John A. Carver, Jr. Oral History Interview – JFK#8, 11/25/1969 Administrative Information

Creator: John A. Carver, Jr. Interviewer: William W. Moss Date of Interview: November 25, 1969 Place of Interview: Washington, D.C. Length: 44 pages. Note: Page numbering begins at 80 and ends on 123.

Biographical Note Carver was Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Public Lands Management from 1961 to 1964, Under Secretary of the Interior from 1965 to 1966, and Commissioner of the Federal Power Commission from 1966 to 1972. In this interview Carver discusses the working relationships the Department of the Interior had with various Senators on the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, in both the John F. Kennedy Administration and the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration, as well as his personal relationships with some of the same Senators, among other issues.

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Transcript of Oral History Interview These electronic documents were created from transcripts available in the research room of the John F. Kennedy Library. The transcripts were scanned using optical character recognition and the resulting text files were proofread against the original transcripts. Some formatting changes were made. Page numbers are noted where they would have occurred at the bottoms of the pages of the original transcripts. If researchers have any concerns about accuracy, they are encouraged to visit the Library and consult the transcripts and the interview recordings.

Suggested Citation John A. Carver, Jr., recorded interview by William W. Moss, November 25, 1969, (page number), John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program.

John A. Carver, Jr. – JFK #8

Table of Contents

Page Topic 80 Clinton P. Anderson’s sphere of influence on Department of the Interior matters 82 Carver’s relationship with Anderson 85 Carver’s relationship with Henry M. Jackson 87 Carver deals with personal biases in the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration 89 The North Cascades National Recreation Area and Park 93 Jackson’s areas of interest as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs 95 Alan Bible as Chairman of different Senate Interior subcommittees 96 Carver’s relationship with after leaving his staff to work in the John F. Kennedy [JFK] Administration 99 Personnel flow from the Hill to the White House and back 101 Ernest Gruening—asking for too much, and not doing it nicely 104 Edward Lewis Bartlett and the importance of Alaska to Interior 106 Partisanship and other divisions in the Senate Interior Committee 110 Carl T. Hayden—Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall’s “own Senator” 112 Frank Edward “Ted” Moss and the Canyonlands project 115 Thomas H. Kuchel—sometimes more Democrat than Republican 116 Additional Senate members and the Interior Committee 117 Contact between Interior and the staff of a Senate committee 120 JFK’s Administration’s relationship with Congress

Eighth Oral History Interview

With

JOHN A. CARVER, JR.

November 25, 1969 Washington, D.C.

By William W. Moss

For the John F. Kennedy Library

CARVER: …all the Administration types. Sort of more like analysis.

MOSS: Yes. Well, I think there is a lot of not just getting things off your chest in these sessions but a rethinking, a re-perspective, and that kind of thing. Let’s see, last time we were talking about people in the House of Representatives who were on the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee and on the Appropriations Committee for Interior and Related Agencies. I’d like to talk a bit first, today, about people in the Senate in much the same way. And I suppose that the man to start off with is [Clinton P. Anderson],

[-80-] who was originally the Chairman of the Committee, as I understand it, and then gave way to Jackson [Henry M. Jackson], what, when Anderson’s health began to fail, or was it for some other reason?

CARVER: Oh, I’m sure it was not that. Anderson took the chairmanship of the Space Committee [Senate Aeronautical and Space Science Committee].

MOSS: That’s right, that’s right.

CARVER: His health was better then than it is now. He always was kind of a hypochondriac, always growling about his health, but he always seemed able to do his work, still does. But the change rose out of his taking the chairmanship of that other committee, and Scoop Jackson succeeded him. Anderson is such a grey eminence in this field, has so many whiskers in it, that it took a year or two for that to shake down, for everybody to remember that Anderson wasn’t still the chairman, that Jackson was the man in charge. I don’t remember the—I guess that change took place right at the beginning of that Congress, didn’t it?

MOSS: Yes, just about.

[-81-]

CARVER: 1961?

MOSS: Yes.

CARVER: So that Anderson was a major force, but on a kind of a declining basis as Jackson’s star rose a little bit that year. We had the great, big wilderness fight, of which Anderson was the leader. He delegated the actual floor leadership to Frank Church, but behind the scenes and in every way that you can imagine.... Nothing would ever go in the conservation area without Anderson’s support, and nothing that he opposed ever was going to really get through, at least for the first two or three years.

MOSS: Any instances of, say, direct interference in the decision-making in the Interior or anything of this sort?

CARVER: Oh, I don’t believe that Anderson did much.

MOSS: I would interpret that pretty broadly; I don’t necessarily mean it pejoratively.

