Alvin Trivelpiece

Weiss:

Good afternoon. I'd like to start this off with just a little bit of background about your history coming up to the SSC. I know you have a background in nuclear physics. Could you describe that a little bit?

Trivelpiece:

My background involves undergraduate education at Cal Polytech and a Ph.D. from Caltech. I got involved in a couple of businesses [Editor's Note ed. Maxwell Laboratories and Science Applications, Inc.], and by some combination of interesting events I ended up as an advice-and-consent appointee [ed. A political appointee, requiring Senate approval.] for Mr. Reagan in 1981 where I led the DOE Office of Energy Research [ed. Called the Office of Science since the mid-1990s]. The department office had budgeted around 2 billion dollars. That included in its responsibilities in high energy and nuclear physics. My own background is in plasma physics. So I was more familiar with the fusion program, although I did have [reactors?] and accelerators and things, and have worked in that area somewhat. I also can't say the precise moment I first understood what the SSC was. But it was very clear because of my responsibilities directing the Office of Energy Research (OER) that I had to deal with the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP). I met with them on a number of occasions, and I had two dilemmas, I guess, and I'll come to the other one later. The first dilemma was literally the day that I walked into the door at the OER.

Weiss:

So this was in January of 1981?

Trivelpiece:

This would be about August of 1981. The so-called Isabelle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory had spent $119 million building a tunnel. And they had not done an adequate job of designing and/or delivering the magnets that would be inserted in the tunnel for that collider experiment. Of course, that collider experiment was originally estimated to cost around $400 million. And as a new political appointee I was going to try to cut it back, but the cost then was probably $700 million and growing. And furthermore there was at least one collection of individuals who asserted that its physics would in fact be done by CERN by 1983. The director of the DOE High Energy Physics program in Germantown [ed. William Wallenmeyer], caused with my advice and consent, the preparation of a letter inviting [Professor] George Trilling [of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory] to head a committee — the so-called Trilling Committee — to look into these questions. I learned an interesting political lesson in that event, in the way the question was posed — I'll make up the numbers to be approximately right, that if the [High Energy Physics] budget was greater than $340 million proceed with Isabelle, and if it were less than $330 million don't proceed, and the budget came out to $335 million. So I decided at that moment that I would never again cause in my name to be posed a question to be reviewed by an advisory committee in which budgetary levels would be an element of the question. Trilling's report provided me with no useful basis for deciding the issue. I wrote personally then a second letter and appointed a new committee, which was headed by [Stanford University Professor] Stanley Wojcicki, and in that letter I basically did not allow any [budget flexibility?] or room. This had to be an up or down, yes or no answer.

Weiss:

Up or down, yes or no, on Isabelle going forward?

Trivelpiece:

On shutting it down or going forward.

Weiss:

So this is another sub-panel?

Trivelpiece:

This is another HEPAP sub-panel. Remember that for the [Federal] Advisory Committee Act, sub-panels can meet in private, figure out what they are going to do, then present their material to the whole committee. Then the whole committee is then obliged to debate this in public. The sub-committee was in fact split slightly on the up or down issue. However, the full membership of that committee provided an unequivocal answer. It turns out that the earlier decision that I'd made on not funding some aspect of the Isabelle program had resulted in... Basically they were never going to make it, in any event. So, it was almost two prongs. As I say, one dilemma was the first one on budget; the other dilemma was what to do about the advisory committee structure. Now both of these in effect came together. In an issue in Physics Today in which [New York] Congressman Carney and I are standing ... I don't know if you remember this issue or not, but it shows him and me standing in front of the podium of the House Science and Technology Committee, and it had been a long, tedious hearing. The issue was whether or not I could reprogram $25 million out of the left-over funding that had been originally intended for Isabelle, and use that to start the work on the SSC. [ed. This would have occurred in September 1983, after the Wojcicki panel decision.]

Weiss:

So this would have been starting work on the SSC Reference Designs Study?

Trivelpiece:

Reference designs, parts, and things. What is an interesting insider aspect of that was at that particular moment, Mr. Carney and I came to an agreement that I would do what I could to see to it that there would be no loss of jobs at Brookhaven, in exchange for his agreement that he would not contest the removal of the money from the support of Isabelle. So to some extent that particular [moment]... It is a certain odd coincidence that by the open question of when did the SSC start, it started right when that picture was being taken, from the point of view of my perspective as a federal employee trying to get money for it. Up until that point, I had been unsuccessful in getting any kind of resources. Well, there obviously had been other work [at Fermilab?], or in Aspen, where the term "supercollider" got invented, so there is another history. But you basically have to get that from folks out there.

Weiss:

Yes, I've gotten a different source for that in fact. [Theoretical physicist] Dave Jackson out at Berkeley claims to have coined the name SSC, at the logistic end at least.

Trivelpiece:

I think it may have occurred before that, but I don't know. The point was that the high energy physics community, and [HEPAP?] in particular as its representative, had in my mind done a very responsible job of always saying, "What is the next most important question for us to address?" I mean, that is not something for which I have the detailed background where I have the experience to evaluate other [disciplines?], but I understood what everybody else was talking about. I understood it clearly enough, it just wasn't something ... I obviously wasn't a player in that game. But the question was a high-luminosity collider that would provide sufficient energy to ensure that you could produce the mass [of the Higgs boson], should that want to come along at that time. Physics details aren't important. From my point of view — I'm a federal official — the issue was: what is the next most important question to answer or ask? Everybody asserts that this is the question: we are short on experimental information. 10 TeV on 10 TeV might make it but probably won't; 20 on 20 guarantees you make it. Therefore, 20 TeV on 20 TeV became the criteria for proceeding at that stage.

Weiss:

Even though at that time it was a dramatic increase in energy over the previous accelerator [ed. The 1 TeV Tevatron]?

Trivelpiece:

Yes. Yes. But I think that if you sort of do the energy division of quarks and two particles, and what does it take in order to have a collision occur in which the left-over energy is equal to the mass of the particle you're trying to produce? [ed. He is probably referring to the fact that the quarks or gluons inside two colliding protons would be carrying only about a tenth of the energy of their parent particles.] That was regarded as a necessary and probably sufficient threshold. If it was there, it was going to show up at that energy.

Weiss:

Previously accelerators had not been aimed at such an explicit experiment. It was always the next higher energy.

Trivelpiece:

Are you sure?

Weiss:

That's the impression I get from the public documents.

Trivelpiece:

I think that a different way of saying the same thing is that no accelerator that was built ever verified precisely the physical phenomenon for which it was designed. But what resulted from the higher energy availability produced results that were far more interesting — and in most cases unexpected. Now, the only example I know for this is Alvarez and the Bevatron at LBL. Getting an antiproton out was the intended purpose for that particular energy upgrade, if I remember correctly. Working your way along in this then, Don Hodel, the Secretary of Energy at that time, when all this got started... Don had an interest in science. On the other hand, when he started looking at the costs [of the SSC], he began to get a little concerned over the whole thing. He and I, at his office, laid out a strategy by which we could possibly proceed. And he had imposed a collection of hurdles that would have to be passed. And it was a pretty good discussion. Somewhere I have a copy of this chart buried in a box. But Reagan got re-elected. Hodel went to the Interior Department. [John] Herrington came in. I assumed I wouldn't be around long, but in fact I ended up staying.

Weiss:

Why did you assume that?

Trivelpiece:

I have the standing record for length of service as assistant secretary at the Department of Energy. It was six years, and the only reason I left was that I was literally financially broke. A negative cash-flow for six years does rather devastating things to your bank account, particularly when you still have one kid in college. And so at one stage I said: "Herrington, I would love to stay in the Energy Department, but as far as I can carry this is the hearings on the SSC." "No," I said, "I've got to go. I've got to go and make a buck." [ed. This would have been in 1987, when he left the DOE to become the executive director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.] He was quite gracious and let me do it. I think he was somewhat disappointed that I left at the time, and there were other people, like Christopher [unintelligible] and Mr. [AL Congressman Tom] Bevills office under [his chief of staff] Hunter Spillan, who were somewhat furious at me for having gotten started and then leaving. I think he assumed that I left for other than honorable reasons, like I really wasn't broke. Well, I really was broke! I can probably prove that.

In any event, Herrington took an interest in this, and at some point, the physics wasn't the issue, yet everyone assumed that it was. Herrington, having been a prosecuting attorney — along with Joseph Salgado, who was the Under Secretary—both had been prosecuting attorneys out in California. And it's sort of an interesting aspect that came up in the O.J. Simpson trial (and I think it's Section 152 of the Californian evidentiary code, or 132, I forget the number). On a couple of occasions Herrington said something like, "Does the prejudicial value of this exceed its prejudicial cost?" What in the blazes was he talking about? But I finally found out that it's part of this coded language that lawyers use. If you introduce new evidence... The prejudicial cost was a few billion dollars, and the [prejudicial?] value was learning something about the structure of matter and matters that nobody had ever seen before. And for $10, it's obviously a good thing to do. For $10 billion that's a whole other question. The upshot of that [analysis] was that somewhere along the line Herrington had asked me what people thought about it. And Roy Schwitters wrote an article in the American Politics journal, or a political journal. He wrote an article in American Politics, I think it's called. Now he’s a professor at Harvard and he wrote an article which I hadn't read. He didn't give me an advance copy of it, it just appeared. And much to my astonishment, Herrington and a lot of other people in the political apparatus had read this thing and understood it. And Roy did a superb job in providing a framework for people other than scientists to understand what the whole thing was about. A darn good article. I recommend that you track one down. I don't have a copy.

