The company had its start when Amory Houghton bought a glass company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, added the Union Glass Company in Somerset, Massachusetts, and having moved the operation to New York City, then bought the Brooklyn Flint Glass Works. The company moved to Corning in 1868, first as the Corning Flint Glass Works, becoming the Corning Glass Works in 1875. http://www.corning.com/inside_corning/150th_Anniversary/Our_story/index2.asp.

My formal name is Horton Guyford Stever, but throughout my life I’ve always been simply “Guy Stever.”

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but my aunt’s shout had a political bite, since Smith was a “wet” on Prohibition, long favoring the repeal of the 18th Amendment, while Hoover was a “dry.”

Some of the stuff got pretty vicious. One leaflet published in New York state had this: “When the Catholics rule the United States, And the Jew grows a Christian nose on his face, When the Pope is the head of the Ku Klux Klan In the land of Uncle Sam, Then Al Smith will be our President And the country not worth a damn.” http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/presidents_and_first_ladies/39019.

The astronomer George Ellery Hale approached Corning after unsuccessfully spending $1 million to have the mirror cast in California from fused glass. He proposed that Corning build the mirror out of Pyrex, then a new type of glass. Pyrex expands and contracts much less with changes in temperature than ordinary glass, so a Pyrex mirror would be less subject to the focus and distortion problems suffered by a smaller, 100-inch mirror. It took two tries, but in 1936 Corning successfully cast the 200-inch mirror, which was then shipped from

Corning to Pasadena by a train never going faster than 25 miles per hour, using a route that avoided low overpasses and tunnels, taking 14 days to make the trip, and with the mirror protected by guards on overnight stops. It took 11 years, from 1936 to 1947, to shape the mirror, with almost 10,000 pounds ground away. First light was in 1948. Full-time scientific observing began a year later. http://astro.caltech.edu/palomarpublic/history/.

Palomar was only one of Hale’s (1868–1938) spectacular accomplishments. He founded and directed three great observatories—Yerkes, Mt. Wilson, and Palomar; founded the Astrophysical Journal, then and now the leading journal in the field; and was an amazingly effective money raiser. A major beneficiary of his intellect, leadership, and rain-making skills was the National Academy of Sciences. He was the animating force in building a home for the academy in Washington and through his leadership in establishing the National Research Council helped create the modern academy. He invented the spectroheliograph for studying the sun, and in addition to his many scholarly publications also wrote popular books, such as Depths of the Universe, Beyond the Milky Way, and Signals from the Stars.

After a distinguished career at the University of Chicago, he succumbed to lobbying by George Ellery Hale to become president of Cal Tech and, with Hale and chemist Albert Noyes, transformed it into the Cal Tech that I entered as a graduate student in the late 1930s. He made enormous scientific contributions, including accurate measurement of the charge carried by an electron and verification of Einstein’s photoelectric equation. Millikan was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in physics “for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect.” He wrote many books, with a recurring theme the reconciliation of science and religion in such books as Time, Matter, and Values and Science and Life.

These included Houghton Stevens, Stuart Rice, Paul Cook, Helen Lovegrove, Winifred Stanton, Barbara Hungerford, and many others.

Charles H. Townes went on to share the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics for “for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle.” http://almaz.com/nobel/physics/1964a.html.

W. K. H. (everyone calls him Pief) Panofsky served as professor and director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center from 1961 until his “retirement” in 1984, but continues to be extraordinarily active in many issues, not least arms control.

Arthur A. Noyes, professor of chemistry at Cal Tech from 1916 to 1936. http://books.nap.edu/books/0309060311/html/26.html#pagetop.

Carl David Anderson, by William H. Pickering, Biographical Memoirs. Vol. 73, National Academy of Sciences: Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 29. http://books.nap.edu/books/0309060311/html/26.html#pagetop.

Anderson received the 1936 Nobel Prize in physics at the age of 31 for his discovery of the positive electron, the positron.

Just to underline that high-energy physics is a complicated business, the mesotrons cum muons of my time were also called mu-mesons. However, it turned out that they aren’t mesons but rather members of a different class of particles called leptons. http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1968/alvarez-lecture.html.

Yukawa received the 1949 Nobel Prize in physics for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces.

You can see a picture of a faltboot at http://home.t-online.de/home/fossil/faltboot.htm.

William H. Pickering became professor of electrical engineering at Cal Tech in 1946, and then a great leader of the U.S. space program. He organized the electronics work for Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and served as JPL Director for over two decades, from 1954 to 1976, a time when JPL ran off a string of spectacular achievements: The first U.S. satellite (Explorer I), the first successful U.S. circumlunar space probe (Pioneer IV), the Mariner flights to Venus and Mars in the early to mid-1960s, the Ranger photographic missions to the moon in 1964–1965, and the Surveyor lunar landings of 1966-67. http://www.the-cape.com/ccas/pickering.htm

Bill commented later that we were lucky we didn’t drown in Lake Tulainyo. I wasn’t worrying at the time about drowning but about an experiment in great peril.

William “Willie” Fowler, professor of physics at Cal Tech, received the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics, with Subrahmanya Chandrasekhar, for his theoretical and experimental studies of nuclear reactions in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe. Fowler had a very special style to him. For example, in a 1941 story Life magazine did on Cal Tech, he described his social life as a graduate student in the 1930s: “The main thing I did was play poker on Saturday nights with the other graduate students. . . . There was one mathematician, Max Wyman, who cleaned us out all the time. . . . Father [Henry] Bolger supplied us with all the wine we needed. He was a graduate student who later founded the physics department at Notre Dame. . . .” I too played games with Max Wyman, but badminton and pool, not poker and not for money. He later became president of the University of Alberta. And I ice skated with fellow physics graduate student Charley Townes, future Nobelist, and climbed in the San Gabriel and San Jacinto Mountains with Bob Wells, later engineering vice president of Westinghouse, and Tim Smith, later a professional meteorologist.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist and scientific director of the Los Alamos laboratory—the Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb (1943–1945)—and was director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. (1947–1966).

H. V. Neher and H. G. Stever, “The mean lifetime of the mesotron from electroscope data,” The Physical Review, 1940, vol. 58, 9, pp. 766–770. See also Eldred Nelson, “Notes on the Neher-Stever Experiment,” The Physical Review, 1940, vol. 58, 9, pp. 771–773.

H. G. Stever, “A directional Geiger counter,” The Physical Review, 1941, vol 59, 9, p. 765 and “The discharge mechanism of fast G-M counters from the deadtime experiments,” The Physical Review, 1942, vol. 61, 1-2, pp. 38–52.

That my experiment showed that a Geiger counter would give a false reading of no counts when bombarded by heavy radiation explained perhaps the first major scientific discovery of the space age. The first U.S. satellite, Explorer I, carried James Van Allen’s Geiger counter experiment. The data showed the counter in

certain regions around the earth going to zero. That turned out to be the high-radiation area now known as the Van Allen Belt, regions of high-energy particles, mainly protons and electrons held captive by the magnetic influence of the earth.

Plaque at the site.

http://www.ibiscom.com/blitz.htm.

This account, and much of the history of the Rad Lab that follows, is taken from the excellent book by Robert Buderi entitled The Invention that Changed the World, Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1997.

Microwaves are part of the electromagnetic spectrum of light, which ranges from very short gamma rays to radio waves a meter or more in length. Visible light is in the 10^–5 centimeter range, and microwaves are in the centimeter range, making them intermediate between radio and infrared waves. For more, see http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/emspectrum.html.

Present, along with the cavity magnetron, were from Britain, Eddie Bowen and John Cockcroft, and from the United States, the host, Alfred Loomis, a retired investment banker who had built a physics laboratory at his home in Tuxedo Park, N.Y.; Carroll Wilson, personal assistant to Vannevar Bush; Karl Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Admiral Harold Bowen, director of the Naval Research Laboratory. See Buderi, p. 37.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 83.

http://home.zonnet.nl/atlanticwall/radar/#entwick.

Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and former dean of engineering at MIT, persuaded President Roosevelt in 1940 that a new organization was needed to mobilize the country’s scientists for the seemingly inevitable conflict. By Executive Order, Roosevelt created the National Defense Research Committee, NDRC, with Bush as chairman. But the limitations of the NDRC quickly became obvious. It could focus on research but not carry it forward into development and production, having neither the funds nor the authority. A year later, on June 28, 1941, Roosevelt established the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) with Bush as director, to “serve as a center for mobilization of the scientific personnel and resources of the Nation in order to assure maximum utilization of such personnel and resources in developing and applying the results of scientific research to defense purposes.” It became an enormous enterprise, responsible not only for the Rad Lab and the Manhattan Project but also for major efforts on new explosives and propellants, submarine warfare, proximity fuzes, and major medical advances on antimalarials, blood and blood substitutes, and penicillin. The OSRD also lastingly transformed the American research enterprise. Prior to the OSRD, research and development partnerships among government, industry, and academia were rare, and with few exceptions the federal government did not support academic research. OSRD changed all that, creating novel arrangements for work among the

three sectors and enormously increasing the flow of federal funds into academia. Moreover, rather than adopting the military’s hierarchical command style (or the German style which apparently trusted only selected industries and military laboratories), the OSRD operated in a highly decentralized and collegial manner, with Bush firm that scientists could do their best work in their own laboratories as civilians. At the same time, where needed, major central laboratories were created. The obvious example is the Rad Lab at MIT, which drew personnel from 69 academic institutions. The enormous success of this style—highly decentralized with the specific technical goals chosen by the scientists—left an imprint that is still with us today in the unique style of American research. See also James Phinney Baxter, Scientists Against Time, Little Brown and Co., Boston, 1946; National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators—2000, National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C, 2000; and G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, Free Press, New York, 1997, esp. pp. 109ff.

Lee Dubridge was trained as a nuclear physicist. His interests encompassed biophysics, the theory of photoelectric effects, and, of course, radar. “Of course” because in 1940 Dubridge took a leave of absence as chair of the physics department at the University of Rochester to became head of the Rad Lab. He never came back. After serving as Rad Lab director from 1940 to 1945, he went to the California Institute of Technology to serve as its president for 23 years, from 1946 to 1969, doubling during his time the size of the faculty and tripling its physical space. From 1969 to 1970 he was President Nixon’s science advisor. Dubridge died in Pasadena on January 24, 1994, at the age of 93. Jesse Greenstein, an astronomer and Cal Tech colleague, captured him well: “He was a modest, eminently likable man, small in stature, but with strong presence. His conversation ranged from reminiscences of great world scientific events and personal friends to the finances of KCET, the Los Angeles PBS station, which he helped found and served as president of its board. He loved opera and made and listened to shelves-full of video recordings of nearly all broadcast performances.” See http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/ldubridge.html.

That bland phrase ill serves the quality of people who came to the Rad Lab on short notice. Examples include E. O. Lawrence, who invented the cyclotron, a device for accelerating nuclear particles to very high velocities without the use of very high voltages; Kenneth Bainbridge, a noted mass spectroscopist at Harvard; and of course, Lee Dubridge, who, aside from directing Rad Lab throughout World War II, in time became president of Cal Tech. Ultimately, 10 of the people who worked at the Rad Lab won Nobel prizes.

Buderi, p. 105.

Robinson was at the famous cavity magnetron meeting at the old Wardman Park Hotel in Washington that I mentioned earlier. On arriving he was given a quick introduction to American style when, as Robinson described it, the host, Alfred Loomis, “came to the door, opened it himself, wearing trunks and otherwise completely nude. . . . It was the first time I had bourbon, and he probably had the best bourbon anywhere.” See Rad Lab: Oral Histories Documenting World War II Activities at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, produced by the IEEE Center

for the History of Electrical Engineering, Piscataway, N.J. Principal investigators: John Bryant, William Aspray, Andrew Goldstein, and Frederik Nebeker, p. 288, also see a biography of Alfred Loomis: Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science that Changed the Course of World War II, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2002.

E. R. Chamberlin, Life in Wartime Britain, Batsford, London, 1972, p. 51.

Brigadier Peter Young, ed., The World Almanac Book of World War II, World Almanac Publications, Bison Books Ltd., New York, 1981, p. 198.

Ibid., p. 198.

For me it was a deeply felt privilege and reward to meet and work with the giants of British radar development: A. P. Rowe, W. B. Lewis, P. I. Dee, and J. A. Ratcliffe, at TRE, and J. D. Cockcroft at ADRDE.

Chamberlin, pp. 60–61. Chamberlin comments that only about 9 percent of the population used public shelters and that “the majority of those who used [them] went into an Anderson shelter. And an Anderson shelter on a winter’s night was an extremely unpleasant experience. . . . Even official and private ingenuity could make of them nothing more than a steel shell sunk in the damp earth.” Later on, there were the so-called Morrison shelters, large steel tables inside houses to protect the inhabitants even if the house itself collapsed. A million were in use when the war ended.

No relation to the American General Electric.

Other members were Lee Dubridge, Rear Admiral Julius Furer, and Brigadier General H. M. McLelland.

Code names for radio grids each with different characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses.

Buderi, p. 212.

The World Almanac Book of World War II, p. 527.

Incidentally, when the Rad Lab colloquium crowd, many of them recent hires, heard me referring to the pocket notebook, they asked about it and then asked why don’t we have a similar talk on American radar. Lee Dubridge immediately asked Louis Ridenour to do that at the next colloquium.

ALSOS, the Greek word for grove, likely because it was organized by Brigadier General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, had several linked tasks: (1) determine the status of Germany’s nuclear bomb program (i.e., did it have a bomb?); (2) find the some 1,100 tons of uranium the Germans had taken in 1940 in occupied Belgium; and (3) capture and interrogate German nuclear scientists before the Allies, especially the Russians, did. It succeeded on all three. The ALSOS military leader was Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash, who interrogated Robert Oppenheimer on his communist affiliations. Sam Goudsmit, a Dutch theoretical physicist who had previously worked at the Rad Lab, was, again, scientific leader of ALSOS. By mid-November 1944, ALSOS found in Strasbourg conclusive evidence that, according to Goudsmit, “Germany had no atom bomb and was not likely to have one in any reasonable form.” On April 17, 1945, a British-American strike force found the missing uranium ore in Stassfurt. And Pash in the meantime pursued the German scientists hard, at times getting into firefights with German forces. Pash captured the German scientists in

Hechingen on April 23, all except Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg, both of them taken a few days later. (This account is based largely on Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1986, pp. 605– 610.)

