COMPARATIVE MAGNITUDE OF EXPENDITURES AND PROJECTS Senator DOWNEY. Now, before reading the biography of Mr. Straus, I assume given by himself to Who's Who, I want to say that up to the time Michael W. Straus, a man totally ignorant of all the West and irrigation and reclamation, up to the time he became Commissioner, we had spent only $1,000,000,000 of Federal money in western reclamation and irrigation. We are now spending according to recommendations in the budget for this next year at the rate of more than $1,000,000,000 every 3 years. The projects were comparatively simple when we had the greatest engineers in the West in charge of the Bureau. They are now intricate and complicated, challenging the ability and character and energy of the very ablest engineers. And yet, under these conditions, we have a nonengineering administration. DATE OF APPOINTMENT OF MICHAEL A. STRAUS The CHAIRMAN. Before you read that, would you mind telling me when Mr. Straus was appointed? I should know, but I do not recall the date. Senator DOWNEY. He was appointed in December of 1945, and he succeeded Harry Bashore, who himself had been one of the able engineers of the West in the service of the Bureau of Reclamation for 39 years, having had experience on most of the great stream courses of the West and in building many different kinds of projects. FUNDS WASTED Senator REED. I do not know much or anything about the personal questions that you are raising. I do know, however, that presently the Bureau of Reclamation is wasting enormous sums, so enormous as to shock the conscience of anybody who is familiar with it. Senator DOWNEY. I am glad to have that comment, and I am wholly in agreement with it, and I think that I am prepared to prove it by documentary evidence. Senator REED. I have observed some of it, and I am in correspondence with the Bureau about some of the projects that are utterly worthless. STATES INCLUDED IN RECLAMATION AREA Senator ELLENDER. Senator, how many States does he cover under that? Senator DOWNEY. The present reclamation area covers 17 States. Senator ELLENDER. And is he at the head of all of that? Senator DowNEY. He is at the head of all of that. The Bureau of Reclamation is the constructing agency of the Government, the engineering construction agency for reclamation and irrigation projects. Mr. Straus is at the head of it. His immediate superior would be a First Secretary of the Interior, who himself has had no engineering administrative experience. His superior would be the Under Secretary, Oscar Chapman, who has never had any experience. And then, of course, we come to Mr. Krug, the Secretary of the Interior himself, who has had no experience in the West. As a matter of fact, we have a line of five or six here, no one of them with any engineering experience, and hardly any of them with any experience in western irrigation matters. Senator ELLENDER. As a matter of fact, his work is not confined to the State of California? Senator DOWNEY. Oh, no; it extends all over the West and more than half of the western United States. Senator FERGUSON. Senator, it covers the entire reclamation projects, no matter where they are? Senator DoWNEY. That is right, but those are limited to the 17 States that are designated in the statute. The Bureau of Reclamation last session made a desperate effort to spread to additional areas and take in several more States where it would engage in drainage work. HOOVER COMMISSION RECOMMENDATION TO ENLARGE ACTIVITIES OF RECLAMATION BUREAU And I might say this: I understand the Hoover Commission now favors one Public Works Agency to build all structures in the United States, which has a large degree of logic back of it, and the Bureau of Reclamation is to be recommended, which would place the Bureau of Reclamation as the great construction agency, not only over reclamation and irrigation but over all flood-control and river and harbor projects in the United States. Presently we are spending only about $370,000,000, that is the net new appropriation for fiscal 1950 on reclamation, and the corresponding figure on flood control and rivers and harbors is $505,000,000. So if Mr. Straus can acquire that power over the whole United States, I think the Senators from other States than the West would see something very interesting. BIOGRAPHY OF MICHAEL W. STRAUS Now, I am going to read, in contrast to Mr. Newell's biography, the biography of Mr. Straus, our present Commissioner: Michael Wolf Straus is the fifth Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation. He was born in Chicago, Ill., on March 20, 1897. He was a student at the University of Wisconsin, 1914-17, specializing in chemical engineering. He left the university in 1917 to enlist for service in the First World War. After that war he entered newspaper work. He was a reporter, later city editor, and managing editor of the Chicago Evening Post, 1920-23. He was an instructor in journalism at Northwestern University, 1922-24. He was national correspondent for the New York Evening Post and Washington correspondent for the Universal News Service, 1932–33. Mr. Straus entered Government service in 1933 as an assistant to the Federal Public Works Administrator, and in this capacity was Director of Information for the Public Works Administration until 1938. From 1938 to 1941 he was Director of Information for the Department of the Interior. During the Second World War, at the request of Donald Nelson, Mr. Straus was drafted into the War Production Board for a year as director of the war production drive labor-management committee. He returned to the Interior Department in 1943 and in March of that year gave up his career-service status when nominated by President Roosevelt as First Assistant Secretary of the Interior. At the delegation of the Secretary of the Interior, he was placed in immediate charge of the supervision of the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Mines, the Geological Survey, and the Petroleum Conservation Division-all western resource-development agencies of the Department of the Interior. Mr. Straus was appointed as Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation by President Truman on December 12, 1945. He still holds that position today (September 11, CLASSIFICATION OF REGIONAL DIRECTORS AND ASSISTANTS Now, Mr. Chairman, I would also at this point like to place in the record, without reading, the classification of regional directors and assistant regional directors of the Bureau of Reclamation with refer- ence to their identification as engineers. We have in the West seven Classification of regional directors and assistant regional directors of Bureau of EXCEPTION TO ENGINEERING QUALIFICATION Senator DOWNEY. Each one of these sections is presided over by a director. This law comprehends not only the Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, but provides in effect that all regional di- Now, strangely enough, this list shows that every regional