John Rees

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ORAL HISTORIES
Interviewed by
Michael Riordan
Interview dates
September 2, 2009 & May 6, 2010
Location
Los Altos, California
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Interview of John Rees by Michael Riordan on September 2, 2009 & May 6, 2010,
Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,
College Park, MD USA,
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/48549

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Abstract

This two-part interview with SLAC accelerator physicist John Rees is part of a series conducted as background research for the book Tunnel Visions, a history of the Superconducting Super Collider. In the first part, Rees recalls his work at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator and on projects at SLAC, as well as an experience working at the high-energy physics program office at the Atomic Energy Commission during the construction of Fermilab. He discusses in detail his exposure to project management and how bureaucracies operate. The conversation also covers his participation in the 1983 High Energy Physics Advisory Panel subpanel led by Stanley Wojcicki and his impressions of the aggressive cost estimates for the SSC that were floated at that time. It concludes with his work on pole-face windings for the SSC Central Design Group. The second part begins with Rees’s arrival as SSC project manager in 1992, replacing Paul Reardon, and he discusses his relationship with the project’s general manager, Ed Siskin, and the implementation of a project management control system. Rees also reflects on his relations with other key figures at the SSC project, including personnel assigned by the Department of Energy, and he offers his impressions of how the project was managed and its relations with Congress leading up to its cancellation.

Transcript

Riordan:

This is Michael Riordan. I’m interviewing John Rees at his home in Los Altos, California, and it’s September 2nd, 2009. I’d like to begin with this interview by getting an idea of your background, your education, how you came into high-energy physics, and how you eventually came to SLAC.

Rees:

Well, that goes all the way back to my education in physics, which was at Indiana University in nuclear physics. And when I got my PhD there in 1956, I was not very interested in continuing along the same path, doing the kinds of physics that people were doing in those days, which to me seemed something like [hunting?] through the periodic table with gun and camera. And there were various opportunities—jobs were not hard to get in those days; there were plenty for a nuclear physicist if you wanted to work in reactors or bombs, and I thought I didn’t. There was one job that intrigued me because I’d been working on the cyclotron, and I liked to build things, and I liked machines. That job was at Harvard and MIT, a joint appointment between the two, but the site was at Harvard, building the Cambridge Electron Accelerator [CEA]. That got me into accelerators, and the next step in the progression is that we finished that accelerator. CEA proposed to build the Electron Positron Colliding Beam Storage Ring in competition with SLAC, which was also proposing to build one at the same time, and we hoped to get the job at Harvard. And the upshot was that the AEC, confronted with two proposals, empaneled the Laslett panel, with Jackson Laslett [editor’s note: of Lawrence Berkeley Lab as chair]. Asked to choose between the two proposals, the panel said they shouldn’t build either because of the current, state-of-the-art of colliding beams as was being experienced at Stanford, at HEPL [Stanford University's High Energy Physics Laboratory], where they had just discovered that two intense [electron] beams would disrupt one another.

Riordan:

So the electron-electron collider…

Rees:

Yes, Gerry O’Neil [ed., of Princeton University, who conceived of this collider], Burton Richter, Carl Barber, and Bernie Gilman were on that project. And the panel said, “That’s something we need to see how that pans out before you build either of these machines, but when you do get ready to build the [electron-positron] machine, build it at SLAC, because the two-mile linear accelerator is much the better injector.” And so, with that and some friction with a colleague at Harvard, I came to Stanford.

Riordan:

Did you work on the CEA Bypass at all?

Rees:

No, I left before it was invented. It was shortly after I left that [accelerator physicists] Gus Voss and Ken Robinson made the startling observation that you could use low beta function at the interaction region and get much higher luminosities than anybody thought, on the basis of the then-theory of the incoherent limit. The beam-beam limit. That’s what made it possible to conceive the Bypass. And then Gus Voss went ahead and led the troops gloriously into battle.

Riordan:

Now, I think the last time we talked, when we had coffee, you mentioned that you also had worked at the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], somewhere in the 1960s.

Rees:

Yes, let’s see. I came here, Stanford, and we made another proposal, and that was the first proposal that eventually became SPEAR. But it was a much more expensive and elaborate proposal. And it was turned down, and then things did not look very promising for it to be accepted in the following year, either. And at that point, [SLAC Director Wolfgang “Pief”] Panofsky suggested sending me off to work for Bill Wallenmeyer, who ran the high energy physics program for the Atomic Energy Commission. And I did, I went off for two years.

Riordan:

Okay, so you were working there, reporting to Wallenmeyer.

Rees:

Reporting to Wallenmeyer, he was my boss.

Riordan:

And as I recall, you say you were not a detailee, you were actually an AEC employee.

Rees:

Yes, in those days—for reasons I don’t remember very well right now, but I wasn’t very concerned which way we did it—I went on a leave of absence from Stanford, and went to work for the federal government, as a GS-whatever-it-was. I can’t remember the rank at that time. And I worked there for two years, and my job there… Wallenmeyer formed what was called a section—it was two people, but now I can’t remember the other guy’s name—the advanced accelerator section of the high energy physics program. My beat was what later became Fermilab. What did we call it originally?

Riordan:

NAL.

Rees:

NAL, that’s right, National Accelerator Lab. And so I became what some called [NAL Director] Bob Wilson’s man in Washington, in the early days, when they moved… Well, first they moved to Chicago, to Oakbrook, and then they moved to the present site, in that little town that was there.

Riordan:

Batavia.

Rees:

No, not Batavia, Weston. There was a town that was obliterated by the laboratory. I used to go out there about once a week, more boring than I cared for. I spent two years doing that.

Riordan:

Would you say that this was, incidentally, construction management, or were you more in the program office?

Rees:

No, I was in the program office. I wasn’t in the construction management then. I had no contact at that point with formal construction management. I didn’t learn about that until later. I had run a project at CEA, I built the RF system; that required planning and some management, but it was all seat-of-the-pants.

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

So, I spent two years in Washington.

Riordan:

So, it wasn’t like an Ed Temple role. [ed., Temple later oversaw construction projects at the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Research.]

Rees:

Ed Temple wasn’t there.

Riordan:

I’m saying it wasn’t a role like he played.

Rees:

No, not at all. I did have a lot of contact with the guy who preceded Ed Temple. Actually, they created a job for Ed Temple, a special job for him in the research division. At that time, that sort of contact was made through what’s called a construction division, at the old AEC.

Riordan:

And this was separate from the program office.

Rees:

K. C. Brooks was the guy [ed., whom Rees worked with at the AEC]. He and I were the terrible twins that went out and dealt with NAL. And of course, K. C. was an old construction guy from way back; he’d built one of the AEC production facilities. He was the manager of that, but I don’t remember now which. I think it was a gaseous-diffusion plant.

Riordan:

Did you learn anything about large-project management from that experience?

Rees:

Well, I learned that you needed to be a hard-headed old son of a bitch. That’s what K. C. was. We got along beautifully, but he was hard-bitten. But he adored Bob Wilson, so then we had a great relationship there. Eventually, that kind of relationship was no longer possible with that agency and its successor. At that time, it was a pretty friendly relationship. But no, I wasn’t doing any construction management.

Riordan:

Wait, I have another question that applies to that. Do you think you got any sensitivity for how the supporting agency, whether the AEC or the DOE, views project management?

Rees:

Enormously. More than just project management.

Riordan:

So, you could see where they were coming from when they came down on you for some one reason or another?

Rees:

No, I wouldn’t put it that way. Let me describe it in my own terms.

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

I saw how the bureaucrats looked at the project that was being supported by the federal agency. And it was by no means a coherent way. That is, for example, the safety people looked at the project one way, the construction division looked at the project another way, and the financial people looked at it another way. There was no coherence. In project management, you have a coherent system that looks at money and planning all in one coherent picture. It doesn’t cover safety, but I guess by now it does. But I got a feeling for that. I also got a feeling for the way the bureaucrats look at their role. So, it was an enormously educational experience. I also had some bitter experiences, especially with the safety people.

Riordan:

In the 1960s?

Rees:

In the AEC, yes.

Riordan:

Actually, it would be the ’70s.

Rees:

No, it was still the ’60s.

Riordan:

Okay, the early days of Fermilab.

Rees:

It was the ’68-’69 I was there. And I remember one thing. You know the design of Fermilab at all, the buildings? Do you know what the Cross Gallery is? Okay, it’s one big building that contains the control room for the whole thing. The lab had laid that out as a big open building, and the reason was that they didn’t know yet what they would need. They put in partitions as required to make a control room, to make cross-connect rooms and all the things you need for communication and power distribution. Well, this, and all the drawings got reviewed by the construction division in Germantown [Maryland], where the building was, north of Washington [ed., which also housed the AEC Office of High Energy Physics].

Riordan:

Yes.

Rees:

And the safety people called me, because I was the contact for the lab. They were going over these drawings and said, “This can’t be. We’ve got this great big building, and there are no walls. It’s got to have walls. You’ve got to have this broken up into cubicles, so much by so much, for three out of four doors.” And I said, “Well, we can’t do that because…”—I explained what the reasons were for the open design. And they said, “Well, we can’t pass this.” I said, “For Christ’s sake, if somebody came in here with an aircraft-hanger design for you, would you tell him to put in four dad-burned walls?” And of course, we did not come to a meeting of the minds. But I got an idea how those people work. There was a set of rules; their job is to keep the thing from burning down. Their job had nothing to do with the function of the thing that was being built. Now that’s a bureaucrat. That’s the view from a certain level of the bureaucracy. When you get down to specialization, that’s the view. I learned that.

Riordan:

Was there an element in that each of these bureaucrats had a certain constituency that they had to satisfy?

Rees:

Not so much in those days, no. Most of them were working pretty much for the general manager. And he was a pretty demanding individual. But he was a lawyer, so he wasn't a safety guru. So, these people had rules in their books, and that’s where they got their [directions?].

Riordan:

Okay. So now, you come back to SLAC.

Rees:

I came back to SLAC at the end of two years.

Riordan:

Tell me about your involvement in SPEAR, building that collider.

Rees:

Well, the problem was that the storage ring, which by that time had got the name SPEAR, which stands for SLAC Positron Electron Asymmetric Ring. It wasn’t approved either. And so, I remember, at the birth of SPEAR, as it came to be built, there was a meeting, an international accelerator conference, and it took place… I think that the location of record was Yerevan, Armenia. But it actually took place at an Olympic training camp on the top of a mountain. And on the way back, Burt had gotten word, while he was there, that project had been turned down again. But the idea had surfaced to build it with equipment money instead of construction money. In those days, there were three cupboards of money: operations, equipment, construction. We’d been turned down for construction money, but somehow, between the then-comptroller of the AEC John Abadessa, and I am sure that Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky was in this, too, the idea came about that maybe SPEAR could be built with equipment money, if it was cheap enough. So we sat on the airplane, and we had an estimate for the two SPEAR rings, asymmetric rings, of $9.3 million or something like that. And we carved that machine up on the airplane; I don’t think either one of us even had a calculator. And we produced a cost estimate of $5.2 million, to build one ring. The original design for the 3 GeV ring was at the two-thirds point in the accelerator. This one was in the Research Yard, where it eventually got built. We were just going to build it outdoors, and then pile some shielding around it. That was the design, and that was what we built.

Riordan:

Were you the project manager on that?

Rees:

There was no designated project manager. It was a research group. Burt ran a research group, and so there was … The management team was Burt on top, John Voss — the chief engineer, who’s a mechanical engineer — and me. And we wrote [specifications?] on it; John Voss did most of the quoting of costs and figuring out how much manpower to have, but there was no formal budget management on that project. That was a very well-managed project. It was managed by “walking around,” as they say at HP [Hewlett Packard]. Burt was interested in everything, and I was interested in most everything. And then we also had some latitude when it looked like it was going to cost more to build the machine, Burt was able to take some money out of what had been set aside for the detector and apply it to the machine. But the result was that we built it with the amount we said we would, and we built it in much less time.

Riordan:

Yes, I remember the story.

Rees:

Still, I had not had any experience at this point. This would be ’70-’71, something like that?

Riordan:

Yes, in ’71 it was finished.