A physicist, he went on to become founding president of Harvey Mudd College and memorialized his experiences in Harvey Mudd College: The First Twenty Years, Fithian Press, Santa Barbara, Calif., 1994.

Mike Chaffee and Al Bagg.

Chamberlin, p. 158.

The teams sent by Bowles included Louis Ridenour and David Griggs, as well as shorter stays by others, and became part of Eisenhower’s staff at SHAEF.

Small bombs with incendiaries carried inside a larger bomb.

Mollie Panter-Downes, “Letter from London,” The New Yorker, May 27, 1944. Reprinted in The New Yorker Book of War Pieces, 1939–1945, Schocken Books, New York, 1947, p. 305.

Bob had a brilliant career in cosmology and relativity with major contributions in the application of science and mathematics to military issues. He was a professor of mathematical physics at Princeton and served during World War II as scientific liaison officer of the London mission of the OSRD, my home base, and as chief of the Scientific Intelligence Advisory Section of the Allied Forces Supreme Headquarters. During the latter period, I met and traveled with him on technical intelligence matters in France, following hard on the Normandy invasion. After the war he moved to my alma mater, Cal Tech, as a professor of mathematical physics. He died much too soon, tragically after a car accident in 1961.

Reginald V. Jones (1911–1997) served as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen since 1946 and Professor Emeritus since 1981. He served as Assistant Director of the Royal Air Force Intelligence Section during World War II, where he developed methods to foil the Germans’ radar and their radio beam targeting of bomb sites in Britain. In 1993 the Central Intelligence Agency honored him with a perpetual intelligence medal in his name.

The Germans’ code name for the V-1 was “Kirschkern” (meaning cherry pit), because it was designed to be spit out against England (Theodore von Kármán, with Lee Edson, The Wind and Beyond, Little Brown and Co., Boston, 1967, p. 282).

“It was a single-stage rocket powered by LOX [liquid oxygen] and alcohol, developing a thrust of 56,000 pounds [cf. 110 pounds for the V-1], a payload of 2,200 pounds, [and] a velocity of 3,500 miles per hour, and inertially guided by gyroscopes and leveling pendulums to its target 200 miles distant” (Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1985, p. 43).

Chamberlin, p. 74.

The title of the song is Kanaouen ar Vretoned. It was composed in 1836 by Auguste Brizeux (1803–1858), born in Lorient.

A. J. Liebling, “Letter from Paris,” The New Yorker, September 9, 1944. Re-

printed in The New Yorker Book of War Pieces, 1939–1945, Schocken Books, New York, 1947, p. 368.

See Chapter 3, note 27.

The most exhaustive description of the work of the OSRD London Mission is the six-part Report of OSRD Activities in the European Theater During the Period March 1941 through July 1945, by Bennett Archambault. The report makes clear the stunning breadth and depth of the work of the office, going beyond radar and guided missiles. The full report is to be found in the MIT Archives (Bennett Archambault Papers, MC 555, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, Mass.).

Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963), born in Budapest, was noted for his work in fluid mechanics, a field he entered in earnest after 1912 when he was Professor of Aerodynamics and Mechanics as well as Director of the Aerodynamics Institute at Aachen, Germany, When World War I broke out in 1914, he became head of research in the Austro-Hungarian Army Aviation Corps. In 1930, he moved permanently to the US to head the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. His important theory of boundary layers and his related studies of fluid flow at high subsonic, transonic, and supersonic speeds were of great importance to post-World War II progress in all areas of flight. He left behind a fine memoir, now regrettably out of print: Von Kármán, Theodore, with Lee Edson, The Wind and Beyond, Little Brown and Company: Boston, 1967.

Theodore von Kármán, with Lee Edson, The Wind and Beyond, Little Brown and Co., Boston, 1967, pp. 273–274.

Pictures of the site can be seen at http://www.nasm.edu/galleries/gal114/SpaceRace/sec200/sec210.htm, which also offers design details on the V-2.

http://www.104infdiv.org/CONCAMP.HTM.

Others at the meeting were Hugh Dryden, Frank Wattendorf, H. S. Tsien, possibly George Schairer, and me.

Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Their Finest Hour, vol. 2, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, p. 381.

James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, pp. 3–4.

Ibid., p. 108.

Ibid., p. 111.

Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1985, p. 79.

John C. Lonnquest and David F. Winkler, To Defend and Deter: The Legacy of the United States Cold War Missile Program, study sponsored by the Department of Defense Legacy Resource Management Program Cold War Project, USACERL Special Report 97/01, 1996, p. 19

“One witness to the flight was an RAF pilot, who sat that night in the officers’

mess with a puzzled expression on his face. There had been something peculiar in what he had seen, but exactly what had eluded him. Then suddenly he jumped up. ‘My God, chaps,’ he said, ‘I must be going round the bend—it hadn’t got a propeller’” (H. Guyford Stever, James J. Haggerty, and the Editors of Life, Flight, Life Science Library, New York, 1965, p. 83).

Stever, p. 83.

McDougall, p. 26.

Lonnquest, p. 16

http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/mtuve.html.

James Phinney Baxter, Scientists Against Time, Little Brown and Co., Boston, 1946, p. 7.

Ibid., p. 12.

The Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was created several months earlier, in February 1942.

Quoted in G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, Free Press, New York, 1997, pp. 160–161.

And the time had also come for the Rad Lab. Here’s how Ivan Getting, who received a Medal of Merit for his work at the Rad Lab, described its end: “On the day of President Truman’s announcement of the Japanese surrender, Lee Dubridge held the V-J convocation of members of the Radiation Laboratory in the beautiful Eastman Great Court of MIT and proudly announced that the laboratory had completed its work and would close in three months; one-third of its staff would leave the first month, a second third in the second month, and the rest by the end of the third month. A few people would remain to complete the Radiation Laboratory Series of books and others to handle the administrative closeout.” At the same time, Vannevar Bush announced that OSRD and NDRC would terminate by the end of the year and there would be no follow-on organization (Ivan Getting, All in a Lifetime: Science in the Defense of Democracy, Vantage Press, New York, 1989, p. 204).

Zachary, p. 246ff.

Ibid., p. 230.

Lonnquest, p. 21.

Quoted in Zachary, p. 314.

Lonnquest, p. 22.

Fact Sheet, NASA/JPL, http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/facts/jpl.pdf.

Sub-, tran-, and supersonic indicate below, at, and above, respectively, the speed of sound, which in turn is shortened to Mach 1. The transonic range actually begins below Mach 1, about Mach .9, as air moving over most of the plane reaches supersonic speeds and shock waves appear.

Ramjets are the engines for reaching supersonic speeds but, paradoxically, are simpler than turbojets, lacking both compressor and turbines and dependent on forward motion to force air into carefully designed air intakes for compression. They have no moving parts and work best at Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound. See Stever and Haggerty, p. 85.

http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/missiles/wep-side.html.

NACA was created in 1915 to keep American aviation technologically current. It

eventually transmuted into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), but much more about that in Chapter 5.

The first missile under the Bumblebee program left the ground in October 1945, flew 9 miles, and splashed down in Barnegat Bay, off New Jersey and about 30 feet from four presumably very startled fishermen. The program was very successful and quite a number of missiles came out of it Talon, Terrier/Tartar, Typhon, and Triton.

For Ernst Mach (1838–1916), the Austrian physicist who pointed out that an object moving through a space changes the space. In the case of planes, a plane moving into the supersonic range creates shock waves that not only affect the controls on the plane and increase its drag but also radiate out from the plane, announcing their presence with sonic booms.

von Kármán, p. 219.

The chair was Walter McNair of Bell Telephone Laboratories,* whose job then was director of the NIKE missile project. Other members were Francis Clauser from the Douglas Aircraft Corporation, who had been deeply involved early in the development of test airplanes for high-speed flight (he was a product of von Kármán education at Cal Tech); and Robert Gilruth, head of NACA’s Pilotless Aircraft Research and Development unit, where the control of rocket-powered guided missiles was studied on test vehicles at a superb, well-instrumented flight test range with excellent telemetering back from the test vehicle to base (Bob later became the head of the Johnson Space Flight Center when NASA was established and a leader of the whole program of manned space flight). Other well-qualified members were Richard Porter, head of guided-missile work at General Electric, which was supported by the Army Ordnance department (he was well acquainted with the rocketry that von Braun and his group of German engineers brought to the United States along with some V-2s for flight testing); Clark Millikan, acting head of the aeronautical department at Cal Tech when von Kármán was away and later to be head of it (a broadly based engineering professor in aeronautics, he was well known for his wind tunnel work at Cal Tech and also for aeronautical design); and Larry Henderson from the RAND Corporation, which had been established with support from the Air Force, growing out of work by Franklin Collbohm and Arthur Raymond of the Douglas Aircraft Company.

Donald Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1993, p. 113. By 1951 that requirement had become even tougher—1500 feet for the circular error, or radius within which half the warheads should land. It took 20 years before ICBMs met that target (p. 114).

For further details of our conclusions and recommendations, see RG 218, 1620 series, CCS 334 Guided Missile Committee (Modern Military Records Branch, National Archives, College Park, Md.).

*Here and throughout affiliations are at the time of service.

Zachary, p. 336.

Ibid., p. 338.

Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1949, p. 36. Quoted in Perry, Chapter 2, Evolution of a Policy, http://www.fas.org/spp/eprint/origins/part07.htm.

But it hedged its bets. “At least partly as a result of Toward New Horizons, Army Air Force planners rejected the widely publicized views of the eminent physicist, Dr. Vannevar Bush, who regarded as futuristic the possibility of perfecting intercontinental missiles. Instead, they embraced von Kármán’s predictions on the feasibility of ballistic missiles and inserted a missile development program in the five-year R&D projections” (Michael H. Gorn, Harnessing the Genie, Science and Technology Forecasting for the Air Force, 1944–1986, Office of Air Force History, Washington, D.C., 1988, pp. 41–42).

MacKenzie, p. 31ff.

The SAB, about which much more later, grew out of the Army Air Force Scientific Advisory Group, formed by Theodore von Kármán. It met for the first time in June 1946, had 30 members, and was chaired by von Kármán (Thomas A. Sturm, The USAF Scientific Advisory Board: Its First Twenty Years, 1944–1964, USAF Historical Division Liaison Office, Washington D.C., 1967, p. 15).

Some “temporary”! It lasted 55 years, finally going in 1998. “The building was constructed in . . .1943 as a war building and is of a temporary nature,” according to an architect’s memo, “the life of said building to be for the duration of the war and six months thereafter.” “Its ‘temporary nature’ permitted its occupants to abuse it in ways that would not be tolerated in a permanent building. If you wanted to run a wire from one lab to another, you didn’t ask anybody’s permission—you just got out a screwdriver and poked a hole through the wall. Of course this was in the days before the dangers of asbestos were recognized” http://www-eecs.mit.edu/building/20/.

The AEC, created by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, assumed civilian control of “the plants, laboratories, equipment, and personnel assembled during the war to produce the atomic bomb. . . . The transfer list ran to thirty-seven installations in nineteen states and Canada. With the facilities the Army would transfer 254 military officers, 1,688 enlisted men, 3,950 Government workers, and about 37,800 contractor employees” (Richard G. Hewlett, and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission: The New World, 1939/ 1946, Volume I, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1962, pp. 1–2).

Jerome C. Hunsaker (1886–1984) was heavily involved in the development of the science of flight in America for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. Indeed, he taught the first MIT course in aeronautical engineering and aviation design and was the first head of the MIT Department of Aeronautical Engineering formed in 1939. Among his many contributions, he designed the flying boat NC-4, the first aircraft to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, and supervised the design of the dirigible Shenandoah, the first American rigid airship. http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/mithistory/collections-mc/mc272.html#bio. Also, see Roger D. Launius, “Jerome C. Hunsaker,” in Emily J. McMurray, et al., eds.,

Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists (New York: Gale Research Inc., 1995), pp. 980-81, and William F. Trimble, Jerome C. Hunsaker and the Rise of American Aeronautics. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002.

These included from MIT Asher Shapiro, an outstanding fluid mechanics student and engineer in mechanical engineering; Clark Goodman, an authority on atomic energy; Fran Friedman, another physicist who was very strong in research in that area and very knowledgeable about nuclear piles, as they were called in those days; Shatswell Ober from the MIT aeronautical engineering department, on my suggestion because he was an airplane performance expert and taught the courses in that area at MIT; and a number of other people who were added to this list to begin to put together some work. Later, Whitman added Wheeler Loomis, who during the war had been associate director of the Rad Lab at MIT and then had returned to his base at the University of Illinois as head of the physics department, and also, Jerrold Zacharias from the physics department, another fellow experienced in radar.

NEPA, a feasibility study, was succeeded in 1951 by a research and development program called Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion, shaped in good measure by the work done by Project Lexington.

Herbert York, Race to Oblivion: A Participant’s View of the Arms Race, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1970. See also http://www.learnworld.com/ZNW/LWText.York.RaceToOblivion.html#chapter4.

Ibid.

RAND (Research AND Development) was created in May 1948, spinning off from the Douglas Aircraft Corporation. General Henry “Hap” Arnold, Army Air Force chief of staff during World War II, had pushed for a place where experts could analyze and propose advanced concepts for the Air Force, and the result was Project Rand established within Douglas in 1945. It spent $640 in its first month, came under Frank Collbohm’s direction in 1946, and by 1948 had 200 employees. http://www.rand.org/50TH/#origins.

The B-52 Stratofortress was first flown in 1954 and entered service a year later. A total of 744 were built, the last in 1962. It is the primary manned bomber for the United States, flies at 650 miles per hour (Mach 0.86), and at takeoff can carry almost 490,000 pounds. http://www.af.mil/news/factsheets/B_52_Stratofortress.html.

James R. Killian, Jr., Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1977, pp. 178–184.

Yes, the “Doolittle” of Doolittle’s raid over Tokyo. In March 1942, when it was very dark indeed for the Allies, 16 bombers launched from an aircraft carrier some 800 miles from the Japanese coast, struck Tokyo, Kobe, Nagoya, and Yokohama, with most crash landing afterwards in China and one in the Soviet Union. General Doolittle was awarded the Medal of Honor. Jim Doolittle (1896– 1993) was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Signal Corps Aviation Section in 1920 and two years later was the first to fly cross country, from Palm Beach, Fla. to San Diego. He made one stop, did it in 21 hours and 19 minutes, and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. A year later, in 1923, he went to MIT, emerging two years later with a doctorate in aeronautics, one of the first in

the country to do it. His considerable talents were recognized in the many assignments he was given and did admirably, including commanding the Eighth Air Force in Europe and the Pacific.

