George Keyworth

Hoddeson:

These questions are designed to fill in your side of the SSC. We have been talking to a lot of physicists and some of my colleagues have been talking to staffers and people in Washington, DC. Just a tiny bit of background before we get started.

Keyworth:

Sure.

Hoddeson:

You studied physics at Duke and got your degree in 1968 and then went to Los Alamos and rose up in the ranks from staff member to group leader to division leader of the Physics Division and then laser fusion.

Keyworth:

Right.

Hoddeson:

How did that work?

Keyworth:

I became simultaneously division leader of P and L division, so the laser fusion program. At one point in time, the last few years I was there, the nuclear weapons testing program, the traditional Physics Division, and all the laser fusion program were combined into one very large organization which I ran.

Hoddeson:

I see. So that gave you the administrative know-how to prepare you for your Washington post as Science Advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or was there a lot more to it than that?

Keyworth:

Well, that is an easy way of putting it. Los Alamos was actually at that time a very efficient technical meritocracy. No bureaucracy had crept into Los Alamos at that time. There was a director and then there were two deputy directors, one for weapons and one for research, and then it was just division leaders who had pretty much ridden there on their scientific merits.

Hoddeson:

So [Norris] Bradbury [Director of Los Alamos Lab from 1945 to 1970] was still the director in 1968?

Keyworth:

Bradbury left in 1970. When I came in 1968 Bradbury was still director and then [Harold] Agnew, and Agnew was sort of my mentor for a long time, and Agnew left in 1980, just about the time I left, I think. George Cowan and I were members of the search committee that picked Don Kerr as the next director. Anyway, I cannot say that I acquired great management expertise because, in fact, running a technical meritocracy when funding sources are pretty well defined and straightforward was not terribly difficult at all. The experiences that I confronted when I went to Washington were pretty dramatically outside [of my] — or for that matter most scientists’ — experience.

Hoddeson:

How did you become science advisor? Reagan came in in January 1981 and you were there in April 1981.

Keyworth:

One never knows completely, but there were a lot of different lists that the President was given and clearly the President wanted somebody who could support him in defense modernization, which was by far the number-one priority. The first two years of the Reagan administration, what they committed to doing was to modernize our defense forces, and so he wanted someone who had some background and familiarity with defense. And also, the President had a bias for youth, and I was only 41 at the time and most of the other people who were aspiring to the job were 25 to 30 years older. The President was kind of an age chauvinist. I think above all it was my relative youth.

Hoddeson:

What influence, if any, did Edward Teller have on that?

Keyworth:

Oh, a lot. I shouldn’t have bypassed that. Of course, every administration has a transition team, and the transition team is constantly looking for the right people to fill positions and to fill the requirements. Very, very quickly after a President is elected, all the political commitments disappear and you are starting to look for people who can really do it, and Edward had been an advisor to them and was very strongly in support of my candidacy. So, he certainly is one who elevated the probability that I would get advanced a lot. He had a big impact.

Hoddeson:

Was he your mentor at Los Alamos in any way?

Keyworth:

Very much so. For a long period.

Hoddeson:

Here or there, at Los Alamos?

Keyworth:

Edward spent a lot of time at Los Alamos, and he and I became very close in the early to mid 1970s. A lot of common interests. He started spending a lot of time here in the summertime. He had a heart attack after [the 1979 reactor meltdown at] Three Mile Island and needed to just stay one place without travelling a lot. This was better than his home in California. So, we spent a lot of time together and spent a lot of time talking about science, up and down and sideways.

Hoddeson:

Does he still come a little bit to Los Alamos?

Keyworth:

Occasionally.

Hoddeson:

What about [Reagan’s first Attorney General] Edwin Meese? Did he play any role in this early stage?

Keyworth:

Ed Meese was responsible for all aspects of the Reagan policy staff. It is a long time ago, but it seems like yesterday to me. The Reagan White House was a bit unusual in the sense that instead of having a single Chief of Staff, the partition of responsibility was negotiated in a contract between Ed Meese and [Reagan’s first Chief of Staff] Jim Baker, that the President endorsed, and basically Jim Baker ran all operational aspects of the White House and relationships with the Congress. Ed Meese ran all aspects of policy. Very unusual, actually. And Ed Meese was the one who was often referred to as the deputy president, who was closest to Reagan. I would say objectively that an awful lot of the job satisfaction that I got was because I was so close to Ed Meese, and Meese was in such an extraordinary position with the President. I mean, people used to say that there was no Ed Meese, that in fact Meese was just an extension of the President. If you wanted to know what was going on in the President’s head—because the President never explained anything to anybody. That’s a simple aspect of Ronald Reagan: he never explained anything to anybody. If you asked him, he would, but when he made a decision he never felt any compulsion at all to explain it to anyone, and since his decisions were not infrequently the opposite of consensus, I used to ask him all the time and he would be quite forthcoming. Never clever. Never saying, “If you can’t figure it out you will never understand it.” He would never say anything like that. He would say, ”Oh, you are interested in why?” and he’d explain it. But he never felt a vestige of compulsion to explain it. Meese had been with him for 16 years before he was elected. And Meese had sort of a father–son relationship with him. It was just extraordinary. Everyone would go to Meese to find out where the President was going to come down. The President was very easy to predict. I got to the point after five years and everybody else had gone, everybody came to me to ask me what the President thought.

Hoddeson:

Had you known either of them before?

Keyworth:

Oh no. This is for jest, but I had two great difficulties when they first started looking at me. My background and people who knew me would have argued that I was pretty conservative, but you don’t find a lot of politically attuned people at Los Alamos. Most people are oblivious. I didn’t even know what party. I was registered as a Democrat, and I voted in Democratic primaries. At one point I had gone back and forth. And Jerry Brown [the Democratic governor of California] had come and stayed at my home, actually in Pojoaque. He had stayed at my home for several days when he came to visit the lab when he was governor of California. I was the liaison at the University of California, and it was during a search committee, and he was reopening for the thousandth time of whether it was appropriate for the University of California to run a nuclear weapons lab. So, I asked him to come out for a tour, to get him to figure out what the place does, to see it. Los Alamos does a pretty good job of selling itself, in those days especially. So, he came out and it got in all the newspapers.

Hoddeson:

This was now during the Carter administration?

Keyworth:

No. It was the search committee job time.

Hoddeson:

So that was when?

Keyworth:

Well, we were picking her. No, it was the transition time, 1980. And it got into all these pictures in the newspaper. I mean, it was Jerry Brown, so you can imagine in the White House the people who do personnel are philosophical purists to say the least. And they took a look at these [inaudible] and saw a picture of me with Jerry Brown and it just about terminated my candidacy. I found all this out later. It was kind of funny. And Jerry Brown and I were pretty good friends. Anyway, I was not in any way politically connected or politically inclined at the time I was selected. My views on politics and government were highly libertarian, but like most scientists I did not read the Economist in those days.

Hoddeson:

So, you got on these lists and you are not exactly sure how. Possibly Teller said—

Keyworth:

Well, there were different kinds of lists put up by industry leaders, scientific leaders, and put up by transition team members. I knew through the University of California — which, remember, Reagan had been governor just before Jerry Brown, so many of the trustees of the University of California were Reagan appointees. In fact, they were kitchen cabinet members. I knew them all from that relationship.

Hoddeson:

I see.

Keyworth:

I wasn’t quite correct in telling you I didn’t have any political connections. I had connections with people who were politically inclined, even though they came through the Los Alamos-UC relationship and not through my own involvement in politics.

Hoddeson:

Right. Before we move to the next section, which is on the decision to kill Isabelle [the proton collider then under construction at Brookhaven], I just want to ask a few general questions about how things worked in the White House when you were science advisor, the working relationships that you had with various people. Could you say a little bit about your relationship with Meese, Chief of Staff Baker, and other people who you would interact with on a day-to-day working basis?

Keyworth:

A touchy subject, don’t you think?

Hoddeson:

Well, tell me.

Keyworth:

No, some of us have very different views on how the science advisor should function. I would argue that the office is pretty much destroyed.

Hoddeson:

We’re talking now early 1980s?

Keyworth:

Right. Meese was very much in charge of policy. So, even though technically I reported directly to the President, the fact of the matter is that I became one of the key members of Meese’s policy team. For example, Meese would have a meeting at his office every single night at 5:30. There were varying — depending upon which year — but most of the time there were four or five of us and I was always one of those. The domestic policy advisor was another one, for example. There was always off-and-on the National Security Advisor or the number-two guy at NSC would show. But, because policy was focused down on a single individual, which is not usually the case, it very much facilitated things for me and I had an extremely close relationship with Meese. It was one of those classical cases where everything he knew was new to me, and everything I knew was new to him. And he is a wonderful person to work for. Extraordinarily able. Very, very well educated. Also, another Yalie. [ed. Keyworth received his bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1963.] All aspects of policy intrigued him. Everything from defense to domestic policy issues.

So, I developed early on a close relationship with the President through Ed. And in fact, there were some funny things early on, because in 1981 Patti Davis, one of the President’s daughters, got very much caught up with Helen Caldicott and the anti-nuclear movement, and she was an extremely nice person but a bit naive. She was in the newspapers all the time. And here is the President trying to push nuclear energy and here is his daughter. And so, lo and behold, I find myself on airplanes at 5 in the evening going to California to have a late dinner with her. And I became the liaison with Patti Davis on these topics. The first couple of years were very formative years and this is a bit of a touchy point. As I said, you must remember, Reagan was elected with two primary goals in mind that drove his entire campaign. One was to get the government off the backs of the people, a more libertarian role for government. —The second one was to close the window of vulnerability and make America strong again. And for the first two years… The first summer, of course, the big issue was the big tax cut. By the way, that was a totally wonderful educational experience for me. I saw some of the greatest things ever because nobody was afraid of me. I am the guy who was saying, how do international currency rates get developed? I never thought about it. How does it happen? I could ask these things and nobody else could ask them.

Hoddeson:

They were so advanced.

Keyworth:

Meese used to say, my god is it a privilege to wear a white coat in this building. I could ask, first principles, things that nobody else could ever ask and nobody would think twice about it. And I learned a tremendous amount during that first summer. I thought one of the greatest Reagan lines of all time that has never been published… The last day before the President was going to go on TV and ask for public support for his tax cut — which is what swung it; everybody was against it in Congress — Baker came into a certain sub-cabinet meeting I was in and said, “Mr. President, I am going to make one last plea to you: your closest advisors, your friends in your Congress, everybody has come and pleaded with you to please not push forward with this tax cut, it is just too contentious. And Mr. President, you are committed to the American people and asking them for their support, and I ask you, with everyone of us against it, how are you sure that the American people are going to support you?” And he looked at Jim Baker with this cherubic expression on his face and said, “Jim, for a reason that you’ll never understand: you see, because I am one of them.” It was the most wonderful Reagan line I ever saw in my life. I never would have seen this kind of thing except that I could be there and nobody could ever dream that I had a particular side on this issue. I really was, if you wish, a welcome voyeur on that issue, and I was new. I was the last top member of the President’s staff to be added. Some people thought this was part of my learning process. That bill was passed in August 1981.

Hoddeson:

Was there any feeling that you came from a different tradition?

Keyworth:

No, there wasn’t, under Meese’s team in a very factional White House. The Meese team did not like the Baker team and the Baker team did not like the Meese team. It was as simple as that, and everybody knew it in those days. So, amongst the Meese team I didn’t have any difficulty at all other than the fact that the White House is filled with jealousies. I mean, I had a good relationship with the President, which made some people jealous. But no, in fact I would say my life was made incredibly simple. Early on, the President was very pro-technology. Not in the sense that he wanted to know anything about it. He really didn’t. He just had a huge faith that man could solve any problem with his own creativity. And AIDS came up, for example. That was our first major policy issue. They were [inaudible] and if you look at it in the history of medicine, it was absolutely unique. There had never been anything like it before. A disease with 100% fatality, for example, makes double-blind tests become hugely unethical—

Hoddeson:

I forgot about that.

Keyworth:

I was the person that the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] came to when there were only seven cases but they could predict with incredible precision. I mean, it was remarkable what they did. Seven people were identified in morbidity statistics. In other words, of all the people who died, these seven anomalies appeared in one year and out of that CDC was able to construct the epidemiology of AIDS. And when they put it together it was a near panic. They knew that something never — you know, the Andromeda Strain was upon us, virtually, and they called me frantically and I went down to [CDC headquarters in] Georgia and went through the whole thing. And they didn’t pull any punches and they said what was unique about this, so we got our act together and went and told the President about this. And of course called lots of groups of scientists in to have lunch with him, to talk to him. And everybody is horrified by a disease that has these particular fatalities. And we didn’t know about the ten-year incubation period either. It was long, but not that long, about three years. And also, the way that it works: nobody knew anything about the immune system. We did know that here was a virus that totally corrupted the immune system. In other words, it went to the cure to begin with. But from the beginning Reagan was the one person who was absolutely convinced that we were going solve it.

Hoddeson:

Because technology is wonderful.