Rees:

So, I had no contact with formal project management. Following that, SPEAR started to run, and before the psi was discovered [ed., in November 1974], I had left. I was asked by Panofsky to take over another project that had been spawned at SLAC but never got built. It was called the Recirculating Linear Accelerator, or RLA. So, I went over and took on a bunch of other people and started on that. And all I can say about that is that it never went anywhere. Nobody was interested. Nobody was interested in paying for it; nobody was interested in using it. It was an obvious extension of the LINAC [linear accelerator] that was not attractive. And at the same time, Panofsky formed the Laboratory Improvement Group, a meeting group. [Stanford University experimental physicist] Mel Schwartz was in it. And Schwartz said—I’m paraphrasing, of course—“I’ve always wanted to run beta decay backwards [ed., the decay of a neutron into a proton, electron, and anti-neutrino]. Would it be possible to build a collider that collided protons with electrons?” I was the colliding-beam guy on that committee, and I went away that night and calculated that it would be possible to build such a machine, in terms of the beam densities in proton machines that were being attained at that time, the densities in electron machines, and the incoherent limits they perform at in colliding-beam machines. I came back and said, “Yes, we can do that.” That was the birth of PEP, which originally meant ‘proton electron positron.’ It was to be a complex of two or three rings we were going to put in all together, I guess. I can’t remember very well. It was going to have all three kinds of particles; we could collide anything with anything. And since we didn’t have any expertise or any experience in building proton machines, Burt, Pief, and the higher-ups negotiated some kind of a collaboration with Berkeley. So, that original proposal, which I read out for the group at the next international accelerator conference at CERN [ed., possibly the 1977 ICFA meeting], was the first proposal to build that kind of a machine. Then the world caught on, and there were proposals like that from every place. But we started out with a superconducting proton machine combined with a fairly ordinary…

Riordan:

Superconducting? Even in…

Rees:

Oh, Berkeley wanted to do a superconducting machine. Remember they had a…

Riordan:

Yes, superconducting dipoles for the Bevatron. They’re difficult magnets…

Rees:

Yes, they were learning to make superconducting dipoles, and I guess they had a project, that was run by Glen Lambertson, but I don’t remember what it’s called now. That was the beginning of PEP. But it quickly became apparent that the AEC was not very interested.

Riordan:

So, in 1974? That changed to ERDA, in ‘77 [ed., AEC’s research activities were reorganized in 1974 into the Energy Research and Development Administration, which was then folded into the new Department of Energy in 1977].

Rees:

Okay, it switched…

Riordan:

Maybe 1975.

Rees:

Yes, I think it switched to ERDA in the middle of building… Well, no, we built PEP between ‘74 and ‘80. Maybe it was already ERDA before we started, I don’t remember.

Riordan:

Yeah, it might have been ERDA by then.

Rees:

Something else had happened, where they changed the end of the fiscal year in the middle of the project. The federal fiscal year. But, anyway, it was then that both laboratories agreed there was no way we were going to get funding for that whole PEP complex. So, we went back to electron-positron storage rings, with a nominal 15 GeV beam energy, to be built by the two laboratories. That was a joint project. And as project manager, I formally reported both to Pief and to Andy Sessler, who became the director at Berkeley.

Riordan:

Can you recall what the original cost estimate was, when you got a construction green light for PEP, for just the positron-electron machine?

Rees:

We never changed it.

Riordan:

Okay. What was the figure?

Rees:

I would say $76 million. I’ll check that, I’ll check that.

Riordan:

This is right in the middle of the greatest period of inflation…

Rees:

No, it wasn’t in the middle. It was at the beginning. And therefore, we didn’t know what was going to happen to it. We ate that inflation.

Riordan:

That was like a factor of two.

Rees:

Oh, no. Oh, you mean the inflation rate went up a factor of two. Yes, that’s probably true, but the contingency, the allowance for inflation… I can get all those numbers. Do you want to interrupt the narrative for that?

Riordan:

No no, it’s just that I’m getting a sense of problems you had to deal with, one of which has to be the fact that the money that you had been granted was no longer worth as much.

Rees:

It wasn’t worth as much, but it was nothing like a factor of two. We probably allowed six percent for inflation, and it probably went up to twelve, something like that.

Riordan:

You buried it in contingency or something?

Rees:

No, you start out, and you have an estimate. There’s an estimate to build the machine and there’s an estimate of the escalation you’re going to experience that goes into it. Then there is a contingency for things that you haven’t thought of. That all added up together to get $76 million. That’s a number that sticks in my head. And we wound up building it for that. Now, we had to make some technical compromises, but we never compromised the energy or the nominal luminosity, although the machine never actually… Just this morning I was being interviewed by a guy at SLAC who was interested in… He found a couple boxes of champagne bottles that had been bought and drunk on the occasions of records set by the PEP machine, and he wanted to talk to [SLAC accelerator physicist] Ewan Paterson and me about how that all came about.

Riordan:

So, what were some of the big problems that you had to deal with?

Rees:

Wait a minute. We’re at the juncture where we’re getting to what you asked me in the first place: where did I ever encounter formal project management? It was at the beginning of the actual PEP project, that project that I’m saying was estimated at that number. At the beginning, Bob Bell was put in charge of the whole magnet system. Bob Bell, the engineer at SLAC. You might know him.

Riordan:

I remember him.

Rees:

And Bob came into my office and said, “John, you really ought to learn something about project management, and they’re having a course, run by San Jose State. They’ve hired a guy to come in and give a set of courses out at a hotel in San Jose. I’m going, and you should go.” So, I went. And that’s where I learned it. The guy taught the whole thing. I ended up with a couple of weeks spent going down there, and he taught the whole thing: scheduling, budgeting, attaching the budget to the schedule, methods of measuring how much money you’ve spent at different times, the “earned value” concept. You know what the earned value concept is? It's I won’t bend your ear about it, but it’s a way to tell whether you have just done something that has put you over budget or not. And without that, the whole thing isn’t worth a hell of a lot.

Riordan:

At that point, was there any discussion of CS-squared systems? You know, cost-and-schedule-control programs?

Rees:

No, this whole management system is that.

Riordan:

Yes, then you did it on paper.

Rees:

Well, this whole system is done on paper. It was done on paper at that time. I don’t remember whether they had CS-squared. Sounds like a bureaucratic…

Riordan:

That’s what they would call it at the SSC. [SSC General Manger Ed] Siskin and [DOE SSC Project Director Joe] Cipriano would talk about it, saying, “You’ve got to have a CS-squared system.”

Rees:

It’s the same thing. We’re talking about exactly the same thing. There’s no difference at all. And the idea is, you have to have a plan which lays out the schedule for everything, and the cost for everything, and attaches nodes all the way along the schedule to amounts of money that should have been spent according to the plan to accomplish that, and then you need a way of measuring, during the course of the process, whether you are on that schedule or not. And then there’s another magical word, “critical path,” and the critical-path method of management, is to concentrate on what that whole network shows you is the salient schedule-limiting event, or cost-limiting event, that has taken place since the last review. That’s the critical path. That was all in this; it’s all one bundle. That never really changed, after I learned it. People came out with much better computer tools for doing it, but I learned how to do it by pencil. And it was done by pencil. The critical paths, the big charts, were drawn by hand every month in the course of PEP—by hand. I had a cost-and-schedule group, run by Al Keiker, and George Moseley was the guy that drew all these… We got very close, and I did run the project that way. I don’t remember Panofsky ever saying, “You ought to do this, John.” I only remember Bob Bell saying that. But Panofsky said, later, that that’s the way he ran SLAC. Or that’s the way Dick Neal [ed., the project manager who oversaw SLAC’s construction in the mid-1960s] did that. So, the method already existed, but it wasn’t widely admired by physicists.

Riordan:

Yes, that brings to mind… Do you know whether the method was being used at other labs, like Fermilab? At Fermilab, they were building the Energy Saver in the late 1970s.

Rees:

No, I don’t.

Riordan:

But SLAC began adopting it and its computerized version, starting with PEP.

Rees:

Well, there weren’t any computerized versions.

Riordan:

I’m saying later on.

Rees:

Yes, we were using it on PEP, and for all I know Dick Neal used virtually the same thing on building SLAC. But I had nothing to do with that, so I didn’t know that.

Riordan:

Okay. Well, that’s a good background. I think I’d like to move on to your participation in the Wojcicki panel [ed., the 1983 High Energy Physics Advisory Panel subpanel chaired by Stanford high-energy physicist Stanley Wojcicki that recommended that DOE terminate Brookhaven National Lab’s Isabelle/CBA project and pursue the SSC].

Rees:

Have you got any more [questions on PEP]? Listen, if you’re going to use any figures about… If you want to know for sure what we actually budgeted, I would have to go look that up.

Riordan:

No, that’s not important. I’m trying to get a sense of how you became a project manager. I guess one other question I could ask is: if you had to identify a major problem that occurred that was not anticipated at PEP, what would that be?

Rees:

That would be inflation. Absolutely, it would be inflation. And the fact that our schedule was actually limited by money. The most painful thing about that project, to me, was that we started it first, but the Germans proposed PETRA [ed., a 40 GeV electron-positron collider at the West German laboratory DESY] under Gus Voss, who was a very, very dear friend of mine. And Gus came over to a national accelerator conference here and asked us to give him our drawings for quadrupoles. He was going to make them with laminations. And then he went back over and was running the project. Germany had this terrible… They had some kind of a budget problem, I think it must have been inflation, which they… Their idea for solving this problem was to give the project early money to build their conventional facilities, while we had to go through this lengthy process of choosing an A&E [architecture and engineering] firm, and then having that okayed by the agency and so on. We couldn’t spend any money even on the design of conventional facilities until this long process was carried out. Gus was able to throw money into design, to go directly to the city of Hamburg and have them take over building this stuff, and they got a big leg-up [on SLAC]. And so PETRA got finished a year before we did. They got finished before they were scheduled to finish.

Riordan:

Were there delays in the US funding profiles because of inflation?

Rees:

Nothing serious.

Riordan:

But you ended on where you thought you would. It’s just that the Germans…

Rees:

Yes, yes, we finished it. I think we were scheduled to finish it in January [1980], and we finished it in April. That wasn’t the problem; the problem was we couldn’t get our conventional facilities built fast. We couldn’t get on a fast track, and so what physics was there [ed., in the energy range accessible to both colliders], it generally was attributed to PETRA.

Riordan:

A little unjust.

Rees:

Yes.

Riordan:

All right. Moving on to the early ’80s and your participation in the Wojcicki panel. How did you come to be invited?

Rees:

How the hell should I know? How should I know?

Riordan:

Stanford…?

Rees:

I don’t know. I imagine it came from the AEC.

Riordan:

Wallenmeyer?

Rees:

Wallenmeyer. But I don’t know who picked my name or whether… Look, in those days, the—I mean, we still do it, that the lab directors talk to one another, and Wallenmeyer talked to the lab directors incessantly, and I expect that Wallenmeyer talked to Panofsky and said, “Who shall I get from SLAC?” And they were concerned about getting people who knew something about accelerators, because one of the things that Wojcicki said was that they were a little light on accelerator expertise.

Riordan:

They had John Adams.

Rees:

Not only that, they had Maury Tigner, and me. Come on, what do they want? No, it wasn’t insulting, but they had a hell of a lot more high-energy physicists; there were a lot of people on that panel.

Riordan:

All right. So, early in the game, there was this Cornell workshop on a 20-TeV collider.

Rees:

I had nothing to do with that. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened there.

Riordan:

They came in with numbers ranging from… I think it was $1 billion for a 10-TeV on 10-TeV machine to at most three billion for a scaled-up version of the Energy Saver.

Rees:

Yes, that was in the spirit of the Desertron, a Bob Wilson-style estimate.

Riordan:

Was there any sense then that maybe these numbers weren’t all that reliable? That they were leaving a lot out?

Rees:

My recollection is that, on that panel, there was no significant discussion of the value of those estimates.

Riordan:

Or any sense that they might be optimistic?

Rees:

Oh, I think they were probably… I would certainly have said they were optimistic. But at that point in my life, I would never have said that it couldn’t be done, because I was a Bob Wilson enthusiast, and I thought Bob Wilson could do anything. He finished Fermilab fifty million under.

Riordan:

That much?

Rees:

Yes.

Riordan:

Wow.

Rees:

He did. Then he spent it all on the [inaudible].

Riordan:

I thought he had to give some of it back.

Rees:

At one time, I told him I thought he would have to give some of it back. But he never did.

Riordan:

But I knew the stuff like this Diebold report. It’s actually an appendix at that time for the collider. And so, all they do is, to get to the infrastructure, and this is the injector, this includes the superconducting magnets, and all the roads and buildings and the magnet factory, I would guess, they just scaled up the Fermilab cost to 1980 dollars.

Rees:

Is that when Diebold was at AEC?

Riordan:

No, that was beforehand. He was at Argonne [National Laboratory in Illinois].

Rees:

Argonne, okay.