Weiss:

That's one that I haven't found. Mainly I've been looking at science journals.

Trivelpiece:

Well, this is a pivotal point, and a lot of people sort of miss some of the understanding of this. I had of course tried to explain this to Herrington in a number of ways. And Salgado and others. If you go back to when Hodel was still Secretary. I was trying to explain to him why CEBAF [ed. the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Jefferson National Lab in Virginia, then under construction] was important. And I started talking about electrons penetrating the nucleus, and ambushing the nucleus, and arousing it in some way, and being able to study things you couldn't find by any other means. But I was sort of talking to myself, and there were half a dozen people in the Secretary's office, and I realized that they were all laughing. I kind of tuned them out — they were laughing — and I said: "Let me start over and try to explain this in slightly other terms," because I had completely lost them. There was no question of that. And to that extent, when Herrington read that article, he crossed a river, and it was well done. In any event, the discussions gradually got around to where, yes we have a design, and yes we have had it vetted by two different groups — independent cost-estimating groups. One group over which I had some control, the other group over which I had no control. They came to the same number, within a few percent of each other, and they were arguing about it. And that was when the budget was $4 billion dollars.

Weiss:

So this is before site selection?

Trivelpiece:

Oh yeah, yeah.

Weiss:

Before the President has taken it on as a presidential initiative?

Trivelpiece:

Absolutely. I mean we're still talking about this internally, in the Department. But the question is: if we go forward and ask the President — because this will have to be a Presidential decision — how much will we be asking for? And we had this turmoil going on, of the one independent cost-estimating group saying about the other that, "Well, you guys are wrong. You have to take this into account, and so on and so forth." I said: "Forget it. It is now $4.4 billion. That is the number the Department is going to go forward with. Whatever that difference is that you guys can't agree on, that's part of the contingency, and that should be more than enough to cover any eventuality."

Weiss:

Now at this point the site is already the so-called green-field site.

Trivelpiece:

This is an arbitrary site.

Weiss:

An arbitrary site?

Trivelpiece:

Right. And when we went through the whole issue — and I had to go through hearings and find a record on that, the magnets. And of course, there were the people in Texas (the Houston Area Research Center) who wanted low-field magnets and 100-mile circumference, and there were other people who wanted very intense fields and a smaller circumference. Obviously in one case it's cheap magnets and a lot of dirt. In the other case, it's not much dirt and incredibly expensive magnets. And the 60 miles [unintelligible] turns out to be the compromise. And that was based on, also, the least perturbation away from the Fermilab magnets, and so that minimized some of the potential risks, as it was understood at that particular time. And there were some prototype magnets and so on. If I made any mistakes along the way, it was probably the reliance on the fact that the magnets worked. And somehow it did not occur to me that just making them longer would in fact produce technical difficulties. I had assumed that they had reached a point where they were at least sufficiently long...This is like making long pipelines out in the desert: every once in a while you have to put a little loop in them.

Well, apparently some of the differential expansion in the magnets, when they got longer did indeed produce a failure in them, which occurred after I left. But nevertheless, the seeds of that were sown... and I probably should have inspected, or questioned that, early on. But in any event, [Texas Congressman] Joe Barton held hearings [ed. probably in the House Science Committee]. We got through the hearings. We got the 60 miles agreed to. We then went and did all the reference design stuff.

By this time, we had probably spent $100 million. But then you could go and put your fingers on — there's probably more that was spent that you couldn't quite put your fingers on — but by and large that was the round number. And for a $4 billion construction project, that was not an unreasonable level. And by my lights I thought it was the best and most conservatively designed project the federal government had ever come forward with. I thought $4.4 billion would in fact cover all costs. And I still believe that today, that it would have covered costs. And I purposely put together the design center out in Berkeley [ed. the SSC Central Design Group]. Had it operated out of the Chicago operations office and not the Berkeley office... And I did so in such a way with (Tigner?) and others that we got a site-independent design. And the reason that I did that is because I had gotten burned on CEBAF, because with CEBAF the design approach and the physical location were inextricably linked, and that resulted in a lot of distress in the Department, because the idea was that it shouldn't have been a green-field start. Argonne [National Laboratory] should have built that accelerator. How could the people at Argonne, with their resources, not write a better proposal than a half dozen professors wandering around the southeastern part of the United States, working Saturdays and nights? How come they put together a better proposal? Well, they did. It doesn't matter how they did it; they did it. As a result, since their proposal was fixed to the site, then to build that [machine], it went at that site, and that produced a lot of distress inside the Department. So the answer was, never again have that particular problem. So when the SSC came along...

Weiss:

Which is only a few years later.

Trivelpiece:

It was in very close in my memory, I don't remember the dates. I'd have to go back and look at a lot of stuff.

Weiss:

I can check those too.

Trivelpiece:

But then we are not going to have two things: one is an Isabelle repeat, which is you get the civil construction done and then you discover that nobody has [successfully] designed the magnets. [Brookhaven Director] Nick Samios will disagree with that, but I'll stick to my story. The other was, we're not going to get a situation in which the site and the technical approach are inextricably linked, so that the Department has no option. So about this time, also, another issue came to my mind, and that was how did you go about selecting for Fermilab? [ed. He means choosing the Batavia, IL, site for what became the National Accelerator Laboratory.] And I still meet people at Berkeley who are mad at the fact that Fermilab had been selected as the site instead of near Sacramento.

I learned a lot of interesting aspects and things. What I did was interview about twenty people: Glenn Seaborg, Norman Ramsey, a whole class of people like that. And Seaborg in particular, asked how did this come about? Is it really true that Lyndon Johnson really [had] a role in any of this stuff. According to Seaborg, the answer is no. And the only thing he did was to say that there had to be two sites in Texas, and what that led to was that there were 135 proposals for what became Fermilab, and they pruned it down to about 30. And the reason that 30 was the number is that that included both sites in Texas. Currently that was the only thing that Johnson put out on that, or interfered with. Other people claim he interfered, Seaborg claims he didn't. I am inclined to believe what Seaborg said, because he kept really good contemporaneous written notes on these things.

But I interviewed all of them. So what did I put together in the form of site-selection criteria? Did that, and then went to talk with Frank Press [ed. then president of the National Academy of Sciences] and Bob White [president of the National Academy of Engineering] and Sam (?), who I guess was with the Institute of Medicine at that time, and ask for their help. And that's when they got involved with, and got [Scripps Institute director and former DOE OER director] Ed Frieman as chairman of the SSC site selection committee. So this was kind of going on in 1986, I was anticipating that we were going to get to that point at some point. I may have the timing of this a little bit wrong in my mind.

Weiss:

That seems right, because once the Presidential decision is made the....

Trivelpiece:

But it hadn’t been made yet.

Weiss:

The appearance of the National Academy [inaudible] is very rapidly [inaudible].

Trivelpiece:

But I could not... This is something that most people do not understand. One day, the president signed the decision [ed. In January 1987], I was six months behind in getting the work done. Now why didn’t I do the work before? I could not do anything that anticipated the successful outcome of the presidential decision. If I did anything that looked like I believed it was going to come out one way or the other, I would probably have gotten thrown out. You don’t do that. The president has the free right to make the decision in a matter like this, and you’re not supposed to go out and do things, thinking “This is right, I really know he’s going to approve this, and therefore I’m going to spend the taxpayers’ money anticipating the successful outcome.” You can get some really interesting opportunities to go up and explain your motives and actions to members of Congress. So I couldn’t do a thing yet.

And so there was some part of that [effort] which did not anticipate a successful outcome, but was my trying to understand.... If you had to do this over again, what mistakes did you make? What would you do differently? And as I say, it was about 20 people [I interviewed], and I got an interesting line on some physics history which wouldn't otherwise have come about — the fact that the decision had been made (and this should be in the SSC historical archives) to site what became Fermilab in Sacramento. And [Isidor] Rabi — probably, and this is hearsay — apparently talked Ed Condon, who was running the thing out in Boulder, to submit another proposal. First time the agency had ever been confronted with an unsolicited proposal. All of the sudden they've got two proposals. What are you going to do? Well, who knows what they said, but the outcome was that they threw this open for competition. They expected maybe one or two more, but after all, they had already made up their mind that they were going to put it in Sacramento, right? 135 proposals came in. They literally did not know what to do about that. Tommy Thompson, one of the commissioners on the committee wanted to go out and inspect sites. I felt that having DOE do this did not provide as good of political isolation as having the Cabinet do this, so that's why I asked Frank [Press?].

Weiss:

Was it political isolation against Congress?

Trivelpiece:

Well, to the nth degree. "Trust us, would we lie to you? We're the Department of Energy." You know, there's a certain stigma, and even Hazel O'Leary [ed. Bill Clinton's first Energy Secretary] said that the public trusts the Department of Energy probably on the same level that it trusts the IRS. So you want a decision that would survive and beat a GAO [General Accounting Office] challenge. And, of course the GAO did challenge [the Texas site decision], and it did survive the challenge. So we started to put in place a collection of hurdles which would be sufficiently clear that in the end, when the final competitive few were selected, and the final competitive branch cleared, that a competitive selection was made, that it wouldn't be challengeable on any trivial grounds. And that part seemed to work alright. There were aspersions that this was done for political reasons, but I don't think that was the case. In any event, going back a bit then....

