On June 17, 1966, Congress established, in the executive office of the President, a National Council on Marine Resources and Engineering Development. Vice President Hubert Humphrey was its chairman and eight members of the President's cabinet were its members. On January 9, 1967, the President appointed a Commission on Marine Science, Engineering, and Resources under the chairmanship of Julius A. Stratton, former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The commission, reporting to the council, carried out a two-year study called “Our Nation and the Sea,” leading to a recommendation for the establishment of a national “inner space” program comparable to the nation's program in space. The commission report, “A Plan for National Action,” was released on January 9, 1969.
I had expected Hubert Humphrey to be elected President of the United States in 1968 and to initiate a major program of ocean development leading to the occupation of inner space. I had been promised a major role in NOAA, the new National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. My missions for the Navy, I had thought, were complete, and I was eager to involve myself in what I regarded as one of the major problems that now faced society, the impact on ocean resources of the population explosion and migration to the coastal zones. But Humphrey, of course, was defeated. As an inveterate liberal Democrat, I saw little prospect of a role in the Nixon administration, and I gave some thought to spending a year in academia. Once again fate intervened, and politics, playing its strange tricks, made me a bedfellow of the Nixon administration.
In January 1969, I received a call from John Calhoun, president of the University of Texas and an old friend from the ocean technology community. His first words were a caution, reminding me of the Hatch Act forbidding political activity by government employees. I was not to tell him whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. “Okay, John,” I said, “I won't tell you” (he already well knew my liberal proclivities). There had been a major oil spill off Santa Barbara, he continued, and he had been appointed chairman of a presidential commission to investigate. He was seeking members for the commission but the ground rules were that no commission member could be associated with either the oil industry or any environmental group. Each member had to be an expert in the technology of offshore oil, and most important of all, each had to be a loyal Republican. “If you tell me you are a Democrat,” he said, “I may not have a commission.”
I played along. I was already aware from inside information that the Nixon administration was developing an enemies list in early 1969 and I had presumed that I was an automatic candidate for that list. I did not know that there was a list of conservative Republicans who could be counted upon to loyally support the administration in its many secret agendas. I did not imagine that, thanks to a bizarre bit of administrative bungling, my membership on the Santa Barbara commission placed me on this list of conservative Republicans. Be that as it may, everyone on the Santa Barbara oil spill commission was well aware that we would be politically pilloried by both the oil industry and the environmentalists. We were also under siege from the Santa Barbara press simply because of the presumption that the commission had been appointed to keep the finger of blame from pointing at the federal government, which had approved the drilling of the well that resulted in the spill.
Worse, we soon discovered that we were up against a near hopeless situation. The spill had come from a well drilled by a subcontractor-that had never built an offshore platform before. All my students know how to respond to the question “What happens when you use land-based technology in the ocean?” They learn from day one to answer in unison: “You die.”
Sure enough, the platform designer had not realized that while oil on land flows downhill, oil in the ocean flows uphill. Nor had he known that if you drill more than one hole in the well to recover oil from more than one strata, the oil from the lower strata, which is under pressure, will enter the upper strata and, if the pressure exceeds the weight of the soil above, the entire formation will crack open—with the oil pouring out along the crack.
When we arrived at Santa Barbara such was the case. The crack in the seabed was about a half mile long. The Coast Guard had attempted to place a floating boom around the spill but there were not enough booms in the nation to encircle this spill. Besides, the oil company had refused the help of the Coast Guard and had called in the famous Red Adair, whose legendary skill at plugging runaway oil wells had been given national prominence. Red, however, was at a loss. Obviously it did no good to plug the drill pipe. The oil was spilling unabated. The beaches of Santa Barbara were black with oil. Environmentalists were photographing dead oil-soaked birds. The highway was clogged with rubber-neckers and protesters. Reporters looking for a new angle and a new twist were everywhere.
The new Secretary of the Interior, Walter Hickel, sought an audience with President Nixon, but was denied the meeting by Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the President's aides. Hickel went public, furious that a cabinet member could not talk to his President whenever he was so motivated. Santa Barbara had become an environmental, technical, and political disaster for the Nixon administration, still in its early days. What then to do? The commission was not empowered to take charge of the operation or even give advice to the oil company. But the oil company had no idea how to clean up its mess.