CARVER: No, I recognize that. My relationships with Anderson were rather special because when I was nominated to be Assistant Secretary, Anderson, for reasons which I can only speculate, opposed

[-82-] me. He didn’t actually oppose me, but he said rather explicitly that he thought that was a lousy appointment. I later found out, I think, that one of his staff members, who has since died, kind of poisoned his mind. I had the pleasure of having him publicly acknowledge his change of mind on it, on at least two occasions, most specifically when I was later nominated to be Under Secretary, but also in certain hearings thereafter. But because he had stood as an obstacle to my appointment at the outset, my relationships with him, personally, never were—well, they were always quite careful, even after all of this had passed by, and after we were on good terms. Everybody was careful with Clinton Anderson, but I was particularly careful with Clinton Anderson. Udall [Stewart L. Udall], on the other hand, got along with him very, very well, and indeed that was part of his problem with other senators and with the House members, because he was so buddy-buddy

[-83-] with Clint Anderson. He consulted him, and he advised him that he was planning to do and confided in him and so on. I wouldn’t be able to remember anything specific that Anderson got in. I think I eventually got back on sound terms with him when I took a strong executive position on grazing fees, for one thing. He’d been a cabinet officer himself and recognized, you know, that the time comes when you have to stand for that prerogative. And I think he also began to get a lot of good reports back from out in the field from a lot of his constituents—he’s got a Western constituency in New Mexico, that they could communicate, work with the Department under my leadership well, so that I think he, you know, came around to an affirmative position. But a senator who makes up his mind in one direction generally still has that view in the back of his mind; you never really erase it. But back to your question as to anything specific: I suppose that his position on Indians

[-84-] was as critically important to the Department’s program, at least the part I was concerned with, as anything else. There was no possible way of working out some of our administrative problems involving Indian problems when he was opposed, and on some things, he was just flat opposed to some of the programs which the Administration wanted to do. I don’t know of anything that we got through in that area easily over his opposition. As I’ve said before, he was opposed to Philleo Nash, and that kept a bad relationship there, over time. But in the larger sense of his chairmanship of the Interior Committee—not his chairmanship but his senior status; I can’t remember anything where he did anything that really got Jackson mad. Jackson grumbled a little because Udall would consult Anderson rather than him, things like that.

MOSS: How about Jackson? What was his position?

CARVER: Well, you get to these fellows—you know, you get to asking me about relationships there which are colored

[-85-]

by just personal problems of one kind of another, some of them tracing to the Administration of President Kennedy [John F. Kennedy], most of them tracing to things that happened later, under Johnson [Lyndon B. Johnson]. Jackson, of course, was the one who insisted that Charles Luce [Charles F. Luce] replace me as Under Secretary, after it became apparent that Luce could not get to be a Federal District Judge out in the state of Washington. So at least in the Johnson Administration, Jackson was kind of playing fast and loose with my status, which causes me to be about as careful with my relationships with Scoop as with Clint Anderson, although my personal relationships with Jackson were always excellent.

MOSS: This is interesting, and it leads us to something that may come a little later, but did you feel because of your past association with Church and that portion, say, of the Democratic Party and being in the Kennedy Administration, that you were more vulnerable after Johnson came in or that some of your protection had gone

[-86-] or anything of this sort?

CARVER: I didn’t feel it in those terms. I didn’t feel it in terms of being associated with the Kennedy group. If I ever had any indication of that, they were kind of dispelled when I was promoted to be Under Secretary by Johnson, I think that was the first appointment of that kind that he made after the election, in December 1964. But it is pretty clear that by that time and later, that such constituency as I might personally be able to lean on was much more in the area of these people that had worked with me, most groups that the Department had worked with, and not the straight political background, either positively or negatively. So I’d say no, I didn’t feel that I ever suffered for having associated with the Kennedy Administration, but I also didn’t feel that I had any particular in with the Johnson Administration. That particularly came through when I was—of course this was long after this period we’re talking about, but

[-87-] my appointment ran out in 1968 as Federal Power Commissioner. I wasn’t reappointed until almost two months after my term had ran out. The President had decided that he wasn’t going to reappoint me, and it was only after some rather strong representations were made to him by people who had watched my performance here on the FPC [Federal Power Commission] that he changed his mind and did reappoint me. Of course I was confirmed by the Senate in something less than twenty-four hours after, so my relationships with the Hill were that good. My problems were with Johnson, and when President Johnson called me about reappointing me, he was at some pains to be damn sure that I wasn’t going to make any statement about the reasons for my troubles. He emphasized that he’d been busy going to Paris and this and that, when everybody knew—he knew, and I knew, and everybody else knew—that I’d been torpedoed by some of these people within this Commission, specifically Lee White [Lee C. White] at that time, as being

[-88-] not quite liberal enough for their taste in the regulatory field. Johnson was very, very generous when he finally asked me to take another appointment. But here again, we’re at the point I was making that in neither case did you have a political base in the ordinary sense. The politics of it were what you might call resource politics or development or some other kind of politics rather than the Kennedy group or the Johnson group or the Church connection or anything like that.