Riordan:

And I’d say that’s crazy. There’s all the costs of building up the human infrastructure, fixing the magnets, building the magnet factory. You can’t just scale up the original cost…

Rees:

Let’s talk about the Wojcicki panel. I don’t know who that report was done for. My recollections do not include any hard looks at any estimates about this project. There was an accelerator subpanel, under [Cornell accelerator physicist] Maury Tigner, who was the prime mover of that Cornell workshop.

Riordan:

Here’s the other document at the time… [Riordan shows another SSC cost estimate]

Rees:

Yes, I used to have a copy of this. Yes, I’ve seen this.

Riordan:

There’s something about the same ballpark…

Rees:

I don’t remember that it was a matter of any concern to the panel, that this might be a horseback estimate. It may be my memory, but I don’t remember any such conversation.

Riordan:

The other thing is that you’re just going into a completely new cost domain. You’re talking about at most half a billion dollars for Isabelle up to that point, and then all of a sudden this is clearly a multibillion-dollar machine.

Rees:

Well, I will give you a personal view about that, but this is not something I brought up in the Wojcicki panel. I believe that we had—and I participated in it—a terrible case of hubris, at that point. Bob Wilson, in my mind, was the symbol of that. Bob Wilson believed in building things for nothing. He was offended at high cost estimates. He thought the Berkeley estimate for NAL, which preceded that final estimate, was somewhere in $360 million range. The project was budgeted at $215 million, as I remember, and he sold it for $200 million. Now, he put it on the air, and then the magnets were popping up at one a week or one a day, I don’t remember which. And he spent a bunch of money replacing the magnets.

Riordan:

I’m familiar with that episode.

Rees:

That was the way he liked to build things, and I thought that was just splendid in those days. I participated in that group. With the advantage of hindsight now, particularly now, with… What’s the CERN project called, I forgot?

Riordan:

LHC.

Rees:

The Large Hadron Collider, foundering as it is [ed., at the time of the interview, about 50 superconducting dipole magnets had quenched and exploded]. The best engineering laboratory in the world has now been…

Riordan:

Yes, and I’ll give you an example here. Here’s this Cornell report, 1983, and look at this: they’re talking about taking three to four years, coming up with two-in-one magnets at a test lab.

Rees:

Yes, I gotcha. Yes.

Riordan:

Here we are, thirty years later, and they’re struggling.

Rees:

Why are you waving it in my face? I know this. I’m telling you, mea culpa, at the time I was on the Wojcicki panel, I thought doing things in this style was okay. I was wrong. I was absolutely wrong. And what can I say? I was stupid. Now I know that’s not true. As a matter of fact, my remark to my friend, Ray Stiening, a while ago, when LHC first panged a string of magnets was, “We’re well out of it, my friend. If that laboratory is going to have this kind of trouble, think what would have happened if Congress hadn’t stopped us from building SSC.”

Riordan:

Let me tell you a little anecdote. I was writing an article about the physics of LHC for Physics World, in December of last year, and my first sentence began—this was after they had gotten the beam around a few times— “Now that the LHC is springing to life…” And then I heard about the problems and called the editor and said, “Could I change that to ‘struggling to life’?” He said, “It’s too late.”

Rees:

Yes. Well, I’d begun to see that, Mike. I’d only begun to see that. Remember, my history was this. First, I was involved in electron accelerators. [CEA’s first director] Stan Livingston was project director. He said it would cost six million; it cost twelve million. It didn’t bother Stan. Every time he put in a new estimate, they just gave him more money. So, he spent twelve million. Okay, so then I came out to SLAC. And I watched Panofsky and Neal build the LINAC for the estimated cost of $112 million. Burt and I built SPEAR for $5.2 million, in less than the allotted time. Then I took on PEP; we built it without going over the estimate and were late only a couple of months. And I thought, “Well, when you estimate things—when you do things the way we’ve been doing things—you can accomplish them.” Now, of course, we had never built anything where we were going way the hell out on a technological limb. The only technological limb in these colliding-beam machines was how well the beams would collide with each other. The magnets were just conventional technology, the RF was conventional. So, I just didn’t have this feeling. Then we built the SLC [Stanford Linear Collider]. I ran that project too. And that wasn’t so hard to build. It was just damned hard to make it do anything.

Riordan:

Yes, by which time you were safely out of the picture.

Rees:

I was out of the picture. But I certainly didn’t foresee the difficulties that were going to be there, and neither did a lot of other smart people.

Riordan:

As I recall, the construction cost of SLC was $125 million.

Rees:

Around there, yes.

Riordan:

But then we had to make it work by sucking the blood out of the SLAC program.

Rees:

If there was any blood left in it. I don’t know that there was.

Riordan:

Yes, but how much additional would you guess it really cost to make the SLC work?

Rees:

I have no idea. I bowed out of that project, not because I had the foresight to see it was going to be covered with shit, but because my back gave out on me, and I had to have an operation. And I was laid up after that for a couple of months. And that was just as they started trying to run it. But the whole job was turned over to others, led by Ray Stiening. So, I don’t know what all that work would have cost. On the other hand, I will argue that I’m not at all sure that sort of bookkeeping means anything. There were a bunch of people whose efforts were commandeered to do that [ed., to get the SLC to work as designed]. A lot of them, some very, very smart people.

Riordan:

Marty Breidenbach?

Rees:

That’s the one I was thinking of, too. Now, what wonders in physics would they have been discovering if they weren’t doing that? Can you tell me what happened in physics, things that could have been learned at SLAC that were learned elsewhere, Nobel Prize-winning events and all that? I don’t think you can.

Riordan:

Not at SLAC.

Rees:

Yes, not at SLAC. Right. And that’s what they…

Riordan:

And all they were doing at CERN was digging a huge tunnel and putting in magnets.

Rees:

So, you take all these people, and you could have turned them loose from that, used the money the way it was originally intended to be used, and what would have been the profit? It’s not clear to me there would have been any. So, I think that the productivity, in particle physics, in the laboratory, had gone way down at that point.

Riordan:

Okay, getting back to the Wojcicki panel, were you there when the first organizational meeting in Washington was held?

Rees:

Yes. And I was there when…

Riordan:

Do you recall where that was held, was that in Germantown or the Forestall building [ed., the DOE headquarters building in Washington, DC]?

Rees:

No, it was in neither of the above. Where the hell was it? Well, my recollection is that it was right in downtown, some place around H Street…

Riordan:

I think [Doug] Pewitt said it was in the national security offices—a situation room or something.

Rees:

I don’t know about that. But I believe it was downtown. It wasn’t at Forestall; it wasn’t out in Germantown. I just have this vague recollection that… Well, Wojcicki would know.

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

But I do remember that Jay Keyworth came. And he did, indeed, say, as has been attributed to him, that the President says to “throw deep.” That’s the correction quotation.

Riordan:

Even then? Didn’t he say, “think big”? That’s what’s been attributed to him.

Rees:

No, “throw deep” was what he said.

Riordan:

Throw deep?

Rees:

Well, he may have said “think big” as well, but he wanted to quote the President. It’s a very colorful quote. Reagan was a very genial and quotable guy. Not a great President, but certainly genial. And the [Keyworth] quotation was literally, “The President says, ‘throw deep’.”

Riordan:

Okay, because that quote comes in later, in ‘87, when Reagan approved the project at a meeting of his Domestic Policy Council.

Rees:

No, I don’t.

Riordan:

No, it may have been repeated.

Rees:

I’m sorry, I was a referee for the Wojcicki article. I just read what he said. [ed., Stanley Wojcicki, “The Supercollider: The Pre-Texas Days, a Personal Recollection of Its Birth and Early Years, https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812835215_0012]

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

And he said that Jay Keyworth said that at that opening meeting.

Riordan:

“Throw deep,” at that opening meeting [ed., the phrase does not appear in Wojcicki's account of the meeting].

Rees:

He said the President said that.

Riordan:

Okay. And encouraged you that you could spend billions of dollars.

Rees:

Exactly.

Riordan:

That it would be there…

Rees:

Well, he never… Now, just a minute. I’m saying that’s the way we all interpreted it.

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

That the President had been told that this panel would consider a machine that was much larger than any that had been built before, and it would cost in the billions, but it would be a frontier machine that would excel over what was available in any other country. I think the President was told that, and the President thought it over, in terms of the billions that would go into it, and said, “Tell them to throw deep.” That’s all I remember of that conversation. Keyworth himself was not a wordsmith.

Riordan:

Okay. In the later deliberations, did you have any reservations about this recommendation, to go ahead with this as a purely American project?

Rees:

The short answer is no.

Riordan:

That we could afford something like that.

Rees:

No, I didn’t. No. I wasn’t that much of a savvy citizen of politics.

Riordan:

Let me phrase the question differently. You have…

[Break in recording]

Riordan:

This is Michael Riordan interviewing John Rees. You just said that [Italian high-energy physicist Carlo] Rubbia [ed., who was a member of the Wojcicki subpanel] was all over the map.

Rees:

Rubbia was always all over the map. But [CERN accelerator physicist and former director-general John] Adams was very, very steady in his concerns, and his concern was that it was a terrible mistake to kill Isabelle. We spent an awful lot of time on the question of Isabelle. We didn’t spend nearly so much time on what it might cost, eventually, to build this big machine [the SSC]. But John Adams was just… if he could have voted three times, he would have, against killing Isabelle. He thought that was the worst thing we could do, and he had a concept in his mind of how scientific enterprises had to regard their masters in government, how they had to preach to masters in government, and we weren’t meeting those standards. I don’t remember whether he scoffed at the cost figures that may have been being thrown around. I didn’t ever take any notes on them, at that time, and so I can’t tell you that. You have to ask somebody else. There are a lot of people that were on that panel that you could ask, who would have been more sensitive to any scoffing that John might have done. He certainly is the one I would expect, most authoritatively, to scoff at the estimates.

Riordan:

[inaudible]

Rees:

Yes, he would say, “That’s absurd.” And he might have done that. But he never did either in the panel or at any time when I was with him privately.

Riordan:

Well, that sentiment would have had to come from the accelerator subcommittee, which was you, Maury, and John, right?

Rees:

Well, I don’t remember if there was anybody else. Those three were certainly on it, yes.

Riordan:

That would be your area of responsibility. Can we really build this thing for the kinds of numbers we’re talking about, here?

Rees:

I don’t remember that actually coming up, either. You should really talk to Maury.

Riordan:

If we could.

Rees:

Why couldn’t you?

Riordan:

He’s not very accessible. I had maybe thirty minutes with him on purely technical issues. It’s just a very sensitive issue with him, how he was dealt with.

Rees:

Well, later on. But this is something… this is before he got upbraided before by the …

Riordan:

Yes, I’m trying to get Lillian [Hoddeson], whose responsibility this is, to look at this and try to ask him just technical questions.

Rees:

Let’s see, John’s dead, so you can’t do anything with that. Can you talk to Stan?

Riordan:

Yeah, we talked to Stan Wojcicki. Stan’s been very open, very helpful.

Rees:

Yes. I think Stan would be the best person. He really kept notes, he was an excellent chairman, and I think that his recollections of what went on there would be much better than mine. I did spend some time with him in private. We had a late meeting, when I think we finally buttoned up the quarter, at Nevis Lab [ed., the high-energy physics lab of Columbia University, where the last subpanel meeting took place]. And when I flew back to California, I needed to go back to JFK airport, and John Adams and Rubbia had a car, and I rode with them, and I don’t remember any remarks by John on the way back, which he could have made, about what a ridiculous estimate people were talking about.

Riordan:

Was there any discussion that you can recall about, “Gee, maybe we really ought to do this as an international project? This is what we’ve been talking about in ICFA?

Rees:

Yes. John did say that. Now that you mention it, now it’s coming back to me a little bit. I think John did feel that anything at that scope should be an international project. And in fact, up at ECFA—not ICFA, ECFA, it was the European [Committee on Future Accelerators]—I thought that ECFA maybe had made pronouncements that anything at the next stage should be an international project. And I think Adams also felt that making this recommendation was in bad faith, that ECFA had done that. This stuff you should check with Stan.

Riordan:

Making the recommendation to go ahead with the SSC as a US project?

Rees:

As a US project, right.

Riordan:

Was in bad faith, given what ECFA had stated?

Rees:

I think it was ECFA, yes. Did ICFA exist at that time?

Riordan:

Yes. It was organized back in the late ’70s.

Rees:

Well, maybe it was ICFA, then. I’m just not sure.

Riordan:

All right. I want to talk about your participation in the R&D at CDG [the SSC Central Design Group]. When we met for coffee, we talked about working on the corrector magnets, which were essential to going to four centimeters, right [ed., the inner diameter of the beam tube]?