Keyworth:

Yeah. Everybody didn’t think it was going to be solved in five years necessarily, and when people came in and explained that this was… and I tried to explain to him one time that in my life I had never seen a scientific problem of this magnitude before. This was much more difficult than the Manhattan Project, for example. I also told him it was the most exciting scientific problem I had ever seen, too. And he was absolutely fascinated by it, but he was fascinated in it not because he was interested in T cells, but because he was interested in it as a manifestation of man’s creativity, society. He was an optimist.

Hoddeson:

Human genius.

Keyworth:

Yeah, human genius. Exactly. My life was extremely easy in the first year, but the thing that happened that made it possible for me to get things to get things done — and for that matter made it possible for me to start the SSC — was simply that there erupted early on some real competition between the NSC and the DOD in putting forth major defense initiatives. And so early on, late in 1981, I started to assume really central issues that were of overarching value to the administration. The first one, and the biggest failure I ever made in my life, was the space program.

Dick Allen was [Reagan’s] first National Security Advisor, and Allen was ousted in an absolutely silly thing that we just didn’t know how to handle very well. A Japanese businessman came to interview Mrs. Reagan, and when they left they brought her a gift, a watch, and it was electronic, not Rolex. And Dick Allen as the National Security Advisor — and actually these people had arranged the meeting through him — he took the watch, and he wasn’t going to give it to Mrs. Reagan. He didn’t quite do that. So, he threw it in the back of the safe and it was decided that he was taking gifts. It was a $300 dollar watch. Anyway, he was out, so we were left at that time with no National Security Advisor. Bill Clark eventually became the National Security Advisor, so we had a void and I think the Reagan administration was never totally comfortable with him. NSC, that’s another story. NSC is in some ways — people were always worried about intelligence because the area of the government that is unaccountable power. NSC is in fact the one example in the US government that is marginally constitutional and has an enormous amount of power. The only person who can sign a document for the President is the National Security Advisor. So, it’s huge… There is always a lot of resistance regarding the NSC in any White House.

Hoddeson:

So how did this—

Keyworth:

I am getting there. What happened was there was a big battle over what the administration’s space policy should be, and every administration has this problem. On the one hand, by the time I went in, the space program was probably the most dysfunctional part of the U.S. government. Spoiled rotten and dysfunctional. On the other hand, it was one of the great things in American history, so everyone loves it. But it was dumped in my lap and I was given responsibility for formulating Reagan administration science policy. I don’t think any science advisor had done that since the Eisenhower years. And did we blow it. God almighty! It was such an opportunity to do the right thing. But it was complex. What we should have done… Remember, the scientific community had for decades argued that space exploration and research is not commensurate with a manned space program. Man in space is a very different issue. And so, from the very beginning, the scientific community had always pushed either 1) an unmanned or 2) a scientific plus manned space program. And here we had an opportunity to go and fix the problem of the space shuttle. The shuttle was the politicians’ choice not an engineers’ choice. And it was out of date and over the hill long before the first flight occurred, and we had a chance to develop an alternative means for space access which could have given the space program a whole new life. And we bowed to complex politics.

Hoddeson:

You didn’t…?

Keyworth:

No, we didn’t do the right thing. We should have taken a firm position and said we will milk the shuttle for a few years and do some manned exploration. I was successful in one thing. I was successful getting the President away from endorsing, and convincing him that the space station was one of the all-time losers of all time, which it is. And he never supported the space station at all until the campaign of 1984, when basically the politicians take over, the handlers take over, and you support everything. But the Reagan administration opposed the space station from the beginning until 1984, in spite of the fact that NASA [inaudible]. So, nothing happened in the space station for four years, which was a good thing. We did take steps in developing [the] Titan [missile] as an alternative launch system. But we should have been much more aggressive in downgrading the shuttle. I am not saying it was because of the Challenger. That was a tragic accident, and it was stupid to send civilians up there.

Hoddeson:

That happened when you were still in—

Keyworth:

No, I wasn’t. It happened a week after I left. Poor Bill Graham [Reagan’s second science advisor]…

Hoddeson:

You were lucky.

Keyworth:

No, I was… [Challenger astronaut] Judy Resnick was a good friend, a good friend of my wife especially, and it was such a tragedy. And you never should have sent civilians up on an accident waiting to happen, which is what the space shuttle was. Absolutely tragic.

But anyway, what I was getting at was, the first priority was the space program. After that it became defense issues. For example, when it came to the critical issue of basing mode for the MX missile, I became the administration spokesman. Let me point out something. This is not exactly a role that people are running to the fore to have. This is a democracy. This is something that people know you have to have, but nobody really wanted to hear a lot about, and the basing mode for an MX missile is very complex. The American people basically really didn’t want them in the U.S. We had already settled the submarine issue. We had to have some alternative. A question that we all felt that what had been done and [diminished, laughed at, in the Carter administration, as a shell game, was actually a perfectly good way, so we were trying to bring that back as a credible alternative even though it had been attacked during the Carter years because he was so weak. I mean, because everybody was attacking him. But it wasn’t bad, and he did have a damn good defense team, Bill Perry and Harold Brown and so on.

The whole stealth program was begun in the Carter years. And then I was given a job of evaluating stealth technology. The President was hearing too many things. Every general who came in had another view. So, I was asked to become his major advisor on issues of defense technology but especially defense systems. For instance, at one point my office held a large number of all the top-level clearances on the stealth program, and we went at it from first principles. Yes, we were part of the B-1 and B-2 decisions, but more than that, my job was to advise the President about whether betting heavily on stealth was a good move or not. So, we went and spent a lot of time and I came back and I went in and spent a long time explaining to the President the reason why in fact stealth was a good investment. And what he cared about was whether it would be an investment that would endure for 20 years. That is what he kept asking. And no good scientific answers. Did I ever learn a lot, because most scientists will talk to other scientists and you will mask over ignorance by saying, well, in fact if you can put it as a differential equation and you can get a family of solutions that clearly you can identify the degenerate solutions. This is gobbledygook for the fact that you don’t really have an answer.

And unfortunately, I would go to the President and — I will never forget this with stealth — I would say, “Mr. President, there are three things that comprise stealth technology: one is absorption, one is reflection, and the other is something called active cancellation.” And he said, “Jay, get to the point.” And pretty soon we would get to the point. And my staff and I would take — I’m not exaggerating — we would spend six months preparing a two-page document like this, and we could go in and finally the President would say, “Jay, I think what you are trying to say is that active cancellation, this ability to read an incoming wave and transmit one that cancels it, is in fact something that draws upon an area where we are 10 or 20 years ahead of the rest of the world in electronics.” I’d say, “You know, Mr. President, that is what I was trying to say.”

So, what I am trying to say is that during a critical period of time, late 1981, all of 1982, and of course culminating with SDI [the Strategic Defense Initiative] in 1983, I was carrying major weight on major programs. I was Mr. Dense Pack. There is a program. The idea that we were going to take all these missiles and put them right close together, and that in fact because of fratricide considerations, this was a very survivable basing strategy, was something that just doesn’t sell well in New York. There was a joke in the White House at one point. People would come up to me, and I hadn’t seen them in a couple of weeks, and they’d say — that’s an expression for the equivalent of saying, in private, “Would you mind looking around the corner to see if there are any Germans over there?” It is the same sort of thing. So, I was carrying a lot of weight. Anyway, starting with Dense Pack and the whole MX basing issue, the stealth issue, and then finally of course SDI, I think it was fair to say that I was carrying my weight on White House issues. And when it came time to doing the annual budget negotiations and settling down with OMB [Office of Management and Budget] and saying here are the things I want, I think it is fair to say that I had an enormous amount of negotiating room.

And when things like the SSC came up — you see, I had one driving priority in science and it was obsessive, no question. The first speech I ever gave when I was in the White House was just two or three weeks after I came. There was an annual science advisor speech to the National Academy of Sciences. And I hadn’t gotten my speech writer staff very well organized. The speech writer that I had inherited, a wonderful guy, but he was leaving, Stan Schneider—a wonderful guy but he was very, very opposed to the speech I wanted to give. The speech I wanted to give came right from my heart as a scientist. It came from the fact that we, the scientific community, especially physicists… First of all, physicists don’t know that there is any scientific community other than physics. But by 1981, if you look back to the period from 1965 to 1981, you realized that we were getting a whole community of scientists who were bureaucratic and we were beginning to see the demise of the traditional, historical emphasis on excellence. So, the first speech I ever gave was on the threat to excellence in science, and that mediocrity was beginning to creep into our profession, and one of the manifestations of mediocrity was the regional distribution of scientific goodies. And the National Science Foundation’s Centers of Excellence program that was started in the 1960s was a classical example of mediocrity, a typical politician’s work, but it was an attempt by the Congress to cram down the throats of NSF the allocation of — basically, forcing them to put money into universities that they wouldn’t have done on a merit basis only.

So, this was my initial thing. And during the 1970s, science had been dealt a devastating blow, not because of incompetence, but because of inflation. Remember, most of us never knew the word inflation until the late 1970s. And what happens in the government budgeting process is that since government is funding its budget a year and a half ahead of time, and if you’ve got a rise in inflation, then you are going to experience some devastating cuts. And if you are in Los Alamos in the weapons program, we would just get supplemental funds. We didn’t suffer very much.

Hoddeson:

One second. I am really enjoying this. I don’t have a time constraint. Do you have a time constraint?

Keyworth:

No.

Hoddeson:

You’re getting into details, and it’s a lot of fun, but I just want to make sure. Otherwise, we wouldn’t get to the end of the sequence.

Keyworth:

I think you will find that we are not dancing around the subject. We are getting to the meat of the subject. What I have said so far is that the first two years was almost entirely wrapped up in defense issues and I became very much involved in those, filled the void, I think, and carried a lot of weight. But my real interest in life, if you wish, was pushing forth an obsession on basic research, which I did all the time I was here, on the simple argument that there aren’t very many things that the government does well. I mean, I think what the government does with the National Park Service is a thing of beauty. No, it actually is incredibly well done. People who are in the National Park Service are dedicated professionals. You go meet one. Go up to a park ranger sometime and ask them their educational level and why they are there. They are interesting people. It is a well-run organization. And NOAA [National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration] is very well run. There are very few things like that, though, that are really well run. Plus, we hate them all — the IRS — but people tell me it is actually pretty competent. But it is like saying morticians are skilled. There aren’t too many such things, but basic research is really motherhood [ed., evidently meaning “unambiguously good,” as in “as American as motherhood and apple pie.”]. If you go back and look at the origins — under Vannevar Bush, who really created the concept of basic research. The man was a genius. I went back and read ten times everything he wrote.

Hoddeson:

[inaudible]?

Keyworth:

Absolutely. My closest advisor. I picked a group, because there had been so much controversy over the advisory groups, of people, mostly of people I knew.

Hoddeson:

Are you talking about the President’s Science Advisory Council?

Keyworth:

Yeah, I called them the White House Science Council. And I picked, well, obviously a smattering of the best [people with] Nobel prizes.

Hoddeson:

You had John Bardeen for a while.

Keyworth:

I had Bardeen for a while. A wonderful man, but a horrible advisor.

Hoddeson:

What did he tell you? I am very much interested in Bardeen.

Keyworth:

He said to me, when I called him and asked him to do it, he said you don’t want me. He said I am useless in a group larger than two. In a group of two, I can hold my own, but otherwise I can’t. And he attacked me a lot on SDI afterward, and you know something, I never could say a thing. First of all, I would never defend myself against John Bardeen. Second, he didn’t even know what had happened. He was oblivious to what had taken place. John is not a policy wonk, he is a scientist. If you want somebody to… Feynman could master policy and I should have…

Hoddeson:

Was he on it?

Keyworth:

No, he wasn’t.

Hoddeson:

Why not?

Keyworth:

I should have, because I knew him but [not?] until later. Anyway, the one man who I became addicted to, the only one, was David Packard, whose picture is there. David Packard is one of the greatest human beings I have ever known, totally unselfish, absolutely brilliant. Anyway, David Packard was the one person I became really addicted to. People used to say I would hesitate going to the bathroom without David Packard’s endorsement. We just started to share a head and it carried on, by the way, until he died. He had enormous wisdom. He knew [Stanford University Provost] Fred Terman. He grew up with Fred Terman. Fred Terman was the protégé of Vannevar Bush.

Hoddeson:

He was?

Keyworth:

He created Silicon Valley.

Hoddeson:

He was the one who invited William Shockley to come and set up shop [at Stanford University].

Keyworth:

Yeah. [Terman] is the one that sent Packard and Hewlett out to form their company. And Varian. But he was Vannevar Bush’s protégé. Vannevar Bush said, look, this [approach] has worked in Massachusetts, which is the first place universities spawned high-tech industries. It didn’t start in Silicon Valley, it started in Massachusetts. And Vannevar Bush said, and it was wartime, always defense-oriented, and in Silicon Valley it was not so much, because times were different. But he sent Fred Terman out there.

Hoddeson:

So, Fred Terman went out during World War II?

