New Year’s Day 1973 was benign enough. Our entire family was at our vacation home in Randolph. New snow. I went skiing at Wildcat Mountain with three of our four children—Roy, Sarah, and Margo. Then in succession the Rose Bowl game, a party at nearby friends, and a game with all four children, Guy, Jr., included this time.

Guy, Jr., was in his third full year of teaching English at Berlin High School 15 miles away from Randolph. Sarah was in her third year of doctoral work at the University of Michigan on Italian renaissance history, relatively newly wed, the only one of our children then married. Margo was close to graduation at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in painting. Roy was enrolled at Cornell University with interests in natural resources and their management.

That wonderful time of family, friends, snow, with nary a thought about the National Science Foundation (NSF) ended Tuesday afternoon, January 2, when I returned to Washington, driving over to Portland, Maine, and flying down from there. Bunny would follow in the car later, spending some more time in Randolph with the children before they had to return to their work and their colleges.

I knew I was flying into a gathering political storm. Nixon was overwhelmingly reelected to a second term in a rough campaign. Watergate was still low-level noise with few aftershocks at the time from the break-in in June 1972 at the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Yet changes were in the wind. I knew Ed David, the White House science advisor, was planning to resign and did so on January 3, the day after I returned to Washington. Bob Seamans, a good friend from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who had been with me on that wonderful trip to Antarctica, was leaving his post as Secretary of the Air Force. But George Shultz, also a former MIT colleague, was strengthening his dual roles as secretary of the treasury and special assistant to the president. Roy Ash came from industry to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Science itself faced problems. I had asked for $675 million for fiscal year 1974 but wound up at $640 million. This was going to be unpleasant to explain to the scientific community, especially the academic research part of the community, deeply dependent on NSF to fund research, support graduate students, and, not too incidentally, help the rising stars get tenure. It would be even more unpleasant to explain the budget to congressional committees with a special responsibility for science. This budget continued the declines since 1967 in overall federal support for basic research. That decline continued in 1975—about 20 percent in real terms since 1967; in constant dollars it went from $1.7 billion in 1967 to $1.4 billion. Most fields—aside from some areas of biology, engineering, and oceanography—declined, with the sharpest cuts in the physical sciences, especially physics and chemistry.

The strongest imperative for NSF in hard times was then (and still is) to protect its core raison d’être: the support of individual researchers, principally at the universities. We favored that in our internal adjustments, reluctantly, by deferring maintenance for scientific facilities, cutting back support for instrumentation, and reducing grant sizes and stretching them out. It was painful to do but unavoidable if we were going to protect basic research.

Budgets were in some ways the least of the problems early in 1973. It became apparent that the Nixon White House was determined to get rid

of its entire science apparatus—the president’s Office of Science and Technology (OST), the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), and a resident science advisor. And it looked like the foundation was going to inherit some of these functions.

Why? An immediate reason was certainly the one always mentioned: that former or current PSAC members and consultants, ostensibly speaking as private citizens, had publicly challenged several of Nixon’s programs, most dramatically proposals for building an antimissile defense and earlier the proposal for a supersonic transport. It came to a head when in early 1969 Nixon requested funding for an antiballistic missile (ABM) program, Safeguard, a successor to the Sentinel program. Moreover, Nixon made it known that he relied for technical judgments not on the PSAC and his science advisor, Lee Dubridge, but rather on the Department of Defense.¹ In congressional hearings, a parade of former PSAC members and consultants and past science advisors criticized the administration’s ABM plans. Indeed, one senator commented that he was “unable to find a former presidential Science Advisor who advocates the deployment of the ABM program.”²

It’s simplistic, however, to believe that the ABM was why the Nixon administration tossed science out of the White House. Animosity had been building up for a long time. Up to 1975, the most successful science advisors arguably had been the two who had served Dwight Eisenhower—James Killian and his successor, George Kistiakowsky. Their accomplishments were considerable, including reassuring a country terrified by the implications of Sputnik that it had a strong and robust missile and space program. Overall:

Further to the expulsion were shifts in the structure of the White House. Killian and Kistiakowsky worked dominantly on issues of defense and national security, areas in which they were giants. And they were backed by people who had worked with them at Los Alamos, the Radiation Laboratory, and other places where science established its centrality to U.S. security. The PSAC was composed of physical scientists who knew each other well through their shared experiences during and after World War II. And, not least, the science advisor and PSAC were virtually the only forces on national security in the White House. That changed sharply with the arrival of the Kennedy administration when McGeorge Bundy substantially enlarged the National Security Council’s staff. That organizational change was mirrored by an enormous broadening of the agenda for a science and technology advisor, to encompass environmental, food, and in time energy concerns. The upshot was that national security issues on which the science advisors and PSAC had built their reputations moved to the National Security Council, while the agenda for a White House science apparatus became more diffuse, less susceptible to hard analyses and decisions (e.g., the Eisenhower-era decision on whether to emphasize solid rocket boosters) and more dominated by “softer” issues where analyses were increasingly perfused by the “on the other hand” syndrome and decisions had even wider economic and political implications (e.g., automotive fuel economy and emission standards). At the same time, the growth of the national security apparatus in the White House was soon joined by other agencies in the White House, each claimants on a piece of the nominal agenda for the science advisor: the National Aeronautics and Space Council, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the Federal Energy Office. These accretions collectively diluted the influence and resources of the White House science office. Science advisors responded to these changes. Jerome Wiesner⁴ faced the need for more staff by creating the OST. The funding had to be provided by the Congress, which of course meant congressional oversight. That chimerical structure—one office, that of science advisor not subject to congressional inquiry, and the other, the OST, subject—sometimes caused confusion, but it worked and produced successes. However disenchantment grew as the Vietnam War continued, and the politicos in the White House—not least, Lyndon Johnson—

began to lose confidence in the White House science structure. Eviction of science from the White House came in the fall of 1972 when the PSAC learned it was history at what turned out to be its last meeting, where the topic was to be how PSAC could improve its relations with the president. I arrived late to the meeting but in time to see the PSAC members leaving. “We’ve been fired,” Luis Alvarez blurted as he erupted out of their last meeting.⁵

The full dénouement came when George Shultz, now secretary of the treasury and also a special assistant to the president for economic affairs, asked me to come to his office in the Treasury Building on Friday, January 12, 1973, at 9:30 a.m. Shultz told me that the White House Office of Science and Technology would be abolished and many of its functions transferred to NSF. He asked me to meet with Roy Ash, director of OMB, and we made a lunch date for that Saturday, the 13th. Shultz and Ash questioned me at lunch about what was on the plate for the White House science office, and I responded in part that they ought to pick up Ed David’s considerable success in setting up science and technology exchanges with the Soviet Union. They certainly agreed to that because détente with the Soviets was something the Nixon administration wanted very badly. But when I said that we still needed something like the PSAC that had just been disbanded, they said that was not in the cards.

They also told me not to discuss it with the National Science Board, but I did talk about it with my deputy, Ray Bisplinghoff, the next day, Sunday. On Monday I met with David Beckler of the OST.⁶ The National Science Board was coincidentally meeting that week, and I invited

George Shultz to meet with the board and describe the proposed reorganization. The board was for the most part enthusiastic about the proposal, some reminiscing that this was supposed to have been the role of the board when it started. It was a return, at least on paper, to the role that Vannevar Bush had envisioned for the NSF, of guidance over research programs across the government.

I began to think of myself stuck in the middle of a large snowball rolling downhill out of control with arms and legs sticking out. Nixon was sworn in for his second term on Saturday, January 20. The next day I went to a White House worship service, feeling much in need of divine inspiration. Realism intruded that day as I was briefed by Hugh Loweth of the OMB not just on the NSF budget but also the full panoply of federal research and development budgets. Friday, January 26, 24 days after Shultz broke the news to me that I had a second job, I told the senior officials of the National Science Foundation. I briefed the press the next day, both on the NSF budget and the science and technology budgets across the government.