MOSS: Yeah, I want to come back to this later when we’re talking about the White House and the Kennedy-Udall-Johnson relationship, and how this changed. So we’ll come back to this later.

CARVER: But just one final word on Jackson. Jackson, of course, eventually became a very strong chairman and asserted himself and carried on a quite important role in getting the Department cleared for some rather touchy issues. The one about the North Cascades National Recreation

[-89-]

Area and Park and so on and a few things like that; he wasn’t timid then it came to issues which mattered.

MOSS: How did that work out? What was the story there?

CARVER: Well, that was a kind of a three-way argument involving the Forest Service, the National Parks Service, and the—four ways, I guess—the conservation interests nationally and some of the lumber and other companies, mining companies, locally. This beautiful area in the North Cascades was proposed to be a national park, and the Forest service felt that they could do a better job of it, and Jackson, having this very, very difficult political problem right within his own state, maintained a real close surveillance over the negotiations, the public meetings, the trading back and forth on boundaries and other areas, and they eventually got it worked out.

MOSS: In what form did these public meetings take place?

CARVER: Oh, they had hearings out there and protest

[-90-]

meetings and goodness knows what all, but a lot of pressures were mounted from both sides. When you get a combination of the development interests with, let’s say, the Forest Service, you’ve got a pretty powerful lobby. You’ve got one part of the government working along with those people who’ve got some kind of an economic stake in the area.

MOSS: Where was the focus back here in the interdepartmental jockeying?

CARVER: It was at the secretarial level: Freeman [Orville Lothrop Freeman], Udall, and Jackson.

MOSS: On a bilateral business, it wasn’t involved in any advisory council business or anything of this sort?

CARVER: I don’t think so. It was strictly a bureaucratic problem.

MOSS: Because I wondered about the use of interdepartmental advisory councils and this sort of thing.

CARVER: Well, they appointed two or three study groups; as a matter of fact, they studied the dickens out

[-91-]

out of this thing. I’d forgotten all about it until you just mentioned it, but I think they sent Sigurd Olson [Sigurd F. Olson] and somebody else out there with a big, old, broad study to kind of make recommendations as to what to do with it. I think those study groups generally favored the assignment of a major role to the forest Service. And I think that was the first case where you had a kind of a reversal of roles between the Forest Service and the Parks Service. Interestingly enough, the Forest Service took the position that if they could have part of this area assigned to them as wilderness, they would be able to prevent the road building and public accommodations and other kinds of things which the Parks Service would do if it were in a national park. In other words, they could maintain it in its more pristine and natural state than the Parks Service. So you had everybody just kind of change sides on it. It was a very interesting shift of roles there, in that particular case. You find

[-92-] that happen more and more after they pass the Wilderness Act. All of the sudden the Forest Service got this tool of non-development in their arsenal, which had always been denied them under the old exploitation days; you know, building forest roads and fire protection and that sort of thing. Now they could close it off and say that they were better equipped to maintain it without the intrusions of roads and housing and the other things to get a lot of people in there.

MOSS: Back on Jackson again. You say that he was involved in the North Cascades business. Is there anything else in which he took a particular interest?

CARVER: Oh, there were many things in which he took a particular interest. The most significant things were pretty much outside of my area. The continued expansion of the public power facilities, the building of the third unit at Grand Coulee, the continuation of expenditures and development

[-93-] for this Bonneville power grid and so on out there, were just vital to the economic health of his particular region, so that when it came to maintaining that little island of socialism out there, he was very, very diligent. He saw it in its larger terms; he saw the importance of maintaining the growth potential of the public power grid out there, which was carried by this intertie, which was a vital success of the Department in 1964, the authorization to build these lines so that you could have an exchange of power with the Southwest. And generally, Jackson’s role in that was pretty direct. Of course teamed up with Magnuson [Warren G. Magnuson] on the Senate Appropriations Committee, it was a powerful, powerful force, and they generally succeeded. They didn’t have much problem during the Kennedy years, those were expansion years. They had problems when Johnson was cutting the budget later, they had to fight harder.

MOSS: Alan Bible?

[-94-]

CARVER: Well, Alan Bible was the—he’s one of the fine gentlemen of the Senate, I’m very fond of him. He was Chairman of Public Lands Subcommittee. He’s a pleasure to work with. Generally speaking, he was parochial in his interest: he was looking after his people and so on.

MOSS: Was he a range man?

CARVER: Well, within limits. He was looking after those people out there, but he also took a pretty interesting attitude about that area down there by Ely, I can’t remember its name, which was of national park caliber and getting that protected. Very able guy. He’s got lots of interests. He became, eventually, Chairman of the District Committee and got kind of tied up in that sort of thing. But he was on Appropriations, did his homework....

MOSS: Did he give you any breaks the second time around on the hearings simply because...

