He didn't have much to do with the mullah, but when they had a good khadkhada the villagers got along fairly well. But if they had a martinet, it was different. Some landlords were careful to select wise representatives.

JOHNSON: So he was the local nabob, so to speak?

WARNE: He was the representative of the landlord.

[108]

JOHNSON: Had his thumb on the economic levers of power in the local areas. But you did get more water to the villagers, and that was one of the basic needs.

WARNE: We got clear, clean water to the villages for drinking purposes, available to all. That eliminated the water-borne diseases. We helped a few projects to get started to expand the irrigation areas that support the villages. But irrigation projects are long-term and can be expanded only when there is unused water available.

JOHNSON: And reduced the infant mortality rates.

WARNE: Yes.

JOHNSON: So you saved a lot of Iranians.

WARNE: Oh, my, yes.

JOHNSON: So now they can be killed by the Iraqis.

WARNE: Yes. So it would seem. That war drags on. It is taking a terrible toll.

JOHNSON: Well, I suppose we should bring it to a conclusion. So, if you have any final comment, you're welcome to make one.

[109]

WARNE: Do you want me to say anything about the San Diego water supply problem?

JOHNSON: Can you give us a quick overview on that?

WARNE: Yes. Near the end of the Second World War, it became clear that San Diego, where we had one of our major naval bases at that time, had increased in population terrifically and the city and Navy were inadequately supplied with water. That affected the security of our military installations.

President Roosevelt set up a committee: myself, Admiral Ben Morrell, who was then chief of the Yards and Docks, and Phil Swing, who by that time had retired from the Congress and was a leading citizen of San Diego. We were to bring in a plan for the correction of the water supply problem of San Diego.

A controversy had raged there for 30 years about where they would go to get water. We came up with a simple solution to transfer their allotment of Colorado River water from the All-American Canal, to the Metropolitan Water District's Colorado River aqueduct, and to build an aqueduct from the Met's new aqueduct

[110]

to the San Vincente Reservoir in San Diego County where it could be used by the city and others, including the Navy. We used the method of a Bureau of Reclamation feasibility finding as a means of authorization for construction of the project. On an emergency basis, I think the White House transferred money to the Navy and to the Bureau of Reclamation. The Bureau was to design, and the Navy was to build the aqueduct, to get it going, to get it done.

As luck would have it, we didn't get the aqueduct done until the war was over. The 80th Congress came in, and a new Senator named Joe McCarthy was elected from Wisconsin. He was looking for something to get after. So he called me down; [Senator George] Aiken was the chairman of the committee, and McCarthy was a new member of it. He performed one of the acts that later he became famous for. He took my statement, a printed in advance statement, he pulled figures out of it and mixed them up. He absolutely confused everything. The hearing went on for an hour, and I never even got to put my two cents worth in. I didn't get any support from some of the members of the committee whom I thought ought to

[111]

have supported me. It embarrassed Aiken very much. He was most apologetic for the performance, which was cut short when the Senate was called into session. But that was it; the committee was going to make a finding that we had proceeded without authority, and therefore there were such and such terrible things that were going to have to be done about it.

Senator Bill Knowland said, "We've got to correct this." He introduced a little authorization bill, and he got after McCarthy. McCarthy dropped his attack, and swung around to an anti-Communist [crusade], and left us alone. Bill and I went to the hearing on his bill. I believe it was the Interior Committee. Senator Nixon showed up, too. It was, so far as I was concerned, his first time at a hearing as a new Senator. He sat there with Knowland doing most of the talking. I was sitting on the right and he was on the left. He and I never liked each other, but we got the bill through.

JOHNSON: You say Nixon never cottoned to you?

WARNE: Never. No.

JOHNSON: But you and Truman shared something in common.

[112]

WARNE: I'm sure we did.

JOHNSON: What turned you off on Nixon?

WARNE: What turned me off on Nixon was the campaign he ran against Jerry Voorhis, who was a good friend of mine, and I thought a splendid Congressman. It was a most unfair, diabolic campaign. Nixon had the support of the Los Angeles Times which never mentioned Voorhis' name throughout the whole of the campaign. Voorhis had been in the Congress for ten years and had done some very fine things. He was a staunch supporter of our public power program and 160 acre law and most of the other things that we were interested in. He was a staunch Truman man.

JOHNSON: You say it was kind of a smear campaign?

WARNE: Absolutely. Nixon smeared him as a left-winger in his district; and the Times, all it said was, "Mr. Nixon," "Mr. Nixon." That turned me off. Later Nixon's campaign against Helen Douglas for the Senate was even worse, really. She was a friend of mine and a Truman supporter.

JOHNSON: Did he support the Bureau of Reclamation or private power?