And that week, on January 26, Nixon publicly announced what was coming down, in his Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1973. For good measure, it abolished not only the OST, transferring its functions to the NSF, but also the Office of Emergency Preparedness and the National Aeronautics and Space Council.⁷ Reactions were mixed. Congress had 60 days to react to the plan but didn’t; I was close to shock that Congress swallowed the reorganization with little comment. One congressman, after I had testified on the changes, remarked, “Well, I guess the president can organize his White House any way he wants.” It was different with the outside science communities. Quite a few were upset that the science advisor no longer had direct access to the president—although in recent years that had become a rather weak reed—but that the science advisor now had to channel his thoughts through George Shultz. Some were upset that the reorganization plan had moved OST’s responsibilities for national security and defense matters to the National Security Council and the Department of Defense. They had a point: the OST, especially under Killian and Kistiakowsky, as I’ve mentioned, had an enormous effect on military technology, not least in killing some truly bad ideas.

The administration reacted to these complaints. On July 10, 1973,

it appointed as science advisor the director of the National Science Foundation (i.e., me), made the science advisor the head of the Federal Council for Science and Technology, and asserted that the science advisor would have a direct line to the president and would in fact take on national security issues in classified areas. But that didn’t dampen the belief of many people that the NSF director suddenly had too many things to do, with the danger that neither job—running the foundation or advising the president—would be done well. How could I respond to that? After all, I couldn’t say that I could handle the added work with a simple twist of the wrist or that I’d just spend less time running the foundation. But it wasn’t all that complicated: I worked a lot harder, had many more appointments, and lots more problems on my daily agenda. One of the first things I worked hard at was organizing for the dual task, for which, reasonably enough, I set up parallel structures at the NSF, albeit without PSAC, the very name of which was anathema to the White House. I tried to entice several of the OST staff to join me at the NSF. Not much luck. Many were understandably bitter. Others thought going to the foundation from the White House was a step down. I did have one lucky break, when one of my senior people said: “Guy, you need a talented assistant to the director, with technical, organizational, and political savvy.” I heartily agreed to that, and he suggested Phil Smith. I accepted that suggestion and never regretted it.⁸ To deal explicitly with the tasks left behind by the dissolution of the White House science office, we set up within the NSF a Science and Technology Policy Office. And I persuaded Russell Drew, a naval officer then directing the London office for the Office of Naval Research, to lead it.⁹ And I had a splendid speechwriter in Stan Schneider.

I plunged in and was quickly in the thick of what was, aside from the Vietnam War, the major international preoccupation for the Nixon administration: détente with the Soviet Union—finding ways to coexist despite obvious differences and strong distrust of motives. As usual, when the United States decides to improve relations with a country, especially one that has been hostile, the first—and mostly easy—agreement is on

science and technology exchanges. Ed David had started that work in the summer of 1972, going to the Soviet Union to explore what kind of exchanges might be made. I was part of the planning group, and the next meeting with the Soviets was set for spring 1973. That was now very much on my plate. There were tensions: the Soviets were pushing for exchanges on computer science and technology. That was strongly opposed by the National Security Council and the Department of Defense for the coupled reasons that we were far ahead of the Soviets in these fields and that they were becoming very important to the military. The Soviets persisted and a small concession was made by setting up a group to discuss computer systems and their uses. This was attractive to the Soviets because with their centrally planned economy they thought computers were key to their future. Little did they know that democracy and free enterprise were better answers. We also agreed on exchanges in fields less sensitive to military and economic security: high-energy physics; intellectual property, where we had serious problems with the Soviets; and materials science. Various agencies had also moved ahead on their own; for example, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) worked for many years with the Soviets on the Apollo-Soyuz hookup program.¹⁰

We of course wanted to do a very good job on this, certainly not least because it was of great interest and importance to the White House. It was a part of the first real attempt at a “thaw” of the Cold War, and science and technology played a useful role in opening avenues of cooperation between the United States and the USSR. We were determined to be very good hosts, which meant, for example, that we would go to New York to meet the Soviet delegation at Kennedy Airport. Bunny in her diary wonderfully captured how it went:

Bunny was right: the meetings indeed went very well. You have to remember that they came in a time of tumultuous events. A year before our talks, Nixon visited China. Four months later, in May, he was the first American president to visit the Kremlin. He and the Soviet Brezhnev signed a set of agreements that included a start toward limiting nuclear weapons and in other areas, including exchanges in science and technology. As Time observed:

The Soviet delegation was led by Academician Trapeznikov,¹⁶ the director of a major laboratory on information systems and computers and number two¹⁷ in the State Commission on Science and Technology. That our talks were focused on science and technology didn’t equate to narrowness, and we dealt over several days with topics such as intellectual property, magnetohydrodynamics, energy sources and distribution, computers for large systems analysis, high-energy particle physics, materials of many kinds, and, not least, human rights, criticizing the treatment by the Soviets of specific scientists. The latter soured things a bit. The Soviets started talking faster and more excitedly and, predictably, told us in effect to butt out of “internal matters.” They clearly had the human rights script down pat, and we made no obvious progress, which was par for the course in these exchanges.

Academician Trapeznikov, Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin, and I met with Nixon, who was very upbeat and enthusiastic about the proposed exchanges. He told the Soviets that we were anxious to cooperate and all of us to “make this work.” Both the Soviet press and the U.S. press gave

our meetings a decent reception, although agreements on science and technology paled compared to some other events, such as the negotiations on nuclear weapons reductions. The next meeting was arranged for that fall, in Moscow. We arrived on Tuesday, November 27, 1973, several weeks after the momentous event of the October oil embargo, imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in response to the Yom Kippur War. We continued the discussions started in Washington in the spring, often arranging for data or expert exchanges, but the most important happening was outside those discussions. When I was scheduled to meet with President Nikolai Podgorny and my counterpart in the science exchange, the deputy prime minister for science and technology, academician Vladimir Kirillin, Spike Dubbs, the ranking officer in our embassy in the absence of the ambassador, asked if he could accompany me to help in the translations. Since I was the first presidential appointee to arrive in Moscow after the OPEC oil embargo, this was Spike’s first chance to meet with a high-ranking leader of the Soviet Union.

Trained as an engineer and president of the Soviet Union since 1965,¹⁸ Podgorny first questioned us closely and sharply about our proposed program, being very insistent that the meetings have, in a phrase I heard often, a businesslike atmosphere. But things became much more interesting when he suddenly widened the scope of the questions he was asking me, and Spike began madly scribbling notes. Podgorny moved from science and technology, to my views on how the Vietnam War was going, to the energy situation, especially the impact of the Middle East turmoil. I quickly realized that the root message through me to Nixon was that détente was primary and that the Soviets would not seek to exploit the Middle East problems nor would they embarrass us in Vietnam. Spike Dubbs spent the night summarizing the meeting, checked it out with me the following morning, and posted it to Washington. He gave me an exaggerated reputation as a skilled international negotiator in fields far from my experience and expertise except for energy. For years afterwards, as I visited embassies, they would ask if I was “the Stever who had the interview with President Podgorny.”

We moved off the heady plane of high-stakes international diplomacy back to negotiating science and technology exchanges, echoing

many of the issues that had come up the past spring in Washington, still trying to make progress on human rights and intellectual property. We also got to visit some of the Soviet science institutes, some quite good and others not. The off hours were glorious, filled with a visit to the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, the Kirov and Leningrad ballet companies, and even a visit to the rooms of Dimitri Mendeleev, who conceived the periodic table of elements, making sense of what then seemed chaotic.

