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Personally—but not politically—McKay has been compared to Harry S. Truman. Both have a chipmunk's cheeky air; both are short, jaunty, friendly and folksy. They would look even more alike if McKay's nose had not been flattened years ago by a fall from a horse. Like Truman, McKay has a zest for people and politics, a talent for off-the-cuff oratory and off-the-cob jokes. The resemblance to Truman ends there: McKay made money in business, and he learned his politics not from Kansas City's Pendergast but in Salem's antiseptic, traditionally Republican atmosphere.
Crutch & Cripples. At his first Washington news conference, early last year, Secretary McKay remarked that the Interior Department has as many parts as a Chevrolet. He knew the car parts were essential, but he added that he was not too sure about Interior's. Since then he has abolished five divisions, dropped 4,000 workers and cut the budget nearly $200 million from its pre-McKay peak. Interior remains one of the greatest, most powerful and least-known departments of the Government.
Interior rules one-third of the nation's area. It controls ranching, mining, lumbering and all economic activity on 750 million acres—an area greater than France, Germany, Italy and Scandinavia combined. It supervises 16,000 Eskimos, 400,000 Indians and 3,000,000 far-flung people from self-governing Puerto Rico to Yap, a South Pacific trust island where the currency is stones. It marketed, in 1952, more electric power than the nation's eight biggest private utilities.
Interior's domain and duties seem boundless:
¶ Its Reclamation Bureau has spent $2 billion to water the arid West and tame rivers like the Colorado (see color pages). Reclamation built the world's greatest irrigation system—California's Central Valley Project—and four biggest dams: Hoover, Shasta, Hungry Horse and Grand Coulee (which has generating rooms twice as big as Yankee Stadium). <| Its Bureau of Indian Affairs supervises 56 million acres of Indian land, operates 62 hospitals. One problem: Who is an Indian? A man who was only 1/256th Indian once cut himself in on tribal bene fits. The answer: an Indian is, usually, anyone with at least one Indian grandparent.
¶ Its Fish and Wildlife Service tries to keep the nation's 32 million fishermen and hunters happy, runs 200 game refuges, breeds 227 million fish eggs yearly, has developed underwater television to study fishing from the viewpoint of a fish.
¶ Its Office of Territories runs Interior's exterior, tries to entice industry to America's outposts. As one result, the Exquisite Form Brassiere Co. may set up a bra factory in Samoa.
¶ It puts identifying bands and tags on birds, fish, crabs and the bats from New Mexico's vast Carlsbad Caverns; it runs a railroad; it operates 2,791 radio transmission stations; it combats the West's halogeton weed (which poisons cattle) and the South's water hyacinth (which smothers fish); it inspects mines; it maintains more than 60,000 graves; it flies 67 planes and three helicopters; it manages a herd of 1,500,000 fur seals on the Pribilof Islands; it is the world's biggest employer of engineers and it protects the nation's last 23 whooping cranes, 577 trumpeter swans and a few midget deer.