For more on what it was like, not only for my colleagues but for many others as well, see “Red Scares Abroad and at Home” in James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, pp. 165–205.

Reinstated in 1963.

It was properly a “Hearing in the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer” before the Personnel Security Board of the Atomic Energy Commission, held from April 12 to May 6, 1954. Whatever it was called, it was a trial.

From June 1948 to May 1949, U.S., British, and French planes flew 278,000(!) flights to deliver 2 million tons of supplies to the residents of West Berlin.

Both quotes are from the complete official text of Churchill’s speech released to the press by the MIT News Office (“For Release After 10:00 P.M. [EST] News Service, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Thursday, March 31, 1949.”

Patterson, p. 135.

The SAB was then under the Army Air Force, carried over to the new U.S. Air Force in 1947, and in 1948 placed directly under the Air Force chief of staff, and subsequently under both the Air Force Chief of Staff and the Secretary of the Air Force.

Quoted by Thomas A. Sturm, in The USAF Scientific Advisory Board: Its First Twenty Years, 1944–1964, USAF Historical Division Liaison Office, Washington D.C., 1967, p. 14.

September 24, 1945, memorandum from Brigadier General Alden R. Crawford to Major General E. M. Powers, “Necessity for an Army Air Forces Air Defense Program.”

There are essentially two types of long-range missiles: an unmanned airplane that is jet propelled and aerodynamic, a cruise missile; and a ballistic missile, carrying its own oxygen, which is boosted above the atmosphere and into space by a rocket engine; once it reaches its apogee, the engine cuts off and it follows a ballistic path (i.e., controlled only by gravity and drag).

Jacob Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960, Office of Air Force History, Washington, D.C., 1990, p. 27.

Ivan Getting, All in a Lifetime: Science in the Defense of Democracy, Vantage Press, New York, 1989, p. 350.

George E. Valley, Jr., “How the SAGE Development Began,” Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 7, no. 3, July 1985, p. 204.

Ibid., p. 197.

Other ADSEC members included Charles Stark Draper, also from MIT, Allen Donovan of the Cornell Aeronautical Institute, John Marchetti of the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, George C. Comstock of Airborne Instruments

Laboratory, Inc., Henry Houghton of the MIT Department of Meteorology, and William R. Hawthorne of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Like most visiting scientists, he would ride the Atlantic in the plane’s bomb bay.

Valley, p. 204.

Yes, the transistor was invented in 1947, but it didn’t come into use for computing devices until the late 1950s and wasn’t packaged into integrated circuits until the late 1960s.

http://acomp.stanford.edu/siliconhistory/Olds/ROIonBasicResearch.html.

Afterburners are second combustion chambers immediately in front of the engine’s exhaust nozzle. Very fuel inefficient, they are generally used only for supersonic military aircraft.

Donald Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance, MIT Press. Cambridge, Mass., 1993, pp. 115, 120.

Getting, p. 351.

Sturm, p. 40.

Valley, Jr., p. 204.

Ibid., p. 214.

Ibid., p. 213.

SAGE and Project Whirlwind had an intimate and symbiotic relationship that powered early advances in computing, especially digital computing, helped launch the computer in the United States, and, not least, set a management style that was to be copied by electronics and computer firms in the Route 128 corridor around Boston and Silicon Valley. Whirlwind grew out of initial work for the navy in 1944 on a computer to enable simulated flight testing, work that led to the conception and development of a general-purpose digital computer with applications far beyond flight testing. As Project Whirlwind’s technical goals grew, so did its budget until it was consuming 10 percent of the annual budget of the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Budget cuts were inevitable, until the Air Force, seeing the potential for Whirlwind through George Valley, took over the major part of the costs, enabling the project to move forward toward developing a ferrite core with a nine-second access time, remarkable then. “All told, ONR spent roughly $3.6 million on Whirlwind, the Air Force, $13.8 million. In return, Whirlwind and SAGE generated a score of innovations. On the hardware side, Whirlwind and SAGE pioneered magnetic-core memory, digital phone-line transmission and modems, the light pen (one of the first graphical user interfaces), and duplexed computers. In software, they pioneered use of real-time software; concepts that later evolved into assemblers, compilers, and interpreters; software diagnosis programs; time-shared operating systems; structured program modules; table-driven software; and data description techniques. Five years after its introduction in Whirlwind, ferrite-core memory replaced every other type of computer memory, and remained the dominant form of computer memory until 1973. Royalties to MIT from nongovernment sales amounted to $25 million, as MIT licensed the technology broadly. SAGE accelerated the transfer of these technologies throughout the nascent computer industry. SAGE was a driving force behind the formation of the American computer and electronics industry”

(National Research Council, Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1999, pp. 93–94).

James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 210ff.

http://www.boeing.com/companyoffices/history/bna/f86.htm.

Sturm, p. 35.

Louis Ridenour, professor of physics at the University of Illinois, was the first chief scientist of the Air Force, the overall editor of the Radiation Laboratory series, and at the time of his sudden death when he was only 48, vice president of Lockheed Aircraft and general manager of its avionics and electronics division.

Other members, in addition to myself, were Al Donovan, Francis H. Clauser from Douglas Aircraft, and Allen V. Astin from the National Bureau of Standards.

Quoted in Sturm, p. 41.

Ibid., p. 43.

Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier, National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C., July 1945. For the text online see http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm.

Bush, pp. 8–9.

Ibid., p. 5.

William Blanpied, of the National Science Foundation, pointed out to me that “Bush’s Letter of Transmittal of Science, the Endless Frontier to President Truman did mention the social sciences, but in a way that can only be regarded as dismissive. Bush’s letter emphasized that when, in November 1944, President Roosevelt asked for his recommendations about a postwar program for science, he assumed that the president was referring to the natural and engineering sciences, not the social sciences, partially on the grounds that social science research was already adequately funded by private sources relative to the natural sciences and engineering.”

G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, Free Press, New York, 1997, p. 369.

See Chapter 1 for details and references.

John von Neumann (1903–1957), a mathematical prodigy as a child in Budapest, became a brilliant mathematician who was the youngest (at age 23) to lecture at the University of Berlin; one of the first professors, with Albert Einstein, of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton; and a key figure in the development of digital computers, so much so that his architecture is called von Neumann processors. He developed a theory of automata, coinvented game theory, contributed importantly to quantum mechanics, and, most significant to my life, was very influential in military science and technology in fields such as ICBMs, nuclear weaponry, and military strategy. He enjoyed life enormously and looked at it with some bemusement, once commenting that, “If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”See http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/VonNeumann.html.

Two valuable sources for much fuller discussions of these issues are by Donald Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guid-

ance, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1993 (esp. pp. 105–113) and Jacob Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960, Office of Air Force History, Washington, D.C., 1990. In addition, a concise summary of the history and lessons to be drawn is given by Stephen B. Johnson in “The Organizational Roots of American Economic Competitiveness in High Technology,” a paper presented at the Conference on R&D Investment and Economic Growth in the 20th Century, Berkeley, Calif., March 26–28, 1999. See http://ishi.lib.berkeley.edu/cshe/r%26d/papers/johnson.html.

Quoted in Mackenzie, p. 106.

The name reportedly came via Simon Ramo, a member of the committee who wanted a simple working name and suggested the Tea Garden Committee, after Trevor Gardner. That was rejected as too obvious for a classified committee in favor of the Tea Pot Committee. See Reference 10 in http://www.spacecom.af.mil/HQAFSPC/history/gardner.htm.

This recommendation echoed similar recommendations of a RAND report issued two days earlier, not surprising since there was steady communication between the two groups.

Neufeld, p. 255.

General Bernard A. Schriever (1910–) was the first commander of the Western Development Division, subsequently the Ballistic Missile Division, which pioneered the development of the US ICBMs. He was born in Bremen, Germany, raised in Texas, and educated at Texas A&M and Stanford University, taking, respectively, undergraduate and master’s degrees in aeronautical engineering. He entered the Army Air Corps in 1932, was commander by the end of World War II of Advanced Headquarters, Far East Air Service Command, and in 1946 went to the Pentagon, where he worked closely with Theodore von Kármán, then working on the blueprint for the future Air Force, Toward New Horizons. He became through that association and with others, including Louis Ridenour, a strong advocate for development and deployment of missile for American security. Trevor Gardner was instrumental in putting him in charge of the ballistic missile program, a confidence that was fully met in the development on schedule of a succession of missile families, from Atlas to Titan to Minuteman. He retired in 1966. Schriever brought to his awesome responsibilities a very special style which the New York Times in December 1957 (Quoted in Neufeld, p. 108) described as one of “relaxed precision” that “gives the suggestion that he has seen a lot of Jimmy Stewart films.” http://www.spacecom.af.mil/hqafspc/history/schriever.htm.

Stephen B. Johnson, “The Organizational Roots of American Economic Competitiveness in High Technology,” a paper presented at the Conference on R&D Investment and Economic Growth in the 20th Century, Berkeley, Calif., March 26–28, 1999. See http://ishi.lib.berkeley.edu/cshe/r%26d/papers/johnson.html.

Donald L. Putt (1905–1988) was a career U.S. Air Force officer who specialized in the management of aerospace research and development. Trained as an engineer, he entered the Army Air Corps in 1928 and worked in a series in increasingly responsible posts at Air Materiel Command and GHQ Air Force. In 1948-1952 he was director of research and development for the Air Force, and

between 1952 and 1954 he was first vice commander and then commander of the Air Research and Development Command. Thereafter, until his retirement in 1958, he served as deputy chief of the development staff at Headquarters USAF.

Von Kármán had earlier established in NATO the Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development (AGARD) and had chaired this together with the SAB. AGARD proved an exceptional success in reviving aeronautics in Europe. Its meetings tapped the best in NATO and the other European countries. Von Kármán felt a missionary duty to help all those countries now that he was the world’s leading aeronautical engineer and scientist. AGARD and SAB eventually proved to be too much as he aged. The AGARD revered him as much as we did.

And in fact that’s what happened. The prototype for the KC-135, the Boeing 367-80, led to the Boeing 707, the first U.S. commercial jet transport. The 707 production model made its maiden flight in December 1957, and Pan American World Airways put it into transoceanic service less than a year later, on October 26, 1958. It was of course not the first commercial jet transport.That was the ill-fated de Havilland Comet I.

One reason the aerodynamics was well tended to may have been the problems with Convair’s F-102 interceptor, where the estimates of the aerodynamic drag on a delta-winged aircraft, as the B-58 was to be, had proved too optimistic. See http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pettypi/elevon/baugher_us/b058-01.html.

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/bomber/b-58.htm.

James R. Killian, Jr., Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1977, p. 71.

Confirmation to Gardner’s post was held up in the Senate for several months “because of his steady support for Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had been accused of disloyalty to the United States.” In 1953, at the height of anticommunist feelings in the United States, Oppenheimer, who had served as scientific director of the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb, was accused of having communist sympathies and deprived of his security clearance. It effectively ended his government service. See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/baoppe.html and http://www.spacecom.af.mil/HQAFSPC/history/gardner.htm.

He got there by both understanding the bureaucracy he had to deal with and finding ways to co-opt and defeat it. That story is well told in Jacob Neufeld’s Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960, Office of Air Force History, Washington, D.C., 1990. Regrettably, the book at last look is out of print.

Killian, p. 68.

Quoted in Neufeld, p. 96.

Formally titled “Meeting the Threat of Surprise Attack.”

Killian, p. 68.

Ibid., pp. 72–73.

Ibid., p. 74.

Ibid., p. 77.

The U.S. membership of our SAB committee was broadly based, fairly representing many interested and capable institutions. We had two members from Bell Telephone Laboratories, Hendryck Bode and S. E. Miller, important because Bell was developing the Nike Zeus missile, which was specifically designed for point defense against ballistic missiles using a ground-based detection, fire control, and missile launch system; from the RAND Corporation we had Ed Barlow and Bill Graham, both of whom had spent a great deal of time on the subject of antiballistic missiles; from industry we had two representatives, Rube Mettler from TRW and former Air Force Chief Scientist Chalmers Sherwin; and from Raytheon we had Ivan Getting. Ivan was a major stalwart of SAB as well as vice president of Raytheon, where he had started a number of missile programs, some of which eventually led to the Hawk missile and then to the Patriot missile of Desert War fame. From the Lincoln Laboratories beginning to get involved in this antiballistic missile work, we had Al Hill and Dan Dustin; from the major nuclear laboratories of the Department of Energy, Wolfgang “Pief” Panofsky from the Stanford Linear Accelerator and Herb York from the Livermore Laboratories, both men quite expert in nuclear explosives and armament generally; from the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, Bob Gilruth, who had been doing a great deal of launching of rocketry, guidance, and so on; from General Electric and from the Killian Committee, Andy Longacre, who was very knowledgeable about long-range radars; and from Cal Tech, Homer Joe Stewart, a distinguished aerospace scientist.

Lindbergh was a faithful participant in our meetings and even came to a cocktail party Bunny and I gave. He was much anticipated by our young children. As I was talking with him, one child tugged at my leg to ask where the famous flyer was. I pointed to Lindbergh, and she began to tip her eyes from his shoes slowly up to his face, for her a giant. I experienced a flashback to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, when he was being hounded by reporters and their flash cameras. While sitting opposite and talking to Lindbergh at breakfast prior to a committee meeting in California, a flash camera went off at a secretary’s birthday party. He went rigid, and his eyes went wild for a moment. He regained control and apologized and began to explain. I cut him off saying, “I understand,” and he thanked me.

The U-2 was a very high-flying photoreconnaissance plane built by Lockheed with a wingspread so wide and light that the tips draped on the ground. The U-2 flights continued until May 1960, when the Soviets finally shot one down.

Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1985, p. 117.

That thinking, then being explored by Army Ordnance and Bell Telephone Laboratories, eventually led to the development of the Nike Zeus A missile system, the first weapon designed to attack incoming missiles. It had a number of problems and was never deployed, and the next Nike model succeeded it.

