In February 1952, I received a “Dear Jim” letter from President Truman. He was seriously concerned about a sequence of tragic civilian aircraft accidents in the New York-Northeastern New Jersey metropolitan area. A series of three crashes had occurred at Elizabeth, New Jersey, and forced the closing of the Newark, New Jersey, airport early that year. The fact that these mishaps were confined, by coincidence, to a single community accentuated the fears of many Americans that aircraft represented a serious hazard to residential areas. These accidents also served to increase public awareness that airports were a nuisance because of aircraft noise.
President Truman decided to set up a three-man, temporary President’s Airport Commission and asked me to serve as chairman. Charles F. Horne, head of the Civil Aeronautics Administration, and Jerome C. Hunsaker, head of MIT’s aeronautical engineering department, were the other two members.
President Truman’s letter pointed out that the location of many of our major airports had been determined many years before, when the aviation industry was new and operations were relatively limited. After the war, both civil and military air traffic grew rapidly and city boundaries were continuously spreading out toward these airports.
Meanwhile, there had been great progress in the art of flying and the development of supporting facilities, and striking advances had been made in aircraft and power plant development, in speed and service, in operational control of aircraft, and in their ability to operate under a wide variety of weather conditions. A common system of navigation and landing aids, for both civilian and military use, had been installed and maintained by the federal government on the federal airways and at important airports. Concurrently, the nation’s investment in both civil and military airports had undergone tremendous expansion.
In view of these developments, the President felt a need for an in-depth study of airport location and use and wanted our commission to be “objective and realistic.” He asked us to complete our study within 90 days and assured us of the full cooperation of all government agencies related to our assignment.
We began our work immediately. The Department of Commerce gave us office space, secretarial help, and telephone service. We sent questionnaires to the mayors of 104 cities, invited all organizations known to have an interest in the airport problem to submit their views, and consulted with 264 individuals and civic associations representing people who lived in the vicinity of airports. The three of us traveled by Air Force aircraft together and singly, and sent staff members to 30 cities to interview aviation management officials and inspect their airports. We submitted our report, entitled “The Airport and Its Neighbors,” to the President on May 16, 1952. Of course, the press immediately called it the “Doolittle Report.”
We made 25 recommendations. Among them: matching federal aid funds for airport development and improvements; establishment of effective zoning laws; regulations clarifying use of airspace; airport certification; positive air traffic control; acceleration of aids to air navigation; standard requirements for runway length; noise reduction programs; avoidance of test flying and military training over congested areas; and separation of military and civilian flying at congested airports.
To counter encroachment on the airports by property developers, we, had two suggestions: construct runway extensions or overrun areas inside the airport boundaries; and restrict by local zoning laws, larger areas outside the airport boundaries to prevent the erection of obstructions that might be harmful to aircraft and to control the erection of public and residential buildings as a protection from nuisance and hazard to people on the ground.*
Sad to say, many city fathers did not heed our suggestions then, and even now still allow an airport to be surrounded too closely by housing, public shopping areas, and tall buildings. Unfortunately, some of these local development decisions are deliberate and are designed to provoke the closing of airports in favor of housing and office building development and thus increase the local tax base.
We held a press conference when we released our study, knowing full well that we could not please everyone and that no one would be entirely happy with all of it. I told reporters that we had dealt honestly with the complicated and controversial problems involved and, with due modesty, felt that the summary and the supporting recommendations should be accepted and implemented. Better airports, adequately supported by community, state, and federal government, were needed. This meant the expenditure of a substantial sum of public money.
We recommended that existing laws be clarified with respect to the navigable airspace, the inclined flight pattern leading to and from the airports, and the certification of airports. There must be adequate air traffic control and prompt development and installation of more aids to navigation; improved airport layouts; reduced aircraft noise; additional training in emergency procedures for flight crews; and a more rapid means of ground transport between cities and airports, which we considered one of the greatest deterrents to the further rapid development of transport aviation.
