John Marburger

[Editor’s note: Marburger further discusses his recollections of these events in chapter two of his posthumously published book, Science Policy Up Close, edited by Robert Crease (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 30–72. The chapter is also available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt21pxkbr.6]

Hoddeson:

This is Lillian Hoddeson and Michael Riordan, and we’re talking to Jack Marburger at URA on June 2, 2009. We’re going to talk about the SSC or anything relevant that you feel like throwing into the conversation, and I want to tell you that I’d like it to be your story. So, although we both have lots and lots of questions, usually these things come out better when we give a few little key points, and you get to talk and organize it. More things come out, I’ve found. So, what I would like you to do is to go back to where you really entered the scene and give us a little background there, and then work your way up to the SSC story — the Reference Designs Group, everything. What was it called again?

Marburger:

Central Design Group. On the reference design and all that stuff.

Hoddeson:

The [1984] Reference Designs Study, and then the CDG and all that stuff. Or maybe you want to go back even a little earlier to the [1983 HEPAP] Wojcicki panel? Wherever you think it is appropriate to start this story and tell us things about yourself and where you fit in, and you can lay out the different groups: the physicists versus the Washington people and URA and any intermediary. However you would like so that we can…

Marburger:

I am not a particle physicist, and I was not part of that community, ever, although I am a theoretical physicist, and I became associated with particle physics when I went to [State University of New York] Stony Brook in 1980 as president. And at that time, Brookhaven National Laboratory was engaged in the final act of what was known as Isabelle, a particle accelerator project that was canceled by the Department of Energy [in 1983, at the recommendation of the Wojcicki panel]. But my colleagues at Stony Brook were concerned about the future of Brookhaven National Laboratory, and I helped early on to bring it to the attention of our congressional delegation in Washington — the importance of Brookhaven Lab and accelerator physics for the state of New York and Stony Brook. I actually wrote an op-ed piece for Science Magazine or maybe Physics Today, probably Physics Today, about the demise of the Brookhaven collider. [ed., John H. Marburger, “The National Crisis in Scientific Equipment,” Physics Today 35 (1): 9-10, 89 (1982), https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2890032.]

Hoddeson:

So, that would have been when?

Marburger:

That was in the early 1980s, 1980, ’81. And so that caught my attention, and I became conscious of all of the subsequent events that led up to President Reagan’s decision to build the Superconducting Super Collider; we followed it very carefully at Stony Brook. But that’s how I got involved in the first place. And my faculty were very interested in the SSC. We had joint faculty with Brookhaven Lab, and Michael Marx, who was one of the leaders of a team that proposed a big detector for the SSC, was on the Stony Brook faculty. And he and the chairman of the physics department at the time, Peter Kahn, and our Nobel Laureate physicist, Chen Ning Yang, all persuaded me to become active in URA [Universities Research Association, the national consortium of universities that managed Fermilab]. So, I did that, and I started attending the annual Council of Presidents meetings that URA has, and I discovered that I was about the only [university] president in those meeting. Everybody else was the research vice president or the chair of the physics department or something.

Hoddeson:

Who were some of the people?

Marburger:

I can’t remember offhand. Some of them are people who still attend those meetings. It’s easy to find out.

Hoddeson:

No, no. It’s not critical.

Riordan:

It would actually be useful now to say what the structure of URA is. There’s a Council of Presidents like he mentions with one representative from each of the 80-some-odd universities. Then there’s a Board of Trustees, of which Jack became the chair. And then there’s a president, vice president, [treasurer,] and staff here in Washington.

Marburger:

URA was established in the 1964 or 1965 by the Department of Energy [ed. then the Atomic Energy Commission, but AEC did not establish URA directly] in order to be the contractor for Fermilab. And URA was approached by the Department of Energy in the mid-1980s to form and manage the SSC Central Design Group at Berkeley, even though URA’s laboratory was Fermilab. The Department of Energy felt it was important to have CDG somewhere else. I was not involved with URA at the time that Central Design Group was formed. But as the site-selection process for the SSC entered its final stages, the Department of Energy required URA to change its organization to mitigate the possibility of a conflict of interest between Fermilab, which was one of the proposed sites, and the other proposals.

Riordan:

So, you’re saying the impetus for that came from the DOE. I always thought it was URA itself that [figured] we’d better avoid conflict of interest.

Marburger:

Of course, there was daily interaction between URA and DOE at the time, and it was a reasonable request that there be no… It was a very collegial relationship at that time. [Former National Science Foundation Director] Ed Knapp was the president of URA and, as I recall, he and the other trustees — I don’t know if they were called trustees at the time, but they were the executive board of URA — agreed that a new organization was necessary. So, a new organization was duly designed and crafted and approved by DOE and put into place. I became the chairman of the new organization.

Hoddeson:

So, you were the first chairman?

Marburger:

I was the first chairman under the new organization.

Hoddeson:

Of the Board.

Riordan:

Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

Hoddeson:

Oh, of the Board of Trustees.

Marburger:

That’s right. My immediate predecessor was Harry Woolf who was the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the time.

Hoddeson:

I know Harry; he was very into science.

Marburger:

So, I was his successor, but I think he was the chairman under a different organization.

Riordan:

In what year was this?

Marburger:

It would have been probably 1988, I’m thinking. I have records of that. My first contact to be a trustee of URA was February 1988. And I have the list of trustees.

Riordan:

The SSC Board of Overseers predated that, didn’t it?

Marburger:

I think there was a Board of Overseers, yes. There was at that time already a Board of Overseers for the Central Design Group. The lab didn’t exist, but the Central Design Group did, and here’s the list. It doesn’t say who was chairman at the time.

Hoddeson:

Well, we can get that.

Marburger:

I’ve got a couple of documents on the organization and the organizational history of this thing, since March 1984.

Hoddeson:

Yes.

Marburger:

As part of the DOE contract, URA was to provide management of the R&D conceptual design phase of the SSC. So, that change, the establishment of a Board of Overseers began in 1984.

Riordan:

So, you were on the [SSC] Board [of Overseers] and moved directly from there to become Chair of the Board of Trustees in 1988?

Marburger:

That’s right.

Riordan:

Were you on the Board of Trustees but not chair for any period of time?

Marburger:

No, I actually chaired [the new?] organization discussed by the Board of Trustees at a meeting of December 5, 1987. So, this reorganization that I’m referring to occurred in late 1987, and I think I chaired the Trustees’ meeting [after that]. I’ve some [inaudible].

Hoddeson:

So, you replaced Harry Woolf. Was he the first Chair?

Marburger:

He was serving as the Chairman of whatever organization URA was before it was reorganized in December 1987. And there was a meeting in December 1987.

Hoddeson:

Ok.

Marburger:

Here it is, April 29, 1988: “Calls were confirmed. You will act as Chairman of the Trustees meeting on May 17, 1988. Your ability to serve on the Executive…” They wanted me to chair the Trustees’ meeting before I was designated as the chairman, I think. Let’s see what this says.

Hoddeson:

1988, that’s right at the end.

Riordan:

That’s the end of the CDG.

Hoddeson:

There are still a few months, juicy months, left to talk about.

Riordan:

Yes, well when they had lunch, he was talking about being involved in the choice of Maury [Tigner] and Roy Schwitters and trying to allay the concerns.

Marburger:

The first thing I did as the chairman was to go out to Berkeley and visit [the Central Design Group there]. So, looking at this, it looks like I wasn’t the chairman until May 1987, and I must have been in, and that was just after President Reagan announced that they were going to go ahead with the SSC. Now what is this? “The first meeting of the newly elected Board of Trustees of URA will be held on…” That was the meeting that I chaired.

Hoddeson:

Wait, so you have a notice there. I’m seeing March 21, announcing it.

Marburger:

And there’s other information here. Let’s see if there’s a history here: “description of reorganization planned for URA.” Okay. This is February 1987: “The Secretary of Energy formally announced that the Administration approved the SSC project. On March 2, 1987, URA submitted its proposal to manage the construction operation of the SSC lab. Subsequently, both the SSC Board of Overseers and the Board of Trustees considered next steps to prepare URA for management of the SSC. There was a task force on SSC management issues consisting of trustees and overseers. Recommended that oversight of the SSC and Fermilab should be under a single board of trustees within a single corporation.” There was extensive discussion at that time of what the structure should look like. And I have the document here that I’ll leave with you that describes the organization.

Hoddeson:

Okay.

Marburger:

And it [the reorganization] was discussed at this meeting on December 5, 1987, and then presumably voted on at that time. And I presided at that first meeting of the new organization, the reorganized form. So, it looks like the reorganization occurred more or less simultaneously with URA’s submission of its [unsolicited] proposal for operating the SSC, for building the SSC.

Hoddeson:

The big administrative…

Marburger:

That was the big contract…

Hoddeson:

Do you know much…?

Marburger:

I had been active in the proposal preparation process, and I can’t… Probably, I was not yet the chairman when I did that, but I must have been somehow involved, maybe I was a trustee before that. I’ll have to dig that up. But I remember going to some location; it might have been in Illinois [ed. He may be talking here about the later M&O proposal, which responded to the DOE Request for Proposals issued in August 1988.].

Hoddeson:

There was a location in a shopping center not far from Fermilab where [Douglas] Pewitt was running a proposal-writing operation.

Marburger:

Right, and I…

Hoddeson:

And it was divided in teams, red teams and pink [or gold] teams and all of that stuff.

Marburger:

And I visited there a number of times and met with Ed Knapp, [SLAC Director Emeritus] Pief Panofsky, Pewitt, and others, working through some of the high-level policy decisions that needed to be made about the management of the SSC, and what would be included in the proposal. We were, among other things, trying to figure out what DOE was really after. It was a very complex RFP, and as I recall from my conversations at the time, the people with experience like Mr. Pewitt had never seen anything quite like it.

Hoddeson:

Really?

Marburger:

The RFP was very unusual. It was requiring “teaming” arrangements with…

Hoddeson:

That was right in the RFP? The request for teaming?

Marburger:

Yes, yes.

Hoddeson:

So, there was no choice?

Marburger:

There was no choice, absolutely. Now, to what extent it was expressed explicitly in the RFP I can’t recall, but I do recall that there was quite a lot of back-and-forth with DOE regarding what it all meant, and to what extent it was necessary for us to include these people. But there was no question that it was necessary for us to have some kind of industrial teaming partner. We ended up with two.

Hoddeson:

Sverdrup and EG&G?

Marburger:

Sverdrup and EG&G, yes.

