J. Bennett Johnston

Riordan:

First of all, I’d like to begin by asking you to recall your first impressions of the SSC, when you first began hearing about it and what you thought about the Supercollider at that time, let’s say in the mid-1980s and thereabouts.

Johnston:

We were involved in high-energy physics. Proctor ran my Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, and we were involved in all that high-energy physics. And of course at that time I always thought it was a good idea because I knew you had to have the energy and the luminosity that only this high-energy [collider] could produce. So, I was quite interested in it, but most of the thinking at that time was about where it was going to be, and I was aware of all the different applications for where the site was going to be. I think we even had one from Louisiana. And they [the DOE] played it very smart by getting [the SSC project] authorized before they picked the site, so they had all the different states that were supporting it, which was very smart. So, I’d been enthusiastic about its science from the start.

Riordan:

Weren’t you rather skeptical at the beginning about the ability of the government to fund such a massive project?

Johnston:

I don’t recall. No, it was not… Funding was not as great a problem on scientific matters back at that time. Did you come across some comments of mine or something?

Riordan:

Well, there was a Science magazine article that has a picture of you, and I think that's 1986. Here’s another one a very short [time later] — Business Week — and I’ve highlighted the second set of comments. It lists you as being an SSC supporter but…

Johnston:

All right, that’s fair. Yeah, I think that would probably sum it up. I was an SSC supporter, but I was always skeptical about the money because I wanted to make sure we’d have the money.

Riordan:

The green light came in 1987, and that was after the Graham-Rudman-Hollings Act. So, already the issue of budget deficits was in the air, and it strikes me that the Super Collider would then be an addition to the deficit [if you were] going to fund it. Either that or you would have to take something out of other projects. How did you resolve that difficulty in your mind?

Johnston:

The administration was supporting it. In other words, I just wanted to be sure that the administration was not going to seek to cannibalize everything else in order to do that, and they did not. Their budget request really had additional funds for the SSC.

Jones:

And I think the context of this, in my recollection of those days, Bennett, was clearly that the competition for dollars before then had not been really keen among the different things we were doing. And I think that the allocation process was then just beginning to mean more than it had before then.

Johnston:

Where you could take funding away from another place without much harm.

Riordan:

So, you’re saying that it was not yet a zero-sum game.

Jones:

That, as well as the sense of competition between the water area of the budget and the energy area.

Johnston:

It wasn’t that the competition was not as keen. It was somewhat of a zero-sum game, but it was really up to the administration to put the money at least in the budget — not that that bound the Congress by any means — and they did.

Riordan:

So, there was a commitment that this was going to be funded out of additional money and not press on the other science programs, in that sense. Given the reality of politics, though, didn’t you question that? Didn’t you say that, well, somewhere down the road…

Johnston:

Well, it was my skepticism which those articles reveal.

Riordan:

Okay. Another question I have has to do with presenting the science of the SSC. From my recollection, amongst the supporters in both the House and the Senate, you were the most eloquent in terms of actually explaining it at some depth…

Johnston:

Well, it was my job as the Subcommittee Chairman to carry the debate on [the SSC], and the debate would generally be between [Democratic Arkansas Senator] Dale Bumpers who was the opponent and myself as the proponent of the SSC. So, it was not that widely debated. You can go back and look at those debates. There were not that many people involved and certainly not that many proponents, and the opponents were mainly talking about budget deficits. But yeah, we did get into the science.

Riordan:

My question is, where did you get your education about the SSC science?

Johnston:

I read, and I spoke to some of those great scientific minds who would come by, [Fermilab Director] Leon Lederman and others.

Riordan:

Lederman? What about [SLAC Founding Director Wolfgang] “Pief” Panofsky?

Johnston:

Oh yeah, Pief was my early teacher. He’s really quite good at being able to make complicated things simple.

Riordan:

Steven Weinberg [Nobel laureate theorist from and the University of Texas]?

Johnston:

And Steve.

Riordan:

What about [SSC Laboratory Director] Roy Schwitters, did he play a role in that at all?

Johnston:

A bit, but not as much as the others.

Riordan:

So, it was really the senior executives of high-energy physics.

Johnston:

Yeah, through the years we funded high-energy physics and nuclear physics. We funded the whole thing, and they would always come in and we’d talk science.

