Howard Wolpe

Weiss:

Hello, Dr. Wolpe. I’d like to start this interview with a brief biography, your education and career before coming into Congress, and how you came to Congress originally.

Wolpe:

Well, I did a Bachelor of Arts degree at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. I was a native of California actually, originally from Los Angeles, went up to Oregon for my B.A., and then I went on to MIT, where I earned a doctorate in political science, specializing in African politics. I went on to the University of Chicago law school for one year and decided that wasn’t for me. Then I began a teaching career at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I taught for about five and a half years. I became politically involved following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, which occurred a few months after I moved to Michigan. And I ended up first becoming the head of an organization that emerged in the wake of the catharsis around Dr. King’s assassination, and then ran for the city council two years after I came to Michigan. I was elected to the city council in 1969 and reelected in ’71, and then I was elected to two terms in the State Legislature, in November of ’72. I ran for Congress in ’76 the first time, and lost by an eyelash, and then went to work heading up Sen. Don Riegle’s office in Lansing, Michigan. He was elected to the Senate in that year. And then in ’78, I ran again for Congress from the Michigan 3rd congressional district and was successful. I began to serve my first of several terms in the Congress. I ended up retiring from the Congress at the end of ’92 as a result of the reapportionment which eliminated our congressional district.

Weiss:

Was the result of the census to send representative [seats] down to the Sun Belt from the so-called Rust Belt?

Wolpe:

Yeah, Michigan lost two seats in that particular census, so mine was the one to be sacrificed in the process.

Weiss:

Is the 3rd District just outside Detroit?

Wolpe:

No, the 3rd Congressional District encompassed Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, and half of the city of Lansing. It was a solid Republican district, but I was a Democrat. I was the second Democrat this century, and the first to ever be reelected from that district.

Weiss:

And you even were elected in an off-year election with the sitting President a Democrat, so that’s even tougher. OK, when did you first hear of the Superconducting Super Collider, do you recall?

Wolpe:

Yeah, I do. It was actually a term or two before I took over the chairmanship of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee. I heard of it in that period because Michigan was one of the contenders, one of the finalists, and I had some grave reservations about the project even then. And so, it was an awkward situation. The position I essentially took was, look, if it’s going to be out there, I’ll fight for Michigan to get it, but I actually made some public statements warning of the… raising the questions about the wisdom of committing those kinds of resources to that single project, from the standpoint of scientific R&D. And secondly, warning that Michigan should not put a lot of eggs in that prospective basket, because the likelihood of winning the project was not all that great. But I don’t remember what year that was…

Weiss:

1988 presumably, when… 1987-88 was the period when states were participating in it, before Texas [won out]. Did you have any insight or sense that the project was likely going to Texas? You seemed to indicate you didn’t think it was going to Michigan.

Wolpe:

Yeah, I was dubious that Michigan would get it, and I thought there was an awful lot of political clout behind it coming from Texas. I was also struck at the time… I remember looking at the budgetary implications, in terms of the R&D budget, and having real problems with the large amount of resources that this single project was going to consume. And I remember that the physics community was deeply divided, with many physicists feeling that this was not a smart use of funds: it was going to take away funds that would otherwise be available for smaller science projects that would advantage a much larger proportion of the physics community.

Weiss:

When did you first work closely with the SSC project in this context, from your congressional position?

Wolpe:

Some of this is fuzzy. It was a few years back, and I can give you some of the names of people. My recollection is that I was actually engaged in an effort to cut back on the Super Collider before I even became subcommittee chairman. I had the feeling… I remember that [Republican New York Congressman] Sherry Boehlert, who became the ranking member [of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee], and I had both expressed serious criticisms of this project, even before my return to the Science, Space, and Technology Committee and to the chairmanship of the I&O Subcommittee, but I don’t know what year.

Weiss:

OK, the record does show some statements during the period before your becoming subcommittee chair, and I guess what I’m wondering is how strong was your opposition to the SSC, say, in 1989?