In fact, I stayed almost six months longer. An unwritten job of a chief scientist is to help get his successor. Mine was Courtland D. Perkins, a former SAB member. He was a “real airplane man,” heading the aeronautical program at Princeton. But he couldn’t come till the summer, so I extended my appointment an extra half-year.

A fine history of the Chief Scientist’s Office, including my tenure, is: Day, Dwayne A., Lightning Rod: A History of the Air Force Chief Scientist’s Office. Washington, D.C.: Chief Scientist’s Office, United States Air Force, 2000.

See Chapter 4.

Quoted in James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 286.

Quoted in Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1985, p. 114.

Indeed, federal defense spending declined in fiscal years 1953–1956. Patterson, p. 289.

The Western Development Division was created in 1954 to build the Atlas ICBM, following on the recommendation of the Tea Pot Committee (see Chapter 3). Sited in Inglewood, California, it was led by General Bernard A. Schriever and placed organizationally for a time under the Air Research and Development Command.

Atlas was fueled by kerosene oxidized by liquid oxygen. Unlike later missiles in which several stages were fired serially, all the Atlas engines fired at liftoff. The “special structures” included pressurized fuel tanks made of thin sheets of stainless steel. http://www.pawnee.com/fewmuseum/atlas.htm.

First called a medium-range missile, but the same thing.

See Chapter 2, note 9 for details on the OSRD.

The name was changed in 1992 to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

This became in 1974 part of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

For example, the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

The name was changed to the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in January 1959, about which more later.

To hear what we all heard that October, go to http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/sputnik/index.html and click on the wave file.

Both quotes are from James R. Killian, Jr., Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1977, p. 9.

Ibid., p. 8.

Ibid., p. 2.

Others at the meeting included Sidney Chapman, S. Fred Singer, and Harry Vestine.

This account of the origins of the IGY and the notion of a space satellite to do science is based substantially on McDougall, p. 118.

Note that two months later Eisenhower made the ICBM a “research program of the highest priority.”

Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, Report of the SAB Ad Hoc Committee on Advanced Weapons Technology and Environment, October 9, 1957.

Cargill R. Hall, and Jacob Neufeld, eds., The U.S. Air Force in Space—1945 to the Twenty-first Century, Proceedings of the Air Force Historical Foundation Symposium, September 21–22, 1995, U.S. Air Force History and Museum Programs, Washington, D.C., pp. 15–16.

Edward Teller (1908–), born in Hungary, came to the United States in 1935. From 1935 to 1941 he was professor of physics at George Washington Univ. and during World War II worked on atomic bomb research at a number of facilities, including the laboratory at Los Alamos that built the first atomic bomb. Later (1946–1952) he was professor of physics at the University of Chicago. He was also associated (1949–1951) with the thermonuclear research program of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Teller was instrumental in the first successful U.S. hydrogen bomb explosion, November 1, 1952. From 1952 to 1960, Teller was professor of physics at the University of California and director of the Livermore division of its radiation laboratory. For his contributions to the development, use, and control of nuclear energy, Teller received the 1962 Enrico Fermi Award. He, too has written a memoir, and a very fine one at that: Edward Teller (with Judith Shoolery), Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2001.

Quoted in Thomas A. Sturm, The USAF Scientific Advisory Board: Its First Twenty Years, 1944–1964, U.S. Air Force Historical Division Liaison Office, Washington, D.C., 1967, p. 81.

Members included all members (except Dr. Ramo, who was not at the meeting) of the Cislunar Committee plus Edward Teller and David Griggs, the new chief scientist of the Air Force.

Killian, pp. 27–28.

In retrospect, public beliefs about the relative strengths of the United States and the Soviet Union in space were almost 180 degrees wrong. The United States was very strong, with robust but classified programs in missile technology and reconnaissance satellites, whereas the Soviet Union, despite Sputnik, was weak on the military side of missiles and space.

Dr. Killian was the first truly presidential science advisor, in the sense that his only boss was the president. The closest approximation prior to his appointment was the chair of the Science Advisory Committee of the White Office of Defense Mobilization, organized subsequent to the onset of the Korean War. The first chair was Oliver Buckley, retired president of Bell Telephone Laboratories, appointed on April 19, 1951, by President Truman. Science Advisory Committee members included James Killian, the only nonscientist in the group. Truman apparently made little use of the new organization during the remaining months of his presidency. http://www.aaas.org/spp/cstc/golden.

McDougall, p. 143. The first operational reconnaissance satellite project was CORONA. The first CORONA satellite was launched August 18, 1960, followed by hundreds more. It operated for almost 12 years during the Cold War. The August flight yielded more photographic coverage of the Soviet Union than all of the U-2 flights to that date, those having begun in 1956. It delivered 3,000

feet of film covering 1.65 million square miles of Soviet territory. http://www.nro.odci.gov/corona/cor-ab.html. See also Dwayne A. Day, John M. Logsdon, and Brian Lattell eds., Eye in the Sky: The Story of the Corona Spy Satellites, Smithsonian History of Aviation Series, Washington, D.C., 1998.

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/sputnik/16.html.

The White House also had an unstated reason for its strong role in space organization. The intelligence programs of the country were strongly centered in White House groups—the National Security Council and the Foreign Intelligence Committee, both of which were deeply involved in the use of satellites for space reconnaissance (“spy satellites”) and military communications, all super secret programs.

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Timeline/1958.html.

A good background to this, especially the legislative history, is provided by McDougall, esp. Chapter 7. For many of the relevant documents, time lines, and other information on the birth of NASA, see the excellent NASA history page at http://history.nasa.gov/history.html.

Hugh L. Dryden (1898–1965) had a distinguished career in research and administration. He published more than 100 technical articles on his work in high-speed aerodynamics, fluid mechanics, and acoustics. He served as Director of NACA from 1947 to 1958, and as Deputy Administrator of NASA from 1958 until his death in 1965. In 1950 he received the Daniel Guggenheim Medal for “outstanding leadership in aeronautical research and fundamental contributions to aeronautical science.” In 1955 he received the Wright brothers memorial trophy for “significant public service of enduring value to aviation in the United States.” Hugh was honored by the National Civil Service League with the Career Service Award for 1958. As his biographer, Michael Gorn, put it: “Indifferent to self-advancement, he nonetheless rose to the pinnacle of the aeronautics profession and subsequently assumed a pivotal role in the initial period of space exploration.” http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/History/Publications/Monograph_5/Gorn_Intro.html.

We had a very good membership, including Werner Von Braun, pioneer rocketeer, first for the Germans in World War II and then for the U.S. Army; Bill Pickering, leader of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a pioneer in the electronics field for guidance and control and instruments; Jim Van Allen, a physicist from Iowa State University and a leading user of scientific rockets for payloads to explore the region of the space directly around the earth; Sam Hoffman, leader of the development of big rockets from North American Aviation; and, ex officio, Hugh Dryden, Smitty DeFrance (director of the NACA Ames Laboratory), Abe Silverstein (director of NACA Lewis Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland), and Bob Gilruth (director of the NACA Wallop’s Island Test Firing Range). In looking over the membership I felt that we needed some added starters in the field of electronics and guidance, radar particularly, so Hendrik Bode of Bell Laboratories and head of the Nike guided-missile program and a colleague of mine in earlier anti-ICBM days, and Charles Stark Draper, director of MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory and the leading inertial guidance developer, were added.

Jacob Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960, Office of Air Force History, Washington, D.C., 1990, p. 151.

For much more on Johnson’s work and style in the Senate, see the third volume of Robet Caro’s biography of him, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Knopf, New York, N.Y. 2002.

McDougall, p. 165.

T. Keith Glennan (1905–1995) served as the first NASA Administrator from August 19, 1958 to January 20, 1961, when James Webb succeeded him. Trained as an electrical engineer he had a strong career in industry, including the then new sound motion picture industry. During World War II he served as Director of the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Sound Laboratories in New London, Connecticut. After the war, he went from an industrial position to the presidency of Case, which he transformed from mainly a local institution to one competitive with the country’s top engineering schools. He transformed NASA during his 2 _ year tenure as Administrator.” http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Biographies/glennan.html.

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/report58.html.

Ibid.

Indeed, the day NASA was signed into law the director of the Bureau of the Budget signed off on a budget giving more money to the Advanced Research Projects Agency, coordinating military space programs, than to NASA. However, that didn’t last long, and soon NASA grew spectacularly. McDougall, p. 191.

The committee had 20 members, including many from the “Ridenour Committee” that had examined the Air Force’s research and development needs and structure immediately after the end of World War II. Among the members was Bennett Archambault, board chairman of the Stewart-Warner Corporation in Chicago and my boss during World War II, when I was part of the London mission of the OSRD.

Quoted in Sturm, p. 84.

Neufeld, pp. 170–171.

Edward Teller, who, with his wife, was at the ranch many times, for business, recovery from medical problems, or simply relaxation was left “with the clear impression that everything was oversized, even the dates on what seemed to be thousands of palm trees. The main hall and dining room of the house were almost but not quite big enough to serve as a football field” (Edward Teller, with Judith Shoolery, Memoirs: A 20th Century Journey in Science and Politics, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, Mass., 2002, p. 458).

These included J. C. R. Licklider from MIT; Leo Goldberg from the University of Michigan; and Charles Townes from Columbia University. Townes would later share the Nobel Prize in physics.

Successor to the Air Research and Development Command.

Sturm, p. 98.

Ibid., p. 117.

Ibid., p. 110.

Ibid., p. 111.

The United Aircraft Corporation become the United Technologies Corporation in 1975.

Not that the corporation was a slouch. Its Pratt & Whitney Division produced jet engines in 1948, its Otis Division the first operator-less elevators in 1950, its Sikorski Division the first turbine-powered helicopter in 1957, and not too soon after I arrived the Pratt & Whitney jet engine for the Boeing 707, the first American commercial jet.

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1950.

http://cslewis.drzeus.net/books/fiction.html.

John “Jake” Christian Warner (1897–1969), armed with a doctorate in chemistry earned in 1923 at Indiana University, came to Carnegie Tech as an instructor in 1926. With others he pushed hard for a stronger research program, rose to successively more demanding and broader positions with Carnegie Tech, and became its president in 1950 when he was 53. He retired in 1965, having transformed Carnegie Tech. His achievements included the Graduate School of Business Administration, the firm and very strong grounding in the emergent computer sciences, an independent board of trustees, major new buildings, and finally, and most critical, recruitment of exceptional faculty, including Herb Simon. He died in 1969 at age 92, leaving much of his estate to the University. [I’m indebted for this account to Edwin Fenton, Carnegie Mellon 1900–2000, A Centennial History. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000, pp. 149ff.]

Andrew Carnegie wanted a technical and trade school in Pittsburgh and created the school in 1900 with a gift of $1 million in gold bonds and a promise of a site by the city of Pittsburgh. The site was in Oakland, in the east end of Pittsburgh, away from the soot, smoke, and dirt of its industry. Carnegie wanted to change Pittsburgh’s sorry national reputation, and he expressed in his diary his hope that “not only our own country, but the civilized world will take note of the fact that our Dear Old Smoky Pittsburgh, no longer content to be celebrated only as one of the chief manufacturing centres, has entered upon the path to higher things” (http://www.post-gazette.com/newslinks/Oakland.asp).

“R. K.” was the son of Richard Beatty Mellon, brother of Andrew Mellon. Andrew Mellon had two children, Paul and Alisa.

I should emphasize that Edwin Fenton’s excellent Centennial History reminded me of things I had forgotten, distorted with time, or simply didn’t know. Edwin (“Ted”) Fenton is now emeritus professor of history at Carnegie Mellon, having joined the faculty in 1954. He received the university’s highest honor for his teaching and educational leadership.

Edwin Fenton (p. 45) quotes the 1908 course catalog: “The courses of instruction offered in this school are planned to develop womanly attributes and give a foundation on which to build a career in distinctly feminine fields. Its emphasis is primarily laid upon the home, which is esteemed the important and logical sphere for educated women.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) came to Carnegie Tech in 1949 to join its new

Graduate School of Industrial Administration after establishing a reputation for his work on organizational decision-making. He developed in the late 1940s his ideas of “bounded rationality,” that rather seeing entrepreneurs simplistically as purely rationalists intent on maximizing profits, they instead operate as cooperating decision makers whose capacities for purely rational actions are bounded by limits of knowledge and by personal and social ties. At Carnegie, he led in the use of computer simulations of human cognition. He focused on discovering the symbolic processes that people use to think, and with his colleagues enlarged the computer as simply a machine for arithmetic work to a processor of symbols and hence human action and thoughts. He received Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 for “for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations.” For more, see: http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1978/simon-autobio.html.

Simon and his colleagues pushed “computer science” beyond its restrictive definition of the “theory and design of computers” and redefined it to include, in Newell’s words, “the study of all the phenomena arising from them.” The department of computer sciences was established in July 1965, or shortly after I became president, and was one of the first such departments in the country. In 1988 the department became the school of computer science. See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/aboutscs/mission.html.

The field took a sharp turn with the development in 1959 of the integrated circuit, which replaced separate and heat-producing parts—transistors, resistors, etc.—with one much cooler “chip” that was much easier to package in a machine and cost a lot less than individual components. The Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation produced the first commercially available chips in 1961, and in 1962 the Air Force used chips in its computers and Minuteman missiles.

Arthur Kennedy, who won a Tony for his starring role in the 1949 production of Death of a Salesman; Andy Warhol; William Ball, founder of the American Conservatory Theater; and Stephen Schwartz, lyricist/composer of “Pippin” and “Godspell,” which received Grammy awards, and “Pocahontas,” which got him two Academy Awards for best song and best original score.

Fenton, p. 102ff.

John, I knew, would be hard to keep and indeed left soon after I arrived to become president of Haverford College, serving as president until 1968 when, true to his beliefs, he resigned after the Haverford Board voted to accept women only as transfer students. See http://www.haverford.edu/publications/fall99/century3.htm.

Fenton, p. 156.

Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, p. 147.

Ibid., pp. 147–149.

Ibid., p. 150.

Casals first visited the United States in 1901. It was to have been an extensive series of engagements, with performances in 80 different locations planned, but midway through the tour Casals seriously injured his left hand while hiking in California. He had been climbing Mount Tamalpais, near San Francisco, when a

large rock somehow became dislodged and fell on his hand, crushing some fingers. Casals said that the first thought that came to his mind was, “Thank God, I’ll never have to play the cello again!” http://www.cello.org/casals/page10.htm). Fortunately, after about four months of treatment in San Francisco, his left hand and fingers regained their strength and agility, and he was able to continue his career. Those who heard him perform then said that his long vacation from performing somehow had added an emotional depth to his interpretation that had not been there before.