Rees:

Well, yes, but that was kind of a mess. Maury found out that I was just wandering around SLAC without any particular portfolio.

Riordan:

This was after the SLC?

Rees:

Yeah, SLC was over. I was finished with the SLC. I’d already had the back operation. And when I went back, I never got involved in commissioning the machine, at the end. When I had my operation, that was the end of my contact with the SLC. I was never involved in the subsequent improvements of it, to the point where it worked. None of that was due to me. And so I was wandering around, doing a little of this, a little of that, running committees, and so forth, doing old-fart-type things, and Maury got wind of this and asked me to come up and help, in Berkeley, on a part-time basis. So, I said I would go up there, I think either once or twice a week, and the thing he gave me to do was the pole-face winding. And it didn’t really work, to have one person or group doing pole-face windings, and another person or group or groups doing magnet design. That is a violation of a principle, of design principle. In order to design something that is as complex as a superconducting magnet for an accelerator, you need to have a single intelligence making the balance between cost and feasibility, cost and quality, and the thing is that is wrong in principle to have people trying to build… The people building the magnet are going to come out with fields that have certain properties, and if those properties require pole-face windings, then pole-face windings become part of their job. It’s not that of somebody who comes down once a week …

Riordan:

I’m sorry, when you say pole-face windings, you’re talking about corrector magnets?

Rees:

No, I didn’t have corrector magnets, pole-face windings. Maybe I told you wrong. I would have called those corrector magnets. I’m talking about pole-face windings, that’s all I had anything to do with.

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

And pole-face windings go in the same… they’re part of the same thermal problem; they’re part of the same magnetic problem; they’re part of the same mechanical problem. They’re part of the damn magnet. And you can’t have Joe building the magnet, and John building the pole-face winding. So, I found it a non-problem. I went to Brookhaven, and there were some guys there that had been given the job of designing pole-face windings. And what they were designing could be made to work; I was convinced of that. They convinced me that could be made to work. But whether they’d be needed for the magnets, there were reasons to believe that, and I think Maury felt that there were things that were more set in stone than I thought. If there were a known relationship between the quality of the magnetic field and the expense of the magnet, maybe you could choose a cost point and say, “Okay, that’s going to require pole-face windings. But then you had to put it all together in one budget and as one technical problem. I don’t think it was terribly satisfying, either to me or to Maury, the participation I had in that. I did get to know some of the guys, and see how that place worked, and I spent a number of pleasant afternoons or mornings, with [accelerator physicist and later Fermilab director] John Peoples, who was in charge of the magnets while I was doing that, and I learned something about him that…

Riordan:

That seems like this was another problem, that the magnet program management passed from hand to hand to hand, from Victor Karpenko to John Peoples to Tom Kirk…

Rees:

Yes, that’s right.

Riordan:

Now… which means that you spent all this time with each party coming up to speed on what’s happened beforehand and understanding all the compromises and decisions that have been made.

Rees:

It was a married mess, and I don’t think you could say that anybody planned to construct a married mess, but a marriage mess happened.

Riordan:

Is this something that was realized or that was highlighted when the… I remember there was a magnet review panel under Gus Voss and Tom Kirk. It was one of the first things that was done after Roy stepped in [ed., as SSC Director in early 1989].

Rees:

Yeah, I was on that, too.

Riordan:

You were on that?

Rees:

Gus Voss was visiting SLAC at that time, and I drove him up to Berkeley.

Riordan:

So, if you need to summarize, what was your participation in that panel, and what were the major recommendations that came out of it?

Rees:

I don’t even remember. I do remember there were three groups trying to build superconducting magnets, or four… There was Brookhaven and Fermilab, is that right?

Riordan:

Yes, and LBL.

Rees:

Oh, and Texas.

Riordan:

You’re talking inside your own [inaudible] field.

Rees:

Look. In an accelerator, from the point of view of the final enterprise, there are magnets. And you don’t know whether they came from Texas or the West Coast or the East Coast. And so, the people in Texas, who had their own approach, were trying to build things to do the same thing as the others.

Riordan:

But I thought that approach would have been pretty much ruled out by then.

Rees:

No. Well, at least, when I was involved with the…

Riordan:

It’s like the Bob Wilson approach.

Rees:

What is the Bob Wilson approach?

Riordan:

Three-tesla magnets.

Rees:

Superferric?

Riordan:

Yes, superferric magnets, and the sewer pipe in the desert…

Rees:

The Desertron, okay..

Riordan:

Two hundred kilometers around… something like that, a hundred miles around.

Rees:

It was Russ Huson [ed., director of the Texas Accelerator Center in the 1980s] that ran that operation. And all I know is we went down there, and I think that the idea was, “Should those guys be allowed to continue to do anything?” I don’t remember what memo came out.

Riordan:

So, this is about the time the Voss and Kirk panel was meeting?

Rees:

Yes. Wait a minute. Kirk wasn’t on the panel.

Riordan:

I thought he was one of the co-chairs. I meant to look at that report, coming out here.

Rees:

My recollection of that is very hazy. It was just one summer, there were just a few meetings. And Helen [Edwards, who led the SSC accelerator physics department] in 1989 was around.

Riordan:

This is like March through June, I think, when the report came in, of ‘89.

Rees:

Well, what did the report say?

Riordan:

I didn’t review it before coming out here. I guess what I’m wondering is that, at a certain point, a decision started being made to go from four to five centimeters, the magnet, the coil windings. I’m just trying to remember whether that began to emerge from the Voss panel.

Rees:

Okay, if you want to deal with that question with me, you’re going to have to bring me… I don’t have any of that stuff anymore. You’ll have to bring me the report of the panel, and make sure it’s one that I was on, and I will read it, and then I will probably remember what happened. But I don’t remember now.

Riordan:

That story is now during the Texas days, so maybe that will be saved for next time. And what I’ll do is I’ll Xerox the right pages of the panel report, and send them to you, and maybe the overview, the executive summary.

Rees:

All right, that was a panel that met in Berkeley.

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

When Voss was at SLAC.

Riordan:

But they hadn’t moved down to Texas until June.

Rees:

All right. I thought it was quite a long time before that. It wasn’t, at that time. We had no sense that this thing was going to be built in Waxahachie.

Riordan:

Well, ‘89—no, it was [decided in November 1988].

Rees:

Well, maybe you’ve got a panel I wasn’t on.

Riordan:

All right, well, I remember that there was a subpanel of this panel that you are on, and I will… I think we need some memory stimulants, here. This is the Texas days. We haven’t quite moved down to Texas, but I consider ‘89 forward the Texas Days.

Rees:

Yes. And I don’t even remember when I went down there and went to work for them. But my wife remembers [ed., it was much later, in 1992].

Riordan:

Okay, let’s save that for next time. We’ve got more than I thought. I thought we would just do one side of the tape.

Rees:

Okay. Good.

Riordan:

And I’ll get my digging and research done and documents and send you copies.

[End Session 1]

[Begin Session 2]

Riordan:

This is Michael Riordan, interviewing John Rees. We are in Los Altos, California, and it’s the 6th of May, 2010. Let me back up a little, John, and ask you, first of all, how did you get involved in the SSC? I understand it was in 1991, when you first came down to the laboratory.

Rees:

Yes. Well, my first involvement was on a committee of, I guess it was the AEC at that time [ed., the Atomic Energy Commission had been reorganized into the Department of Energy]. It was during the Reagan administration, but we covered that before, didn’t we?

Riordan:

We’ve covered all that material, earlier.

Rees:

The second involvement I had was, at the time in 1990-1991, on the Scientific Policy Committee for the SSC.

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

One time when I went to an SPC meeting, Paul Reardon [ed., then the SSC project manager] asked me what I was doing, and at the time I didn’t have any specific projects going on at SLAC, and I said I was pretty much at loose ends. And he said, “Well, could you come down here and help us out for a year or so?” I said yes, and then I talked to Roy Schwitters, the SSC director, and he said, “Yes, you can come down here under circumstances that won’t be onerous.” For people coming temporarily like that, they were able to pay you a stipend for their rental properties, so that you didn’t have to rent out your home.

Riordan:

So, you stayed on the SLAC salary?

Rees:

I stayed on the SLAC salary. I was on SLAC’s salary until the last year I was at SSC. When I became project manager, it became untenable for me to be on somebody else’s payroll, so I retired from SLAC, prematurely as it turned out, and went to work for URA [Universities Research Association, the SSC management and operations contractor].

Riordan:

What were you doing that first year, 1991? In fact, in exactly what month did you come down?

Rees:

We went down there in, I guess it was June 1991, and the specific job that they offered me, or asked me to do, was to work under Don Edwards, as the guy in overall charge of what they call the warm [ed., non-superconducting, ambient-temperature] machines: the linac, beam transfer lines, Low Energy Booster, and the High Energy Booster, and the Medium Energy Booster [ed., the latter two boosters were superconducting proton accelerators]

Riordan:

What about the linac [ed., the linear accelerator, the first stage in proton acceleration]?

Rees:

I said the linac.

Riordan:

Okay, so that would make sense. Your experience was in more in warm machines, as opposed to superconducting…

Rees:

That’s right. That’s right.

Riordan:

At what point did they begin to talk about you stepping up as project manager?

Rees:

Oh, that happened very suddenly, and to tell you the truth, I can’t remember when that was. I think I was there about a year, so it must have been in 1992. And I can’t or won’t say what the circumstances were that they asked me to take on the job of project manager. And I did. Panofsky had a lot to do with it.

Riordan:

Did it have anything to do with Paul Reardon not being able to function appropriately in the position?

Rees:

Well, it had to do with Paul Reardon’s availability, yes.

Riordan:

I think the last time [I interviewed you] you said that the project manager’s got to be there every day. And he wasn’t.

Rees:

Yes, that’s right.

Riordan:

He was off too much of the time. Was that at the core of the problem?

Rees:

Yes.

Riordan:

I always thought that January 1992 was when you stepped in.

Rees:

It could have been, I don’t…

Riordan:

And you probably don’t want to say any more about Paul.

Rees:

No. I think he took over as manager of one of the detector projects.

Riordan:

Did he have the right skills for that—as project manager? He had lots of administrative skills, but project management is more than administration, right?

Rees:

I believe Paul had the skills for that job, but his style of doing it was not very well suited.

Riordan:

Did he have conflicts with Ed Siskin [ed., the SSC general manager appointed by Secretary of Energy James Watkins]?

Rees:

Certainly.

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

That didn’t make him unique. So did the director [Roy Schwitters].

Riordan:

But you managed to establish a good working relationship with Ed Siskin.

Rees:

Yes.

Riordan:

Can you come up with any rationale for that?

Rees:

Well, certainly. It was clear to me from the outset that Ed Siskin was the general manager because the Department of Energy required him to be general manager, required him to serve that function. And that project could not be carried out by people who were constantly in a battle with the general manager. An organization can’t function like that. So, from the outset, I knew that I had to establish a good working relation with him, and I did.

Riordan:

Any reflections on his [Siskin’s] management abilities? His large-project management abilities? He came from Stone and Webster, after all.

Rees:

He was only at Stone and Webster for a few years. Before that he came from the AEC. He was a product of [Naval Reactors head Admiral Hyman] Rickover. He was a Rickover creation, and I think he went directly after he graduated from University of Pennsylvania to work for the AEC and worked his way up to what the AEC in those days called a project manager. I think they called him a… or maybe he was a [local author?]. I don’t know what the title that was under, but anyway, he was in the nuclear submarine business, and he worked for Rickover.

Riordan:

Then he knew the admiral [Secretary Watkins].

Rees:

And like many people who worked for Rickover, he became absolutely enthralled with Rickover. He loved Rickover. A lot of people that worked for Rickover felt that way. Rickover taught him the skills of being an AEC project manager on Rickover’s projects. So that’s where it came from, that’s where he got his skills. And at Stone and Webster, I don't know exactly what he did. He certainly got involved in projects, and he did some analysis, according to what I learned from another friend, a friend of both of us named Bill Matson. Ed was actually quite good at mathematical analyses of some kinds. He was trained as an electrical engineer. I know he was an electrical engineer. So, he did not lack the necessary skills.

Riordan:

Then he was a professional engineer, in electrical engineering, nuclear engineering, chemical engineering…

Rees:

No, he didn’t have academic credentials in all those fields. He learned on the job.

Riordan:

But it’s on his resume that he was a registered professional engineer, which is not easy to do, in all these fields.