Keyworth:

Right after. I mean, basic research was not born in World War II. Radar was born in World War II. Right after, Fred Terman went out there to the Stanford area. Actually, I am in error. Fred Terman went out there in the 1930s.

Hoddeson:

You know, there is a Lewis Terman. Is he related to Fred? He was there a long time earlier. He was the one who did the intelligence testing and so forth.

Keyworth:

No. Not the same person.

Hoddeson:

I know it’s not the same person, one is Lewis and one is Fred. I always thought they were related.

[ed. Psychologist Lewis Terman was Fred Terman’s father. Fred Terman lived for most of his life around Stanford University, taking on a faculty position there in 1925 and becoming an influential university administrator after World War II.]

Keyworth:

I know, because David always used to say to me, “Fred would do this.” For me, basic research was the set of priorities and the view that made it more fun to be a scientist than anything else on Earth. That was what it was to me. And you can imagine, from this spoiled place, and I had the most spoiled role of all at Los Alamos. I went to Los Alamos because I had an expensive experiment I wanted to do, and they were the only ones who could afford it. Then here comes Dave Packard and he says to me, basic research is why we have the electronics industry. Basic research is why we have growth. Basic research is why we have no unemployment in this country. Basic research is why we are going to cure AIDS. I’d say that the President believed that technology can solve all problem. That was nothing compared to Packard. Packard wouldn’t just sit down and do equations and solve a problem. No, he believed what was in there. So, I had my own view of basic research: it worked, it was productive, and it was American. Packard’s view of basic research was… He had no interest in elementary particle physics, but basic research itself was the font of all new ideas. So, that was our real driving interest, and of course the National Science Foundation is always the manifestation of that, because basic research… In spite of coming from a national lab, I’ve always been very skeptical about national labs and very skeptical of… In fact, I lost an awful lot friends during my five years as science advisor because I was much harder on the national labs than I would have been if I had come from a university. But it’s simple. You get paid twice if you invest in a university. You get the research and you get the next generation of scientists. Whereas if you invest in a national lab, you get the research. So, clearly the university is the place to do basic research. Not industry. And all these dreams that Bell Labs did basic research are just nonsense. A few percent of Bell Labs [staff] ever went near basic research. Most of Bell Labs [was a] vastly more applied lab than Los Alamos.

Hoddeson:

I of course have studied the transistor in detail, so I have run into the basics.

Keyworth:

I sort of grew up with it. [plasma physicist and Bell Labs executive] Sol Buchsbaum was the chairman of my White House Science Council.

Hoddeson:

One more question about John Bardeen, which relates to another project. Was he completely useless on the White House Science Council? Did he make any contribution at all?

Keyworth:

You can’t say useless, because John’s taste in science was legion, it was absolutely impeccable. On certain issues…

Hoddeson:

There were two issues that he was concerned with: one was the SDI and there was another one I can’t remember now.

Keyworth:

John was very, very strongly interested in and supportive of the whole concept that we started of the multi- disciplinary centers. That was the driving thing of 1982 of our whole… I mean, it is a small thing, okay. But the two things we really pushed hard in 1982… In any administration it is the first two years where the force behind the waves gets created. We pushed very hard for these multi-disciplinary centers. We called them engineering research centers. Interestingly enough, the whole idea was to have them be [about] scientific research. To get NSF to do science is no problem at all, but to get NSF to pay engineers lip service was another story. So, what we did is we started these things called engineering research centers on the argument that it was the only possible way we’d even get five percent of the money for engineers. Then, later on, Eric Bloch, who I put in there, argued that they should be science research centers. Well, that is what they were in the beginning, was kind of a token. The idea was that the traditional disciplines had become a combination of arcane and out-of-date, and that nowadays you were [becoming multi-disciplinary?] even then you were starting to find that scientific problems were being attacked by mathematicians, electrical engineers, material scientists and theoretical physicists all in one group, and we needed to have an environment in which that could happen. John was very, very useful in the formation of that. But in general, on policy issues and defense, John was just oblivious. For instance, on stealth technology, which is really fascinating technology, John’s attention span was nil. He just couldn’t care less. Let me say something: it is extremely difficult for people who have never been in policy to advise on policy issues. So, you ask me if he was useful. Very, very few people were useful. Dave Packard had been there before, so he was extremely useful, but there were very, very few people who had a vestige of comprehension.

[End of side of tape]

Keyworth:

What I was trying to say is that scientific training and the conduct of scientific research is the world’s worst training for policy. Policy is exactly the opposite. You are making lots of decisions on a very global scale on almost intuitive trends, but hardly on data. So, I found that not only was it very difficult to find a scientist to be a member of a PSAC [ed. President’s Science Advisory Committee, a predecessor body to Keyworth’s White House Science Council and here used as a generic term for such bodies], but on top of that, even reaching out to the broad community, it is very difficult to find people who are really good at it. It is just a difficult task. You’ll find that with a lot of the PSACs after World War II, that was a different story. Scientists were involved in creating a lot of the policy, so policy was familiar to scientists. If you go back and look at PSACs since, if you look at PSACs in the last 20 years, it has been a group of businessmen. It has been people looking at business issues, nothing like what PSAC used to do.

Hoddeson:

[inaudible].

Keyworth:

No, no. The vice or co-chairman of the PSAC is John Young, who used to be the CEO of Hewlett Packard. He is not a scientist.

Hoddeson:

How about [saying] a little bit more about SDI?

Keyworth:

If you want to be chronological, do you want to go to the SSC’s origins, because that happened before SDI?

Hoddeson:

What people often say, and maybe this is completely wrong, is that there was some connection between SDI and the reception of the SSC.

Keyworth:

That’s interesting.

Hoddeson:

That is what people say. Just people who talk about it.

Keyworth:

SDI wasn’t even a dream when the SSC was basically [inaudible].

Hoddeson:

When was the SDI…?

Keyworth:

March 23, 1983.

Hoddeson:

And SSC was…

Keyworth:

Listen, if I had tried to start the SSC as late as March 1983, it never would have gotten started in the Reagan administration.

Hoddeson:

Maybe we should talk about that. But even before the SSC started, we have Isabelle to kill, right?

Keyworth:

That is the SSC. That was the deal.

Hoddeson:

That was the same thing.

Keyworth:

In 1981, the first year I was science advisor, clearly high energy physics and the high energy physics facility issue had to be resolved, and on top of that, by the way, it was a good issue and one I had intense interest in. Well, I am not a materials scientist, it was right in my background, so I was extremely interested in the whole issue.

Hoddeson:

How would you evaluate the state of high energy physics at that point, when you became science advisor? Would you have thought it was in a bad situation?

Keyworth:

No, I would have said quite the opposite. I would have said that elementary particle physics in 1981 was continuing to carry on boldly and strongly its pinnacle-of-physics position. It had phenomenally good people. Fermilab was phenomenally productive. It was the best lab in the world, bar none. It was not necessarily the best facility in every way, but it was the best lab all in all. Best people, best leadership. Leon Lederman was phenomenally good. He had the wonderful combination of both leadership abilities and impeccable taste. Really good. So, I can’t say anything negative. It was great. And I didn’t come with any prejudice either, by the way. The issue of what was then called the World Accelerator or something was esoteric and not a serious issue at the time. And Isabelle was… In the scientific community Isabelle wasn’t taken very seriously.

Hoddeson:

Well, it was taken seriously.

Keyworth:

Of course, it was. We always had our crazy things, too. We got [inaudible]. No, the game is constantly played. I am not disputing that. I am talking about in general. In general, the right decisions are made. Fermilab was the right decision. The selection of place and so on was of course political, but it was the right machine, no question about it.

Hoddeson:

Right. At that point Fermilab was building superconducting magnets that were beginning to work.

Keyworth:

Absolutely. No, they were working.

Hoddeson:

By 1981?

Keyworth:

Absolutely. Well, laboratory working, but there was no question about the fact that they were going to work. So, I said something to you before and now you’ll see the relevance. I said something about my concern that mediocrity was creeping into science and the way priorities were being settled — we were becoming bureaucratic. You know, the great leaders, the Wilsons for example. There weren’t any. Or before my days, the Von Neumanns. Where were they? I mean, Von Neumann helped shape deterrence in this country. And where were they? There weren’t any. Naturally, I was making a generational comment. Well, along came this SSC issue, or along came the Brookhaven [Isabelle] issue. It was absolutely classical. Here was a second-class facility…

Hoddeson:

Leon said Brookhaven made all the mistakes they could possibly have made when you visited them in the summer of 1981.

Keyworth:

Yeah, but you know something, we had a meeting with HEPAP [High Energy Physics Advisory Panel] before that.

Hoddeson:

This was before you visited Brookhaven?

Keyworth:

At least in my recollection. It had nothing to do with what they showed me. First of all, to tell you truth — I mean, I have visited every facility on Earth practically — I don’t know how you are going to change your opinion much from one visit to the facility. For instance, I went to Fermilab numerous times, and I had opinions of Fermilab. Leon was very nice to me. I think I stayed with him. We had dinners together. I liked his wife. You don’t really think that my impression of Fermilab was in any way affected at all by any of my visits to Fermilab? Look, we have been searching for 120 years for what amounts to a grand unified theory, since [James] Clerk Maxwell did his tricks in the 1870s, and we have been pursuing opportunity after opportunity after opportunity, and certain machines provide certain areas of opportunity for exploration. And so Fermilab was selected, not because of the accelerator technology. Most scientists couldn’t care less about the accelerator technology, but because—

Hoddeson:

Which at that point wasn’t that great.

Keyworth:

No, it wasn’t.

Hoddeson:

But it was being rapidly improved.

Keyworth:

Most people just leave that to others. Most elementary particle physicists are not interested in accelerator technology. They are interested in the experiments, and they want to know what energy protons, or what energy electrons, or what kind of targets will create what types of secondary beings, and what intensity versus energy trade-offs, what kind of detectors will be… This is what people care about. With Fermilab there wasn’t a lot of controversy. We pretty much knew what we wanted to do. Isabelle did not fill any unique bill identified by anyone. SLAC did. SLAC was of course at exactly the opposite end of the spectrum from Fermilab. Electron [scattering], and no one was questioning early on that that was legitimate. But Isabelle was almost like an unwanted child and then along came the blatancy… If there is anything they did to me that was the kiss of death, it was showing me a map that showed one facility on the West Coast, another facility in the Middle West, and another in the East. My one answer to them was, did you ever try an airplane? When I was at Los Alamos, I was almost theological with my people about saying, “Don’t ever come to me for money to do experiments to make use of Los Alamos’s facilities. Come to me for the best experiment. We will do it wherever it has to be done.” When you have facility-based research, you are on the road to mediocrity. You can’t do it. And the argument that we needed to have facilities distributed geographically is a step toward total mediocrity. That proportioning has nothing to do with excellence. What I am saying is that it didn’t take a visit to Brookhaven, which I do think is a great laboratory…

Hoddeson:

Was.

Keyworth:

I have always been a fan of [Brookhaven National Lab Director] Nick [Samios]. I thought he was great, a good scientist. But it was a second-class facility at birth, in its origin.

Hoddeson:

It was a reactor lab in its origins.

Keyworth:

That’s true. No, Argonne was a reactor lab. Wilson, who was really a great man, made Brookhaven, and he did it by building a big accelerator there.

Hoddeson:

Who are you talking about?

Keyworth:

Wilson. Who do you think built the accelerator there? You don’t think Fermilab was Wilson’s great contribution to mankind? Wilson was a great man long before Fermilab was ever dreamed of. Go back and look. No, that is why he built Fermilab, because Brookhaven was already started. It is not their generic origin. Stanford wasn’t exactly known as the place for linear accelerators either. You just got a group… In fact, I don’t know what we’re talking about. I can’t think of a facility on Earth that has historical origins that gave it the basis for being that. Fermilab, after all, was a one-time start-up. Los Alamos became a real center for basically high-power accelerators. And Los Alamos had absolutely no origin at all. As every new idea comes along, a team gets together to pursue it. It is a little bit like arguing why Microsoft is Microsoft and IBM is a distant follower. Let’s start with Darwinism. Every time some new idea comes along, new people find a way to adapt to it. I don’t think it would have made any difference if Brookhaven had been a biological lab. I think they still could have built the best next-generation accelerator. It is not that.

Hoddeson:

So, what was it that really made you so—

Keyworth:

Second-class facility, not reaching far enough. It is like the space station.

Hoddeson:

Was it the management?

Keyworth:

No, the facility itself was absolutely third class.

Hoddeson:

The way it is spread out all over the place?

Keyworth:

It wasn’t the right energy. It was much too low. They weren’t proposing to pursue any of the really interesting theoretical questions that had been raised in the last ten years.

Hoddeson:

In the Standard Model [of particle physics, which was established in the mid-to-late 1970s.].

Keyworth:

Absolutely. It was born at an earlier time. And then they were justifying… And then, instead of standing up like men and justifying it on the basis of it filling a crucial need, they justified it on the basis that it filled a regional economic requirement for which I have zero interest. I would say that Isabelle never had a chance from my point of view.