Weiss:

There are also some historical accounts that indicate that Illinois had some political basis for that [Batavia site being chosen for the National Accelerator Laboratory] as well.

Trivelpiece:

Which decision?

Weiss:

The siting of Fermilab. That there was a collection of Midwestern senators who looked at the map and said that there was a lot on the East Coast, there is a lot on the West Coast, we need something near our universities.

Trivelpiece:

I've heard that story. I think the one that probably has more bearing on it had to do with the state of Illinois coming forward with eliminating its racial barriers. You need to check on that, and I could probably reconstruct some of the story, but I know there are people who know. That was the hold-up. This did something for Lyndon Johnson that was quite important. Now I don't think that was the turning-point, and I doubt that any of the other political muscle, as the term...

Weiss:

You would say that it is similar to the SSC story?

Trivelpiece:

Yeah, that it was done honestly, and straightforwardly, and on its merits. The only place we were having any trouble with the selection of Texas was: "Why wasn't the state of Mississippi included?" I went down to... What's the town down there, Starkville? It sits in the middle of a region which is very economically depressed. It's that high-delta region. It sits over an area which is something like 100 miles squared, which has about 20 to 50 feet of dirt [cover], and below that is 150 feet of chalk, and the chalk has an impressive strength of something like 50,000 psi and drills like hot butter. So geologically, they would have passed the test. For whatever reason, Mississippi was not included in the competitive six or seven. And the grounds was that it didn't have the necessary infrastructure. I think that if they had picked Mississippi, the SSC would now be operating, because the political momentum to cause that to fix an area in the United States which benefitted from that would have been quite important, and the question was: "Was snobbism really at work?" I don't know, but geologically I thought it had characteristics which were quite similar. And Tennessee also came tolerably close. I have had all the talk with Glenn [Seaborg?], and we've had that train started. We decided that $4.4 billion dollars is it. [ed. This is a big leap back in thought, back to the question of the estimated SSC cost, not the site-selection process.]

Weiss:

When you picked that number, you really felt that it was a stable number?

Trivelpiece:

Yes. In fact, I thought it was a number in which money would have been returned to the government once the project had been completed.

Weiss:

Which is of course [Robert] Wilson's famous achievement. [ed. Wolfgang Panofsky build SLAC under budget, too, but kept the savings for use in detector development.]

Trivelpiece:

Yes. Well, I mean we essentially bumped up the contingency by a substantial amount, taking into account that there were some experimental things. Now, you can ask by what justification we did that. Well, it is a justification to know that ultimately that appropriate funds are going to have to be attained, and certain cost-accounting standards are going to have to have to be looked at, and construction costs are going to have to be accounted for, and all that. And if $4.4 billion was too much, they would turn it in, and if it wasn't enough we would simply have to incrementally increase that. But what that did is it eliminated all the internal arguments about whether or not it was 4.0178625 [billion dollars] or 66, and that was getting to be quite tedious at that particular stage. So at the senior management level, the Salgado level, we just said: "That's it. Henceforth the Department goes forward; that is the number and the contingency will be whatever it will be to make that number come out that way." It was a very straightforward and intelligent thing to do at that point.

[cut in tape] [ed. There is also a leap in thought forward in time, from 1986 to 1987.]

And I was in fact prepared to write a decision memorandum to that effect at that time, but eventually I got to where it was close to my leaving and basically ought to have vacated my involvement in it. But I thought [inaudible] was the responsible agent for it. And did the [inaudible] play an appropriate role, the Office of Energy Research should be responsible for it. But clearly there ought to be.... I probably was at odds with people inside the Office of Energy Research, because for this to be another "Dumpty-Dump" project inside the High Energy Physics program seemed to me to be inappropriate. The Presidential priority project, at $4.4 billion. If not an assistant secretary doing it, there out to be somebody reporting directly to the assistant secretary, namely the director of energy research. So I was prepared to create a new special projects office, find somebody to put in charge of that office, and run it through the Office of Energy Research — and essentially endow that individual with reporting to me directly or to my successor, and being responsible for the life of the project. It's a big deal. I mean, this is the largest proposed civil construction project that the United States was ever going to have taken on, and therefore (and it had a Presidential seal on it) it should be done at a level and in a mode and manner that was consistent with that.

Weiss:

And this was a structure then that Watkins picks up and implements?

Trivelpiece:

No, No. Watkins, in my mind, did not do it right, because one of the things that I think is imperative is a strong system of financial controls, project management. And the Office of Energy Research was in a better position to do that. It hired two people — Joe Cipriano and Ed Siskin, I guess [ed. Admiral Watkins imposed these hires on OER and the SSC Lab in 1990, well after Trivelpiece had left]. That deprived the Office of Energy Research [of control], since it had to get the money, and should have been accountable for it, it basically deprived them of the proper management role that they should have had in doing this. And Jim [Watkins] and I have never argued about this particular point, but I think that he did not do it in the right manner.

Now I don't think that that's what went wrong, that that is why the SSC failed, but it contributed toward it because it created a climate in which, they said, "Okay, now we've got the project, now we'll tell you how much it's really going to cost." I was accused of being a liar, by a lot of people, because I had said it would be $4.4 billion and no more, and had testified to that effect on a number of occasions, promised the President of the United States personally that it would not exceed that amount. That was the correct number, and my colleagues and I had always said, "Oh yeah, we'll do it for that." The ink was hardly dry [ed. on the SSC management and operations contract with URA], they throw Maury Tigner out, [ed. Maury decided to return to Cornell soon after the contract was signed.] they redesign the thing, and they come up with a much larger number.

Now was it the increased size in the [magnet] aperture or the concern over the [long] commissioning time such that that warrants a higher energy injector? I don't know, that's an interesting debate. But I kept asking them repeatedly over a period of several years, "Don't try to second guess me over the political part of this. You tell me what you think it costs." And I'm quite convinced that if the number had been $5.5 billion instead of $4.4 billion, that on a particular day that the President had signed the decision memorandum, it would not have mattered. But the fact is that once you've gone forward, and you justify it, then the question was: "Well, those swine (?) physicists, you can't trust them, you cannot trust them because they lie. You told us this. You lied to us, because you said it would be that amount." [inaudible] And I do still suffer some degree of embarrassment over that particular matter.

And then the other one was of course — I could probably go back and find the minutes in there — I said, "You guys realize, that if you proceed with this, there's a reasonable chance that Fermilab, Brookhaven, or SLAC go out of business." Or it'll happen one way or the another. It will either happen because of positive action, or it will happen because, like what happened at Berkeley. Everybody will realize that "this is where the action is," and they’re going to run and go there. And eventually one of the three sites is no longer going to be viable, and it will probably be recommended for termination by you. Well, somewhere along the line, we'll need the upgrade for this, and [Watkins?] isn't agreeing — whatever, I don't know what happened. But in any event, all of the sudden the uproar toward fixing the other labs up, and now the SSC cost goes up to $6 billion dollars, and inflation, and then several members of Congress say it's really $10 billion, and it got out of hand. You can go back — and I've thought about this hundreds of times — and I go back, and I can't find a triggering event.

Weiss:

It's one of the most difficult things to track down.

Trivelpiece:

But [Kansas] Congressman [Jim] Slattery, as far as I'm concerned, he's the one who is the evil deed-doer, because he actually introduced the legislation that ultimately resulted in its death. And [Louisiana Senator] Bennett Johnson, with all of his influence and prestige, couldn't overturn a one-term Congressman from Kansas. I still regard that as an American shame and, unfortunately, an American tragedy.

Anyway, I look at all the people who left tenured positions and went down to Waxahachie, Texas, and they couldn't even spell it. [ed. Not that many physicists left tenured positions to go to Texas.] It was a dream. And I think our country blew it on this one. I would have been happy — and I've said so many times — if Reagan had said no that day [ed. 29 January 1987, when Trivelpiece presented the SSC project to the White House Domestic Policy Council (DPC)]. I wouldn't have been happy, I would have been disappointed, but we'd had the opportunity to prepare a $100 million dollar design. Our design was accurate and fair, the question was well-posed, and we'd had an opportunity to brief the President of the United States on it, the full Cabinet was there, and we talked about it. The President [could have] said: "Well, thank you very much, I'm not interested. We won't do this." Okay, we struck out. But for him to say yes, for the Congress to say yes, to have spent as much money as we did, to have made as much progress as we did, [and then cancel the project,] that was in my mind truly outrageous.

Weiss:

As far as domestic politics was concerned in the Cabinet, there were two meetings before the meeting with the President. And when I went out to the Reagan Library, I was unable to piece together the entire argument of the speech because they closed some of the memoranda to the President from those early meetings because it's confidential advice to the President. I don't have access to that for 5 more years. It seems like there was some level of contention in those meetings that required a presidentially headed meeting of the same group. Could you give me a sense of what was going on there? Were you present at those meetings?