And though hardly intentioned by our hosts, we learned something about why they had problems innovating. When we visited what was by their standards a quite modern electronics plant, they showed us a very high-resolution film. We asked where it had been developed, and they said, proudly, “We did it here because we needed it.” In the United States, if a researcher needed a particular kind of film, he wouldn’t create it himself but simply call someone, say, at Eastman Kodak. And Kodak would provide it, from stock or from its laboratories. Much more efficient, with the U.S. researcher bearing down on his particular task and expertise, getting the tools he needed from others who were much better at it. Not so in the Soviet laboratories. They simply didn’t share our cross communication among our science and technology laboratories. We went on to two days in Poland, with a major item the new Nikolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center under the Polish Academy of Sciences.¹⁹ The National Science Foundation was going to provide partial support, and the Poles were anxious to have us appreciate its importance.

On a later return to Moscow my interview was with Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin. His message for me to carry back was that the science exchanges needed some highly visible symbol such as a world-class hospital, built and staffed jointly by the two countries. This never came to pass. Returning from that meeting we stopped in Romania, where I had a one-on-one talk with the Dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu,²⁰ who pleaded for help in building a commercial nuclear plant. That, too, never got started in his remaining time.

It wasn’t all East-West. The U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation had started up in 1973, using funding available for cooperative programs. The funds had first been used to support the translation of Soviet science literature by Russian-speaking Israelis. Most of these were of course recent emigrants, and it kept them employed. The Israelis weren’t

all that interested and wanted us to use the funds to support joint research. With the guidance of Herman Pollack at the State Department, we set up with the Israelis an analog to the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation, a granting agency using peer reviews and the like to select among grant applications for joint projects from Israeli and American scientists. I chaired the first-year operation of the overseeing Board of Governors, with an Israeli taking the second year and then alternating. That program has done very well and in fact is still going.²¹

My work with the Soviets, the Poles, and the Israelis was only part of it. My agenda became very heavy with the gathering intensity and interest by other countries in exchanging with us, and not least getting some of our dollars. The dynamics also changed, as tools emerged for comparing the science and technology efforts in different countries. Notable was the publication by NSF early in 1973 of its first Science Indicators, which compared how different countries were doing in supporting science and technology by, for example, comparing the percentage of their gross national product invested in science and technology programs.²²

In any case, as NSF director I was up to my ears in science exchange programs and the like. It made for special moments, such as when a visiting delegation from the Soviet Academy of Sciences—about a dozen—trooped into my office right after Nixon had tossed science out of the White House and I became the science advisor. I said a few pleasant words, and their leader answered with, “So, Dr. Stever now you are czar of all of science in the United States.” I disputed that: “We don’t have anyone in this country who has that role. And, besides, we all know what happens to czars.” There was a brief pause, and then the delegation members who understood English started laughing really hard, echoed by others when I was translated.

The Eighty Sixth Congress established the National Medal of Science in 1959 as a presidential award to be given to individuals “deserving of special recognition by reason of their outstanding contributions to knowledge in the physical, biological, mathematical, or engineering sciences.”²³

Up to 20 awards were to be given in a year. It took the usual fiddling around so that the first award wasn’t given until 1961 in President Kennedy’s first term, and then, fittingly, I thought, it was given to only one person, Theodore von Kármán, the great pioneer and leader in aeronautics and astronautics.²⁴ With the disappearance of the White House science office, the awards could also have disappeared. But they had become very important to the science community, and I was determined that they would go on. And they did. In October 1973 after the expulsion of science from the White House we had medalists and a ceremony to honor them. There was a fine lunch in the diplomatic reception rooms of the State Department, and George Shultz gave the speech. I introduced him and sat down just to his right. He gave a very good talk on science and technology and the importance of these medals. Before he was through, however, one of his Secret Service agents came in, walked behind the podium and reached up and put a message in front of him. Being in a better position than anyone else, I kind of leaned over to see what the message was. It read: “Please return to White House as soon as possible. Vice President Agnew has resigned.” George didn’t miss a beat in his speech, but I noticed he hurried it up, summarizing rapidly. He then said that he unfortunately had to leave for an important meeting at the White House.²⁵

There was of course a darker shadow over the administration than Agnew’s troubles and departure: Watergate. What started with the arrest on June 17, 1972, of five men at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee was slowly but surely eviscerating Nixon’s presidency. In January two former Nixon aides, G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord, Jr., were convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping in the break-in. On April 30, Nixon’s top aides in the White House, H. R. Haldeman and John Erlichman, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst resigned, and another White House aide, John Dean, was fired. The televised Senate Watergate hearings began on May 18. On October 20, about a week after the National Medal of Science ceremony, was the “Saturday Night Massacre”: Nixon fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor for Watergate, and both the attorney general and deputy attorney general, Elliott Richardson and William D. Ruckelshaus, resigned in protest.²⁶

Thankfully, the NSF, science, and I remained untouched by this mess. But we saw some of its effects close hand. I saw President Nixon in the Blue Room in the White House just before the awards ceremony for the winners of the National Medal of Science. I used the private moment to ask if he planned to attend the summer camp at the Bohemian Grove.²⁷ His response shocked and depressed me: “I’d like to come to the Bohemian Grove, if the American people don’t shoot me first.” His mood changed, he became pensive, and gazed out the Blue Room to the gardens below. But he came back to give a splendid talk at the ceremony, with smiles and gentle kidding when some of the citations I read got too deep into technical jargon.

Watergate was the immediate and eventually lethal problem for the Nixon presidency. For the country, there was still Vietnam, but also a serious energy crisis and a faltering economy.

In 1973 our natural gas production, little more than one-quarter of our total energy consumption, had leveled off. Coal production was about one-sixth. Nuclear energy, which had become a factor in supplying energy in the mid-1960s, had grown to still only a small percentage of our total energy use.

The energy crisis was an oil crisis, either not enough oil or enough oil but too costly. Through much of the postwar period leading up to the crisis, the demand for oil exploded, in part to drive the rapid industrial expansion of the developed countries, including the United States. In 1973 almost half of the total energy consumption by the United States was petroleum, and only about half of that came from domestic sources. Since in 1973 energy consumption was increasing by about 4 percent per year with no domestic energy sources of any substantial nature that could handle that increase, we were becoming steadily more dependent on foreign supplies. We were hooked on foreign petroleum, and our dependency was growing rapidly.

At the same time, the petroleum exporters faced a 40 percent decline in the purchasing power of a barrel of crude oil. Yet by 1971 the potential power to control oil prices had shifted to the OPEC countries. The raison d’être for breaking the pincer of more demand and less profit came with the onset of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 and the support of

Israel by the West. OPEC cut production by 5 million barrels per day, resulting in a net loss of free world (i.e., non-Soviet bloc) production of 7 percent.

Clearly, the major alternative to fossil fuel energy for at least the remainder of the century was fissionable nuclear fuel. We had lots of coal, but it was a serious polluter. We had a reasonable supply of natural gas and domestic oil but not enough. We either had to stop increasing our energy consumption by using it more efficiently or using less of it or building alternative supplies such as nuclear power plants. In the FY 1973 $770 million budget for energy research and development, almost two-thirds was for nuclear.

Nuclear in principle seemed a logical way out. But efforts to build nuclear fission power plants were handicapped by a growing opposition alarmed by an uncertain safety record. The record was spotty, with some nuclear fission power plants very well run but others built, maintained, and operated poorly, handing opponents lots of ammunition. Another serious problem for nuclear power was our failure to come to terms with long-term nuclear waste management. The disposal of nuclear waste has haunted the nuclear energy program continuously and at no time has the country put enough effort into solving it.