Wolpe:

It was very strong. In the early period, it was based largely on some of the broad budgetary implications, that there were so many other competing needs. And I saw this as the kind of project, like the space station and some other things, that was going to claim an inordinate share of the resources. When I moved over to the subcommittee, and we began our serious oversight of the project’s merits and the implementation of the project, then we became more and more focused on two points. One was the failure of the project to secure the international funding that had been promised, and secondly the mismanagement of the project: cost overruns, and the remarkable secrecy that surrounded the operation. I felt that there was an enormous amount of unwarranted secrecy and deception involved in the handling of this project. I recall, just as an illustration, that [Secretary of Energy James] Watkins had actually developed a back-door channel of communications, which made it impossible for some of the folks that would normally be in the chain of command to exercise proper oversight over a number of the management decisions that were being made. That was a really peculiar kind of discovery.

Weiss:

So, you were fairly familiar with the internal management dynamics at DOE [the Department of Energy] then?

Wolpe:

That was a product of our oversight, of the I&O staff getting into some fascinating documentary material. Prior to my taking over the chairmanship of the subcommittee, we knew that there were cost overruns, and some of that had already been on the record. We knew that the international contributions were not forthcoming. We were unclear as to just how pessimistic the [George H. W. Bush] administration was about getting those international commitments, but that became clear from the documentary material that we began to develop in the course of the oversight. And then the broader issues of some of the mismanagement — concerns about the management team that had been put in place, that were being privately voiced in the administration, that I only became more sensitive to once we began our own investigative work.

Weiss:

So, there was some sense that the administration was losing confidence in the management team?

Wolpe:

That’s right.

Weiss:

From within the White House or within DOE?

Wolpe:

My recollection is the DOE.

Weiss:

Were you aware… Were there any White House officials who were involved closely with the management and oversight, anyone from OMB or anyone like that?

Wolpe:

I don’t recall that. People who might have a better handle on that would be my chief of staff, Keith Laughlin, who is now with the White House Office on Environmental Policy. And also Bob Roach.

Weiss:

Before you were subcommittee chair of Investigations and Oversight, you had chaired another committee, or subcommittee. Isn’t it a little unusual to change committee chairs like that?

Wolpe:

Yeah. I had been chairman for a decade of the Africa Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And two things happened. One is that I was simply seeking a new challenge. Much of the agenda that I had been advancing was essentially consummated. I had been leading the effort to rewrite America’s approach to economic development in the African continent. We got that through. We created a [inaudible]. And I was also deeply involved in the fight for sanctions against South Africa, and by the year in which [inaudible] changed that was also clearly in the process of happening. And then [Science Committee Chair, California Congressman] George Brown made clear to me that he really wanted me to become chair of this subcommittee, and he agreed in advance to give me a kind of autonomy and staff capacity that would enable us to really gear up the oversight [subcommittee] in a way that had not happened for a number of years. And so that was very exciting to me, because one of my domestic areas of greatest interest happened to be energy policy. And as you may recall, we also did a lot of work with the energy policy measure in the course of those two years.

Weiss:

At the time did George Brown know you were an opponent of the SSC?

Wolpe:

Oh yeah, I think it was pretty clear.

Weiss:

And that wasn’t, up-front, going to represent a problem?

Wolpe:

He never expressed that to me. The only time there was any political sensitivity — and even there, I must give him credit — he was most uptight about the first project we took on, which was the laboratories, Livermore research labs, and the issue of the new contract which was being written between the federal government and the University of California at Berkeley, which is his own territory. But even there he gave me a free hand and never altered the work I was doing.

Weiss:

I remember that that was even when the [University of California] Faculty Senate voted not to extend the contract...

Wolpe:

I don’t remember a lot of the details, but it was clear that our oversight managed to very significantly alter the nature of the contract that was in the end offered. There was much greater conditionality.

Weiss:

What kinds of changes in these sorts of agreements were you looking for, from your oversight position?