Trivelpiece:

Oh yeah. I was present. I made the presentations. The first one John Herrington and I went to. I guess that was a DPC meeting and I think, if I remember correctly, Hodel was running it. I think he was head of the DPC at that time, at least he was acting as the head of it. The usual collection of people was there, and we went over the proposal with them. And at that stage it wasn't flip charts, it was just little booklets that went over all the things. Don [Hodel], I think, was opposed to it, and he raised some questions about it. And the questions then required... It was kind of like, "Have you done enough work?" That kind of frosted me. I didn't quite know what Don was up to. But in any event, we had another meeting and it's the day before Christmas. Herrington was out at his cabin at Lake Tahoe. Bill Martin and I were the two folks that were going over. He was Deputy Secretary [of Energy] at the time. And I took about ten boxes of material, all of which were the designs and design studies from all the hearings. It literally filled the middle of the table, I guess in the Roosevelt Room.

[break in interview]

Weiss:

After a bit of an interruption, we are back here at the interview. Before we left, we were talking about the Cabinet meeting; this is the Domestic Policy Council meeting. And I think we had gotten through the first two meetings and were about to go to the presidential meeting [in January 1987].

Trivelpiece:

Yes, from my point of view, and from the point of view of Secretary Herrington, and the coaching that he gave Bill Martin and I, it was to get the Domestic Policy Council to agree that this was a matter of sufficient importance that direct presidential participation in the meeting was an essential ingredient.

Weiss:

The decision was more to gain the President's support as stronger than just the Domestic Policy Council, as opposed to, say, some kind of dispute within the Council?

Trivelpiece:

The issue we were trying to put on the table was: did this project warrant the President's participation in the decision-making process, or was it something that the DPC would do? And weren't seeking approval of the SSC. We were seeking recognition of the fact that this ought to be a meeting that involved the President. Now at that particular stage, I was working on — and this gets into an area of disagreement with my friend [former NSF Director] Eric Bloch — but the drill was: how do you put something like this forward and have it accepted by the small-science community? Well, it seemed that if you ran the SSC for ten years, and that cost $4.4 billion dollars, and during that same period you doubled the NSF budget in five years and let it run for another five years, if you do the arithmetic, that would turn out to have been $10 billion of new money for the clients of the National Science Foundation. So the idea was that this would be a combined NSF and Supercollider announcement, and that that would be in the [1987] State of the Union message by the President. And we worked out the language for that, and much to my disappointment, it didn't happen because the information we received was that we were going to have a Cabinet meeting on the subject, but it was going to be two days after the State of the Union message. And so with great distress the sections referring to the Supercollider were removed from the State of the Union speech. So, therefore, they never existed.

Weiss:

I wondered what happened to that, because I found some information about language to go into the State of the Union address, and I couldn't find it in the State of the Union address.

Trivelpiece:

No, it wasn't in there. And you might well imagine that I was in a state of high distress. I was glad that we were going to get to talk to Mr. Reagan, but the other side of that was that it wasn't going to be in there because we couldn't get the Cabinet meeting scheduled before the State of the Union speech. And that was perfectly reasonable. When you look back now, in the light of historical 20-20 hindsight, and you realize all the things going on in the White House at that time that have since been documented in the historical accounts, it's amazing that we ever got on the agenda, to have a Cabinet meeting for this project. And then the Cabinet meeting itself... I guess I made a 15 or 20 minute presentation — actually it was really 15 minutes.

I use this as an example when I try to get people to understand what it means to give a briefing, because there are two kinds of briefings. There's one that's called a constant-interval briefing, and there's the constant-message briefing. If you're lucky enough to be in position where you're giving a constant-message briefing, it means that if somebody asks you a question you just keep talking until you get the whole message out. Whatever the message is, whether it takes 10 minutes, 20 minutes, or 30 minutes, you do it and you're always going to get the whole message out until you come to the conclusion. Then there's the other kind, in which at the end of 15 minutes you're going to stop talking, no matter what message you've gotten out. Well, this was a 15 minute delivery. It didn't matter if somebody interrupted me, or the President interrupted me, or whatever, I was going to have to subtract that out of the time that was available. Here's a $4.4 billion project, and all I get is one shot at it, and I get 15 minutes in which to do it.

And as Bill Martin said: "Well, Al, all your friends and colleagues are depending on you, now don't be nervous when you go over and make this presentation." He came close to being slugged at that moment because until that point I don't think I had really been nervous. At that particular point he made me think about it, and I was nervous. But in that sense — and I've still got all the stuff, and that is one of things that I will make available [inaudible] — the briefing went very well. It was simple and at the end of it, Secretary Herrington took a few minutes to summarize the situation from his point of view as the Cabinet officer involved. And then Mr. Brock, Bill Brock, spoke.

Weiss:

Bill Brock is Secretary of Education?

Trivelpiece:

No. I believe Sam Pearson was Transportation. [ed. Bill Brock was Secretary of Labor in January 1987.]

Weiss:

Okay.

Trivelpiece:

And he spoke quite eloquently on the value of science to the United States, and that this was a project which should be done. And other members spoke, some in favor, some not in favor. The incident I remember most is [OMB Director] Jim Miller saying that this will only make physicists happy, and the President said: "Maybe that is only fair because I certainly made physics professors unhappy [inaudible]." And then at some point the President pulled out a card and said that this was something that had been written by Jack London and proceeded to say that "I'd rather be ashes than dust, I'd rather be [inaudible], I'd rather be a superb meteor..." And he said that that had been Roger [ed. he means Kenny Stabler's] statement when he was quarterback for the Oakland Raiders, and that when asked what was the deep and hidden significance of that, Reagan said: "Throw deep!" We all laughed and clapped, and the President exited. The next day he signed a decision memorandum which caused the project to get started.

I thought it was interesting in a rather unusual way, that he informed us not that the decision was "yes" but that the decision probably was going to be "yes." And that even in a period of budgetary stringencies and concern over the deficit, that there are things that a nation needs to do that look out into the future, and that this was sure a good thing to do. And I think his past association with the University of California, and with John Lawrence, and with [Ernest?] Lawrence, his brother... Well, he understood a great deal about the role of Berkeley and the cyclotrons and all that, and he had knowledge of some of these things. To this day I don't know if anybody did a pre-brief for him. And if they did, I don't know if he did what they told him. So I don't know whatever this guy did was what he heard.

Weiss:

Was there anyone tracking your preparations in the White House?

Trivelpiece:

That's an interesting point. I do not like to do dry runs. I did no dry runs for this talk. And when people say, well you've got to do a dry run for this, I say: "Well, I didn't do one for the President of the United States, I don't reckon I'll do one for this particular event either." No, I obviously rehearsed it personally, and I had parsed every word out of my presentation that I could, and I would say it was a very good presentation by any standards. But no, in the sense of doing a dry run for anybody else. No, I didn’t even do one for John Herrington, and even Herrington was surprised when I used that line about where Fermilab was, that Fermilab was not 50 miles west of Chicago, was in fact 50 miles east of Dixon, Illinois. He and the other Cabinet members laughed at that, or groaned a little bit, and that was an interesting way, and the President smiled about that, and I think appreciated the subtlety of it [laughter]. So I tried to make it entertaining, and I tried to make it informative, and I did not say, “This is a quark, this is a gluon, this is a lepton.” I tried to point out what was the importance to the United States of proceeding with this, and what was at stake. By the same token, [inaudible], and of course Secretary Herrington. On one occasion I said: “I don’t want to do anything that causes you to be misled. Obviously, I’m enthusiastically in favor of this, but you ought to hear from the people who are not in favor of it.” And so I got together a collection of about 20 people in his office.

Weiss:

These were scientists?

Trivelpiece:

Yeah, and some were strongly in favor, and some were strongly opposed. And I said, “These are the people,” and I outlined what peoples’ positions were. And he listened to all of them, and what surprised me was that it was more along the lines of, "Why is this valuable to the United States?" whereas a lot of my colleagues said, "Can't you [inaudible.] He's going to want to support this." Oh, Lord. Sometimes our colleagues are not always as understanding about what it takes to get something like this through the system as they should be. But Herrington became a supporter.

One of the things that had come up — which I think has to do with how one pays political debts, and is part of the arrogance of some of my colleagues — was the deal that this would be called the Reagan Accelerator Center, wherever it went. And there probably would have been a dedication. There should in my mind have been a dedication in which he was brought to it, and there would have been a dedication with probably five living Presidents there. And if the physics community, the high-energy physics community, had proceeded with the dedication in which that took place, I think the project would have been bullet-proof from a financial point of view. But they basically decided through some form of snobbism that Mr. Reagan's name on an accelerator center is probably not acceptable. Whether that caused them to pay the price for it not being a facility nobody will ever know, but I think they didn't pay a political debt that I believe that they had signed up for.

Weiss:

How would the naming of the lab to be the Ronald Reagan Accelerator Center occur? Would that be something the OER would decide, or the SSC lab staff...?

Trivelpiece:

No, that was part of the condition of going forward with the project.

Weiss:

It was part of the... okay.

Trivelpiece:

Not that Mr. Reagan ever knew that, but all the rest of us did. And it had come up on one of the trips when I was overseas as part of the economic summit, [ed. which was part of the Group of Seven meetings], and I just assumed that everybody would live up to it. To me it seems axiomatic that this is a means by which the project would go forward. I mean, there's a Johnson Space Flight Center, and that gives it a certain degree of invulnerability. Well, they didn't call it the Wernher Von Braun Space Flight Center, they call it the Johnson Space Flight Center. Now whether or not picking a scientist to have it named after ... As it is, it is not named after anybody now. But I know that John Herrington was prepared to, at some point, go forward, and [President George H. W.] Bush even said that he thought about calling it the Reagan Accelerator Center. So why our colleagues decided not to fulfill what I thought was a firm political obligation on their part, to this day I don't understand or know.