Quoted in Fenton, p. 145.

Ibid. Fenton also adds: “How appropriate! The founders of the three family fortunes supporting Carnegie Mellon and the Heinz School—Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Mellon, and H. J. Heinz—had been friends when they were still vigorous young men” (p. 145).

This summary is based on Fenton, esp. pp. 138–139 and 144–145.

Aiken Fisher (1908–1996) became Chairman of the Board of the Fisher Scientific Company in 1965, the year I came to Carnegie. The Company was established by Aiken Fisher’s father in 1902, and become one of the major suppliers of scientific products, tools, and service in the world. Aiken Fisher was the first board chairman of Carnegie Mellon and was awarded an honorary degree by the University. He died at 88, of cancer.

Both quotes are from Fenton, p. 162.

A quarter of a century later, Paul Mellon, in Reflections in a Silver Spoon: A Memoir (written with John Baskett and published in 1992 by Morrow) described this merger: “The last President of Carnegie Tech, H. Guyford Stever went on to become Carnegie Mellon’s first President. Stever, resigned in 1972 to become Director of the National Science Foundation. . . .”

See http://www.wild-trout.co.uk/leven.htm for a fine watercolor of this splendid trout and its history, which notes in part: “Following the retreat of the ice sheets from northern Britain some 10,000 years ago, a massive block of ice was left stranded just north of the Firth of Forth in what is now southeast Scotland. As the climate slowly warmed, the ice melted, and its water cut a river into the Forth at Largo Bay. The lake that now fills the depression made by this gigantic block of ice has become the most famous trout water in the world: Loch Leven.”

Geiger, p. 198.

See http://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/99statab/sec04.pdf.

Geiger, p. 213.

Ibid., p. 201.

Ibid., p. 202.

Ibid., p. 245.

Ludwig F. Schaefer, Evolution of a National Research University, 1965–1990: The Stever Administration and the Cyert Years at Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1992, p. 111. Indeed, Dr. Schaefer offers a detailed accounting of Carnegie Mellon’s financial problems, notably in “Management: 1965–1972.”

Ibid., p. 106.

Fenton, p. 158.

Ibid., p. 179.

Herbert Simon, Models of My Life, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996, p. 279.

Quoted in Fenton, p. 169.

James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 595.

Ibid., p. 597.

Fenton, p. 177.

The inevitable shorthand for this group was PEACHY. Members included Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, Chatham College, Mount Mercy College, Duquesne University, and later Point Park College.

Patterson, p. 598ff.

As Edwin Fenton reminds me (p. 182), the 1970 issue of The Thistle was especially offensive, and when they sent me page proofs in advance I said “it was in bad taste, unrepresentative of campus life and scurrilous.” But I didn’t stop it, although I did move to shield the student sponsor from liability.

Simon, p. 287.

Ibid., p. 282.

Ibid., p. 287.

It included Frederick Seitz, who had gone to Rockefeller University to be president, having been president of the National Academy of Sciences; Phillip Handler, now president of the National Academy of Sciences and also chairman of the National Science Board; William O. Baker on the Carnegie Mellon board and president of Bell Labs; Simon Ramo, who was one of the founders of TRW; General Bernard Schriever, who had recently retired from being the first commander of the Air Force Systems Command and before that was the first commander of the Western Division, which built the nation’s first intercontinental ballistic missiles; and Edward Teller, the so-called father of the H-bomb.

Fenton, p. 172.

Ibid., p. 169.

Simon, p. 257.

These included the Roy Hunt family; Vera Heinz; the Fisher brothers and Fisher Scientific; the Fred Foys; Fletch and Peg Byrom and Koppers Corporation; the Carnegie Mellon units; the board; the faculty; the alumni; the administration and staff; the PCHE presidents; and a host of other acquaintances and friends who had made us welcome and our stay rewarding in Pittsburgh.

Story as told by Toby A. Appel, Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945–1975, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2000, Foreword. I’m not going to tell you the “sausage-making” details of how the NSF was created. However, there are many places to turn for that story, such as “The Birth of NSF,” Mosaic, Nov./Dec. 1975, pp. 20–27. The Mosaic piece is from a longer work also making for profitable reading: Milton Lomask, A Minor Miracle: An Informal History of the National Science Founda-

tion, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1976. Other fine sources are George T. Mazuzan, The National Science Foundation: A Brief History, esp. pp. 6–13, available online at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/stis1994/nsf8816/nsf8816.txt; William A. Blanpied, Impacts of the Early Cold War on the Formulation of U.S. Science Policy: Selected Memoranda of William T. Golden, October 1950–April 1951, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C., 1995 (http://www.aaas.org/spp/cstc/golden/); J. Merton England, A Patron for Pure Science, National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C., 1982; Daniel J. Kevles, “Scientists, the military, and the control of postwar defense research: The case of the Research Board for National Security, 1944–46,” Technology and Culture, Jan. 1975, vol. 16, pp. 20–47; Daniel J. Kevles, “The National Science Foundation and the debate over postwar research policy, 1942–1945,” Isis, Mar. 1977, vol. 68, pp. 5–26.

Mazuzan, p. 4.

http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/history.htm.

http://ntalpha.bfa.nsf.gov/NSFHist.htm.

The social sciences in time joined the foundation’s portfolio and were given “statutory stimulus” in July 1968 in a bill amending its charter that became Public Law 90-407. Michael D. Reagan, Science and the Federal Patron, Oxford University Press, New York, 1969, p. 191.

He called it the National Research Foundation.

Reagan, p. 190.

Ibid., p. 190.

Interview of Don Price by Milton Lomask, January 13, 1973, Historians’ Files, 1945–1985, Record Group 307, Row 30 (unprocessed), National Records and Archives Administration, College Park, Md.

Ibid.

Jeffrey K. Stine, A History of Science Policy in the United States, 1940–1985, Science Policy Study, Background Report No. 1, Task Force on Science Policy, Committee on Science and Technology, House of Representatives, 99th Congress, Second Session, September 1986, p. 57.

ONR had the political space to offer generous terms to the universities. “Senior naval officers did not approve of ONR’s role, but they were too preoccupied with first the demobilization following World War II and then the start of the Cold War and the Korean mobilization to take the steps necessary to alter it. But outside the Navy, ONR was viewed as conducting a military mission, one apparently buttressed by a vital national security rationale. . . . Scientists were encouraged to propose their own projects and were not required to submit progress reports—mere publication in the open literature, refereed literature was considered sufficient. . . . ONR [also followed] the special wartime policy of paying full overhead costs, generously defined, thus reimbursing universities for sponsored research at rates that government agencies in the 1930s shunned and private foundations to this day refuse to do. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars have been provided to research universities for allocation by their administrators via this mechanism” (Harvey Sapolsky, “Financing science after the Cold War,” in The Fragile Contract: University Science and the Federal Government, David H.

Guston and Kenneth Keniston, eds., MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994, pp. 166–167).

I was the fourth director, preceded by Alan T. Waterman, a physicist who served for 12 years; Leland J. Haworth, also a physicist, 1963–1969; and, my immediate predecessor, William McElroy, a biologist, 1969–1971. Apparently, according to Jim Killian, Alan Waterman was the third choice after Karl Compton and James Conant. He was a great choice, in part because, as Don Price observed, “the Office of Naval Research had made a great hit with the universities by doing what they didn’t think any military organization would do, to have a program of comparatively unrestricted money for basic research. Now, Waterman was not in terms of personal glamour and personality a Vannevar Bush by any means. He was a rather diffident and neutral-appearing type of man. But I suspect that in the post-war atmosphere with all the weakness in the position of the Science Foundation that he was just as effective as a more dynamic-appearing man would be” (interview of James Killian by Milton Lomask, January 16, 1973, Historians’ Files, 1945–1985, Record Group 307, Row 30 (unprocessed), National Records and Archives Administration, College Park, Md., and Lomask interview with Don Price).

Of course, NSF wasn’t unique in its use of peer review. Other agencies—the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research, and the research programs of the Atomic Energy Commission—all used the principle to varying extent.

These included Senators Jacob K. Javits (R-N.Y.), Hugh Scott (R-Pa.), Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Peter H. Dominick (R-Colo.), Richard S. Schweiker (R-Pa.), Harrison Williams (D-N.J.), Russell Long (D-La.), and Allan J. Ellender (D-La.). Senator Williams chaired the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare that conducted my nomination hearing on November 30, 1971.

The commitment in the early 1960s by the federal government and the aerospace industry to build a commercial aircraft capable of operating beyond the speed of sound ran into very severe criticisms in the late 1960s. These included the sonic booms created by the aircraft and its potential for destroying the ozone layer. Congress, after several hearings, terminated the program in 1971. “Although the SST conflict really dealt with the nation’s policy for technology rather than science, it signified new involvement for scientists in the political process, through Presidential science advice and Congressional testimony, as well as through involvement in citizen groups.” (Stine, p. 59.)

He was best known for his research on luciferase, an enzyme responsible for the “twinkle” in fireflies.

Mazuzan, p. 19.

It was a rare moment for Dubridge, having had a rough time of it with Nixon, even though they had known each other for over two decades, when Nixon was governor of California and Dubridge was president of the California Institute of Technology. Among the more visible problems was of course Nixon’s veto of Dubridge’s nomination of Franklin Long as director of the NSF; but even during the transition, Dubridge was “pointedly not included among members of Nixon’s

inner circle called to the president-elect’s suite in New York City’s Pierre Hotel to draft position papers on issues for the transition” (Herken, p. 167).

http://ntalpha.bfa.nsf.gov/NSFHist.htm.

Stine, p. 57.

The late Philip Handler, a biochemist, served as president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1969 to 1981, and was a member of the National Science Board from 1962 to 1970, the last four years as chair.

Don K. Price, “Money and influence: The links of science to public policy,” Daedalus, Summer 1974 (Science and Its Publics: The Changing Relationship), vol. 3, no. 3, Proceedings of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, p. 97.

Quoted in Milton Lomask, A Minor Miracle: An Informal History of the National Science Foundation, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1976, p. 233.

Some saw this then and today still do as smacking of ignorance of the value of fundamental research. I think a better perspective was offered by Don Price, who suggested that the emphasis on applied science “does not cast doubt on the fundamental utility of science as a means of acquiring knowledge, or even on the expectation that basic knowledge will be translated into useful applications that will further human progress. On the contrary, it shows an impatient confidence in these traditional ideas, and a determination to take political shortcuts to make them effective. The fundamental philosophical basis for this reaction is not any new alternative cognitive system; it is old-fashioned Jeffersonian confidence that science will be furthered better by very pragmatic and applied approaches than by scholastic theorizing” (Price, p. 99).

Price, p. 100.

Albert H.Teich, “Federal Support of Applied Research: A Review of the United States Experience,” available online at http://www.ulib.org/webRoot/Books/National_Academy_Press_Books/federal_role/fedl051.htm.

For example, in the 1960s the foundation made a number of sizeable institutional development grants to enable them to raise the quality of their research programs.

And the money was also to be used to offset the impact of the Mansfield Amendment. This amendment, actually introduced by Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.) but associated with Senator Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.), made it unlawful for the Department of Defense to pay for basic research projects unless they were clearly related to a “military function or operation.” And more tellingly for NSF, it ordered the foundation to support a larger share of such projects. Even before the Amendment became law on October 7, 1970, it was applied not only by the Department of Defense but also by other agencies supporting research, such as the Atomic Energy Commission. By the end of 1970, NSF had to cope with $40 million laid on its doorstep by the amendment, and Bill McElroy projected that NSF would have to pay an additional $74 million for projects dropped by other agencies because of the amendment (Lomask, p. 240).

A much fuller account, from which this is abstracted, is provided by Lomask (Chapter 14).

Alfred J. Eggers, Jr., was appointed permanent director of the Research Applica-

tions Directorate on March 2, 1971. Eggers was an aerospace engineer who contributed important experimental and theoretical research in supersonic and hypersonic aerodynamics and in aerospace vehicle technology.

Lomask, pp. 246–247.

Ibid., p. 248.

Ibid., p. 249.

That convenient and politically weighty location came to an end when in 1993 the foundation was moved to an office building in Ballston, in Arlington, Virginia.

Ehrlichman directed the White House “plumbers” unit. He also approved the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press. He was convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice and perjury in the Watergate case and of conspiracy in the Ellsberg case. Haldeman was Nixon’s chief of staff and spent 18 months in prison for his role in Watergate.

We weren’t close colleagues professionally, since he was an economist in the School of Humanities and Social Studies, and I was in the engineering school. However, we did occasionally work together—for example, when he was a member of the MIT Staff-Administration Committee that I chaired.

The federal budget process operates under a fiscal year cycle that is 12 months in length. The federal fiscal year begins on the October 1 preceding the calendar year for which the fiscal year is named (e.g., fiscal year 1973 began on October 1, 1972, and ended on September 30, 1973). The president, of course, submitted the FY 1973 budget in January 1972, and the preparation of that budget and its climb upwards from offices to division to directorate to director to OMB, with countless planned and unplanned side excursions along the way, began early in the summer of 1971.

It can also function as a radar telescope.

Frank Press and Raymond Siever, Understanding Earth, W. H. Freeman, New York, 1994, p. 450.

National Academy of Sciences, Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 1970s, Vol. 1: Report of the Astronomy Survey Committee, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., 1972, pp. 1, 3.

Ibid., pp. 4, 54–55.

For an account of this extraordinary experiment, see Norman Metzger, Men and Molecules, Crown Publishers, New York, 1972, pp. 84–100. The experiment rested on the very rare conversion by a neutrino of a chlorine isotope to argon, Cl 37 → Ar 37. Since then, an array of neutrino detectors have been built, embodying different detection schemes. For example, the SAGE and GALLEX detectors in Russia and Italy, respectively, both use vast amounts of Gallium, looking for the conversion of a Gallium atom to Germanium, ⁷¹Ga → ⁷¹Ge; while the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan is a pure water detector, depending on a neutrino hitting an electron in a water molecule, knocking it out of orbit, and making it detectable with photomultiplier tubes.

National Academy of Sciences, Physics in Perspective, Volume 1, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., 1972, p. 185.

http://www-odp.tamu.edu/glomar.html.