Hoddeson:

What if their magnets had worked?

Keyworth:

It wouldn’t have made an iota of difference. In fact, in the summer of 1981 when we— I don’t mean to be egotistical, but I think this was my decision. I don’t think this was a community decision. I never used my advisory council for things like this. I used them for advice, but I did not use them for decision-making on anything like this. And I think I can say that I made this decision uniquely. It wasn’t the DOE. I am the guilty party. It had nothing to do with the magnets. It had to do with the fact that it was the wrong facility, and the basis that they were using to sell it would never have been successful. That is, the Congress… Money was tight enough and there was no way that I was going to go before the Congress and push for a project that was being sold on regional arguments. So, number one, it was the wrong machine. That was the real reason. Number two is that they had the dumbest reasons on Earth, a “my fair share” argument. To me, Isabelle…

Everybody has a list of priorities. If, say, NSF was a symbolic “10”— If you get NSF in the right direction to support your policy, almost everything else will follow because other agencies look at NSF. So, NSF has a very good leadership. That was why it was important to have it right down the street. And NSF was my top priority by far. I would have said Isabelle was right down at the bottom. If I hadn’t been able to make a deal with the group… The deal was, if you agree to terminate Isabelle, I give you my absolute word I will put myself lock, stock, and barrel behind SSC. And I delivered on that. I went to Congress and spent whatever coins I had to spend on it.

And this did not start after SDI. It had no correlation. In fact, after SDI — and I have been terrifically criticized for this — I had no choice but to give up being science advisor and devote myself 100 percent to SDI. It was what my boss told me to do, and when I didn’t do it, I would get phone calls, and he had me in on Saturday mornings and we would have a chat. I was a servant, basically, and beside that, I believed in it, too, and I think the end results — regardless of what the high-energy physics community likes to say — the end result I think is manifestly obvious: it worked. But there was no correlation between the two. You know, SDI has been criticized because people say it was born in the last week. Well, SSC was totally launched by the administration. Don’t forget, when the White House spends its nickels, then you start to see the results of that years later, but all the internal battles with OMB had been done long before SDI.

Hoddeson:

So, the SSC is really born in the summer of 1981?

Keyworth:

Well, my commitment to it was really going in late 1981, and 1982 in the spring, and early 1983, before SDI got thought of. I’ll tell you why. Dense Pack was… I had to go and spend my blood on Dense Pack in November and December of 1982. Very tough time in the Reagan administration. Recession, all the Republican congressmen got thrown out of office. That was the lowest point in the Reagan administration, and that was when we had gotten every single thing we wanted to have funded in strategic modernization except the MX. And we had the Nuclear Winter movement, and the worst thing is that most of us were having real second thoughts. I think the American people saying they don’t want counterforce ballistic missiles based on American territory is an eminently logical observation on their part, especially when there are other ways of doing it. And so, we had this great commitment to the so-called strategic triad, and the American people were saying they don’t really feel any great commitment to the triad. “I don’t care what you do with the boats. They are out there in the middle of the ocean. But I don’t want it in Wyoming or in the Dakotas.” And the President felt the same way, and we basically thought they were pretty sensible. There is a tremendous amount of rationality here. When I said "Nuclear Winter movement," that is not what I mean. There was a big anti-nuclear movement started in 1982 that was unique in that this one was classical middle America. This wasn’t people who had been classical demonstrators with Jeremy Rifkin. This was [made up of] extremely average Americans. We had taken a long look at this, done a lot of polls. The President didn’t listen to a lot of polls, but he listened to these —whatever you want to call it — populist messages. So, we made this last effort on Dense Pack and I was being sacrificed. We all knew it. It is your turn to take the hit. We knew that we were going to lose. This is in the late 1982. But when we went into the budget cycle, when we went into the next round, we started at OMB. I’ll never forget, because when SSC came out, and I was talking to my friends at OMB, I just simply said [inaudible] SSC, because needless to say OMB… OMB and a new project that is just going to represent $10 billion down the road. And we knew it was going to be a tremendous amount of money. I just said to OMB, okay, you want to go resolve this in Ed Meese’s office.

Hoddeson:

When you talk about your friends at OMB…

Keyworth:

Friends is not quite what I had in mind.

Hoddeson:

David Stockman? I hear that there was friction between you.

Keyworth:

Right. I kicked his door down once. Well, you ever see anybody not have friction with OMB? And by the way, I have tremendous respect for Stockman and his people, [inaudible] the guy too. It is just that their job is to always tell you how you can’t do something. My job was always to argue how you could do something. I am showing you, I think, an insight that is at least the whole story of the Reagan years, and my guess is that it has also been there in other years. The only way the science advisor is going to be really effective and really get things done is if he is able to carry mainstream water in the White House and therefore effectively trade. The reason we got the SSC is because I carried so much water on my back. Basically, the President and Ed Meese… I wasn’t about to sell everything for SSC, by the way. There were other things I cared about, too. It sounds trivial because the amount of money isn’t large: I cared more about the 18% increase in the budget of NSF than I did about the SSC, and that is how much we were increasing NSF’s budget each year. And I cared more about getting someone really good in there. I can’t take great credit for that, but I really tried.

Hoddeson:

I am grateful for that story.

Keyworth:

It is how you got things done. Who the hell is the science advisor otherwise? If the science advisor sits there as the representative of the scientific community, you are like an agent; you are like a foreigner. SDI certainly didn’t injure my ability, my influence in the White House, because I was the one who… the night the President gave that speech [on March 23, 1983], I was the one who had to talk to everybody, all the living Secretaries of State and all the living Secretaries of Defense were brought to that dinner. I am the one who had to give a briefing on SDI, so I was effectively the President’s National Security Advisor on that issue. And then afterward it became very interesting because [Secretary of State George] Shultz and [Deputy National Security Advisor Robert] McFarlane defined SDI as the great arms-control chip, and I was the only one who knew from the very beginning, like religion, that the President would die before he’d ever trade it for anything. The fact is that the President was an extreme hawk, but he thought nuclear weapons are uncivilized. And nobody ever really understood the extent of this.

Hoddeson:

What did he say?

Keyworth:

You’ve probably read, because I have talked about this a lot, but the cocked-guns theory. The President said there is nothing more uncivilized than two grown men holding cocked guns at each other’s heads. And he said — he says this surrounding the speech — he said that in his view the idea of holding women and children as hostages is a philosophy that cannot endure and that a weapon that cannot distinguish between civilians and soldiers… He used to ask me about nuclear weapons because I ran testing, and he’d say, “Gen. Curtis LeMay proposed saturation bombing in Vietnam. What was your view at the time?” I said, “Mr. President, all you have to do is see one, because the truth of the matter is that I can lift a nuclear weapon myself, which, if you allow me to drop it or detonate it over New York City at an altitude of 1,500 feet or so, I can take out 3 million people with a bomb I can hold in my arms.” And he said, “What do you think about it?” What he was concerned with was, is it civilized? Really.

Well, if you go back and read the words of the SDI speech, which was his speech… I mean, I am given credit for writing it, but it is not true. Yes, I did the editing, and I was the only one whose pencil went on that speech, but all the main themes were from his heart, and he spent his presidency on that. Lots of people have said… Jim Baker never even knew about this speech until 4 o’clock. Jim Baker didn’t even want to look at it. He said, "Mr. President, this is the end of your presidency." Imagine what our NATO allies did. Mrs. Thatcher turned against us. My job from that day on was to go out and talk to heads of state all over the world saying the President was not going too deep in this. So, I was not a science advisor after that until I left. So, the distinction between SDI and SSC… They not only weren’t correlated, but these were completely distinct times…

Hoddeson:

Okay, so we’ve got the Isabelle story. I guess it is not a technical problem that was bothering you at all but an organizational one…

Keyworth:

My own career, with my own hands, was about low temperatures. Well, nuclear-physics experiments, but polarization experiments at very, very low temperature. I built the second diffusion refrigerator. I knew a lot about superconducting coils. I have no question as to whether that could be done and whether it could even be done economically. I wasn’t worried at all about that. And the setbacks that they were having [at Brookhaven] didn’t bother me at all either.

Hoddeson:

Good. I understand that now. Now, at some point you and Leon Lederman were working together on this. When did you first meet Lederman?

Keyworth:

HEPAP.

Hoddeson:

HEPAP wasn’t… .

Keyworth:

Well, I don’t know when I met him first, because I probably knew him before I was ever science advisor, but I think everybody came from Los Alamos. I was 19 years off. I totally apologize. I am quite sure that Leon was a member of HEPAP that first summer when I met with him. One thing I do remember — I could almost give you the room number — we met in the [Forrestal Building?]. Having come from Los Alamos, I didn’t have a whole lot of truck with DOE. Nobody does. DOE is…

Hoddeson:

DOE was talking about this.

Keyworth:

It is just a total…

Hoddeson:

Did you have a good working relationship with anybody at DOE?

Keyworth:

No. I never really…

Hoddeson:

What about [Reagan’s first Energy Secretary] James Edwards, the dentist?

Keyworth:

Oh God. You know, nobody is ever going to give me great credit for, how should I say it, personality, or taking time to build relationships, but Edwards was from the very beginning — how should I say — not the most serious member of the President’s cabinet. I worked with him okay for a while, but pretty sure I just went on. He had one thing in the world he cared about: a waste facility, DWPF [the Defense Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site] in South Carolina. It was a piece of pork. That is all it was, and that is all he really cared about. And I did the things I needed to do with that, but as far as science went and DOE, Jim Edwards couldn’t even understand why we did science.

No, I am talking about the more enduring people. There are some good program managers that I had a lot of respect for, no question about it, but the overall leadership in DOE I didn’t spend a lot of time cultivating. I don’t think I ever talked to anybody at DOE before I had it on their budget. And things like the addition to SLAC, that was in DOE’s budget without DOE even knowing about it. It never even really occurred to me to work at DOE. You know, there is no way to bury a project faster than to try to build consensus. I was on the original team to abolish the DOE. Joe Wright, who was the Deputy Secretary of Commerce, and I were given the job by the President in 1981 to draft a plan for a new department of energy, to kill the existing one.

Hoddeson:

That’s in Michael Riordan’s interview with [Douglas] Pewitt. And he said that the idea was not to kill the programs themselves, but it was the overall organization.

Keyworth:

Well, remember what had happened. President Carter had decided to set at very high priority the goal of energy independence in four years. OPEC oil embargo and all that stuff. If you ever go talk to [Carter’s science advisor] Frank Press, he will tell you that one of the worst moments of his life was when he found this commitment to producing 10 or 20 percent of America’s energy requirements by renewable sources in four or five years. He had never been asked. He knew it was scientifically impossible. But DOE was used in the Carter years as an economic solution for oil dependence, all kinds of what we would call interventionist arguments. The Reagan administration came into office with the idea of getting [government] off the backs of the people, but the symbolic example of intervention in the marketplace was the DOE. Subsidies for solar-heated homes and creation of all these new industries, from shale oil to windmills. The President [Reagan] felt very much that the marketplace should be deciding it. So, we wanted to abolish that aspect of DOE. We had no intention of abolishing the nuclear weapons program, which was half of DOE. In fact, we wanted to make it healthy. And we had no intention [of abolishing] OER, the Office of Energy Research, either. What we wanted was this interventionist thing killed. The point is that Joe Wright and I were given the job of doing it. Joe was a consultant from one of the big consulting firms, and I sort of followed his lead, but we built consensus. We went to all the congressional committees and got their advice. We went to DOE advisory groups and got their advice. And we finally put it together and went to the President with the plan. We had this great big ceremony in the Roosevelt room. And the President said, “Okay guys, what I want to know from you is what do you think of this?” And Joe and I looked at each other and said, “What do you mean, Mr. President?” And he said, “Well, you bring me this thing — is it an improvement?” And we looked sheepishly, and we said, “Mr. President, what we are bringing you is vastly worse than what you have today.” And he said, “How did you do that?” And we said, "Mr. President, we did it by consensus."

Hoddeson:

What did he say?

Keyworth:

He laughed, and that was the last anybody ever heard of reorganizing the DOE. It was. But by the same token, I never would have gotten the SSC going — for right or for wrong, by the way — but I never would have gotten it going if I had tried to build a consensus within the DOE establishment, other than HEPAP. The reason I did it with HEPAP is because I respected HEPAP. Incredibly good people as far as scientists go.

Hoddeson:

Was Peter Carruthers [head of the Los Alamos theory division] a player in the plan to kill Isabelle?

Keyworth:

No, but Peter Carruthers was a player in one sense — and somebody must know me pretty well here. I had enormous respect for Peter Carruthers. Do you know Pete?

Hoddeson:

Yeah, I used to. He was head of P division for a while.

Keyworth:

Yeah, Carruthers was one of… He was [inaudible]. In fact, he built the greatness of modern Los Alamos. The things that were good were Peter’s taste. Peter is one of those creatures who I could never put on my advisory council. He’s not housebroken. First of all, I come from a, relatively speaking, puritanical background. I am not puritanical, but relative to Peter... I have been married to one woman for 38 years, very happily.