Riordan:

Moving on, one major surprise, at least to me and I think in Washington, was the reversal of the House in 1992. This was by essentially the same members of Congress that had voted pretty strongly in favor of the SSC in 1991. Maybe a few members had changed, but basically the same House voted something like 250 to 180 in favor of it when one of the SSC amendments came before them, and then essentially they reversed themselves in 1992. From your perspective, do you have any memory or feelings about why that reversal came about?

Johnston:

It was purely budget-driven. Congress was playing a very phony game at that time. Everyone was saying they wanted to cut the budget, but if you asked them, “Do you want to cut Social Security?” “Oh, no.” “The retirement programs or the entitlement programs?” “Oh, no.” Particularly these Republicans. Strong on national defense. “We’ve got to increase national defense.” Water projects? Well, there wasn’t much money in water projects, and they liked those. Such miniscule dollars in water projects. And so, they were looking for something to cut that they’d have the courage to cut, because they never would propose limitations on COLAs [cost-of-living allowances] and Social Security — something that really had some money. And all they could find was the SSC, because nobody understood what it was out there, and they could derisively say that they’re just trying to prove the Big Bang theory or something like that. And so, all these do-gooder budget cutters… That was all it was. People wanted to find something so they could stand up and say, “I cut the budget.” And that is it really. There was a [GAO] report that came out which criticized the running of the office down there in Texas.

Riordan:

That was one of my questions. How about cost overruns and mismanagement?

Johnston:

That was absolutely infuriating. One of the things being said was they had cocktail parties. Well, they brought these distinguished scientists in for seminars, to mine some of their knowledge and get some of their judgment on these things. So, they would have a reception. And GAO [the General Accounting Office] itself had spent a lot more money in these various categories, percentage-wise…

Jones:

Potted plants [...] a million dollars. The image of…

Johnston:

Now there was also the question of the cost overruns on the design of the magnet. These are brand new concepts and … prior to construction of the SSC, they decided that they needed additional power in the magnets, to give it a margin of confidence.

Riordan:

This was the $2 billion cost increase?

Johnston:

I don’t think it was quite $2 billion. It was a lot.

Riordan:

It went from $5.9 billion up to $8.2 billion.

Johnston:

You mean the total cost of the project?

Riordan:

The real increase of 1990.

Johnston:

Well, the redesign of that magnitude. They wanted to change the aperture, and… But I think the total cost of the other items in there…

Jones:

Yeah, they did.

Johnston:

And then some of that was inflation, and the figures were not that hard anyway, you know, with these projects. So, it was totally phony. It was not like the traditional cost overrun. It was, “We thought we might have done it this way, but we want to be sure, so we’re going to do it with a little higher degree of confidence.” To say that that was a cost overrun is not worthy of the term. It was something different than that.

Riordan:

Compared to the space station, it was a rather modest increase.

Johnston:

That’s exactly right, but the main thing is that back in those days when you… I showed that the marginal additional cost was just a little over $2 billion, comparing stopping the project and continuing the project. They would come up with these huge, huge figures which were phony baloney because you wouldn’t make… I mean, you already had the sunk costs and then you had the termination costs and all that, so the cost of continuing [the SSC project] was not that great. Serious dollars, but as I recall it was like $2.4 billion.

Riordan:

There had been about $2 billion spent on construction, including Texas money, at the time of termination, and then [it took] another half billion to shut it down. But going back to the 1992 vote, which is where the Senate managed to overrule the House, I’m still trying to get various opinions on why the House changed its [collective mind]. And another thing that occurs to me now was the lack of foreign contributions. What’s your assessment of that?

Johnston:

That was raised. That was not a big thing. It was raised as one of the arguments, and we never lost to it in the Senate. And frankly the House… there was no real champion for it [the SSC] over there.

Jones:

Leadership.

Johnston:

I don’t want to speak about my colleagues, so don’t quote me as saying that, but there was no leadership in the House.

Jones:

[Democratic Alabama Congressman] Tom Bevill over there, the Chairman of the Energy and Water Subcommittee, was not able to get up on the floor like Bennett could, and he didn’t champion it.