Ibid.

It was built by Cornell University under contract with the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Department of Defense was at first mildly interested in this project but became very interested when it was pointed out that it could detect the ionization trails put down by rockets and Sputniks.

Bunny and I on a visit to Arecibo realized that the dish was about 20 acres, about the area of our Randolph property. The site wasn’t chosen because astronomers prefer pleasant places but rather because, if planets were to be studied, the instrument had to be sited near the equator. The Arecibo site also had large sinkholes of limestone that offered natural shapes needed for the large reflector. Nevertheless, some 270,000 yards of solids and rock had to be excavated or blasted out. See Daniel R. Altschuler, and Chris Salter, “Arecibo: 36 years ago,” available online at http://www.naic.edu/about/history/35years.htm.

The foundation had the lead responsibility for the United States for this program, “initially organized to study the biological structure and function of ecosystems and determine man’s relation to them. One of the goals is to predict the consequences of possible natural or man-induced changes brought on specific ecosystems. . . . The research work was organized into large projects within five distinct kinds of life zones called biomes—grassland, desert, coniferous forest, deciduous forest, and tundra” (National Science Foundation Annual Report— 1972, p. 19).

National Science Foundation, “Tundra: The cold ecosystem,” Mosaic, Winter 1974, p. 3.

Toby A. Appel, Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945–1975, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2000, pp. 259–261.

The United States and other nations had research on the continent since 1956, although Britain claims to have been doing research and exploring in the Antarctic for about 200 years (!) The program has for three decades operated under the Antarctic Treaty, “whose primary purpose is to ensure ‘in the interests of all mankind that Antarctica shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene or object of international discord.’ The Treaty provides for freedom of scientific research in Antarctica and promotes international cooperation toward that end. The original Parties to the Treaty were the 12 nations that were active in conducting research in the Antarctic during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–1958. Throughout the years, additional countries have become Consultative Parties, until there are now 26”. The treaty joined the advent of space satellites as another legacy of the International Geophysical Year. During the IGY, July 1957–December 1958, “12 countries—Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the UK, the USA and the USSR—established more than 40 bases on the Antarctic continent and a further 20 on the subantarctic islands” (http://ast.leeds.ac.uk/haverah/spaseman/index.shtml).

Logistical support for the foundation’s Antarctic program came from, and still does, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard.

National Science Foundation Annual Report—1972, p. 41.

Alan T. Waterman did go to Antarctica after he left office.

Amundsen left a note for Scott in a tent he set up at the pole.

Amundsen’s advice to Byrd on the attempt was apt: “Take a good plane, take plenty of dogs and only the best men” (http://www.south-pole.com/p0000107.htm).

The exposition was held in 450 acres at League Island near the U.S. Navy Yard in South Philadelphia. Thirty foreign nations participated and 7 million people visited. Participation lagged expectations, however, and financial problems dogged the project from beginning to end. The association passed into receivership in 1927, and it was years before the claims of the organization’s many creditors were resolved in U.S. district court.

Siple went on to a career in Antarctic exploration and wrote several books, including A Boy Scout with Byrd. His association with Byrd was continuous and strong until the admiral’s death in 1957. See http://www.south-pole.com/p0000111.htm.

A major figure in instrumentation and control for airplanes and missiles, Seamans served as Secretary of the Air Force, the position he had when we jointly “circumnavigated” the world at the South Pole; as deputy administrator of NASA; and as the first administrator of the Energy Research and Development Administration, the predecessor to the Department of Energy. He was president of the National Academy of Engineering and is now professor emeritus in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT.

Robert Scott called his 1902 hut “The Discovery Hut” and wrote that “it was obvious that some sort of shelter must be made on shore before exploring parties could be sent away with safety, as we felt that at any time a heavy gale might drive the ship off her station for several days, if not altogether. With the hut erected and provisioned, there need be no anxiety for a detached party in such circumstances. . . . We found, however, that its construction was no light task as all the main and verandah supports were designed to be sunk three or four feet in the ground. We soon found a convenient site close to the ship on a small bare plateau of volcanic rubble, but an inch or two below the surface the soil was frozen hard, and many an hour was spent with pick, shovel, and crowbar before the solid supports were erected and our able carpenter could get to work on the frame.” Several members of Earnest Shackleton’s 1915 effort to cross the continent from sea to sea, assigned to put down depots for the main expedition, died trying to reach the Discovery Hut. See http://www.theice.org/historicguide.html.

Since my visits to the Cape Royds and Evans huts, they have been fully recognized as historical sites under the Antarctic Treaty. Visitors cannot take away artifacts.

Indeed, the station built in 1956 for the International Geophysical Year had become unusable for science and habitation by the end of the 1960s when the decision was made to build a new station.

Bob Seamans when he got home offered to send about half of the ice to the

foundation for scientific work-up, but I declined because a single sample from one depth wasn’t that helpful; a continuous core from the top down was needed. Rather, I urged Bob to “continue your own line of investigation—possibly by conducting a series of small experiments (about the size of a drinking glass) to determine how the ice interacts with a good brand of Scotch” (Stever to Seamans, January 15, 1973, Historians’ Files, 1945–1985, Record Group 307, Row 30 (unprocessed), National Records and Archives Administration, College Park, Md.).

Congressman Melvin Laird reportedly agreed to be Nixon’s secretary of defense only if the science advisor was kept out of national security matters. See Bruce L. R. Smith, The Advisers: Scientists in the Policy Process, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., 1992, p. 169.

Quoted in Gregg Herken, Cardinal Choices: Presidential Science Advising from the Atomic Bomb to SDI, Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2000, p. 169. See pp. 166–183 for a detailed accounting of the fall and eventual rebirth of a science advisory apparatus in the White House.

Memorandum from Henry Simmons to Jim Cannon, March 18, 1975, Office of Science and Technology Policy, 1975, Box 32, James M. Cannon Collection, Gerald R. Ford Library, p. 2.

See Box 8-1 for a list of my predecessors as White House science advisors.

For more details, see Herken, p. 180.

Until science was cast out of the White House, David Z. Beckler served as PSAC’s executive secretary and principal assistant to six science advisors.

The Office of Emergency Preparedness was the successor of several agencies dating back to 1947 and had principal responsibility for dealing with civil emergencies and disasters, investigating imports that might impair national security, and oil policies. These functions were dispersed to various line agencies. The National Aeronautics and Space Council was set up in 1958, as part of the response to Sputnik. It was abolished, and none of its functions were transferred.

Philip M. Smith had been head of polar programs at NSF. When responsibility for the U.S. activities in Antarctica shifted from the Navy to the NSF, Phil had worked for about a year at OMB to get it done. Hugh Loweth wanted Phil to stay on at OMB and work on the preparation of the next year’s science and technology budget, which he did. All that was excellent experience for the assistant to the director job. For the rest of my time in the two-hat period and the later operation at the White House, Phil was my right-hand man. His inside experience at OMB was invaluable in establishing close working relationships with that powerful organization. Phil and I worked together on many other ventures in the past three decades as he continued his outstanding career.

Many other talented people joined me, and I simply can’t credit them all. For example, I needed help in the speechwriting area, a growth industry for me. There I was blessed by my friend, Glenn Seaborg, who mentioned that he had a

great speechwriter when he was head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Stanley Schneider. Stan and I hit it off right off the bat, and he joined me and proved to be a great boon. There is nobody in Washington who can succeed in his job without having a good speechwriter, and I had one of the best.

We were fortunate to have as deputy director Ray Bisplinghoff. Ray was invaluable with his broad experience as a teacher of engineering in the aeronautics and astronautics area, as a consultant to many major aerospace companies of the country, and as a strong participant in the space activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Alfred Eggers and his colleagues in the RANN (see Chapter 7) program often helped when the science advisor had jobs to do in many applied science and technology areas of interest to government.

The hookup of the U.S. and Soviet spacecraft occurred on July 17, 1975. For a thorough description of the entire program, formally known as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, see http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4209/cover.htm.

Responsible for NSF congressional liaison.

See Chapter 7.

See Chapter 2. Dave Langmuir headed the two-person team (I was the second person) in the OSRD Science Liaison Office in London during Word War II.

The Russians originally intended them for my predecessor, Ed David, an avid rock collector.

Time, June 5, 1972. See http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/16/1st.draft/ for longer text.

Vadim Aleksandrovich Trapeznikov was an Academician with the Division of Physical-Technical Sciences of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He died in 1994. See http://www.icp.ac.ru/RAS_1724-1999/CD_PAH/ENG/27/2783.HTM.

The number one was ill.

Nikolai Viktorovich Podgorny was deposed in 1977 in favor of Leonid Brezhnev, who wanted to combine the posts of presidium chairman (i.e., Soviet president) and party secretary-general. He died in 1983.

See http://www.camk.edu.pl/info/index.html.

Nicolae Ceaucescu ran Romania from over 30 years, until he was executed in a coup in 1989.

For details, see http://www.bsf.org.il/.

These international comparisons have grown in time in both sophistication and scope. Nowadays, in addition to the percentage of the gross national product going into science and scientific research and development, comparisons include, inter alia, the different fields of emphasis in the efforts of science and technology in the different countries, the efficiency and effectiveness of science education fields, and the outputs of various countries in terms of patents and intellectual properties.

The social and behavioral sciences were added in 1980. For more details, see http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/awards/nms/start.htm.

The award citation was on target: “For his leadership in the science and engineering basic to aeronautics, for his effective teaching and related contributions in many fields of mechanics, for his distinguished counsel to the Armed Services,

and for his promoting international cooperation in science and engineering.” See Chapters 2 and 3 for more on this splendid man and my time with him.

Agnew was investigated by the U.S. attorney in Baltimore for allegedly receiving payoffs from engineers seeking contracts when Agnew was Baltimore county executive and governor of Maryland. Agnew asserted his innocence, but he resigned on Oct. 10, 1973, and pleaded nolo contendere, or no contest, to a single charge that he had failed to report $29,500 of income received in 1967. He was fined $10,000 and placed on three years’ probation. See http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/vp/vpagnew.html.

For a more detailed Watergate time line, see http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/chronology.htm.

The Bohemian Grove is a 2,700-acre redwood forest, located in Monte Rio, California, with accommodations for 2,000 people to camp. The Bohemian Club, a private, all-male club, owns it. For more, see http://www.sonomacountyfreepress.org/bohos/bohofact.html.

Paul Donovan became its director and Paul Craig the deputy director. We also got considerable help from Richard E. Balzhiser, who before it was abolished had been associate director in the Office of Science and Technology responsible for energy, environment, and natural resources. I tried to lure Dick to the foundation, but he preferred to go into the private sector, where he had a splendid career.

John W. Tukey, who died in 2000, was one of the seminal contributors to statistics in the twentieth century, credited for the invention of many graphical and numerical methods now commonly used in statistics, including the fast Fourier transform algorithm. He received the National Medal of Science in 1973.

Inevitably, the government apparatus for energy and the environment expanded and became more complex. For example, the White House created a new Office of Energy Policy in June 1973 to be directed by John Love, former governor of Colorado. The following December it became the Federal Energy Office headed by John Sawhill and in May the Federal Energy Administration. The Atomic Energy Commission was split in 1974 into the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And in 1977 the Energy Research and Development Administration transmuted into the Department of Energy. The White House Council on Environmental Quality came into being in 1970 led by Russell Train. The Environmental Protection Agency opened for business in December 1970, with William D. Ruckelshaus the first administrator, succeeded in 1973 by Russell Train. And in October 1972 the Congress had established its own Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) “as an aid in the identification and consideration of existing and probable impacts of technological application.” And it had wisely mandated close coordination by the OTA with NSF enjoining both to maintain “promotion of coordination in areas of technology assessment, and the avoidance of unnecessary duplication or overlapping of research activities in the development of technology assessment techniques and programs.” Alas, the Congress—unwisely—abolished the OTA in 1995.

Of course, I got the question many times that every science advisor gets: “Do you often see the president?” Tiring of the question and with tongue firmly in cheek, I would sometimes reply: “Yes, I see him almost everyday out of my office window when he walks from the Oval Office to his limousine.”

See http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/awards/waterman/start.htm. In addition to a medal, the awardee receives a grant of $500,000 over a three-year period for scientific research or advanced study in the mathematical, physical, medical, biological, engineering, social, or other sciences. The first award, in 1976, was given to Charles L. Fefferman, Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University “for his research in Fourier analysis, partial differential equations and several complex variables which have brought fresh insight and renewed vigor to classical areas of mathematics and contributed signally to the advancement of modern mathematical analysis.”

There are two others: (1) always write your minutes in such a way that your master can come to only one decision, and (2) don’t drink before the evening. I often violated the first but never the second.

Nixon was empowered to appoint Ford through the 25th Amendment, which provides that when the vice presidency becomes vacant the president shall appoint a successor, subject to majority approval by both houses of Congress. Gerald R. Ford, sworn in as vice president on December 6, 1973, had served in the House since 1949, winning 12 consecutive elections and became minority leader of the House in 1965, holding that position for eight years until he became vice president. For more, see http://www.ford.utexas.edu/grf/fordbiop.htm.

Of course, the political reality was that the office, whatever its congressional pedigree, could be ignored, appointments delayed, etc.

Stever to Donald Rumsfeld et al., October 24, 1974, Science and Technology Policy, Legislation, Glenn R. Schleede Papers, Box 35, Gerald R. Ford Library. Donald Rumsfeld was assistant to the president.

James Reston, “Calling all scientists,” New York Times, October 10, 1974, p. 39. Reston flattered me by calling me in the same column an “able and talented man,” but I couldn’t really quarrel with his judgment that I “wasn’t at the center of policy-making at a time when science is central to the problems of the nation and the world.” While I was science advisor, I still sat in the National Science Foundation, whose clout across the government was limited and hence limited in coordinating much more powerful agencies.

John F. Burby, “Science Report/Congress ready to move on new federal R&D structure,” National Journal, Dec. 14, 1974, pp. 1871–1876.

James R. Killian, Jr., Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1977, p. 257. See also the National Academy of Sciences, Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Science and Technology, Science and Technology in Presidential Policymaking: A Proposal, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., 1974.

