N. Douglas Pewitt

Riordan:

Okay, Doug, to begin with I’d like to get some background on you, and what you got a PhD in, and how you became involved with the federal government.

Pewitt:

Okay, I received a PhD in elementary particle physics doing bubble-chamber physics on the SLAC 82-inch [bubble chamber, while studying] at Florida State University in December 1974. I went to work during the PhD glut in bubble-chamber physics … at the Center for Naval Analyses in Washington. I was recruited from there into the Office of Management and Budget in… I’m going to guess 1976. I was there [at CNA] a year or so and then I was recruited into OMB in 1976. And it was at OMB where I was responsible for the basic research programs and other programs of the Department of Energy. It was ERDA [Energy Research and Development Administration]; it became the DOE when Jimmy Carter was President. Two years into Jimmy Carter’s presidency, I became John Deutch’s deputy at the Office of Energy Research [within DOE].

Riordan:

Let’s stay at OMB a little longer. What exactly can you tell me about that?

Pewitt:

Our job was to be intimately familiar with the programs for which we were responsible. The politics, the efficacy of the efforts, the budget, and the institutions — totally. OMB is basically the President’s eyes and ears for the programs of the federal government.

Riordan:

So, it’s more than just financial?

Pewitt:

Oh, absolutely. Management and Budget. The management is a really big part of it, although obviously the way that you can make your judgments felt much more strongly is through exercise of recommendations to the President. And when I say recommendations, in most cases it’s the final say. Congress will diddle, the agency will [deal?], but basically, to a 90% level, the OMB sets the budget. In some agencies, it is even closer than that. For instance, I was also the master branch chief… Historically, the OMB budget is enacted into law within 1% year after year.

Riordan:

So, did you have direct interaction with particle physics?

Pewitt:

Oh yeah. Well, they very quickly learned [that I was there]. Bill Wallenmeyer was the high-energy program manager [head of the Office of High Energy Physics within the Office of Energy Research]. Of course, I had no hint as a graduate student of being funded by DOE rather than Florida State, with other people… They immediately found out I was at OMB and knew that they had a friend at OMB who understood. They didn’t have to explain particle physics and all that. I would do my best, consistent with my responsibilities, for high-energy physics. We had our squabbles because OMB has certain institutional responsibilities, but I was very pleased that I had advanced the project called Isabelle, the Brookhaven [National Laboratory on Long Island] project, to the best of my ability, because I thought it ought to be done to maintain the vitality of the U.S. high-energy physics program. I followed that in my various capacities until I left Washington in 1983. So, I guess I had six or seven years of very close tracking and involvement with the Isabelle project.

Riordan:

So, you were initially a strong proponent of the Isabelle project. Would that be a fair statement?

Pewitt:

Yeah. I have no reservations. I was a strong proponent of the Isabelle project, and I don’t think anybody else would question that commitment.

Riordan:

There was a crucial decision, I can’t quite date it, to go for 400 GeV [proton beams].

Pewitt:

And I was part of that, too. I had a meeting with [Brookhaven experimental high-energy physicist] Nick Samios and told him I thought they were nuts not to go for 400. I knew I could get it into the budget.

Riordan:

They thought they had a successful magnet.

Pewitt:

At the time I was told — and I believe what I’m told — that they had strong indications that the magnets were under control. And Jim Sanford was the project manager, and Nick Samios was intimately involved with it. George Vineyard was laboratory director. [inaudible] … in Washington and [inaudible] on Long Island. Bill Wallenmeyer was present at Brookhaven when I told them that they really ought to go for the 400 GeV because of the physics. 200 was a little sickening. It was not presentable.

Riordan:

There was also a HEPAP [High-Energy Physics Advisory Panel] subcommittee at the time.

Pewitt:

And [SLAC Deputy Director] Sid Drell handled that, and I had, and continue to have, immense respect for Mr. Drell and that panel, which I thought, under Sid Drell…

Riordan:

So, at a certain point in the Isabelle story you went over to the DOE.

Pewitt:

That’s right.

Riordan:

It was like the second year of the Carter administration?

Pewitt:

Well, it was 1979 when it happened. It was late 1979, I think. Deutch was Assistant Secretary for Energy Technology and Director of Energy Research. He recruited me as the deputy at Energy Research. Unknown to me at the time, he had to have a deputy in there because James Schlesinger, who was Secretary of Energy, wanted to promote Deutch to Under Secretary. … As soon as I got there, John threw me the keys to the office and said, “Here, go find yourself another director.”

Riordan:

This is like a James Decker kind of a position, isn’t it, this deputy position?

Pewitt:

Well, whoever the [successive?] deputy was.

Riordan:

When did you begin to sour on the Isabelle project?

Pewitt:

I never soured on the project. I soured on the way they were managing the project. I mean, basically they never solved their magnet problem. It came out, and I forget the exact timing of this — Jim Leiss [head of the Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics, above Wallenmeyer] would know the timing of this; he’s retired to West Virginia now — but we had a meeting at Brookhaven to review the Isabelle project. It must have been in the summer of 1981… I think it was the summer of 1981, where we went over the plans for Isabelle. I was Deputy Director and acting Director of Energy Research. We got up there, and I was supposed to hear basically the culmination of this thing. And the magnets were the problem that we tended to concentrate on. I asked George Vineyard when were they going to have the magnets under control. And if they didn’t get them under control, when were they going to decide that their approach had to be abandoned for a different approach. I was told, “The magnets will be under control when they’re under control, and we will never abandon this approach for the magnets.” It became clear to me that management of Brookhaven hadn’t a clue about how to run a project like this.

Riordan:

This is why you say it was a project management problem.

Pewitt:

Yes!

Riordan:

As opposed to a technical problem.

Pewitt:

Of course! I mean, there is no doubt in my mind that those magnets could have been built by some… A fellow named [Robert] Palmer showed a few months after the project was for all intents and purposes dead that they could build perfectly good magnets. It was a problem that they didn’t solve because, for whatever reason, they had an approach and would stick to that approach come hell… The details of which have long since escaped my memory.

Riordan:

I thought they had essentially solved the problem by 1982 or 1983…

Pewitt:

The project was dead at that time!

Riordan:

Because…

Pewitt:

The political system had tired of excuses.

Riordan:

Okay, so in effect it was dead. The decision was made in the summer of 1983, right?

Pewitt:

No, the Wojcicki panel [a subpanel of HEPAP, chaired by Stanford University physicist Stanley Wojcicki] made no decision; they delude themselves to think that they had… The project was dead well before that.

Riordan:

Really? This is new information.

Pewitt:

Oh no, positively well known.

Riordan:

I’m talking about…

Pewitt:

The Reagan administration was a very strong supporter of science [inaudible]. It was dead. The project was dead and the reason it had not been killed was because OMB had made the decision on that — to quote the assistant director of the office of OSTP [White House Office of Science and Technology Policy] at the time — that it’s better to let dead fruit fall than to shake its tree. [laughter] But it was dead… [inaudible]. The Wojcicki panel just… Now, in that period at some place, we called… I was at the White House now. I was the Assistant Director for Science Policy under [OSTP Director Jay] Keyworth. Keyworth had me set up a meeting, and we had a meeting in the National Security Council secret council chambers with the high-energy physics panel, and he basically told them, “Kill Isabelle and I’ll give you the synchrotron [i.e., the Superconducting Super Collider].”

Riordan:

He said this to the panel at the National Security Council chambers?

Pewitt:

Yeah.

Riordan:

Wow!

Pewitt:

I once had the — I showed Roy [Schwitters] this, I don’t know where they are now — I had the attendance of the meeting of the HEPAP panel, and I was pretty sure it was in 1982.

Riordan:

The national timing was [inaudible]. Snowmass, where the community said, do we really want to go for 20 or 40 [GeV] in the center of mass? That was 1982 summer at Snowmass in Colorado that they were talking about the…

Pewitt:

It was before Snowmass, I am almost positive. It was around that time, but you’ll have to check. Snowmass came later. There were people advocating the Desertron at that time. Basically, the political system had deduced that Isabelle was a lost cause, and we had to have something [to replace it]. Why go for a few hundred GeV when… It was May in OSTP, sometime in late 1981. It took us several months to work the process around. The engineer that [Office of Energy Research Director Alvin] Trivelpiece [inaudible] later jumped on… He decided to stay around.

Riordan:

What puzzles me is that to do this you really need the input of somebody in the physics community to tell you what is possible.

Pewitt:

They came by all the time. You’ve got to understand that the political process has advisory bodies for two reasons. The principal reason they have advisory bodies is to provide cover for decisions they’ve already made, and that basically was what the Wojcicki panel did, but they didn’t really know. Rarely, it’s for getting advice. That’s like 10% of the time. The other times mostly they provide cover.

Riordan:

So, what physicists were coming around in 1981 to recommend the killing [of Isabelle]?

Pewitt:

I think Leon mostly.

Riordan:

[Fermilab Director] Leon Lederman?

Pewitt:

Yes. You’ll have to ask George [Jay Keyworth] who exactly talked to him. I haven’t… Jay and I had terrible fights over this. I told him that the high-energy physics community could not do that [Super Collider] project at that stage. They weren’t up to it. There were times we had terrible fights. He’d throw me out of his office, and then a week or so later he’d tell me to come back over. We just had terrible fights over this. I resisted the project [repeatedly?] because after watching Isabelle, I was absolutely convinced that this project was beyond the ability of the American high-energy physics community.

Riordan:

Why wasn’t that just a problem of Brookhaven rather than, say, Fermilab or SLAC? Why is it a problem of the entire high-energy physics community because one particular laboratory…?