Hoddeson:

I know all that stuff.

Keyworth:

But Peter would come into my office, especially in the White House, and have thought for weeks about some obscenity that could turn me red. Obscenity beyond obscenity. And he would do it every time and he would usually try to do it front of my secretary, who was very much a lady and whom he knew for a long time from Los Alamos. And he would do it every time. On the other hand, for taste in science there was not anybody I respected more than Peter. So, I talked to Peter a lot about the SSC. I don’t remember Peter being anti-Isabelle one way or the other. I remember more than anything else talking to Peter about the wisdom of what became the SSC. I want you to realize something from the beginning, that everybody had concerns about whether the scientific community could bring it off, and it turns out to me that was the problem. And we knew it.

Hoddeson:

When you say everybody, I know Doug Pewitt had concerns. He was rejecting it.

Keyworth:

He was one of my directors, associate directors, [ed. Pewitt was OSTP Assistant Director for General Science] and an old friend, a man who had done very well for me before I became science advisor. He worked for Ed Frieman. Frieman was the director of the Office of Energy Research under Carter. Ed Frieman is an absolutely world-class scientist. He was on my science council. He ran the fusion program at Princeton. But, believe it or not, he is a very quiet, retiring guy. You don’t think of a fusion salesman as a quiet, retiring guy. He was a Navy SEAL, in fact. He until very recently ran the Scripps [Institution of Oceanography]. He’s a very good guy. Anyway, Doug worked for him, as his deputy. That is how I got to know Doug. Of course, Doug had been managing facilities at DOE under Frieman, and of course he had cynicism. My concern was, where is the [Bob] Wilson? I deeply believe in the Great Man theory. You don’t get anything great, [but that] there is always a great man under there. The success of Fermilab I am going to heavily attribute to Wilson and Leon, both of them, and if you took away those two guys, there wouldn’t have been the greatness of Fermilab. That’s the way the world works, and I looked out and I said to myself, I think I see the shadow of a Von Neumann, and I think I see this, that, and the other thing, but I sure don’t see leadership in the community. And I did fight very hard, by the way, perhaps naively, too, to get the project management of SSC out of the scientific community. My argument was really simply…

Hoddeson:

This is in what period?

Keyworth:

This is much later.

Hoddeson:

This is 1985 or 1986?

Keyworth:

This was really 1984-85. And what I have told you before is the inner workings of White House priority-setting, and that is what I refer to as the launch of SSC, because, I guess I would say this: if I had dropped dead in February 1983, I believe that SSC would have kept going. In other words, its roots were that deeply entrenched, in spite of the fact that Congress didn’t know about it. No, the White House budget process is a pretty entrenched process, and it is the way that policy and priorities were established, and it was in [the budget] at the end, and the President was enthusiastically behind it at that point. So, I think it would have kept going. What I am saying is, the hard work to me was done there, and then later on of course I had to testify often in the Congress, and I had to build up friendships with people like [California congressman] Ron Packard, who were powerful congressmen and very powerful advocates of SSC. And talking with those people, my argument was simple: we are for the first time seeking an amount of money that is not on anybody’s horizon. You could argue that building any previous accelerator, even Fermilab, was relatively affordable, but this thing is going to start to become a really big part of the federal budget. This is unprecedented. And the project cannot be run in a haphazard manner that we [have done before]. I mean, I had been responsible for the building of [inaudible], the big huge laser up there. We have to be given a fair amount of credit, because I don’t think we overspent by more than a factor of two. But that was the way we talked. What do you mean we are doing badly? We are not more than a factor of two over. And now we are talking about something that initially was $3 billion, and we knew it was a lot more than $3 billion.

Hoddeson:

Even then.

Keyworth:

Oh yeah, sure. Partly just because there is a [lack?] of knowledge inside the scientific community. You know that you are talking about X but what you are really talking about is 2X.

Hoddeson:

Fermilab wasn’t. But that was a special cutting-corners approach.

Keyworth:

It’s not just cutting corners. Wilson didn’t tell a lot of lies either. You are not going to find very many people who are going to tell you that Wilson went out and exaggerated stuff. Wilson had a lot of self-confidence, of the right kind, and he would stand out there in front of a congressman, and he felt no compunction at all in underpricing it or anything else. Wilson is kind of a straightforward guy. Wilson knew what it meant to be a winner. And anybody who thinks that way knows that it is much better to tell somebody it is going to cost $1 dollar and then build it for 80 cents and come out a hero, than it is to tell them it is going to cost fifty cents in order to get a short-term win. So, he not only cut corners, he was thrifty. And it wasn’t only that. It was also that he never told the lies that tie you up into knots later on. Wilson was quite capable of thinking about a project in its totality, holistically as they say. That is one of the reasons he was so exceptional. And none of the people who were associated with the SSC… People wouldn’t let Leon… I wanted Leon [Lederman] to be the guy who ran it.

Hoddeson:

[inaudible]?

Keyworth:

It would have been the only way, and I think it would have worked.

Hoddeson:

What about [Director of the DOE Office of Energy Research Alvin] Trivelpiece?

Keyworth:

Where did he [inaudible]?

Hoddeson:

No. Now we are getting on a side-track for a second, on who would have been a better director than Roy [Schwitters].

Keyworth:

Trivelpiece never even entered my mind. Never. Trivelpiece is an institutional scientist. Let me give you a different opinion about the SSC. I was absolutely committed and really rigid on the subject of selling SSC on only one basis, basic research. No more selling it on medical research, no more selling it on better nuclear weapons, no more selling it on the E. O. Lawrence tradition. Every major accelerator was always sold on something other than what people really knew it was going to be used for.

Hoddeson:

What about the argument, training people who are high-tech types?

Keyworth:

What a crummy way to train people. You want to do that? I’ll tell you what you do. You buy a whole bunch of Van de Graaff accelerators and put them in universities. Much better way of training people, because you would give them a much broader spectrum. Elementary particle physics doesn’t train very good experimentalists. There aren’t many very good experimentalists trained in elementary particle physics. There are people who were great superconducting-coil guys and there are guys who are great electronics guys. But they aren’t scientists. They are just specialists in those areas. They aren’t the guys who are driving Microsoft and so on. No, I don’t subscribe to that theory at all. It is a very expensive way to train.

I think the only reason to do it is… In the twentieth century, basically, you can go back and say that there are only two things… you can go back and say, Maxwell’s equations and the photoelectric effect drove the whole twentieth century, the century of electronics. Just those things. You could really make that argument. Well, I am not quite rationally sure why I would argue that the weak interaction and gravitational theory and the strong interaction are on the same level as the formalism that put Maxwell’s equations on magnetism and electricity. I am not so sure that I can tell you what devices are going to come directly out of that, but I know with absolute certainty that you will drive a tremendous amount of human progress if you could really create a truly simple grand-unified theory, and I have no question at all that in the long run solving all these, basically a fifty-year family of symmetry issues, which is what elementary particle physics has really been about. But when it all appears and is cohesive and we’re not just looking for quarks like the last twenty years, and when we do all this, we will find insights that will deliver incredible things.

I spent a lot of time at the lab. My field, nuclear structure physics, was basically dead when I got out of graduate school, and I knew it. And I got really interested in promoting at the lab what I called fundamental-interaction physics and basically elementary particle physics, but not necessarily that done with accelerators. And I really got the big Los Alamos neutrino program started, for example. I stole money from the weapons program to do it. And I still am convinced that it is possible to develop a neutrino detector that is event-based, that can tell directions, neutrino type — a real honest-to-goodness analytical detector. But that is a very fundamental problem, and you’ve got to get into radically new ideas. I think if you did, you would open up infinitely the most exciting aspect of astronomy. More interesting than X-ray or gamma-ray astronomy, for example. You could see much more. So, what I am saying is that I wanted to argue [for the SSC] on basic research alone, and Al is a real cynic. Al Trivelpiece comes from fusion. These guys make used-car salesmen look like amateurs. Look, fusion research was born at Los Alamos in 1951. That was 49 years ago. It is more difficult today than it was then, and they are still telling people that the break-even point is right around the corner if you’ll just cough up a trillion dollars.

Hoddeson:

So, with this enthusiasm about basic research and what it can do for humanity, you went forward and sold the SSC?

Keyworth:

The SSC was a symbol to me. I already told you that NSF was a huge symbol and I really believed in the symbolic value of SSC. The only other person who really understood this was Leon [Lederman]. I asked Leon…

Hoddeson:

Leon has the same kind of enthusiasm.

Keyworth:

I sat down with the HEPAP group and said, I’ll do my best [break in audio]. When I met at one point with the HEPAP group, I don’t remember if it was the first meeting…

Hoddeson:

This was about when?

Keyworth:

It was either 1981 or 1982. It was either the first or second one. I said to them, “I will give you my absolute word that if you will get people to agree within the community that Isabelle is gone, I will place SSC at very high priority, but I can’t do it alone because it has to be sold to the American people and it has to be sold not by this garbage about curing cancer, welfare, and poverty, and everything else, but we have to do it by capturing people’s imagination” — the way the space station has. And I said there is no reason why we can’t convince people that it is just as exciting as undersea research or something else. Everybody except Leon thought I was being cheap, as in tawdry. [ed. Keyworth is probably referring here to his remarks to the HEPAP subpanel chaired by Stanley Wojcicki in early 1983. That panel was charged with evaluating whether Isabelle should proceed and what strategy should be chosen to secure U.S. leadership in high energy physics.]

[End of side of tape]

Keyworth:

Back to Leon. He was the only member of HEPAP who really understood what I meant when I said you are going to have to capture the imagination of the American people. Leon wrote an article that was published in National Geographic that was a thing of beauty, and you should really go look at it. It must have been 1983 by the time it came out, and it followed an article, I remember distinctly…

Hoddeson:

This was in National Geographic?

Keyworth:

Yes. There was an article about exploring the deep oceans, all this wonderful photography of fish with no eyes and things at five thousand feet deep, and anybody would love this article. The next article was about exploring the depth of matter and it was just as good and it was pure Leon. It was exactly what we needed to do. I got more mileage out of that article by using it as… Congressmen would all of course say, “But Jay, you’ve got to deal the regional issues and you can’t forever avoid the fact that it has to go someplace. Where would it go?” And I refused to get sucked into this discussion at all. I refused and I said, “Look, I think we’ve got to start out at the highest possible plane,” argued that it is part of our administration’s commitment to basic research, and it is part of what America has done better than anybody else in the world. “This is something we are really good at, and if you want to see what I mean, look at this,” and I would bring a copy of the National Geographic. We must have had 100 copies of the whole National Geographic issue. Just beautiful. Leon really got it. You know, the scientific community as a whole is so terrifically elitist. The idea that the average guy on the street is paying the bills is abhorrent to them. Leon is not that way at all.

Hoddeson:

He’ll talk to anybody.

Keyworth:

No, but he understands who is paying the bills. Leon is grateful, which is stark contrast to [Pete?] for example. [Break in tape]

Hoddeson:

I love to give Leon credit. He’s an old friend. I am from Columbia [University, where Lederman was a professor becoming Fermilab director]. Okay, so we were talking about Leon still, and you were saying that if Leon…

Keyworth:

I was just saying in a sense I always had concern about whether the scientific community could bring this off.

Hoddeson:

Because they couldn’t manage this large of a project?

Keyworth:

Well, the first thing was what I referred to about gratitude. It is very difficult to go before a publicly elected body like the Congress and talk about units of money that are large compared to other things the government does — not just large compared to other parts of the science budget, but that compete with other major parts of the government. In other words, really visible units of money, and to do that without realizing that it is important to gain public support. The scientific community has been very elitist about that, and Leon was one hope in that area. The second hope was of course the ability to manage a big project, and that means leadership skills, not just management skills. Management skills can be purchased, but a combination of leadership and management skills... And Leon was clearly, even though he was sort of toward the end of his career… First of all, I have no doubt in my mind that Leon was still young enough to do this project, and I thought he was definitely the right person. On the other hand, that was a decision that really had to be made within the community. And on top of that, as I have already confessed to you, when SDI was on the table, I had a full-time job. Period. And I did not have enough time to push anything else. [NSF Director] Erich Bloch always said that I abandoned him. I did, but I had no choice.

Hoddeson:

Let me ask you how some of the other people you mentioned reacted to the multibillion-dollar project. [Reagan’s first OMB Director] David Stockman, for example?

Keyworth:

First of all, from OMB’s point of view, the near-term spending was low. So, the first few years of spending wasn’t going to impact their budgets a whole lot, which made it less devastating than it might be. On the other hand, the idea of this administration starting new government projects when our job was to roll back government was antithetical to that.

Hoddeson:

You are referring to the difficulty of starting a major new project when—

Keyworth:

The Reagan administration wasn’t trying to grow government. It was trying to shrink government.

Hoddeson:

And trying to shut down DOE.

Keyworth:

Yeah, but I already said we did that and [went past it?].

Hoddeson:

Okay.