Riordan:

So, the RFP basically said you had to have industry participation directly in the…

Marburger:

I can’t be that definite. It was a very long and complex RFP, and I don’t remember how the message was conveyed, whether there was explicit direction in there. It would be worth getting hold of the RFP and looking at it and talking [about it]. If Doug Pewitt is still alive, he would be a very good person to talk to about this.

Hoddeson:

Sure, sure.

Marburger:

I remember being most impressed by Pief Panofsky’s reaction to it [the RFP].

Hoddeson:

You remember something about that?

Marburger:

Only that he was impressed with the great detail and legalistic, more or less, toughness of the RFP. That was… Let me back up now.

Hoddeson:

I have two questions to ask you about that, but go back first.

Marburger:

There was sort of a pattern. My impression at the time was that the Department of Energy was changing rapidly with respect…

Hoddeson:

That was one of my questions, I was just going ask about a change in the Washington culture.

Marburger:

[It was] changing rapidly. It wasn’t the Washington culture; it was DOE…

Hoddeson:

The DOE culture.

Marburger:

And clearly, the proximate cause of that was the discovery of serious environmental contamination at the weapons sites, weapons manufacturing sites.

Hoddeson:

Oh, I never put that together.

Marburger:

Yes, [it was a] major problem. And President Bush appointed Admiral Watkins to be the Secretary of Energy

Hoddeson:

Because of the contamination?

Marburger:

Specifically to get control of the environmental contamination problem, which was a very big deal. Newspapers were filled with it, and indeed, the contamination was in fact very serious and remains serious today.

Hoddeson:

Uh-huh.

Marburger:

Watkins had just finished chairing a task force on AIDS for President Reagan, and he got national recognition for doing a very good job with that; he handled it very well. He had the reputation at the time of high integrity and being a good troubleshooter. So, he was installed as the Secretary of Energy, specifically to deal with this issue. In these documents, and I think it’s in that folder, I have a copy of Secretary Watkins’s testimony.

Riordan:

That would be 1989, right?

Marburger:

Well…

Riordan:

Watkins comes into the picture, at least in [the Department of] Energy, in 1989.

Marburger:

Well, I guess that it was 1989. It probably was 1989.

Riordan:

So, we’re jumping a little bit ahead

Marburger:

I’m jumping ahead, but this is important.

Hoddeson:

But it was the environment.

Marburger:

It was important because the Department of Energy was under pressure to improve the management of its laboratories, and the political appointees at the top basically applied that pressure to all of the operations. And the RFP for the Superconducting Super Collider was clearly affected by that attitude, the changing attitude. At the time, there was pressure on the operators of all the laboratories, to accept new constraints on their independence. I recall discussions with the Brookhaven leadership — Nick Samios was lab director at the time — but also [theoretical physicist and UC administrator] Bill Fraser, who was representing University of California on various committees, and Pief Panofsky. They were all concerned about the changing atmosphere that they were experiencing, and efforts to insert language in the contracts that reduced the independence of the laboratories. So, it was a long time ago, and I can’t remember the time sequence of all these things, but the atmosphere at that facility where we were putting together the proposal for the SSC…

Hoddeson:

In St. Charles [Illinois, near Fermilab]?

Marburger:

St. Charles, could’ve been. [Laughs] I don’t remember.

Hoddeson:

I have a note on that.

Marburger:

But Doug Pewitt was the one who knew the most about what you might call the technology of the Department of Energy bidding process, and he was putting the pieces together and making recommendations about wording and what we should do and what we shouldn’t do.

Riordan:

Did you participate at all in his choice, or was it Ed Knapp?

Marburger:

No, he was there when I came. Ed Knapp would have put that team together, probably with a lot of help from others, and including DOE. There was continual interaction with the Department of Energy about these things, and Ed Knapp was the go-between.

Riordan:

Okay.

Marburger:

Ezra [Heitowit, URA Vice President] would have been at URA by then.

Riordan:

Yes. And there have been some strong sentiments expressed about Pewitt. Do you have reflections on his character and ability for this job?

Marburger:

I thought he was good for this job, because it was an inside job. You wouldn’t necessarily want to see him be the manager of a big operation or large numbers of people. He rubbed people the wrong way. He had a very, very colorful personality, and he expressed himself without inhibition. Those qualities did not detract from his ability to write the proposal, so I think he was regarded as a valued colleague, but it was acknowledged that he had a prickly… or he had a personality and a style that not everybody could tolerate easily. So…

Hoddeson:

We’ve heard that from physicists and others, too. Some years ago, Michael interviewed Pewitt, before we learned as much about this subject as we know now, and he suggested that there was an effort to do the proposal-writing in Berkeley near the CDG, and that that somehow seemed unwelcome. Is that true?

Marburger:

Yes, he said that he spent about a week initially in Berkeley, trying to set up camp and work with the CDG people, but they were just getting nowhere.

Hoddeson:

And then they…

Marburger:

And then they came out to Fermilab.

Hoddeson:

St. Charles.

Marburger:

And set up in St. Johns.

Hoddeson:

St. Charles.

Marburger:

I don’t know anything about that. I do know that Berkeley was far away, at that time, and that there was a pretty clear separation between the Berkeley operation and the proposal-writing operation. They, the Berkeley operation, had appropriate levels of input into the process because a big part of the proposal was dependent on what was being done at the Central Design Group. I was not involved with that part of the proposal at all, none of the physics or technical stuff. I was involved with the issues associated with the teaming partnerships, defining what their role was, trying to sort out what the role would be, because nobody, no contractor for any of these GOCO [government-owned, contractor-operated] laboratories had ever been required to have such an arrangement. We were trying to sort out what it was that they would do and what role they would play. And we reached out to a number of places, probably put ads in papers, or something. I don’t know how that was done, but we did get a list of names of companies and their representatives. They came out, and we interviewed them, and they…

Hoddeson:

In St. Charles?

Marburger:

Yes, they gave presentations, PowerPoint presentations.

Hoddeson:

Which in that day was new.

Marburger:

I can’t remember how they did it, but I remember seeing displays on the screen, so they must have had slides. So, we agreed on how this [teaming relationship] would be embedded in the proposal, and that’s how Sverdrup and EG&G got involved. I think that later we all realized that Sverdrup did not appreciate the limitations that would be imposed on their participation in the work by their being a teaming partner. They were precluded from being the A&E [architecture and engineering] contractor by being our partner on what you might call the management of the A&E part. I believe that — and I have to be careful how I say this because this is speculation — but it seems that the Department of Energy wanted us to have a partner that could assist in the management of all the large subcontracts. And obviously, in that role, the same company could not be the manager and the contractor, the A&E subcontractor. So, at any rate, that’s what I remember about that period.

Riordan:

On the teaming issue, I have one further question. You say “we decided,” but, specifically, who would have made that decision? Was it Ed Knapp, yourself, Roy Schwitters, or Pewitt? Who? And how did that decision get made?

Marburger:

I don’t remember, and URA was the responsible organization. So, ultimately, all these issues were vetted by the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees — and by the trustees themselves, and the SSC Board of Overseers. There were presentations on the proposal, if I recall correctly, fairly detailed descriptions of these arrangements, and they were discussed and endorsed by the trustees.

Riordan:

Obviously, because of the speed at which everything is happening, it’s the executive committees that have [the real power], and they made the recommendations.

Marburger:

Sure, the Executive Committee was clearly the one, and the SSC Board of Overseers was heavily involved. More heavily involved than the trustees were, because the Board of Overseers had people on it who really knew the business. The trustees were people like me who were not only university presidents but also some fairly substantial people from industry at the time.

Riordan:

Yes, I remember Robert Stempel [ed., after 1990 the president of General Motors].

Marburger:

There are lists in that material of who was there. We all discussed those things and tried to figure out who would be the best.

Riordan:

So, these boards are then going to make recommendations, and as the executive officer, Ed Knapp would make the decision. Who would say, “We are going to team, we’re going to go with Sverdrup, we’re going to go with EG&G?”

Marburger:

The decisions were really made in an open way. Ed did not make decisions unilaterally. There was a lot of care taken to talk to me, and to Pief Panofsky, and [to the first SSC Board of Overseers Chairman and former Cornell University Laboratory of Nuclear Studies Director] Boyce McDaniels about these things. There, Ed was not closed.

Riordan:

A consensual process.

Marburger:

It was pretty consensual, yes. And one of the reasons is that it was so fuzzy, but fuzzy is probably not the right word. Everyone that had experience with Department of Energy labs and contracts was impressed by the uniqueness of the RFP. And we definitely were puzzled by the roles. We were challenged to sort out what the roles of these teaming partners would be. That required a lot of discussion. We really had to talk about it and think about what it was that was supposed to happen and how it should work.

Hoddeson:

But it was definitely a departure from the way physicists had written proposals up until then, in response to this change, which had at least partly to do with the environmental concerns that you discussed before.

Marburger:

If you think about it, there were not many occasions for a proposal like this. Then subsequently, many years later, I had the experience of putting together a proposal to operate Brookhaven National Laboratory, when the former contractor [ed., Associated Universities, Inc.] had its contract by terminated by the Department of Energy. And we spent just as much time and trouble on that one as we did earlier for the SSC contract. That is to say, looking back on it, the proposal to operate Brookhaven was not unlike the proposal to build and operate the SSC.

Hoddeson:

The later one, the one you were involved in. But the original proposal, I understand, was trivial.

Marburger:

For Fermilab?

Hoddeson:

For Brookhaven. The first one, the one in nineteen forty…

Marburger:

Forty-seven. No, that was a completely different era, and nothing was the same, then. But it was…

Hoddeson:

But the level of complexity.

Marburger:

The level of complexity was very great in the second Brookhaven experience, which was in 1997. The only other new lab that was started up by DOE was the Thomas Jefferson Lab [ed., in Newport News, Virginia, in the 1980s]. And before that was Fermilab. So, these are rare occasions.

Hoddeson:

Sure.

Marburger:

And all the other contracts were renewals. So, although you could say that it occurred because DOE was changing, I believe that there was at the time an attempt by the political management to change the culture of the Department of Energy laboratories. It is also true that the creation of an entirely new laboratory was a unique event, virtually a singular event.

Hoddeson:

Right.

Marburger:

So, I think it’s fair to say that no one in the room at that St. Charles site had experience with that kind of contract before.

Hoddeson:

Right. We just want to be careful before we say the culture had changed, but it sounds like it really did.

Marburger:

That’s right, but there were other indications of a changing DOE culture on all of the contract renewals, of the existing contracts, although the contractors were not being changed. These contracts were updated annually, or every couple of years.