Our recommendations were considered “drastic” by some factions. At a meeting of aviation organizations in Kansas City the following March, a reporter asked a spokesman what the industry was going to do about our report. He replied that the general agreement was to “let buried dogs lie and do little about the Doolittle Report” so far as discussion of its most controversial parts was concerned.
One of the controversial items was our recommendation that airports be certified in the interest of public safety by the federal government. Our reasoning was that pilots had to be licensed by the federal authorities; aircraft had to be certified before they were considered safe; and mechanics, tower operators, and others working in the airport environment had to pass certain federal examinations to assure their competence. However, airport authorities did not see why airports should have to meet any standards, especially standards dictated by the federal government. After years of wrangling and resistance, airport certification finally became a fact in the mid-1970s. It was the pressure applied principally by the Air Line Pilots Association to the Federal Aviation Administration that mandated federal certification of airports—a quarter century after we had recommended it.
A bit of partisan politics surfaced in the middle of our deliberations. We had decided early that we would not pinpoint any airport by specific mention as an example of good or bad planning or procedures. At the time, there was a controversy about whether Washington National Airport or Friendship Airport near Baltimore (now Baltimore-Washington International) should be the airport serving the nation’s capital. Congressmen and other high federal officials liked their reserved parking spaces at Washington National, and the airport is just a few minutes ride from their Capitol Hill offices. I don’t know if congressional pressure was the reason, but Major General Robert W. Burns, President Truman’s advisor on aviation matters at the time and former group commander of one of my World War II bomb groups in England, called on me to deliver a message from the President. He said the President wanted one of the commission’s recommendations to state that Washington National Airport should be the choice for the nation’s capital airport.
I was surprised and very disturbed at this request. I told Burns that we wanted to be completely objective and would frame our recommendations in general terms that would apply across the whole spectrum of airport problems. We would not mention any airport to prove a point, use as an example, or take sides in a controversy. “If the President wants me to change that philosophy,” I said, “then I’ll turn in my suit and he can find another chairman.”
Bobby Burns was surprised at my reaction and asked if I really wanted him to give that answer to Mr. Truman. I expressed myself in a very strong affirmative and he left. Never heard another word about it.
In November 1952, General Eisenhower was elected to the presidency. Despite the controversy I seemed to raise whenever I was party to a government study and its resultant report, someone was pushing my name with the planners of the incoming administration to become the next secretary of the Air Force. I was not and am not a politician. My identity has always been with aviation technological progress, and I do not like partisan politics to enter into the equation when it comes to issues affecting aeronautical developments. Being active in the Air Force Association at that time, I realized that politics entered into many basic technological decisions affecting the future of our defense establishment, but I was never comfortable when I felt the nation’s survival depended on technical decisions made solely to satisfy biased political ends.
I did not feel that accepting a political appointment as the civilian head of the Air Force fitted my nature or my desire to serve in a nonpartisan capacity. Perhaps my feelings became known. I was never offered the appointment, but I would have refused if it had been. When a good friend wrote to me in December 1952, congratulating me on hearing that I was to be nominated, I replied, “My spies tell me that the decision has just about been made and that another and better man has been selected.” That man was Harold E. Talbott.
The year 1953 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ triumph at Kitty Hawk. I was asked to serve as the chairman of the national committee to celebrate their accomplishment. In 1954, President Eisenhower asked me to chair a committee to study the Central Intelligence Agency. Senator Joseph McCarthy had loudly claimed that communists had infiltrated the agency, and he had raised such a fuss that the President had no choice but to have a committee appointed to look into his accusations. Concurrently, he appointed General Mark Clark to head another committee to study the possible reorganization of the agency. I traveled to Japan, Korea, and other foreign locations during this period.