Pewitt:

You’ve got to remember that we worked with the whole high-energy physics community on this one, and we saw the high-energy physics community attitudes. All three centers [inaudible]. I even attended some meeting at Cornell set up on Isabelle. Fermilab, you know, is the [Cornell physicist and founding Fermilab director Robert] Wilson school: we’re going to do this thing with hodgepodge, build the magnets with hodgepodge. Enough foolishness is going on there to patent it. Brookhaven clearly was unable to deal with the problem. Fermilab was even worse. And then there was SLAC. SLAC wasn’t particularly interested in hadron-hadron collisions at this time. Had [SLAC particle physicist] Burton Richter proposed to build a Super Collider, I could have supported him, but Burt was busy with electron physics.

Riordan:

Do you think there’s a significant difference between the hadron community and the electron community as far as their capability?

Pewitt:

I don’t know if you could slice it up that way. I saw that at SLAC, on very minor projects — which seemed very large to the physics community, but the projects at SLAC were small in the scale we’re talking about — they had done pretty good. I basically had more confidence in Burt than in the rest of these guys, because he had a sense of realism about what it took to get public support for a project. And you just don’t do it in the way that Bob Wilson and everybody at Brookhaven was. Institutional barriers. It wasn’t the people so much as the institutional way of interacting. There were perfectly competent people at Brookhaven. I had a lot of confidence in Samios and Palmer and people like that, but institutionally they just couldn’t hack it [inaudible].

Riordan:

Let me try to get some dates clear, having mainly to do with when you came over to OSTP.

Pewitt:

Okay, let’s see. I left OMB in the spring of ’79, I think. Reagan came into office, was sworn in, in 1981. I was acting Director [of the Office of Energy Research] then until the late summer at DOE, and I came over in the late summer, I think, of 1981 to OSTP. And basically, the two things I started working on… I thought that the Congress had been right to ask OSTP to provide a science policy for the administration. So, that was my first agenda, to develop a science policy: what was the role of scientific research? That was my first priority, to get that out. Straightening up the mess in high-energy physics was priority two — a priority that Jay and I agreed on, because it was a mess. The Isabelle thing was just one big mess. Then I got pulled off on… There was a big problem with the FAA air-traffic control workers strike, and I got involved with that. I was an aviator and a scientist. Those were the major things I worked on right away. I very quickly concluded that something had to be done about Isabelle. And the decision was that we would support a bigger machine, the bigger machine that was on the horizon.

Riordan:

This was in OSTP in late 1981.

Pewitt:

That is correct. As I said, I resisted that decision, but it was not mine to make.

Riordan:

Did OSTP have that power over DOE? I don’t know about OSTP then, but now it is more of a coordinating institute between a bunch of Cabinet-level agencies. It doesn’t have the power to say, “DOE, you are going to do this.” Did it have that power [in the Reagan administration]?

Pewitt:

Within the White House they respect process, and if you know how to work that process you can get your… you can influence decisions. The fact of the matter is — you’ve got to remember that the Secretary of Energy at that time was a second line of defense. He didn’t draw that much water around the White House. And the program of the President, they all have got to support. The program of the President was formulated between the Cabinet departments and the Executive Office [of the President], and I think we had the power to make… The facts speak for themselves. We decided that the DOE was done.

Riordan:

What occurs to me is that at that time, correct me if I’m wrong, Reagan was trying to close down the Department of Energy.

Pewitt:

No, he wasn’t. He was trying to close down the department, not to get rid to the programs. Remember, the constituent parts of the department… I mean, the nuclear weapons programs, he wasn’t about to close that down. He wasn’t about to close down the science. And that decision was independent of the department. I had participated in the task force that [aimed to] shut down the DOE. I heartily endorsed this, and I still think it’s the right thing to do. It [DOE, established in 1977] had been nothing but a disaster for science programs. Start at the weapons programs and everything else — it was a bad management decision, and I still think it ought to be shut down. That is totally separate from what do you do with the programs. As a matter of fact, I participated in those task forces specifically to make sure that the programs got [through the door?].

Riordan:

The point I am making is that OSTP had significant authority to make a decision like this and impose it on the science...

Pewitt:

Authority doesn’t work that way. Authority is not something that you have. Authority in government is something which you can enforce. And you can enforce it by being a part of the process and knowing how decisions get made, from weighing in with the right argument at the right time. I mean, there are strong OMBs and there are weak OMBs. There are strong OSTPs, there are weak OSTPs. I fortunately was there when it was a very strong OSTP.

Riordan:

So, you felt that the decision leading [to the termination of Isabelle was made] within the inner halls of the Executive Office?

Pewitt:

No. Just go in and ask. The administration… We’re talking about the White House, talking about the 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue area. That decision was made… [Reagan's first Energy Secretary] Jim Edwards was going to make that decision? Al Trivelpiece was going to make that decision? No way. It was politically too important to the President to leave it to the Cabinet agencies. Cabinet agencies always block out the hard decisions because the White House is going to make the decision…

Riordan:

You’re talking about the decision that would kill Isabelle?

Pewitt:

That’s correct.

Riordan:

And go for…

Pewitt:

The main project. My job was to get that implemented and to work all the widgets so that it would come to pass. I did that.

Riordan:

But who would you say were the primary players in making the decision? What people?

Pewitt:

Well, obviously Keyworth was one of them. I was not. I got to argue with it, but I didn’t make the decision.

Riordan:

Was there an OMB person?

Pewitt:

OMB didn’t have [much input?] about science. I had more confidence in the science than the [inaudible]. The OMB people at the time didn’t have the depth. And Jay had input from all sides, and Jay had put together that White House Science Council, which had some pretty significant players on it. [inaudible] The people that convinced Jay… you’ll have to ask Jay about it. Basically, he was convinced of this in our first meeting, when we talked about me coming to work at OSTP. And I know that Leon was part of it, but I don’t know who else. Probably somebody at… Who was the guy at Los Alamos that went to Arizona? A particle theorist. That’s the guy that probably convinced him… Peter something.

Riordan:

Carruthers?

Pewitt:

Carruthers. You ask Peter. Peter probably had more to do with convincing Jay than anybody else. Jay had [inaudible] and I forgot about it.

Riordan:

What about T. D. Lee?

Pewitt:

Yeah, I suspect that it was Peter Carruthers. But I don’t know that. That’s my surmise. Jay was already there.

Riordan:

What was it that got Jay elevated from a relatively obscure position as the Physics Division leader at Los Alamos to the presidential science advisor?

Pewitt:

Well, he… Bill Wilson. Not [Edward] Teller, but Bill Wilson. [Editor’s note: the transcript consistently states “Wolff” rather than “Wilson” here, but Reagan’s representative and later ambassador to the Holy See was William Wilson, who was also a University of California regent.]

Riordan:

Bill Wilson?

Pewitt:

Bill Wilson. You don’t know who Bill Wilson was? He became the Ambassador to the Vatican in Reagan’s first term. He was one of the Regents at the University of California. [inaudible] And Bill Wilson was obviously one of the backers of Reagan from the very early days. And they went looking for a science advisor right away. And Bill Wilson got him his job, not… I mean, Edward Teller would say to this day that what got Jay his job had nothing to do with his ability.

Riordan:

Okay. So, what you’re saying is something that, really, has not entered our discussion that much, that the decision to build the SSC was really made behind the scenes in the OSTP by late 1981, early 1982?

Pewitt:

I don’t know if I’m saying it, but it was very much on my screen, and that was what my problem was really about.

Riordan:

Well, the way the physicists see this is that it was a response to the great upswelling of interest that occurred at Snowmass in the summer of 1982.

Pewitt:

I don’t know that. I certainly never read… I wasn’t in Snowmass. Jay wasn’t in Snowmass. By the summer of 1982, I was just trying to figure out how to… I mean, you can’t do things by fiat in this government. You have to coopt a lot of people. I used to tell [General Atomics CEO] Harold Agnew, “Why don’t you come to Washington?” Not to give him a lesson but [inaudible]. You’ve got to work all these [inaudible]. I mean, I was working with everybody to get the decision made, and the physics community was part of that. We gave them all the encouragement in the world — that if they decided to do this, they would have the support. Now the [high-energy] physics community said, “No, we don’t want the bigger machine; we want Isabelle.” I said, “Fine, then you won’t have anything, because you’re not going to get Isabelle.” So, it was a pretty easy decision. That’s life.

Riordan:

Okay, so all of this that we’ve seen in many places in the literature, including Science magazine, that the revised Isabelle, which I think they called the Colliding Beam Accelerator, was just an exercise in futility by the summer of 1982. That all the decisions that the Wojcicki panel could have made on behalf of Brookhaven…

Pewitt:

They would not have gotten… DOE would not have submitted a budget to the Congress for that plan. We would not have allowed that plan to move forward.

Riordan:

We, meaning OSTP and OMB?

Pewitt:

And the Executive Office, which we… We lined up everybody. We lined up the Council of Economic Advisors, White House personnel. We just touched all bases. It was… The only place we didn’t go talk to was the Council of Environmental Quality, because we didn’t think we needed them. [laughter] We’d have used them if we had had to. And as I said, I didn’t like the decision, but it wasn’t mine to make. It was mine to carry out. And actually, I was concerned about the ability of the… I would have been behind it as much as I was behind Isabelle.

Riordan:

On the one hand, you were in favor of the decision that Isabelle had to go…

Pewitt:

Well, because they’d fucked it up.

Riordan:

And on the other hand, you were extremely concerned about the ability of the physics community to deliver a multi-TeV machine.

Pewitt:

Well, for the same reason that I agreed that Isabelle had to be stopped. Not because of physics or the other things that [inaudible]… go forth and do the project. It was going to wind up being a losing battle. It was something they couldn’t pull off, the sociology of it.

Riordan:

What do you think they should have asked for?