Rockefeller was asked to take on restoration of science to the White House as one of his principal responsibilities, no doubt in part because of his work with the Commission on Critical Choices for America, which he organized and funded for the purpose of developing national policy alternatives. After extended con-

gressional inquiries into his financial resources (considerable), he was confirmed by a vote of 287 to 128 in the House and 90 to 7 in the Senate. He was sworn in as the forty–first vice president on December 19, 1974.

Memorandum of the vice president to the president, March 3, 1975, Michael Raoul-Duval Collection, OSTP folder, Box 23, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.

Robert C. Cowen, “Research notebook: Is science out of fashion?” Christian Science Monitor, June 4, 1975.

The vice president, who had had a long public service career dating back to the FDR administration, had a keen interest in science and technology. He and his chief of staff proved to be critical allies in getting control over those who were reluctant to see the science office reestablished.

Letter from the vice president to Senator Kennedy, December 3, 1975, and Senator Kennedy to the vice president, December 8, 1975, Glenn R. Schleede Collection, Science and Technology Policy, 1975, Senate and House Positions, Box 38, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.

For more on Dick Atkinson, see http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/pres/atprofil.html.

George T. Mazuzan, “The National Science Foundation: A brief history,” available online at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/stis1994/nsf8816/nsf8816.txt; p. 4.

Don K. Price, “Money and influence: The links of science to public policy,” Daedalus, Summer 1974 (Science and Its Publics: The Changing Relationship). Vol. 3, no. 3. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, p. 101.

John Walsh, “NSF: Congress takes hard look at behavioral science course,” Science, May 2, 1975, p. 426.

“NSF gets a record $768 million,” Science, Sept. 20, 1974, p. 1030.

I thank William Blanpied, of NSF, for noting that Doris McCarn was secretary to Alan Waterman, when he was chief scientist at the Office of Naval Research before he came to the foundation as its first director. Doris was sworn in first, Waterman second. So she was NSF’s first employee and Waterman its second.

That included substantial support by the foundation for graduate students through fellowships and similar means. For example, NSF invested $256 million in fellowships and traineeships between 1952 and 1967. Memo from Stever to Schleede, January 29, 1976, Glenn R. Schleede Collection, National Science Foundation, 1976, Appropriations for FY 1977, Box 22, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.

Much of this summary is adapted from my January 29 memo to Glenn Schleede referenced above.

Letter from Jack Kratchman to the Honorable Joe L. Evins, June 12, 1975, Historians’ Files, 1945–1985, Record Group 307, Row 30 (unprocessed), National Records and Archives Administration, College Park, Md.

MACOS was developed by the Education Development Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a well-regarded organization that had developed other curricula with foundation support, notably in the physical sciences. Extremely distinguished consultants guided the project, including Jerome Bruner and Irven Devore of Harvard and Asen Balikei of the University of Montreal.

Kratchman to Evins.

This committee was chaired by Robert E. Hughes, NSF assistant director for national and international programs, and included two members of the National Science Board, Grover E. Murray, president of Texas Tech University and Texas Tech University School of Medicine, and L. Donald Shields, president of California State University at Fullerton.

Edward Patrick Boland (D-Mass.) served in the Congress for 18 successive congresses, from January 3, 1953, to January 3, 1989. He was enormously influential as an appropriator in the rising fortunes of the National Science Foundation and other research agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health. I always enjoyed my dealings with him. He was tough and questioning but always fair, and when he felt you were right on a hard issue, he was a powerful ally. Not least, he was resolute with another strong supporter of good science—William Natcher (D-Ky.) —in fighting “pork-barrel” spending.

Quoted in Walsh, p. 426. The reference to “competition from other publishing houses” was another arrow in the attack on the NSF; specifically, charges of impropriety in the manner in which the foundation had found a publisher for the MACOS course, the disposition of royalties, and the like. We responded to these additional charges very effectively I thought, and rather than go into detail on these, I refer anyone interested to the Science article by John Walsh, especially pp. 427–428.

The story of course had many twists and turns, cut short by this summary. The reader who wants all the gory details can find them in the excellent series of articles by John Walsh in Science. In addition to the cited May 1975 article, others by Walsh in Science worth reading are “NSF and its critics in Congress: New pressure on peer review,” June 6, 1975, pp. 999–1001; “Peer review: NSF faces changes, the question is how extensive,” Oct. 17, 1975, pp. 253–256; and “NSF: How much responsibility for course content, implementation?” Nov. 14, 1975, pp. 644–646.

President Ford was well on his way to stopping and reversing the decline in research funding. The Carter administration went on to seek real growth in research support by the National Science Foundation and other agencies, such as the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, and Energy. Overall, support grew for federal defense and nondefense research during the Carter administration, embodying as well growth for the support of basic research. With the arrival of the Reagan administration, nondefense research and development support declined markedly, whereas defense research and development increased sharply. Total support for basic research began rising again in 1984 and continued to do so through the remainder of the twentieth century. See http://www.aaas.org/spp/dspp/rd/trendtot.pdf.

Ford, the “accidental president” now seeking the nomination for presidency on his own, had a strong challenge from the right by the two-term governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Ford countered by picking a conservative, Senator Robert Dole from Kansas, as his running mate, dropping Nelson Rockefeller. Even so, Ford won the nomination by only 60 votes. And he lost the general election to Jimmy Carter, but in bittersweet vindication made it a close race after being badly behind in the opinion polls at the start of the campaign. For more

on the 1976 presidential campaign, see http://www.americanpresident.org/KoTrain/Courses/GF/GF_Campaigns_and_Elections.htm.

Senators Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), James McClure (R-Ind.), Clifford Hansen (R-Wyo.), and Carl Curtis (R-Neb.).

For this correspondence and related materials, see the Glenn R. Schleede Collection, the Folder on Science and Technology Policy, 1976: Nomination of Dr. Stever (1), Box 40, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.

Other members were Otis Bowen, Glen Campbell, Ed David, Elizabeth LeDuc, Paul O’Neill, Fritz Russ, Charlie Slichter, Charlie Townes, Caspar Weinberger, and Brad Wiley. I was an ex-officio member.

Don, a distinguished neurobiologist, stayed past the end of the Ford presidency to head the Food and Drug Administration under President Carter for two and one-half years. He returned to Stanford in 1979 to serve as provost and then for 12 years as its president. In June 2000 he became editor-in-chief of Science. Bill Nierenberg, who died of cancer in September 2000, was a physicist who served as director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for 21 years, from 1965 to 1986. He was instrumental in founding JASONS, a group of physicists who conduct studies on military issues. As a memorial tribute put it, Bill had a very dynamic style and “held his views strongly, and showed no fear of making a mistake. He would teach Chinese to the China-born and was heard to lecture on French chateaux to a president of a society devoted to restoring them. Although an impatient listener, Bill still ‘heard’ you. To use an analogy from Antisubmarine Warfare, in exchanging information he used the principles of active rather than passive sonar, bouncing his ideas off you and observing your reactions.” (http://www-senate.ucsd.edu/assembly/nierenberg.htm).

By 1.7 million votes out of 81 million cast.

Quoted in National Research Council, US Industry in 2000: Studies in Competitive Performance, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 1.

National Research Council, Securing America’s Industrial Strength, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1999, p. 4.

Richard R. Nelson and Paul M. Romer, “Science, economic growth, and public policy,” Technology, R&D, and the Economy, Bruce L. R. Smith and Claude E. Barfield, eds., The Brookings Institution and The American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., 1996, pp. 54–55.

That $80 billion equated to about $62 billion in constant 2001 dollars. About $30 million of that was for defense research and development, the dominant portion of that going to prototyping and weapons testing. Of the nondefense funds, about $10 billion went to basic research. The distortions in representing federal research and development as a single number—grouping weapons testing with basic research—were addressed in the mid-1990s by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, which argued that a new measure was needed that set out what the federal government was actually spending on the provision

of new knowledge, what it called the “Federal Science and Technology Budget.” The idea was somewhat radical and thus took time to gain acceptance. But acceptance came, notably in the FY 2003 budget, which explicitly used the measure. The report itself can be found at http://books.nap.edu/html/federal_funds. See the next chapter for further details on the work of this committee, of which I was a member.

Quotes taken from Davis Dyer, TRW: Pioneering Technology and Innovation Since 1900, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1998, pp. 233–234. Indeed, this volume provides a thorough account of the history of the companies, both in its originally separate parts—Ramo-Wooldridge (R-W), which had built its reputation on system engineering for the nascent Air Force ICBM programs, and Thompson Products, a mass producer of parts and components for the automotive, aircraft, and aircraft engine industries. Merging them was a challenge: they were geographically apart, R-W in Southern California and Thompson in Cleveland; and more critically the cultures of the two organizations were polar, R-W people more at home in the highly specialized and intense world of aerospace and advanced electronics and Thompson people more ‘‘old-line” running a business that by sticking to a basic formula had been successful for decades. That the merger came off is quite a story, and Dyer tells it well, especially pp. 225–249.

Rube Mettler was a fellow Cal Tech graduate, earning all his degrees there, including a doctorate in electrical and aerospace engineering. He began his career with Hughes Aircraft in 1949, moved to TRW in 1955, and retired as chairman and CEO of TRW in 1989. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1965 as an “outstanding creative missile and systems engineer.”

At the same time, Stanley Pace became president and chief operating officer. Certainly not least, Simon Ramo reached his sixty fifth birthday and chose to retire from his vice chairmanship of the board, but stayed as a member. He kept his California office right next to that of the chairman and frequently consulted with and led special studies for the chairman, remaining a force to reckon with.

Dyer, p. 341.

Richard Delauer (1918–1990) earned a doctorate in aeronautics and mathematics from Cal Tech, pioneered work on nuclear rocket propulsion, and in 1958 joined the new TRW Space Technology Laboratories as assistant laboratory director, eventually rising to responsibility for all of TRW’s defense, space, electronics, and information systems. Dick Delauer was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1969 for the “design of spacecraft and ballistic missile weapons systems; application of systems engineering methodology in defense, space, and civil systems.” He became under secretary of defense for research and engineering in 1981. He left government service in 1984, founded a consulting group, and from 1989 until his untimely death was chief executive officer of Fairchild Space and Defense.

Simon Ramo, cofounder of TRW, has been honored in many ways, including the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1964. He was born in Salt Lake City on May 13, 1913, to Lithuanian immigrants who owned a clothing store. Ramo earned a B.S. in electrical engineering at the University of Utah and, at 23, a

Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics at Cal Tech. From 1936 to 1946 Ramo worked for General Electric (GE) in Schenectady, New York, developing microwave transmission and detection equipment and GE’s electron microscope. In 1946 he accepted a position with Hughes Aircraft in Culver City, California, where he developed fire control, radar, navigation, computer, and other aircraft electronics systems. Ramo and fellow engineer Dean E. Wooldridge left Hughes Aircraft in 1953 to form the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, obtaining financial support from Thompson Products, Inc. For the next four years, Ramo-Wooldridge had primary responsibility for guiding the development of the Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman ICBMs. In 1958 Ramo-Wooldridge merged with Thompson Products to form Thompson Ramo-Wooldridge, Inc., a name later shortened to TRW, Inc.

George E. Solomon was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1967 for the “design and development of space and weapon systems.” After earning a Ph.D. at Cal Tech, Solomon joined the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, rising to executive vice president and general manager of its electronics and defense sector.

John S. Foster, Jr., after earning his physics doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, began his career with the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University in 1942. He spent 1943 and 1944 as an advisor to the 15th Air Force on radar and radar countermeasures in the Mediterranean theater of operations. He was director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and for eight years director of research and engineering before joining TRW. His many awards include the Enrico Fermi Award of the Department of Energy and the James Forrestal Memorial Award. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1969 for “technological leadership in defense research and engineering.”

Pierce Angel, an old-timer in the Cleveland operations, became the focus of these information exchange groups, though his health-related retirement cut short his participation.

Formally, the Redondo Beach Space Center, for which ground was broken in December 1960. It included several major buildings, including one that Rube Mettler called “a tremendous gamble,” $7 billion for a facility to manufacture spacecraft. It included a 50-foot-high manufacturing bay, a 10-ton overhead crane, and a 30-foot space simulator that could handle spacecraft much larger than those built at the time. The gamble paid off, as both NASA and the Air Force selected TRW in the 1960s to manufacture major and very large spacecraft programs—the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory in the case of NASA and for the Air Force Project 823, or “Vela Hotel,” to detect nuclear explosions. That was only the beginning. Out of this building and other facilities at Space Park emerged Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to leave the solar system; the tracking and data relay satellites (TDRS) for communications between the earth and low-earth orbit satellites, including the Space Shuttle; the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory; the Defense Support Program satellites to monitor missile launches; and the engine for the lunar descent module that enabled six astronauts to land

on the moon and, certainly not least, was key in the safe return of Apollo 13. Dyer, pp. 2, 235–236.

Bement worked with William Perry, director of defense research and engineering in the Carter administration, on the materials research programs that led to the stealth technologies that demonstrated their effectiveness in the Gulf War. Arden then became David A. Ross Distinguished Professor of Nuclear Engineering and head of the School of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University. In 2002 he returned to public service as director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Richard J. Fruehan, Dany A. Cheij, and David M. Vislosky, “Steel,” in National Research Council, U.S. Industry in 2000, pp. 75–76.

Indeed, the Bethlehem Steel story has a sad end, for the company filed for bankruptcy on October 15, 2001. Its financial problems worsened a lot after September 11, and according to its chairman, “what was a declining market has become a free fall” (Washington Post, October 16, 2001, p. E1). The impact of the steel tarriffs imposed by the Bush administration in 2002 remains to be seen.

That cultural difference is still evident in TRW today, nearly a quarter of a century later.

Schering-Plough was created in 1971 by a merger of the Schering Corporation and Plough, Inc. Each had modest beginnings. “The Schering concern started in 1852 as a local pharmacy called the Green Apothecary, but soon began to produce the new wonder drugs chloroform and cocaine. Schering later made a fortune by pioneering the use of synthetic drugs to avoid importing raw materials” (Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin, Carol and Graf Publishers, New York, 1998, p. 144). Plough, Inc., was created in 1908 by 16-year-old Abe Plough. With $125 borrowed from his father, he bought a horse and wagon and began selling remedies to town folk and farmers around Memphis, Tennessee.

Comprehensive analyses of the worldwide automobile industry were developed at MIT by Jim Womack, Dan Jones, and Daniel Roos, my former colleagues, who started the MIT International Motor Vehicle Program in the early 1980s. See Alan Altshuler, Martin Anderson, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos, The Future of the Automobile, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1984, and James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos, The Machine that Changed the World, Rawson Associates, New York, 1990. They are classic studies of engineering and management.