Hoddeson:

Yes, but the way in which you…

Marburger:

And the negotiations for those that were taking place at the time clearly revealed new pressures from the Department of Energy on the contractors. And the bottom line was increased accountability by the contractors.

Hoddeson:

I was just going to bring that up, accountability.

Marburger:

Increased accountability.

Hoddeson:

Which also brings up another issue. Somewhere somebody suggested — I don’t know if it was somebody knowledgeable or not, I can’t remember now — that as the budget for the SSC grew — initially it was only 2 billion, but by this time it was a whole lot bigger — that the physicists began realizing it had crossed an invisible line in Washington where different ways of approaching things like this began to be called upon. The military-industrial [management] style.

Marburger:

Yes and no. First of all, the threshold at that time was actually pretty low. A billion-dollar project would get political attention, so already at its very first inception the SSC was a politically visible deal. And this Central Design Group estimate was about $3.9 billion, and some relatively minor changes pushed it up to over four billion dollars by the time it came to the proposal stage. So, it was already a four, four-and-a-half-billion-dollar project, when the proposal went in.

Hoddeson:

By that time? Oh, sure.

Marburger:

In my view, it was in the political spotlight from the beginning. From the beginning. There’s no question about it. As a matter of fact, when the editorials began to appear in the New York Times or Washington Post, as soon as Reagan made his Rose Garden Speech in 1987 [ed., March 30, 1987]. Already, the community had begun to line up, and everybody began to be concerned about the impact. I can’t remember the economic situation at the time. By the end of the 1980s, it was pretty clear that it was going to be a really tough budget time, and of course, at the beginning off the 1990s there was a recession. Then all these things intersected. So, let’s see…

Hoddeson:

Yes, I’m trying to remember when Graham-Rudman was.

Riordan:

1986.

Hoddeson:

1986. So, already then it was getting very tough. [ed. The Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act was signed into law on December 12, 1985.]

Riordan:

During the Reagan administration, especially during the second term, was the first time the deficit was greater than 5% of GDP since World War II, and now we’re doing it again.

Marburger:

The decade started off, in 1980, with the most serious postwar recession that we had had. And there hasn’t been another one that serious until now. So, that’s when Reagan came in and he started spending money. One of the criticisms, — and it shows up in one of the editorials in the New York Times, I think — was that Reagan was asking for the SSC, for the space station, and for the Human Genome Project.

Riordan:

Yes, that’s this one I’m looking at right now.

Marburger:

That’s probably it.

Riordan:

“Yes, Big Science, But Which Projects?” Friday, May 20, 1988.

Marburger:

Simultaneously with that, Frank Press, who had been [President Jimmy] Carter’s science advisor, had become president of the National Academy of Sciences. He gave this famous speech called, “Some Science in the Golden Era,” or something like that, in which he called on the science community to make some priorities. He had some criteria, three categories or types of projects that should have priority, and he named projects, which was a very brave thing for him to do. And he was immediately criticized by the science community. [There was] immediate harsh reaction by the science community against Frank Press’s proposal. He probably made that speech in 1987, ’88; he certainly made it during the period when these three proposals were on the table. I may actually have… Here’s my folder for 1989. By the way, these folders are from much bigger boxes full of papers. [ed., Frank Press, “The Dilemma of the Golden Age,” presented at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences on April 26, 1988, reprinted in Science, Technology, and Human Values 13 (3/4), 1988: 224-231. https://doi.org/10.1177/016224398801303-402]

Hoddeson:

Wow.

Riordan:

I’m going to go out and ask Rhonda to make copies of these two things.

Hoddeson:

Now?

Marburger:

Go ahead, you might want to…

Hoddeson:

Well, because maybe we should just take…

Marburger:

There’s a lot of other stuff here.

Hoddeson:

We could pull out…

Marburger:

Anyway.

Hoddeson:

But we’re getting to the end of the CDG [discussion], though. Pretty soon.

Riordan:

Okay, but we still need to talk about the [SSC] director choice.

Hoddeson:

We do.

Riordan:

Okay.

Marburger:

I don’t see it in here. Anyway, Frank Press’s speech was another manifestation of concern about priorities that surfaced at the same time, as well as many things that were happening at once: the Reaganomics approach to funding things, his optimism about all these projects, putting them all on the table at the same time, a growing sense of competition among the different fields of science, or even within the same field. And the SSC proposal just came on the table with all the rest of those things, and that sharpened the scrutiny of everything that was done in connection with the SSC. Everyone had the sense of being in a fishbowl. And even during the proposal-writing process, everyone was conscious that the community was watching.

Hoddeson:

Were people conscious of the fact — or did it appear to them, maybe it wasn’t even a fact — that the DOE didn’t trust the physicists to make these decisions about how to spend large quantities of money intelligently?

Marburger:

Sure. That was the message that we inferred.

Hoddeson:

That was the message?

Marburger:

That was the message we inferred from the calls for increased accountability. And it resonated with the concern that was being expressed over the environmental contamination.

Hoddeson:

Right.

Marburger:

After all, despite the fact that it was the weapons labs [ed., laboratories, such as Los Alamos, managed under the auspices of DOE’s nuclear weapons programs] and not the Office of Science [then the Office of Energy Research] labs, nevertheless the manager of the big weapons labs was the University of California. Now, there were other government contractors as well, with the manufacturing sites — the University of California didn’t operate Hanford [a heavily contaminated nuclear weapons production site], but it was implicated in them, along with this, and they were the most visible labs. So, everyone was getting the message that this partnership concept that had been in place since the end of World War II was changing rapidly.

Hoddeson:

Then, one of the issues we’re up to talk about is the director, I think. One of the issues was the discussion about the choice of the SSC director. You may not know the answer to this one, but let me just throw in something that I never got an answer for. Maury Tigner was one of the people who was being discussed [as SSC director]. Do you know who selected him originally to be head of the CDG?

Marburger:

No, I don’t.

Hoddeson:

Or of the Reference Designs Study, the study before that, or even what the process was?

Marburger:

I don’t know. There’s possibly some correspondence about that. You know who would be able to answer that question immediately is Leon [Lederman, director of Fermilab from 1979 to 1989].

Hoddeson:

Leon would know that?

Marburger:

Yes, Leon would know that. If I had to write something about it, I would call Leon.

Hoddeson:

Yes, I know that Maury organized some meeting at Cornell that was a little earlier [ed., March 28 to April 2, 1983], and I thought maybe he did a good job at that, and then they thought of him.

Marburger:

Maury was then and is now regarded as one of the key accelerator physicists of our time. He had a good reputation and was a logical person to ask. There aren’t too many of them.

Hoddeson:

No.

Marburger:

There was Bob Wilson, and there was Maury, and the others tended to be [experimental] scientists. There weren’t too many people that build [accelerators]. Another person with a great reputation at the time was Hermann Grunder. He eventually went to the Thomas Jefferson Lab.

Hoddeson:

Right.

Marburger:

He was at Berkeley, and there were other people at Berkeley who were famous. There’s a very small community of accelerator physicists who have… People in that field can name you the six top ones, and then there’s a big gap. And that’s true even today. There’s a different set of six or five or four, but they’re a different [breed], they stand out, and Maury was one of those, and he did a good job

Hoddeson:

He did a good job, and so he was [named] head of the Reference Designs Study [in 1984]. And then, I assume, because he did a good job on that, he moved on to become head of the Central Design Group. But, okay, we’ll find out through somebody else.

Marburger:

Yes, I don’t know about that.

Hoddeson:

And maybe Leon does know.

Marburger:

Well, he would know. He should know if he can remember. Ezra might know.

Hoddeson:

We’ll ask Ezra later. Yes. So, anyway, let’s jump back to where we were, which is 1988.

Marburger:

I was involved with the selection of Roy, because I was URA Chairman [of its Board of Trustees] at the time. Boyce McDaniel… was that McDaniel or Daniels?

Hoddeson:

McDaniel.

Marburger:

Boyce McDaniel was a good guy. He was the chairman of the search committee. And I remember having long talks with him on the telephone, during that time. One of the things that bothered me about that search were lots of rumors and gossip about people that the Department of Energy would or would not accept. That spilled over into political acceptability of different candidates. I was uncomfortable with that, but there was quite a lot of it. I call it gossip because nothing was ever written down about the individuals, but there was a lot of talk about it. It was not a good kind of talk to have in connection with a search because it interfered with the objective judgment, I thought, of the search committee. But it was there, and it would be a mistake to assume that that didn’t have an influence on the process.

Riordan:

You spoke of the DOE, which is this big, sprawling — some people say dysfunctional — bureaucracy. Are you talking about individuals within that bureaucracy or the DOE as a whole?

Marburger:

Yes, I’m talking about numbers of individuals within the DOE bureaucracy. All these bureaucracies have lots of gossip, and one of the… I was the president of a university and universities also have lots of gossip. So, I thought I could evaluate the quality of this gossip, and it wasn’t clear to me that some of these stories had a grain of accuracy to them. So, that bothered me, and it also bothered Boyce, who was a very honorable man. But there was clearly prejudice against nearly every name. As a matter of fact, I think there was probably prejudice against all names that were recommended. So, there were rumors and gossip that were derogatory towards all, everybody that you could name. For example, Leon was regarded as being too old, and Maury was regarded as being too emotional, and Roy was regarded as not having appropriate experience. Those were three names that stick in my head.

Hoddeson:

Oh, I have other names. Somebody I don’t know. James Beggs? Former head…

Marburger:

Briggs? Not Briggs?

Riordan:

Beggs. James Beggs, former head of NASA, was on the list. Don’t know him? And Richter?

Marburger:

Burt Richter [then director of SLAC], I don’t know why Burt’s name didn’t come up longer. I think Burt was regarded as being a real cantankerous guy that might have trouble with the political [types] because I can name the…

Hoddeson:

Nick Samios was on the list.

Marburger:

Nick Samios, same thing. Nick, you know, uses lots of Bronx slang and expletives and—

Hoddeson:

Hey, I’m from the Bronx!

Marburger:

Bronx… Is he from the Bronx or Brooklyn? I can’t remember which. [ed., Samios was raised in midtown Manhattan.]

Hoddeson:

I don’t remember.

Marburger:

But he was clearly a New York boy that didn’t…

Hoddeson:

Leon is from the Bronx.

Marburger:

…mind how he talked in front of the ladies. These are the kinds of things that were there, and they were…

Hoddeson:

Sam Ting. I’ll give you the—

Marburger:

…the kinds of things that come up in every search.