John Calhoun and I, ocean technologists, thought the solution was simple. Install tents underwater, we advised. One half mile of impervious canvas tents anchored to the seafloor over the source. The oil will flow into the tents, its buoyancy will make the tents balloon, and a simple hose at the top can direct the oil into a tanker without so much as a pump. No oil spill, no stopping the oil flow, no loss of oil revenue for the company. Impossible, said the land-based company engineers. The water was two hundred feet deep at the site and divers can only operate at that depth for a few minutes at a time. Hadn't they heard of saturation diving? we asked. No they had not, but they agreed to give it a try. They tried, failed, tried and failed again because of their inexperience, but in the end finally got it right. Tents and saturation divers ended the spill and as far as I know that is how the oil continues to be collected at that site to this day.
As I anticipated, the commission was reviled by both the environmentalists and the oil industry, but praised by the Nixon administration. I, alas, was branded a Republican, and placed on the list of White House friends. The implications of this had yet to sink in. I proceeded with my plans. I took a leave without pay from my official position as Chief Scientist of the Special Projects Office. My office furniture, my mahogany desk, and my flag were placed in storage and my administrative assistant was in demand for temporary assignments at the executive level. I applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Scripps sent me a pile of paper to fill out. MIT sent me a one-page letter telling me when and where to report. Draper, the founder of MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, was enthusiastic about the prospect of my sabbatical and volunteered to rent the guest house on his Victorian estate to the Craven family. An office was provided as well. On the first payday I stood in line waiting to initiate the laborious bureaucratic process that I was certain I would have to endure, since I had yet to be asked for my Social Security number or any other documentation. But I got to the window, gave them my name, and they handed me my check. Here was an institution in which I could get my work done.
I had been given a half-time appointment in political science, where apart from teaching I could revise a paper on sea power and the seabed that I had written for the Naval Institute Proceedings, and a half-time appointment in naval architecture, where I would give a course in the design of ocean systems. The students in that course were exclusively engineering duty officers of the Navy or civilian employees of the Ship System Command. I welcomed these appointments but the MIT community did not welcome me. The campus was in ferment over the war in Vietnam and anything military. There were three “evil empires” on the campus: the political science department, because it had advised Kennedy on counterinsurgency; the school of naval architecture, because the students were naval officers proud to wear their uniforms to class; and Draper's Instrumentation Laboratory for its role in the development of the MIRVs for the Polaris and other missiles. As Chief Scientist for Polaris, as professor of political science, and professor of naval architecture, I was an embodiment of all three evils. To make matters worse, I was living in the Draper guest house.
The stage had been set the previous spring. MIT had been contemplating divesting the Instrumentation Laboratory of military contracts and there was even talk of closing the lab. The Defense Department rallied to Draper's support, documenting the importance of his contribution to the nation. As part of this effort, Admiral Raborn had given me the task of assembling an account of the professional life of this remarkable man.
Draper was born into an affluent family in 1901. The Wright brothers were his childhood heroes, and his adolescent heroes were the flying aces of World War I. Even as a young man he owned his own airplane, studied aeronautics, and experimented with stability and control, technical terms for daredevil flying. Flamboyance and technical proficiency were his hallmarks. He soon learned how vulnerable the airplane was to gyroscopic forces and realized that the gyroscope itself could be used as an instrument to measure these forces and manipulate the control surfaces of the plane.
His first experiments were manned demonstrations and, on one flight, he took the president of MIT along, put the plane into an apparently uncontrollable spin, and brought it out just before hitting the ground—or so it seemed to the president. Draper's Ph.D. thesis was on the role of the gyroscope in controlling manned flight. (In his thesis he inserted a page that offered a case of scotch to any professor who would call his attention to that sheet of paper during his oral exam. None did.) He never stopped mixing technology with pleasure. For as long as anyone could remember, he kept a bar in his office with a sign saying, “No Drinks Before 5:00 P.M.” But when occasion warranted, Draper's impish grin would suddenly appear. He would push a button under his desk and the hands on the wall clock would move to five o'clock.
His opportunity to apply his technological genius came soon after his appointment as a professor at MIT. The attack on Pearl Harbor was followed three days later by the sinking of the British warships Repulse and Prince of Wales. Early widespread pessimism about the war's outcome was nourished by the dreadful inadequacy of the antiaircraft guns on Allied ships. If the gunner kept his sights on the incoming attacker, the plane would be out of harm's way before the shells fired would reach its altitude. A mechanism that would aim the gun, not where the plane was but where it would be, was lacking. This “lead angle” estimation was beyond the ability of even the most skilled gunners.