Riordan:

There was a certain [degree of] anarchy in the House between about 1990 and 1994, a lack of strong, focused leadership.

Johnston:

Right.

Riordan:

Would you say that that might have been part of it?

Johnston:

Yeah. It was all about the budget, people looking for something to [be for]. Here these House members are out running on the balanced budget and all that. They were going to be budget cutters, but what would they be willing to cut? They were not really willing to cut anything. That’s the problem, so along comes this target which had no real defenders, which they didn’t understand, and the public didn’t understand, so it was kind of a free shot, even though it was irresponsible in my judgment to do that.

Riordan:

So, it had a high enough visibility that they could take credit for cutting it, but a low enough impact that it wasn’t going to cost them any votes. Would that be an accurate statement?

Johnston:

Yeah. The public did not know then, does not know now, what it’s all about.

Riordan:

I think there was one thing that was really different between the House and the Senate, other than the level of the votes, and it really had to do with the issue of foreign contributions. This was really important to…

Johnston:

I don’t think the House had a real debate on [the SSC] in terms of what it was designed to do, what it could do, why it was important to the nation. I just don’t think that was really raised in the House. If it was, it was on some…

Jones:

Foreign contributions. So many people used that as an issue, but it really didn’t make any difference if foreign contributions had been there. They were just looking for an excuse, and foreign contributions was one of those they could use, but it wouldn’t have made any difference.

Johnston:

They raised the issue in the Senate, and we pointed out that if there were foreign contributions, then they’d want to make the magnets or whatever.

Riordan:

They’re not going to give cash.

Johnston:

Yeah.

Riordan:

They would give in-kind contributions. But Watkins, when I talked to him, I asked him, “Do you think that the SSC could have survived if you had a billion-dollar scale contribution from the Japanese?” and he said yes. He said it point blank. But my feeling is that that would have caused additional problems in the Senate. What’s your take on that?

Johnston:

Well, as I say, we were able to win on the thing because we took it head-on, on the value of the science, and I think that’s where we won. The foreign contribution was… Had the Japanese been willing to put up a billion dollars, sure, it would have helped. I doubt… You just have to ask, how would that have affected the appropriation for that particular year? Would it really have been done, or was this promised billion dollars way out there in the future somewhere? Clearly, it was about dollars and if we had a billion dollars [from Japan], that would have helped.

Riordan:

It is clear from the research I’ve done that the Japanese were on the verge. They needed to be asked. Things needed to be resolved in terms of the U.S. going soft on trade quotas and things like that. And they were concerned about the lack of support [for the SSC] in the House, but the Japanese were ready to come in if these problems could be resolved in 1992-93. Assuming they had come in, would that have caused problems? Because they would have come in contributing half the magnets and that [would have] made problems for General Dynamics and Westinghouse. What’s your read on that? [ed., General Dynamics had agreed to produce magnets for the SSC at a facility in Hammond, Louisiana, which is Bennett’s state.]

Johnston:

We never got to any specifics on what they were willing to do and when they were willing to do it. I mean, as far as I was concerned, I thought that the magnets were… We were building the magnets, and I thought it was a wonderful business, and we’d use the magnets for other things as well, so I didn’t want to give the Japanese all the benefits of [making them], where we’d just be digging the hole [i.e., the SSC tunnel] and they would be doing the high tech. But we never got specific, as I recall, about what they were willing to do and when they were going to be willing to do it.

Riordan:

There was this US–Japan working group, and about the only thing they could contribute on a billion-dollar scale would have been, say, one ring of superconducting magnets plus other items. Again, my question is would that have caused problems with the General Dynamics and Westinghouse support?

Johnston:

No, I’m sure they would have still supported it, maybe with half the enthusiasm.

Jones:

I do recall, though, Bennett, that [Deputy Energy Secretary] Henson Moore came to see you a couple of times [about this], but it was never specific, like you say. He was saying that we’re negotiating, we’re having meetings with them. But it was almost like you’d meet at the table, but no one would ever tell you what the menu was going to be.

Johnston:

And I would always say we don’t want to give away all the good science.

Jones:

You made it clear.

Riordan:

Another difference between the House and the Senate, it strikes me — and correct me if I’m wrong — is the ability of senators to take the long view. They are not facing reelection in the next two years, and they are not as concerned about their own district.