Hoddeson:

Sure.

Marburger:

But this was a pretty high-level responsibility, and these factors… It disturbed me that these factors were being taken seriously. So, what about Sam Ting?

Hoddeson:

Sam Ting was on the list.

Marburger:

Yes.

Hoddeson:

And people, of course, didn’t like him, I know. Steve Weinberg?

Marburger:

Steve Weinberg was Steve Weinberg... You mean the theorist?

Hoddeson:

Yes.

Marburger:

Yes. There were lots of people on the list, but…

Hoddeson:

Charles Baltay?

Marburger:

You’re talking about names of known particle physicists. They’re big-time scientists, but they, generally speaking, lack experience with DOE construction projects.

Hoddeson:

Sure, absolutely. None of these.

Marburger:

That would have disqualified them. Steve Weinberg and Baltay, they’re all good guys.

Hoddeson:

But they’re physicists.

Marburger:

Baltay subsequently became chairman of the Yale physics department.

Hoddeson:

Wojcicki was on the list.

Marburger:

Stan would have been on the list. I can’t remember anything specific thing about him. He might have withdrawn. I don’t know.

Hoddeson:

Bjorn Wiik

Marburger:

Bjorn Wiik, another one from… He’s European.

Riordan:

He built the DESY [Deutsches Electronen Synchrotron] machine HERA [the Hadron-Electron Ring Anlage].

Marburger:

Actually, I think the fact was that he wasn’t a U.S. citizen and didn’t make…

Riordan:

Yes.

Hoddeson:

Probably. Right.

Marburger:

His reputation in the U.S. would have dictated against him.

Hoddeson:

Alvin Trivelpiece was on the list. [ed. Trivelpiece was director of the DOE Office of Energy Research from 1981 to 1987.]

Riordan:

But he had to be taken off because he had too recently resigned as…

Marburger:

From DOE.

Riordan:

Energy Research Director.. He needed two years [away from DOE] to avoid the revolving-door [rule].

Marburger:

That’s probably true. I never saw these names.

Riordan:

And Burt Richter. I have a letter or memo between Burt and Pief. Pief actually asked him, would he be willing to serve, and Burt said no.

Hoddeson:

Okay.

Marburger:

Yes, I’m not surprised.

Hoddeson:

Trilling was on the list.

Marburger:

George Trilling?

Hoddeson:

George Trilling [a leading experimental high-energy physicist at Berkeley].

Marburger:

Yes, he would have been on the list.

Hoddeson:

And then, of course, the big three: Roy, and Leon, and Maury.

Marburger:

Yes. I don’t know all of the considerations that the search committee went through. I can’t remember. I do remember going down these lists with Boyce, and Boyce telling me about different people. But the final list had the big three on it, more or less. But I think ultimately the thought was that Roy had had experience, a good record, with the big detector.

Hoddeson:

The CDF [Collider Detector at Fermilab, for which he was spokesman].

Marburger:

CDF. And he had a champion in Pief. Pief argued very strongly on behalf of Roy, and I think that weighed heavily. I think his youth was important.

Hoddeson:

It was important, yes.

Marburger:

So, when it comes down to it, there were two finalists; it would have been Maury and Roy. So, the question is, why Roy rather than Maury? And I think that in making the final recommendation — and it was the recommendation of the search committee — these concerns about Maury’s acceptability to the Department of Energy were important. Again, I cannot evaluate the rumors. But there were definite rumors, and I can only call them rumors, about the fact that Maury would not be acceptable to the Department of Energy. And so, as I see it, the Department of Energy had a very great presence in this process of the director selection. As I said, probably appropriately — as is always true in these contracts — we had to name the management team in the response in the RFP. The whole management team had to be put in there.

Hoddeson:

Yes.

Marburger:

I’m sure that some of the people on that list withdrew because they didn’t want it known that they were looking for a different job. It’s a real negative to put your name up for something like this and then not be selected or whatever, or if the contract would not have gone through. My point is that ultimately the Department of Energy gets to decide on who the management is going to be anyway.

Hoddeson:

Right, and you have to put names in that they’re going to like.

Marburger:

That’s right. So, I think there was a lot of tea-leaf reading by the search committee regarding who was going to be acceptable to the Department of Energy. So, practically all of the senior people had some kind of back-door contacts within the Department of Energy. It’s a big place, and the program officers, the lower-level bureaucrats, they always like to think they know what’s going on, and the people in the [Office of Energy Research] Director’s office or the Secretary’s office like to think they know what’s going on, so you’ve got all of these people, bringing in the rumors that they’ve heard and putting them on the table.

Riordan:

You said rumors, but did you ever hear any specific statements, from the DOE, that Maury would not be acceptable to the Department of Energy?

Marburger:

I don’t recall that. Among all the people that I was talking to at the time, which was probably 50 different people, some of them were Department of Energy people, and some of them were people at different levels in the Department of Energy and other university and lab people. And I can’t really… in my memory, I can’t make any distinction.

Riordan:

Because I have heard it stated by a fairly knowledgeable source, and it also corresponds with a memo that Pief wrote, a memo to file — he did this frequently, it was a wonderful practice — where he just went and talked about the eleven or so people that he contacted. And from that memo it’s clear that one of the questions is, “Who can work with Maury?” As if he’s already been excluded. “We recognize that we can’t put Maury in the number-one position, but we want to find a director who can work effectively with Maury serving as his deputy and project manager.” It seemed like somewhere before the final decision had been made, that people were looking for a director who could indeed work with Maury. You see?

Hoddeson:

And the only one who could have worked with Maury would have been Leon.

Marburger:

Yes.

Hoddeson:

Was there ever any discussion about having Leon as a kind of a figurehead [director] with Maury [acting] as the person who basically built the lab?

Marburger:

You have to remember that, as the chairman of the organization, I wouldn’t have been knowledgeable about all of the discussions that took place. I had a lot of conversations with the chairman of the committee, but they only took place after much of the work had been done.

Riordan:

Okay, yes.

Hoddeson:

Uh-huh.

Marburger:

I can’t tell you. I do know that, by the time all this discussion got to me, Leon was not in the picture, because he was regarded as being unlikely to be able to follow this program all the way through. You know, he was too aged.

Hoddeson:

And why was that necessary?

Marburger:

I have no idea. Yes, I mean, I’m not… I would have been… I was pretty neutral about all this stuff myself. I was not a member of the community, and I didn’t know the qualities of the people, and I was only remotely familiar with the Department of Energy at the time. But I thought that the search committee clearly had good people on it, and the Board of Overseers, and particularly Pief, were people that I had a lot of confidence in. So, I basically took their advice. I did that frequently. As a matter of fact, later on, I wrote a document that defined what the role of the Trustees was relative to the Boards of Overseers, and I tried to make it clear that I expected technical decisions and very personal decisions and so on to be made by the Board of Overseers and that the Trustees were not in the position to make judgments like that, except that our role was to make sure that there was due process, and that it was legal and fair and reasonable from the management point of view.

Hoddeson:

Things weren’t completely fine at CDG apparently. There were some problems. They weren’t because of Maury necessarily, but it was because Maury didn’t, for example, hold the purse strings, and so making people work together wasn’t very easy for him. And I’m just wondering whether that sort of problem — which of course the physicists knew about and Maury of course knew about, and wasn’t happy to reflect on later — did that trickle up to people who were making decisions?

Marburger:

I wasn’t conscious of that at the time. I was not conscious of that at the time. I can speculate that a problem like that would have been visible to the Department of Energy and could have influenced them in their view that he wasn’t going to be right for the big job. That’s a speculation. But that’s the kind of thing that happens. The more of a track record you have, the harder it is for you to be appointed to anything.

Hoddeson:

Right. It does look that way.

Marburger:

That’s right. Anyhow, I went out with Ed Knapp. This is about the last thing that he did and the first thing that I did, when he was leaving the presidency and I was coming into the chairmanship. We went out and spent a very painful afternoon at CDG, talking about the proposal.

Hoddeson:

Wasn’t Boyce along, too, on that trip?

Marburger:

Yes, Boyce was there too.

Hoddeson:

Okay. I forgot who told me about it, it might have been [Berkeley theorist] David Jackson.

Marburger:

Yes. And I…

Riordan:

Was this the day you were revealing to them the choice [of SSC director]?

Hoddeson:

Which they already knew.

Marburger:

I think so. I can’t remember what we were doing there, but it was painful. I remember standing up against the wall…

Hoddeson:

I would love to hear… Yes, tell me whatever you remember.

Marburger:

…and Ed Knapp was there, and I was there, and I don’t remember if Pief was there or not, maybe, and Boyce was there. And everybody was angry. Maybe there were divisions within that group, but they were all solidly behind Maury that day, and Maury was rather angry, and…

Hoddeson:

He was angry?

Marburger:

Everybody was angry. It was a very tough, tense, sweaty meeting.

Hoddeson:

So, it was a meeting. Was it a big meeting, or a small meeting?

Marburger:

It was the group. It was the typical thing…

Hoddeson:

The whole CDG?

Marburger:

…where there’s a big conference room and everybody’s invited to come and hear what the URA president.

Hoddeson:

A conference room bigger than this? [ed., the small URA conference room where the interview was conducted, about 20 feet by 30 feet]

Marburger:

Yes, bigger.

Hoddeson:

But it had a round table

Marburger:

It was a square. No, no.

Hoddeson:

Oh, no?

Marburger:

As I recall there was… Thirty years ago, I can’t, I don’t remember. It was a square room; it looked to me like one of those utilitarian conference rooms, but a big one. Ah, it might even have had a black board, a chalkboard or something on one end, I can’t remember. But the room got smaller and smaller as we went on.

Hoddeson:

It must have been hell.

Marburger:

And I didn’t know, I didn’t really. I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of the emotion that I saw there, but I thought that the emotion itself was a sign that there was something wrong about that. For an emotional tension like that to build up, there would have had to be something rather wrong, and clearly the subsequent interaction between Central Design Group and Maury on one hand and Roy and the Lab on the other, revealed deep, deep fissures in the relationship.

Riordan:

Well, one of the things I’ve heard is that…

Hoddeson:

Yes, Schwitters called it a classic conflict of style.

Marburger:

I don’t know if it was classic or not, but they had very different styles.

Hoddeson:

Yes

Riordan:

I think part of the source that I’ve heard for the emotional intensity of the CDG reaction was that most of them felt that they had not been consulted in this decision.

Marburger:

Yes, yes.