Weiss:

Where would say science generally fit into the Reagan agenda, in a broader view?

Trivelpiece:

In my view it was near the top. If you look at the Office of Energy Research, the budgets that I was responsible for in the six years that I was there grew something over 80 percent in real terms. I don't think there was any other element except some of the defense programs that grew at the same level, and most of that was for basic research. And to the extent that the Office of Energy Research is the principal agent [for physical science] inside the Department of Energy, and supports in fact four times as much physical science as NSF does, that grew by 80 percent. Now the person that told me all that was Mike Telson, who was the staffer for Mr. Gray, chairman of the House Budget Committee in that period. So Mike had gone off and analyzed it and he said: "You're the sweepstakes winner." This was when I was out of the job. He said you're the sweepstakes winner in this because in six years it went up 80-some-odd, 86 or 87 percent in real terms. I had not thought about it in those terms. I had not gone after that as a target, goal, or objective. I just happened to believe that science is an important ingredient in the national enterprise, and everywhere I could push I did — whether it was the Human Genome Project, or the Spallation Neutron Source [ed. at Oak Ridge National Lab], or ALS [ed. Advanced Light Source at Berkeley], or CEBAF, computers, everything I could go after, as far as I could go after, I went after it. Same way with the SSC.

Weiss:

Before I asked if you were Director of the Office of Energy Research as the SSC percolated up, would you have had a predisposition to support the SSC, or was it really following the design that convinced you...?

Trivelpiece:

Well, there are a number of necessary conditions. There's certainly the necessary condition that the high-energy physics community had to assert that Isabelle wasn't going to be continued. They had to assert that this was the next most important question for the high-energy physics community to address. They had to come to the cold realization that this project might well impair one of the other facilities, the future health and well-being... So, those are all necessary conditions that this has to be the right science. Given all those necessary conditions, I certainly had no problem with going for a facility that would allow making progress in an area of physics I happen to hold important. And curiosity. I have the same inquisitiveness that most of the other people who are living this really do. I like to know the answers. What did happen before the first [inaudible] months [inaudible]?

Weiss:

Who did you regularly consult about the SSC as you were coming to a supporting position?

Trivelpiece:

Lots and lots of people, and like I said, to go after the idea of how would you go about site selection? I talked to 20 people and obviously [inaudible] and [inaudible], certain other people who I relied heavily on in terms of having respect for his judgement and his understanding of government, and how it worked. People at OMB. Hugh Loweth [ed. the OMB official who handled energy and science], whom I think is one of the people who [knew] science of the United States... Nobody ever makes a monument to an OMB examiner, but the science community, I think they owe one to Hugh Loweth. I always felt that very strongly. I talked to him a lot, and he certainly helped in guiding me on how to go about managing the aspect of the budgetary elements associated with the SSC.

Weiss:

So, he was the examiner for the [inaudible]?

Trivelpiece:

No, that was actually Judy Bostock, and then Tom Halmary (?), but Hugh Loweth had the position equivalent to the one now that Katherine [unintelligible] does. So there are political appointtees, T.J. (?), then there is [unintelligible], then there is Terry Bennet, and now there is Michelle Donovan. The examiner is Michelle Donavan, and I guess that would have been Bostock [inaudible]. There was somebody else in there as well. But how to go about doing these things... There's the mechanics of government, you have to understand the mechanics.

Weiss:

So that was in some sense more important to your framing of the SSC as a project than the physics, and the support of the physics community?

Trivelpiece:

No, the physics community comes first. Okay, there has to be the leading up. The physics has to be right because there is no way you can get past square one if the physics is wrong. And see, that was the thing I found the most fascinating answer, and the one that was most disarming to most people, is that the various people who were unalterably hard-nosed, publicly opposed to the SSC when I would talk to them, would say: "Yes, of course, those are important questions to answer. Collisions of this sort will likely yield new information." Do you agree that that's the right thing to do? "Yes, but it costs too much." Aha, you've just crossed over from being a physicist to being a politician. Don't tell me how much it costs. Tell me if the physics is wrong. If the physics is wrong, I'll do everything I can to kill the project. Nobody, during the entire time that this was going on, ever said that this was not the right physics to be pursuing. But a lot of people who were opposed to it were opposed to it for a variety of extraneous reasons, most of which usually were like, "This will take money from small science, or this will cause the budget to be [inaudible], or this is too much money to answer that question." But is the question the wrong question to be asking? Absolutely not. It was the right question to be asking. So, you have to be in an unassailable position from the point of view of, "Is this the right physics to do, or any other, is this the right biology?" If you can't answer that question in the affirmative then you've got no business chasing a project, large or small.

Weiss:

About what proportion of your time did you spend on the SSC? Was this a half-time proposition? Ten percent of the time?

Trivelpiece:

No, I'm sure I spent more of my time on fusion. Not because I was interested in it, but because it was in trouble most of the time.

Weiss:

This refers to the Princeton program?

Trivelpiece:

Well, the whole United States. It included Los Alamos and Berkeley, and there was a thing called MFTF-B [ed. the Mirror Fusion Test Facility B] and the like. Congress was cutting the program fairly consistently, the OMB was cutting it. Don Hodel said at one point that the United States is not likely to put 500 million bucks into a program that doesn't have a useful product for 30 years. Well, he was right. You know, painfully, he was right. But I still believe that the right thing to do is to as rapidly and efficiently as possible answer the question: can you assemble a collection of charged particles at a temperature and density such that the [combustion energy?] due to fusion reactions will exceed the energy of assembly. That's a fairly straightforward question, and if you can answer that in the affirmative, then the amount of money you spend after that isn't as important.

On the other hand, if you pursue this at a rate that is below a critical level, you may never get the answer — even at infinity. So, I was always interested in trying to ask what is the area, what is the curve, that will produce the answer with the least total expenditure? And I always thought that it [the funding] was sub-critical, and the question was: can you make this an international program? And I got caught up with Reagan and Gorbachev to try to get the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) started. And I had an interesting, pivotal role in getting all that done. But part of that was to get the question answered as quickly as possible, because if it ain't going to work, if after all these years of enthalpy (?) versus sigma b (?), enthalpy (?) versus time, if this curve goes up to the magic number and then turns flat, and remains flat forever, epsilon below break-even, that would be a cruel and unusual turn of nature.

So I believe that unless something happens this slope is going to continue that line through break-even. Well, it does, but then the question is: so what? Maybe it's not an economical means. But I was also interested in getting this up, answer the question, get on with either doing it or not doing it, but, Jesus, don't run it at a level that's anemic in which you never answer the question, forever. The same thing is true of all of these, so when you ask which one I put the most time on...

[Tape Ends. Interview continues.]

Weiss:

What were your initiatives that you were remarking on? You mentioned the fusion program, but that sounded more like [you were] keeping it alive. CEBAF was coming in.

Trivelpiece:

Well, CEBAF had actually started before I took the job, but then, obviously getting it through the system clearly fell on my shoulders. Beyond that, I proposed the activities that led to the synchrotron light source at Berkeley, the synchrotron light source at Argonne, the heavy-ion collider at Brookhaven. Already having spent $119 million on the tunnel up there, the next question was: what else could you do instead of what ultimately became the CERN project? Unfortunately, they didn't get the W-plus or Z-zero, but they weren't going to get it anyway, they just couldn't get there fast enough. And of course, at that particular stage also, having no knowledge I was coming here [ed. to Oak Ridge National Laboratory], the Advanced Neutron Source. So, there were four major projects. And then the Advanced Neutron Source required research [funding?], which I say was collateral damage, along with the death of the SSC. And now of course we're trying to look for a Spallation Neutron Source, and that happened fairly recently. Mr. Gore and Mr. Clinton decided that they were going to put $23 million dollars into getting it started this year, and that's a happy occasion down here.

Weiss:

Generally, the programs had much more visibility?

Trivelpiece:

The archive [?] is close to $1 billion bucks. I mean, that's not a piece of chicken feed. Although it was originally supposed to cost $400 million it did come in. ... But then that was a change in scope. Some inflation and some change in scope.

Weiss:

Okay, where did the Office of Science and Technology Policy go? I mean, it's been missing from the discussion, and it seems like it would have been involved in such an act. [ed. Here the focus seems to switch back to the SSC from the Spallation Neutron Source.]

Trivelpiece:

Certainly Jay was involved, Jay Keyworth. [ed. Director of OSTP from 1981 to 1985] I talked with Jay about this a lot. I've got to be careful how I say what I say because I don't want to give you the wrong impression. Jay was a strong, enthusiastic supporter of going forward with the SSC and came to several OER meetings and so stated. It isn't entirely clear to me that he was treated fairly in terms of recognition for what he did by the high-energy physics community after the fact, after he left the job. But that's one of the casualties of working in the government, you don't necessarily get credit for these things. He deserves more than he got.