CARVER: Oh, we didn’t have any problems with him. You don’t have problems with those fellows just

[-95-]

because you have a confrontation with them, if they respect you. It turns out that we had better political judgment than he did about how it was going to come out, and as soon as the thing simmered down, he didn’t care. They were reactive to what kind of troubles they were going to be in with their people, and when it turns out they weren’t in any trouble, why, they were delighted.

MOSS: Okay, we have your old boss Frank Church, also.

CARVER: Well, Frank and I came to a parting of ways on an Indian issue fairly early, the so-called Indian Heirship Bill. He and I took each other on, so to speak, in a very hot hearing on the subject. Many people said it involved a break in our relationships; of course, it didn’t. But it had the advantage for me of a kind of an emancipation, people didn’t associate me with Church after that, much, just thinking of it. Frank Church is an extremely able guy. Whenever he gets into anything, he gets into it so that

[-96-] he does a real good job. For example, his handling of that Wilderness matter was just absolutely superb. But fundamentally, his interests then, and now, were with the Foreign Relations Committee. And so far as the Interior Committee is concerned, after his huge successes on the statehood matter, which came, of course, before the Administration, and on the Wilderness Bill, he took a subcommittee chairmanship on Indians, and he had great hope that he was going to be able to work things out. He hated that job; he really hated it and eventually got off it. But it was just the kind of a fudge factory to just drive him absolutely crazy, the intricacies of Indian politics and the inability to get the Department or anybody to react in the fashion he thought they ought to. And what bothered him most was that he never did get any real rapport with the Indians. And it’s not very often that Frank Church doesn’t get real rapport with whomever he s trying to get rapport with, which is, particularly lately,

[-97-] not everybody. Early in the Administration he wanted me to fire some people who had been associated with the old Administration, a director of the Bureau of Land Management’s office in Boise, for example, and I refused—as a matter of fact, the man’s still there— because his problem really wasn’t with him, it had been with the Department and to sacrifice that man would have been a bad mistake. I just said I wouldn’t do it, at least not on any personal basis. He, for a long time on straight political grounds, was trying to get a job for the former state chairman of Idaho, named John Walters [John G. Walters]. And this was a continuing problem between us because Walters was totally incompetent; he knew it and I knew it, but he wanted me to take care of him because I was downtown. And we kind of took care of him by getting him short-term jobs, but we wouldn’t ever feed him into the hierarchy. And that eventually died

[-98-] down. Frank’s pretty direct about these things. He says, “Well, you ought to do it.” I’d say, “This Administration is trying to run this thing right, and he just doesn’t fit in with our plans.” I was always candid with him. So things were a little sensitive. Frank is a really outstanding human being. But the problem of a former administrative assistant going downtown is kind of a special problem, and the Kennedy Administration had lots of them. There were a lot of Hill people scattered around, and each one of them had in one way or another this kind of problem with their old superiors. That’d be an interesting study for somebody some time.

MOSS: Yes, it would

CARVER: Because, you know, Hubert Humphrey’s [Hubert H. Humphrey] guys were kind of over there in Agriculture; they eventually kind of got him into a little bit of trouble. Frank McCulloch [Frank W. McCulloch], Rand Dixon [Paul Rand Dixon], just a whole bunch of these guys were called on to staff the new Administration.

[-99-]

I think it was a great thing because there had been a kind of a shadow government up there anyway, particularly on the Senate side. There had been a lot of actually substantive work done in the late years of Eisenhower [Dwight D. Eisenhower]. And Kennedy knew it because his office had been part of it. And of course Ted Sorensen [Theodore C. Sorensen] knew all of us, and this was a natural place to go, looking back on it.

MOSS: Did you get much of a reverse flow later on?

CARVER: Some guys didn’t really work out and migrated back to the Hill. Jackson’s administrative assistant, for example, went back up on the Hill after a while; he didn’t like it downtown. But basically no, the flow was to downtown, and then out to trade associations or private law practice—a lot of them are doing very well, just look around, you know.

MOSS: Yeah, here in town, as a matter of fact.

CARVER: Here in town. So I can’t think of much reversal flow. Strangely enough, not much flow back into

[-100-]

the elective office either. One or two, but not often.

MOSS: Gruening [Ernest Gruening] of Alaska?

CARVER: Oh, that miserable wretch.

MOSS: Outspoken chap.

CARVER: He just.... He maintained, I think, overall good relationships with Ernest. I liked him personally, you couldn’t help liking him; you know, the old goat still carrying on in his independent fashion. But he just didn’t have any concept of the limits of what he ought to do. He called me up one time and in effect told me to authorize the Department to pay his way up to Alaska. That’s one of the few times I can remember a kind of a direct illegal request coming to me. I don’t think he intended it to be illegal or knew it was illegal, but...

MOSS: What’s the difference between that and a dinner for Mike Kirwan [Michael J. Kirwan]?