Johnston:

You can always say that about the Senate, and certainly they were able to take the long view on the value of the science. I think frankly that was more of a question in the House of nobody defending this thing. I didn’t go back and read the debate in the House, but it was pretty much a non-debate. It was all about, “Do we want to spend X billion dollars to prove the Big Bang theory?”

Jones:

Yeah, members would put statements in the record, but what actually occurred on the House floor was very, very little of any kind of substance.

Johnston:

They wouldn’t defend it. They would put out these reports, like on the cost overruns and all that, and we were able to defend [against] that kind of the thing because we were right. It was a very well-managed program, as these programs go.

Riordan:

So, you think Roy Schwitters and Joe Cipriano were doing a good job managing it?

Johnston:

I do. Let’s see, Cipriano, as I recall, was the career DOE man who was brought in to sort of shut the program down, wasn’t he?

Riordan:

No, he was the guy from the DOD, who Watkins knew from when he was Chief of Naval Operations, whom he brought over to DOE to be the chief DOE oversight person down in Texas.

Jones:

But Bennett is talking at a later time. That’s when he surfaced. The tension between that office running it [i.e., Universities Research Association] and DOE running it was always there. They were rubbing against each other. Who was really in charge? Who was running it? I think that’s the context you’re talking about. But that was …

Johnston:

It’s a little vague in my mind, but I did not… My recollection is that I did not have a high regard for Cipriano.

Jones:

I think Bennett viewed the whole affair as a matter of bureaucratic interference, at least as I recall.

Johnston:

Yeah.

Jones:

They were more interested in doing studies. You couldn’t do your work [on the SSC] because you had to respond to all the questions of bureaucrats. [inaudible].

Riordan:

What do you think of Watkins’ efforts to try to bring a stronger management to the project? What’s your opinion of Watkins and his role in the SSC in general?

Johnston:

That’s a little bit vague with me.

Jones:

Yeah, I think that would be… At Bennett’s level, I think he would see it in a different sense, but from my level I was concerned that what Watkins was doing in terms of playing everything closer to the vest, [inaudible] secretive, and a lot of ways, I always thought. It got running all right, out of his office. It was creating problems for the project. Put more layers of bureaucracy on it, Navy style, then you can’t fix it. We couldn’t trust the high-energy physics guys to really build this. We’ve got to have a fancy company project-management team… But we never really saw it from that viewpoint. In hindsight now, a lot of people…

Johnston:

I just didn’t get much into the management of [the project], because that wasn’t my role. We didn’t do a lot of oversight, except after they came up with a report. Then, I got into the report to determine whether it was correct, or not and thought it was BS.

Jones:

Project management is a peculiarly executive-branch function. They fought about how to execute this. They couldn’t really turn it over. The watch stopped here at my place… That created that tension.

Riordan:

Don’t you think that one of the reasons they did that [i.e., try to manage the SSC] was because they were the ones who were going to have to defend the project in Congress and get the next appropriation for it?

Johnston:

They weren’t the ones who had to get the appropriation, I was. They had at least to begin the process.

Riordan:

Yeah, from the executive-branch side, they would have to make the arguments on behalf of the SSC and on behalf of the fact that it was well managed. Therefore, Watkins, being an old Navy man, thought that he needed his Navy boys to go in there and manage it. Moving on to 1993, where you worked [in conference with] the House, I have a few questions as to what was different in 1993 from 1992.

Johnston:

When we lost it? Well, we won it again in the Senate, but we lost in the House. As I say, it’s totally based on the budget.

Riordan:

There’s a few conjectures of mine I’d like to suggest. First off, in 1993 you had the lack of a presidential veto standing behind it. What do you think? That’s my conjecture.

Johnston:

I don’t recall that that he ever threatened to veto…

Riordan:

You mean President Bush?

Johnston:

Yeah, he was supporting it. I don’t ever recall a presidential veto being an issue, do you?

Riordan:

But don’t you think it was implicit?

Johnston:

No.

Riordan:

So, that’s not much of an issue. It certainly was true that Bush was a strong supporter of the SSC, whereas Clinton and Gore were lukewarm about it.

Johnston:

I think so.