The Navy and its gun sight manufacturers Norden and Sperry were at a loss until young Doc Draper somehow entered the picture. He had theorized that a gyro set in a very viscous fluid would rotate at right angles and come to a halt at an angle proportional to the rate of rotation. That meant that the lead angle of the gun barrel could be set in a way that the gunner had only to aim at the target and the gyros would do the rest. Testing this theory, Draper took an ordinary shoe box, went to a brand-new parking lot at MIT while it was still being tarred, and collected soft asphalt, which behaves like a viscous fluid. He filled the box with this gunk, mounted a gyro inside, and attached it to a gun sight. The contraption was taken to a naval laboratory at Dahlgren, Virginia, and tried out against a plane towing a target. It worked.
The Draper gun sights were hastily manufactured and installed on the battleship South Dakota. In its first engagement with Japanese aircraft, she shot down every attacking plane. The sights were rapidly deployed for the entire fleet.
During the Cold War, Draper was in at the beginning, working on both the Ships Inertial Navigation System and the Polaris guidance system for the Special Projects Office. The Draper lab also worked with the other services and with NASA. Computers were still in their infancy, but Draper delivered the advanced model required for the Apollo mission to the moon. The docking problem for the DSRV, though far less publicized, was twice as difficult as the moon landing—and solved by Draper with the use of two Apollo computers.
In spite of all these accomplishments in the national interest, Draper was now on the hot seat. Defense Secretary McNamara had decided that the Polaris missile needed MIRVs. Each Polaris missile would then be capable of carrying sixteen independent hydrogen bombs. Draper's Instrumentation Laboratory had been the contractor. The students protesting the war were also protesting the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Many, if not most, of the faculty joined them. Moreover, they argued that classified research was incompatible with academic freedom and the movement to divest the nation's universities of Defense Department research was in full flower.
Hearings were to be held by the MIT board of regents in the spring of 1969. As (still) Chief Scientist of Special Projects, I was scheduled to give testimony. Immediately before my appearance at the hearings, an MIT professor called to ask if I would meet with a few of the students afterward to discuss their concerns. I agreed, though another professor, learning of my acceptance, questioned my sanity. The day of the hearings coincided with a teach-in, and my willingness to talk with the students had been advertised far and wide. The meeting room was transferred to the gymnasium. When I arrived, it was overflowing with hostile students and teachers. The professor who introduced me was brief. He said, “Here he is.”
I asked if someone would tell me their concerns. Secrecy was the first one. They wanted to know the number of MIRVs, their yield, and their accuracy. Those were indeed secrets, I said, and I was bound by security not to reveal them. But there must be somebody in the audience who thinks he knows, I said. Information was volunteered and a consensus reached and we all concluded that it was probably correct. Let us see, I said, what is inappropriate about this many warheads. How many of you, I went on, believe in some sort of deterrence? Nearly all believed. The crowd began to warm. A lot of give-and-take ensued. After three hours, the professors who had organized the encounter announced that they had had enough and asked everyone to join them in walking out. Some did, but the vast majority stayed for a dialogue that lasted for about five more hours.
I don't know if I changed anybody's mind, certainly not my own, but at the end of my academic year appointment (Fall 1969–Summer 1970), the professors presented me with a plaque bearing a citation lifted from an editorial in the paper of the militant student group SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. It said, “Although Professor Craven wins all his arguments with fantastic logic, he is obviously out of his mind.”
In that same year the Instrumentation Laboratory was in fact divested of its defense contracts and reconstituted as the Draper Laboratory. The political science department was bombed; no one was hurt. I was picketed and my children were ostracized at the Newton public schools, but I still accepted every invitation to discuss the issues and defend deterrence and the Draper Lab's crucial role in deterrence.
My year at MIT, in spite of the political turmoil, was very productive. My class in ocean systems consisted of sixteen engineering duty officers and one civilian from Ship System Command. As a class assignment each officer had to design a naval system for some new mission. I would lead them through the design process on the basis of my own experience. Their class studies would ultimately be published in a text on ocean engineering systems. One of my cardinal principles of design is that the designer have an actual sea experience that would replicate the problems he would encounter when his own system was deployed. I soon discovered that although my students were Academy graduates, few of them had an experience that I believed would qualify. So I arranged for the Navy to bring a motor torpedo boat to Boston from a new class of vessels called “nasty” that was being deployed in Vietnam. The Navy had already lost six of them in combat.