Bill Graham came in, and Bill Graham was actually the President's science advisor at the time the Cabinet meeting took place [January 1987], and in fact he made a couple of comments during the course of the meeting which I think were in fact quite productive and useful in terms of steering the conversation in the directions that resulted in the President's approval. So somewhere between Jay's departure, and John McTague on an acting basis, and Bill Graham, I had help and support. But I also had a lot of help from a lot of other places. If OSTP had taken a hard position in opposition to it, it would have been impossible to get it through. Their unabashed support would not have been sufficient to get it through, so it took all these things. Any activity like this has a thousand parents, and this had a lot of parents. And some of whom... People like David Gardner, who was president of the University of California at that time and wrote an absolutely superb letter to the President in support of this, and he did so from the point of view of having written.... What was that education report?

Weiss:

"A Nation at Risk?"

Trivelpiece:

Yeah, "A Nation at Risk," I guess. The education thing. He wrote a superb letter, and I'm sure that had influence on the President and others. And there were a lot of other people who weighed in — some for, and some against — but the project attracted a lot of attention. As one of the senators said: "Until such time as the first site selection level is made, you'll probably have as many as 90 of us strongly in favor of this," which is more or less correct. But when we went to seven, [ed. After the initial culling down to eight sites and New York had dropped out] then there weren't quite as many in favor of it, and certainly when it went down to one... But he said, "We will live up to our obligation to go forward with this," and that's why I'm more distressed by the fact that they decided to increase the request. That then broke the obligation on the part of the members of Congress who said they would support this no matter where it goes. That contained with it the understanding, if you bring it in at the price you said you were going to.

Weiss:

One of the opponents was [New York Congressman] Sherry Boehlert. Obviously Sherry was a member of the Science Committee, or whatever its name was. Did you or Boehlert, or you and other members of that committee ever develop some sort of relationship?

Trivelpiece:

Boehlert, as far as I know, was enthusiastically in favor of proceeding with this early on. Somewhere along the line in the site selection criteria I was given the chore of figuring out, whether we will allow any state of the United States to include, as an artifact of its proposal, the benefits of having itself attached to another country, Mexico or Canada. And I thought about it, and I thought that that would be unfair. I said no.

Weiss:

It would be unfair to the other states?

Trivelpiece:

It would be unfair to the interior states that might be proposing it, so to that extent my effort in preparing for the site-selection criteria was to ensure an absolutely level playing field, so it could stand the GAO [ed. General Accounting Office] challenge subsequent to site selection. If you have the whole country of Canada as a declared asset in your proposal, for whatever freebies, electricity, you want, then that creates an unlevel playing field, and I thought that that was unfair. Mr. Boehlert, I think to this day believes that John Herrington made that choice, and John Herrington (without knowing that I had done it) bravely stepped forward and said he did, and that was wonderful. But in fact it was a routine element in the site-selection criteria. But once Boehlert found out that was the case, he then became very hostile and opposed to it, and also there was some issue that people in that part of New York State became opposed to it as well. But there was a period where he was in favor of it.

Weiss:

Were any other members of that committee really important supporters or opponents?

Trivelpiece:

Well, I think the House Science and Technology Committee — HS&T I guess at one time — probably had more of the ability to influence the outcome of events usually presided over by Mr. Bevill's committee, in appropriations [ed. Alabama Congressman Tom Bevill, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Projects], than it did in the authorization committee. To understand what the Congress was doing at that particular period in time is a complicated question [inaudible]. Appropriations had more control. DOE and I had an authorization for a long time, therefore the appropriations committees played a role in that. So, to that extent probably it was the few people in the appropriations committee, and Mr. Bevill, he really worked hard, and Hunter Spillan, his chief of staff, who was probably in favor of the SSC. ... It wasn't even clear that everybody on the committee at that time was — well, the staff was in favor of it. But without Mr. Bevill and Mr. Meyers' [ed. Indiana Congressman John Myers, the minority leader on the committee] help in this effort, I don't think we ever would have gotten it off the ground. By the same token, [Louisiana Senator] Bennett Johnson at one point ... I don't think Bennett was enthusiastically in favor of it at the beginning, but he certainly became a firm enthusiast for it by the end. In fact, he used all of his prestige to try to get it through at one point. A guy from Kansas [Congressman Jim Slattery] led the House opposition.

Weiss:

In your internal discussions, or your discussions with other members of the government, or even with other physicists, did the CERN Nobel prizes [ed. for the discovery of the W and Z bosons] come up and play a role, an important role, in the SSC support within the administration? I mean, there was this classic New York Times editorial titled, "Europe 3, United States not even Z-0."

Trivelpiece:

I don't know. It's an interesting question. It's speculation, and I don't know that it would be much more than that. The guy who was head of the House Science Committee, Bob something from New Jersey, went off to Transportation....

Weiss:

Oh, Bob Roe?

Trivelpiece:

Yeah. He visited CERN. And probably one of the best things that could've happened for the SSC was [inaudible]. A sense that it gave him a somewhat arrogant description of the fact that Europe was clearly ahead and the United States was likely to remain behind indefinitely. Mr. Roe came back furious, and by God, the United States was going to build the SSC. And he did become a very strong supporter for it at that particular point.

Now, another funny thing — you hear about all that stuff that went wrong — I had prepared a letter that either the President or Mr. Herrington would send out, to either the other heads of state or to their counterparts in the case of ministers, and the thrust of the letter was going to be that the United States has decided to proceed with the design and construction and operation of the Superconducting Super Collider. Recognizing the international nature of this area of science, we wish to involve other nations [in this project?]. But a representative of our government would be in contact with them in the future to explore their interest in participating with us in this project.

Well, I say this wasn't initially an international project. The intent, by the Presidential decision memorandum and everything I did, was to make this international. I visited Japan. It is my belief that the government of Japan was prepared to put $400 million dollars into this if they were just asked. Mr. Shitako (?) and others had given me to believe that this was quite accurate. That may not be provable in retrospect, but I'm quite certain that that's the case. This letter, for whatever reason, got held up in somebody's inbox in the State Department. They didn't send it out. They were supposed to. I was mad then; I am still mad, because I believe that had that letter gone out, and routine diplomatic courtesy calls followed — including, I would have gotten on [from a number of cities?], because I had already gone over there many times — that we would have captured a substantial amount of support for the SSC. Real money. By virtue of waiting a long time, then other things began to happen, and the letter was no longer relevant. If I hadn't waited... The opportunity to get an early commitment from Japan and a couple of other countries was lost. I think that was a tragedy. You can never go back and redo that, but I'd laid all the groundwork for it.

I'd been to Japan on several occasions, and I was chairman of a committee, I think it was part of the Technology, Growth, and Employment summit. Remember [French President Francois] Mitterand had a summit [ed. of the Group of Seven nations]? At the summit there was [the theme of] Technology, Growth, and Employment. And one committee was on high-energy physics, and I chaired that. That included my counterparts in the Summit Seven countries. So, we talked a lot about this, and I like to believe — unless they were blowing smoke — that at some point there would have been appropriate support by most of those governments in the supercollider project. That would have required the right kind of quid pro quo. What do they want? And I'd gone so far as to meet with the heads of the European Community at that point, to see whether there was a way whereby we could say: "If the United States decided to proceed with this, we would like cost-sharing on your part. We will agree and stipulate now that we will then participate in some other projects in the future." And we could never define what the units of account would be, but that this would be the principle.

A lot of people liked that idea, and even today people are still trying to raise those questions. I know that there's this large-facility committee, or whatever it's called, [inaudible], I used to chat with people about it. It just seems silly that several nations would simultaneously, in the case of fusion, put up $8 billion each to build the [inaudible]. It's a foolish waste of money; it's a more foolish waste of talent. So, everybody gets caught up in the money. It isn’t the money; it's just that you don't want to squander the time and the people, which are very valuable. The scientists in this country. So, building the SSC on a collective basis, with talent from every country, is the right thing to have done. Not just money. Everybody always gets caught up in the money. Forget the money, none of these nations are broke, and this wouldn't have broken any nation. Fusion wouldn't have broken any nation. But you might have stretched the resources in terms of talent if you insisted that each nation build simultaneously the same object with the same result at the same time. That I regard as catastrophically stupid.

Weiss:

Speaking of this talent base, the resource of manpower, one of the early reports out of the conceptual design effort was the number, 2,300 physicists needed at the SSC. And at the time there were roughly 2,000 physicists in U.S. high-energy physics. It seems like one of two things had to happen: either there is going to be some dilution, or you end up in a situation where the [high-energy physics] base program is in direct competition with the SSC for all the talent. I probably shouldn't have framed the question so much.

Trivelpiece:

I understand what the question is, but I've never known how to answer it. It's like, how did you answer the question that Berkeley created the field, and they put Fermilab where it is? There were people who stayed at Berkeley for years after that and wouldn't even visit Fermilab because they thought that was outrageous. Eventually enough young physicists come along, they don't know anything about all the people who are still mad, they're going to go where the action is. If the SSC had been built, people would have gone where the action is, and these other issues would have become moot. What is the base program other than the assemblage of people who are trying to understand the most fundamental properties of matter? I can't believe that somebody would continue to pursue an activity that is not nearly as exciting, and if it's not nearly as exciting, then ultimately the funding goes away.

In fact, the Princeton-Penn accelerator doesn't exist anymore, and there's a bunch of accelerators... There was a point where everybody had their 2 MeV [machines], and then you had a few at 4 MeV, and then you a few at 6 MeV, and then pretty soon it boils down to Fermilab, SLAC, and Brookhaven. Then pretty soon it would have probably have boiled down to the SSC. Well, should we have an electron [collider]? Well, maybe the Europeans ought to build that? Well, then what happens to Stanford? Stanford gets some of that. Well, I don't know, but the degree to which the collection of people who pursue this area of science said, "This is the most important thing to do next," then I thought that was the thing to try to support. And I think that for some other strange reason, other extraneous considerations came into play which I think helped lead to the death of the SSC.