Jones:

Clinton certainly had said some things that we got privately. We never saw it written or quoted in that sense, but it led people to believe that it was certainly not a very high priority in the Clinton administration.

Johnston:

No.

Riordan:

He did circulate a letter, but he didn’t really jawbone on behalf of the SSC.

Jones:

Well, only because Bennett had finally kept urging them that they needed to come out. It took a long time to get that letter out and Bennett…

Johnston:

It wasn’t all that strong.

Jones:

Bennett had been urging [the Clinton administration to write] that letter for weeks.

Riordan:

Okay, this is news to me. You played a major role in getting Clinton to write that letter?

Johnston:

Yeah. Well, Texas did not go for Clinton.

Riordan:

It has been reported... I’ve heard it rumored that the Texans were given the choice of: which project, the SSC or the Super Collider, do you really want me to spend my political capital on?

Johnston:

Which project?

Riordan:

The SSC or, excuse me, the space station. Is there any truth to that?

Johnston:

I don’t think so.

Riordan:

It’s been denied by Ann Richards’ office.

Johnston:

I don’t think so. I would have known about that.

Jones:

But in Ann Richards’ office, they were having these discussions at the same time with Clinton’s staff, and Bennett was calling the chief of staff and others. And it was clear that they had not formulated a strong program to defend the project, even during the campaign. Because you’d call on your friend the chief of staff at the time, also … Clinton. But through Ann Richards and Jane Hickie, who would come to see you, Bennett, telling you what the Clinton administration was doing. That’s why they were urging them to get a letter. Bennett would say, we'll get a letter from [Clinton]. And all during that time, it [appeared] the support was eroding, just a lot of erosion… At the same time, there were all these attacks from the environmental community, as well as the taxpayers union.

Johnston:

National Taxpayers Union.

Jones:

That organization. Those things took a toll, particularly on the House members, a greater and greater toll.

Riordan:

Another thing that happened in 1993 was that you had a new House. You had 114 House freshmen, who came in there with the stated purpose of reducing the deficit.

Johnston:

Right, balance the budget.

Riordan:

That had a major impact.

Johnston:

Sure.

Riordan:

I’ve been told that there was an understanding that the Energy and Water Bill would probably have to come back to committee…

Johnston:

Come back to conference.

Riordan:

Yeah. To conference — that it was likely to be voted down in October 1993. And I’m trying to reconstruct the actual sequence of events.

Johnston:

Well, appropriations start in the House, and of course it would have to go to conference after it leaves the Senate.

Riordan:

In 1993, the SSC was put in for the full $640 million in the conference committee bill that went to the House floor.

Jones:

You mean after the first conference, the recommendation… Yeah, that’s the way the system works. If it were voted down, you’d either have to reconvene the conference committee or send out a substitution motion. That was fully anticipated.

Riordan:

But wasn’t it anticipated that [New York Congressman Sherwood] Boehlert and the anti-SSC forces might be able to defeat that bill on the floor? And were there plans for how to deal with that if it came back?

Jones:

No, no. It was anticipated before the bill left conference the first time that there was a high probability that it wouldn’t go through, based on counts and everything else, but you had to give it a try. Why give it up before you even had the test in the House?

Johnston:

They had a vote on the motion to instruct the conferees, which was very strong, and it instructed the conferees to stick to the House position.

Riordan:

As I recall there as an attempt by [Indiana Republican Congressman John] Myers [the leader of the committee’s minority] to send it back to conference. There were two votes. There was an initial motion by Myers to send it back to conference with no stipulation.

Johnston:

Just recommit.

Riordan:

Yeah, just recommit, and that motion got defeated, and then they took the vote to recommit with instructions.

Jones:

And that was the Boehlert motion. That was the anti-SSC movement. They clearly had in mind what they would do.

Johnston:

Have you been in to talk to Boehlert?

Riordan:

Just briefly. We had ten minutes with him and then…

Johnston:

Is he proud of what he did?

Riordan:

Yeah. It’s one of his pieces of legislation that he is particularly proud of. But at this point, didn’t Tom Bevill essentially throw in the towel?

Johnston:

Tom was never that big on the SSC project and didn’t really understand it, and it was pretty plain — whether he’d thrown in the towel or not — it was pretty plain that the House, once they took that vote, would stick by it.

