New Look at Interior

Into the hopper of the Federal Power Commission last week plopped a report from the Interior Department discussing the possibility of building a new federal high dam on the Snake River between Oregon and Idaho. The report, as it stood, was a drastic modification of former Interior Secretary Douglas McKay's stand against the celebrated Hell's Canyon federal dam, a stand which some Western Republicans have blamed for the defeat of many a Western Republican candidate last November (including Oregon's candidate for the U.S. Senate Doug McKay).

Symbolically, the high dam now suggested by Interior would impound water enough to obliterate the Hell's Canyon dan site--much as McKay's energetic successor, Interior Secretary Fred A. Seaton, is superimposing on McKay policies strong new decisions of his own.

Refitted Policy. Though Seaton, like McKay, holds to the Eisenhower concept of private-public partnership in river development, he takes a broader view of what can be accomplished. Studying the private low dams that McKay favored, Seaton noted that they offered only limited flood control, failed therefore to achieve full development of the Snake's potential. One high dam (at Pleasant Valley, downstream from Hell's Canyon) would generate more power and provide more flood control than two McKay-type low dams at Pleasant Valley and Mountain Sheep, he explained to the Federal Power Commission. (Before the FPC is an application from Pacific Northwest Power Co. to build the two low dams.)

Seaton has refitted McKay policy in another Interior problem: the continuing deficit in operations of the Southwestern Power Administration, an Interior Department subsidiary. To make up the deficit, McKay proposed a 40% increase on power supplied by the administration to rural electric cooperatives. Seaton sliced the coops' rate increase to 27 1/2%, suggested other revenue by increasing rates on power supplied to private power companies. He also demanded that a 30-year contract between Southwestern Power and the Reynolds Metals Co., fashioned by Truman Interior Secretary Oscar Chapman, be renegotiated to allow higher rates.

Mollified Lobby. In another version of the Seaton new look, Ross Lillie Leffler, 70, last week was confirmed by the Senate to fill the new post of Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife. Philadelphia Steelman Leffler assumes control of two equal bureaus devised as partial mollification of the powerful conservation and sportsmen's lobby, which McKay had offended. Not entirely satisfied with simple equality, the conservationists nonetheless like Leffler, trust Seaton and are willing to give the new system a chance. They are also pleased because Fred Seaton has suspended the issuance of oil and gas leases on federal bird-and-game refuges; Doug McKay approved more in his term (364) than had been granted in the three decades before him (277).

For Nebraska Publisher Seaton, at 47 the Cabinet's youngest member, designing a forward look in the Interior Department is one more item on his list of delicate Administration assignments. Rushed into Government sendee to become Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson's assistant for legislative and public affairs, i.e., public relations, Seaton succeeded as well as any man in the face of "Engine Charlie's" proclivity for hip shots. As a presidential assistant, Seaton got many a touchy job, e.g., smoothing out patronage squabbles, asking for resignations. Moving into his toughest task, Seaton already has shown a considerable capacity for learning quickly the intricacies and the pitfalls. He is respectful of other views and attentive to suggestions, but one fact stands out: in the new-look Interior Department, Fred Seaton is calling the shots.

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