Keyworth:

By the way, be careful on that, because one of the reasons that made it relatively easy for me to push basic research with OMB was, first of all most anybody would rather spend money on basic research than anything else.

Hoddeson:

Really?

Keyworth:

Oh yeah. It is like motherhood. That’s why the history of basic research since WWII has been almost a steady increase [in funding]. It is amazing. Compare it to defense, for example. Nobody ever really analyzes this carefully, but basic research grew in the Reagan administration faster than defense grew, not defense research but defense spending. And it is a relatively easy thing to sell. I don’t know anything in the government that is as easy. When you have to walk into a congressman’s office and you are trying to push something, I think it is easier to push basic research than it is to push any single other thing. That was always the easiest part of my job. It is an easy thing to sell as long as you don’t try to [inaudible]. When Pete Dominici, our New Mexico senator was trying to push for the balanced budget, in 1986 or 1987, after I left, I was always delighted that he stood up and asked for only one exception to the balanced budget and it was NSF. There is the motherhood. People know that it has been successful in the past, that it is not porkish. Back to my question. I was worried about the [high-energy physics] community being able to act grown up enough to bring this off. By the way, to jump way forward, I am going to argue that that is exactly what happened. In the later years, when SSC was being terminated — you are going to think I am a coward — I was asked time and time again to come and testify. I refused every time, because, you know the old argument, if you can’t say something nice don’t say anything. I couldn’t…

Hoddeson:

[inaudible]?

Keyworth:

The community? It never got off to a good start in terms of building—

Hoddeson:

We are now talking 1992 or so?

Keyworth:

It never got off to a good start in terms of building public support. If you are going to build or drive an argument that you don’t believe, then you are going to have to give arguments that you don’t believe, and the argument that we were going to build the SSC in order to make jobs and skills training. Look what took place, for crying out loud. The whole computer revolution took place and it has been estimated that Microsoft by 1994 had created 750,000 jobs in this country. Not Microsoft itself, but all the software developers. And what are you going to do, stand up and talk about SSC at this point? I was giving speeches in the early 1990s, 1992, all over the world, arguing competitiveness. I think the President’s commission on competitiveness was part of my early responsibility and I got very interested in how we could have totally missed the ball so much. It has driven me ever since. I would give speeches on how the thing we have to face up to is the fact that no longer are we questioning who has the strongest economy in the world. After having indulged in self-flagellation in the early 1980s to the point where we were aligning ourselves with Rome, I said… In 1992 I was arguing, the question is not who is number one, it is who is number two. Japan had already gone into its recession and was in deep trouble.

Hoddeson:

[inaudible].

Keyworth:

Who is? There isn’t anybody. We are in such an incredibly privileged… Our machine is coming along so incredibly smoothly, do you really want to sell a facility using government money based on job creation when economists were already predicting in 1992 that in the long run the biggest problem we were going to have was enough people to fulfill the requirements? And of course, that is where we have been ever since.

Hoddeson:

While we are in 1992… I was going to ask you this question at the very end. If you had to give three reasons for the SSC’s failure what would they be?

Keyworth:

Arrogance, bad salesmanship, and bad management, in that order.

Hoddeson:

What do you mean by arrogance?

Keyworth:

Inability to respect and meet the objectives and requirements of the people who were paying the bills. If you think the average snook on the street is too stupid to understand why you are building a facility, why the hell should he pay for it?

Hoddeson:

Okay.

Keyworth:

Leon is exactly the opposite. That article in National Geographic was a testimony to Leon.

Hoddeson:

Let’s talk about some other people in that early period. Ed Meese: how did he react to the SSC?

Keyworth:

Ed Meese was my friend. Basically, he said if you care that much about it, it must be good. He was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. I knew this. I can say this now. If I went to Stockman, or [inaudible] — I didn’t do it very often; I didn’t spend [inaudible] very often — but I went to them, and I said I am going to go up the floor on this one, if you want to we’ll talk about it with Ed… And he reported to Ed just as much as I reported to Ed, Stockman did. So, he knew perfectly well that I wouldn’t say that without Ed backing me. And Ed, on the other hand, would back me badly a couple of times. You can’t afford to do that very often. On the SSC, I don’t know that Ed ever felt that it belonged as high on the priorities as I did. I think he caught the symbolic value. What I wanted of course was really simple: I wanted 20 more years of commitment to basic research. No more confusing space research with basic research. No more confusing hotels in the sky with basic research. I wanted basic research to be…

By the way, if you asked, I never dreamed that basic research could have fallen as far as far as it has in terms of how popular… I just can’t believe it. I know how it happened. Look, if the scientific community wanted to create a science advisor’s office that was basically independent of what the President wanted from his staff, they got exactly what they asked for. So, they got a science advisor with absolutely no power. Second, no power anywhere can replace the management and budget process, the ability to get things put in the budget and implement them. So, you have just seen 10 years, 12 years —18 years, if you count all the way back to 1982 — of unparalleled economic growth in this country, with only two quarters with any difficulty at all, and those weren’t even negative growth. The great recession was… No, no, the next recession was 1991. That wasn’t even a recession. It wasn’t actually negative growth. It was just a downturn in the stock market. And with all this incredible economic growth, we have seen ten years of relative decline in basic research. How? Well, part of it was particularly focusing on the process. It was just irrelevant. You don’t make priorities in the government by a consensus process. You elect somebody to do it, and then you try to get those fulfilled.

I would argue you can fit basic research into almost anybody’s agenda. In this one, you have a very special case, the last eight years. You have [Vice President] Al Gore, who knows a tremendous amount about technology and is really, really obsessed with trying to make the government into a more effective steerer of how commercial technology develops. And so, Al Gore’s objective has been to take more and more of the federal pot of money and move it over out of basic research into technology. The scientific community, being leftist in nature, has gone along with him without realizing the implications. When you take money, and you start pushing for all these government-industry collaborations like these at the labs… I was a big enthusiast for having industries involved with universities, because industry leaders can come in and tell universities about problems that they have. I am not talking about technological problems. High-tech industries. I think Bill Gates going to Stanford and giving a speech on how much can be done with decision theory, and how important it is to the future of the computing industry, is an incredibly good thing to do. But universities have a built-in mechanism to restrict the damage that industry can do. I mean, industry is near-term and a university is supposed to train, educate people. They are diametrically opposed. But universities are so, if you wish, self-regulated through their own academic processes that they are insulated from that.

Hoddeson:

And the SSC was not?

Keyworth:

No, this has nothing to do with the SSC.

Hoddeson:

No, I know, I am just thinking about industry—

Keyworth:

I am talking about the fact… What I started telling you is … In the SSC we had to displace huge amounts of earth and build lots of niobium-tin [superconductors]. Industry wanted to do that, and the scientists wanted to do an experiment. Period. I think I am kind of typical: I would rather have a service that gave me a 100 GeV proton beam and so many particles per second when I pressed a button. Just give me the beam and I will use it. I don’t care about the accelerator. The accelerator is not science. The technology of the accelerator is pedestrian technology. What we do, but the best technology in the world is done by… The best lab on Earth today, in terms of being leading edge, is either Microsoft or NIH in terms of pursuing really, really leading-edge technology. Going out and building a bunch of superconducting magnet devices? For crying out loud, that is early-twentieth-century technology.

Hoddeson:

By the way, how do you get [along with?] DOE [officials?] Jim Reese, [High Energy Physics program head William] Wallenmeyer, people like that?

Keyworth:

Careful. Jim Reese and Wallemeyer I have had my arguments with. They are pros. They are committed people. They have taste. You go on criticizing government all you want, but there are every once in a while these guys who really are decent people. They are. They are good. They were very cynical.

Hoddeson:

They were very cynical?

Keyworth:

Oh yeah, of course they were. They should have been cynical. It is a big project.

Hoddeson:

We are talking 1982?

Keyworth:

Sure, right up to ‘82, ‘83, even back when it got to be implemented. They were cynical because… Look, let’s be honest about something. When you are trying to push policy and priorities, you value the things that have maximum symbolic value. You know this battle of big science versus little science? You know, anybody, from Vannevar Bush on, if you are trying to keep and establish a priority for basic research you are going to go for a big project because it is the only way you can talk to the whole country at the same time. It is extremely difficult for me to go out and… I really believe what I said before, silly as it is, that Van de Graaff [accelerators] are the best way to train the best experimentalists. That is where you get guys who are very good at practical electronics, guys who are very good at high-vacuum systems, guys who are very good at optics. You get a guy who has worked four or five years on a Van de Graaff and he’s a damn good experimentalist. On the other hand, I can’t go out and explain to people with very short attention spans on why Van de Graaff accelerators will build a better America than otherwise. But I can do it with an SSC. It’s whatever you want to call it. It is the communication tower of a large project. Now if you ask me…

Hoddeson:

[inaudible]?

Keyworth:

Sure, exactly. It inherently does. You can blow it, but Leon could not have written that magnificent article about Van de Graaff accelerators as a great teaching tool. Maybe Leon could have. I couldn’t. So, [that’s] the reason why people who are involved in policy lean on big projects. And there is a very good reason why Wallemeyer and Jim Reese don’t like big projects — concentrated risk. I don’t blame them at all. If I were in their shoes, I would push for the Van de Graaffs. So, were they helpful? They were very helpful. They were helpful partly because they are absolute professionals. They don’t have agendas that are complex. They are not sneaks. Don Hodel [Reagan’s second Secretary of Energy]? Don Hodel was a good friend of mine.

Hoddeson:

He was a friend of the SSC, too.

Keyworth:

He was a friend of the SSC. I am the one who…

Hoddeson:

Oh. You made…, okay.

Keyworth:

Well, he was a bright guy, and he was very, very dedicated to the President, and I convinced him that the SSC was very much consistent with Reagan administration policy. And on top of that, I got the President, so we talked about it a lot. The President was completely familiar, but evidently it wasn’t his SDI.

Hoddeson:

What role did the lively panels that met on HEPAP, what priority did they really play? And some of them started before you came in. The Drell subpanel in 1980? But then there was Maury Tigner, who led a subpanel meeting in 1980, and the [Berkeley physicist George] Trilling panel in January/February of 1982, and then eventually the [Stanley] Wojcicki panel [in 1983].

Keyworth:

Which one?

Hoddeson:

Stan Wojcicki’s panel. Were they really influential, or were they just acting out the agenda which had already been established?

Keyworth:

Well, let’s distinguish. The individual components, working groups and so on, weren’t to me going to sway, one way or the other, the decision. But the quality of HEPAP and the ability of HEPAP to put together the right kind of people was instrumental in my early assessment that the SSC could be undertaken. But let me make a point clear. I spent all my nickels on the SSC. I mean, I sat down with a group and made a deal about Isabelle, and then I said that I would go and I would push this [project]. And then over the course of the next 12 months, into the next budget cycle, I spent all my nickels. And after that, it didn’t matter if 72 advisory committees came down and said it was dead meat. I think we are missing the point.

Hoddeson:

[inaudible]?

Keyworth:

Well, the quality of HEPAP was important, the talk we had about Isabelle, and the fact that I could look at them and say that the giant accelerator, the World Accelerator, etc. Wait a minute, guys, what do you think about it? And we had a lot of talk about that.

Hoddeson:

About the VBA [Very Big Accelerator]?

Keyworth:

Yeah, about, what was it? Yeah. Absolutely.

Hoddeson:

About the fact that it would never get built?

Keyworth:

I never liked the word VBA, by the way.

Hoddeson:

That was Leon’s name by the way.

Keyworth:

I know. The reason I didn’t like it was because the VBA was perceived two ways. It was perceived as the word for the accelerator that never should be built because it cost too much. And it was also something else which to me gave it the kiss of death, that we in the scientific community always fell into it: it was the accelerator that was too big unless it was done internationally. The truth… I mean, we can say that, and we will always want to do these things internationally because science… because America would be second-class if we didn’t have [inaudible], that’s why. We didn’t have any great science in this country until Hitler. J. Willard Gibbs was perhaps the greatest American scientist [before that], right?

Hoddeson:

There were a few. Joseph Henry was pretty good.

Keyworth:

Joseph Henry gave us something really useless until superconductivity came along. The only [inaudible] Henry coil there is a superconducting coil. Never mind, I am being facetious. The fact of the matter is that you can’t have a facility that will be world class unless it’s got people from all over the world. In other words, unless it is purely Darwinian. You can’t do that. On the other hand, you are not going to get the Congress to support a project which is big time unless the U.S. is the dominant partner, because that is the role we play in the world. You don’t think that NATO is a democracy. It is the role we play. It is the responsibility we have, or it is our manifestation of isolation, if you want to call it that. But the VBA in its original concept was that it was the "it-can’t-be-done" accelerator. So, I wanted to hear from them. Let’s talk about the right accelerator. I think Leon will tell you, this was the question I kept asking: if you simply aspired to be best, and you aspired to push forward the field, what would you build?

Hoddeson:

Yeah, but the VBA changes design. The early version is actually a scaled-up Fermilab, and then they eventually changed to a design that was very much like what the SSC was.