Pewitt:

It wasn’t my job to figure out what they should have asked for. It was my job to see that we weren’t embarrassed. I mean, clearly, sometimes you take the cost and you get your act together. But the fact of the matter is they had no ability to execute those big projects, and they shouldn’t have been asking for one, and I wanted to stop them until they could demonstrate some confidence. And it’s not that… I mean, you just have to change the sociology of how they went after projects. They could have learned a lot from the Europeans, but you can’t clone big projects by getting a European to come to Isabelle and have a dual project. I asked Deutch… Remember, I told you I asked him two questions… That was the third question: I wanted to know who the project manager was of Isabelle, and he gave me two names: the Norwegian fellow [CERN accelerator physicist] Kjell Johnsen and Jim Sanford. He didn’t realize that he had just totally defeated his project management, because he had to get the project manager’s report. [inaudible]

It’s that simple. You had to change. You had to learn how to build an accelerator, and it is my view to this day that you should not have physicists build accelerators. You should have electrical engineers build accelerators, and physicists do the physics with them, because physicists simply don’t understand the… In my first-hand experience, they don’t understand the necessity. And [Fermilab accelerator physicist] Helen [Edwards] doesn’t understand this either. You’ve got to have solid engineering discipline to build a large project. You can’t do it as you would if accelerators were just a science. Hell, it ain’t science. If it’s science, you better not be calling it a project, for you won’t succeed. I’m for the science, but I am not for squandering, like we did in Texas, two billion dollars. It’s real fine for the [fellows?], they just need a whole bunch of [inaudible]. That’s a lot of science.

Riordan:

Do you think that the Isabelle experience really colored the DOE’s perception of the ability of high-energy physicists to manage large projects?

Pewitt:

That was, watching them at… a hard position to be in. Now let’s turn that around. The DOE can’t throw very many rocks either, because the DOE, to my knowledge, has completed very few major projects that they started, and after a while you start to say there’s something rotten in these decisions. You know, in DOE they completed a large reactor project to build in the Savannah River Site, and that’s the only billion-dollar-scale project that I am aware of that they completed since its inception and quite a while beforehand. They don’t have a great record of completing large projects. So, the problem is that you can’t just say it’s the physics community.

Riordan:

But what about the DOE’s perception of the physics community?

Pewitt:

Oh, it’s definitely very terrible. And then there was the [SSC Central Design Group] CDG’s performance in trying to put together a project plan. You know, they’d had it with… There was no confidence in DOE that the physics community on its own could manage such a project.

Riordan:

Are you referring to… Maybe you weren’t there at the time, but there was an attempt by the CDG, before the RFP [DOE request for proposals] on the Super Collider, to put in an unsolicited proposal, saying, “This is the way we would like to manage the project.”

Pewitt:

Yeah. We have a saying in the Navy, something like, “Pissing onto the ground [doesn’t change things?] very much.”

Riordan:

But you were aware of that proposal. And what would be your opinion of it?

Pewitt:

Those guys had no idea how to put together a management proposal to manage a major project.

Riordan:

But in your opinion, what was wrong with that proposal? What specifically?

Pewitt:

Well, you’re asking me to remember the specifics of a document I read about, how long ago, ten years ago? I took a look at it because basically I thought that it would form a good basis for the proposal, because when I read the RFP, I saw they wanted a management proposal. It was just plain and simple. It was a classic, “Give us a management proposal.” It was not a proposal for costs and all this sort of thing. So yeah, obviously I’ll just go to what the CDG had done… [inaudible] because the management proposal didn’t hold together, didn’t address the sort of questions you had to ask. There it was.

Riordan:

Were you in the… You weren’t in OSTP at the time.

Pewitt:

No, I had left government. I had finally gotten tired of everything. Being in a division where the [inaudible] was not… That’s what being in the government is. Everybody wants stuff, and if you give it to them, they [inaudible] blocked their ambitions, so I just got tired of that.

Riordan:

When did you leave the OSTP?

Pewitt:

Oh, in the fall of 1983.

Riordan:

Okay, but it was after the Wojcicki panel decision?

Pewitt:

Oh yeah, definitely.

Riordan:

But you say that basically the Wojcicki panel decision gave cover…

Pewitt:

No, the decision had been made at the White House. It was there. But the people that made the decisions on what the administration was going to support, that decision…

Riordan:

Would you say that Keyworth was an ardent supporter of the SSC, of a multi-TeV collider?

Pewitt:

At the time he sure as hell was.

Riordan:

There has been varying commentary on that.

Pewitt:

Well, later on it changed, but at the time… I mean, it was to the point that… He and I had terrible fights over that. On more than one occasion, I walked out of his office, and on one occasion he threw me out of his office.

Riordan:

The issue was not science, but it was really management?

Pewitt:

Absolutely. I’d go for the project today if we had a reasonable management structure. Sure. I mean, I’m out of date. I’ve divorced myself from high-energy physics. I don’t read anything about it and couldn’t tell you what was happening. I understand you guys [at SLAC] have built something called a B factory, or you are building it. That’s about all I know. I don’t talk to people. You’re the first person I’ve talked about high-energy physics with in probably…

Riordan:

Do you think there was any element in Keyworth’s thinking about the SSC, that it was in some sense linked to the SDI [the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative anti-ballistic missile system]?

Pewitt:

No, different, totally different. Absolutely not. How it may have gotten churned up later is another matter. But at the time, SDI… His big priority was that the President basically wanted something better than this MADness, as we called it. He wanted something better than Mutually Assured Destruction. And we had started looking at things one could do well before the SDI decision was made. We contemplated in anticipation… I say we, OSTP — I was not involved in that. A guy named Dick [Reed?] at the Secretary of Defense [inaudible], he helped Jay on that, and they had a panel at the White House Science Council that started looking at that issue. Totally two separate issues altogether. SDI occurred in… The speech occurred in early 1983.

Riordan:

March of 1983, almost contemporaneously.

Pewitt:

But they were… Believe me, they were absolutely separate issues. Only in retrospect would you be able to cobble something together. And certainly until the SDI speech itself, there was no linkage between the two. After that, everything got linked to SDI in the press, in terms of interpretation.

Riordan:

It has been suggested by some skeptical persons that this SSC project was something to give the physicists in hopes that they would remain in line, remain quiet, not oppose SDI.

Pewitt:

Pure hogwash. Absolutely. First time I’d ever even thought about people [inaudible]. It’s interesting how people will think when no facts appear. I can see how one, by being outside of it looking in… You’ve got to remember the guys inside that complex, they get up in the morning, they cut farts, they belch, they’re just like everybody else. They’re not that smart. They don’t have these great plots working together. It may look that way, but it’s mainly… Inside, it’s mainly chaos. When people would come to work… Everybody wants to work at the White House, and occasionally the first thing I’d tell them, two things you have to know: if you don’t think somebody’s out to get you, you just aren’t looking in the right quarters, because they are. You’re going to recommend something that is going to be a public position. There’s 250 million people [in the United States]; somebody’s out to get you; it’s not personal. That’s the first one, and the second thing is that you… [long pause] I’ve got to take a break. I’ll be back.

[End of side of tape]

Pewitt:

I forget what I said. Anyway, you need a working model of what you’re doing. Of course, you never have time to think. Things come at you so fast in that complex, and so your model has to be that you’re involved in a knife fight in a ditch [inaudible], and then you begin to understand the circumstances of working in that complex. That was what it was like. So, those were the two things you had to learn.

Riordan:

I wasn’t exactly clear why you were selected to come over [to OSTP]. You were like the Assistant Director of Physical Sciences?

Pewitt:

Yeah.

Riordan:

Associate director?

Pewitt:

No, associate director took Senate confirmation, and we made the very early decision we weren’t going to go through that. It made no sense. It didn’t add anything to operational capability.

Riordan:

And you left in the fall of 1983 to go into industry?

Pewitt:

Yeah, came out and went to work for a fellow named Bob Hunter, who later showed up [as Director of the Office of Energy Research at] the DOE. And I guess you’re going to talk to Bob, if he will talk to you. I don’t know if he’ll be willing to talk to you.

Riordan:

Yeah, I wasn’t aware that you had worked for Hunter. In San Diego?

Pewitt:

Yeah, he had a little company called Western Research Lab.

Riordan:

Western Research? [ed., The company worked on high-intensity excimer lasers.]

Pewitt:

Yeah. Then I went to work for SAIC [Science Applications International Corporation, a major federal contractor.]

Riordan:

Okay. Was it in your SAIC capacity that you were keeping informed of the SSC?

Pewitt:

Oh, a lot of people I talked to, people who wanted to talk to me about this stuff, just breathing air. At SAIC I got involved with SDI and stayed involved with the SSC to some degree, not to know what was going on, but to know [inaudible]. Then it became clear that DOE wasn’t going to accept the unsolicited proposal from CDG and began issuing an RFP. Ed Knapp, who I knew, who was at that time president of URA [Universities Research Association, the management and operations contractor for Fermilab] and wanted the SSC for URA… And they had to write a proposal. I was on vacation in northern Montana.

Riordan:

Summer of 1988?

Pewitt:

It probably was. He called me, “You’ve got to write a proposal; you’ve got to come see our proposal.” I said I was on vacation in Canada. He found me up at Blackfoot Lake, dragged me back there. Anyway, I thought it was important. The decision had been made to proceed with the SSC from the Congress. Basically, we never shook it off.

Riordan:

So, as you said when we were having lunch, it was clear from that RFP that there had to be an industry component.

Pewitt:

Right. The RFP was in black and white. If you know how to read an RFP, which I happen to know, you just give them what they want. They wanted an industrial component.

Riordan:

In fact, I think you said — correct me if I’m wrong — that it was specifically written to exclude URA [going it alone].

Pewitt:

Exactly. It required [experience in building] certain-sized projects in a certain time period. That specifically excluded URA from consideration, so we had to go out and put together a team that would be able to meet those requirements of the RFP.

Riordan:

And you were talking about the ability of a company to direct a certain fraction of its employees to move to the state [where the SSC was being built].

Pewitt:

You had to have experience in building a project of a certain dollar value in a certain time period. URA simply didn’t qualify, so we went out and got Sverdrup Corporation.

Riordan:

We talk about the DOE writing the RFP, but individuals at some point had to write this document.