Although coal was one of our most abundant sources of energy, the emerging environmental and mining health and safety constraints had greatly limited its use. Improving methods of developing and utilizing coal in harmony with environmental and social objectives became a national priority. So the program in coal was aimed at coal gasification to produce synthetic gas from coal, coal liquefaction to convert coal into liquid fuel for transportation uses, and technologies to remove sulfur compounds both before and after combustion. Research on oil shale conversion and demonstration programs carried out with companies were also part of the strategy. Then as now this potential resource awaits a breakthrough technological process that makes it cost competitive.

The National Science Foundation had been involved in energy issues for some time before I became director in 1972. In addition to sponsoring research and development on fossils fuel technologies, it pursued what have come to be called alternative energy technologies: solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower. Taking parts of these existing programs in Au-

gust 1973, I created the NSF Office of Energy Research and Development Policy, responsible for giving advice on energy research and development to the director in his role as science advisor to the president.²⁸ Using especially the work done through the RANN (Research Applied to National Needs), we constructed scenarios using a spectrum of assumptions on energy demand and supply. We also felt that it was important in our long-range energy research priorities to start dealing with U.S. energy supply and demand as a complete system, not least because changes in any one part of it quickly spread and ramified throughout the whole system. We needed to look at the total energy system to gauge the impacts of changes in energy production, use, and conservation. We needed to see how the system could be “gamed” to minimize the impact on health, safety, and environment. On the last item, we looked at the consequences of such key issues as the control of emissions from fossil fuel combustion—in stack gases, automobile exhaust, and many other sources; new coal mining techniques leading to improved health and safety conditions in the underground operations; intensified research on nuclear safety problems, including processing, transportation, storage, and disposal of radioactive wastes; and techniques for restoration of land destroyed by strip mining and the like.

We also wanted to begin quantifying the social cost of various energy strategies (e.g., the genetic and health costs of exposure to low-level radioactivity). And we wanted to develop techniques for assessing and defensibly comparing the risks in different energy strategies and options. That was a big menu of complicated matters. Yet it was very important for us to start looking at them in a systematic and holistic way. And that we did. That’s not to say we solved them; we didn’t. But we got a good start. These studies in time wove their way into U.S. energy policies and regulation. For example, the Federal Power Commission revised its usual ways of predicting energy demand by a more or less straight-line extrapolation to include conservation scenarios. More widely, the central idea of looking at energy in the United States as a complete system has endured and is now considered obvious. It wasn’t obvious in 1973.

The year 1973 was also when environmental issues forced themselves

into presidential policies. One of the first things I did as science advisor was to pressure OMB to release an important report on chemicals and health done by the late Office of Science and Technology. The White House worried that the data on the environmental costs of technologies described in the report might further wound an economy already stumbling. Still, we did get the report out. Reporters at the press conference were a bit startled, however, when John Tukey²⁹ of Princeton University, chair of the report panel, told them that “although there are many problems of health and environment due to the many, many chemicals that are being conceived at all times, the problem that society had with almost all of those were minor compared with the two great ones which they hadn’t yet been able to harness, namely alcohol and nicotine.” ³⁰

I was deep into energy issues in the summer of 1973, digging harder into being science advisor and running NSF, including getting its FY 1975 budget into shape. Arrangements for the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation were progressing; we’d had our first meeting with the Soviets on science and technology exchanges; plans for the fall meeting were moving along; and the new energy office in NSF to help me in my role as science advisor was in place.

It was a hectic summer, but we still managed an extended stay at our summer home in Randolph, New Hampshire, although my travel continued to be very heavy. I gave many talks with many purposes, not least trying to assure the academic science community understandably distressed by a research budget that had declined significantly in real terms since 1967. In a talk at a place quite familiar to me from my previous life, the Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, I did acknowledge that “in general science faces tight times in the days ahead, but the picture is not as black as many of us make it. The basic reasons for the pressure are the administration’s desire to work with a realistic ‘full employment budget’ without increasing the national debt or raising taxes; the need to allocate resources to meet first priority national programs based on urgent economic, social, and environmental demands; and a public attitude that is less sympathetic to the needs of science than to the need to solve our most pressing problems soon.” I also tried to assure this audience of friendly skeptics that even though I had two fulltime jobs, that the foundation was in good shape and that my role as

science advisor was a real one, that it had both substance and impact in the White House.³¹

NSF was indeed running well. The budget was in good shape, although we could always have used more. We innovated in, for example, creating a grants program for science and technology museums; reorganized the facilities programs to align them with their disciplinary “homes” within the foundation; and created a new directorate for biological, behavioral, and social sciences, appointing Eloise Clark as its first director. Our twenty-fifth anniversary arrived, and we celebrated in the usual ways with a convocation run by the National Academy of Sciences and in at least one exceptional way: by creating the Alan T. Waterman Award, after the foundation’s first director, “to recognize an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering supported by the National Science Foundation.”³² Not least, the NSF administration was reorganized, and in particular I reversed the previous introduction of professional administrators from other agencies such as NASA in favor of restoring control to true science administrators (i.e., who understood the science for which they were responsible). When Ray Bisplinghoff resigned as deputy director to take a university presidency, I chose Dick Atkinson, a “hard” social scientist from Stanford University with excellent results.

I think I have earned a reputation as a nice guy, always willing to help where I can. But that can get me into trouble. During the summer of 1973 I was in Aspen, Colorado, to give a speech, but this one had a special pleasure to it: I had been asked to go fly-fishing on the Roaring Fork of the Colorado River. However, just before I was to leave for a day of fishing, I was asked by a TV station in Denver for an interview on the energy crisis and on science and technology more generally. I said nothing doing. But being a nice guy I didn’t stop there, and said that if they wanted to interview me on the banks of the trout stream, I’d do that. Sure enough, the next day after I had already caught six nice trout, a TV truck lumbered up a logging road toward me. There was nothing to do but do it. They put a radio pack on the back of my fishing vest, a microphone on the lapel, and told me to head into the middle of the stream to

start fishing and answer questions. So I stood in the stream, caught fish, and answered questions about the new Prudhoe oil fields in Alaska, about solar energy, and especially about coal shale of which western Colorado had many deposits. They wound up with two reels of film that became a half-hour broadcast, titled “Stever—Man of Science.” I never saw it but lots of friends did. It was one of my better payoffs for working away at energy problems.

C. P. Snow in his Strangers and Brothers has a senior official offer several rules for survival in the upper stratum of the British civil service. One rule was “Be There.”³³ In late 1973 the science advisor was of course not “there.” Not in the White House, not in a fancy office in the Old Executive Office Building. But I felt in 1973, and certainly do in hindsight, that it was a good thing science was “not there” in the White House. I’m not sure that it would have made a difference; the budget was going to be squeezed hard wherever I sat, and I certainly had access to the budget people, including senior OMB officials. I was directly involved in key issues for the Nixon administration, notably détente through my negotiations with the Soviets on U.S.-Soviet exchanges on science and technology. But I was not involved in the worsening Watergate scandal. By the end of 1973, Nixon had told the country “I’m not a crook,” and the White House blamed an 18-minute gap in an Oval Office tape on a “sinister force.” I told friends that it was a good thing for the science advisor and science to be “out of the White House” and even once said so publicly but was not reprimanded, even though my remarks were published in a major newspaper. As Watergate moved from what seemed at time the dirty politics by a few overzealous junior operatives into the Oval Office, many of us came to realize that a tragedy was unfolding, one that the Nixon administration would not survive. Many people, including senior science people in and out of government, began to seek out Gerald Ford, whom Nixon selected as his vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned.³⁴

I was also pressured to talk with the new vice president and did so, using as my entrée the publication of the new Science Indicators, which

reported that our investments in science and technology were at best flat if not declining, in absolute terms and relative to rising investments in other countries such as Japan and Germany. He pointed out quite rightly that the governments of Japan and Germany were not saddled with large military budgets and could focus almost exclusively on civilian investments, including science and technology. He also asked me how things were going, an opening I used to argue quite strongly that the White House needed its own capacity for science advice and also something like the president’s Science Advisory Committee. He agreed on the first point but not on restoration of PSAC. He was well aware of the political problems that led to its end.