WARNE: Nixon?

[113]

JOHNSON: Perhaps we already have established that.

WARNE: I never found him supporting anything that we were engaged in.

JOHNSON: Well, that's maybe a note to end on, a famous name.

Well, I appreciate very much the time you've taken to come out and share this information.

• Acheson, Dean, and "Little Cabinet," 73
  Aiken, Senator George, 110-11
  Alaska, and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, 62-66, 68-69

  Barrows, Harlan H., 18-19
  Bashore, Harry, 37, 44
  Bennett, Henry G., 80-82
  Bennett, Hugh, 16-17
  Bessey, Roy F., 19
  Bonneville Power Administration, 32, 34, 35
  Boulder (Hoover) Dam, 5-9, 15
  Bureau of Reclamation, in 1980's, 58

  Central Valley Project (California), 52-56
  Chapman, Oscar, 39-40, 45, 46-49, 50
  • and Presidential campaign of 1948, 78-79
  Clawson, Marion, 20
  Colorado River Aqueduct, 12
  Columbia River Irrigation Project, 17-22, 32-33
  Columbia River Authority (proposed), 25, 33, 36

  Davison, C. Girard. 32-36, 45-46
  Desalinization, 60-61
  Downey, Senator Sheridan, 44, 51-52
  "Drainage Basin Programs and Problems" (report-1936), 17
  Dulles, John Foster, and Point IV in Iran, 92-93
  Dworshak, Senator Henry C., 33-35

  Eklutna Project (Alaska), 65, 67

  Fort Peck, 31
  Fortas, Abe, 23
  Fryer, E. Reeseman, 81, 83

  Gardner, Warner, 44
  Glaha, Ben, 15
  Goldschmidt, Arthur R., 23-24

  Hanover nuclear power plant, 24-25
  Hardy, Benjamin, 80
  Hawaii, and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, 66-68
  Hoover Dam. See Boulder Dam

  Ickes, Harold, 13-14, 36, 53
  • Presidential campaign of 1948, role in, 70-72
    resignation as Secretary of Interior, 42-43
  Imperial Valley (California, 2, 4-8
  Iran
  • absentee land ownership by local landlords, 99-101, 107
    demographics of, 102-104
    khadkjada (ditch tender), role of, 107-108
    land reform under the Shah, 99-100
    Majlis, role of, 87
    the mullahs and their political role, 84-87, 100-103
    nationalization of the oil fields, 96-98

  Kashani, Seyed Abdul (Mullah), and point IV, 85-87
  Kwonland, Senator William, 44, 111
  Krug, Julius, 38-41, 43, 44, 45

  "Little Cabinet" (Assistant Secretaries, 73-74
  Los Angeles, water supply of, 8-9

  McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 110-111
  Magnuson, Senator Warren, 63
  Missouri Basin Field Committee, 28, 82
  Missouri Valley Authority (proposed), 25-28, 29-30, 38, 39
  Molokai project (Hawaii), 67
  Mossadegh, Mohammed, 82-83, 89, 92-94, 95

  • and Eisenhower's policy to oust him, 92-94
  Murphy, Charles S., 76-77

  National Iranian Oil Company, 97-98
  Nixon, Richard M.

  • campaign against Jerry Voorhis, 111-112
    and reclamation policy, 52

  160 acre rule, in Bureau of Reclamation. 22, 50-51, 53-54, 56

  Page, John, 17, 18
  Peck-Sloan plan, 27-29
  Point IV

  • inception of, 80-83
    in Iran, 83-109
    and politics of host countries, 93

  Roosevelt, Kermit, 94, 95

  San Diego, water supply for, 109-110
  Seattle Chamber of Commerce, and Alaska, 63-64
  Short, Joseph, 75, 89
  Skinner, Carl, 60
  Soil Conservation Service, 16-17
  Stassen, Harold, 92-93
  Straus, Michael, 13-14, 35-36, 43, 49, 50, 79
  Swing-Johnson bill, 11
  Synthetic fuels, 61-62

  Truman, Harry S.

  • and "dress code" in White House, 77
    inaugural speech of 1949, 79-80
    and "Little Cabinet," 74-75
    Missouri Valley Authority, policy on, 25-30
    and Point IV program in Iran, 89, 93

  U.S. Corps of Engineers, 48-49

  Voorhis, Jerry, 112

  War Production Board, 23
  Warne, William
  • appointment as director of Point IV in Iran, 82-84
    and Presidential campaign of 1948, 78-79
  Water Pollution Control Advisory Board, 59
  Water Resources Policy Commission Report (1950), 57

  Zahedi, Ardeshir, 85-87
  Zahedi, Fazlollah, 94