Pewitt:

It’s not so simple. The process of drafting an RFP is not one where a couple of guys get together in a room. They have to be coordinated at all sorts of levels of bureaucracy. Legal counsel has to sign off, the chairman has to sign off, everybody has to sign off, and it takes longer to write the RFP than it does to write the proposal because there is more coordination of staff and all that.

Riordan:

How long, would you guess?

Pewitt:

Oh, I suspect that that thing was under preparation for the better part of a year. That’s not unusual at all for an RFP of this scale to take to be developed. And I forget how many weeks we had. We just had weeks to write the proposal.

Riordan:

So, it has to reflect the collective will of the many?

Pewitt:

Very much so.

Riordan:

As opposed to one or two powerful leaders.

Pewitt:

Well, in the end the Secretary or the designated procurement official, the Under Secretary [ed., at the time, Joseph Salgado], had to sign off. But it is one of these staff deals where everybody has a hand, and everybody agrees that this is the way to go. In the first place, you never let one of these guys make the decision, because he might make the wrong decision. If you work everything out, everybody goes in with a united front. Sign here. That’s what you want.

Riordan:

We’ve heard it said — and I was not present at this interview — that Salgado was almost ready to sign, or agree to the unsolicited proposal.

Pewitt:

I have no knowledge of that.

Riordan:

And that had Trivelpiece still been there and pushed for it, it could have gone to URA.

Pewitt:

I simply don’t know. Probably you’ll have to talk to [OMB analyst] Judy Bostock. She may have a better memory of these things. She was there at the time. I was talking to her weekly.

Riordan:

She was at OMB?

Pewitt:

Well, she was at OMB; she was at OSTP. I don’t know what the time frame was, but she knew everything that was going on. She attended private meetings with the Secretary of Energy. She’ll know an awful lot about what went on inside of government, in that decision-making process in the timeframe you’re talking about.

Riordan:

Would that be mid-1980s?

Pewitt:

Mid-1980s.

Riordan:

About 1987?

Pewitt:

Before that. She goes back to when I was at OSTP. She goes back to 1983. That’s where I got to know her pretty well. She will know. I don’t know how good a recall she’ll have.

Riordan:

Before we move on to the actual writing of the M&O proposal, I want to return to this question — I think you voiced it in your letter to Physics Today — about the post-Vietnam climate for large projects. High-energy physicists had delivered on two, what would in the 1980s have been billion-dollar projects. I’m referring specifically to SLAC and Fermilab.

Pewitt:

They basically had their roots in the political structure of the 1950s and 1960s.

Riordan:

Would you say that the problems that occurred with the SSC, in terms of the DOE insisting on the industrial-style project management, was due to a change in culture, or was it just skills?

Pewitt:

Probably both, but let’s talk about the cultural changes, which are more important. I said post-Vietnam because I didn’t want to say post-Watergate. But to me, the two are part of the same… What Nixon did [inaudible], he just got caught [inaudible]. But remember, those two projects were done under the aegis of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Well, Congress overthrew the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and changed the committee structure that oversaw this stuff on the Hill. That’s an exceptionally rare event. Congressional committee structure? Agencies get organized and come and go, but committee structure? No, boy that is rigid. There are deals to this day in Congress that were made when Agriculture got National Forests and Interior got National Parks. What’s really the difference? Those deals stick forever! Throwing over the Joint Committee was a signal event, which the high-energy physics community didn’t totally take into account. It was an earthquake!

Riordan:

When did that actually happen?

Pewitt:

In the early-to-mid 1970s. The whole world turned upside down. All of the sudden, this special deal, that the guys who got a lot of credit for winning World War II, atomic scientists… You’ve got to remember what giants those men were viewed as, and how the political structure dealt with that whole community, and the latitude they had. They threw all that out, and all of a sudden, you’re just another group of constituents. You didn’t win the war in Japan — two years off the war, saving a million boys’ lives, and stuff like that. You no longer had that going for you. The world had changed. Why? Our heroes — and I mean that in the real sense because it is, to me, today, and was [inaudible]. Pief [Panfosky] didn’t understand that. He still insisted that it was a partnership between government and science. Well, shit, he was the only guy who still believed that. That went out. That was history. The Bob Wilson way of running things? Not a snowball’s chance in hell that you could run it that way, basically telling an agency what they would or couldn’t do in his laboratory. His whole attitude about how you ran things in physics, that was very, very different from how everything else in government ran. It was history and had been history for a long time. But you still had this attitude that prevailed: “We’re different.” That’s not the way we do things.

Riordan:

“Throw the money over the transom and leave us alone.”

Pewitt:

And leave us alone. That’s a bit unfair, but it kind of makes the point. It makes the point.

Riordan:

[inaudible]?

Pewitt:

Sure, but they never did that. They always responded to some other… But it was very different.

Riordan:

Pief made the point, when I asked him, that there were something like 20 or 30 AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] guys on site while they were building SLAC, but they were nowhere near as intrusive.

Pewitt:

Sure, of course, but guess what: any project that they ever build, they are going to be as bad or worse than they were at the SSC. That’s just the world, and if you can’t build a project in that environment, guess what: you don’t get to build it. You’re not going to build it. You just have to learn that that’s true. They want their earned-value system [ed. the cost-and-schedule control system]. They are going to have it, you’re going to have it, or you’re not going to build the system. Bob Wilson’s famous statement about [organization charts?]: just a bunch of bureaucratic nonsense. Even if it were true — I don’t happen to believe it was true — even if it were true, it’s not true anymore. You have got to do it. You’ve got to have a project-management system, you’ve got to have an earned-value system, and you have to manage with those things. And they work fine. People manage to work with them. As a matter of fact, [inaudible] bottom line. At the SSC, they turned into a bureaucratic nightmare, but it doesn’t always have to happen. [inaudible] contractors [inaudible] Soviet Union.

Riordan:

What you are saying is that industry learned this lesson and were able to put in place these mechanisms that the government insists on having.

Pewitt:

Well, the government gets involved in the idea and makes a mess of it, but there you go. That’s what you do. The customer is the government, and that’s something that physicists don’t understand. [SSC Laboratory Director] Roy [Schwitters] insisted on saying that the customer for this project is the high-energy physics community. Wrong. The customer is the guy who pays, not the guys that want it, but the guys who pay. The guys that pay are the Congress, and you don’t piss off your customers.

Riordan:

Let’s go to the M&O proposal. Was there an attempt to involve CDG in writing it?

Pewitt:

Absolutely. The first thing I did was to… I thought this was going to be a six or nine-week effort, something like that, because it was really a simple, straightforward management proposal, the sort of thing you put together with a small group of people in a few weeks as part of a big proposal. And so, this was a rather finite thing. It also became immediately clear that we couldn’t use government money. There are rules about how you can spend government money. We couldn’t go up and work in CDG’s spaces that were being paid for by CDG money [ed., which was provided by DOE] and not URA’s proposal money. And so, we went out to Berkeley and tried to set up a proposal office out there, and the CDG viewed the whole business of writing a proposal with something less than enthusiasm.

Riordan:

Did they realize they had to do it?

Pewitt:

No. You’d have to ask them what their views were, but I got no help from them. And after trying for some period of time — and not days but a few weeks — nothing was getting done and I told…

Riordan:

A few weeks was a lot of time.

Pewitt:

Yeah, because we had 90 days. It was a significant amount of time that was wasted. I would go up to the CDG and talk to them, and they would give me stuff. I can’t write the proposal; I’m just the proposal manager, so I spent a lot of time burning time and not getting much done. I told Ed Knapp it just wasn’t going to get done. So [Fermilab business manager] Bruce Chrisman grabbed this bull by the horns, rented some space outside of Fermilab, and we did the whole thing there. And CDG has nobody to blame but themselves. They just refused to… Bruce and a couple guys from Fermilab, we really got it started. We got the Sverdrup people there, and we got a professional proposal writer to come up and did it.

Riordan:

But there were initial attempts to do the same process somewhere in the vicinity of Berkeley?

Pewitt:

Yes, and they just refused to play. Time’s up guys, I’m going. We screwed around with them as long as we could, and nothing was happening.

Riordan:

What would be your assessment of [CDG Director and Cornell University accelerator physicist Maury] Tigner?

Pewitt:

Very, very nice guy, but living in an unreal world. I guess that happens. He had no sense at all of what it took to get such a project of such scope. He was playing in the NSF league.

Riordan:

I guess that kind of agrees with my point. His experience was not with DOE project management but with the NSF. In effect, it was a college-town… [ed., Tigner’s principal association was with Cornell University’s Laboratory of Nuclear Studies, an accelerator center funded by the National Science Foundation.]

Pewitt:

His ideas of how to do that project might have worked for something that you could build under a soccer stadium at some university campus, but he had no idea what the politics was. He just had no chance in what he had gotten into.

Riordan:

He was really a technical person.

Pewitt:

I think he was a good leader for a project, if you had had something that was close to his experience. Great man to do it.

Riordan:

What scale? $100 million?

Pewitt:

Something like that, sure. Something of reasonable scale.

Riordan:

Do you think he could have played an effective role somewhere in the SSC management?

Pewitt:

Oh yeah, he should have been the Project Manager, with the right sort of support, because he was an accelerator physicist. He cut corners, as we all know, on the aperture and a whole lot of other things, but that’s a technical judgment you make and [inaudible]. And he didn’t understand what it was to build 8,000 objects, 53-feet long, with a magnetic field accurate to a part in 10⁴. It was an industrial undertaking. I don’t think anybody in the high-energy physics community really understood what that meant and what sort of effort that would be.

Riordan:

They had a little better understanding [inaudible]…

Pewitt:

To me, it was the issue that, if you didn’t handle it, the rest of it didn’t matter, and if you did handle it, you would probably be able to handle the rest of it.

Riordan:

So, you think he could have served, had he been willing?