Wolpe:

Well, basically the way things had been operating up to that point was the government was giving a blank check to the universities. And I mean it was really outrageous. There was no accountability. There were again significant questions of cost overruns and inefficiencies. And the federal government, because of the way the contracts had been drawn up to that point, had no leverage. And the university had adopted the posture of indignation that the federal government should even question how they were managing and administering these laboratories. I mean, it was really pretty outrageous. And our investigation in a sense didn’t uncover [anything]. What it did was reinforce. The General Accounting Office — not the GAO, the inspector general I think it was, maybe the GAO; I think it may have been both — had done some independent work that was quite excellent in which they identified a number of problems with respect to the university’s handling of these contracts, in handling the contracts of the university, I should say. And so, the role of the hearing was essentially to publicize that, so as to provide leverage to those that wanted to create much greater accountability institutionally.

Weiss:

That sounds like a similar pattern as to what emerged in the SSC.

Wolpe:

In many respects, yes, because we had some supplemental work done in the GAO that helped to reinforce the concerns that we had had.

Weiss:

What were the issues that you saw in the SSC? You mentioned very broadly the management problems.

Wolpe:

Well, as I said there was a broad policy concern about the merits of the project from the beginning. But that we didn’t revisit once I took over the chairmanship, that was simply…

Weiss:

That doesn’t strike me as something that the oversight committee would easily be…

Wolpe:

No, it was outside the purview of the committee. It wasn’t for us to be engaged in the policy wisdom of the choice that was made before, but it was within our purview to identify and to give some visibility to the mismanagement, to the cost overruns, to the failure to follow through on commitments that had been that had been promised in terms of international contributions to the operation of the SSC and the like.

Weiss:

When you assumed the Investigations and Oversight chair, who were your staff members at that time?

Wolpe:

Well, I brought with me, essentially… George Brown made all the appointments under Science and Technology, unlike the Foreign Affairs Committee, where subcommittee chairs appointed staff directly, we were dependent upon full-chair appointments. But I negotiated with George in advance certain understandings about who would be there. He hadn’t been comfortable with that, but he agreed to my preferences, and so I brought with me Keith Laughlin, who had been with me since my first days in Congress. He started out my driver in a campaign and ended up moving up the ranks to legislative correspondent, to legislative director, to chief of staff of my personal office. He subsequently became chief of staff for the Northeast-Midwest Congressional Coalition when I was co-chair of the coalition. And then he became chief of staff of the I&O subcommittee. I’ve never known anyone better at policy and legislative politics. He could take an issue, and even make it work politically, sort of expanding [inaudible]. And he did that at the committee.

And then we brought on Bob Roach, who was a nominal investigator and had done a lot of work with [Mike Synar?]. And then we brought on Edith Hollowell, who was a dynamite investigator who had a history of turning previous ill experience into some solid work. Then we had some other folks in support capacities. And I had another investigative type, but I don’t think he was involved in the SSC; it was some of the space projects we were looking at, someone from the Department of Defense that was [inaudible] and did a beautiful job for us. We had for a time Greg… I’m not sure I have the right name, but he’s with Al Gore now, and he had been counsel of the subcommittee, and inherited him. He was a very solid guy, but then when Gore moved to the Senate, he asked him to move to the Senate with him.

Weiss:

And then there was Dan Pearson…

Wolpe:

Oh yeah, who was Sherry’s guy, and who shared the same agenda basically as related to the SSC, a similar perspective.

Weiss:

And was Bob Palmer there for a little while or not?

Wolpe:

On the space issues, Palmer was there, but not… Wasn’t he with the full committee? Oh, he had been with us, and then he moved to the full committee staff as I recall.

Weiss:

Yeah, I think that’s the route he went. I was just trying to place the timing.

Wolpe:

He started out with me and then shifted to the full [Science Committee] staff essentially, about six months later.

Weiss:

In addition to you and Sherry Boehlert, who did you really feel were the strong opponents of the SSC?