We met with President Suharto and Minister for Research and Technology B. J. Habibie among others. Habibie was an aeronautical engineer by training and since 1986 a foreign associate of the National Academy of Engineering. In the 1980s Indonesia was stable and a good place for business, although the ruling Suharto family had already begun to get into trouble because of nepotism. Habibie became president in 1998 but was forced out after 17 months of an extremely turbulent time for the nation.

Even now, at the start of a new millennium, Japan has relatively few venture capital investors other than banks and established companies, few university-industry joint research programs, and still fewer industrial and incubator parks than we have in the United States.

Gregg Herken, Cardinal Choices: Presidential Science Advising from the Atomic Bomb to SDI, Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2000, p. 208. See also pp. 208–211 for a detailed account from which I’ve drawn for the origins of the March 23 address and its repercussions.

For the complete text of the March 23 speech, see http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/rrspch.htm.

See Chapter 4 for more on the ABM study I chaired in 1954.

G. A. Keyworth, II, “Federal science and technology policy—The Reagan years,” paper presented at 25th Anniversary Symposium of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 1, 2001, pp. 5– 6.

Herken, p. 213. The official was Victor Reis, then Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)’s assistant director for national security and space.” Laetrile was at the time one of the better-known supposed “cures” for cancer, made from substances in the pits of apricots and other fruits. No reliable evidence for its efficacy has yet turned up.

Ibid., p. 210.

Keyworth, p. 6.

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/m8310017.htm.

I was also mindful that OTA committees have a sharply different role than those of the National Research Council. NRC reports are the responsibility of the committee, and NRC procedures stem from that. For OTA reports the committees are advisory only, and the reports are the responsibility of project staff and OTA. Thus, an OTA report can be issued even, say, if most if not all of the advisory committee members disagree with it; that’s impossible with NRC reports.

In addition to me as chairman, there was Solomon Buchsbaum, executive vice president of AT&T Bell Labs; Ashton Carter, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard; Robert Clem, director of systems sciences at Sandia National Labs; Sidney D. Drell, deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; Daniel J. Fink, president of D. J. Fink Associates, Inc.; Richard Garwin, IBM fellow, Thomas J. Watson Research Center; Noah Guyler, Admiral, U.S. Navy, American Committee on East-West Accord; Colin Gray, president of the National Institute for Public Policy; George Jeffs, president of North American Space Operations, Rockwell International; General David Jones, U.S. Air Force (ret.), former chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; Robert S. McNamara, former president of the World Bank; Michael M. May, associate director at large, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories; H. Allen Pike, program manager, Space Station at Lockheed, Missiles in Space; Fred Seitz, president emeritus, Rockefeller University; Robert Seldon, associate director for theoretical computational physics, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Marshall D. Shulman, director of the Herrman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, Columbia University; Ambassador Gerard C. Smith, president of Consultants International Group, Inc.; Sayre Stevens, vice president of Systems Planning Corporation;

Major General John Toomay, U.S. Air Force (ret.), consultant; and Seymour Ciberg, vice president, research and engineering operations, Martin Marietta Aerospace.

Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Congress, Ballistic Missile Defense Technologies, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1986.

Ibid., p. 34.

Ibid., p. iii.

That of course turned out to be wrong, and the conflict over the technical feasibility and strategic wisdom of building an ABM system is now a major issue for the second Bush administration.

Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Congress, SDI: Technology, Survivability, and Software, vol. 2, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 5

Universities Research Association is now one of several consortia that sit in effect between major facilities and the government agencies that support them, and whose job it is to assure and manage the national use of these facilities. Thus, the association now has 89 member universities and through its governing board of university representatives serves as the primary contractor to the Department of Energy for operation of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. See http://www.ura-hq.org/about/index.html.

It became Fermilab after the great Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, on May 11, 1974.

Of course, there were (and are) other centers of high-energy physics in the United States and other countries, at which momentous discoveries were made. For example, the first evidence for point-like quarks came from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, confirming speculation by Richard Feynman and providing strong support for the Standard Model.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Jan00/RRWilson_obit.hrs.html.

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/about/whatis/history.html.

With Melvin Schwarz and Jack Steinberger.

The lengthy political battles about the Superconducting Supercollider facility construction, about its partial completion followed by an orderly closing down, and, not least, about helping very able people find new positions, were difficult chapters in the SSC story. The load fell on the shoulders of John Marburger, chairman of URA, John Toll, president of URA, and John Peoples, director of Fermilab. But the loss of the SSC by no means spelled the end of U.S. high-energy particle physics in the United States. Fermilab and several of the other principal laboratories received support for new facilities and strong research programs. The field, however, being a prime example of expensive “big science,” always presents difficult budget decisions.

The Gang of Four was a group of four hard-core communists, including Mao’s wife, who in the mid-1960s pushed for total destruction of traditional Chinese culture to be replaced by textbook communist ideology and culture. They became the leading forces in Mao’s cultural revolution. For more, see http://www.europeaninternet.com/china/underst/gangfour.php3.

Phil Smith, who worked with me when I was science advisor to President Ford and then stayed to work with Frank Press as associate director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy aptly described U.S.-China dialogue at the time of my visit: “As the administration was getting underway, China was also just beginning its renewed modernization drive, an undertaking of enormous magnitude then and now and the genesis of China’s interest in acquiring technology from the West. Trade, science, technological, and academic contacts had been taking place since the Nixon initiatives, but they were private, non-governmental exchanges and contacts. The president and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzenzinski asked Frank to develop a possible program of government-to-government cooperation in S&T. After a few months of preparation, Frank led a large delegation, including the heads of NSF, NASA, NOAA, NIH, USGS, the research directors of DOE and the Department of Commerce, and other government R&D leaders on an extended visit to China. At the time it was, and may still be, the largest official R&D delegation of government S&T officials to go abroad. They went in their own Air Force plane, which added prestige to the visit from the perspective of their Chinese hosts. The discussions in China led to the formal agreement on cooperation in science and technology signed by the President and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping in early 1979, initiation of government-to-government cooperation in R&D, and the start of the influx of Chinese students studying in American universities. There’s an interesting anecdote related to Chinese student study in U.S universities. In discussing student study with Deng Xiaoping, Frank cautioned that it was possible that some students would choose to remain in the U.S. to pursue their scientific careers. After a pause, the Vice Premier responded: ‘Dr. Press, we have plenty more!’” (Philip M. Smith, “Science and Technology in the Carter Presidency,”paper presented at the 25th Anniversary Symposium of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 1, 2001).

The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies, the other parts being the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. The National Academy of Sciences came first, in 1863. The National Research Council, an organizational vehicle for conducting studies, mainly for the government, was created in 1916. A major reason for bringing it into being, and the subsequent and eternal confusion on its role vis-à-vis the National Academy of Sciences, was to provide a means for creating committees that included non-Academy members. The National Academy of Engineering arrived in 1964 and the Institute of Medicine in 1970. Oversimplifying just a tad, the latter two were created because of the restrictive criteria for election to the NAS—“distinguished contributions to science.” That often made it tough for people who made major contributions to engineering science and technology and to the advancement of health care to be recognized by election to the Academy. All three organizations—NAS, NAE, IOM—annually elect new members to their respective academies and getting elected was and remains very tough, making it one of the highest honors for a professional in the fields of science, engineering, and medicine. For more, see http://nationalacademies.org.

Chapter 3 has more on Tsien’s brilliant career and political troubles.

National Research Council, Engineering Education in the People’s Republic of China: Report of a Visit, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1983.

On the other hand, we enjoyed that culture when we were shown the antiquities of every region visited and the top political leader gave us an unsurpassable Chinese banquet, culminating in Beijing when we were guests of the minister of education in the Great Hall on the occasion of the twenty-ninth anniversary of the communist revolution.

This was a project of the NRC’s Board on Science and Technology for International Development sponsored by the Agency for International Development.

National Research Council, U.S. Science and Technology for Development: A Contribution to the 1979 UN Conference, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1978, p. iii.

Ibid., p. 7.

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/docs/history.html?s

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/.

Francis R. Scobee, commander; Michael J. Smith, pilot; Judith A. Resnik, mission specialist 1; Ellison S. Onizuka, mission specialist 2; Ronald E. McNair, mission specialist 3; Gregory B. Jarvis, payload specialist 1; and Sharon Christa McAuliffe, payload specialist 2.

Formally, the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. Its chair, William P. Rogers, secretary of state under President Nixon, and I were both Colgate alumni, Bill Rogers having graduated five years ahead of me. We received honorary Colgate degrees at the same occasion, his twenty-fifth anniversary and my twentieth. We had several interactions, when Bill was at the State Department and I was at the National Science Foundation, for example, on NSF’s role in the law of sea negotiations and in establishing the United States-Israel Bi-national Science Foundation mentioned in the previous chapter.

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt.

The members of the Panel on Technical Evaluation of NASA’s Redesign of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster, in addition to me, were Laurence J. Adams, Martin Marietta Corporation; David Altman, United Technologies Corporation; Robert C. Anderson, TRW, Inc.; Jack L. Blumenthal, TRW, Inc.; Robert C. Forney, E. I. DuPont Nemours & Co.; Alan N. Gent, University of Akron; Dean K. Hanink, General Motors; James W. Mar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Edward W. Price, Georgia Institute of Technology; and Robert D. Watt, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

This was Myron F. Uman, perhaps the most critical selection for what turned out to be an incredibly arduous task. Then a member of the professional staff of the National Research Council for over a decade, he came armed with a doctorate in electrical engineering and plasma physics from Princeton University, academic time as a former faculty member of the University of California at Davis, and experience in running many programs and studies. He was indispensable.

National Research Council, Collected Reports of the Panel on Technical Evaluation

of NASA’s Redesign of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1988.

John Thomas was selected by NASA to be responsible for the redesign, and Morton Thiokol selected Alan McDonald to lead the effort. They soon recognized the expertise of our panel members and that we could be a positive and supporting team.

The panel’s concern was that flaws might arise in manufacturing or assembling the rocket that could not be detected by quality control processes. So flaws should be intentionally introduced into test articles to be sure the design is resilient.

National Research Council, p. 38.

STS is Space Transportation System, the formal name for the shuttle.

The surgery included two laminectomies, excision of posterior arches of vertebrae, and several foraminotomies, removing some of the foramina or passages between vertebrae to ease nerve compression.

This was one of several so-called White Papers (a term misappropriated from the British who would call them “Green Papers,” intended for discussion) done by the Academies for the new president. The other topics were AIDS, global environmental change, science and technology advising in the White House, and federal science and technology budget priorities.

These are more fully summarized in H. Guyford Stever, and David L. Bodde, “Space policy: Deciding where to go,” Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 1989, pp. 66–71.

Ibid., p. 70.

The president was a psychiatrist, David Hamburg, who before going to the Carnegie Corporation served as president of the Institute of Medicine. Earlier he had been a professor at Stanford University. Hamburg had very broad interests in science, technology, and health policy, and this motivated his interest in establishing the Carnegie Commission. He became president emeritus of the Carnegie Corporation in 1997 after a 14-year tenure.

John R. Steelman, Science and Public Policy: A Report to the President, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1947.

Of course the immediate predecessor to the Steelman Report, Vannevar Bush’s Science, the Endless Frontier, was also influential but more as a hard-hitting call to arms—national strength in research in peacetime—than as a detailed battle plan, which the Steelman Report provided.

The national research and development effort has been well above Steelman’s one percent mark since the early 1950s, while the federal portion climbed to almost 2 percent in 1961 but has been closer to 0.5 percent since then. See http://www.aaas.org/spp/dspp/rd/trendusg.pdf.

William A. Blanpied, Science and Public Policy: The Steelman Report and the Politics of Post-World War II Science Policy, available online at http://www.aaas.org/spp/yearbook/chap29.htm.

Jeffrey K. Stine, A History of Science Policy in the United States, 1940–1985, Science Policy Study, Background Report No. 1, Task Force on Science Policy, Committee on Science and Technology, House of Representatives, 99th Congress, Second Session, September 1986, pp. 30–32.

A full listing and text of the Carnegie Commission’s products can be found at http://carnegie.org/sub/research/index.html#science.

Joshua Lederberg received a Nobel Prize in 1958 for his work in bacterial genetics. William T. Golden, among his many contributions, served as a special consultant to President Truman on mobilizing the nation’s scientific resources.

Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier, National Science Foundation, July 1945, Washington, D.C. See also http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm.

Both reports are available through the Carnegie Commission’s website at http://carnegie.org/sub/pubs/ccstfrep.htm and also through the State Science and Technology Institute’s site at http://www.ssti.org/Publications/carnegie.htm.

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

This is obviously cursory. For more details, see National Research Council, Linking Science and Technology to Society’s Economic Goals, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1996.

National Research Council, Harnessing Science and Technology for America’s Economic Future, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1996.

It was a very distinguished and able committee: Frank Press, Carnegie Institution of Washington, chair; Lew Allen, Jr., Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc.; David H. Auston, Rice University; Forest Baskett, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems; Barry R. Bloom, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Daniel J. Evans, Daniel J. Evans & Associates; Baruch Fischhoff, Carnegie Mellon University; Marye Anne Fox, University of Texas at Austin; Shirley A. Jackson, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Robert I. Levy, Wyeth-Ayerst Research; Richard J. Mahoney, Monsanto Co. (ret.); Steven L. Mcknight, Tularik, Inc.; Marcia K. McNutt, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Paul M. Romer, University of California at Berkeley; Luis Sequeira, University of Wisconsin; Harold T. Shapiro, Princeton University; H. Guyford Stever, trustee and science advisor; and John P. White, Department of Defense.

National Academy of Sciences et al., Allocating Federal Funds for Science and Technology, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.,1995.

http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/fedfunds/.

http://www.greatachievements.org/greatachievements/index.html.

Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1985, p. 75.

Roger L. Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940, Oxford University Press, New York, 1986, p. 183.

Ibid., p. 86.

Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978, p. 290.

Ibid., p. 289.

Ibid., p. 307.

Quoted in James Phinney Baxter, Scientists Against Time, Little Brown and Co., Boston, 1946, p. 9.

Which, of course, became the Carnegie Mellon University during my tenure.

An umbrella term for the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine.