SOMETIME in May, at one of our last meetings, we got around to making a list of possible recommendations. Somebody would say, “Maybe one of the things we should discuss is the establishment of a safety board.”
“Okay, we’ll put that down.”
I’m thinking, “At last! We’re going to have a discussion!”
But it turns out that this tentative list of topics becomes the recommendations—that there be a safety board, that there be a this, that there be a that. The only discussion was about which recommendation we should write first, which one should come second, and so forth.
There were many things I wanted to discuss further. For example, in regard to a safety board, one could ask: “Wouldn’t such a committee just add another layer to an already overgrown bureaucracy?”
There had been safety boards before. In 1967, after the Apollo accident, the investigating committee at the time invented a special panel for safety. It worked for a while, but it didn’t last.
We didn’t discuss why the earlier safety boards were no longer effective; instead, we just made up more safety boards: we called them the “Independent Solid Rocket Motor Design Oversight Committee,” the “Shuttle Transportation System Safety Advisory Panel,” and the “Office of Safety, Reliability, and Quality Assurance.” We decided who would oversee each safety board, but we didn’t discuss whether the safety boards created by our commission had any better chance of working, whether we could fix the existing boards so they would work, or whether we should have them at all.
I’m not as sure about a lot of things as everybody else. Things need to be thought out a little bit, and we weren’t doing enough thinking together. Quick decisions on important matters are not very good—and at the speed we were going, we were bound to make some impractical recommendations.
We ended up rearranging the list of possible recommendations and wordsmithing them a little, and then we voted yes or no. It was an odd way of doing things, and I wasn’t used to it. In fact, I got the feeling we were being railroaded: things were being decided, somehow, a little out of our control.
At any rate, in our last meeting, we agreed to nine recommendations. Many of the commissioners went home after that meeting, but I was going to New York a few days later, so I stayed in Washington.
The next day, I happened to be standing around in Mr. Rogers’s office with Neil Armstrong and another commissioner when Rogers says, “I thought we should have a tenth recommendation. Everything in our report is so negative; I think we need something positive at the end to balance it.”
He shows me a piece of paper. It says,
The Commission strongly recommends that NASA continue to receive the support of the Administration and the nation. The agency constitutes a national resource and plays a critical role in space exploration and development. It also provides a symbol of national pride and technological leadership. The Commission applauds NASA’s spectacular achievements of the past and anticipates impressive achievements to come. The findings and recommendations presented in this report are intended to contribute to the future NASA successes that the nation both expects and requires as the 21st century approaches.
In our four months of work as a commission, we had never discussed a policy question like that, so I felt there was no reason to put it in. And although I’m not saying I disagreed with it, it wasn’t obvious that it was true, either. I said, “I think this tenth recommendation is inappropriate.”
I think I heard Armstrong say, “Well, if somebody’s not in favor of it, I think we shouldn’t put it in.”
But Rogers kept working on me. We argued back and forth a little bit, but then I had to catch my flight to New York.
While I was in the airplane, I thought about this tenth recommendation some more. I wanted to lay out my arguments carefully on paper, so when I got to my hotel in New York, I wrote Rogers a letter. At the end I wrote, “This recommendation reminds me of the NASA flight reviews: ‘There are critical problems, but never mind—keep on flying!’”
It was Saturday, and I wanted Mr. Rogers to read my letter before Monday. So I called up his secretary—everybody was working seven days a week to get the report out in time—and I said, “I’d like to dictate a letter to you; is that all right?”
She says, “Sure! To save you some money, let me call you right back.” She calls me back, I dictate the letter, and she hands it directly to Rogers.
When I came back on Monday, Mr. Rogers said, “Dr. Feynman, I’ve read your letter, and I agree with everything it says. But you’ve been out-voted.”
“Out-voted? How was I out-voted, when there was no meeting?”
Keel was there, too. He says, “We called everybody, and they all agree with the recommendation. They all voted for it.”
“I don’t think that’s fair!” I protested. “If I could have presented my arguments to the other commissioners, I don’t think I’d have been out-voted.” I didn’t know what to do, so I said, “I’d like to make a copy of it.”
When I came back, Keel says, “We just remembered that we didn’t talk to Hotz about it, because he was in a meeting. We forgot to get his vote.”
I didn’t know what to make of that, but I found out later that Mr. Hotz was in the building, not far from the copy machine.