Weiss:

Did you make any effort to recruit other scientists from positions they held?

Trivelpiece:

Recruit? I wasn't in a recruiting position. I had a fixed collection of federal employees that worked for me.

Weiss:

In terms of moving money to high-energy physics training programs, graduate programs?

Trivelpiece:

Yeah, but the DOE supports more graduate students than anybody else in the world in that sense. And so what incremental things should have been done? My God, how many people [inaudibe]? Everybody piled off and went to Waxahachie, Texas. It was the place to go. [ed. Except for several important Fermilab leaders like Helen and Don Edwards, few senior physicists left tenured positions to go to Texas.] Promising tenure careers were altered; probably marriages and other things destroyed as a result of all that down there. But people went there because that was the place they wanted to go.

Well, one of the things we did, which was a funny event — somewhere along the line... I'd actually left DOE [by then] but I continued to see Joseph Salgado very frequently and he kept saying, what should we do? Well, [I replied], one of things you might consider is to have the President go to Fermilab. This is for the site-selection committee [inaudible]. Go out to Fermilab. No, no. Go out to California — I guess that was it — go out to California, get a few kids, go to Berkeley or something like that and talk about science. Now this got vetoed for a variety of reasons, and they were all correct. Eventually I said that instead of taking the President somewhere, why don't you get a few kids and we'll take them to the Roosevelt Room and have the President tell them about science and a few things, and maybe we can go up to talk to people on the Hill. Joe asked me how would you pick them? I said pick a collection of honor students that go to Fermilab every year. How would you pick them out? I said, it's no big deal, and I can do it on the computer. He said, no, invite them all, only a few will come anyway. We sent the letters out and of course all 50 kids, or whatever it was...

Weiss:

And their parents!

Trivelpiece:

They all came. All of the sudden we were stuck with this event, and it was kind of like: "Oh, good grief!" And so instead of a modest little ceremony in the Roosevelt Room we had a Rose Garden ceremony. And I got [SLAC Director] Burton Richter and [MIT physicist] Sam Ting, and everyone else to show up, and the President and Herrington. And they did a superb job. I mean, all the kids in the honors group picked two kids as representatives, and they went up there and met the President, and the President had a good time. It was a great event, but what was remarkable was not that Rose Garden ceremony [ed. On 30 March 1988], it was that all these kids went up on the Hill. And I learned later that there were two of them from one state who talked to a Congressman, and one of them said — two girls — "I want to be a high-energy physicist, I'm in high school now, I'm going to go to such and such university, and when I get out I want to be able to work on the SSC. You're in support of the SSC, is that right Congressman?" Well, of course he was. And these kids went up and did a better job of lobbying on behalf of the SSC than anybody who was a professional could ever hope to do. They came across well. They were sincere. Well, when you say, "Where is the training ground?" that's it. There's a lot of kids out there who were going to alter their careers in high school and college, and what do we do? We trash it. So when you ask, "Why aren't there enough students going off to pursue careers in science and engineering”, I'll tell you why. It's because you took away the SSC.

Weiss:

I guess the only other question I really have, and maybe I'll think of more: was there ever a national security angle to the SSC? From physics training it seems unlikely. Was that ever part of the discussion?

Trivelpiece:

Not in anything that I participated in. I did a lot of work in that area, so I think I would have known. No, other than as a device by which to help inspire young people to consider careers in science and engineering, which the nation needs. Other than that, no.

Weiss:

So, it was no more directly about national security than any...

Trivelpiece:

A lot of nuclear physics, plasma physics, and all of those provide experimental training ground. But in some sense plasma physics and nuclear physics [inaudible]. But nevertheless you get training in instrumentation, and measurements, and advancements in state of the art, and various kinds of things, that are really quite useful. I mean, people who go through that discipline end up useful in almost any area of technology. And a lot of the leading activities in high-performance computing have grown out of people who started in physics and got caught up in that and decided to do something else.

Weiss:

You also did mention in a couple of — with regard to site selection — especially the power of the GAO's oversight.

Trivelpiece:

No.

Weiss:

Or that you were concerned about your work being completely unassailable?

Trivelpiece:

Clean and unassailable. That this should be perceived to be a level-playing-field selection, and that the selection after the fact could be audited, explored, the people who made it interrogated, and in no sense would there ever be criticism that there were bias or improper behavior on the part of anyone doing it, because that would have been fatal. I wasn't going to put all this work in to have it fail for the trivial reason of performance on the part of someone in the selection process.

Weiss:

Is that an expression of GAO's reputation on Capitol Hill?

Trivelpiece:

No. Whether you call it the GAO, or the Inspector General, or whatever, I was absolutely certain that no matter how the site selection came in, there would be a challenge by somebody, for some reason. Not being able to know what the challenge would be, I just wanted to ensure that there was a level playing field, unassailably proper, capable of withstanding any after-the-fact investigation, and no impropriety in the process. And that's why, in particular, I chose Frank Press and Bob White, and asked them to play that role in this process, and then relinquished to them the responsibility for doing that [ed. the role of the NAS and NAE in making the selection of the best-qualified sites]. And I think it worked.

Weiss:

Yeah.

Trivelpiece:

In my opinion, it worked.

Weiss:

What I'm trying to get at is a sense of how powerful GAO is.

Trivelpiece:

No, it's not because of the power of GAO, but it was... GAO was the protype for anyone who might raise a protest, when in fact it could be any state. For instance, the state of Tennessee says, well, look, it came so close, we want to go back and see if you had done it some other way, maybe we would have been the winner. And we think that somebody on there was biased in favor of one of the states, and they have not been biased. And in fact, I really hadn't thought of GAO in this sense, other than just being the paradigm, but it was one of the losers, saying that we deserved it, you did the wrong thing, our governor wants to speak to the President and challenge this, and we're going to carry out an investigation.

Weiss:

So, the reference to GAO is as a place-holder for anyone for viewing your work, not that they had any particular stake or likely involvement.

Trivelpiece:

No, no.

Weiss:

Okay.

Trivelpiece:

But I've had several personal GAO investigations, so they do come to my mind from time to time.

Weiss:

Yes, there certainly would have been an examiner, a GAO examiner, who followed your work closely.

Trivelpiece:

Routinely. It should be a routine auditing question: was this done properly? I mean, you're going to spend $4 billion of the taxpayers’ money, and you want to do it without having anybody ask you, "Did you do it right?" No, I couldn't imagine that.

Weiss:

Are there any other people who come to mind who we need to make sure we talk to? You mentioned Hodel, Herrington, Salgado, Edwards, and so forth?

Trivelpiece:

If you want to know who would be interesting to talk with... Certainly Jim Edwards wasn't a player, because he left before any of this came up. Hodel was a player, and he has a good memory and an interest in science. Whether or not he recalls any specifics concerning this would be interesting. He got more caught up in CEBAF. I was out going to a meeting, then home to my hotel, after a meeting at Berkeley, driving along, [inaudible] and a guy says: "An advisory committee has decided that the CEBAF," and he reads it out, "will be located in Virginia."

I thought that was odd on several accounts. One, why is this on the 11 o'clock news in California, and I had a bad feeling this was trouble. And sure enough, this was trouble, because the announcement had been made late-night, and [Virginia Senator] John Warner and [Illinois Senator] Chuck Percy called Don, probably around midnight, one of course with pleasure, wanting to make sure it stayed in Virginia, and the other one outraged that it was not going to Argonne. Hodel, over a period of the next few weeks and months, became progressively more stressed, and at one point he asked, "Are people in this field always like this?" And I said, "Actually this isn't so bad, they're usually much worse." And he couldn't believe that here he was, a senior Republican Cabinet officer, just being whipsawed ruthlessly by two senior Republican senators, probably with whom he was on good terms otherwise. And he didn't like that, and how was it that we caused this particular event to have occurred in a way that put him in this somewhat awkward position. He didn't like it, so I'm sure he'd remember that part. Now, the part beyond that with the SSC, his memory might get dim. But if you do talk to him, he is likely to have a good and accurate memory of his relationships with Mr. Percy and Mr. Warner on CEBAF.

Weiss:

Do you know where Mr. Hodel is?

Trivelpiece:

He has a consulting company out in Colorado, that's all I remember. I saw Herrington on the tube last night, he was obviously someone. He's Chairman of the Republican Committee. He has a restaurant out in Walnut Creek, California. Bill Brock might be... He and I had exchanged correspondence on the fact that, this is sort of unfortunate that this came out the way it did. He might have an opinion on this matter, and certainly [Don Johnston?] does.

Weiss:

Yeah, I'm trying to get [David Johnston?] during his twilight hours here. He's seems interested. That was another interesting question. I guess I was sort of surprised that the other Cabinet officers had, in some sense, oversight and were consulted as part of the decision on the Department of Energy — on going forward with the SSC. Was that fairly typical?

Trivelpiece:

No. You're talking about... This is the largest civil construction project...

[Tape ends. Interview continues.]