Wolpe:

Sherry and I pretty well carried that, in terms of energy and activism. Now there were some folks outside the committee who joined with us. I want to double check my memory on this, but I think [Oklahoma Congressman] Mike Synar was there. People like… from Kansas [Jim] Slattery was very involved.

Weiss:

OK, so you and Sherry were the central, most energetic ones. What kind of specific activities were you engaged in as members, to voice your opposition?

Wolpe:

First of all, we tried to organize these hearings, and to get them… to bring in as many media folks as we could and give the hearings themselves as much press attention as possible. And then we did a lot of “Dear Colleague” letters that we sent around to our [congressional] colleagues that drew attention to the various issues that were identified in the course of the hearings. On one or two occasions, we actually did press conferences and advance press work on this. And, of course, we participated in debates and discussions of these matters on the floor of the House. We also worked with some of the external groups that could help do some targeting activities with respect to undecided members who might…

Weiss:

External groups?

Wolpe:

Well, the National Taxpayers Union stands out in particular.

Weiss:

What kinds of talking points, or what kinds of issues did you raise when speaking with other members, do you recall?

Wolpe:

Well yeah, I think I’ve probably alluded to just about all of them.

Weiss:

Did you target specific members with specific points often?

Wolpe:

We focused very heavily on the whole mismanagement, and the waste, because independent of where people stood on the merits, the best way of reaching folks was to persuade them that the SSC was just a boondoggle, and was not worth the expenditure of dollars, particularly as we began to get into more of these budget-centered debates where huge cuts were being made in all sorts of programs. And yet this project and the space station and some other projects that were claiming such a large percentage of total resources were still being kept alive. So, we kept trying to draw attention to the implications of that in terms of these other things that people value. The condemnation was simple mismanagement, and then when they would raise the question, “Well, isn’t it meritorious scientifically?” We would say, yes, but we also were trying to make sure there’s no negative environmental harm here in comparison with other kinds of undertakings. But even the scientific community was itself divided. Even the particle physics people were themselves divided on the priority that should be attached to this particular venture. We also managed to assemble some of these objectors from the scientific community. We got them to develop letters. We had one very impressive letter I thought that was co-signed by influential organizations and key and prestigious individuals that we circulated.

Weiss:

I think I’ve seen that circulated as one of the “Dear Colleagues” letters. Did the Northeast-Midwest Coalition play a role in opposing the SSC? Did it ever come up within that organization?

Wolpe:

I don’t believe that the coalition ever took a position on that issue, as a coalition. Obviously, there was an unusual dimension to this, namely that Sherry and I did not endear ourselves to our Texas colleagues. And since I was co-chair of the Northeast-Midwest Coalition and Sherry was active in it, there was a perception on the part of these Texas guys that this was a regional fight, and they tried to make it appear a regional fight. It also was a bit awkward that there was also fighting against the space station. And I had earlier led the fight against the savings-and-loan bailout, so there was a series of issues. Some of my Texas colleagues and I used to have this joking relationship, in which they would thank me privately for enhancing their political stature back home by giving them someone to fight against, to rail against. My agenda really was not anti-Texas; it was merely focused on all these projects. But it happened that all these projects and all these events happened to have a Texas base.

Weiss:

Did you ever sense that the powerful Texas delegation tried to take things out of your district that were important, or anything like that?

Wolpe:

No, I didn’t endear myself to [Democratic Texas Congressman and Speaker of the House until 1989] Jim Wright over the years. That was very awkward. Oh, also I should say that one of the first fights I led was against… Mike Synar and I co-led this fight against the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, which happened to be Jim Wright’s special baby, as he described it. And my relationship to Jim was subsequently never as warm as it might otherwise have been. And so, it just happened, a series of these issues put me at odds with a number of the members of Texas congressional delegation. And, in fact it was amazing, because they knew that Sherry and I had an agenda related to the death of the Super Collider, the Texans made sure… they put Texans on the committees that year just to protect the SSC, both on the Science and Technology [sub]committee and the I&O [sub]committee. The person who was their point man on the I&O subcommittee was Pete Geren, who was a very fine guy — we get along famously, but his reason for being there was to protect the SSC, no bones about it. And then there were certain hearings, when… what was a bit unusual, he would have all the other Texans from the Science, Space, and Technology Committee sit in on the hearing. Like Ralph Hall, I remember, sat in on some of these hearings. They were there to keep Sherry and me honest. Texas was very well organized to defend its projects.