Later, I talked to David Acheson about the tenth recommendation. He explained, “It doesn’t really mean anything; it’s only motherhood and apple pie.”
I said, “Well, if it doesn’t mean anything, it’s not necessary, then.”
“If this were a commission for the National Academy of Sciences, your objections would be proper. But don’t forget,” he says, “this is a presidential commission. We should say something for the President.”
“I don’t understand the difference,” I said. “Why can’t I be careful and scientific when I’m writing a report to the President?”
Being naive doesn’t always work: my argument had no effect. Acheson kept telling me I was making a big thing out of nothing, and I kept saying it weakened our report and it shouldn’t go in.
So that’s where it ended up: “The Commission strongly recommends that NASA continue to receive the support of the Administration and the nation…”—all this “motherhood and apple pie” stuff to “balance” the report.
While I was flying home, I thought to myself, “It’s funny that the only part of the report that was genuinely balanced was my own report: I said negative things about the engine, and positive things about the avionics. And I had to struggle with them to get it in, even as a lousy appendix!”
I thought about the tenth recommendation. All the other recommendations were based on evidence we had found, but this one had no evidence whatsoever. I could see the whitewash dripping down. It was obviously a mistake! It would make our report look bad. I was very disturbed.
When I got home, I talked to Joan, my sister. I told her about the tenth recommendation, and how I had been “out-voted.”
“Did you call any of the other commissioners and talk to them yourself?” she said.
“Well, I talked to Acheson, but he was for it.”
“Any others?”
“Uh, no.” So I called up three other commissioners—I’ll call them A, B, and C.
I call A, who says, “What tenth recommendation?”
I call B, who says, “Tenth recommendation? What are you talking about?”
I call C, who says, “Don’t you remember, you dope? I was in the office when Rogers first told us, and I don’t see anything wrong with it.”
It appeared that the only people who knew about the tenth recommendation were the people who were in the office when Rogers told us. I didn’t bother to make any more telephone calls. After all, it’s enough—I didn’t feel that I had to open all the safes to check that the combination is the same!*
Then I told Joan about my report—how it was so emasculated, even though it was going in as an appendix.
She says, “Well, if they do that to your report, what have you accomplished, being on the commission? What’s the result of all your work?”
“Aha!”
I sent a telegram to Mr. Rogers:
PLEASE TAKE MY SIGNATURE OFF THE REPORT UNLESS TWO THINGS OCCUR: 1) THERE IS NO TENTH RECOMMENDATION, AND 2) MY REPORT APPEARS WITHOUT MODIFICATION FROM VERSION #23.
(I knew by this time I had to define everything carefully.)
In order to get the number of the version I wanted, I called Mr. Hotz, who was in charge of the documentation system and publishing the report. He sent me Version #23, so I had something definite to publish on my own, if worse came to worst.
The result of this telegram was that Rogers and Keel tried to negotiate with me. They asked General Kutyna to be the intermediary, because they knew he was a friend of mine. What a good friend of mine he was, they didn’t know.
Kutyna says, “Hello, Professor, I just wanted to tell you that I think you’re doing very well. But I’ve been given the job of trying to talk you out of it, so I’m going to give you the arguments.”
“Fear not!” I said. “I’m not gonna change my mind. Just give me the arguments, and fear not.”
The first argument was that if I don’t accept the tenth recommendation, they won’t accept my report, even as an appendix.
I didn’t worry about that one, because I could always put out my report myself.
All the arguments were like that: none of them was very good, and none of them had any effect. I had thought through carefully what I was doing, so I just stuck to my guns.
Then Kutyna suggested a compromise: they were willing to go along with my report as I wrote it, except for one sentence near the end.
I looked at the sentence and I realized that I had already made my point in the previous paragraph. Repeating the point amounted to polemics; removing the phrase made my report much better. I accepted the compromise.
Then I offered a compromise on the tenth recommendation: “If they want to say something nice about NASA at the end, just don’t call it a recommendation, so people will know that it’s not in the same class as the other recommendations: call it a ‘concluding thought’ if you want. And to avoid confusion, don’t use the words ‘strongly recommends.’ Just say ‘urges’—‘The Commission urges that NASA continue to receive the support of the Administration and the nation.’ All the other stuff can stay the same.”
A little bit later, Keel calls me up: “Can we say ‘strongly urges’?”
“No. Just ‘urges’.”
“Okay,” he said. And that was the final decision.