Trivelpiece:

Therefore, it's really a question of the President's direct involvement. If you're going to have a Cabinet meeting, then the President is going to be there, and the other Cabinet members are going to be there, and they're entitled to have their say in this matter. And they did. [Walsh?] was the Deputy Secretary of State, I think, at that time. He vacillated. He was opposed to it for a while, but in the end it doesn't matter. Once the President has made a decision, then everybody was obviously unanimously in favor of it. Bill Brock, as I remember it, was the first person [to speak]... I'd say Bill Graham is probably worth talking to. He was physically there at that Cabinet meeting, so to that extent, that does put him in the player category.

Weiss:

What role did the lower DOE personnel play? Jim Decker, [inaudible], and so forth?

Trivelpiece:

Oh, a lot.

Weiss:

They did a lot of the leg work, certainly.

Trivelpiece:

There were a zillion meetings, and by the time I got it down to a 15-minute talk, it had gone from a three-hour dissertation. I had a lot of help, and I put a lot of people to a lot of work getting educated and refining the message. What is it that would cause the President of the United States to decide this is the right thing to do? What particular key questions? And I still have a briefing book around somewhere.

Weiss:

I saw the briefing book at the Reagan library. It was part of a [inaudible]. It seems very dense. I'm surprised that it only took 15 minutes to go through it.

Trivelpiece:

I did not waste a word. I said "no dry run," but there was a lot of self-rehearsal. I think I even sent my wife off to California during that period to visit her sisters because I didn't want any obstruction. And I look back at this, and I'm actually impressed with my own remarks. I'm normally not, but I thought that this did capture... You ask what I was thinking? Well, I thought, well, this is not bad. These were things that I had actually said in testimony. It was an interesting collection, an interesting thing to have done.

Weiss:

Did you ever work with Buck Cuette [inaudible] during this time? Sort of an in-and-out, all-around kind of fellow?

Trivelpiece:

Ed Frieman would probably be good to talk to because he chaired the Site Selection Committee. And Hugh Lowitth is an interesting citizen to have known. I'll tell you one of the more interesting people that you wouldn't think of is Jim Miller, who had been head of OMB at that time.

Weiss:

I've been thinking of speaking to him.

Trivelpiece:

And I see him from time to time. He found himself in the rather interesting position that OMB was opposed to it; he was in favor of it, but he had to carry OMB's water. He almost looked relieved when the President pulled that number on him about, "Well, Jim, it's only fair, because..." And later we've chatted about it. He's a physics junkie, and he wanted to go into physics, but never managed to get himself organized to do that.

Weiss:

The nice thing about Miller is that he's very convenient for me.

Trivelpiece:

Yeah, he's easy to talk to. Who else is there? If you want the previous site-selection business, [Norman Ramsey?] probably still remembers our conversation. I was trying to remember if there's anybody still around on that Fermilab stuff.

Weiss:

Lillian ought to know of this.

Trivelpiece:

Who?

Weiss:

Lillian Hoddeson, who was formerly the historian at Fermilab, working on Fermilab history. She ought to have that down, and if not, I'd say that's her interest.

Trivelpiece:

No, because of the nature of the questions, I didn't take any notes from my conversations with all these guys, because I wanted to gain a sense from them on what they thought about site selection — what went right and wrong — and I learned a lot of interesting things. That thing, that hearsay, about [Rodney?] and [Ensor?] tying a condom into doing it, because of his rather intense dislike of the OER. I'd love to be able to know somebody who would do that on the record, but it's all hearsay. Fascinating stuff.

Weiss:

If someone was doing a biography on [?], sort of beyond the science of [?].

Trivelpiece:

Ramsey might actually know the story. If I recall, Ramsey actually was one of the people who came... One of the people I invited in to meet the Secretary. I think he was at that meeting. [Saul B?]. I'm just trying to remember who was opposed to it. [ed. Trivelpiece is here jumping back from the Fermilab site selection to the SSC story.]

Weiss:

[Princeton University theoretical physicist] Phil Anderson was opposed it.

Trivelpiece:

Phil might have been there; I don't remember if he was there or not. Somewhere I've probably got a record if he was present at that meeting.

Weiss:

Do you remember the approximate time frame of that? Was that when Herrington first came in?

Trivelpiece:

Oh no. We're now getting close to the point... In fact one of the surprising parts of this is that I worked on Salgado and got him convinced, and then Salgado and I started working on Herrington, and then Herrington would never say yes. We were actually pestering him a tad. "Come on, John, get over the hump on this." And John never brought Salgado and I in and said: "Well, I've thought about this, and we're going to proceed." I read about it in the Washington Post, or Washington Times or something, because Herrington had a meeting with some journalist, and it was on the oil crisis, sort of tucked down at the bottom of this oil-crisis article was a thing about the Department proceeding with proposing the Super Collider, and it was like, "Yeah? No kidding!" So, what people would think was an orderly process... There's nothing orderly about that. If Herrington had made up his mind, he hadn't told us. And if he had made up his mind, why did he choose to tell this management outsider?

Weiss:

But this would have occurred between the conceptual design completion in March 1984, before the President has signed off?

Trivelpiece:

In 1987. That was in January 1987, so this came in that period. And there was also the whole issue of bringing this forward when it might appear that we were trying to influence the outcome of the election. Everybody says that people did this to influence it. No, we went out of our way the other way around, so it did not appear that we were doing this in a manner which would cause somebody to accuse us of trying to influence the outcome of the election.

Weiss:

So you're referring to the Presidential election, picking a site that was favorable to one campaign or another? [ed. Weiss is confusing the question, thinking that Trivelpiece is now referring to the site-selection rather than the January 1987 Cabinet meeting.]

Trivelpiece:

Yeah, and I can't remember the exact dates now, but in fact we had quite a bit of debate on when to propose to go forward to the committee. There was a midyear, midterm election right around that period. [ed. That would have occurred in November 1986.] And in fact that was the problem. We didn't want to do it immediately before the election. [inaudible] We did not want to do this before the election because of the appearance. The election occurred, and all of the sudden, all of the Cabinet officers disappeared. So, after the election, which is in early November, then getting a Cabinet meeting on a domestic policy issue is difficult to do because they've all gone home, and they're tired from trying to get people elected, and now it's Thanksgiving. And then after Thanksgiving immediately begins the cycle of the OMB budget review. And then the President has the operation on his colon [ed. That was in July 1985, so Trivelpiece must be "telescoping" events here.]. And in the midst of all that, underneath all that, Iran-Contragate was going on. And here we are trying to schedule a routine Domestic Policy Council meeting. And obviously if we could have gotten an agreement without going to the President, we would have been okay. It was pretty sure we weren't after the first meeting, so therefore the second was dedicated to trying to get it on the President's calendar. And then we ran through it before the State of the Union address. It came two days after the State of the Union address. That was an incredibly tense period. I make it sound like there were big time intervals between these things. This was going on all the time. It was hyper-kinetic activity. Fascinating, too. I wouldn't regard any of that as being boring.

Weiss:

Michael Riordan, who has been working faithfully on this project, likes to ask this question: if you could give three reasons why the SSC was cancelled, what would you claim are the most important reasons you can think of?

Trivelpiece:

Greed, arrogance, and hubris.

Weiss:

All by?

Trivelpiece:

Lots of people. Somehow when I look back on it, the arrogance of throwing out the original CDG design. The greed of not recognizing the fact that they agreed to do it for $4.4 billion. The hubris that's associated with not living up to what I believe to have been a clear political debt — to name it the Reagan Accelerator Center.

Weiss:

That sounds like you would lay most of the blame at the feet of the scientists themselves.

Trivelpiece:

Well, who else?

Weiss:

All the others came later?

Trivelpiece:

They were contributory, but they aren't the main part of it, and everybody has a different devil theory, but it wasn't a single event. This was a death of thousand cuts. It's like looking at airplane accidents. I don't know if you ever flew airplanes or not, but if you follow safety reports, what you find is that there is a sequence of unlikely and seemingly inconsequential events, any one of which had not occurred, the accident wouldn't have occurred. And I think that the same thing was true for the SSC. You can go back, if [CDG?] had done a slightly better job of accounting... if Roy [Schwitters] had not gotten a [proposal?] from Sam Ting, or Sam Ting's detector had continued... If they had had the dedication... It just goes on and on and on, and I know too many of them, so therefore I can't pick any one of them. But if you want to characterize it, I would characterize it by those three words.

And rather than being grateful that the taxpayers were prepared to give this rather interesting community of scientists $4.4 billion, it was: "Well, that's really not enough to do the job." Somebody claimed that we did this [design] because the energy was kept low so that Fermilab could be kept in the game. That's baloney. It's been said that the injector energy was picked so that Fermilab could be a player. The most expensive thing the Department of Energy has ever published is the [free injector accelerator?]. So that green-field [inaudible]. By the time you get through... So you build around Fermilab. The next thing you know you've got to dig up the tunnels you've got to put a new accelerator in. I didn't regard that as a particular advantageous situation. Fermilab was Fermilab. It could either put together a proposal which could compete or not, but it wasn't a question of them being there and being an asset. Same thing with that business with Canada [and New York], or being involved with any other state along the border, or Mexico.

Weiss:

The death of the thousand cuts is a nice way to put it, but I'm not going to use it.

Trivelpiece:

Oh, you can use it, it's fine.

Weiss:

Well, that's what makes it a fascinating history.

[End of Interview]