Weiss:

Now in 1992, when the first House vote to kill funding for the SSC — you were still around for that vote in the summer of 1992 — there was a very dramatic shift from 1991 to 1992, a turn of roughly a hundred votes.

Wolpe:

Yeah, we were delighted. We didn’t win out eventually, but it was very clear that we were on the verge of a major victory, which I wish I had been around to enjoy the subsequent term. I think that vote surprised, really surprised, a number of the supporters of the project, how much the support had eroded. [Editor’s note: Congress ultimately terminated the Superconducting Super Collider in October 1993 by rejecting appropriations legislation that funded the project and then passing legislation that defunded it.]

Weiss:

Now, that turn came within the same Congress, without any intervening elections.

Wolpe:

Yeah, I think that one of the biggest elements here was how it was coming home to the members about the gravity of the budgetary crisis, and the growing difficulty of maintaining support for projects that were clearly marginal in terms of their political value.

Weiss:

Would the Clinton campaign at that time, which was very strongly emphasizing budgetary issues, as well as the Republicans who had long spoken on budgetary issues —do you think that played a role?

Wolpe:

No, no, no, no. The presidential campaign? I don’t recall any sense of that having any influence at that point.

Weiss:

So, it was more within Congress itself, just recognizing how bad the numbers were?

Wolpe:

Yeah, we were having these huge troubles with Bush over the budget and taxes.

Weiss:

You mentioned that you worked the press quite a bit as SSC opponents. Did you feel that the press was sympathetic and responsive to your efforts?

Wolpe:

No, no, I didn’t have that feeling. In fact, I think that they sort of bought into… I don’t want to say it was the opposite either. I just never had any sense that we brought the press with us. There was not a lot of editorial commentary urging the defeat of the SSC.

Weiss:

Yeah, the research I’ve done shows a fairly balanced view, some on each side. It didn’t seem like either side was making big inroads.

Wolpe:

Yeah, I think that’s true. I don’t remember any strong advocacy, one way or the other.

Weiss:

One of the interesting transition periods, I think, is in 1993, with the new Congress. Essentially, the work that you began in your committee moved over to [Michigan Congressman John] Dingell’s Investigations and Oversight [Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which Dingell also chaired] rather than staying in the Science Committee’s I&O Subcommittee.

Wolpe:

After I left Congress you mean? That’s because Bob Roach went over to Dingell’s committee.

Weiss:

Certainly, that’s a primary reason. What kind of relationship would you have had with your colleague John Dingell?

Wolpe:

It was a very close relationship, especially on oversight issues. John and I had cooperated on some other issues when I was chairman of the Science I&O Subcommittee, and we had even coordinated some special activities related to common efforts — not on SSC, but on other projects. So, this was a natural extension of that.

Weiss:

…some of the things that they were saying and the way they expressed themselves.

Wolpe:

Well, I had no [inaudible], but I had a lot of folks from Michigan State University right on my doorstep. I didn’t have East Lansing, but a lot of the folks from my district care about Michigan State. They came to me and were very upset. How could I possibly be opposed to basic science? And my response invariably was, “I’m not opposed to basic science.” And I’d draw their attention to the dissent within the physics community about the relative priority that should be given to this highly capital-intensive project. And I felt that their point of view was, “Gee, this is basic science,” and anyone who opposed it had to be engaged in an act of demagoguery because they didn’t appreciate the science. It’s hard to make that argument against me, given my own background in academia, but they tried at times. And you expected it.