Riordan:

That maybe Stan Wojcicki had been called as a possibility, or Dave Jackson

Marburger:

I think that’s true…

Riordan:

But [Fermilab theorist and CDG Deputy Director] Chris Quigg had not been consulted, for example, and others in the next level of management had not been asked to give input. And when you don’t get that input from some of your key players, who I think have a right to have a say, then you get that kind of reaction.

Marburger:

Yes. I have to say that I assumed that the search committee was doing that, so I was surprised at some of the questions.

Riordan:

Yes, you as a Board of Trustees chair can’t micromanage the whole process.

Marburger:

Yes, and Boyce behaved apologetically.

Riordan:

Okay. Well, Maury was kind of his protégé, in a way. You know, he hadn’t…

Marburger:

Yes, I think that might have had something to do with it. I was not aware of all the personal interactions and everything, I was kind of…

Riordan:

So, you were surprised, when…

Marburger:

I was very much a greenhorn at this whole enterprise. And I regarded my role in the organization as operating with the other trustees and the industrial partners in Texas, and mostly the Department of Energy senior personnel. So, I interacted with the Secretary of Energy and his next levels down. And the leadership of what is now called the Office of Science — I don’t remember what it was called then [ed. the Office of Energy Research].

Hoddeson:

I think that some of the people I talked to at CDG, they felt they’d been also, right from the proposal stage, they’d stopped being listened to.

Marburger:

Well, that’s…

Hoddeson:

And that’s not even…

Marburger:

I think that’s true, because they’re… So, much of the proposal dealt with things that were not physics or technical. It was quite a lot of management stuff. And there wasn’t really much expertise there [at CDG]. But on the technical stuff, they were the source of it. They had to be.

Hoddeson:

Going back to this meeting, I just found out [inaudible] a quote I took out of an interview with Chris Quigg. So, the meeting was very awkward of course. Chris Quigg recalled that Knapp and McDaniel went back and forth uncomfortably at the podium…

Marburger:

Yes.

Hoddeson:

Neither wanted to reveal the bad news, which most at CDG already knew anyway.

Marburger:

Yes, I don’t know about that. I remember all three of us being there, and I don’t remember the details.

Hoddeson:

You don’t remember a podium, though you remember a conference room.

Marburger:

I don’t remember a podium, but there could well have been one.

Hoddeson:

I see.

Marburger:

Because I remember a square room, with people standing around the sides, and other people sitting. There could have been a podium, and it was such a routinely furnished room. There was nothing special about the room. It was a room where you typically have a table and a podium or something, so I didn’t…

Hoddeson:

It may have been another meeting with a podium.

Marburger:

No, this is the meeting. There was only one meeting like that.

Hoddeson:

Okay, I think we can move on, unless you have some more on this.

Riordan:

Do you think the situation at that point was irretrievable, in terms of retrieving Maury to play a number-two role in the SSC management?

Marburger:

Yes.

Riordan:

Okay. As of that point?

Marburger:

Yes. I think so.

Riordan:

Okay.

Marburger:

Maury was very hurt, and I think had made it clear that he didn’t want to work with Roy. That’s my impression.

Riordan:

Because there was some going back and forth [after that]. I think Roy came up from a meeting of the Annual Reviews [Ed note: Annual Reviews of Nuclear and Particle Physics, of which he was an editor] in Palo Alto the following weekend and had a talk with Maury. And he [Maury] was on board for a while. Or he seemed to be on board for a while.

Hoddeson:

Yes, there was a short period when Tigner tried to work as Schwitter’s deputy. It didn’t last very long.

Marburger:

I don’t even remember that. It must have been very short.

Hoddeson:

It was very short. I don’t know, I don’t think I have a note of how long it took.

Riordan:

Okay.

Marburger:

I don’t remember that.

Hoddeson:

But they definitely had a lot of differences, yes.

Riordan:

All right. You see, early in the [proposal] process, Roy had to name his accelerator physics person, [Fermilab accelerator physicist] Helen [Edwards], which I think probably was done before the end of September.

Marburger:

We had to name the whole raft of them [ed., four key individuals].

Riordan:

I was talking to [SLAC accelerator physicist and CDG member] Alex Chao about this, and he said that Maury was willing to consider it, but when he actually tried to work with Roy, during probably October [1988], as Alex put it, “It was clear who Roy was listening to.” And that they just could not set up an effective working relationship. But there was a time when they could have, I think.

Hoddeson:

It’s from Stan Wojcicki, an interview that Adrienne Kolb and Glenn [Sandiford] did with him, that this comes from, yes.

Riordan:

He did give it a try?

Hoddeson:

They did go down and work with him [Roy] for awhile. We can go back to that interview.

Marburger:

Yes, it could be. I wasn’t conscious of those things.

Hoddeson:

Anyway, we know how it came out.

Marburger:

I can’t help with that. Once that decision was made, my head was somewhere else. I didn’t follow all of the personnel details from that point on, only on the management side. I was much, much more conscious of the management stuff than I was of the technical, the physics and accelerator side of things.

Hoddeson:

Right.

Marburger:

Although, from time to time, I went to Texas and talked with people, tried to figure out…

Riordan:

Yes, why don’t we move on to the next phase, which is the negotiation of the contract with the Department of Energy, and I understand…

Hoddeson:

Unless you want to take a short break. Do you?

Marburger:

In a few minutes, I will take a short break, but…

Riordan:

Well, this is probably the juncture to do it at.

Marburger:

Well, I can deal with this one pretty quickly, because I was not directly involved with the negotiations of the contract.

Riordan:

Okay.

Marburger:

I was involved with the selection of the interviews, and the selection of the teaming partners and the definition of their work. But when it came to the very close interaction with the Department of Energy during that stage of the procurement, that was Ed Knapp and Roy. That is, as I recall. Other people here in the [URA] office [were involved], and I didn’t have anything to do with it.

Riordan:

I think there was a pernicious clause in this [draft contract], or probably there were several, but one in particular that resonates with what you told us before — that DOE wanted to have too much control over the individual decisions that would normally be made by a contractor and overseen by the DOE.

Marburger:

That’s right, that’s right. I’ll tell you what my view was at the time. My view was that the provisions of the contract were less of a problem. I felt that we could live with those, with whatever the contract said, as long as there was good faith between the contractor [URA] and the Department of Energy. But that good faith was never established, and that was a serious problem. I felt that there was an atmosphere of distrust, from the very beginning, that was never overcome. And the attitude of the new people… Under Admiral Watkins, an entirely new SSC organization was established in the Department of Energy, completely ignoring the existing expertise in the Office of Science [then the Office of Energy Research]. And the new people that were brought in to staff that office were military types, military-procurement people, mostly from the Navy as I recall, and they saw the contract, particularly the construction part, as no different from a military procurement, in which the user specified what he wanted and the contractor built it to those specifications. There wasn’t any real appreciation for the fact that this was a beyond-the-state-of-the-art device that still had unresolved science questions associated with it — accelerator design issues — and that there wasn’t any contractor that could build it without a great deal of hand-holding from the science community. That point was never accepted by the Department of Energy. So, there was, I thought, a basic lack of a shared vision of management, which was much more insidious than any language in the contract.

Riordan:

Did you see a bifurcation coming in between the typical — like you said, the existing —expertise, which largely was housed in Germantown, or in [the DOE] field offices, and, as the Watkins regime came in, they tried to manage [the SSC] out of the Forrestal? [ed. many Office of Energy Research functions were based in Germantown, Maryland, while DOE headquarters was at the Forrestal Building in downtown Washington, D.C.]

Marburger:

That’s correct, except you mentioned the field office — there are three parties, not two. And the field office [ed. DOE’s SSC field office in Texas led by Joe Cipriano, who was hired by Watkins] was heavily staffed by people that were designated by the central [inaudible], by the Forrestal people. In other words, the field office was not under the control of the Germantown program offices. There was a separate field office that had huge numbers of people. In fact, I called — and I don’t remember what year it was — and asked for a meeting with the Deputy Secretary [Henson Moore], and I may even have tried to get [President George H. W. Bush’s science advisor] Allan Bromley there, somebody from outside to try to “bell the cat.” And the Inspector General’s office, one of these oversight offices at headquarters. I actually have something relevant to that that I wanted to give you.

At any rate, there was a high-level meeting at which I took the chair position, and I complained about the oppressive oversight that was building up at the lab and how it was getting in the way of doing the work. And the representative of the [SSC site] office contradicted my numbers. And there was a heated exchange, which was interrupted before it was consummated, unfortunately, by another person in the room. I can’t remember who was there. In addition to the hundred or so employees of the Department of Energy that were down there, or however many it was, there was also a much larger number of contract people that the Department of Energy had hired to enhance their oversight capability. And the Department of Energy never acknowledged that those people were there, so that when we complained about the numbers, it was seen as an exaggeration. And that kind of thing happened repeatedly. This was in the later stages, when there was more-or-less continual scrutiny of the laboratory.

I know, years later, when I became the Director of Brookhaven [ed., from 1998 to 2001], I experienced how bad it could be. Oh, it probably wasn’t as bad as it was at the SSC Lab. When the predecessor contractor [Associated Universities, Inc.] had been terminated by Federico Pena, who was the Secretary of Energy for a short time, and, as I explained before, Stony Brook and Battelle [Memorial Institute in Ohio] bid on the contract to operate the laboratory, I was the lab director. And during the first year and a half of our management, we had a serious review that required a lot of homework about twice a week, from one oversight office or another within the Department of Energy. It was, and I’m not exaggerating, a serious disruption of our work. We were trying to get RHIC [the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider] finished and commissioned at the time. And it was a major management problem for us to deal with the continual scrutiny and hostile tasking that we received from, not only the Department of Energy, but the Environmental Protection Agency and OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration], and from all kinds of organizations that chose to pile on because we were a wounded fish in the water. [ed. Brookhaven was under intense scrutiny because of a small tritium leak at its High Flux Beam Reactor facility that led to a major public controversy and ultimately the facility’s closure.]

So, this is something that happens; it’s a political phenomenon, but it began happening at the SSC lab. It had started happening in 1988, the end of 1988 and beginning of 1989, and it got very bad starting in 1989. And it was almost impossible to get anything done. Roy was not able to handle it very well, and I’m not sure — having been through it myself later, under much more benign circumstances — that anybody would have been prepared to handle it in a way that would have looked good to the outsider. So, my sharpest memory, my strongest memories — and they’re mostly emotional, they’re not even that specific — of that whole period were on the behavior of the Department of Energy and the harassment of the laboratory that took place in that time. It was a very unpleasant experience.