director except Mr. Boke, who is the regional director out in the Central Valley, is an able engineer. Their biographies, which I have ex- amined, show that they have 20 to 30 years' experience in building projects, in surveying our great water courses, and in working as engineers in the Bureau of Reclamation. Every one of them has made an outstanding record as an engineer and an administrator. As a matter of fact, all of the assistant directors, with one single exception, It remains only for the unfortunate Central Valley, which is the largest and most complicated project in the Bureau of Reclamation, man you could find in the United States, and I am prepared to prove that by documentary records of the Bureau of Reclamation itself. Now, Mr. Chairman, any exhaustive investigation of the projects of the Bureau of Reclamation would take weeks. Senator REED. It ought to be made. Senator DOWNEY. It has in part. Incredible stories have been told. But the whole story is yet far from being known. Manifestly, my time before this important committee, with Congress in the condition it is, must be very limited, and I am therefore restricting myself wholly to the use of documentary evidence from the Bureau of Reclamation files. If I should occasionally state an opinion, I want to say that I am prepared to reinforce that opinion by substantial witnesses. CRITICISM OF MEMORANDUM OF AUGUST 31, 1945, BY MR. STRAUS TO THE SECRETARY ENDORSING RICHARD L. BOKE To understand the quality of Mr. Straus and his intellect, I am going to read a letter from his own hand and heart which richly illuminates the kind of administration we now have in the Central Valley. I think in this letter, that I am now expressing an opinion about, that Mr. Straus revealed his inmost thoughts and telegraphed exactly what he expected to do when he later became Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation. Now, this letter was written on August 31, 1945, when Mr. Straus was still the First Assistant Secretary. As later facts will show, he had practically usurped the jurisdiction of the Commissoner of the Bureau of Reclamation, Mr. Bashore, and later literally drove him out of his office. I would like to read this letter and comment on it as I go along. I will later revert to certain external evidence to discuss certain ambiguities in the letter. They, too, will be from the documentary records. of the Bureau of Reclamation. It is a memorandum for the Secretary: For your convenience in appraising and interviewing Richard L. Boke, who has been mentioned in connection with our Central Valley problem, I provide this biographical sketch. Richard Lathrop Boke, a native-born Californian, is 36 years old. He specialized in economics, biology, and literature (at Antioch College, 1927 to 1931). Right there is the first misstatement of repeated misstatements. He was at Antioch College for 2 years. If you are there 2 years, you go to school 1 year and you work for a year; and I am not criticizing that, because that only meant, instead of 2 years of college work, it meant 1. Incidentally, to explain, according to Mr. Boke's own statement, for one vacation he worked for a forestry service at $50 or $60 a month, and in another he worked in the building of a theater at $60 or $70 a month, and Mr. Straus builds up those two boyish instances to tremendous proportions. Senator FERGUSON. This letter is from the files of the Bureau of Reclamation? Senator DOWNEY. It is admittedly the letter of Mr. Straus. He is of good family with some independent means. He engaged in forestry work for the Ohio State Forestry Department and engineering construction work for G. A. Fuller Construction Co. Now, those two jobs consisted, as a boy, when he was 17 and 18 and 19, of simple jobs in a forestry department and being a roustabout or a carpenter, such as we all were when we were young-I do not use that critically-when some engineer was laying out a movie theater; and Mr. Straus builds that up to the statement that he had had engineering and construction experience. And on the basis of that he got an important engineering job in the service of the Bureau of Reclamation. He did some publicity work prior to his first Federal employment. That publicity work, according to Mr. Boke's own statement, consisted, in the depression year of '32, of trying to sell books to the public, and he said that he made a complete failure, and I have no criticism of that, but that was his "publicity work," trying to sell books to the public as a book canvasser; and Mr. Straus builds that up to be some publicity work. And at that time, incidentally, he was a boy of about 22. Senator FERGUSON. What kind of books did he try to sell? Senator DOWNEY. I do not know. He covers almost everything else. Senator FERGUSON. Was it an encyclopedia of knowledge, or something like that? Senator DOWNEY. He will probably be on the witness stand again and will be glad to tell that, I am sure. ** which happened to be for you in the office of Indian Affairs, laying out of a Mexican Springs erosion-control station on the Navajo Reservation. Subsequently, his Federal employment went forward with the Soil Conservation Service until he became its regional director, with headquarters at Albuquerque. That is a total falsehood. He was an assistant in the office of the director, and he was grades below the director, and he was far too young; and yet Mr. Straus represents to his superior, Mr. Ickes, that he was the director, a total and abominable falsehood. When the war came, he joined the Nelson Rockefeller Inter-American Affairs Committee and worked through South America on procurement and land resource and food work, later going to the Foreign Economic Administration as chief program director for the purchase of food supplies for import into the United States, and as administrator in budget work. I want to say to the committee that I can express no opinion on that. The files relating to whatever work Mr. Boke did down in Paraguay and Ecuador and Peru have all vanished. What he was doing, whether he was boondoggling or doing work of any kind, I do not know. But his time while the war was on was largely spent down in South America endeavoring to secure a greater food supply in those LatinAmerican countries. He returned to the Department of the Interior at the end of last year, through my efforts, when Director Charles Carey, of California, stated that he could find no man in the Bureau of Reclamation qualified to head up the regional operation and maintenance and land-use planning work in the Central Valley. Now, let me say, Mr. Chairman, that, too, is totally false. There were several men who had the qualifications for this position as chief engineer in charge of operation and maintenance. That is the way Mr. Boke first went in. And Mr. Straus is now telling how he got young Dickie Boke, with no irrigation or reclamation experience or engineering background, into this position of chief of operation and |