Rees:

But he wasn’t a registered nuclear engineer. I would be astonished if he was. If the record says that, okay, [but] he never said anything like that to me. He learned about nuclear reactors and he learned about nuclear physics. He was sharp, smart. And in the Nuclear Navy, of course, what they were doing was engineering, or rather building nuclear reactors to operate underwater, deep underwater, reliably, and be safe in a boat where there’s no escape, with a lot of people in it. That was certainly a demanding job and required all kinds of care. And he had learned how those projects were managed.

Riordan:

And [the submarines had] a lot of systems interacting with one another. You can’t just be a specialist, if you’re a project manager in something like that.

Rees:

That’s right. But now he was not the project manager [at the SSC], he was the general manager of the laboratory.

Riordan:

Of the laboratory. Could you explain that?

Rees:

Of the whole enterprise.

Riordan:

Explain what that really meant.

Rees:

I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

Riordan:

What was his special role that he played?

Rees:

Look at the organization chart. Let’s see [looks at SSC organization chart].

Riordan:

Was he there simply because the admiral needed to stick somebody high up in the organization?

Rees:

Yes. Look at this organization chart, and you can figure out exactly why Ed was there. He’s between him [ed. Laboratory Director Roy Schwitters] and all the rest of the enterprise.

Riordan:

So, does that mean that he’s taking away the management responsibility of the director?

Rees:

If he wants to. That’s what the organization chart said.

Riordan:

Although there’s one area—notice in the organization chart—that he doesn’t really have control over, Physics Research.

Rees:

That’s true, that’s true. That was negotiated. So, it’s building the machine; it’s building this organization, and he did not have responsibility for building physics research equipment or for managing the research projects. That definitely went around Ed Siskin.

Riordan:

Everything having to do with building the collider, all of the civil construction, is all under Edward Siskin.

Rees:

That’s correct.

Riordan:

And a subset of that is under you, as the project manager.

Rees:

The project manager runs all this, yes, that’s right. And the general manager ran Laboratory Services [ed., a division under Associate Director Jack Story of EG&G]. This would be, essentially, a bunch of administrative functions. He ran those directly. That wasn’t… Now, let’s see if cost-and-schedule recording is…

Riordan:

It doesn’t show up explicitly in the…

Rees:

This was an old chart; it was in 1990 [ed., when Siskin stepped in]. So, it hadn’t been… But I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll tell you this, which goes back and bears on this project-management system we were talking about, and you were wondering: was there always one, or did it come into existence after this time? Which it did. I don’t know what the truth is, but I know that Ed Siskin believed that Paul Reardon had dragged his feet about establishing a formal project-control system because he didn’t want there to be a system on the basis of whose reports the Department of Energy could charge the laboratory with being behind schedule and over budget. That’s what Ed Siskin believed. I do not know that it’s the truth, but I do know that there was no way for that strategy to work. It had to have a project-control system.

Riordan:

So, did Siskin himself have to step in, and say, “Okay we’re going to [establish one]”?

Rees:

I do not know.

Riordan:

This would have been in 1991, presumably.

Rees:

Yes, and I don’t know what interactions were before, between Ed Siskin and Paul Reardon. I know Paul did not like Ed Siskin.

Riordan:

Another person who was really adamant against the project management control system was Helen Edwards.

Rees:

Yes.

Riordan:

Tom Elioff cited a certain example, where she rebuffed his overtures that they had to get one of these things established early in the game. [ed., Elioff was a UC Berkeley physicist who worked with the SSC Central Design Group in the 1980s, trying to set up a project-management control system for the SSC.]

Rees:

Yes, and Tom was right.

Riordan:

And she said, “I don’t build accelerators this way.”

Rees:

Yes, that’s right. And she didn’t build this accelerator, did she? She threw her hands up and left.

Riordan:

Well, looking at this project, at this organization chart, even by this time, she’s been shunted aside, to being Technical Director, but she doesn’t have operational…

Rees:

No, but in this era, she was very powerful. She wasn’t shunted aside.

Riordan:

This is October 1990.

Rees:

That’s right. She was very, very crucial. She was the Technical Director of this [project]. Paul had not much, nothing to do…

Riordan:

She’s establishing the design that these people are then going to implement, right?

Rees:

Yes, except these aren’t all implemented. The accelerator design was being [established] down there…

Riordan:

And her husband [Don Ewards] was in charge of accelerator design.

Rees:

That’s right. But all these enterprises required daily technical decisions. All the enterprises under the project manager, in this era, had to do with the design of the systems, and all those decisions were presided over by Helen. So, she was in no way shunted aside at this point.

Riordan:

Let’s talk about project-management control systems, generally. Did you use one for the SLC [ed., Stanford Linear Collider, on which he served as the project manager in the mid-1980s]?

Rees:

Yes. I used one for PEP. Panofsky used one for the [SLAC] linac.

Riordan:

As far back as the mid-1960s?

Rees:

Yes, yes.

Riordan:

So, they’ve always been used at SLAC.

Rees:

Yes.

Riordan:

But maybe not so much at Fermilab.

Rees:

I don’t know.

Riordan:

While you were at the site office of Fermilab when they were building it, right?

Rees:

No, no I wasn’t. I was in Washington. When they started building it, I was in Washington.

Riordan:

You were in the [AEC] construction management division, right?

Rees:

No, I was in the high-energy program office.

Riordan:

I got it wrong, John. You were in the high-energy physics office.

Rees:

That’s right. I worked so well in there.

Riordan:

You would not have had close enough visibility as to how they were actually managing the building of Fermilab.

Rees:

No, I did. I travelled all the time with a guy from construction, who later became the site manager at Fermilab, K. C. Brooks—Kennedy Brooks. A great man in the AEC construction division, but in those days the construction division was strictly conventional construction, not technical construction. And their attitude was that whatever the laboratory had in place in the way of a project-management system was okay. There was no battle about that, at that time. In the construction division, I don’t remember whether any of those guys had… I think some of them were from military construction, but they were from what was called the Army Corps of Engineers. That was a totally different kind of operation from the Nuclear Navy, which is where all these influences came from, or were brought to bear on the SSC.

Riordan:

So, what I’m getting at, was a project-management control system, or a cost-and-schedule control system, something that was gradually being taken up by high-energy physics at about the time the SSC was being built? Or was it something that certain laboratories, like SLAC, did all the time?

Rees:

Well, it was something that SLAC did on all its big projects. That I know.

Riordan:

This is a computerized system?

Rees:

No, it doesn’t have to be. The system has nothing to do with the computer. The computer is something that makes it easy. For the original construction of SLAC, the system was run entirely by people, who were drawing on… The critical-path diagrams were drawn, every month, by a human being, on the basis of information collected by running around and talking to all the individual group leaders and reading the financial reports, which every laboratory always had. They always had a bookkeeping system, and an accounting system, which told you how much was spent on each account. They always had—whether they called it that or not—a “work breakdown structure.” In other words, when you sit down to write out a cost estimate, the structure of the cost estimate, the structure of its presentation, is a work breakdown structure. These things weren’t given these names, maybe, by that time, but that’s what they were. And every laboratory had that. You never worked any place that didn’t have a work breakdown structure. When you look at the monthly financial reports, that’s the form it takes.

Riordan:

Was it easy, in that system, then, by hand, to see that a certain package of responsibilities might have been falling behind?

Rees:

Absolutely.

Riordan:

And would impact the entire schedule?

Rees:

Absolutely, because the diagrams were used to find the critical path. That meant the thing that was most in the way of getting a project finished on schedule, according to the current revised schedule. It was all done by hand.

Riordan:

And then when a project manager sees that happen, he’s got to throw in more resources or something, right?

Rees:

Yes. You start out by yelling at people. If that doesn’t do anything, then you might probably have to throw some more resources in.

Riordan:

They work overtime.

Rees:

Well, you ask the guy, “Why is this happening? What can you do to keep it from happening?” The way you run a project is you have constant meetings with the people who are responsible for the subsystems, and here’s a subsystem that the critical path [analysis] says is on a path such that it will not be completed until a month later than it’s scheduled to be completed. And of course that impacts everything on down the schedule. And so you get that group in for the monthly meeting, and you say, “What are you guys going to do? What can you do?” There are various options. You could relieve some of the standards that are being applied. They say, “This thing is not quite up to snuff yet, and it won’t go as fast as it needs to go.” Well, what would happen if we just let it go? “Well, the final machine wouldn’t be able to do this or that, one thing or the other.” Okay, you’re a project manager and say, “I’ll give up on that specification.” There’s one way of dealing with it. Another way of dealing with it is, a guy says, “I can’t get this done without another man.” You’ve got to give him some money, or in effect you give his schedule some money, you get somebody from some place that’s probably already working on the project. Move him over there and hope that you don’t get a critical-path bust where you took him away from.

Riordan:

So, it’s really keeping track of a lot of elements.

Rees:

Yes, that’s right. Well, the projects you’re talking about were hundred-million-dollar-sized projects. SLAC, PEP, and SLC were all hundred-million-dollar projects.

Riordan:

All right. This was a $10 billion project, the SSC.

Rees:

This was $10 billion, with a lot more parts, and a lot more forefront technology.

Riordan:

As long as we’re on that subject, Tom Kirk [ed., a Fermilab accelerator physicist who worked with the SSC Central Design Group on superconducting magnets] once made a statement that I question. He said that the complexity does not scale linearly with the number of dollars, it scales as the square root of the number of dollars, and I thought, “Gee, it might even scale as the square of the number of dollars.” What’s your opinion?

Rees:

Or the fourth power. My opinion is that it’s a stupid statement. To say that it scales in a known way, before you know what the project is, that’s just ignorant.

Riordan:

But comparing your experience on the SSC with the SLC, do you have any guess at the scaling?

Rees:

I tell you, it’s a fool’s errand.

Riordan:

But would you say that the square root of the number of dollars is an underestimate?

Rees:

Depends on the project. There are projects for which that could be true. But to say that for all projects, whether you’re building a submarine, or a superconducting accelerator…

Riordan:

No, let’s just keep it to accelerators.

Rees:

Then it depends on if it’s an electron or a proton accelerator. Go back to circular accelerators. Proton accelerators were found, pretty generally, to scale. The cost scaled pretty much like the energy, and that reason was because, in those days, you couldn’t get an electric field or magnetic field higher than such-and-such. And so, when the energy went up, the site size went up, the circumference went up, and so forth, so it scaled pretty much linearly.

Riordan:

Okay. But when…

Rees:

All right, now, let’s go to electron accelerators.

Riordan:

But what I’m talking about is the complexity of the project manager’s job. How does that scale? The difficulty of the job. It’s very subjective.

Rees:

Well, the way big projects get managed is by delegating. Typically, I’d say that on projects in the scale that I’ve worked on, from SPEAR to SSC, the number of people reporting to the project manager tends to be about the same, because when you get too many people reporting to you, you get yourself some sub-managers because you can’t keep track of all of them. The information has to be collected and bunched before it gets to you as the project manager. So, I would say, the bigger the project doesn’t mean the larger the number of people you have to deal with and meet with every week. That’s more or less constant, in my taste. Panofsky had a somewhat different view. He was so smart it didn’t make much difference how many people reported to him. He could still handle it. But most people do it the way I’m describing. Now, what does happen when the project gets larger is that you worry more, because there’s a bigger chunk of change at stake, and there’s the danger of what happened to SSC. Congress decides, “Well, this is costing too much, we’re not going to do it.” So, you may have more trouble sleeping.

Riordan:

Did you have good deputies, or assistants or associates, working and reporting directly to you at SSC?

Rees:

Yes, I did.

Riordan:

Was George Robertson in there [ed., the civil engineer who supervised SSC construction and became deputy project manager under Paul Reardon]?

Rees:

George did not report to me.

Riordan:

In this chart, here, I see he reported to Reardon.

Rees:

He reported to Reardon, that’s right. When I took over the job, he went elsewhere.

Riordan:

You must have had a deputy for those days when you couldn’t be there.

Rees:

I didn’t have a specific deputy. The one thing, as I said, my idea was that I’d be there. I did go away for a better part of a month, once, and I think I left Gerry Dugan in charge. [ed., Gerald Dugan was a Fermilab accelerator physicist who went to Texas to work at the SSC on the superconducting accelerators in the injector chain.] Gerry Dugan ran the… Yes, I guess I did have deputies, I’m sorry. I had deputies, but it wasn’t organized the way Paul’s were. Paul had this single deputy project manager, George Robertson, a retired general from the Army Corps of Engineers.

Riordan:

That’s what I thought.

Rees:

And he was a very loyal person. Loyal to the person he worked for.

Riordan:

Did he follow Paul wherever he went after stepping down as…?