We could not reveal the details of our CIA investigation, but our committee found the agency was doing a creditable job and was “exercising care to insure the loyalty of its personnel.” I so reported to the President. In my cover letter I noted that there were important areas in which the CIA’s organization, administration, and operations could and should be improved. The agency was aware of those problems, and steps were being taken toward their solution. Only one copy of that report was made and I handed it personally to the President. He wrote me a thank-you letter saying, “Both the report itself and the discussion I was privileged to have with the group when the report was presented here were of unusual value in providing an appraisal and stocktaking of those operations.”
My appointment had its detractors. Westbrook Pegler, a nationally syndicated columnist, called our study a “whitewash” and wrote:
I see no reason to place any value on the report which James H. Doolittle has made for President Eisenhower, on the mysterious, secretive, and sinister agency of our government called the Central Intelligence Agency.
To begin with, I know a little about Doolittle’s career but absolutely nothing which seems to qualify him as a competent man in this field.…
He was a friend of Ike and a protégé of Roosevelt and he was favored by an overload of rank which presents him to history as a Lieutenant General. Altogether, this inflation, or dilution, of rank has worked to the popular discredit of the titles of Admiral and General in their several degrees.
Naturally, this column made me furious but I knew there was nothing I could do about it. It was his opinion and he was privileged to render it in print, but I have often wondered what the basis was for it. I cannot recall ever meeting or having been interviewed by Pegler. I do recall reading some of his columns but always had difficulty understanding his verbiage. I never realized that anyone could possibly imagine that I was a protégé of President Roosevelt, whom I met only once. Whether or not I was “favored by an overload of rank” is an opinion, hopefully, not shared by many others.
The technological superiority of the Soviets, first apparent in the Korean War, had become a major concern by 1955. Once more, I was asked to help out. I began serving as chairman of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, which concerned itself solely with Air Force weapons and equipment. Its function was also to advise the Air Force on the latest aerospace developments and to evaluate its long-term planning. I followed Theodore von Karman, a world-renowned aerodynamicist and missile expert, and Mervin J. Kelly, a prominent industrial engineer, as the third chairman. Concurrently, I served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and was appointed chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), predecessor of the National Air and Space Administration (NASA). I was also chairman of the President’s Task Group on Air Inspection of the Stassen Disarmament Committee. To round out my activities, I joined the advisory board of the Smithsonian’s National Air Museum (later the National Air and Space Museum). These assignments were in keeping with my background and interests, and I spent many days away from Joe carrying out my responsibilities. Typically of jobs like that, whatever input I had is buried in the minutes of the many meetings I attended, and many of our deliberations were and still may be classified. Suffice to say, the fifties were busy years for me. I like to think they were also worthwhile as far as my contributions were concerned.
Joe and I were invited to visit Australia in 1956, where I was to serve as a U.S. representative to the commemoration of the Coral Sea naval battle of May 1942. Another representative was Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, a delightful companion on this trip with whom I had many interesting conversations.
In the Coral Sea battle the Japanese were prevented from landing troops at Port Moresby, New Guinea. It was historically noteworthy because the battle was fought between carrier-based planes; no shots were exchanged between surface ships. It was a very pleasant and restful visit “down under,” after which Joe and I continued around the world.
When we returned to the States, President Eisenhower had another assignment for me. At the beginning of his second term, he appointed me to the President’s Science Advisory Committee. As the name indicates, this group was formed to recommend national research and development policies and programs for the future; it consisted of some of the most competent scientists in the United States. However, he must have forgotten my name was on his list of appointees. At a White House reception for the committee, he shook hands with each member and when he came to me, he said, “Why, Jimmy! What the hell are you doing here with this group?”
I guess, after all my years of trying to shake my “dare-devil” image and my service under him as one of his top World War II airmen, he apparently still thought of me as a “ flyboy” who could only operate airplanes. However, I overlooked his brief memory lapse and we continued our friendly relationship. I enjoyed responding to his calls for my services because they were always a challenge.
* In 1955, the Federal Aid to Airport Program called these clear areas “Doolittle zones.”