The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Keith Glennan, the man who got NASA running 30 years ago, can recall in vivid detail the night his boss, Dwight Eisenhower, warned America about the military-industrial complex. Glennan, who had been called away from the presidency of Cleveland's Case Institute of Technology to become the first NASA administrator, was watching television in his Connecticut Avenue apartment in 1961 when Ike sounded his ringing alert.

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience," said Ike in his farewell address. "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Glennan had rarely been as thrilled as that night when he heard the old soldier's telling words. He had spent years in technology and industry, and he knew the truth of the danger Ike described. Now 82, Glennan is weak in body, but the engineer-educator's mind still blazes. Circulating privately in Washington since spring has been a letter Glennan wrote to the Harvard University Press that all but says Ike's nightmare is upon us.

Asked to do a book on space exploration, Glennan declined because of his age, but he wrote the following: "Were I up to it, I would take on the management problems arising out of an overly aggressive Department of Defense and a greedy industrial community aided and abetted by scientists and technologists. Someone should have the courage to call the shots on this cancer which is strangling the country and nowhere more than in the space area . . . The basic question is, Who is in charge? Not Jim Fletcher ((the current NASA administrator)), not the President, not Howard Baker ((White House chief of staff)), but Cap Weinberger ((Secretary of Defense)) and Jim Miller of the Office of Management and Budget."

There are no inherently evil people in this turn of events, Glennan insists. He attacks no one personally. But the blind pursuit of individual interests has created a concentration of power that seems to overwhelm anything that gets in its way. "There is now less than a good, honest business relationship between contractors and the Defense Department," he says. "We've integrated scientists and technologists, and that is not always healthy. Scientists should be the cutting edge. But one of the reasons we have made so little progress in arms control is because too many scientists want to keep their weapons programs and laboratories going. They argue against such things as the limited test-ban treaty. And everybody with a special interest heads for Capitol Hill. There is a subcommittee for almost every one of them. Congress loves it because they want to try to manage the programs."

Glennan's concern emerges at a time when Washington is increasingly nervous about the U.S. position in space. We are short of launch vehicles for commercial and military satellites. Both NASA and the Pentagon are thrashing around once again, more in competition than in cooperation. America's space- flight program is on hold.

Meantime, the Soviet Union spends more, builds more and launches more. Soviet cosmonauts have accumulated 12.9 man-years in space, compared with the U.S.'s 4.8 years. Those Soviets have come down with some fascinating reports, such as the discovery that after three months 250 miles up in space, they are so attuned that they can see with the naked eye ships at sea, tanks gathering on a field and, so rumor has it, even submarines under the surface of some ocean areas.