Rees:

No, no, he didn’t.

Riordan:

Where did he end up?

Rees:

He went to… Where did he go?

Riordan:

Did he go to Civil Construction?

Rees:

I think he went over to Administrative Services. I think Bob Van Ness left, and George Robertson ran Administrative Services, but don’t trust that. If you really want to know, you need to get a later organization chart. Find out where he went.

Riordan:

So, Van Ness left?

Rees:

Well, you look that up. I think Van Ness left. Yes.

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

But what I did… What Don Edwards had done, when I went there, is he had taken me and put me in charge of the injectors, what’s called the injectors here [on the organization chart]. And he had already hired Dugan, but he wasn’t there yet, to take charge of the superconducting machines. It was a completely different organization chart when I took over.

Riordan:

I tried to find a later chart, but I couldn’t. I probably have one somewhere.

Rees:

Yes, you probably do. But I had a person, let’s see… Dick Briggs came out of the [SSC] director’s office because I think there was some kind of a fuss and kerfuffle with the Department of Energy and, I think, they wanted Briggs out of there. I don’t really know why. [ed., Lawrence Livermore accelerator physicist Richard Briggs was the first SSC project manager and also served as SSC deputy director from 1990, remaining in that position.]

Riordan:

I think the early reports show that he wasn’t functioning well as project manager, so he became just Roy’s deputy.

Rees:

That’s right. And that’s what he was when I got there. But then he came out of there at the time I took over as project manager, and he took charge of what I had been in charge of, the warm machines. And at that time he was there, Dugan took charge of the superconducting machines, and basically I regarded Dugan as my deputy. But I didn’t do much deputizing. I never did.

Riordan:

What about John Ives? He would have played a big role.

Rees:

Oh, John Ives was a… yes.

Riordan:

He was the original [head of Civil Construction].

Rees:

Yes, he and I got along very nicely.

Riordan:

Was he an Army guy?

Rees:

Navy. Yes, he was an admiral. I think he retired as a rear admiral.

Riordan:

Okay, so he had extensive civil engineering experience.

Rees:

Yes.

Riordan:

On large projects?

Rees:

I was completely happy with him.

Riordan:

He would have been the one managing the tunneling, right?

Rees:

That’s right. But one of the reasons that the tunneling hadn’t gotten started was that they weren’t making decisions. And the decisions that had to be made were project manager-level decisions, and Paul wasn’t at the meetings where the decision-making came up. So, from the time I took over as project manager, I went to a weekly meeting with John Ives and the whole PBK… what was it?

Riordan:

PBMK? [ed., Parsons Brinckerhoff/Morrison Knudsen, the consortium responsible for architecture, engineering, and construction management (AE/CM) on the SSC]

Rees:

Parsons Brinckerhoff—PBMK. See, I had Parsons Brinckerhoff working on the PEP project, too. So, I went with him [Ives] to a weekly meeting on the status of construction. And what decisions were needed, I just made them. That’s how we got the tunneling started, and we had, what, 23 miles of tunnel [completed] by the time it was killed.

Riordan:

And as I recall, those came in under budget, too.

Rees:

That’s right.

Riordan:

Would you say that was one of the shining successes of the project, was all the tunneling that got done, and under budget?

Rees:

Absolutely. That worked. And that would have gone on and worked, we would have gotten that job done. I have no doubt in my mind at all about that.

Riordan:

Did you ever have to go over Siskin’s head, or around him, to Roy for anything?

Rees:

No.

Riordan:

Did Roy have any power, if there had been [something like that]?

Rees:

I don’t know. I never tested it.

Riordan:

Did you ever see evidence that Siskin could, or would, be talking to the admiral [Energy Secretary Watkins] directly, and getting feedback from him?

Rees:

Yes, he did it all the time. That’s what he was there for.

Riordan:

So, he definitely checked off with the admiral on key things.

Rees:

Sure he did. The admiral wouldn’t talk to Roy.

Riordan:

So, in a way, then, you were reporting to the guy who had the power.

Rees:

That’s right.

Riordan:

The decision-making power.

Rees:

And we had no trouble getting decisions made. That is, we had no bureaucratic trouble, getting decisions made.

Riordan:

But Roy still would have had authority over the detectors, the experimental physics portion?

Rees:

Yes, absolutely.

Riordan:

Which was about a $1 billion activity, at that time.

Rees:

Yes, I don’t think Ed Siskin was exercised about that. I never heard him upset about that at all.

Riordan:

That still would have had to feed into the cost-and-schedule control system, right?

Rees:

Sure, it did. Well, no, there was a big battle about that. Siskin asked me, one time… He had wanted to have one project-management control system for the whole enterprise. The whole budget, including the research division. And he said, “I think I’m just going to put this thing together by fiat.” And he said, “Would you mind?” Since I was basically running the project-management control system, [he asked me,] “Would you mind if I do this?” And I said no, I don’t care. He sent out a memo, and there was an instant revolution. All the detector groups, Gilman and everybody that worked for him, rose up in righteous wrath about this, and said, “We will not tolerate this. We will not do it.” So, they didn’t. That’s all there was to it. There was a lot of animosity, and I was a victim of some of it.

Riordan:

That brings up an important point that, in order for this system to work, you’ve got to have buy-in from the associate directors at all levels. And because they’ve got to provide data, they’ve got to provide whatever algorithms are used to assemble that data, which has got to come out of those divisions.

Rees:

That’s right. And they didn’t [cooperate], and so it never got put together, and when the project was killed, there was still … That [revolution] happened shortly before the project was killed, and there was still pretty much animosity, when the laboratory was killed, among the people who had been doing cost and schedule for the…

Riordan:

Let me talk about one particular individual over in that part of the chart, Barry Barish.

Rees:

Why are you saying that? He wasn’t there.

Riordan:

He was the head of GEM, the [Gammas, Electrons, Muons] detector. [ed., Barish was a Caltech high-energy physicist who had previously led a major Fermilab neutrino experiment.]

Rees:

Oh, was he? Okay. I had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Riordan:

Do you have any reaction [to him]?

Rees:

I’ve had a lot to do with Barry Barish in my life, but not anything to do with that.

Riordan:

What do you think of him as a project manager?

Rees:

I think he’s probably pretty good. He’s the project manager of the International Linear Collider. You’ll have to talk to somebody else. I had no experience with him as a project manager. I had experience with him as a professor. One of his students decided to go into accelerator physics at SLAC, Lenny Rifkin.

Riordan:

Yes, I’ve heard of him.

Rees:

Okay, basically, he was my graduate student because Barry didn’t do accelerator physics. So, when Lenny wanted to move over into accelerator physics, he asked me to supervise him. So, I did—my sole graduating graduate student.

Riordan:

I talked to Barish at the APS Council meeting. I’m a member and he’s the President-elect. And he said that they tried to implement a project-management control system and interface with the one that Siskin had put together, and they finally gave up and just did it themselves.

Rees:

Well, that could well have happened when the project-management system wasn’t coming together in the era before I took over. Because I never was obstructionist about it at all, and I guess Paul Reardon may have been. Not that that would have caused the problem with GEM, but it wasn’t coming together. They did have a bunch of people working on it, and it simply was not coming together, so if Barish and company were trying to interface with something that was changing every week and not coming into being, of course he would be frustrated.

Riordan:

Yes. In a way, isn’t it true that trying to implement a project-management control system in the midst of a project is an enormously difficult task?

Rees:

Yes, even if it’s not in the midst of…

Riordan:

Could it be likened to trying to repair an airplane in flight? Would that be an apt metaphor?

Rees:

I don’t think it’s very apt, no.

Riordan:

No? Isn’t it better to have these in place at the beginning?

Rees:

Oh, yes, no question about that. With an airplane, you’re describing a situation in which if you don’t get it fixed and damn soon, it’s all over. And that’s not the way it was in the early days. It is much, much preferable to be able to start a project with a cost-and-schedule control system installed at the outset, with buy-in achieved…

Riordan:

Yes, people agree to use it.

Rees:

“Okay, this’ll do; this is how we’ll do it.” And in fact, that’s the way it worked on the SLAC projects I’m talking about. It was set up at the outset. Nobody raised any hell about it. If they raised any hell about it, it got incorporated into the structure early. And then we just ran [with it] after that.

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

So, that would be much better. In this case, Helen’s attitude made it very difficult to get the thing implemented. The fact that Paul and Siskin were at swords drawn, that made it difficult. You’re certainly not going to get buy-in form the people that work for Paul if Paul doesn’t buy in, right? Now, what happened after I took over was that the [system] had a new estimate installed in it that had been brought into it, and the thing started to work. And the first thing that happened was, Ed asked me to go around and give talks to all the groups. He didn’t tell me to do this, but what I did was show them that I was entirely in favor of this thing. We were going to manage this project using the project-management control system. And that I thought it was a damn fine thing. And that I’d used these things before.

Riordan:

And would the fact that this was coming from a high-energy physicist with some experience in project management, would that carry some weight?

Rees:

Well, I hope so. All I know is, it worked. I’m sure there was grumbling, and there always is grumbling.

Riordan:

But does lack of buy-in, at least in the initial years, was that a problem?

Rees:

Yes, the two highest-ranking technical folks on that side of the organization chart were not buying in, and we were just screwed.

Riordan:

Cipriano, when I talked to him—and that was not a taped interview; it was just in his big posh office at the Pentagon—said he almost considered calling everything to a dead halt so that they could get the project-management system up and running.

Rees:

Yes, he would have thought that.

Riordan:

And he said, “But the burn rate was a million dollars a day.”

Rees:

I don’t know where he got that.

Riordan:

Well, I figure, that’s $365 million a year.

Rees:

Yes, but I don’t know where he got his figure. I don’t know where he got a way of pricing it.

Riordan:

The time he just called it right into a halt, if he could have done that, if he had the authority to do that, would…

Rees:

Well, he probably could have done that. Yes, I think he had the authority to do that.

Riordan:

Did he?

Rees:

Yes, you bet your ass. He also could call up the admiral every day, if he wanted to, and get him on the phone. So, Siskin’s probably the one that talked him out of it. They were very close.

Riordan:

Yes, I saw them operating in Washington, going to the various congressional hearings together.

Rees:

This was when the SSC was alive?

Riordan:

Yes, this was in 1991, when I was in Washington.

Rees:

Yes, they would have gone together, and probably both gave testimony. They crucified Siskin at the last hearing after that.

Riordan:

Was there an incident? Somebody else said that you were at one of these hearings.

Rees:

That was a different kind of a hearing. I’m talking about the time Siskin was crucified—these were the budget hearings, and they happened every year. Who was that guy, the representative from Michigan?

Riordan:

Dingell? [ed., Michigan Democrat John Dingell, then chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and its Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee]

Rees:

Dingell. John Dingell.

Riordan:

Oh god.

Rees:

He had what was called…

Riordan:

An Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

Rees:

Is that what it was called? I don’t know. Anyway, what he was doing was getting in favor, I mean, that was his Congress.

[End of side of tape]

Rees:

All right. I got subpoenaed to talk to the staff of the Dingell committee. I never was in a hearing, an actual congressional hearing. And they were on a witch hunt about the management of the SSC. They were the ones who publicized these terribly wasteful purchases of plants to put in the offices…

Riordan:

I always thought that was a red herring.

Rees:

It certainly was. And they were after me. I guess they were after everybody that was in a fairly high position there. I spent a very uncomfortable hour, maybe two hours, with the staff.

Riordan:

Down in Texas?

Rees:

No, I had to go to Washington. It was in the basement of one of the House office buildings, wherever Dingell’s office was. So, that was no fun, because they weren’t after anything substantive. They just wanted dirt. For example, they asked me about the arrangement that SSC had for people like me to come from other laboratories, on temporary stay, and this lavish provision of monthly rent. I was still on salary from SLAC, and I was getting my rent paid in Dallas, and they figured that was pretty good stuff. That was the kind of thing it was. Not nice.

Riordan:

So, it had nothing to do with the status of the cost-and-schedule control system.

Rees:

No, they didn’t ask me a thing about that.

Riordan:

We were talking about Joe Cipriano. Did you see any evidence of his less-than-harmonious relationship with Roy Schwitters?

Rees:

No, I didn’t see any, because I was never there when the two of them were in the same room. I met with Joe once a week, and we started with daggers drawn, but I found out, like with Siskin, if I just calmly sat there, he would eventually broach some subject, and I would chat about it. He had questions he wanted to ask. When he found out that he could ask the questions, and I would give him an honest answer, it was no longer unpleasant to meet with him. And he once told me that, when he took over the project, when he took over the DOE site office, that he just thought for sure that the problem with this project was going to be technical. We were going to screw up something technical because of the way we were going at things. And he said, “I found out I was totally wrong. That’s not the problem with the project at all.”