On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon had to turn over all the tapes of conversation in the Oval Office, denying his claims of executive privilege. Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee voted the first of three articles of impeachment, this on obstruction of justice. Nixon resigned August 8. Gerald Ford was sworn in as president the next day. Four days later the new president held a reception for all top presidential appointees. As I was going through the receiving line, he said to me: “Say, I’m delighted to talk with you, Dr. Stever.” (He called me Dr. Stever not Guy until very late in his term.) He said he wanted to reestablish the White House science office but by a congressional act. That would mean in principle that the office couldn’t be summarily dismissed as Nixon had done.³⁵ From that point on, our relationships with the White House thrived. Everyone in the government was now supportive, including the OMB, because they knew the president was interested in the well-being of science.

Work on creating a new science office in the White House began almost immediately in the Congress. For me it was “sausage making” at its most graphic. (And it wasn’t until almost two years later—May 11, 1976— that President Ford signed into law a new Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President.) Sausage making started in the Senate when Senator Edward F. Kennedy introduced a bill to establish a Council on Science and Technology in the White House.

That got strong support from science society presidents who thought, as I wrote in a memo to senior Ford officials, “a White House science mechanism must be used by the president partly as a foil to excessive military domination.” I went on that “the continued absence of comment on the subject by the Administration is creating an impression that it is not interested” and, showing my frustration, vented my strong feelings that “preemptive action by the Congress would create still another mandated organization which may or may not have functional effectiveness.” And I added for good measure that, while I would continue to be the good and loyal soldier, “I am reluctant to be a public advocate, for it places me in the position of being a constant advocate for the status quo which can be viewed as completely self serving, not unlike the old Office of Science and Technology.”³⁶

I wasn’t alone. James Reston of The New York Times wrote that, while the government had at its disposal a vast amount of scientific knowledge and expertise on matters then quite important, such as energy problems, increasing world food production, and the like, that information was quite dispersed. “It is not brought together, with all its potentialities for the future, and put before the president as a vision of the possible and the basis of his policies, which is too bad, because we have a President who is listening.”³⁷ And journalists were perceptive in understanding that the role for a science advisor had changed radically from the glory days of Killian and Kistiakowsky. “The task of advising a President on science policy has shifted from a relative simple one of supporting or opposing proposals to develop and deploy defense and space hardware to a more complicated job of initiating and monitoring R&D programs in energy, transportation, and other domestic problem areas.”³⁸ The role of science and technology had since Eisenhower and his science advisors moved from responding to the Soviet threat—whether in missiles or space satellites—to issues much more central to American life. Jim Killian himself in describing a report he chaired on restoration of science advice to the White House pointed out that “a new science advisory mechanism would have to deal with a range of problems quite different from those which had confronted Eisenhower’s science advisor [i.e., Killian], and that its foundations for a new structure should not nostalgically seek to repeat the ‘good old days’ of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations when

space and national security were so high on the presidential agenda.”³⁹ And Vice President Rockefeller⁴⁰ in a “Memorandum for the president” quite correctly pointed out that “the dissolution of science advisory apparatus in the White House in 1973 was greeted with great dismay by the scientific community. Pressure is growing steadily from the scientific community leaders for action to restore some science presence to the White House.” The same memo was blunt in its assessment of what had gone wrong. “The failure of the Office of Science and Technology staff to relate to the White House policy formulating procedure made it difficult to integrate that Office’s recommendations with those of other advisory functions in the White House. . . . As the Office of Science and Technology allegiance to its constituency grew, its effectiveness in serving the president diminished.”⁴¹

Yet public recognition of the importance to the nation of science and technology was mirrored by rising criticisms, that while science and technology were public goods, they could also be misused. However unfair, many no longer thought of science as an unalloyed good. The heady days of Apollo were over. “We are,” I told a journalist in 1975, “going to be involved as never before in the economic success or failure of this country, and the rest of the world, and we are going to be taking the praise and the blame for far more than we ever bargained for, not only economically, but ethically and socially.” The same journalist also captured the spirit of the scientific community: “Many U.S. scientists feel bewildered. They know American science is at the peak of its powers. Yet they see their research support tightening, their job market dwindling. They sense public hostility to what they are doing.”⁴²

President Ford on June 9, 1975, forwarded “proposed legislation to create in the Executive Office of the president an Office of Science and Technology Policy headed by a Director who will also serve as my Science and Technology Adviser.” Many things intervened between the president’s wishes to create a new OSTP in August 1974 and its formalization two years later. At the root were fundamental political and administrative disagreements over control and power. The political part was the reluctance of the congressional branch, principally in the Senate and even more particularly by well-placed staffers, to establish a strong science and technology office in the White House, favoring a weaker structure controllable by the legislature. The administrative barriers were principally

within parts of the president’s domestic council, many of whom were holdovers from the Nixon domestic council staff. They were reluctant to in effect cede some of the council’s control to a new office replacing the office they had helped disestablish.

The domestic policy staff was the first hurdle. Valuable weeks passed between President Ford’s signaling his intent to have the science office reestablished legislatively and sending the Hill a proposal for such an office. There was internal debate about the structure and functions of the office, the size of its staff, and its budget. Finally there appeared to be a consensus on a decision memo for the president, but it did not go forward over several additional weeks. Vice President Rockefeller, as frustrated as I was by the seemingly endless discussion, took the decision memo on the science office into the Oval Office. When it came out signed, staff could only fall in line.⁴³

The relevant House committees were generally supportive. But, as I mentioned, the Senate side was another question. The Senate approved on October 11, 1974, Senator Kennedy’s bill to establish a three-person Council for Science and Technology as part of the Executive Office. The council would, among other things, annually appraise science and technology in relation to national needs, do policy studies, and through the National Academy of Sciences examine the federal organization for civilian science and technology. In contrast, the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, chaired by Olin “Tiger” Teague, a Democrat from Texas, basically accepted the president’s proposal for a full-fledged Office of Science and Technology Policy led by a single director but added several mandates: confirmation of the director by the Senate, a declaration of national policy for science, and a federal science and technology survey committee to examine within two years of enactment a survey of the totality of the federal science and technology effort—missions, goals, funding, etc. This latter provision was a compromise within the committee itself. A subset of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics led by Rep. Mike McCormack (D-Wash.) championed the establishment of a department of science and technology, which of course would have been a nonstarter with the administration as well as most in the scientific community. The survey was a way to get that group on board with the House bill.

The administration wasn’t totally happy with the House version—

we didn’t, for example, need a national declaration on science policy— but it was even less happy with what the Senate wanted to do. The gap widened in late November when, after the House had approved its version, Senator Kennedy surfaced a new bill empowering the OSTP director to determine funding levels and priorities for federal science and technology programs, with the president obligated to give his reasons for not accepting these recommendations. I and all the senior officials in the administration objected to the bill, especially to OSTP’s preempting the president by setting funding levels. Vice President Rockefeller asked Senator Kennedy to accept the “House bill intact, without further alterations in the Senate.” No dice. Senator Kennedy and his colleagues shot back with: “that there are a number of areas in which the House bill should be strengthened, and that it is in the national interest that we attempt to improve the legislation in the Senate.”⁴⁴ Happily for the sake of compromise, the Senate Committee on Space, chaired by Senator Frank Moss, a Utah Democrat, weighed in with views that paralleled the House’s version of the legislation and the administration’s position and prevailed on Senator Kennedy to modify his views.