CARVER: Well, maybe not much. But I guess when a man asks for it like Gruening does, it is a little different

[-101-]

than a man like Mike Kirwan who indicated that he’d appreciate it. I don’t know, probably not much difference. But a damned dinner, what difference does that make? I don’t think we ever gave Kirwan any money.

MOSS: Yeah. I’m just feeling for the...

CARVER: It’s just his ego that you’re dealing with, whereas Gruening, it was a damn sight more practical than that. They had pretty stringent limitations on travel, and if he could work out a business way to get to Alaska to do a little campaigning on somebody else’s budget, why, all the better.

MOSS: Yes. This is not Interior lobbying.

CARVER: No, no, it was the other way about, strictly the other way about. And he’d have been outraged if anybody had suggested that we were going to get anything out of it, that would have been improper! But still, one shouldn’t give the wrong impression simply because he was that direct. He played the game downtown; he’d been a governor under the Department of

[-102-] the Interior , he’d fought for years with Harold Ickes [Harold LeClair Ickes], and he knew where lots of skeletons were. And I recall right after I came into office, I went up to Alaska and had a kind of a—I mentioned it to you once before—a confrontation with Helen Fisher [Helen M. Fisher], or whatever her name was, who was the National Committeewoman. She was outraged at my suggestion that we wanted to fill some of these positions on merit.

MOSS: There was a chap named Frank Peratrovich that she wanted appointed or something of this sort?

CARVER: Well, Gruening wanted Peratrovich appointed director of the Indian Bureau, who was a state senator up there. Nice guy, but it would have been the worst thing in the world for him. We had a damn good guy up there, who was an Indian, [Robert L. Bennett]. Later, we did remove the guy he was opposed to, which was Hawkins [James E. Hawkins], brought him back to the states, brought him down south. But Gruening’s the kind of guy Gruening

[-103-] is. He wrote a telegram to Kennedy saying to fire me. Well, he didn’t fire me. But that never colored our relationships. I worked with Ernest after that time and time and time again, always on the most pleasant of personal relationships because we could sit down and talk, you know; we always did. And I’d level with him, and lord knows he’d level with me; he was pretty direct. He’s a unique guy, but he just didn’t have any sense of where to stop on some of these things. He was always at sword points with his colleague, Bob Bartlett [Edward Lewis Bartlett] who is one of God’s chosen people. But Bartlett never would fight with him openly either. He’d cuss him out privately to me, but he’d know better than to get into a public contest with his colleague. Gruening would get away with murder sometimes, simply because people didn’t want to take him on.

MOSS: How about Bartlett, since we’re on to him?

CARVER: Well, of course Alaska is extremely important

[-104-]

to the whole Interior activities because 98 percent of the land is under Interior supervision or was at that time, most of it. And our programs up there are vitally important. A huge percentage of the Alaska education budget is Federal Indian schools because the population is so heavily Indian, and so welfare and education and road building and the operation of the railroad and the operation of a lot of the mining laws, just many things in Alaska were under the Interior Department. Bob Bartlett, of course, understood the system extremely well. He’d been delegate for many, many years and then Senator. He was loved by everybody up there; nobody ever would have beaten him. But he was effective; he was really effective. Gruening wasn’t effective. Bob always knew how to get things actually done, and so many people were really so personally fond of him, they’d really work hard to try to work it but Bob’s way. I mentioned a long time

[-105-]

ago in one of these interviews about working with him to get that change in the arrangements for the railroad to have ICC [Interstate Commerce Commission] supervision of its rates; that’s just one tiny little example of the things that Bob looked after. He wasn’t on the Interior Committee, but through his long association with that Committee over on the House side, and because his state was so vitally interested in all those matters, he was really much more effective on Interior matters than almost anybody. Didn’t vote.

MOSS: I’ve got Dominick [Peter H. Dominick] fairly far down on the list, but he keeps cropping up in references and all kind of things.

CARVER: Well, Pete Dominick was a member of the House Interior Committee under the Kennedy years I guess before or he was elected to the Senate. I guess he didn’t get elected until ’62. I can’t remember, but I think it was something like that.

MOSS: That’s about right.

[-106-]

CARVER: He’s an arch-conservative, but one of those smart guys who works hard and has a real—at least in my mind—a real interest in facts and doing his homework and that sort of thing. I’m a fan of his; worked with him on a very pleasant personal basis, as I always did with Gordon Allott [Gordon L. Allott], maybe even more particularly with Gordon Allott. And here we’re at a point which is very important when you think about the Interior Department. Most issues don’t divide on any kind of partisan line. There’s lots of lines, but they’re not Democratic-Republican lines, they’re some other kind of line. Right today, for example, I dare say that if you went up and looked at the House Interior Committee, you would find that in terms of its working components, even though it’s under Democratic leadership, that it’s effectively a Republican committee, which may make quite a little bit of difference because we now have the Nixon [Richard M. Nixon] Administration, but then, of course, that’s

[-107-] a different problem.