I discovered… I’ll never forget another remarkable instance, when we did some oversight on the National Science Foundation and discovered that major reports that had been used by the NSF to justify requests for increased funding were totally fraudulent in the way they were put together. In fact, what it purported to claim in that document, [the scarcity of?] scientists and engineers wasn’t true. That they had [inaudible] this methodology was absurd. And when we raised that issue, I still remember the chairman of the NSF Board, James Duderstadt of the University of Michigan [ed., a nuclear engineering professor and university president from 1988 to 1996], having lunch with me and trying to… insisting that I was just playing the role of the demagogue. And I suggested that I thought that ethics in science was a relatively important subject, and he was totally defensive with me, the NSF bureaucracy, and a blind refusal to look objectively at what was going on at the agency. Those were the kinds of responses we would get at times, a rather elitist arrogance that I don’t think was a politically effective ruse — more annoying than anything.

Weiss:

Certainly, your critique of this [NSF] report saying there’s not enough scientists and engineers has been proven correct…

Wolpe:

Oh yeah, in fact I’ll never forget he kept trying to dismiss this. I think James Duderstadt’s language to me was like “a pimple on an elephant,” like I was magnifying an insignificant issue. That was a few days before we had our public hearing, and then we had the public hearing. The revelations were so significant, they were first paid attention to by the Washington Post. It was outrageous what had happened, but…

Weiss:

Once you left Congress, did you continue pressing any of the anti-SSC issues in any way whatsoever?

Wolpe:

No, when I went back to Michigan, I went back to the classroom to teach, and then I ran for governor, but these kinds of issues have little relevance in that context.

Weiss:

So, you didn’t continue carrying the torch at all after you left office?

Wolpe:

No, no. Well, [inaudible].

Weiss:

I think that covers most of the things that I had gotten from previous interviews that I knew I wanted to hear your perspective on. Do you have any broad insights into the SSC, things that are very important that I might want to look at?

Wolpe:

Well one of these… this isn’t just SSC-specific, but I think it really is relevant here. The broad political science lesson that I gained from my years on the Science, Space and Technology Committee was the politicization of R&D — that repeatedly decisions were being made by that committee, not on the basis of any kind of objective assessment as to what would be the greatest scientific or energy payoff from investments of federal dollars, but rather was based upon who had the greatest lobbying clout and power. I’ll never forget my first or second term, the first I was on the committee, suggesting that we try to establish some kind of objective criteria for determining, for example, how R&D dollars should be allocated in terms of energy technologies, suggesting that maybe those technologies that offer the greatest promise of displacing petroleum at the cheapest cost and in the speediest time, that that kind of standard might guide how we made our decisions. And eyes just glazed over, and they threw out the idea. No one even responded, they just sort of sat there.

And so, I was intrigued subsequently by the uncovering of this document that we did, where Linda — I forget her name, but she was head of the policy office in the Department of Energy under Watkins — came up with a proposal to Watkins that they undertake an objective assessment of how R&D dollars should be spent. And he gave her the go-ahead. [ed., possibly referring to Linda Stuntz, who was Deputy Secretary at DOE in this timeframe.] Are you familiar with this? Oh, this is something that does bear on your history. They looked at every program within the Department of Energy’s R&D budget — energy, basic science, all the programs. And they developed panels to evaluate every conceivable technology on the basis of… They had four or five different dimensions: technical feasibility, environmental impact, commercial feasibility, maybe one or two other dimensions.

And then they assigned these numerical scores, weighted averages, I mean they had this very remarkable undertaking. And they came up with a document which rank-ordered every investment in terms of the priority it should be given as a matter of a basic R&D policy. And it turned out there was a perfectly inverse correlation between what this objective assessment generated and the dollars that we were giving out. For example, the SSC was like last or next-to-last on this list. Investments in nuclear fission and coal technologies were at the top of the list for investments in energy efficiency and renewables, but of course the dollars that would be spent were in just reverse order.

