<--PREV Doc #83  |  Memorial Commission Home Page  |  First Term Table of Contents  |  Presidential Papers Home Page  |  Doc#  |  NEXT--> Doc #85 Document #84; March 16, 1953 To Robert Ten Broeck Stevens Series: EM, AWF, Administration Series: Army The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Volume XIV - The Presidency: The Middle Way Part I: Charting a New Course; January 1953 to April 1953 Chapter 2: "A number of misunderstandings": Party and International Struggles   Memorandum to the Secretary of the Army (through the Secretary of Defense): I note in the paper that you have decided adversely on the construction of a bridge in New Orleans. This case was presented to me some time ago on the basis that the request involved only a removal, by a distance of a few hundred yards, from the site which had previously been approved by the Army for the construction of a similar bridge. If this is correct, why should we now disapprove of this construction? Will you please let me have the shortest kind of a memorandum at your early convenience?1 1 On March 18 (AWF/A: Army) Secretary of the Army Stevens would explain that in 1950 the Corps of Engineers had approved a bridge that would have stood 135 feet above the Mississippi River and provided 1,800 feet of horizontal clearance between two piers (financial problems had blocked this project). The Army earlier in 1953 had turned down a design that would have allowed 400 fewer feet of horizontal clearance and placed a pier 700 feet from the wharf line in the river's channel, "an unreasonable hazard to navigation especially with respect to oil tankers and multiple barge tows." On that same day (Mar. 18) the mayor of New Orleans and Army engineers were to meet "to obtain those specifications which might be acceptable from a navigational standpoint and which would provide a basis for redesign and resubmission of a new request." In a separate March 18 memorandum (ibid.) Stevens would send the President copies of telegrams from New Orleans port authorities supporting the 1953 rejection of the bridge design. Bibliographic reference to this document: Eisenhower, Dwight D. To Robert Ten Broeck Stevens, 16 March 1953. In The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed. L. Galambos and D. van Ee, doc. 84. World Wide Web facsimile by The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission of the print edition; Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/84.cfm <--PREV Doc #83  |  Memorial Commission Home Page  |  First Term Table of Contents  |  Presidential Papers Home Page  |  Doc#  |  NEXT--> Doc #85

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