MOSS: What do you mean by “effectively a Republican Committee?”

CARVER: Well, I mean that if they are going to have a hearing up there, you have to have a quorum under the rules, it’ll be the Republicans who will show up and make quorum. If you’re going to get down to marking up a bill, it’ll be Republicans who will show up at the meeting and do the drudgery…

MOSS: Okay, why?

CARVER: ...going through line by line. Well, I think after the reappointment and the other kinds of changes that have taken place in the last eight or ten years, the power of the cities, or the interest in urban matters has greatly increased. So when you get to these kind of rural- type Western problems, the Democrats, who are fewer in number and are a different kind of a breed, tend as they come in to go on the Interior Committee, and they tend to be from New York or somewhere like

[-108-] that, and they just don’t care, even though they’re on the Committee. So that the Committee is made up of guys that you never heard of, whereas in the years we’re talking about, I knew the case history on every one of them. I just don’t think that you’d find that anybody would be asking who is a member of the—Ted Kupperman [Theodore Kupperman] was a member of the Interior Committee, and they’d say they never heard of him! Downtown even! Because he’s just not a force in it. That was to some extent true when we first got there. You remember I mentioned Wharton [J. Ernest Wharton]. He didn’t have any damned interest whatever in that Committee. Or Adam Clayton Powell was on that Committee before the Administration changed, as a matter of fact, he could have been chairman of it at one time. But the interests are just not there for some of these Eastern, urban-oriented, or even Western, urban-oriented congressmen, like Phil Burton [Phillip Burton]. He doesn’t really give a damn about the Interior

[-109-]

Committee; he cares about the urban problems of San Francisco and Los Angeles and so on. So that you finally get that Committee becoming a kind of a cohesive working group of those people who come from those public land states with Interior-type problems, either water development or land development or parks or something like that, or Indians. But you kind of slush off at the lower end those guys who come and go and don’t make much of an impact.

MOSS: Well, we can’t leave the Committee without talking about Carl Hayden [Carl T. Hayden], I’m sure.

CARVER: Well, Carl Hayden, of course, was the Secretary’s own Senator. I think they had good relationships. I don’t really think it ever did Udall a hell of a lot of good when it came to most of the appropriations crunches that we sometimes would get into. Carl was always great as the Chairman of our Appropriations Subcommittee, and was interested in the same projects he’d been interested in over the years, but there got to

[-110-] be a kind of a falling away as he began to suspect the orthodoxy of Udall when it came to the Arizona project. And old Uncle Carl got a little aggravated at some of the developments which seemed to be taking place in terms of the dams, particularly on the Colorado, so that Hayden was doing a lot of his work through Dominy [Floyd E. Dominy]. And they were together a force which was working pretty independently of the Secretary, and it was pretty disorderly there for a long time. In the meantime, of course, Hayden’s assistant, who aspired to succeed the old man, was afraid that his real competition was going to be one of the Udalls; that kept things kind of sensitive.

MOSS: Which assistant was this?

CARVER: Elson, Roy Elson [Roy L. Elson].

MOSS: Okay, right. That’s right. I was thinking of Kent Watkins.

CARVER: Roy Elson eventually did run, if you’ll remember. But there was no love lost between Elson and Udall, between Elson and Beaty [Orren Beaty], so that this

[-111-] relationship had plusses and minuses. As a practical matter I had almost nothing to do with that relationship, as you might expect. It was the Secretary’s own state, and I had a kind of a cardinal rule to stay out of it, if I had any choice. Just a lot better to do it that way.

MOSS: How about Frank Moss [Frank Edward “Ted” Moss]?

CARVER: Well, that was an interesting kind of a proposition because during part of that period at any rate, Clint Anderson stepped aside and let Moss become the chairman of the Irrigation and Reclamation Subcommittee even though he was very junior. And I don’t think Anderson thought Moss was properly grateful for that because, I guess, eventually that situation was called back. I don’t really know the details of that. At any rate, he didn’t keep the committee after he had been reelected in ’64. Ted was…. He’s a good friend of mine, and I’m very fond of him and over the years, like a lot of those guys up there,

[-112-] they begin to act like senators even though they seem very much unlike it when they get there. And Ted’s preoccupation with taking junkets, trips, was almost equal to Gruening’s. They were the two travelingest senators you ever saw. And of course a lot of the places to travel were under Interior jurisdiction—Alaska, Virgin Islands, Guam—and whenever there was a trip, why, you could count on at least those two to be along. But to look to Ted as having any vital force on anything other than the Canyonlands project would be wrong. Now it’s an interesting study of a politician at work to see how he reacted on that Canyonlands, because when that project was first exposed by the Department (by the way, it was kind of done rather stupidly, because Udall in effect set aside two, three million acres of land in the confluence area of those rivers), Moss was violently opposed, reacting on a kind of a knee-jerk basis to the