Riordan:

I’m looking at your papers of 1989, one dated July 24, 1989, marked “confidential,” a summary of DOE ER issues: rejection of Dick Briggs as deputy director. Would this be a good thing for us to copy?

Marburger:

That’s one of them. There’s a better one.

Riordan:

Shall we take a break now?

Marburger:

Yes, I’m about ready to take a break.

[Break in recording]

Riordan:

I’d like to move on to the major upgrade of the SSC and the cost growth that it incurred in 1989-1990, and I’d like to get any insights you have on that. Let me just briefly summarize the sequence of events. I’ve got a whole set of documents here. Actually, here’s a chronology of events that occurred in late 1989. This all led up to a joint meeting of the Board of Trustees and the SSC Board of Overseers. I think it was on the 19th of December, 1989. As Helen Edwards brought her team in and began to do the site-specific design, a more conservative approach, with a built-in safety margin, began to take over. And I’d say the two principal changes that occurred were the increase in the magnet apertures from 4 centimeters to 5 cm and the increase in the energy of the [proton] injector from 1 to 2 TeV. It’s hard to put a dollar figure on it, but, all told, those two alone led to about, at this time, a $600 million cost increase. And then there were a lot of other things that were being picked up that had not been included in the CDG conceptual design that were now being included. So, in general, there was about a billion to a billion and a half of additional costs that were coming in at this time. And the Board of Overseers and ultimately the URA Board of Trustees had to deal with this cost overrun and its impact upon the vitality of the SSC.

Marburger:

Right. Right, right.

Riordan:

Do you have any reflections on this whole process? How did you become aware of the problem?

Marburger:

I probably became aware of it in a phone call from Ed Knapp, or from — at that time the URA President was Johnny Toll, I guess.

Riordan:

Yes, Toll.

Marburger:

Johnny Toll was very good at communicating with me and the Board. I have just a huge amount of material in my file from him, and from Ezra [Heitowit, URA Vice President] as well, on that period. That is a decision that was made in a fairly, with a lot of information, back and forth [manner]. As I recall, the presentations on this that I recall most were made by Roy, as the representative of the laboratory. And there was a lot of discussion by the Board on this.

Riordan:

The Board of Trustees?

Marburger:

The Board of Trustees. There was the awareness that it was a big deal. And ultimately the Board of Trustees went along with Boyce’s technical judgment about what was going to be best supported by the Board of Overseers, and I think there were other studies at the time, too. [ed., There were similar recommendations by the SSC Machine Advisory Committee.] I can’t recall what else was being done. But there was a fair amount of technical detail disclosed to the Board as the basis for the decision to go with these more expensive things, and the Board was very uneasy about it. But as the type of Board that it was, with people who were technically savvy but not experts in the fields that were involved, we could all understand, first of all, how there could be a difference between the conclusions or recommendations of the Central Design Group, on the one hand, and the team that was assembled actually to make final design and do the construction, on the other. It was not surprising to any of us that there would be differences, and even things like this.

So, there were questions about exactly what evidence there was that they really needed to do this. And I don’t remember details. I do remember that there were questions and there were answers, and that ultimately the Board said, “Well, if you guys think it’s necessary — and it sounds like you’ve taken care to examine the issues, and you’re telling us that there is a risk of the facility not meeting its primary objectives unless we do this — therefore we will support the changes.” That’s, in a nutshell, the thinking about what was done.

Riordan:

Yes, yes. And I think there were two concerns: one, that the most difficult time was always when you’re trying to inject the beam [into the collider ring] — when it’s circulating in the main ring at 1 or 2 TeV — that’s when you’re going to have your beam losses. And so, if you have substantial beam losses at that point, you’ll never get the design luminosity. The second concern was that, I think the people who went down there did not want to have a long and difficult commissioning time, such as had been experienced at Fermilab with the magnet problems.

Hoddeson:

In the Main Ring, and not in the Doubler [ed., i.e, the Tevatron], where they did.

Riordan:

Yes, the initial [commissioning of the Fermilab Main Ring in the early 1970s].

Hoddeson:

Helen Edwards-type correction coils and everything. The Doubler just turned right on.

Riordan:

They wanted a built-in safety margin, to avoid both of those problems.

Marburger:

Yes. When you say it that way, it sounds simple. But, remember, this was just a huge chain of accelerators.

Riordan:

Yes.

Marburger:

The injector complex was bigger than anything that had ever been built before. We all knew that Helen was very conservative, by the way. The feeling was that she was very conservative [in her design philosophy]. And my recollection is that that we took that into account in listening to the accounts and tried to arrive at a judgment appropriate for an oversight board. We sort of balanced all these things, or tried to. I think we were aware of the complexity of the whole facility, and the need to be conservative in order for it to work, to be honest.

Riordan:

It’s a very visible project.

Marburger:

It’s a very visible project. It’s a very expensive project, and you have an accumulation of complex parts — they’re in series, literally — and they all have to work.

Riordan:

Yes. I guess it’s not the role of the Board of Trustees to second-guess the technical judgments of the experts, especially when the Machine Advisory Committee endorses these changes.

Marburger:

That’s right. But it’s a fairly common role for boards like this to question the people who worked the different steps in the sequence of decisions that led to the final result, to see if they know what they’re talking about. That was done, and these are technically very competent people. Everybody that we dealt with on this project, on the accelerator physics side, and the simulations, and all the rest, we knew we were dealing with the best people in the world in these areas.

Riordan:

Yes, except for Maury.

Marburger:

Except for Maury.

Riordan:

He wasn’t there.

Marburger:

And how do you weave in all the personality differences and emotional conflicts and things that we knew were part of the history of the project. We were all conscious of those things; it was a fairly sophisticated Board, and it was used to making decisions in big complex projects, and we felt that we were talking with good people. Maury’s good, but he’s not the only one out there who knew about accelerator design. It’s not that we made a systematic effort at the Board level to reach out to additional experts, but we thought that the Lab had done due diligence in coming to this conclusion. We knew that they were conscious of the fact that the decision was going to cause trouble, and we felt that that made them particularly sensitive to doing it right.

Riordan:

Uh-huh.

Marburger:

My recollection is that the Board did not have a basis for second-guessing or stopping the process and having it done over again. That’s another thing: there was a tremendous push to get this project going, because the longer you delayed actually putting shovels in the ground, the more expensive it was going to be, and the harder it was going to be to get control of it. So, there was pressure to get these decisions done, but at the same time, great consciousness that they had to be done right. So, all of the parameters for decision-making under those conditions were satisfied, in my view. And the Board was not comfortable with it. How could we be? But given the technical advice that was coming, from people that we had every reason to have confidence in… Even today it probably would have come out the same way. We thought we made the right decision.

Riordan:

That these changes really needed to be made, for the good for the project?

Marburger:

Yes. And by the way, at the time Johnny Toll was the president. Toll is a physicist, not an accelerator physicist, and he too was conscious of all the problems, and he talked with people about the situation. So, I think the Board was satisfied that Johnny had asked even more questions than the Board asked when the presentations were made.

Riordan:

Uh-huh. So, the next step in this issue is what Pief brought up, what can we do to make some attempt to keep the cost in line, given the fiscal climate of those days. As I recall, and I have his memo, Pief was a strong advocate of descoping the project.

Marburger:

Seventeen, or…

Riordan:

Yes, to 17 TeV per beam, instead of the designated 20. His rationale — and I’ve participated in this as a particle physicist myself — was that theorists may tell us that we need this mass or energy range, but oftentimes, especially when it comes to masses, the theorists don’t know what they’re talking about. And 17 TeV was not really all that different from 20 TeV. One could conceive scenarios where you could initially design for 17 and get up to 20, say by changing the temperature of the superconducting magnets. There were games that one could play. Do you have any recollection of that or reaction to that?

Marburger:

Well, I remember there were discussions about that. It’s hard for me to talk about it now because so much time has gone by and we have learned so much subsequently about what we were looking for. At the time, you have to remember that we didn’t have much of a handle on the Higgs boson. We didn’t really know what we were looking for. Within a few years after that, other experiments had put some bounds on the thing and it began to look like you didn’t need quite so much energy. But at the time, there was very little information on what the mass would be, and there were theoretical estimates that were scary. So, again, speaking at the Board level, we were aware that there was a big unknown territory there. [ed. When this interview was done in 2009, the Higgs boson had not yet been discovered at CERN, at a mass of 125 GeV, but experiments there and at Fermilab, especially the 1995 discovery of the top quark at 175 GeV, had established tighter upper limits on its possible mass.]

Riordan:

Uh-huh.

Marburger:

The kinds of arguments that Pief made, although coming from an expert, were intuitive arguments. They were arguments that were no better than the arguments that other people were making about the… You really need to go up, to keep it up. I don’t remember any detail about those arguments, except that once again the Board was presented with a set of judgments that it was necessary to stay, to stick with the scale. What was the date of that decision? Was that 1989?

Riordan:

Well, these are the various stages of the decision-making process.

Marburger:

This is all 1989.

Riordan:

They’re all 1989.

Marburger:

Yes, 1989.

Riordan:

Okay, the Board of Trustees meeting, December 19, 1989.

Marburger:

I can’t say much more than I’ve just said without it being speculation, a reconstruction of events. The Board was more concerned about the interaction with the Department of Energy at that time. That year the Board was concerned about the management aspects of the laboratory.

Riordan:

Uh-huh.

Marburger:

So, there was a lot of criticism of how the laboratory was being run. There was criticism of DOE, there was criticism of the lab, and lots of discussion about the cost. But the discussion about the cost was obscured by the huge difference in various estimates, and it was only in the following year that we had these more detailed studies of the cost.

Riordan:

Yes, I think that was in 1990.

Marburger:

1990, that’s right.

Riordan:

There were four separate attempts to come up with a total project cost.

Marburger:

I remember three, but yes, there was a lot of disagreement even within DOE about the right way to put a price tag on this thing. And different methodologies led to very different numbers, and those numbers were comparable to the numbers associated with the upgrades. Now, admittedly, the cost of the upgrades — the cost of anything — is difficult to assess. The ultimate implications of these kinds of things are difficult to assess. At the time, I recall that there were other uncertainties of cost that appeared to be of the same order of magnitude. Later, I think, after the cost estimates were available, we became conscious of a very large increase in the cost associated with the upgrade. But at that time, when the decision was made, I think we probably had a much less clear picture of what the costs actually were going to be. We knew that it was getting expensive, but we didn’t know there were all these other things in the air.