Riordan:

What did he come away thinking was the problem with the project?

Rees:

Well, I think that he thought [it was] the problem we’ve been talking about, the management of the project.

Riordan:

Okay. There was always this question—and Pief raised it—of the DOE site office, the DOE oversight people, stepping across the line from overseeing and approving of actions taken by the line laboratory staff, and actually trying to manage it. Did you see evidence of that?

Rees:

I think Pief was coming from the experience that he had with the AEC. The AEC had a small staff, it had trust in him and in the laboratory people, and it had no motivation to do that, and it didn’t do that. Pief had a marvelous relation with his Cipriano, [whose] name was Larry Moore, and they had a wonderful, loving relationship. And that’s the way he thought it should be. And so, when he saw the much more complicated interface that had developed in the modern era, between Department of Energy and SSC laboratory, it seemed to him to be terribly invasive, and he thought that that was a problem that should be solved. My view was that it was a problem that couldn’t be solved. It was there, and the only way to deal with that problem was to deal with that problem. In other words, you just accept it, that we’re going to keep trying to do that, and you are going to keep fending them off.

Riordan:

But Cipriano built up this site office of people who had no, or virtually no, experience of having worked with the high-energy physics community before, whereas in previous instances the site office would have people that really understood the high-energy physics culture and maybe even had come out of that culture.

Rees:

No, you didn’t.

Riordan:

Oh really?

Rees:

Which one do you want to talk about? SLAC? Larry Moore had absolutely no experience with high-energy physicists—or nuclear physicists, as they were called in those days.

Riordan:

Yes, maybe I’m thinking more of the Fermilab site office.

Rees:

Well, let’s go to the Fermilab site. I know Kennedy C. Brooks, who ran that site office during the latter part of the construction. Larry Moore was first put into that office, and that didn’t work out. And then they got Brooks in there, and that did work out. He worshipped Bob Wilson.

Riordan:

And he had no previous experience of working with [high-energy physicists]?

Rees:

No, he was a conventional construction guy, and the people he got in there had had absolutely no experience with physics or physicists. This is not true of those people that came out to it… We, in the high-energy program office in Washington, or in Germantown under Wallenmeyer, we were all physicists.

Riordan:

Okay, but not in the site offices.

Rees:

No, we were not in the site office. The first thing we had to do when we got to the site was go to the site office and talk to everybody and soothe down any ruffled feathers. That was one of our jobs. One of my jobs was to do that.

Riordan:

I had interactions with two guy in that office besides Cipriano, the DOE site office of the SSC: Gene Dretke, who was in civil construction, was there pretty early, and then Greg Haas, who was, I think, their physicist, right?

Rees:

Oh, I remember they did get a guy that had a physics degree, yes. That was the only physicist I ever saw in one of those offices, but I never met him, I don’t think. If I did, I don’t remember it.

Riordan:

And they both struck me as [having] less-than-stellar credentials.

Rees:

Well, of course. If you come out with a PhD in physics, and you take a job as a bureaucrat, obviously you’re not one of the brightest stars.

Riordan:

Well, I’m not even [sure he had a PhD].

Rees:

But we do graduate poor students.

Riordan:

Well, getting back to Cipriano. He did institute this Change Control Board that you must have had to interact with day and night. That was, as I saw it, his way of controlling the project, or one of his ways of controlling the project.

Rees:

Yes, that’s right.

Riordan:

How did you find that board?

Rees:

It was okay.

Riordan:

You never…

Rees:

We probably should have done it in the project, because change control is a part of the PMCS. Remember, a part of the PMCS is the estimate. Now, when you discover that something is going to cost more, you need to change the estimate. And in case that has any impact on the schedule, you need to change the schedule. So, it’s a significant project act, to make a change.

Riordan:

Okay, but it looks to me that, in this case, he was controlling the contingency, and you could only use the contingency by going through the Change Control Board to get approval.

Rees:

That’s right.

Riordan:

Was that the case for, say, previous projects at SLAC? Did the DOE site office control the contingency?

Rees:

Well, I don’t think I ever had to use one either in PEP or the last project in the modern era, the SLC. I don’t think I had to have a Change Control Board. I think I simply did it myself, in the regular meetings. And when there was a significant change, an actual change to the budget, I also had monthly meetings with the project office, with the AEC [ed., DOE].

Riordan:

The site office.

Rees:

The site office, and I had to tell them. So, it’s the same sort of thing.

Riordan:

But who was sitting on those funds? SLAC?

Rees:

In my case, we could make decisions about the use of the contingency. Now I don’t remember whether Joe Cipriano actually sat on, was chairman of the Change Control Board. I thought I was chairman of the Change Control Board. My memory of that is insufficient. I remember meetings of the board.

Riordan:

Who was on the board?

Rees:

Oh, hell, I don’t remember who all was in it.

Riordan:

Joe, you, Siskin?

Rees:

No. Siskin wasn’t on it. There were twenty people on that board. I don’t remember who the hell they were.

Riordan:

From both the project and the site office?

Rees:

I didn’t remember that there were site office people on the board. I thought they were the site office people observing. That’s just beyond my [recollection]; I dealt with the board. I didn’t find the board onerous. I didn’t go back and grind my teeth at the end of a board meeting.

Riordan:

Was this something that might have been an import from the Department of Defense way of doing things?

Rees:

Absolutely.

Riordan:

This [Change Control Board] hadn’t made much of an appearance in previous high-energy physics projects.

Rees:

No, the only previous project of any significant magnitude was Fermilab. And I’m sure that Bob [Wilson] controlled the contingency himself. As a matter of fact, he didn’t use it. The project was funded at $320 million, I think, and he said, “I’m going to build this for $250 million,” so his budget was completely different from the agency’s budget, and the agency certainly wasn’t nervous, because he was trying to save them $70 million.

Riordan:

And he sent some money back.

Rees:

Yes, they hoped he would send some money back. Now, when he got to the end of the project and had spent only $250 million, he said, “You should let me have the rest of that $70 million, and I’ll make it a better laboratory,” and he got away with it because they loved him.

Riordan:

One item that must have come before the Change Control Board is the quadrupole magnet apertures. And I remember, in 1991, this was the big issue that Helen quit over.

Rees:

Yes.

Riordan:

The quad apertures had somehow been overlooked in the [dipole] aperture increase to five centimeters, and they were still at four centimeters. And for several reasons including, I guess, impedance on the beam, and also because they were now beginning to want to put a liner in there [ed., the beam pipe], it became obvious that you needed to go to a five-centimeter aperture.

Rees:

I do not remember.

Riordan:

You weren’t there at the time.

Rees:

No, I was there. I just don’t remember. Well, wait a minute. I was there, but I was not project manager when Helen quit. That was before I became project manager, and all that I remember is that it was argued, with what appeared to be merit, that the quad apertures had been overlooked. I’m not sure that was really true. But when the aperture of the bending magnets was increased, they didn’t increase the bore of the quads, and my guess is that at that time, they simply said, “Oh hell, we could probably get away with it. We don’t want to raise the estimate.” Because there were people who really wanted to keep that estimate down. Remember, people who came from Fermilab were used to Bob Wilson, who didn’t like to spend money on anything.

Riordan:

But Helen really wanted to, and I think the Machine Advisory Committee had said, “You really need to do this.”

Rees:

I think you’re right. I think you’re right.

Riordan:

And it was a $50 million dollar add-on.

Rees:

Yes. It was $50 million?

Riordan:

Fifty million. [ed., Riordan had seen a figure as high as $70 million on a list of pending items that the Change Control Board had yet to approve in September 1993, but recalls $50 million from the discussions that occurred in 1991, while he was at URA and visiting the SSC Lab.]

Rees:

Only $50 million?

Riordan:

Yes. Okay? Actually, later, I can show you an entry…

Rees:

But at that point, that was pocket change! I don’t know why they didn’t just do it.

Riordan:

Because they had just settled on $8.25 billion.

Rees:

Yes, but $8.255 billion isn’t that much different! [ed., $8.30 billion.]

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

I just don’t see that, if you’re really right. I bet it was $500 million.

Riordan:

Well, here, I’ll show you a number. This was in the very last progress report, it’s September 1993, and where do we have some items here? [Riordan looks through document]

Rees:

You’d be lucky to see a number in those.

Riordan:

Let’s see if I can find it here. [reading] “Condition red.” Here we are. I think this is it, here. These are items, a list of laboratory-approved Change Control Board actions, and it says, “quadrupole aperture and associated 3B”—I don’t know what that means—the change is forty to fifty millimeters. “Awaiting DOE approval of contingency.” I think this is $70 million.

Rees:

Oh, I see. Well, that may not have been all [due to the] quadrupole aperture [ed., there may have been additional expenses for “associated 3B” items]. I don’t know. I’m not able to help you with this. This must have been while I was sitting on this board. This was the last report?

Riordan:

This is the September 1993 report.

Rees:

Yes. Well, I was involved, but I do not remember.

Riordan:

It appears that this item, which I think was a point of contention between the lab people and the DOE site office, had still not been approved, and that’s going to hold up the construction of the collider ring.

Rees:

Yes.

Riordan:

If Babcock and Wilcox is sitting on the sidelines, getting ready to make quadrupole magnets, and they still don’t know what the aperture is going to be… [ed., Babcock and Wilcox is the company that had won the contract to fabricate the superconducting quadrupole magnets.]

Rees:

Yes, I don’t know that it was one of the most profound problems we were facing at that time.

Riordan:

But working with the Change Control Board was not a huge difficulty?

Rees:

It wasn’t for me. You’re always going to complain if you’re building something and you say, “Oh, I’ve got to change this,” and then it turns out that that means you have to go to the Change Control Board. It’s not as easy as if you could just change it by yourself. You’re going to bitch, but I don’t think that would’ve caused the project to founder.

Riordan:

Okay. Let me go through some of these questions on the first page I have here.

Rees:

Please do, it’s getting late.

Riordan:

Yes. The EG&G people? [ed., EG&G was one of the two companies that initially “teamed” with URA to win the SSC management and operations contract.]

Rees:

What about them?

Riordan:

Was this a separate fiefdom they had, within Technical Services?

Rees:

Well, in a way it was, yes. It was EG&G people working for an EG&G boss.

Riordan:

Did it extend to Administrative Services like procurement, and things like that?

Rees:

They did a lot of that, yes. Jack Story ran the show. They were okay.

Riordan:

I’ve seen various reports, including [Stanford physicist David] Ritson’s, saying that there just were too many of them, that the place was flooded with EG&G people. And there were like 600 of them at the end, according to those monthly progress reports.

Rees:

I guess. But look what they were doing, these services were all required.

Riordan:

They were providing valuable services?

Rees:

Oh, absolutely, they were a chunk of the laboratory that if they weren’t doing that, somebody else would have had to do that, and there would have had to be another Jack Story running it. Now it may be that, were it organized by somebody from academia, it would have been done cheaper. Sure, I agree to that. But I don’t know. Surely Ritson knows we had to measure magnets, and we had to have facilities engineering, and maintenance. These services had to be carried out. EG&G’s style was, “Sure, we’ll do that.” And they didn’t give you a money statement at the beginning, and then, the next month, you found that they’d had ten people to do it when you thought it would be done by one.

Riordan:

So, there could be some of the cost overruns that are occurring, due to excess people.

Rees:

Yes, except we were not playing by cost overruns. That’s not what killed the project.

Riordan:

But they seem to be beginning to appear at the end.

Rees:

Oh, there were cost overruns all the time. In the first place, that project would sure as hell not have been finished for $8 billion, okay?

Riordan:

Okay, yes.

Rees:

As a matter of fact, I don’t know that it would have been finished for under $12 billion, but it would have been finished, and it wasn’t the fact that the costs were increasing that killed it. It was the fact that it was a multibillion-dollar project, and there were things going on in the government, in the White House, that needed the money, and it got killed on that account. In [comparison with] military projects, we were doing fine.

Riordan:

Yes, the numbers here [pointing at report]—this is the September 1993 report, which shows numbers here that I calculated at 5.4% over budget.

Rees:

Yes. That’s a good project.

Riordan:

And 8% behind schedule.

Rees:

That’s good project management.

Riordan:

Okay.

Rees:

I think we were also being forced to stretch out the schedule, by the way.

Riordan:

Yes, that would be a large portion of that $12 billion you just cited, right?

Rees:

Part of the impetus for that was coming from the White House.