New legislation closer to the administration’s liking passed the Senate on February 4, 1976, and, with some promoting from the president to get it done, the House and Senate conferees reconciled their differences and agreed on a final bill. On May 11, 1976, the president signed into law the bill to create the Office of Science and Technology Policy and quoted Thomas Jefferson that “knowledge is power; knowledge is safety; knowledge is happiness.” Just so.

I was somewhere between spectator and player in the serpentine route to restoring science to the White House. There was of course the National Science Foundation to run, not to mention continuing being science advisor, now for a new president. The NSF side was going well, and I think we were handling ourselves quite creditably in various special tasks, such as providing an analytical base for the nation’s energy programs, continuing to work with the Soviets on science and technology exchanges, maintaining strong contact with the science community, and represent-

ing the administration’s role in science to the Congress, to the scientific community, and to my counterparts in many countries. And I paid another visit to Antarctica to dedicate a new station at the Amundsen-Scott base at the South Pole. One downside was the departure of my deputy director, Ray Bisplinghoff. We had been colleagues at MIT and shared the NSF leadership throughout my years there. However, the pain of Ray’s loss was salved quite a bit by the arrival of Richard Atkinson as deputy director. Dick was a social scientist at Stanford University and more specifically a “hard” social scientist who used mathematics and computation heavily in his research on memory and cognition. He also applied his fundamental work to develop, for example, one of the first computer-controlled methods for instruction, which subsequently went commercial. Dick came to the NSF in 1975, and after a stint as acting director, as of October 1976 when I moved full-time to the White House, was appointed NSF director by President Carter.⁴⁵

Turning to a very able social scientist as deputy pirector turned out to have some unexpected pluses, as I was hit full-bore by the mixed views, if not downright hostility, that some people—especially in the Congress—held of the social sciences. That had a history, of course. Vannevar Bush was dismissive, and didn’t leave room for them in his postwar plans for “The Endless Frontier.” The original enabling legislation for NSF didn’t mention the social sciences, only referring vaguely to “other sciences” besides chemistry, mathematics, etc.⁴⁶ That they grew within the foundation was due largely to my predecessor, William McElroy, who introduced the perspectives of the social sciences as the agency turned more of its resources toward the applied sciences, especially in its RANN program. It was also due to the considerable effort in the 1960s by the chair of the House Science and Aeronautics Committee, Emilio Q. Daddario (D-Conn.). I was part of an advisory group to the committee and strongly supported Representative Daddario, which earned me barbs from my fellow advisors, who said, in effect, that “the social sciences aren’t really sciences at all, and, worse, they’ll take money away from the physical and biological sciences which are really important.”

Ironically the Vietnam War probably helped the social sciences. “The reaction within the universities against the Vietnam War has been accompanied by an increase of interest—especially among younger scien-

tists—in dedicating their research to social policies that they consider liberal and humane. . . . The main result of this has been to give new emphasis and status to the social sciences.”⁴⁷ But the gain was two-edged, for the implicit linkage of social action and concern with the social sciences also aroused political hostilities. It aroused suspicion that the social sciences were being used to drive a political agenda; that value judgments and beliefs were being promoted under the cover of science; that federal funds in the form of grants and contracts were paying for an attack on fundamental values. The social sciences were attacked as drivers for social change, using school “reform” as a stalking horse to turn children against the beliefs and values of their parents. And these weren’t simply teacup disputes. There had been violence in some of the more bitter disputes, as in West Virginia where parents verbally attacked the “godless” and “dirty books” their children were studying in the schools and physically attacked local defenders of curricula using these books.⁴⁸ When those beliefs were held by the political powerful, the upshot was trouble. A very direct example was that the splendid budget the foundation got for FY 1975— $768 million, $100 million more than the previous budget—didn’t apply to the social sciences, whose budget was held flat. In somewhat the same vein, the budget for science education was cut.⁴⁹

Doris McCarn was my secretary at the foundation, having done the same job for every NSF director.⁵⁰ She was a very wise woman, never more than when she observed that “every Director has to have one scandal in his directorship.” My scandal arrived abruptly in 1975. We had been hearing some criticism from the press and some in the science communities about a foundation science education curriculum study program for fifth and sixth graders called MACOS—Man: A Course of Study.

Some background. Science education at NSF was embedded in its organic act of 1950, which empowered the new agency “to initiate and support basic scientific research programs to strengthen scientific research potential and science education at all levels.” True to that, through much of the foundation’s history, research has accounted for about half of its budget and science education about a quarter.⁵¹ By 1975 the science education programs at NSF had evolved considerably. Originally, the programs focused on undergraduate and graduate education. With Sput-

nik the program reached downward, into science education at precollege levels. And with the growth of the foundation’s budget, Congress pushed science education for “institution building”: helping smaller colleges and universities strengthen their undergraduate science programs and bootstrapping science capability in second-tier graduate schools. Tensions between the administration and the Congress built up toward the end of the 1960s. The administration, arguing that scientific and engineering manpower was sufficient for national needs, terminated institution building in 1972 and cut funding for direct support of graduate and undergraduate education, believing that the support could more effectively come if indirectly through research grants and contracts. Congress fought those changes, and the administration’s 1972 impoundment of science education funds didn’t help. Strong differences on strategies intensified the tensions. For example, should the science education programs at the foundation be experimental, fostering new ideas until they either wither or become self-sustaining? Or should they simply be a means for moving public funds into education programs, using standard grant practice? To what extent should the foundation—indeed, the federal government—market the educational materials developed with its support? Where is the line between a federal role in science education and an intrusion into values and social beliefs?⁵²

This strong stew boiled over with MACOS. The foundation had since the late 1950s as part of its mandate supported some 53 precollege curricula projects spanning almost all the sciences within its purview.⁵³ And it had done so without much controversy, aside from some criticism of evolution theory taught as part of a foundation-supported program, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study. MACOS was different.⁵⁴ Developed between 1963 and 1970, MACOS was a one-year course intended to help children “think about the nature of human beings and what is unique about being human.”⁵⁵ To probe these questions, the course included the life cycle of the salmon, the habits of herring gulls, the group behavior of baboons, and the daily life of the Netsilik Eskimos. It was the last part that got us trouble. The Netsilik live in the Pelly Bay region of the Canadian Arctic, with the nearest town being Taloyoak, the most northernly settlement on the Canadian mainland. The program showed traditional Eskimo life before the European acculturation. The

Netsilik Eskimos had long lived apart from other people and had depended entirely on the land and their own ingenuity to sustain life through the rigors of the Arctic year. Examining the Netsilik offered insight to the unique qualities shared by all human beings no matter how harsh their lives, and the lives of the Netsilik are indeed harsh.

MACOS had been extremely successful, adopted since its introduction in 1970 by over 1,700 schools. The feedback had been by and large very positive. Moreover, schools and their teachers had a choice of which modules in the series to show. As I looked into the course, I found many grade school teachers who thought it was a great course. And I also learned that teachers had wide latitude to decide what they showed their kids and what they didn’t.

When the rumblings about MACOS started, I asked for a briefing, which turned out to be poor because it made MACOS content seem palatable. I then learned that one feature of family life it showed was that anyone who was too old and infirm for the vigorous life of these people was put on an ice floe and sent out to sea. That was not very pleasant, especially teaching it to fifth and sixth graders. But there was worse. For example, if the wife of a hunter was ill and couldn’t go on a hunt with her husband, he borrowed someone else’s wife. And, finally, the films showed vivid hunting scenes in which the hunters killed seals as they came up to their breathing holes in the ice. Butchering the seal on white ice was a pretty colorful scene for young people in grade school, never mind other scenes such as popping the eyeballs of the seal out to eat as a delicacy, eating the still warm liver on the ice, and drinking the blood. Then there were scenes of children stoning a snared gull to death.