Riordan:

Yes. I think there was widespread agreement that you had to do the higher-energy injector, and that came first. That had been held down artificially to 1 TeV…

Marburger:

Something like that, yes.

Riordan:

…just because of the Fermilab site. [ed. If the Fermilab site had been selected, the injector energy would have been limited to the 1 TeV of the Tevatron.] That one was pretty cut-and-dried. There was more discussion about the aperture change.

Marburger:

Right. But there — I think I mentioned this to you before — I do specifically recall the argument that Roy espoused and set forth before the Board, of the fact that they had redone the simulation of the operation of the machine and had found effects that had not been included by the Central Design Group. They indicated that the beam losses would be greater, and that they would be potentially, fatally greater and prevent the machine from functioning at the necessary level. So, it was the — at least speaking for myself, not necessarily for the rest of the Board — idea that there were new computer capabilities available to the SSC Lab, that were not available to the Central Design Group, that uncovered this new phenomenon, or a more accurate… That was an important argument in persuading me that it was a serious thing to do.

Riordan:

Yes. But then Pief’s argument was that — and I think Pief Panofsky accepted these changes in his memo — we have to do this, but therefore I recommend that we try to show that we are capable of sharing the pain [being felt throughout U.S. science], and everybody else’s expense, by cutting back, descoping, or stretch-out kinds of plans. I think everybody agreed that 15 TeV would be…

Hoddeson:

Too little.

Riordan:

…too much of a cut, but that 17 or 17.5 TeV would work.

Marburger:

Okay, there’s Pief. He was one voice.

Riordan:

He was probably the only voice [arguing for descoping the project].

Marburger:

And there were others. And the importance of doing things for political reasons, at the end of 1989, was not as apparent as it was later.

Riordan:

Yes, okay.

Marburger:

The Texas group was still pretty confident that they could get this thing through. There was political support, strong political support, although the whole year, 1989, was filled with questions whether this is the right project for the nation. But this Board was, I would say, not in a good position to weigh those political factors to the extent that they should have been. Now, I’m saying that after having been in Washington for seven and a half years [ed., as science advisor to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009]. I’ve been sensitized to this. And looking back on it, I know a hell of a lot more about politics now than I did then.

Riordan:

Yes.

Marburger:

I can’t think of anybody else on that Board who would have been in a position to evaluate the politics.

Riordan:

Yes. You see, Panofsky, who’d been going to and coming from Washington since 1955, basically, really had this deep, broad experience about…

Marburger:

Yes, but you know what?

Hoddeson:

But Washington was changing.

Marburger:

You know what? I know, from my perspective, having been in the White House for seven and a half years, that Pief participated in Washington as an outsider, as an advisor. He didn’t participate as an actor, if you know what I mean. There’s a real difference. Pief was pretty idealistic about how the politics should work, and the politics are much less idealistic than his vision of them.

Riordan:

Yes, but here I think he was playing the pragmatist.

Marburger:

He was, and the gist of what I’m saying here is that we should have listened to Pief. Pief was right. And he did have a better sense of what needed to be done at the time than all the rest of us, and all the rest of us were not in a position to do it. But at the same time, we didn’t know how to evaluate Pief’s input, because we were getting input from a lot of other people, or some other people, that seemed to be just as good as Pief’s. And the fact that Pief… What I was about to say doesn’t apply to this particular decision. When I think about that decision, I don’t remember Pief as playing a really important role in it. Pief was on the Board of Overseers, but he wasn’t on the Board of Trustees.

Riordan:

Okay, but you would all have been in the same room for this joint meeting?

Marburger:

For that meeting, we were all there. I’m having trouble visualizing the meeting, although I have the records from the meeting.

Riordan:

It was held over in Crystal City [in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.], just so that people could come and go quickly.

Marburger:

I can’t remember.

Riordan:

Yes. All right. Well, the point I’m getting at here is that, after being in Washington for so many years, you recognize this ineffable but important essence called “political capital.”

Marburger:

Yes, yes, yes.

Riordan:

And what I’m throwing out as a hypothesis here, is that at this crucial juncture we stepped beyond what the intrinsic political capital of high-energy physics was at that moment.

Marburger:

The problem with that thought is that [following] political expediency may lead you to the point where you fail your mission. That was uppermost in our mind. And by the way, there were a lot of other things that happened during the saga of the SSC where we were under political pressure to do things that we judged to be not in the best interest of the project and that might have been fatal to the project. One of them was the pressure to get rid of Roy as the director. We resisted that because we felt that it would lead to such a disruption of the project that, at that stage, it would have been fatal. So, that was an issue that we argued about, or that we discussed and argued…

Riordan:

This is probably the 1992 or 1993 timeframe, right?

Marburger:

Every time, yes, and even before that.

Hoddeson:

Before that?

Marburger:

No, even before that, yes, because the way Roy talked about the project to people outside the science community did not inspire confidence in his management sense. So, we heard from a number of people that this was something that we ought to be worried about. And the political pressure… I can’t remember when that started, but there was always… The solution in politics is always to get rid of the person who’s in charge and find somebody else. The Board was aware of this, and the Board was quite concerned about the balance between maintaining political credibility and maintaining a viable project. And the decision was always to go with the viable project, even when it was not politically expedient. And that was a tough decision to make, because we did have pragmatists on the Board. We had people on that Board who had been in business — they’d been there — and they were all conscious of the fact that we might not have anything left, that we might fail. By the way, the decision to continue with NIF has a lot in common with decisions that were made on the SSC. And it would be very interesting to see if NIF pays off.

Riordan:

Okay. For the recording, you mean the National Ignition Facility [at Lawrence Livermore National Lab].

Marburger:

Yes. NIF is going to be operating on the edge of feasibility for its mission, and risks were taken on that project, as well. So, anyway, that’s not a particularly relevant issue, I guess, but…

Hoddeson:

These are interesting ideas. They’re very helpful.

Marburger:

NIF was scaled back and went through many revisions and the perils of Pauline. If it hadn’t been connected with a weapons program, it wouldn’t be operating today. But I think it compares in a decision-making sense, though the lifetime of NIF is much longer than the lifetime of the SSC. A comparison of decision-making in NIF with the decision-making in the SSC would be illuminating.

Riordan:

Okay. We had — and you were starting to get into this when you were talking about Roy as the manager — a discussion a couple months ago that I thought was very fruitful. Based on your vast experience in management of science, and in management of universities, there were certain things that could have been done better. And for the benefit of the future, for the benefit of this study, I could throw it open to areas that you thought could have been managed better.

Marburger:

Well, it’s hard to disentangle the personalities from the operation. But we should have had a very seasoned senior manager paired with Roy in a more equal partnership than we had. The teaming partnership with Sverdrup was designed to address the Department of Energy’s conviction that we needed that kind of management experience. Clearly, the Department of Energy — despite the fact that they gave us such a hard time — had it right in the perception that senior management experience was needed at the top. And the nervousness there about having somebody with Roy’s experience at the top was justified, because the quality of management is, for that project, not something that anyone currently, at that time, in the science community had.

Hoddeson:

Is this the same discussion as the one about the systems integrator? Or is that an earlier one?

Riordan:

No, that’s a detail, I think.

Marburger:

Systems integrator?

Riordan:

Lockheed came in as a systems integrator.

Marburger:

Oh, that was later. No, that is a more of a technical type of issue. No, this is at the top. This is the sense of, well, let’s put it this way: the corporate structure of the laboratory should have had a chairman-like figure at the laboratory, full-time. It would have made sense to have Roy as chairman, as president, and have someone else beside him, either…

Riordan:

Leon [Lederman]?

Marburger:

Well, I don’t want to talk about personalities; I want to talk about structure. What was missing there was experience of someone — like I said, I didn’t want to talk about personalities, but somebody like Norm Augustine, for example, who was the chairman of Lockheed-Martin —somebody who had been… Or someone like… Who’s the Motorola guy? Galvin. Bob Galvin. A really senior person, an industry CEO-type, who had experience in dealing with the very large forces in society that are necessary to get a big project done.

Riordan:

You say this would be an industry person, really, as a chairman?

Marburger:

I don’t know, a university person, if their experience was only at universities, then… But there’s one guy that could have done it, his name is Bob Gates. You could say he was a university person, but he’s also had other kinds of experience that permit him to be doing an effective job as the Secretary of Defense right now. I can’t remember what else Bob Gates did, but there are people out there who did this. This would have been totally alien to the science community at that time, to have created a more effective management structure. It would have been so different from what the science community was used to, or willing to accept, that it might have caused even more tension in the science community than already existed. There was quite a lot of tension in the science community already. This fear of industrial practices exists in virtually all the national laboratories. And it’s unfortunate, because the industrial practices are what you really need to manage all of the aspects of the big projects. [ed. Gates was Deputy National Security Advisor and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the George H. W. Bush administration and was president of Texas A&M University from 2002 to 2006 before serving as Secretary of Defense.]

Riordan:

Actually, you were mentioning at lunch, your experience of Battelle, and it might be worthwhile repeating some of that for the record.

Marburger:

Yes, well, let me just say that I had had a good deal of executive experience with large organizations — complex, big physical plants, hospitals — as a president of a research university with two hospitals, both of which opened on my watch. And yet, when I later went to be the director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, in a partnership arrangement with the Battelle organization, I learned things about technical management that I had not been aware of. And I learned how effective it can be in dealing with those very demanding cultural aspects of performance that are necessary for environmental protection and safety. Those are two things that require a different cultural attitude, if you wish. I simply didn’t know how those things were managed. And at Brookhaven, and particularly with the advice from people who had been working with Battelle, I learned how you can make management systems that help people to do these jobs better without…

Riordan:

So, this was, and is, a kind of teaming arrangement between academics and…

Marburger:

In our case at Brookhaven, it worked very well to have me as the lab director. It was an accident that I was a physicist with a great deal of executive experience, but from the academic side. And I had people in my administration as associate lab directors who came from Battelle. Battelle lent me those people, and they worked alongside with me in a team. As part of our proposal for the bidding to operate the laboratory, we promised to install certain types of management structures that turned out to be very effective. But probably even more important was that I listened to them, and I was in a position to sell it to the scientific staff.

Now in the SSC lab, I don’t think Roy had the executive experience that was necessary for him to understand the importance of what he was hearing from the industrial types and to translate that into a message to the scientific community, that this was okay, to do it this way and then to… [laughs] So, now Roy did not have the people next to him who made up for this particular gap in his expertise. And right now, I’m thinking of who… someone like a deputy director.