Riordan:

So, he couldn’t have come back and said, “Let’s cut this down to $400 million”?

Johnston:

No, not at that point.

Riordan:

That was not an option at that point.

Johnston:

No. See, we’d rolled the House the year before. When the House had taken it out, we’d put it back in. We’d gone into conference and won, and this year they were just determined not to do that.

Riordan:

I should ask either Hunter Spillan [Bevill’s clerk] or Tom Bevill himself, but was there any element involved here that he’d been overruled by his own body [the House], that he’d sent something like 20 Energy and Water bills to the floor in his life and never had one sent back — that this was a crushing blow?

Jones:

His staff certainly tried to protect him on all scores like that. I could tell they didn’t want Mr. Bevill to be embarrassed. They wanted to keep him [seen] as being up front, a real effective, strong leader. That was their [goal?]. But you could ask Hunter that.

Riordan:

You made a telling comment that he didn’t have this real solid commitment to the project like you did.

Johnston:

I don’t think so. I think [inaudible]. And don’t quote me about talking critically about Bevill. He’s a good friend and all that.

Riordan:

Okay. I just wanted to go through a list of factors and get your opinion as to the importance of each. I’ve actually touched on some of them already, like the impact of the perceptions of DOE mismanagement or the lack of major foreign contributions. What about the increasing cost of the SSC and the perception that it was going to continue [growing]?

Johnston:

That’s clearly a factor.

Riordan:

A major factor?

Johnston:

I mean, it’s all about dollars in the budget. That was the main thing, and these other things — cost overruns and all that — just tended to give further support to those who wanted to kill it.

Riordan:

Didn’t the Clinton administration stretch-out further feed the perception of costs out of control? [ed. Shortly after President Clinton took office, the White House announced it would extend the SSC’s construction schedule, which would have reduced its year-to-year costs but increased its total cost.]

Johnston:

I wouldn’t say that, no. A stretch-out is always a way to make it more affordable this year because you are always looking at each year as a separate thing. So, I thought the stretch-out was fine, as I recall. We didn’t criticize the stretch-out.

Jones:

No, I guess only in the context that you’re getting things fixed. But the problem was that you had the liability that everybody thought this project was well-defined and mature from day one, which it never was. It was an ongoing process. A lot of it, this engineering design, was coming in later, you know. So, the fact that you started with this earlier figure, that was meaningless… We were hamstrung with that, in a sense which led to this…

Johnston:

Yeah, you know how it is…

Jones:

The stretch-out was fixing some of the things that needed to be fixed and making the project doable and affordable, so you could plan it in a certain way — contingencies, all of that stuff, uncertainties, whatever you want to call it.

Riordan:

But most projects of this size have those kinds of increases anyway, don’t they?

Johnston:

But this one was nit-picking in the case of the SSC, because the participants didn’t get their act together on this. Either side. The management within the SSC Lab itself or the management at DOE. They were kind of working against each other.

Riordan:

How about the combination of cost increases with an inability to communicate what the purpose of the project was?

Johnston:

That’s what I’m saying — and the budget mania with the lack of courage to find something real to cut. This was just the most available target out there.

Riordan:

You have an increase in a weapons program. People can understand that it’s an increase but it’s necessary for the national defense, so we go ahead with it. There’s a rationale for a cost increase. But people don’t understand what that extra $2 billion is going for.

Johnston:

Well, they didn’t understand what the first $2 billion was going to.

Jones:

And it suffered from this thing that again is that the first $3 billion figure, that was just a back-of-the-envelope figure, and then there were the detailed engineering designs. You know what I’m talking about. It labored under all that. The $8 billion figure was probably the first time that they’d ever put a fine-toothed comb on it. [ed., This refers to the discrepancy between early cost estimates for the project and the baseline cost established in 1991.]

Riordan:

How about this reason, what I call the need for a symbolic sacrifice?

Johnston:

That’s what I’m saying.

Riordan:

The incoming freshmen in the House needed some visible success that didn’t cost them votes.

Johnston:

That’s the whole point.

Riordan:

What about the arguments being made about the impact of the SSC on other fields, small-science fields?

