Changing White House Priorities

As the second and third volumes of Research: A National Resource neared completion, the White House became preoccupied with the war in Europe. In June 1940, ve days after the fall of France, President Roo-sevelt accepted Vannevar Bush's proposal for a special relationship between government and those scientic disciplines that could help with the rapid advancement and deployment of new military technologies.

22Report of the Science Advisory Board: July 31, 1933 to September 1, 1934, op. cit., 13.

Figure 5.2: Karl Compton (right) and Vannevar Bush. Courtesy of MIT Historical Collection.

In May 1940, Bush had presented a memorandum outlining his thoughts about the organization of science for war through a National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Bush's memorandum argued, There appears to be a distinct need for a body to correlate governmental and civil fundamental research in elds of military importance outside of aeronautics. . . It should supplement, and not replace, activities of the military services themselves, and it should exist primarily to aid these services and hence aid in national defense. In its organization it should closely parallel the form which has been successfully employed in the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.²³

The memo's reference to NACA provides an essential clue to Bush's thinking. That body was an advisory committee, comprised of both non-government and government specialists and largely independent of cabinet-level bureaus, that operated its own facilities and could enter into research contracts with private institutions.

On June 27, the president, by means of an executive order, created the NDRC, naming Bush as its chairman. It consisted of four non-government members (Bush; James B. Conant, President of Harvard; Karl Compton; and Frank Jewett, President of the National Academy of Sciences) and four statutory government members. A year later, on June 28, the president issued a second executive order expanding Bush's authority by naming him chairman of a newly created Oce of Scientic Research and Development (OSRD). The OSRD was comprised of the NDRC (with Conant as its chairman) and a Medical Research Council, with the scope of the OSRD expanded to encompass engineering development as well as scientic research,²⁴and its chairman given direct access to the president. Roosevelt's executive order establishing the new oce stated that it serve as a center for mobilization of the scientic personnel and resources of the Nation in order to assure maximum utilization of such personnel and resources in developing and applying the results of scientic research to defense purposes . . . [and] to coordinate, aid, where desirable, supplement the experimental and other scientic and medical research activities relating to national defense carried on by the Departments of War and Navy and other departments and agencies of the Federal Government.²⁵

The creation of OSRD shifted the focus of federal science policy away from the social scientists' emphasis on science for governance and that of the natural scientists on science for the public good to a third rationale for science policy: science for national defense.

Because of the government's obvious need for substantial scientic assistance for World War II, Bush was able to insist that science should be mobilized around existing institutions that would preserve a large measure of their autonomy. Rather than electing to become a scientic czar who would centralize and control all aspects of the wartime research eort, he assumed the roles of buer and arbiter between science and the technical bureaus of government, particularly within the military. Because of his special relationship with Roosevelt, Bush was able to beat back attempts by Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to put the science eort in their departments.

Bush and his colleagues also convinced the president (if not all the old-line scientic bureaus) that science could best serve wartime emergency needs if scientists remained civilians and worked in their own university and industrial laboratories except in special cases, such as the Manhattan Project. Perhaps the best example was the Radiation Laboratory (or Rad Lab) at MIT, a classied facility where scientists throughout the country were recruited to conduct research and engineering development on radar systems.

Bush insisted on focusing attention on a relatively narrow range of problems where scientic research could make an appreciable impact during the limited duration of the war. He also insisted that he report directly to the president, thus insulating his system from the federal bureaucracy.

The pre-war institutional relations between the federal government and non-governmental scientic insti-tutions were left intact by the way in which science was mobilized during World War II, and the experiences of the scientists and engineers involved in Bush's wartime system provided the basis for their perspectives on what science policy should be in the aftermath of that conict. Guided in part by Bush himself, the U.S.

scientic community put forth, and managed to have the president and the Congress accept, proposals that were far stronger than those of the ill-fated Compton Board. Ever since, the notion that science deserves

23A. Hunter Dupree, in Gerald Holton (ed.), The Great Insturation of 1940: The Organization of Scientic Research for War (New York: Norton), 450

24The rst prominent coupling of research with development (R&D), which by now has become commonplace, seems to have been made at the time the OSRD was created.

25Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, op. cit., 371.

direct access to the president, largely bypassing the federal bureaucracy, has remained central to the vision of science for the public good.

Chapter 6

Science and Security: National Defense