Fortuitously, for demonstration purposes, a furious nor'easter appeared on the day that we deployed. Cold sleet enveloped the ship, the sea was fully arisen. It was necessary to head into the sea tacking just enough on each heading to make advance along the chosen course. Safety lines were rigged for officers while they were outside on the deck. No one was seasick, since the slamming and pounding were so great that we were outside the seasickness motion window. I then gave each officer some tasks that involved manual dexterity. Most were unable to execute them. Class dismissed! Our postvoyage seminar addressed the changes in design required to minimize loss in combat and to maximize mission performance. Almost all the members of that class went on to distinguished careers in system design to the level of captain. At least two made admiral.
My MIT year also provided new opportunities for shaping the nation's destiny at sea. To my surprise a letter from Republican senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts offered me an appointment to the Defense Intelligence Agency Scientific Advisory Board. The Nixon administration, he said, had asked him as a condition of this appointment to verify my political “correctness.” The senator thought this to be inappropriate. Political affiliation should play no role in appointment to a committee so intimately involved in national security, he said, and he therefore hoped that I would understand why he had taken the liberty of vouching for me in advance to insure my appointment.
Since I had come to MIT convinced there was no place for me in Nixon's Washington, the senator's letter was quite ironic. But I was now, as I wanted to be, reenrolled in shaping the nation's intelligence strategy and programs as we sought to contain and win the Cold War.
In December 1969, I received a call from James Wakelin, who had been assistant secretary of the Navy in the Eisenhower administration. He had been appointed chairman of a presidential commission to look at the government's relationship with the ocean and ocean activities. He asked me to be a member of this commission. We went through the party affiliation routine, but this time my name had been provided to him by the White House. He wanted me to be on his commission whichever party was in power, and I agreed to serve.
Now my teaching assignments had to be interspersed with surreptitious trips to the Pentagon to advise the DIA on national intelligence and with publicized trips to the executive office of the White House to advise on ocean policy.
Service on the DIA Scientific Advisory Board was frustrating for all. I was not the only one who had been disturbed by the CIA's taking over underwater intelligence. The DIA was very upset. Its Scientific Advisory Board had as complete a survey of all the intelligence projects in the Defense Department, their technology, and their results, as any group in the United States. Although I was not then a member, the board had relied on me for briefings on submarine intelligence. But I had been cut off from detailed knowledge of the CIA's undersea program, and both the board and I were deemed by the CIA as not having a need to know. I was, however, in touch with someone who had such a need. It is too late to indict the late intelligence officer Gary Lang (the Air Force intelligence officer assigned to ride on Halibut during its missions) for the “heinous crime” he committed within the precincts of Special Intelligence: keeping me, and thus the DIA, informed of the progress of the CIA program.
As for the Wakelin commission on ocean policy, our first White House meeting in January 1970 boded well. An enthusiastic young staffer told us to conduct our study for the good of the nation without restraint. The Stratton commission report “Our Nation and the Sea” had just been released and we decided to adopt it and convert it to a Republican document. Rewriting assignments were made. One month later we returned and were greeted by one of Nixon's top echelon deputies. I can't recall whether it was Haldeman or Ehrlichman, but one being the same as the other was a given. There had been some changes in our instructions. Our report had to match the conclusion of the executive office, which he then wrote on the blackboard: “The oceans are not of commercial importance to the United States.” Whereupon he walked out.
The Republicans of the committee, not to speak of the sole Democrat, were thunderstruck. Almost all of them were involved in the commercial exploitation of the ocean and they had anticipated strong government support. No one but I was aware of the CIA decision to incorporate underwater intelligence, employing submarines, saturation divers, and other undersea machines as a major source of global intelligence. It was all too clear to me that the advances we had made in ocean technology were to be held under wraps as long as possible for espionage purposes and that superiority was to be maintained by a deliberate undercutting of support for nonmilitary ocean technology. Only this can explain the deliberate attempt, in the name of the Glomar Explorer, to persuade the world that the major resource of the oceans was manganese nodules, rocks lying on the inaccessible seabed. I suddenly realized that I had been a participant in wounding, if not killing, programs in ocean technology. I would carry that responsibility for the rest of the century thanks to the mistaken assumption that I was somehow involved in the Glomar caprice. I hope the publication of this book will relieve me of that burden.