Johnston:

The scientists who said that, and there were some who engaged in that. I remember one guy who, it seems like was from Syracuse, as I recall…

Riordan:

Ben Stevens? Rustum Roy?

Johnston:

Yeah. And they treated this as if there were a science budget that was a zero-sum game, and if they took it away from this project, the money would flow into other science, which was totally wrong. The money would flow — if it flowed and it wouldn’t flow — it would either flow back into the budget in general, or, if necessary, into energy and water projects, and then it would probably go into water projects and whatever. It certainly wouldn’t go into his materials science or whatever Rustum Roy wanted. I don’t know whether you’ve talked to him since that time.

Riordan:

One of our colleagues did.

Johnston:

What did he say?

Riordan:

He was again particularly proud of having done what he had done. But my question really was this, do you think this claim had an impact on your colleagues in the Senate? I guess it would be more important in the House, this issue.

Johnston:

I wasn’t over there in the debate in the House. You had several hours of debate, and this was part of it. We debated probably four hours in the Senate and this issue was mentioned, then we ended up winning. Now, how can you say what part of that debate influenced people? But clearly it was not helpful to our side to have him say that.

Jones:

I saw that issue coming on, in my recollection. I remember Phil Anderson, for example, from Princeton. He came before the committee, to probe him on this issue where he made these statements. And furthermore, in the committee where this occurred, and some of those debates in committee, Bumpers was there. You couldn’t really ask those kinds of probing and penetrating questions. But they [the SSC opponents] wanted to use that. They had a large number of scientists from other fields that were saying this project was going to hurt…

Riordan:

Did it hurt?

Jones:

Whether it was biology or …

Johnston:

And they really took the view that the SSC took away from their projects, as if there was a science budget.

Jones:

High-energy physics was the catalyst of the science world. These kind of integrating… It was dog eat dog. You say an evil about my stuff and [inaudible]. That’s why I think they tried to get the American Physical Society and others to raise the larger issue, which represented science as opposed to just high-energy physics.

Johnston:

But the fact of the matter is with scientists, one field of science is about as foreign to another field of science as law is to medicine. These high-energy physicists are working on something so esoteric and so different from materials science and all that. One is theoretical, dealing with something that is almost philosophical, and the other is very practical and produces widgets, and so you cannot count on a scientific community with any spirit of science. It’s just unfortunately not there, and they just got had. The fact of the matter is, the more money you spend on science in any field, it does not take away from somewhere else — it rather increases, I think, the appetite for more science. The percentage of the federal budget that went into the SSC, as I recall, was less than 1/1000 of 1%. It was some miniscule little amount.

Riordan:

And in the kind of particle physics we do at Stanford, we have swarms of materials scientists and biologists coming to use the X-rays that come off the ring, particularly in materials science and molecular biology. But in the case of a machine like the SSC, there is a weaker case to be made that there are practical uses of it.

Johnston:

We could have had a beam — we talked about doing that — on the science of medicine. But I do recall that most of these anti-SSC people, they would seize on anything. So, if they had somebody that had credentials, they’d want to quote them over and over. Boehlert or Dale Bumpers, whoever, and that’s natural in this kind of business. Why not quote them? But they did great harm to the scientific community by trashing this project.

Riordan:

That really had an impact.

Johnston:

It had an impact that people who wanted to be against it anyway could drive onto it.

Riordan:

One thing that was really telling, which Boehlert told us, is that it made it possible to vote against the SSC but not be “against science.”

Johnston:

Exactly, so you could say I’m for Phil Anderson’s mechanical whatever.

Riordan:

I think we underestimated… There were some very distinguished materials scientists with their own Nobel Prizes like Philip Anderson and J. Robert Schrieffer and Nicolaas Bloembergen getting up and saying that maybe the SSC was not a good idea. They could trot out their gallery of greats just like [the SSC advocates].

Johnston:

Sure, but they were really not qualified to speak about the SSC. Just not. As I say, their field of science is so different from this, so how can they speak about the value of the SSC? They weren’t qualified to do that any better than I was.

Riordan:

Moving right along, what about the impact of what I call a Rust Belt versus Sun Belt rivalry?

Johnston:

I don’t think so. I mean, clearly when you didn’t locate the SSC in some other states the enthusiasm in those states waned, but that’s only natural. But I wasn’t aware of a Rust Belt versus Sun Belt rivalry.