[-113-] opposition of those ranchers and other commercial interests in the area. But is a changing state, and a lot of its population is up there in an urban complex from Provo to Salt Lake and Ogden and Logan, and he took soundings, and pretty soon he found out that this Canyonlands, this park idea, had a lot of political appeal. So he just made it one of his campaigns to get that park through as a part of his campaign to be reelected and became a great, outspoken advocate of it. Of course that and some other things worked; and it was a great success, and it’s a fine park. I think that really important thing to remember out of it is just the kind of sense of surprise, really, that comes to some of those Western types who really think all the political muscle is strictly where the dollars are in terms of mining or grazing or so on, and all of a sudden they see these conservation issues develop. When he ran next time—of course this last time he was running

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this consumer bit for all it was worth, again successfully. So there’s been quite a metamorphosis there. Well, I say this next time—he’s running right now, he’s running again in ’70 and that’s what he’s running on. He’s head of a subcommittee on that in the Commerce Committee.

MOSS: Tom Kuchel [Thomas H. Kuchel].

CARVER: Well, Tom was the ranking Republican. He’s always much more a Democrat than a Republican. His relationships with the Democrats were always good; his relationships with the Republicans, some of these matters, were always bad, even though he had a leadership post in the Republican hierarchy. I didn’t work with him much. Most of the whole Redwoods fight came after I left, and he hadn’t been very vitally involved in it when I was there. I’d be hard-pressed to think of any kind of Kuchel project, other than kind of a continuing interest in that water rights question, the so-called Kuchel-Moss Bill, which is a vital reform in federal-state

[-115-] relations which he sponsored and I think did very well. It didn’t succeed, but he brought quite a little bit of statesmanship into that issue and did some work on it and understood it well.

MOSS: Okay. Who else do you think that we’ve left out should be mentioned?

CARVER: On the Senate?

MOSS: Yes.

CARVER: Well, I guess you shouldn’t really—I’m going back to think of the Senate as it was at that time. I guess McGovern [George S. McGovern] came a little later. Quentin Burdick [Quentin N. Burdick] came a little later...

MOSS: Nelson [Gaylord Nelson]?

CARVER: Gaylord Nelson came later. I didn’t ever have any work with Nelson when I was there or at least not enough to...

MOSS: Walters [Herbert S. Walters]?

CARVER: Who?

MOSS: Walters, Tennessee? Must have been later. You mentioned Allott a little earlier.

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CARVER: Gordon Allott had a pretty vital role and Len Jordan [Leonard B. Jordon], of course, from my own states. Well, we shouldn’t leave out Lee Metcalf. Lee Metcalf had the chairmanship of the Indian Affairs subcommittee there for a while, I think. I know he did, he kind of took it over from Frank [Frank Church] when he was a very junior member. I can’t remember why he went on that committee, but he did—on the Interior Committee. I think he got assigned as a subcommittee chairman as a freshman, which is rather unusual. Nobody else would take the damn thing, I think. Really, when you get to thinking about these committees and the roles of assistant secretaries, under secretaries, even secretaries, you have to examine some of those department-staff relationships much more then the department-member relationships. And the committee-staff, of course.... Just to go back to the point we were mentioning earlier, Jackson inherited the Anderson staff, and I don’t know whether Anderson stood

[-117-] up for them or not, but Jackson I don’t think has got his own staff yet! It’s now a Jackson staff, but Jerry Verkler was an Anderson protégé, Jim Gamble [James H. Gamble] was an Anderson protégé, and some of the others had been parceled out to be the senior members’ men on the Committee; you know, like Bible had a man, Roy Whitacre, on the Committee. I’d be hard pressed to say to this day who Jackson’s man on the Committee is in that sense. That tells you a little bit about some of the problems that we were talking about earlier.

MOSS: Who makes the contact between Interior and the staff of a committee? You’ve mentioned a number of times that you had talked to Senators and representatives, or that Udall had. Who does the staff contacting?

CARVER: Well, it’s an ad hoc kind of a problem there. If you’re doing your work right and you happen to talk to a member, you be damn sure that you call the appropriate staff guy and tell him what

[-118-] happened so that he’ll know. Now, whether you’re going to talk to the staff, or whether you’re going to talk to the member will depend in many cases upon factors which will just change. If the project that you’re concerned with is in the member’s own state, why, you generally will try to talk to him or to his administrative assistant, simply because you’ve got some relationships there which you want to be careful about. Unless, of course, the staff member is also from that member’s state, in which case then you’re back to the staff member again. There isn’t any real hierarchical arrangement which says that assistant secretaries talk to senators, and deputies talk to staff members. A wise Secretary will make quite a few contacts with the staff just to keep the staff on his side, so to speak. That means something to them, to be able to deal with secretaries and under secretaries and assistant secretaries. So you just kind of play it as a violin; as you

[-119-] see your interests are going to be served. You don’t have any hard and fast rules. But for damn sure you don’t ever get yourself in the position on getting the staff members exasperated with you for going around them, the end run business, because they can do a lot more damage to you than you can to them.