Pewitt:

He would have been much better in the role that Helen [Edwards] had been because he was… Helen was… I really like Helen. She was… I really like Helen. I don’t think I would have… She just pure wanted to do good [inaudible]. But I think Tigner would have been better if they’d gotten him, but Tigner had to run everything. He wasn’t going to be part of the team. He [inaudible]. [ed., Edwards led the SSC’s accelerator group, whereas Tigner was passed over in the process of recruiting the director for the entire project in favor of Harvard University physicist Roy Schwitters.]

Riordan:

Did you play any kind of role in trying to get him to come down to the laboratory?

Pewitt:

No, that was Roy’s ballgame. I had my hands full, and it would have been inappropriate for me to get in that business. That was something that Roy had to do. Only Roy, only the laboratory leader could recruit the top-level [people] scientifically in accelerator management. Anybody else was just wasting their time. They would have looked silly. It had to be something that worked between Roy and the individual. It’s not something that… [ed., Schwitters unsuccessfully negotiated with Tigner to define a portfolio for him in the role of deputy director or a similarly senior role.]

Riordan:

Your job was to get to the proposal out the door, not do the recruiting.

Pewitt:

My job was the proposal, and we got the proposal done. It had no flaws such that they could throw it out for not being responsive. I did what I was asked to do. I got the proposal out. It was sitting in the URA office in Washington several days before it was due, ready to be submitted, and it hit all the marks, so they couldn’t reject it for not being responsive and go out and get somebody else.

Riordan:

Besides the fact that to be responsive you needed to include industry partners in teaming, was there any positive rationale to do that?

Pewitt:

For DOE?

Riordan:

No, for URA to include the requirement. Was this something that you were doing simply because that was what the RFP said to, or, in your opinion, did teaming really add something?

Pewitt:

I wasn’t sure it added something, but I know that they could not have succeeded just with the URA crowd. I didn’t think they needed EG&G, but… I got Roy to go by and talk to Bell Labs because they could have given us project integration. That would have been the right sort of organization to bring in.

Riordan:

Bell Labs?

Pewitt:

I set up a meeting between Roy and [Bell Labs Executive Vice President] Sol Buchsbaum — I thought it went pretty well — to try to get Bell Labs to come on and do the project integration. I think that might have worked. That might have been possible. Sverdrup was just available to meet a mark on an RFP. I wasn’t particularly crazy about them, but I felt they would be… I thought they could have performed, but it turned out that they stiffed us later on.

Riordan:

They did help get the proposal out. DP. But they got the proposal out, and they got their check marks. They did what we had to have done. Bell Labs would have been better and probably would have made an effective contribution to the project, but they refused to come on board.

Riordan:

They probably would have had a lot more respect in the physics community. DP. Of course. That was the right answer, but they declined, and it was too bad. Basically, Sol Buchsbaum, after talking to Roy, [inaudible]. He didn’t want Bell Labs to get involved. I think they might have done it if they were going to get the directorship, but [inaudible].

Riordan:

What’s in it for a company? You’re not going to get a lot of profit out of teaming like this, are you?

Pewitt:

Well, you get a fee like you do on all government contracts, a certain percentage of your labor. It’s easy money, as far as getting a lot of people employed without having to write proposals every year. [inaudible] It’s a nice little piece of work.

Riordan:

Not much risk involved.

Pewitt:

Very low risk, and there is a thing about being involved with one of America’s highest-profile projects; it’s good PR. There are very few downsides, unless the project fails, and you don’t have to put your best people on it, because it is not very tough stuff by the normal standards of what industry does. You can use it as a training ground for people.

Riordan:

Really? That’s a comment I heard from the physicists, that there were a lot of very mediocre people that came down from industry operations.

Pewitt:

But this was easy stuff by their standards.

Riordan:

One thing that struck me coming down there in 1991 was that the parking lots were empty at 5 o’clock.

Pewitt:

That’s what you do on big projects. Digging the big tunnel, you get lots of stuff at the right place at the right time. The hard part is getting that design right and getting it into manufacturing. You don’t have a project… Remember, at the peak of that project, we were supposed to have tens of thousands of people on it. You don’t do a project at that scale with people that work 24 hours a day like high-energy physicists are used to doing. You and I know what it is to provide a beam. It is bone-tiring hard work. That’s accepted, but that’s not how you do major projects.

Riordan:

Just eight hours a day, five days a week?

Pewitt:

It’s eight hours a day. It’s labor. They go through the motions. That’s the way you do small projects that are really time-sensitive projects, but not these large industrial projects. You do those with people who leave the parking lot at 5:01 pm. That’s the way it is. If you have a better scheme for doing it, you’ve got to show me one that’s succeeded on these very large projects. Something like that is the way industrial projects work. You get in this scale, and you’ve got to accept what goes with the scale of such a project. When do we get this-many feet of pipe for this price at this time? And there’s a lot of that sort of labor. Brain power? It doesn’t take a lot of brain power to do it. But in the cut and cover [ed., how the Fermilab main ring was built]… That stuff was never… DOE had to worry about that sort of stuff in building Fermilab. These projects have never had that trouble now, because, guess what: it’s not very challenging. But digging a 53-mile tunnel? That’s a big tunneling project. No doubt that that would have done just fine.

Riordan:

To get back to the RFP, one thing that puzzled me — and I hope I am not taking up too much of your time — was that fact that even though they requested the names of the people who would be the director, the head of the accelerator physics, Helen, the head of the administration, Bruce [Chrisman], the head of conventional construction, they did not insist on [the proposal] naming the project manager, which strikes me, after the director, as the second-most-important position.

Pewitt:

That’s something I never I understood either. As a matter of fact, I think in the posting they just assumed that the project manager would be the laboratory director. Best to check that with the DOE people. If I remember, the head of the review board — the source selection board — was the deputy at Argonne [ed., the DOE Chicago Field Office, based at Argonne National Lab, not the laboratory itself], and I think he is still at DOE someplace. Ed Cumesty would be the guy to ask about that, but I think — lots of brain cycles have passed — I think they just assumed that the project manager and the laboratory director would be the same person.

Riordan:

It has been speculated that it was because the DOE itself planned on naming the project manager.

Pewitt:

Don’t believe that for a second. Don’t believe that for a second. Pure made-up bullshit! No way in that sort of contractual lash-up to get a government employee on as project manager. Just no way! In the RFP there’s always a draft proposed contract [inaudible]. No, if they had had that in mind, and if they had that in the proposed contract, I’d have walked.

Riordan:

I think that’s reflecting later circumstances that occurred, that [DOE “Project Director”] Joe Cipriano and his team tried to manage the project from the DOE site office.

Pewitt:

Sure, I think that is what Watkins sent him down there to do. There’s no doubt about that, because Watkins had no confidence in the laboratory management.

Riordan:

Okay. Let’s get into the laboratory then. I’d like to go on now to the point where you came in at the SSC lab. How did you come to be invited and into what capacity?

Pewitt:

Oh, at some stage in the proposal process or the closed proposal. After this proposal went in and got accepted, there was a lot of stuff that had to be done. They wanted to try to get the cost-and-schedule control system in place. They didn’t know how to do that, so I put together a plan to implement a cost-and-schedule control system. Anyway, Roy asked me — and I forget how the subject came up — he said, “How can we get the laboratory to do this?” Oh yeah.

Riordan:

Is this before the proposal-writing project is over? Is this January of 1989 when they are writing the contract?

Pewitt:

I forget exactly what time, but I think it was after the proposal had gone in and we were in the process of the proposal negotiations.

Riordan:

Because you were the only…?

Pewitt:

Well, I told him that I didn’t want to be part of the national laboratory. I proposed coming down for two years and commuting from California. And I don’t know why that changed. I just remember the proposal as that. I didn’t want to be part of the laboratory forever, because I was just not interested in being part of the national laboratory. I am an entrepreneur, not a scientist. And I don’t recall how all that changed. It probably had something to do with DOE. Anyway, I wound up taking the job and they made up a title, the [CDG?] guys made up a title, Director for Integration and Management, but I really wound up doing the project-management work.

Riordan:

I was talking with Burt [Richter], who said he thought he was responsible for you coming down here, because he told Roy, “You damned well better have somebody who really understands Washington from the bottom up as part of the top management.”

Pewitt:

That may have been true. I didn’t know that. And if he did, thanks a lot buddy! Anyhow, I would not take exception to that. Roy, obviously… The way the thing developed, Roy was after me for some reason, I don’t know why.

Riordan:

But would you agree with that sentiment, that they really needed somebody who was really familiar with Washington.

Pewitt:

Yeah, but Roy chose to use this guy named Rafe Kasper, who had worked at the National Academy. He had not a clue, but he was a sycophant and told Roy what he wanted to hear, and of course got everything in the world screwed up in Washington almost from day one. He wouldn’t listen to anybody. [ed., Raphael Kasper was a physicist and senior National Academy of Sciences staff member who had worked with Schwitters and others in the 1988 SSC site-selection process, and Schwitters subsequently hired him to be Associate Director of the SSC Laboratory.]

Riordan:

Because he had gotten Rafe.

Pewitt:

Rafe told him what he wanted to hear. Roy liked guys who said, “You’re wonderful, Roy. You’re always right, everything you want to do is right.” And anybody who knows me knows that I don’t do that. Roy didn’t want interference, so I had plenty of work to do.

Riordan:

One of those things that you were working on was the implementation of the cost-and- schedule control system.

Pewitt:

As I recall, one of my colleagues says the specific requirement…

Riordan:

Of the control system?

Pewitt:

Absolutely.

Riordan:

There was a deadline.

Pewitt:

And I put together a plan to do it and as soon as we got the contract, and the contract was all filled up, and we showed that to Roy, he said, “Fuck that, we won’t do it.” The physics division… I forget who ran the physics division initially.

Riordan:

Is that Fred Gilman?

Pewitt:

Before that.

Riordan:

Helen Edwards?

Pewitt:

She said she’s not going to have anything to do with that. Helen didn’t understand why they needed to do that. It just sort of…

Riordan:

The cost-and-schedule control system is a program, right? The CS-squared, it’s actual software, right?