Riordan:

I mean, the feeling that too many projects were going to states like Louisiana and Texas versus Illinois and Michigan.

Johnston:

If that was a factor, I was not really that aware of it.

Riordan:

What about the dwindling power of the Texas delegation over the life of the SSC? At the beginning you have [Texas Senator Lloyd] Bentsen, [Speaker of the House] Jim Wright, and you have Bush in the White House.

Johnston:

Well, we still had Bentsen.

Riordan:

No, he went off to the Treasury [as Secretary of Treasury].

Johnston:

Was he there by then? Well, as far as he was concerned, we didn’t lose it in the Senate. Certainly, if Jim Wright had been there, that would have been… If the Democrats had still had control, that would have been a lot different. [ed., Wright was Speaker from 1987 to 1989]

Riordan:

You mentioned earlier there was no strong leadership in the House, and part of that can be attributed to the fall of Jim Wright.

Johnston:

Yeah.

Riordan:

After that you had [Washington Congressman Tom] Foley [as Speaker], who couldn’t even survive reelection in 1994. How about the fact that there seemed to be little public understanding of the science of the Super Collider?

Johnston:

That’s what I’ve been saying, the public had no idea what this project was all about.

[End of side of tape]

Riordan:

Do you think it is something that a future project, let’s say another billion-dollar project in high-energy physics, ought to pay more attention to — educating the public as to what this project is all about?

Johnston:

It’s going to be hard to have another big science project. For example, when we had the fusion project…

Riordan:

ITER [ed., the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor]?

Johnston:

ITER. We were spending a lot of money on ITER every year without ever having thought down the road as to what we were going to do as a country. And I put in a resolution, which we passed, that said in effect that we ought to make a decision as to whether we were going to do it, and basically do the negotiation with foreign countries to determine what they were willing to do, and do that now before we continue to spend, as I recall, about $750 million. And as it happens, they pretty well abandoned ITER. [ed., Congress passed legislation shortly before this interview withdrawing the U.S. from ITER, though it rejoined in the years after the interview.]

Riordan:

The U.S.?

Johnston:

They just never would make up their mind as to whether this was the right technology and what percentage of that $20 billion would have to be put up by the U.S. and whether the U.S. was willing to let it be located in Japan, and still put up X percent of it. You need to think those things through and make a clear commitment in advance rather than just slip into it. It’s going to be hard to build. I don’t know what other big science projects there would be. I guess you have the space station, which has been a great public relations coup. It’s not really good science, but it’s great public relations, and people somehow, after all this time, are still interested in seeing pictures in space.

Riordan:

I think there is a U.S. commitment to space as a new frontier that goes back to the Apollo project. Even though it’s not as strong as it once was, it still exists.

Johnston:

Well, we had a commitment to the SSC as well.

Riordan:

But was it as deep?

Johnston:

The public understands the space station and pictures of men in space a lot better than they do…

Riordan:

And John Glenn [ed., an Apollo astronaut who served in the Senate from 1974 to 1999]. If the U.S. is contemplating another major multibillion-dollar high-energy physics project, and there are people who are, such as Burton Richter, what would you recommend would be done differently the next time?

Johnston:

It is easy to say build public understanding, but I don’t know how to do that. I did it as best I could. You’ve read those debates. Trying to bring it down to something that’s understandable is just very hard to do, to be poetic about it, to try to explain what it’s all about, and not understanding what’s not…

Riordan:

But if there was a broader public support…

Johnston:

Yeah. But it’s not as if you can look back on that and say if they had done this different or done that different, it would have been different. It was just the times, and you didn’t have the leadership in the House, you didn’t have the Texas power. And [the science] is something that is just very, very difficult to explain, and you couldn’t even explain it to the Philip Andersons of the world. But that is the challenge to try to do it. But it is going to be very hard to get a new big science project going.

Riordan:

Any other areas that I might have overlooked? Is there anything else worth talking about?

Johnston:

I don’t think so. Tell me about the new quote-unquote breakthroughs in CERN.

Riordan:

This is the so-called quark-gluon plasma. Well, it’s a mini-breakthrough. It got a lot of play in the New York Times.

[End of recording]