I was told that in some classes where this was shown boys and girls fainted. I have no doubt that the film and all that went with it were faithful to the reality of life of the Netsilik and as such a major contribution to showing with care the life of a culture quite different from ours. At the same time, while the science was right, the politics was not. MACOS was bound to cause trouble at a time of rising suspicion of the social sciences. There were unbelievable misjudgments on what should be given to grade school students.

Things got worse, much worse, when an internal investigation by NSF turned up serious irregularities in approving the grant for MACOS. And even more lethally the irregularities subverted the foundation’s peer review system. It struck at the heart of how NSF gained and kept high standards in its funding decisions. Unlike the National Institutes of Health, NSF gave its programs officers significant latitude in selecting reviewers, vetting and summarizing their comments, and making a final judgment. The MACOS grant—in this case, an extension of an earlier grant—had gone through peer review and also, because of the size of the grant, required approval by the National Science Board. Eleven reviewers had vetted the grant proposal and, according to the program officer, all 11 supported it. Not quite: 8 reviewers supported it, 1 was neutral, and 2 were negative. I told the program officer that it seemed she had lied. And she said, in effect, “oh, yes, because my supervisors told me that we had to have a perfect case or the grant would not be approved.” I was shocked but even more so when we put her up for disciplinary action and a Civil Service Commission officer in effect dismissed the charge of lying with “civil servants lie all the time” and that the real and only question was whether she made any money by lying. I thought there was a higher standard for civil service.

It got worse. All this was leaked to certain members of Congress. At first I was puzzled how the Congress learned that one of our own program officers had violated our peer review principles. But then I found out. One day as I was leaving the foundation building at 1800 G Street, a car belonging to one of our leading congressional critics, Representative John B. Conlan (R-Ariz.), stopped at the entrance and out popped one of our senior staff members. A few days later, as I was walking early in the morning down the corridor to my office, the same fellow jumped out from a nearby office. He was excited and a bit incoherent: “Dr. Stever, do you know what they’re doing out there? All the things they’re doing?” I could only respond that we had put together a good internal review committee⁵⁶ and hoped to learn more. This fellow, I found, was very conservative, and I imagine his friends and family had put great pressure on him to do something about the “awful things” the foundation was

doing. I never took any action against him. To have done so would have only increased the problems in the NSF and the Congress.

Next up was testimony on NSF’s FY 1976 budget, which meant private visits with key people in the Congress. This included Tiger Teague, chair of the House Science and Technology Committee; the ranking member, Charles Mosher (R-Ohio); and James W. Symington, Jr. (D-Mo.), who chaired the subcommittee dealing directly with NSF. Those private conversations made it clear to me that they were very concerned about what they were hearing on MACOS and the larger issue of the foundation’s peer review system.

I was flabbergasted when I sat down to testify before Representative Teague’s Committee on Science and Technology to present our new annual budget proposal. Every member’s seat was filled. Most of the time the seats are empty, with maybe one or two members in attendance, often on a revolving basis, as one member makes a cameo appearance and another departs for yet another hearing. I knew of course why the members were there and why the audience was packed. I couldn’t avoid what they wanted to talk about, nor did I want to.

So I began by simply saying that before I started my formal testimony on the foundation’s budget for the next fiscal year “I would like to take a few minutes to discuss a very serious problem.” I then briefly discussed our recent problems with MACOS and the questions on peer review and that I had put together an internal committee to look at what happened and what lessons and correctives were to be drawn from it.

I could almost hear an audible sigh of relief. I wasn’t ducking, and the issue was on the table. I got lots of questions, some detailed—on peer review, on MACOS, on the role of the social sciences in the foundation. I did not comment on the egregious behavior of the program officer who handled the MACOS grant but did discuss pretty much everything else during the question period.

A rather strange thing happened a few days later when I testified before the Subcommittee on NSF Appropriations, chaired by Edward P. Boland (D-Mass.).⁵⁷ A congressman, not a member of the committee, after requesting permission to quiz me asked, “Any of your staff at the National Science Foundation told you [of] things going on in the Education Directorate that weren’t right?” I instantly remembered the fellow

who had caught me alone in the hall with charges of nasty doings in the Education Directorate. So my answer to the Congressman’s trap was: “Of course. I recall meeting in the hall a staff member who was very seriously concerned, and I told him that I was going to tell the Committee I had appointed to look into this.” I went on that one of our senior secretaries at the foundation had told me her daughter had seen MACOS films in school, and that she couldn’t stand them. I also said that we have about 1,000 staff members at the foundation, that they are hardly lock step in their beliefs, and that they certainly don’t universally agree with the decisions made by program officers, the National Science Board, or by me. But, I added, we do our best to listen to all points of view before a decision is made. Chairman Boland then interrupted: “I think we’ve had enough along this line, we’ve had frank and very open answers, and that we had better turn back to the other material”—that is, our appropriations for the next fiscal year.

That was welcome, but the Congress, or some of its members, weren’t finished with me. Two congressmen, John Conlan (R-Ariz.) and Robert Bauman (R-Md.), led the attacks. It came to a head when the foundation’s FY 1976 appropriation of $755 million came before the entire House. In the debate, Representative Conlan, a very articulate gentleman, described MACOS as “a course for 10-year olds mainly about the Netsilik Eskimo subculture of Canada Pelly Bay Region. Student materials have repeated references to stories about Netsilik cannibalism, adultery, bestiality, female infanticide, incest, wife-swapping, killing old people, and other shocking condoned practices. . . . It is absolutely unacceptable for NSF to continue using taxpayers’ money for aggressive promotion and marketing activities for their own preferred social studies courses, undercutting competition from regular textbook publishing houses.”⁵⁸ The House debate on MACOS was acrimonious, the upshot of which was that the House rejected, 215 to 196, a Conlan amendment to provide for congressional review of completed NSF curriculum projects but approved a Bauman amendment that the Congress would review all NSF research proposals! Thankfully, the amendment didn’t survive House-Senate conference, but we were hardly out of the woods. Much of the spring and summer of 1975 dealt with the foundation’s peer review system. There were multiple inquiries—by the congressional General Accounting Of

fice, through hearings before the Symington Committee; by a “science curriculum implementation review group,” appointed by Representative Teague; and, of course by our own internal review committee. The upshot of all this was to tighten our procedures—for selecting curriculum developers and peer reviewers, for monitoring reporting of peer review results, and the like. While at times quite painful, I believe the episode strengthened the foundation. Another silver lining was that we learned that when the chips were down the foundation, a small agency in the world of political Washington that had quite firmly avoided lobbying its own interests, had powerful friends in the Congress. Congressmen Teague, Mosher, and Symington, Senator Kennedy, and others gave us a vivid demonstration of “tough love”—arranging for unsparing examinations of the foundation’s procedures but when mostly positive verdicts came in strongly supporting us against attacks by their colleagues.⁵⁹

Those positive verdicts were reflected in substantial increases proposed for the foundation’s FY 1977 budget, and I was especially pleased that a new directorate for biology and the behavioral sciences that I had created got strong budget support from the Congress. The NSF wound up with a $792 million budget, $180 million more than its FY 1973 budget, the first one I defended before the Congress.⁶⁰

In the White House Rose Garden on a lovely May day, President Ford signed into law the the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act of 1976. Science was back in the White House. The new office needed a new director who would also be the president’s science advisor; appointment of the OSTP director required senatorial approval while that of science advisor did not; the director was subject to congressional oversight; the adviser was not and could in principle claim executive privilege. The peculiarity in all this was that one person had both jobs.