Pewitt:

Well, you need software to implement it, but the CS-squared project management idea doesn’t require software to do it. It just makes it a lot more… It’s like project management. The quote that I always use to try to put this thing in context — because the first objection is that you can’t find this stuff… I usually quote Eisenhower, who ran a pretty good-sized project himself, called “the invasion of Europe.” His comment was, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” You think it through. You know you’ll never execute such a plan, but you know what the factors are and what you’re going to do. You wind up knowing what is important and what your choices are.

Riordan:

This applies to a business plan?

Pewitt:

A business plan bears some similarity. Projects and business plans have a lot of similarities. Although I have written… Business plans are sort of in, because you know they are no good beyond a certain amount of time and represent a commitment of what we’re going to do. And you can do a business plan. As a matter of fact, every business plan I do I use MS Project to lay out what is going to happen. And they did the invasion of Europe without computers, obviously. So, you can have a project-management plan and a project-management system. This is the earned-value system. It’s a way to [pick up?]: here’s spending and here’s time. Well, that is not a real reflection of what progress you are making. You want an earned value of how much of the work that you got done, [how much is it worth?]. It’s just more efficient to put all that stuff in the database. But it’s not the software, it’s not the system. It’s just that a spreadsheet program like Excel is better than a chalkboard. There’s a lot of cells, so you have to change… It’s a lot more efficient.

Riordan:

You could do this with paper and pen?

Pewitt:

Oh yeah. As a matter of fact, the first time I ever saw a system done, it was done with paper and pen, before you had all these nice toys that you have now. It’s just a way of accounting for resources.

Riordan:

So, the problem at the SSC, then, was that you couldn’t get the various managers, associate directors, to sign onto these things?

Pewitt:

They’d say, “This is science! This is not project management, this is science!” [inaudible] In science, you’re in deep shit, because people come to this thing thinking it’s a project, and it’s not research. You’d better know what you’re doing before you start because if you don’t know what you’re doing before you start, you are in deep trouble. There’s always questions but…

Riordan:

This is also the problem of being able to communicate.

Pewitt:

So that what they do adds some coherence to it, absolutely.

Riordan:

Beyond that, the people that are sending the dollars down to Texas…

Pewitt:

One of the outputs of these systems is the earned value. How are you doing against the project’s objectives, and how is the money going? People want to know that the money they are sending you is being spent in such a way that they are going to get what they paid for, and they are not going to be faced with big overruns, delays, and stuff like that. It’s a lot of work, and it’s a big problem that one guy in an office and a project manager can’t do alone. You can’t do it. We’ve got to plan, plan, plan. In the middle of all this, we were doing a baseline of the project, going though all the cost stuff, finding claims all over the place that CDG had just said that cost too much, moved us on. They were costing the magnets based on housewives’ salaries [inaudible].

Riordan:

[CDG? EG&G?] was involved in this?

Pewitt:

Yeah.

Riordan:

It was after Tom Bush came in? They weren’t doing it that long?

Pewitt:

Well, after Tom Bush came in, I am not sure what they were doing. That was one of the reasons I quit. What Tom Bush was doing made no sense with what EG&G was doing.

Riordan:

Okay. I forgot one thing. You may not want to put this on the record. But when we were at lunch you said, going back in time, that the reason that Martin Marietta withdrew its proposal was that you had talked to John Deutch and gotten him to [ask them to withdraw it?]…

Pewitt:

I think he had already [inaudible]. I told him that it really would not have been a very good-looking [market?] to submit a proposal in competition with URA. That’s what I told him. I knew that he knew Norm Augustine [then CEO of Martin Marietta]. But Norm was [inaudible] and John would talk to him and, sure enough, they withdrew it. And I assume there was cause and effect to that.

Riordan:

Who? Deutch had [what position]?

Pewitt:

He was at MIT. I don’t know whether he was chairman. I don’t know whether he had become…

[End of side of tape]

Riordan:

We’re talking about John Deutch, who I believe was on the URA Board of…

Pewitt:

I don’t know whether he was still on it then or had recently been on it. But I knew John very well. We worked closely together. I told him it was a bad idea. I wasn’t sure if… Martin Marietta was a very large company and Norm was in the headquarters in Bethesda. The guy… Colorado was a long way away and he may not have even known he was doing it anymore. But within a couple of weeks, it stopped. And Martin Marietta came to us and wanted to team with us [i.e., URA] at that point, but our team was already formed. They visited us in Illinois and proposed joining the team, but at that point they didn’t have a proposal that made any sense. And they didn’t join the team.

Riordan:

And the argument was that if Martin Marietta had come in with its own proposal, then DOE would have given [inaudible]?

Pewitt:

In a New York minute. I believe that absolutely.

Riordan:

And then what would have been the reaction of [inaudible] part?

Pewitt:

They would have… They wouldn’t have let him. They wouldn’t have had any choice. That’s the project, either join it or not. In fact, probably very few would have, and the project would have proceeded along somehow. But, see, Martin had already lined up Sam Ting to be its lab director. We thought they had him signed up. I don’t know if we knew that, but we certainly had intelligence to that effect that they had lined up a couple of lawyers. Look, if I want somebody, I’ll get them, because all you have to do is just stack enough money on the table and you’ll get them. Everybody sooner or later… If you’re running a commercial enterprise, you can beat anybody’s price. You want a hamburger stand, I can get that.

Riordan:

I’ll tell him that.

Pewitt:

He’d agree with that. Hey, it might take a stack of bills, but there’s some price. You can always get somebody.

Riordan:

I think your Ting example doesn’t seem to be consistent with the way you’re operating.

Pewitt:

Yeah, but if you can’t get one guy at a price, you can get somebody else.

Riordan:

But your argument was that this was not going to sit very well with the [high-energy physics] community.

Pewitt:

I didn’t think it would sit well, but I didn’t think it would make a damn bit of difference. I thought it [i.e., Martin Marietta managing the SSC] would be a disaster. And I felt — all things considered, with my reservations about everything else — it was still better to have the scientific organization in charge than a commercial organization, and we should move to stop it. I didn’t think that this was the sort of thing that an industrial organization ought to undertake.

Riordan:

You still felt that you needed the project-management experience that an industrial organization could bring?

Pewitt:

I think that the skill that they have is what was needed. How to get there? I thought Bell Labs would be the right choice, because they are a scientific organization and have very big projects. They’re sort of unique that way. We could talk about how their research… That was basically my list: Bell Labs. I didn’t have a number two.

Riordan:

They didn’t want to do it.

Pewitt:

They didn’t want to do it.

Riordan:

Okay. I wanted to get that before I forgot about it. Now, moving forward to using CS-squared in project management, you could not get the various other people in the laboratory to sign onto it?

Pewitt:

I think that we would have eventually found somebody. We wouldn’t have done it on the timeframe that URA had committed to, and a lot of other things. We could have gotten the system in there, but we couldn’t have met the goddamn contract schedule so far. [inaudible] about the contract… They’d come in and say, “Listen, it says here in the contract, here we are supposed to have a project-management system in place by…” When did they have it place? They didn’t have one in place and functioning when the project shut down, three years after I left the project! I would think that this was our initial responsibility and would go to Schwitters and say, “Listen, we are going to be in severe trouble if we don’t get this implemented.” [inaudible] I would have had to say that over and over.

Riordan:

Did you?

Pewitt:

Of course.

Riordan:

How did they react?

Pewitt:

“So what? They’re just a bunch of bureaucrats.” [inaudible]

Riordan:

Isn’t this what got Hunter in trouble?

Pewitt:

No, that was what Hunter beat the lab with, because it was so convenient and so easy. Bob Hunter enters the picture… I know Bob Hunter very well, and he hates my guts — long story about the time I spent there. But I have a great deal of respect for Bob Hunter’s intellect. He had analyzed the situation and said, “You guys can’t do the project.” And he was searching around for some way to fix the project, too. He wasn’t a bad guy. He was just saying, “You guys can’t do the project.” Dead right, as usual, in his analysis of the situation. He almost always analyzed correctly. The problem was that his solutions made Attila the Hun look like a French diplomat! And he was sourcing all… bringing the Corps of Engineers and all sorts of other things. This was just a convenient way to beat the shit out of the laboratory. Then he initially blocked the approval of [Lawrence Livermore accelerator physicist] Dick Briggs [ed., to become the SSC Lab's first project manager].

Riordan:

Dick Briggs?

Pewitt:

Oh yeah, [inaudible]. So, you’ve picked Briggs for a project manager, guess what: write it in. Dick Briggs is a good friend of mine, but he’s no project manager. He wasn’t interested. He wanted to be the technical laboratory man. He just wasn’t interested in it. He didn’t understand it. The project manager has to lead the project. Well, you know what the business is like? You know what project managers’ lives are like? They don’t have vacations. They don’t have days off. It’s just hell. And Bob was right, as usual, but rather than saying, “Okay, we want this guy to be [inaudible],” Bob’s approach was, why use a tack hammer when a pile driver will work? He just doesn’t have a sense of proportion. But he was dead right. Dick was no project manager.

Riordan:

Was there anybody on the horizon that they were looking at, that was interested, that you feel could have stepped in and filled that hole that was left by Maury Tigner?

Pewitt:

I thought there were three guys that could have done it, but at least two of them, and maybe all three of them, would have insisted on [David Bruker?], which in my view wouldn’t have been the right thing to do. And that’s John Peoples [then head of Fermilab accelerator physics], [Brookhaven Director] Nick Samios, and Hermann Grunder [the founding director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility]. Those three people, I thought, could have pulled it off. There were the pros and cons of each and the likelihood, etc., but I thought that the project would have had a much-improved chance with them as project manager. But what skills did they have that Roy didn’t have? All three of them had infinitely greater political perception, knew something of the broader world. Roy’s only experience with the external world was to sit on advisory panels. All three of them knew how the world worked, how you had to interface. And they were all very [inaudible] about it. They knew how to build a particle accelerator. If they wanted somebody to build some detector or something… Roy’s only experience with those, the only thing of consequence, is really the $50 million CDF detector at Fermilab.