Riordan:

Yes. I think when we talked at the Cosmos Club [in March 2009], you said something like he really needed a full-time deputy to manage the relationship with the teaming partners.

Marburger:

Yes. Right.

Riordan:

Or maybe two full-time deputies. He relied on Rafe Kasper [ed., Assistant SSC Lab Director Raphael Kasper, who had previously worked on the National Academy of Sciences staff].

Marburger:

Right, yes. Right next to him, that’s right. Rafe came from a different world and didn’t have the expertise to do that. He needed somebody right there next to him to help him do that.

Hoddeson:

Even at Fermilab, when Roy was the head — co-head, really — of CDF, he had [physicist] Dennis Theriot doing all that stuff. And he was very good at it.

Marburger:

There was controversy over some of Roy’s appointments; that held them up, also. This was another problem. It is possible that Roy could have found people to help him with that, had he been given the opportunity to do so by his Department of Energy minders, because there was controversy over practically every appointment that we wanted to make. Everything took a long time to get through. There were questions of competence, questions of “why are you doing this?” and “why are you doing that?” And it was very difficult to get decisions through the Department of Energy bureaucracy because they hadn’t staffed up their office, and the people that they did have in it had no previous experience with the science community.

Probably the worst effect of that bureaucratic molasses at the beginning was to prevent the normal weeding out of personnel that was appropriate for the roles that they had to play. You have to kind of experiment a little bit at the beginning to get the right people in the right roles. And clearly, both we and Sverdrup made a mistake. We did not succeed in getting this kind of help from our teaming partners. Very shortly, very quickly, the Sverdrup agreement was annulled, and we tried to make do with other arrangements. So, it was hard to find people that were acceptable both to the DOE organization and to Roy’s organization, including the Board of Overseers. So, there was a lot of struggling about people — the Briggs appointment, I don’t know if that.... [ed., accelerator physicist Richard Briggs, from Livermore, whom Schwitters named to be Project Manager and Deputy Director in early 1989 but was rejected by Robert Hunter, then Director of the Office of Energy Research.]

Riordan:

Yes, I got that.

Marburger:

There was a flap about that, and I can’t remember what that was all about right now.

Riordan:

Well, there was the Briggs appointment, and there was that whole difficulty having to do with naming a project manager, Paul Reardon [a Brookhaven accelerator physicist]. The DOE brought in Ed Siskin [ed., as SSC General Manager] to add another layer of bureaucracy.

Marburger:

Well, I remember that one of the roles that I played at that time was I went out probably to National Airport or some place and met Ed Siskin, who flew in, and I interviewed him, to see if I felt comfortable about selling him to Roy and the lab, which I and my colleagues subsequently did, because I thought Siskin could be helpful. But Siskin himself, although he was the right kind of person… In general, he didn’t have the wisdom that you would need — of a Pief Panofsky, for example.

Riordan:

Few people do.

Marburger:

Yes, Pief was unusual. The great thing about Pief was he was able to translate the political and bureaucratic necessities to a language that scientists could understand and accept. That was something I learned from Pief, by the way, the importance of doing that, and when I later became the director of Brookhaven, Pief was one of my models of how to talk about and solve these things. It’s very interesting. On the other hand, Pief was such a strong supporter of Roy from the beginning — during the search process and subsequently, he was always in Roy’s camp — that the very strength of his support tended to undermine his credibility somewhat, after Roy came under attack.

And I began to get complaints from some members of the Board of Overseers about how things weren’t working too well. [ed. Panofsky chaired the Board of Overseers from 1988 onward.] So, I started attending the Board of Overseers meetings myself, and — I think I mentioned this to you at the Cosmos Club — I remember at one meeting (and I think I did this at several meetings), Pief would sit in this chair and right next to him I sat in the next chair, and from time to time I would tap Pief on the shoulder, and say, “Pief, you’ve got to stop talking if you want them to talk.” Because the way he was running the meetings was to respond personally to every point that anyone else around the table was making and sort of explain things. It was taking a lot of time, and it was preventing other people on the Board from making their points.

Riordan:

Do you think that they felt that they couldn’t really express their concerns fully?

Marburger:

Yes, I think that some members of the Board of Overseers felt that they were not able to be as effective because of the way the meetings were run. But I think that got fixed, and, by the way, when I sat there and watched and later talked with Pief about it, he understood.

Riordan:

Okay.

Marburger:

It’s hard for Pief to stop talking, by the way, because he usually does in fact know more than anybody else around the table, and he expresses himself very articulately. And so, it was wonderful to watch him and hear him, but at the same time, if there are unhappy people around the table who don’t feel that they’re being heard, it’s not good for their dynamic. However, I do want to say that I supported Roy throughout the whole period, and defended him with our Board [of Trustees] and to the Secretary of Energy, through at least two different Secretaries of Energy, because I thought that the major problem… At no time was the major management problem at the laboratory Roy Schwitters. I thought that there were other problems, much more serious than that, that weren’t getting attention, and that that was not the top of my list of things to fix. I told Roy that. I said, “Roy, you are not the biggest problem in this laboratory, so just keep trying to make it work.”

The biggest problem was the relationship with the Department of Energy and the lack of complete staffing of the Department of Energy unit that was set up, which made it the… The Department of Energy office was dominated by, I guess, Joe Cipriano, and he had his own style, which was difficult to work with. And the Department of Energy is a very conservative bureaucracy anyway; the reason that the science labs had worked as well as they did was that you had the program officers in Germantown who acted as intermediaries between the more bureaucratic oversight machinery and the science community. They knew how to do this. And that was precisely the part that was side-tracked by new organization, so that we didn’t have the same… There was an impedance mismatch that was caused by ignoring the Germantown operation.

Riordan:

Okay, well, I’m about to wrap it up. One thing I like to ask almost everybody I interview is my standard question: If you had to pick three things, and only three things, three issues, three reasons, why the SSC failed — and you can be as broad or as narrow as you want — what would you say?

Marburger:

Cost. Cost would be on top.

Riordan:

Okay. The ever-increasing cost. What other two?

Marburger:

Failure to engage international partners, and a failure to have an appropriate international strategy at a much earlier stage in the process, would be the second thing. And the third thing… Third comes a lot of things. There was a conjunction of events that are hard to disentangle from the economic situation, but the political situation and the fact that there was division, a lack of coherence in the science community. Politics, economics, division of the science community, and…

Riordan:

That’s like five, now.

Marburger:

And the cost, these all interacted, you see. Remember, the SSC was terminated under Clinton, fairly early on. It was a different Congress. It was the beginning of a bad recession. And already the lab was wounded with all of these disclosures about buying palm trees and things for the lobby and the [House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair John] Dingell hearings and stuff like that. There was just ruthless harassment of the laboratory during that period, preceding the stuff. So, it’s hard to disentangle these things. Major events never happen for a single reason.

Riordan:

Yes, that’s why I let you have three.

Hoddeson:

Maybe it’s more than three.

Marburger:

Yes, but you get a false perception that fluctuations in the multi-dimensional systems can occasionally throw up a giant wave. And this was already a troubled project because of the extraordinary expense. Although one of the problems I had with the Department of Energy was these guys that had come in from the Defense Department, that had been brought in to help manage the SSC program, they looked at this six-billion-dollar cost, or ten billion, or whatever; they said, “What do you mean? We spend that kind of money all the time. This is not a big project. What are you talking about, why is it so much trouble? Just do it this way.” And that was a problem. These people didn’t take it seriously. They didn’t understand that they were in a different ball game. And they didn’t regard it as a big problem; they regarded it as a much more routine thing, and they couldn’t figure out why the science community was having so much trouble just doing it right.

And so, I don’t want to go beyond those two things. I think this was a very expensive project at a time when choices had to be made. It was not well understood, and it was regarded as a relatively narrow field of science, having a relatively narrow impact on science. The fact that particularly the Texas [National Research Laboratory] Commission hyped it so much, and the industrial supporters really prepared PR materials — that undermined the credibility of the thing.

Riordan:

Yes, spin-off arguments, things like that.

Marburger:

All kinds of things, and the slick presentations, just embarrassing in a way.

Hoddeson:

The public perception of the SSC was destroyed by the way it was presented, is that what you’re trying to say? I’m not finding the right words to express what…

Marburger:

The public is a diverse beast, and I don’t think the general public’s impression was significantly damaged. It was another exciting science adventure. But among the science community, and among more sophisticated supporters like congressional staffers and other program officers and science policy people in other parts of government, they would look at this material and say, “This is just another sales job.” So, I think it hurt in a sensitive part of the public, if you see what I mean.

Hoddeson:

So, the Washington scene.

Marburger:

Yes, and those who interact with the Washington scene. And not just those located in Washington, but also people like Rustum Roy at Penn State, a solid state physicist who wrote editorials about what a waste of money this was. But this kind of hype just made those criticisms seem more plausible. It’s a very complex world to deal with, and for most science projects of normal cost, up to about a billion dollars, that complexity is hidden. It isn’t really relevant. But when you get over a billion dollars, the number of people who begin to be attracted to the project increases stepwise. And issues that you never thought about become important, like political issues, and getting everything exactly right, and not making statements that come back to haunt you in the future. So, no question that the SSC exceeded, far exceeded a threshold in which the stakes were different and the game had changed. And that’s — I don’t think that you could call that a contributing factor — why I put the money, the cost of it, at the top of the list.

Riordan:

Yes, I think many people do. I know, it’s…

Marburger:

The cost relative to its function. I will add that, because…

Riordan:

Relative to the community it served, also. There were, what, 3,000 high-energy physicists in this country? Maybe another 2,000 internationally would come and use it?

Marburger:

Yes.

Riordan:

We’re talking about more than a million dollars per scientist, and that’s including graduate students in those numbers.

Marburger:

That’s right. And all the statements that I made when I was science advisor were cautionary statements to the particle physics community about the need… You may have read my speech on the 40th anniversary of SLAC. It’s a good speech, by the way. Did you read that speech?

Hoddeson:

No, no, I haven’t.

Marburger:

Oh, that’s a good speech.

Riordan:

Which one?

Marburger:

The speech I gave at SLAC’s 40th anniversary about eight years ago? You don’t have that speech? [ed. Delivered on October 2, 2002, the speech is available via the Internet Archive by searching “http://www.ostp.gov/html/02_10_9.html”]

Hoddeson:

No, we should get that.

Marburger:

Oh, yes, I quoted T. S. Eliot in that speech. Yes, I can send it to you by email. May I have your email addresses?

Riordan:

You have mine.