Who would that person be? I was not anxious for the position, having enough to do and having already determined that, with the end of President’s Ford term, I would leave government, no matter who won the election. That meant that my tenure if I were to become OSTP director and science advisor would be short indeed. And I had been preparing myself for a bit easier load until the end of this presidential term. No deal. A few days later after the signing, Vice President Rockefeller asked

me to come see him, to discuss possible candidates. A little while later a White House personnel officer called to ask if I would be interested.

I was hardly a safe choice. President Ford was the obvious Republican candidate for the 1976 presidential election.⁶¹ But the extreme right wing of the Republican Party not only didn’t care for President Ford, it didn’t care for the National Science Foundation or for me. It got pretty vicious and, if one had a sense of the macabre, sometimes funny. One day, Pat Nicely, of the foundation’s congressional liaison office, came in wearing a big grin and carrying a newsletter. It turned out to be a rightwing publication and on the front page was my picture, along with that of two senators, Jacob Javits, a Republican liberal from New York, and Hubert Humphrey, Democrat from Minnesota. The headline explained that “these three men are one of the greatest threats to America.” I did then (and still do) consider it a great honor to be included with these two fine people and distinguished public servants.

Still, the vicious attacks were hard. And I faced for much of 1975 and 1976 attacks on me and much testifying on our social programs, on our peer review systems, on MACOS, and our science education programs. It was beginning to get me down rather badly. It was easy for me to decide that I was really going to leave government at the 1976. I even looked at the family exchequer, realizing that we had in fact seriously dropped off in saving for the education of our children because the pay wasn’t very good at that time in government; it was a lot worse than it is today. I wanted to get back and do other things, get away from government service.

An attack on me by four Republican senators⁶² didn’t help my mood, but the response did. In a letter hand delivered to President Ford on June 9, 1976, they wrote that:

Whew. Quite a letter, and in its attacks on Congressman Symington and Senator Kennedy quite outside how members of Congress treat each other. The reaction was swift and blunt. Representative Teague in a letter to the senators called their comments “inaccurate,” “an affront,” and “untrue.” Fellow Republican Charles Mosher, ranking member of the House Science and Technology Committee, regretted that the four senators had “accepted very inadequate, selective, and distorted information as the basis for the judgments you expressed.” And he added that “I hate to see the president and Dr. Stever publicly harassed by allegations that I am convinced are blown far out of proportion to the realities of the situation.” Senator Kennedy also weighed in with language as blunt as theirs, citing “unsubstantiated and unfounded allegations” in their letter, “which can only be viewed as an irresponsible attempt to undermine the bipartisan effort to restore this urgently needed function to the White House.” And he twisted the knife a bit with: “Also welcome would be your interest, in a legislative forum, in the six-tenths of one percent of the NSF budget devoted to curriculum programs [i.e., MACOS and the like] and in the remaining 99.4% of the NSF budget.” But maybe the strongest rebuttal was the letter from Elmer Staats, the comptroller general, of the General Accounting Office, stating that the letter was simply wrong in how it characterized the GAO’s findings.⁶³

The upshot of this senatorial melee, which of course found its way into the press, was that I was confirmed, not unanimously as I had been for the NSF job, but by a very lopsided margin: 78 to 6, with 16 absten-

tions. But it came after some nine weeks of delay. Given the controversy, I had suggested that my appointment be reconsidered, and the president in effect put it on hold a while until it was clear that he had enough delegates to win the Republican nomination against Ronald Reagan.

Vice President Rockefeller swore me in on August 12, 1976, after a generous speech by the president, affirming that science was back in the White House. And despite the fact that by my own choice I would have a very short tenure—leaving office no later than January 20, 1977—I set myself an ambitious agenda for this short time.

Even before the act of 1976, in late 1974 and early 1975, Vice President Rockefeller and I determined that we needed to make a study of the kinds of issues such a new office as was being bandied about in the discussions of the new legislation should do. So President Ford, in early 1975, issued a directive that we should set up something to look at how the office might conduct its affairs if it were established. This led immediately to the proposal for two committees, which were established, one led by Bill Baker of the Bell Telephone Laboratories and the other by Simon Ramo of TRW. One of these committees looked at the important future scientific and technological advances broadly and the other at relating scientific and technological advances to the health and strength of the economy. These committees were quite active in 1975 and into 1976. An early report was ready for me when I assumed full-time responsibility for the White House office.

Then the new President’s Commission on Science and Technology was chosen, with Si Ramo as chairman and Bill Baker as vice chairman. We went to work on a broad range of issues, including scientific and technical information and the systems for handling it government-wide; improved technology assessment in the executive branch of the federal government; improved methods for effective technology innovation, transfer, and use; stimulating more effective federal-state and federal-industry liaison and cooperation in science and technology, including the formation of federal-state mechanisms for the mutual pursuit of this goal; reduction and simplification of federal regulations and administrative practices and procedures; strengthening the nation’s academic institutions’ capabilities for research and education in science and technology; maintenance of adequate scientific and technological manpower in quality

and quantity; technology for local and individual needs to consider the technological needs of communities and individuals; and long-range planning for future national problems.⁶⁴ The committee had a short tenure because all of its recommendations were accepted in March 1977, less than a fourth of the time it was supposed to be in business. A short but effective life.

Additional items that I worked on included new directions for energy supply and demand, policy for exploiting the oceans, and means for safe disposal of radioactive wastes. Also in the energy field I became a member of an economic council to help the Saudi Arabian Kingdom in its economic development. This, together with a military council to help the Saudis develop their military strengths, was devised to get the most powerful member of OPEC on our side. I met several top Saudi Arabian civilian and military leaders when Prince Faud led their teams to Washington. I elected to stay away from national security matters, in part because I thought they were in capable hands, in part because I thought that the science advisor should deal with issues not clearly “owned” by one agency, and in part because I didn’t want to spend my few months in office on bureaucratic struggles with 800-pound gorillas such as the Department of Defense.

And so it came to pass that I left the National Science Foundation in October 1976 with a tear in my eye. I had enjoyed my time there very much. We had many battles, losing some, winning many more, substantially raising our budget, and becoming a stronger agency. I was fortunate in having two very good people from the foundation join me, Philip Smith and Russell Drew. And I was also able to persuade two of the nation’s leading scientists to join me: Donald Kennedy⁶⁵ of Stanford University to deal with biological issues and William Nierenberg, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, for the physical sciences, especially geology, which was very prominent in those days. Election Day finally came, and Jimmy Carter narrowly defeated President Ford.⁶⁶ The day after the election at the senior staff meeting we were instructed to cooperate fully with the incoming administration, including summarizing all we were doing so the new people could pick up what they wanted without too much trouble.

My office dutifully did as it was told. The first visitor from the Carter

transition team was a young woman, who breezed in and announced that she was in charge of transition for, among other things, the Office of Science and Technology Policy. No talk about anything substantive. Next was a young election worker from Alabama or Georgia, who announced he was in charge of OSTP transition and could I tell him what OSTP was and did. I soon realized that he was illiterate in science and technology. He did ask me for the name of a Democrat who would know all about this, and, after catching myself, I suggested that he get in touch with Jerome Wiesner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who of course had been President Kennedy’s science advisor. He then asked me who Wiesner was and where. I knew then something had to be done and said so to the Carter transition team. Fortunately, a few weeks later a perfectly capable fellow arrived, and things went much more smoothly.

We had a very nice Christmas party, a white tie ball for the White House staff. Then at the end, early on January 20, 1977, we went to the White House for a breakfast reception with President Ford, Vice President Rockefeller, and other leaders of the administration. It was a moving occasion. President Ford had to leave to dress for the swearing-in of his successor. I walked back to my office with Alan Greenspan, the president’s economic advisor, who observed, “I’ve lost some in my life and won some. It’s more fun winning.” I sat in my empty office until shortly before noon, walked out of the office, handed in my badge, and left the building. It was over.