BOARD01799

• Board Meeting Date: 9/8/1961
• Description: Minutes and Resolution
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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We had to have a unanimous agreement on the
resolution. There is one thing in the Upper
Commission that perhaps you may not be familiar
with, and on the other hand you may be familiar
with it - all of our decisions on matters of
this kind have to be by a vote of four. Three
Commissioners and the Chairman can make up that
vote of four. .ve felt in this case that we
didn't want to embarass Mr. Newell who, by the
way, is a very impartial, a very objective, a
very fine presiding chairman. His loyalty, of
course, belongs to the Department of the Inter-
ior and the Bureau of Reclamation. He has
always been loyal to them and always will be
as long as he lives. He's a former employee
of the Bureau and a very fine gentlemen. We
didn't want to involve Mr. Newell in having
anything whatever to do with the adoption of
this resolution so the four Commissioners had
to agree on every word and every point that it
covered and made. That took an awful lot of
time and we did take a lot of time. My per-
sonal views on executive sessions, for more
years than I know, ever since I've been in
public life, have been very much against them.
In Congress the committees mark up bills always
in executive sessions, so they hold executive
sessions frequently and mark up bills and go
ahead with the business before them. They do
that in executive sessions. They don't think
anything of it in Congress, the executive
sessions are routine with the committees of
Congress.

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We had difficulty on language in preparing
this resolution. The resolution covered a great
many points. It reviewed the history, pretty
much, of this whole controversy, item by item,
and it was a long resolution. It had an awful
lot of language in it and every word and every
phrase and every statement that was made was
given very careful consideration by each of the
Commissioners because each of the Commissioners
had to be satisfied with that language. After
we had received the letters and after we had
agreed upon the language in the resolution, the
meeting was thrown open. It's a basic rule of

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