MOSS: One last, quick question for this session, I think, because you have a meeting at 11:00, don’t you?

CARVER: Yes.

MOSS: In the whole relationships with the Congress, was there one point at which you thought the Kennedy Administration could have done something to better its relations with Congress, given the difficult, conservative bent of the Congress? Was there some one place where they slipped up that you felt they could have done better? Or several places or an area?

CARVER: Well, I’d have to answer that question in a rather self-serving fashion because at a time—this is rather strange, too—at a time when our

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relationships were going along quite well, some of the other departments around the government were just in god-awful trouble. And we said, you know, through our Congressional liaison people and through the Secretary and Orren Beaty and so on, we were quite often making the point, which eventually I think they picked up over at the White House, that this kind of moderate, deferential attitude toward the Congress would get you more in the long run than this kind of direct, “This is our business, the hell with you guys” kind of thing that some of the other departments were getting themselves tied up with.

MOSS: It was a departmental...

CARVER: And so I think that our relationships overall—I think most students of it would say that overall the Interior Department had fewer troubles in that era with the Congress, in a basically sensitive area, than most of the other departments of President Kennedy’s

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Administration.

MOSS: Okay, but I was wondering, do you attribute this to the departments or to, say, an attitude out of the White House or what?

CARVER: Well, I would attribute it to the departments. A lot of those guys were prone to take their problems to the White House pretty quickly, and we seldom did that. We didn’t really think that we ought to bring the White House in, unless it really, really, really mattered, figuring that’d do more harm than good in the long run. You might get that one, but then you’d lose the next two or three. You pay a price when you do that arm-twisting business, and a lot of the others didn’t really understand that. I think they came to eventually. But just looking at the Kennedy Administration overall, and not the Department of the Interior, I’d say that that’s the one generalization I’d make now, thinking about it. As to what we might have done, that’s hard to say, but I certainly

[-122-] think that under Udall’s leadership at that era, we did a lot, lot better than anybody had any right to expect we’d do. Even that first run-in that Udall had with Charlie Halleck [Charles A. Halleck] turned out not to hurt us; just kind of good fun; everybody kind of enjoyed that one. And it came out pretty well. Udall was good in this area, and he wasn’t prone to go ask for help from Larry O’Brien [Lawrence F. O’Brien] or somebody like that. And I think the Congress generally appreciated that.

MOSS: Okay, that’s very good. Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[-123-] John A. Carver, Jr. Oral History Transcript – JFK #8 Name List

A J Allott, Gordon L., 107, 116, 117 Jackson, Henry M., 81, 82, 85, 86, 89-91, 93, 94, Anderson, Clinton P., 80-86, 112, 117, 118 100, 117, 118 Johnson, Lyndon B., 86-89, 94 Jordan, Leonard B., 117 B Bartlett, Edward Lewis, 104-106 Beaty, Orren, 111, 121 K Bennett, Robert L., 103 Kennedy, John F., 86, 87, 89, 94, 99, 100, 104, Bible, Alan, 94, 95, 118 106, 120-122 Burdick, Quentin N., 116 Kirwan, Michael J., 101, 102 Burton, Phillip, 109, 110 Kuchel, Thomas H., 115, 116 Kupperman, Theodore, 109

C Church, Frank, 82, 86, 89, 96-99, 117 L Luce, Charles F., 86

D Dixon, Paul Rand, 99 M Dominick, Peter H., 106, 107 Magnuson, Warren G., 94 Dominy, Floyd E., 111 McCulloch, Frank W., 99 McGovern, George S., 116 Metcalf, Lee, 117 E Moss, Frank Edward “Ted”, 112-115 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 100 Elson, Roy L., 111 N Nash, Philleo, 85 F Nelson, Gaylord, 116 Fisher, Helen M., 103 Nixon, Richard M., 107 Freeman, Orville Lothrop, 91

O G O’Brien, Lawrence F., 123 Gamble, James H., 118 Olson, Sigurd F., 92 Gruening, Ernest, 101-105, 113

P H Peratrovich, Frank, 103 Halleck, Charles A., 123 Powell, Adam Clayton, 109 Hawkins, James E., 103 Hayden, Carl T., 110, 111 S Sorenson, Theodore C., 100 I Ickes, Harold LeClair, 103

U Udall, Stewart L., 83-85, 89, 91, 110-113, 118, 121, 123

V Verkler, Jerry, 118

W Walters, Herbert S., 116 Walters, John G., 98 Watkins, Kent, 111 Wharton, J. Ernest, 109 Whitacre, Roy, 118 White, Lee C., 88