Keyworth:

But from my point of view, if you think that any aspect of SSC’s origins had anything to do with whether the superconducting coils were credible or not, or whether they were niobium or titanium, it had never had any relevance at all. I am going to argue — partly [because] I knew too much about the particular aspects of the coil problems. Those were not leading-edge coil problems at all. They were systems problems. The question wasn’t whether we could build a coil. The question was: could we operate an accelerator with thousands of these segments without one of them quenching every day? That was the overall issue. But I don’t think it was as serious a design problem as Boeing faces every time you go with a plane. I mean, a jet airplane is a fifty-year-old technology. The superconducting coil problem was not a difficult problem, so I refused to get sucked into that. My feeling was that maybe it will take another year, but it won’t take another two years, so who cares? The issue was, are we building the right accelerator? And I think the SSC was. Or at least that’s the impression I have. And that’s where these HEPAP groups were all valuable. They all did come out for the argument that this is going to be hard but this is the best accelerator.

Hoddeson:

This is what we need in order to make progress in the field of physics now.

Keyworth:

Right.

Hoddeson:

And it just happened to be almost the same design as the VBA [project], being run by the ICFA [International Committee on Future Accelerators] people, and then, from their point of view in 1983, the U.S. coopted their machine. And I asked Leon what happened, and he said, “Oh well, you know, people didn’t [inaudible] to ICFA discussing it. Once we found out we could be funded on our own, we forgot all about ICFA, because it wasn’t going to happen.” He called it a mirage.

Keyworth:

It is like people sitting around talking about how evil monopolies are, and then you say to them, “But how would you like to have one?” And they say, “I could do that,” f course.

Hoddeson:

But in connection with the American physicists forgetting all about ICFA and the VBA at the moment when the realized they could have their own machine, this led to some bad feeling among the international [high-energy physics] community. In particular, the Japanese were offended. Did that affect you when you went to Japan?

Keyworth:

Sure. The Japanese have a level… I’ve forgotten what it is called, but it is the equivalent of a ministerial scientific advisory council. No other country has anything like it. You are talking about… It is as if you put Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, James Watson… You know, just pick the five biggest people on Earth and put them in this group. And they came and met with Dave Packard and a select group of mine. You have to give the Japanese credit. They really can look forward. They can actually hold a conversation on how things are going to be 100 years from now. We have difficulty with going five years from now. And they got talking about very abstract stuff, and they were at the same time very deeply worried about their ability to generate public support inside Japan for basic research and the fact that we were making it more difficult for them because — they never used the word — we are basically isolationists.

So, we talked a lot about this. Did they make it difficult? No. First of all, one thing you don’t think about until you go to work in U.S. government, especially the White House, is that we really are a big country. Nobody makes things difficult for the U.S. It just doesn’t work that way. We’re just too big. And the problem is you don’t want to, but the fact of the matter is that Japan can’t make life difficult for the U.S. They depend on us; it is not the other way around. So, when they came to gripe about this, they came bringing us their problem and asking what we could do about it. And I did go to Japan several times and give lectures to Diet bodies about why basic research has worked so well in the U.S., at their request.

But as far as the strategic mission went, I don’t think anybody ever believed the U.S. could be effective in international cooperation. You don’t think we ever did in the space station? I would go around the world and my counterparts, especially in Europe, would say, “To tell you the truth, we will pay lip service to your space station, but we don’t really believe you are ever really going to let us do anything except pay for the things you don’t want to do.” To the ones I knew really well, like Herbert [inaudible] in France, I’d say, you are absolutely right. What can I say? We never involved ourselves in… We have been very good partners to CERN, even though we haven’t [paid much?]. We brought big detectors. We supported a lot of the community that works there. But we haven’t paid for the facility.

Hoddeson:

So, the Wojcicki panel was a subpanel of HEPAP. You spoke to them actually in March 1983. [inaudible] My notes don’t say here, but then you gave a big talk in April 1983, which I think I have a copy of here. In this you anticipate the Woods Hole meeting where the Wojcicki subpanel finally had decisive meetings. In the summer of 1983, you anticipated that the watershed episode for the U.S. getting back on track and regaining leadership … and this talk was given one month after Reagan’s famous talk about SDI, but it probably had no connection to it.

Keyworth:

No. I am not being cynical. You are talking about a speech-writer’s speech.

Hoddeson:

Oh, this was a speech-writer’s speech.

Keyworth:

Bruce wrote that. We did together. I don’t mean that I give speeches— Nobody stands up and gives a speech he hasn’t read. Believe me, that’s suicidal. But what I meant was… We are talking about two different things. We are talking about me making a commitment to do what I could do to push SSC, and now you are talking about the process of trying to get the process to be more effective, disseminated so that everybody would pull together. This is part of the second part. It is all done before that. Whatever you want to call it, my reputation, my power was on the line long before this was [inaudible]. Stockman’s acceptance of the SSC and the project, and OMB’s acceptance of the SSC as a project, was done long before this.

Hoddeson:

Okay. So, then in July the Wojcicki panel puts forth its recommendations, for Isabelle [to be cancelled] and to go forward with the SSC project, on July 11th. And then it starts with your request to the DOE. And it seems that they supported it formally but [inaudible] because he always feels underfunded and [inaudible]?

Keyworth:

No, I wasn’t. I mean, I was and I wasn’t. I was aware of it. Well, let’s put this whole thing in context for a second and go back. You say it goes back to 1981. The reason it goes back to 1981 is because in 1981 we had to make a decision about Isabelle. Isabelle was embryonic at that stage. It was taking money. It was accepted in the community. We had to get it back in, or find an alternative, or kill it, and I wasn’t going to kill it, because if you think about it, it was because in the first year we had an administration which wanted to kill everything. I shouldn’t say the administration. This was a small-government administration. Everything is at risk. One of the first things I had to do was push forward an argument to very good people of why NIH should be allowed to do in-house clinical research, which is half of NIH, why they should be allowed to do it. First, why would you take the best laboratory medical research institution on Earth and crush it? But on the other hand, they should have asked that question and they should have forced me to give answers. But that is where we were, back to basic principles — you know, questioning the role of sociology research at NSF, that kind of stuff.

The first year, that is where we were. So, the basic question of why not kill Isabelle — let us just kill it for the sake of budget — was there. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to just lose basic research money without getting a counter. But we had to deal with it. That is why the HEPAP subpanel that met in the Old Executive Office Building with me was, as I recollect, called by us. It helped us make up our minds on this problem. Then, during 1982 we had to start setting up these budget priorities where, because you work with a three-year budget [cycle] in the White House… The agencies work with a one-year budget, but we work a three-year budget because we are thinking about policy and one-year is not policy. One-year is initiative. So, we had to do that. People knew at that point, and I had to work it carefully with Ed Meese and, you know, at least my way of working with the President was to get him to feel comfortable with something, not to go and pander. If had something I wanted, I am not going to go to the President of the U.S. to help… [inaudible] can do that.

Hoddeson:

He would?

Keyworth:

No, [inaudible] certain weaknesses. But anyway, I wanted to disseminate this in the White House so that it had some staying power. Afterward, I didn’t care what happened. I knew he was going to go. Edwards was secretary in 1982. After that, [we had] Hodel, who could think. Hodel was not stupid. I would go and try to disseminate it with these people. This process and this speech is the right thing [to do]… First of all, it is kind of fun. I remember this now very well, because these are very, very good people, and all you are trying to do is get them to… You can’t tell them to do anything. All you can do is get them to try to pull the right way. But after that the science advisor can’t do it, and to sit there and worry about the fact… I know exactly what was happening with the budget, because Stockman would support anything as long as it didn’t cost very much out of this budget so he was putting pressure on it. And DOE wasn’t fighting back, or wasn’t fighting back hard enough. It wasn’t the Congress’s fault at all. If you wish, the priority, that we had put it high, was taking some real effort to keep high. And you know, in a sense, the reason the project died is because everything… I don’t know quite what to say except I never saw this happen to a project before. If you go and look at any other major project, you will find that there is a really concerted effort to support or drive that effort. Take Fermilab, for example. There wasn’t a known scientist in this country who didn’t go to his congressman and his senator — I am not talking about in Illinois, I am talking about in this country — to support Fermilab. It was just a concerted effort. I can say that I was too busy on SDI, but that is not true. I had a good-sized staff, and it only took me one hour to go and get over to Congress. I could do it, and I did do it all the time. It is that there is a point where you try to do your best to disseminate it, to get the support spread throughout the community and throughout DOE, and it was in every place, but it never really jelled, and I am going to fault the scientific community above all. It is not just HEPAP. HEPAP had good people.

Hoddeson:

Do you think it was partly the fact that the site selection made losers out of all the states that didn’t win?

Keyworth:

The whole site-selection process was absolutely a waste. All the wrong arguments. When I was her — I was telling you my arguments for building the SSC — you sure didn’t hear any of my arguments when they were doing the site selection, only “jobs”. Then it became a bidding war. I was actually advising Roy Romer, who was the governor of Colorado at the time, about what they could do so the state could get it. I said, talk about your commitment to building a better university environment. Colorado had been sort of the…

Hoddeson:

Everybody thinks Colorado was second.

Keyworth:

Well, one of the seconds, yeah. But the problem is Colorado couldn’t bid the way Texas did about just plain giving scientific money. What they could have done is to make it part of some kind of a big package. Roy Romer really wanted to get a more attractive environment for high-tech industry in Colorado. It was in deep trouble. In 1988, Colorado was the slowest-growing state in the union. Now it is very healthy, but then it was in deep trouble. It had a very anti-growth governor in [Richard] Lamb and the aerospace industries had too much of a role, and so they were in big trouble. And because I had been on the board of Hewlett-Packard forever, he talked to me a lot about what it would take to get HP there. And I said better universities. Boulder isn’t good enough to draw somebody and you need to put more emphasis on it. If the SSC can be part of that whole commitment to high-tech, then you’ve got a chance. They did, by the way, and they had a pretty good proposal. But Texas just out-Texaned them, I don’t know if that’s the word for it.

Hoddeson:

But then the resentment was all over the country.

Keyworth:

Yeah, it was, but you know something? I don’t know whether to put this in terms of the [inaudible] or not, but you know, a man on my advisory council the last couple of years and a very dear old lifetime friend, [MIT physical chemist and provost and Carter administration DOE appointee] John Deutch is the guy who really started the big science versus small science [argument]. … He always was the kiss of death. That had nothing to do with big science versus small science. That had to do with a bunch of materials scientists who felt they hadn’t been getting their fair share, and it became a wave.

Hoddeson:

[inaudible].

Keyworth:

Actually, it was more MIT. And he was always there, always had [to say?] the same thing. It is almost like the engineer-versus-scientist argument which settled down a long time ago because the marketplace took care of it. Physicists have more prestige; engineers get paid more. Everyone is happy, sort of. But as in the 1960s when major research funding for universities really started to explode, there is no question that individual researchers, materials scientists in particular, didn’t get as much as other people. But, by the way, if you want to get the guys who really got screwed, it was mathematicians. They are in the pie, and one of the reasons is that mathematicians don’t cost very much, they don’t want very much, they don’t require expensive things. Number two, in materials science, because semiconductor technology took off and there was such an enormous amount of money available for anything to do with semiconductors, it came from industry, it came from the Defense Department. NSF never really felt a great compulsion to put money into solid-state science. They put plenty of money into quantum mechanics, which was the foundation of solid-state science, but there were plenty of other sources of money.

Anyway, for whatever the reason, opposition grew, and big science versus small science started on my watch, and I realized what it was going to do, and it has been devastating to basic research. It has torn a community that used to be committed to basic research into little pieces. So now you have guys… What happened with the SSC is that you had congressmen up, down, and sideways who had been lectured by their local university about big science versus little science. If you listen to the terms, it wasn’t big science versus little science, it was the have-nots versus the haves, and it was always followed secondly with the fact that 100 universities get 99 percent of the money, and 10 universities get 85 percent of the money, or something like that. You know what? That is exactly the way it is supposed to be. Go out and look at how the flowers are distributed under a tree or something and you’ll see who gets all the nutrients. The tallest flowers do; that is the nature of excellence.

We have actually a fair amount of dynamism in the universities. Look at Carnegie-Mellon, for example. Twenty years ago, Carnegie Mellon was a second-class school. It is a first-class school today. Stanford is not all that old. My school, Yale, bit the dust basically. Yeah, it is retarded. It doesn’t happen like that, but there is a fair amount of natural selection in the process. I am off on a subject that really bothers me. Big science versus small science is completely destructive, a no-win [argument], and it hurt the SSC. And you’re right, the competition for site selection opened the door to that. It said to every congressman that this is not a national issue, it is a local issue.

Hoddeson:

As a follow-up, we can talk about the end of the SSC. One factor that we didn’t discuss at all was the U.S. relationship to Europe in physics. This is a period …

[End of side of tape]

Hoddeson:

Going back to the period when the SSC begins, this is a period in high-energy physics when the U.S. relationship to Europe is beginning to teeter a little bit — those three wonderful discoveries at CERN, one in 1982, gluon jets [ed., discovered at DESY, not CERN], and the W and the Z in 1983. What I read in the materials is kind of a global feeling of the U.S. losing ground in the international scene, and I was wondering how this played in your [thinking?].