Riordan:

Where he came and fixed the political problems.

Pewitt:

That was all the experience he had. It didn’t prepare him very well. But Pief wanted him, so it was Roy.

Riordan:

So, let’s see, I’m getting back to Hunter. At some point, opposition was coming from outside, but Hunter had his legs cut out from under him, largely because of the SSC.

Pewitt:

I don’t know about that. Roy kept telling me that I had to get Hunter fired, which I considered kind of silly, because Hunter was going to self-destruct. His understanding of what he could and couldn’t do in DOE were… It was just a matter of time, because he ran up against somebody. I think Watkins didn’t have much confidence in him on the SSC, but it was my understanding that it was that fusion guy that actually got him fired. One of the New Jersey Senators got exercised over him and insisted on getting rid of him.

Riordan:

Didn’t he take $25 million out of the fusion budget?

Pewitt:

I don’t know what the details were, but you don’t go after an Assistant Secretary [of a Cabinet department] from a position of weakness. If you are in a position of weakness… They weren’t performing on the contract. It’s that simple. And Roy would tell me, “You’ve got to get him fired.” I likewise found it silly. On top of that, I thought Hunter’s instincts of what to do were all right, and I never questioned what he wanted to do. I just think that the way he went about doing it was [inaudible]. So, Roy reacts against this project-management plan that began developing in 1989 with the DOE. I think there were a lot of people who were really… Pief was trying to run the project. There was no question that it allowed Pief…

Riordan:

All this business?

Pewitt:

Oh, Pief wanted to run the program. He really thought he could join the project…

Riordan:

From Washington?

Pewitt:

No, he wanted to run the project, and most of the suspicions of DOE trying to get in there… I’m sure there’s probably a measure of truth with Pief. Pief was not a player in this [inaudible]. There were people on the [point?] that had some visibility, but they weren’t players anymore. [inaudible]

Riordan:

Okay, but they were the ones who were authorizing this detailed project-management plan. But Hunter was taking over and saying, this is the way we…

Pewitt:

Yeah, it’s silly. And they weren’t even very good craftsmen, because they did things like cut the stuff directly out of the URA contract. I forget who was the head of the Texas National Laboratory Commission was at the time — one of the lawyers, Tom something-or-other, Tom Luce?

Riordan:

Yeah.

Pewitt:

He pointed out, here’s this, and here’s this, and this is the URA contract, and this is the same paragraph! And that blew Hunter right of the water, right there. Luce is a good lawyer. He just did a great job. “Here. Here. I got it to work.” Can’t do that. So, Bob just didn’t… I know other people who tried to, and they did their best to do what Bob could. It was a question of how to solve a problem...

Riordan:

But at the beginning, I see the DOE really trying to take over this role as project manager, which, if I look at one thing through this whole history, there was supposed to be a project manager. Tigner was supposed to be project manager. Then Briggs was supposed to be.

Pewitt:

No, who was supposed to be project manager?

Riordan:

Initially, on the response to the RFP, a named project manager wasn’t requested. There’s no resume for him in the bag and his name is listed on the proposal. URA put Tigner forward when they submitted it. Now, whether that one was just for show or what, I don’t know.

Pewitt:

Yeah, but when they really got down to negotiating what that meant, as opposed to just putting it on the paper, Tigner says, “I’m in charge, and I’m not there.” And in that case, you know, it’s the Director of the Laboratory we would be stuck with. It just would not have been good for the laboratory. That was unworkable.

Riordan:

What seems to be falling out is, we can’t talk to Tigner.

Pewitt:

Why can’t you talk to him?

Riordan:

He doesn’t want to talk to us.

Pewitt:

He’s got lots of stories.

Riordan:

Yeah, but it certainly seems to me that he wanted Roy to accept that he had total control in that area.

Pewitt:

Yeah, he had to work to get Tigner to allow his name to be included. What I am saying is that, if I look at the history, Roy never had a project manager. He never really had one. It was supposed to be Tigner, but he wouldn’t do it. Then there was Briggs, and he wasn’t interested in doing it. I think I was there for six weeks exactly, but of course I didn’t want that job. Nobody in their right mind wanted what that job entailed. It needed someone in the high-energy physics community to work there. He got [Brookhaven accelerator physicist Paul] Reardon in there. Reardon was an absentee. It was too big a project for him. And then I forget who was next.

Riordan:

[SLAC accelerator physicist] John Rees [ed., who joined the SSC project in early 1992].

Pewitt:

Well, there was some short period when I think you had another one. Anyway, John Rees, was he there at the end?

Riordan:

Yes. He was only committed to work for two years.

Pewitt:

[inaudible] And John wasn’t very happy with this way of doing things either. This was a big project, and people were eating him up. He wasn’t interested in all this cost-and-schedule control system stuff. He was the only… Well, he was the best of the bunch by far, better than anybody else, but by that time we had… Who was the guy who Watkins sent to the SSC Lab?

Riordan:

Joe Cipriano?

Pewitt:

No, [nuclear industry manager] Ed Siskin. He had Siskin put in there. Siskin made the decisions that project managers should have. Of course, John didn’t have much management control either. If he wasn’t so serious… It didn’t happen, from day one.

Riordan:

So, I see a pattern that from very early on, these guys, I think you said it, these physicists can’t get into this project. “We’ll damn well put in our own project manager.”

Pewitt:

Well, I don’t think that happened until Paul was there. I think Paul had a chance. At that point, you had a traditional deal with a project manager. And if it had jelled, if had been all right with Paul, like he was going to be a traditional project manager from the start [inaudible]. Paul was pretty old at that time, past the age where a guy ought to be there sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. That’s what you have to do, and worry about it. And John, good guy that he is, Schwitters stuck with him, and there was a lot of new stuff there for him.

Riordan:

But you couldn’t get him [inaudible] way out of his scale?

Pewitt:

But basically, they never solved the problem of the project manager. And now I regret that I got involved as much as I did.

Riordan:

Was there a period where you were acting project manager?

Pewitt:

Oh yeah.

Riordan:

Can you pin that down?

Pewitt:

Yeah, I forget what happened. I had gone over to CERN. I was trying to see how CERN had managed projects. We had gone up to take a look at HERA [the Hadron-Electron Ring Anlage at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg]. It was still under construction, and I was up there, and I got this frantic call: “Oh, you’ve got to go to come back and take over.” I didn’t tell them at the time, but I had sort of given up on the project, and I was going to come back… But Roy called up and there was some goddamn emergency, and he said, “You’ve got to come back right away. “

Riordan:

Fall of 1989, maybe?

Pewitt:

No.

Riordan:

Earlier?

Pewitt:

This was May of 1990. I forget. Anyway, just before I resigned, six weeks before I resigned, whenever that was. I think that was May of 1990.

Riordan:

That was May of 1990.

Pewitt:

Anyway, so I came back. You know, I had to come back right away. Well, shit, it was February, and I was going to Russia and what a great, great sacrifice! So, I came back and we got together. It was just unsatisfactory. We had to replace [the project manager]. We didn’t have any choice who to replace him with. Well, if you don’t have any choice, I’ll do it on an acting basis, but you’ve got to get somebody else. And I told Roy that I had no intention of being the project manager for any period of time. You get somebody else. In other words, I was going to act. I was going to act, I wasn’t going to just sort of hold. The problem was, as with any project manager, that when we agree on a course of action, we have to stick to it, but if we changed after we agreed on a course of action, or if he reversed himself, then I would resign. And it took him about three weeks to go through the normal things and I resigned.

Riordan:

Is this the Tom Bush episode?

Pewitt:

Oh yeah. What happened is that we hired Tom because he had experience in getting things built in industry. Big [Trident II] D-5 rockets. Once the M&O proposal was done, we thought we had a magnet design. Well, as it turns out that we’ve got to redesign the magnets — they were [inadequate?], remember? And Tom hadn’t a clue of how to do that. The choice was to do what he had always done, get an industrial concern in here and they’ll do it. What he wanted to do is play the role of government contract manager. And the fact of the matter is that there’s no government industries that built superconducting magnets. There are government industries that build rockets, airplanes, and all that stuff with which he’d be familiar, and that would probably work. But his idea was that he was going to go out and put in place a contract-management organization and not a technical organization to do it. And it was very clear to me that we wouldn’t succeed.

Riordan:

In other words, he was going to bring in General Dynamics to design the 5-centimeter aperture magnets?

Pewitt:

They were going to do it all. I mean, he was going to cover… Well, I think it was 5.7 centimeters.

Riordan:

They went from 4 to 5 centimeters.

Pewitt:

Okay, 4 to 5. Anyway, they were going to do all that stuff. That’s crazy. All the technical expertise for this sort of stuff doesn’t lie in industry; it lies in Fermilab. You have to put together an organization. Well, he didn’t have a clue how to do that, and we had to make that change, or we would just walk around as evidence three years later when we [inaudible], when they didn’t even have a short magnet.

Riordan:

Because the industry hadn’t produced one?

Pewitt:

No.

Riordan:

They had no experience with magnets?

Pewitt:

Of course. [inaudible] But we were closing… He didn’t know how to get industry to design and build. He could probably to get them to build one, but he just wasn’t the person to do it. I saw no sense in marching down this road, and that was a longshot attempt. Remember, if you go back and look at the project management plan, we were supposed to have prototype magnets out a year or two before they shut the project down, and the prototypes… They didn’t even have short-section prototypes.

Riordan:

Out of industry?

Pewitt:

Out of industry. Complete failure. It was clear what was going to happen if they didn’t make that change. Roy agreed to proceed on the course [inaudible] and put [inaudible] in the back of the technical project. Let Bush run the industrial program but not… And they reversed themselves, so I left. That was the end of that.