Riordan:

Yes, I’m certain that’s where major [cost growth] came from. The Lockheed systems integration people … There were about, I don’t know, fifty or seventy of them.

Rees:

Yes. And we required them.

Riordan:

What were they doing?

Rees:

They were doing systems integration.

Riordan:

What is that?

Rees:

I never got clear on exactly what it was, but you had to do it. It was keeping surveillance over the interfaces between the systems. You’ve got one group building the… I don’t know, let’s say you’re building a linac, right? That’s your group, and you’re spending whatever you spend on it—$50 million or something to build a linac. And somebody else is off someplace building a control system. And somebody else is off putting in conventional facilities with water pipes, and air conditioning ducts, and the electricity delivery, and all that. And now your guy building the linac has to have an interface with all of this other stuff: the size of the pipes, the kind of plugs that you plug together to carry information signals, the power controls to shut off the power in case of fire—those are all interfaces. And it is not trivial to make sure that the linac is going to fit with all those things that you are building, or that are coming from the control system, but that’s interface control.

Riordan:

But how did we do that on smaller projects, like SLAC or Fermilab? It still had to be done.

Rees:

That’s right. What you did in something like Fermilab, is you were all in the same area, if not in the same building, and you walked around and talked to people. You remember when Hewlett-Packard talked about management by “walking around”? Okay, well, interfacing by walking around is the way we built accelerators before.

Riordan:

Would there be one person whose particular responsibility was that these parts have to fit together? Or was that just the project manager’s responsibility?

Rees:

I had a guy on PEP, Helmut Biedermann. He was in charge of making sure that everything fit everything else, and that the specifications were compatible between different systems, and he did it.

Riordan:

So, we now get to the scale of the SSC, which is maybe a hundred times bigger, in terms of dollars, and you need fifty people from Lockheed to do that.

Rees:

I can’t guarantee you that you needed 50 people, but Lockheed did this kind of work because they built huge aerospace systems, which had the same kinds of problems. They had an outfit in Houston that was used to doing that for NASA, and they were looking for work. It was a division of Lockheed looking for work, and they came and talked to the lab management, and said, “Gee, we can give you these people, whenever you need them, you can ask us for one and we’ll have him there in a week, and when you’re through with him, you can send him back to us.”

Riordan:

I imagine it made DOE happy to know they were there.

Rees:

Yes, that’s right.

Riordan:

The final area I want to talk about is the superconducting dipoles.

Rees:

I know nothing about superconductivity.

Riordan:

All right, but at what stage was General Dynamics? [Was it] beginning to manufacture them? Was there a preliminary production run?

Rees:

You have to talk to somebody else. The guy I would send you to would be Gerry Dugan. Gerry Dugan is, I think, still a professor at Cornell. I think he’s retiring, and they spend half their time down in Palm Desert or someplace like that. They bought a place down there. Someplace in California. I’m sure you can find Dugan’s number. You can look up Dugan’s email address at the Cornell University site, and just write him and tell him that I sic’ed you on him.

Riordan:

Well, he wrote that report at the end [ed., the so-called “black book” on the SSC, a DOE publication], and he co-edited it, so I’ll check that first. But I’ve seen reports that there finally had been a production run of some 50 or 100 superconducting dipoles at General Dynamics at the plant, not built at Fermilab [ed., at the General Dynamics plant in Hammond, Louisiana].

Rees:

You mean SSC?

Riordan:

Yes, the SSC dipoles, and they were coming in something like 50% over budget.

Rees:

I just don’t know. I never heard that.

Riordan:

That’s another item that falls under the project manager’s responsibility, right? [points at organization chart] Magnet Systems.

Rees:

Yes, if it was more than a rumor, I would have had to do something about it.

Riordan:

Did you have trouble getting information through Tom Bush? [ed., Bush was an engineering physicist by training who came up through the Navy, managing production of Polaris and Poseidon missile systems.]

Rees:

I don’t think Gerry did.

Riordan:

Gerry would have been the one interacting with him?

Rees:

I always had trouble getting information out of Tom Bush, too. Yes, I always had that problem. Tom Bush was a thorn.

Riordan:

And that’s on one or two billion dollars of the total that you’re trying to manage.

Rees:

Yes, that’s right. Now, interestingly enough, I always felt that Tom Bush was not nearly smart enough to run that enterprise, because Tom Bush was not very bright.

Riordan:

I had some interaction with him.

Rees:

You did?

Riordan:

Yes.

Rees:

But he was very savvy. He was, I think, good at managing contracts, and Ray Stiening always told me, “Don’t worry about Bush; he’s going to get the job done.” So, I may have been prejudiced against him. When I discovered that he had a PhD in physics and he didn’t understand Maxwell’s equations, I was…

Riordan:

He has a PhD in engineering physics from the Naval Postgraduate School down here in Monterey.

Rees:

Oh, okay. I never even knew what that was.

Riordan:

But he still needed to pass tests on Maxwell’s equations.

Rees:

Yes, it was more elementary; he didn’t understand Faraday’s Law. But, anyway, as I say, Ray said, “He’s going to get the job done,” and Ray’s very astute.

Riordan:

All right.

Rees:

Yes, you make a good point. That would have been under my jurisdiction, and I would have had to do something about it. But frankly, I took that job with the idea that I was only going to be there a couple of years, and I had never had any experience whatsoever, or interest, in superconducting magnets. I just knew very little about superconductivity, beyond the simple quantum mechanics of it. And I figured I wasn’t going to need to get that expertise to survive for a couple years in that job. So, I never got it, and it was a failing of mine, which Congress relieved me of ever correcting.

Riordan:

When you were trying to talk to the Magnet Division, could you go to Roger Coombes, who was his [Bush’s] deputy, just go around Bush and say…? [ed., Coombes was another SLAC physicist who went to Texas to work on the SSC and served as Bush's second in command of the Magnet Division.]

Rees:

I could, but that would make Roger very nervous. Roger lived near me in Dallas, as a matter of fact. I ran into him in the neighborhood.

Riordan:

I didn’t [know that].

Rees:

No, I’d go to Gerry. Once Gerry took over, I didn’t have to deal with Tom Bush any more at all. Tom Bush was damned near impossible. See, my subdirectors were… Well, Ed Worth was gone, but [Ted] Kozman, Bush, John Ives.

Riordan:

Where was Dugan? Was he your deputy up here [points to the organization chart]?

Rees:

Yes, he was.

Riordan:

Okay, so he would handle Bush.

Rees:

He was the deputy in charge of all these [divisions]. Kozman I had no problem with. I could deal with Kozman. But Bush … Well actually, Bush didn’t report to Gerry, but Gerry could talk to Bush, so it worked.

Riordan:

Who did Bush report to? You?

Rees:

Yes, he did, he reported to me, but I couldn’t even get him to come to a meeting. I’d schedule meetings for all those associate directors, and Bush just wouldn’t come. He was impossible. He was running a fiefdom. He played golf with Ed Siskin and Robertson. I think he figured that as long as he had Siskin as a buddy, that he could just stiff me.

Riordan:

So, in a way, he’s going around you to your boss.

Rees:

That’s right.

Riordan:

That’s not good.

Rees:

I don’t know if that would ever have blown up. But Bush had a way of not doing anything that I could take him to court for.

Riordan:

But if indeed these magnets were going to come in 50% over, there would have…

Rees:

Yes.

Riordan:

The feces were going to hit the fan, at some point.

Rees:

Yes, well, if I’d called a meeting to talk about that problem, Bush would have shown up, or would have explained why he couldn’t, when we had another meeting.

Riordan:

Well, let’s wrap this up. You said that Congress relieved you of that responsibility, but before that, DOE was closing in. It was going to take the management completely out of Roy’s hands and give it to an industrial contractor, right? I’m talking about Hazel O’Leary, now.

Rees:

Oh no, I never heard any more than a rumor about that. I don’t have any idea. You can’t run a project and take seriously every scuttlebutt that comes through. You just have to ignore those. And I never, never saw that as any kind of an imminent threat at all.

Riordan:

That’s what was around Washington, that after the Dingell hearing, Hazel said, “Okay, I’m going to take this over, and we’re going to get a real managing company in there.”

Rees:

Well, yes, she was savage, just savage, with Roy. You probably heard that she came to the lab and had some kind of a meeting where she invited everybody to come and stand on the floor of one of the buildings while she got up and talked about what was going to happen next. This was after Congress had killed the project. And she brought [Fermilab Director] John Peoples, and she got up on the platform and said, “I’m turning this over to a real project director, John Peoples.” Invited him up on the stage. As far as I know, Roy was there. I don’t know. I wasn’t. I never went to a meeting where Hazel was.

Riordan:

I think by that time Roy had said, “Listen, I came here to build this thing, not to tear it down, and I resign.” And so then she brought in Peoples, but I hadn’t heard about this particular meeting.

Rees:

Well, check with somebody else. Everybody had heard of that.

Riordan:

Were you surprised when Congress killed it?

Rees:

No. We went through that every year. And we sat there like this, and said, “Oh dear God, please”—and no, I wasn’t surprised.

Riordan:

Finally, just an overall, general question. Do you think this project was too big for the high-energy physics community to take on? Is there any way we could have done it with a better manager [ed., i.e., director]?

Rees:

Yes.

Riordan:

If the community had shown up…

Rees:

Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me separate this whole matter into two areas. The stuff you’re talking about, a lot of it has to do with how the community views what we did down there, and what in detail went on. And the other part of it is that Congress killed it. Now, what I would say to you is, the first part has damn little to do with the second thing. It was killed for reasons that have nothing to do with Bush or Schwitters or me or Siskin or Cipriano. That’s not what did it. Something else altogether killed it. Now, if we’re not talking about what killed it, but how could we have made it a better project to avoid getting killed, we could have gotten people in at the outset that were more respectful of the problems—of military projects in particular—who were willing to go and study them, and emulate the processes that they use to get those jobs done. Because that’s the world we were in. We were in a world where it could only be built that way. I am not at the same time saying that somehow, if we had another Bob Wilson, we couldn’t have built the project in a different way. But we couldn’t have interfaced… we couldn’t have had the project financed by the Department of Energy in a different way. And if that had been realized at the outset, and let me say maybe, I don’t know where we would have found these people.

Riordan:

Did they exist? Where was the Pief or Bob Wilson? Who could have?

Rees:

I don’t know, because Roy Schwitters was actually my candidate. I went one time, before the laboratory was set up in Texas, to Fermilab and visited Roy, whom I’d known, of course, at SLAC, and urged him to take that role. I thought he’d be good at it. Turned out he wasn’t. So, I don’t know where we could have found the people. I don’t know, it might even have worked better if the management of the project—I mean the construction project—had been delegated to somebody other than a high-energy physicist or an accelerator physicist. I don’t know. But I know it couldn’t have been built any other way.

Riordan:

Do you think that if we could have held a line at something like $8 billion dollars, that it would have been different?

Rees:

No, that wouldn’t have saved it. No, it wouldn’t have saved it.

Riordan:

Well, let me just tell you a little aside—I talked to the guy, he probably was the one grilling you from the Dingell committee, Dan Pearson is his name. So, he was one of the congressional staffers. I asked him, point blank, “If—and I know this is a big ‘if’—if Congress could have been convinced that this project was not going to go over $10 billion, do you think you could have killed it?” That’s the way I put it, because he was saying…

Rees:

He had nothing to do with killing it. Nothing.

Riordan:

Well, he was the one that was tar-and-feathering the record.

Rees:

I know, but that had nothing to do with killing the project, all right? He was getting in the paper, getting Dingell’s name in the paper.

Riordan:

I took him to understand [my question as] could Congress have killed it? And he said, after he thought about it a minute, he said, “No.”

Rees:

I don’t believe he’s right. I don’t believe he knows. If you’ve got that testimony from somebody in the Appropriations Committee staff, then I’d listen to it.

Riordan:

What I’m getting at is that there was a perception—reality is something else, but Washington functions on perceptions—there was a perception in Washington that we couldn’t come up with any reliable number. It might be ten billion; it might be twelve billion; it might be fifteen billion. They didn’t know, and that was part of the reason it got killed.

Rees:

Well, I think the first part of that is true, but the last statement is not.

Riordan:

You think it was going to be killed, no matter what the cost situation.

Rees:

Yes, and that comes by way of Senator… the senator from Louisiana, Bennett Johnson. It comes indirectly from Bennett Johnson.

Riordan:

That people in Congress wanted that money for other reasons, and maybe in the White House, too.

Rees:

Yes.

Riordan:

All right, I think let’s leave it there.

[End]