Keyworth:

From 1981 to 1984-5, the whole climate in America, the whole public mentality, was that we were a great nation that was going down the tubes, and nobody was looking at what we were doing well in this country. We were looking at what the Japanese were doing well. We were looking at what Germany was doing well. But this was not a great period of pride in the U.S. I think science felt really the same thing. First of all, you are absolutely right that for the first time in memory, a majority of breakthroughs, a majority of the best papers each year, letters in elementary particle theory, were in fact being done at CERN. It doesn’t matter that they were being done by Europeans. They were being done at CERN. And we were of course aware of this. By the way, Fermilab was getting mature.

Hoddeson:

And Fermilab had given up this competition in order to finish its Doubler [the Tevatron].

Keyworth:

Absolutely, and wisely by the way. So, on the one hand, I don’t think we were experiencing a sudden panic. Look, if you look at all the different things that the U.S. could be measured on, I think we probably had more unanimous agreement that we were better in science than we were at most things, but definitely our unique position of leadership was challenged, no question. For me the issue wasn’t so much the scientific competition, although that was an issue. The biggest issue was the fact that we needed to go back and invest more money in the things we knew how to do well. And I always argue, and I argued with my tears at the time at the White House, that we knew how to do basic research better than anybody else in the world. We had the right institutions, because it was university-based and we didn’t give PhDs on the job the way they do in Europe, for example. We give PhDs in universities as the means to be able to do independent research, not to be able to prove that you have been in the field for 10 years. The PhD in this country is supposed to be a criterion for being able to do and lead independent research, period. In other words, we really have pretty much mastered it, and that’s why we should do it.

I am trying to say that, in terms of the whole international relationship, there is no question that our uniqueness was eroding. There is no question that competition between CERN and the U.S. was contributing to a self-assessment of what do we do next. Let us do something exciting and bold, recapturing the lead. No question about it, and there is no question that I was sensitive to all of these, but I keep saying, and I am going to be redundant here, my real issue was to… I thought basic research and priorities for basic research had been threatened in the 1970s and my real interest was to see the commitment and priority of basic research reestablished. And I felt that if we could do it in a conservative administration, it would survive liberal administrations. And I thought that the SSC was something I was both personally extremely excited about — which I must confess is probably half the story in the sense that, if I were going to go out and do something at a working level, that would have been tops on my priority lists, one of the top things. Astrobiology and that probably. So, all of that was there and then the question of competition from Europe. Of course, America likes to be the best at everything.

It is interesting. I mean that was really a passing fancy, because I think Europe very quickly fell into things like Eureka, these industrial-policy approaches, which just spent huge amounts of money that could have gone into science and didn’t. It went into completely ineffective things. Europe’s production of semiconductors was less after those programs than it was beforehand, and it is almost significant. I do a lot of Europe today. Europe is a tragedy. There is more hope in Africa than there is in Europe right now. The problems of desocializing are unbelievable. And France, for example, with unemployment at 27% under the age of 30. The biggest problem is Germany. Europe is [inaudible] right now, not because they are not [inaudible], but because they are creating… but because of what always happens. Young people are really being left out. That is what socialism does. It boils out the kids, or spends it all before you get to the kids.

If you read yesterday in the New York Times, I think there was an article about how finally the cost of internet access is beginning to go down. We talk about digital have-nots and haves in this country. The truth is there has never been a technology that brought the poor and rich as close as the internet has done. In Europe, it is the opposite. They toll phones. We haven’t seen this for so long, most people can’t even remember. In other words, if you make a local phone call here in Santa Fe, you pay a nickel a minute. Well, you can say you could manage it if you tell your teenage kids not to talk long on the phone. On the internet you can’t tolerate that. So, all over Europe internet access is virtually free because the phone companies pay the internet service providers $20 a month for every customer they have because all the money comes from these toll charges. You go on the web for an hour and you pay ten bucks. My consulting over in Paris is an old guy who used to be president of Thompson, a real thinker too. When I was griping to him about this, he said “Jay, don’t worry about it. Just get used to it.” Next thing you know your $25 phone bills are $100 phone bills, and you get used to it. I said, “That is easy for you and me, but how about the guy who didn’t go to college and is in his third year of his first year, and he is working in a shoe store?” Internet access in Europe has created incredible disparity and that doesn’t get tolerated for long.

In other words, they are starting to fix it. They set up the International Monetary Union to create a trade zone, but in fact what it is doing is forcing countries to reduce their government expenditures in order to fit into the 3% deficit requirement to be a member of the EEU [European Economic Union]. So, they don’t have the political will to desocialize inside the governments. 52% of the GNP of Western Europe is redistributed through the governments. They can’t compete. They can’t cut it down, because people won’t vote for it, but they can do it on the argument that they have to do it to be members of the EU. What I am trying to say is that science is part of a bigger picture here. Yeah, I think the competition was actually pretty healthy. I think it is always good when we Americans are shown we are not as good as we think we are. And on top of that, I give talks all the time to point out that we owe Adolf Hitler a contribution because he made America into the greatest scientific power in the world. Without Adolf Hitler, we would be second class.

Hoddeson:

Let’s see, I just have two things to ask. One is just general. We need to talk about the end of the SSC a little bit. But maybe before we get to that, I’ll ask you why you left OSTP at the end of 1985, resigning on Thanksgiving eve I guess?

Keyworth:

I’ll tell you what I really did. I resigned first after the Geneva Summit [ed. which occurred on November 19 and 20, 1985]. The President came back, and I’ll never forgot the conversation I had with him on Saturday, I said, “Mr. President, the Geneva Summit was the President’s success.” This is when Gorbachev went to the summit and said we want you to stop SDI, and Reagan said no, and the next thing we knew we had arms control talks and we were well on our way to START I. It was considered an enormous success. For the first time, the U.S. had really taken the lead in U.S.-Soviet relations in a long time. And the President had insisted on putting the word “obsolete” in the SDI speech. I went to see him on Saturday and said, “Mr. President, I am now the longest-serving person on your staff. I am tired and I want to leave, and with your performance in Geneva you have made me obsolete.”

He chuckled, but there was a tricky thing that needed to be done. The President had just set up a blue-ribbon commission on defense reform, and David Packard was the chairman of it, and he knew David Packard and I were extremely close. And David Packard and Cap [Secretary of Defense Casper] Weinberger, who I also was close to, couldn’t tolerate each other: they hated each other. So, he asked me to stay long enough to get that thing going, and so in fact I got to be very close friends with Colin Powell, who was Weinberger’s assistant. The two of us worked carefully to get this relationship working. I stayed, but to be quite blunt, I had a child who had been hospitalized for three and a half years at NIH, and I was at the end of my rope and working a night-and-day job, every single night being dropped off at NIH at 11 at night so I could take [care of?] the kid. I was very tired.

The truth of the matter is — and I think anybody in the Clinton administration will probably tell you the same thing — the first three years are exciting. The next five years are trying to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed. You set all the priorities, you do all the hard work, which is fun. It is figuring out right and wrong for the first few years, and then you are just trying to get those policies implemented. I stayed five years. Until Jack Gibbons, I had been the science advisor longer than any science advisor in history. That’s a long time. And SDI had been my all-consuming thing for a year and a half and, basically, by the time I left we could declare victory. The Reykjavik summit was the greatest day in Reagan’s eyes. I think the greatest day in his administration was totally brought about by SDI. So, it wasn’t any fun going to work anymore.

Hoddeson:

If you had anything to do over just simply, what would it be?

Keyworth:

Number one, the space program — I would have put it into somebody else’s hands. They expected me to put my most behind it, and I [shouldn’t?] have. We could have had a really great space program. I really believe deeply in the Mars mission, but not when it is manned, that’s terrible. But the Mars mission is well within our capability. We had done all the groundwork for it. We had propulsion engines. But this damned hotel in the sky. We had done sky labs in the 1970s. NASA has just become a tired out old xerox machine. Nobody respects NASA. Look what has happened now. Congress can hardly stand up to them.

Hoddeson:

[inaudible].

Keyworth:

I deserve a lot of the credit for NASA. Because we were pro-defense, because we were a very conservative administration, we could do things like that. What we should have done is create a new NASA. I think we would have had support for it.

Hoddeson:

I’m focusing on high-energy physics in the early ’80s. You had a major impact.

Keyworth:

If you ask me whether I feel I’ve made a mistake after what happened to the SSC, I would do it all over again. I don’t have any qualms about that. You know, this man that I simply don’t get along with, Murray Gell-Mann — and I don’t like him either — but I will tell you something, he has been criticized a lot for his aspersions on dirt physics, and I don’t know why he has to make aspersions, but I will say one thing: the field of [particle physics, to] which he has been a permanent contributor… so, his contributions will remain forever, as long as science chronicles itself, as the pinnacle of man’s ability to reap knowledge out of his environment. It is.

Trivelpiece and I used to argue about this all the time, because I would be unabashed. He’d say, “What is the difference between a particle physicist and a fusion physicist?” And I would say, “Thirty IQ points.” (And I am not either one.) Particle physics is an extraordinarily creative field and has drawn extraordinarily creative and analytical people. I think at the time we put the SSC forth — and we should have done it — I think a lot of things had to be right. I wish I had paid more attention to trying to build a three-way relationship between the community, Congress, and, if you wish, the politicization of science. I wish I had spent a little more time on that. Ultimately, the community’s inability to make itself accountable killed the project. If you overspend on a project by a factor of two, if it is 100 million bucks nobody really cares. But if it is five billion versus ten billion and six billion versus twelve billion, and you don’t say I made a mistake and here is what I have learned and this is why it is not going to happen again, nobody is going to trust you. They never did that. They always blamed everybody else.

Hoddeson:

But their big budgets kind of came when the [superconducting magnet] aperture increased, isn’t that right?

Keyworth:

It is not clear about [horse and buggy?]…

Hoddeson:

Later on, after they got the work [inaudible]…

Keyworth:

Yeah.

Hoddeson:

I forget now exactly what happened.

Keyworth:

It is nice and convenient to blame it on the aperture. It is nice and convenient to blame it on magnet problems and so on. The truth of the matter is the scientific community never walked up to that project with an idea that they were going to ask for something and live within it. I mean, Wilson’s genes were devoid in the way the SSC was approached. Wilson, for all of his personal arrogance, was a very humble man.

Hoddeson:

I know. I am such a big fan of Wilson’s. Wilson hired me at Fermilab.

Keyworth:

Did he really? He was a great man. He was here a lot.

Hoddeson:

I just [heard that he died?] yesterday. [ed. Robert Wilson died on January 16, 2000.]

Keyworth:

Did you see the obituary in the New York Times?

Hoddeson:

Yes.

Keyworth:

Did you ever see the [inaudible]? Anyway, Leon has a lot of the same traits. Sure, he’s more facetious, sort of. Oh, he’s more down to Earth, too.

Hoddeson:

He’s a lot more with the people.

Keyworth:

Right. But Leon had the traits and the ability to do it. We as a community… You know, all the early great men in this country in science… One of the ones I was raised by was Luis Alverez, and those guys… First of all, they all have one thing in common that none of us do: they remember we almost lost World War II, and they went to work to try to keep it from happening, and then afterward they had great gratitude. And then when great funding for science came along in the 1960s — I mean big projects came along in the 1960s — they said, god, people are wonderful to us. And so, you got to know these people. They were completely different from my generation. They all had gratitude. And then my generation comes along…

And you do see it much more in the biomedical community, and you know why? Because biomedical research is not basic research. It is very much applied research. You are very closely coupled with a problem and solution. I got to know most of those guys who were— Bob Gallo and so on, the leaders of human virology in the early days of AIDS. They were all just like wartime scientists and just totally, totally committed, and realizing that they were doing a process that was at the public’s whim, basically. So, they did go out and explain things. We just got so damn arrogant and ungrateful. I gave a speech… Bob Walker, the chairman of the [House] Science Committee…

Hoddeson:

Bob Walker, the one who—

Keyworth:

Congressman Bob Walker, who was the chairman of the Science Committee until he retired about three years ago. Bob asked me to come up and give a speech on my old proposal for a department of science and technology, and since I was very reluctant — I mean, I think there are pluses and minuses — [we found a] solution, and I did. I went up and talked for about an hour about the erosion of the trust between the American public and the scientific community, because basic research was built on it. The only way the SSC would have ever succeeded, not only being built but being funded at a level such that… You had never run into anything at the same traditional level of elementary particle physics before. The only way we could have done that was to go back and re-strengthen that trust again. I think you’d see the American people are not cynical about science. They are very, very receptive, very quick to make heroes out of scientists. I’d rather go talk to the public about science than I would anything else I could think of. I am not sure what…

Hoddeson:

Thank you so much. This has been a truly wonderful interview.