Riordan:

In like June of 1992?

Pewitt:

Right. I was planning on leaving anyway, so it wasn’t a great sacrifice. I didn’t think the project would succeed, and you can’t change the direction of a ship that is headed for the rocks. I told the people that I had worked with that summer, I told them that the project would be cancelled, because in September 1992 there would be a presidential election. That had nothing to do with being with the nature of the process.

Riordan:

[Jenning?] had a magnet problem. I think it was... It was that time in 1989.

Pewitt:

You’re going to have to excuse me. I am going to go.

Riordan:

Okay, it says 12:00.

Pewitt:

So, it was really Roy and the physics community that were holding on to the full course of keeping me on.

Riordan:

Let us see if we can’t straighten this out, because I think this is the important part. You feel that politically you could have shrunk it down to 15 TeV per beam, so that in fact it was not a problem at all. Right?

Pewitt:

I mean, that was a project decision. I don’t think any other state would have really cared. I think this was really one of the key decisions. It was, as I told you, an active acquisition. They concluded the project was over. How do we, without taking the lid off the…

Riordan:

Why do you think it was over? Because it sent a message to the outside world watching them that the project was out of control?

Pewitt:

No, because the project was not… There was no possibility, really. You are in management, oversight and laboratory management of the project that we did in management. The project was over by the fall of 1989.

Riordan:

Really?

Pewitt:

Yes. Trivelpiece’s viewpoint was that it was very natural for a project starting out to have some problems, realize that the design that they are working with is inadequate, and make those changes. Let’s take one big step, get Congress to sign onto it, and get our house in order, and then build it. Had that process been made in a way that had any political sense… but that is not what happened. Now look, the decision was made in 1990 — there was no logic to it, or there was a logic that was inappropriate for the project — and I…

Riordan:

Would you say that Roy, in typical bureaucratic fashion, brought us these review panels? I had review panels, I guess, but the problem with them is… We really had to have…

Pewitt:

Yeah, like I said, there are two reasons to have a panel: 90% of the time it is to endorse a decision that has already been made.

Riordan:

So, you can meet by…

Pewitt:

Of course. I mean, all the information there is provided by the particular authorities. There was no independent analysis of that information. It was all formulated in a short period of time. They didn’t do anything independently or… Those processes are not meant to make decisions, but to endorse decisions. When you really want advice, you set up a group that works on a problem or is substantial.

Riordan:

What analysis was devised by…?

Pewitt:

None that I know of. It was a big decision, and maybe it was the right decision, but I don’t think there is anybody on this planet who really knows.

Riordan:

Did you argue at all with Roy about holding the line on costs?

Pewitt:

No, I ran the numbers, what the modified system is going to cost. When I told him the number, he told me that’s ridiculous.

Riordan:

The $9.5 billion.

Pewitt:

The $9.5 billion. He wanted me to make it lower. There is no… The way you do the accounting, I can give him any number I want. Mr. [Schwitters?] used to say, “I’ll let you have any number you want for the budget, but I want to cap it.” He wanted a different number, and I told him I’d give him that, but that I was going to defy the rules, and I’d have to leave the whole report… That’s what he wanted, and he was happy with $7.2 billion or whatever it was.

Riordan:

This was still in 1989?

Pewitt:

We started in February of ’89 and we were well into that process. And I gave him the numbers. I was able to crank out the new magnet numbers without a lot of trouble.

Riordan:

This is with 5-centimeter aperture?

Pewitt:

Yeah.

Riordan:

Wasn’t there a huge uncertainty coming in with magnet costs, because ultimately you couldn’t project the cost at which industry would be willing to supply these magnets?

Pewitt:

Well, it was the assumption for the magnet production. Roy wanted a number, and I told him I would give him the number he wanted, but I had to find the [rationale for it?].

Riordan:

They were the numbers given to you by the [magnet designers?] were over...?

Pewitt:

No. They were the numbers. They were giving me the numbers. I didn’t make any effort to exercise any independent judgement. I just recorded what they gave me.

Riordan:

What is your analysis now?

Pewitt:

You can ask me what it was then. I thought they were a crock of shit, but I labeled it for what they were. He wanted those numbers. The responsibility was on him. I just wanted to finish up what I had promised to do and get out of the laboratory. It didn’t really matter what I did.

Riordan:

The project was out of control by early 1990?

Pewitt:

No, by mid-1989. I was not in a position to do much about it. I wasn’t going to run to Washington and say, “god, it’s wrong.” I couldn’t change the man’s mind, and nothing short of that was going to save the project. And I told the people that I had worked with, I told them exactly what my sentence was, and I told them how long they had to get out of there. I told them they should position [themselves] so they could wrap it up. As soon as I left, they were…

Riordan:

If this thing had not been cancelled… Let’s say somehow it had gotten through the 1993 process, and they actually built it…

Pewitt:

What would have happened? I think that’s impossible. After the Congress killed it, the physics community said it was political, but in fact Congress killed the project because it had ruptured out of control. They killed it for the right reasons. If it had gone on, the problems with the magnets would have magnified. The worst predictions of its opponents would have been realized, and high-energy physics in this country would have been equated with a four-letter word on the Hill. I’m not sure there would have been any survivors. There certainly wouldn’t be the program we have now with the [Large Hadron Collider at CERN?]. I just think the whole area of science was in terrible shape. We can debate about how terrible “terrible” is, but it was terrible. I think the physics community dodged a bullet, because it was not going to get better. They had real problems, and these were becoming self-evident with those magnets.

Riordan:

So, you think magnets were a really big problem?

Pewitt:

Yeah. The way they were going, they weren’t going to have magnets, and they would have spent… Well, they spent I-don’t-know-how-much money, but if they had gone another year and not had a prototype magnet [ed., manufactured by industry], it would have been pretty embarrassing. That would have been the fifth year of a ten-year project, and they didn’t [ed., even] have low-rate production of the magnets that was needed.

Riordan:

Well, you’ve got to allow for a certain transition where the only thing they had in 1989 were these 4-centimeter prototype dipole magnets [made at Fermilab]. The superconducting dipoles made in December 1989 were going to go to pot. That’s not going to happen overnight. There would have to have been a new prototype.

Pewitt:

But they never changed the schedule. Take a look at the schedule, at what they were promising the Congress. Of course, you had to, but what were they telling the Congress was: “We’re on budget, we’re on schedule.” And they were nowhere even close to being on schedule. It was going to call for a lot more and take a lot longer. And sooner or later… The magnet train test [of five superconducting dipoles in series] was a great political move. But how long can you wait before you have the industrial magnets? [ed., the test was done with 5-centimeter prototypes fabricated at Fermilab, not at General Dynamics.] We weren’t there. Those guys that did the magnets train test were [Fermilab] people. Not the SSC magnet people but the magnet people [from Fermilab?]. Tom [Kirk?], was that his name? In my view he was… They should have made him project manager when they had the chance.

Riordan:

[inaudible]?

Pewitt:

Those guys knew how to get things done; they knew how to get to it. I wish I had known them a lot better.

Riordan:

There were really serious problems, although you were gone by that time. But actually, the administration had to come up with its own way making…

Pewitt:

It didn’t have a chance. It didn’t have a snowball’s chance. They didn’t know what they were doing.

Riordan:

Because, as you said before, Tom Bush… Generally, we rely on scientific or technical design, being an industry.

Pewitt:

And as a matter of fact, if you talk to the guys in the magnet division, they weren’t allowed [to talk with others at the SSC]. Tom Bush didn’t want those laboratory scientists messing up the conductor and taking some of what they knew about magnet design. No, he didn’t need that sort of interference. It was…

Riordan:

I would have had this suspicion that there were two threads of the costing that were grossly underestimated. One was the magnets, and the other was the detectors.

Pewitt:

I don’t know about the detectors. That was the physics stuff, and I don’t know. The guy to talk to about the magnets and that stuff… What was his name?

Riordan:

[inaudible]?

Pewitt:

He’s a good guy to talk to about that, but the guy who was actually in the accelerator division. Let me ask Sue, I’ll be right back. [Pause] He was a pretty good engineer. [inaudible] If you see him, give him my regards, tell him where I am.

Riordan:

I ask this question to just about everybody as a summary. If you had to pick three things about why the Super Collider project failed, and you can make them as broad or narrow as you want, what would you focus on?

Pewitt:

The high-energy physics culture. Certain areas. It’s certainly not applicable to everybody, but they are not accountable to anybody but themselves on how to use public monies. A legacy of the Joint Committee [on Atomic Energy] is where it came from. Second, DOE’s absolutely dismal project-management record. And Pief crying when the project by remote control blew up. I’ve given that a lot of thought, that is not… He had a very strong personality, and all the things we admire about the guy, and I ain’t one to… But his absolute refusal to accept the realities led 20^th-century project…

Riordan:

You say he was still within this frame of mind?

Pewitt:

Yeah, putting Roy in there and supporting Roy when it was very clear that Roy was… Roy was a very presentable guy. There is nothing evil about Roy, but he was just the wrong guy for that project. He was there because [of Pief?]. He was there at the very end.

Riordan:

They got [URA President] Johnny Toll. He took a fall for URA.

Pewitt:

No, nobody brought in John Toll.

Riordan:

Yeah, after Congress had killed the project. Then.

Pewitt:

It was too late.

Riordan:

Do you think that Roy might have been miscast?

Pewitt:

Oh, absolutely. Roy is not a bad guy, but who, presented the opportunity to be the director of what was going to be the preeminent high-energy physics laboratory in the world, is going to say, “Hey, I’m not your guy.”

Riordan:

I wouldn’t.

Pewitt:

But you don’t have dreams of being a Nobel laureate. Roy did. He thought he should have had… This is the guy who saw himself as having greatness. To ask him to turn that down would be nuts.

Riordan:

What occurs to me is that if a person could have been found for whom both Tigner and Schwitters could have worked for, that might have worked.

Pewitt:

And he didn’t even have to be a physicist.