So, we found this document. It was not given to us. It was leaked to us, and we decided to do a hearing on this document. Well, Watkins refused to allow the office to testify on the policy to be contested by the hearing. But that document… I entered a special order, a very extensive special order, focused on the energy piece. I don’t recall getting into the SSC, but I do recall the SSC coming down. I might have even mentioned the SSC. But you may want to get hold of that special order in the Congressional Record, which really laid out this whole document and what it revealed.

Weiss:

An investigation that sounds like it bears Bob Roach’s staff work.

Wolpe:

Yeah, I don’t remember who found it, but we were delighted to get it. And Keith [Laughlin] was very centrally involved in helping me to understand this. It was actually the smoking gun, and it was wonderful to have this, for the Bush administration to have this kind of memo come into public view.

Weiss:

Could the person involved be Linda Cohen by chance, because she has a recent book out with another Brookings person called Technology Pork-Barrel?

Wolpe:

I don’t think so. Bob Roach or Keith would know. You ought to get the document itself. I had the luxury of a phenomenal staff. I was really blessed with a remarkably good staff.

Weiss:

Did it seem like the pro-SSC forces were as well-staffed?

Wolpe:

Yeah.

Weiss:

But within the Texas delegation.

Wolpe:

Yeah, there was external staff, it was clear that [New Jersey Congressman Robert] Roe’s followers on the project were feeding these guys talking points, rebuttals, disclaimers, and every conceivable rationalization they had at their disposal. [ed., Roe chaired the Science Committee before George Brown took on the role in 1991.]

Weiss:

Now, in the record there’s not much strong pro-SSC work in the [Science] Committee, even the full committee or any of the other subcommittees. There’s the occasional hearing, but it doesn’t seem to be strongly directed at countering the work the I&O subcommittee was doing, for instance.

Wolpe:

No, theirs was basically a defensive posture. They would try to be present to muddy the waters during hearings, that was about it. And they would write “Dear Colleague” letters and stuff like that.

Weiss:

So, would it be fair to say that the pro-SSC forces within the Science Committee were not being as active politically in supporting the SSC as you and Sherry were in opposing it?

Wolpe:

No, they were pretty active. I mean, my sense of it was that they were much more active than they would normally have been. There was a real sense of protecting their turf, and trying to be present at every meeting, and raising questions. I think they were pretty active. I think they also had a sense that they had the institutional leverage. And they were right in one sense, in knowing that Jim Wright and the Texans would be there for them. But the institutional leverage in the near environment didn’t count for as much as it did.

Weiss:

What kind of relationship did you have with [Alabama Congressman Tom Bevill], who was the chair of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee?

Wolpe:

Not much of one. It wasn’t hostile, but we didn’t have much of a relationship in any common sense of the word. He viewed me as someone he semi-tolerated. Like I say, it wasn’t hostile. He was always a gentleman, but I couldn’t go to him and seek his active cooperation in killing a bad project. He was too locked into his appropriations role.

Weiss:

Around the time of the 1992 conference report, where the Senate figure for the SSC funding was reinserted, what was going on in the House at that time?

Wolpe:

There was a vote on accepting or rejecting the conference report.

Weiss:

Was there much of a chance of beating that conference report, like the House did one year later?

Wolpe:

No, I mean once we’d lost that first vote, it was clear. We weren’t going to win the vote, but we were making great progress. The die was cast of some sort.

Weiss:

Do you recall any other times where appropriations conference reports were rejected, and what character was around those?

Wolpe:

The space station caused a great deal of controversy, and there we had the advantage of having an appropriator working with us. [Michigan Congressman] Bob Traxler was working with us, working together with us on that. But even there, as you know, we ended up losing. And I don’t remember if we had a transitional victory.

Weiss:

Would you care to distinguish between the SSC and the space station, why one was able to survive and the other was able to be killed?

Wolpe:

Yes, there were more vested interests gathered in support of the space station than for the Super Collider. Many involved brought a base constituency, lobbying interests.

[END]