TAPE 1, SIDE 1

DR. NEEDELL: I sent you a copy of this outline, which I put together very quickly.

MR. WEBB: I want to be as helpful to you as I can be. I mean, that's the reason I'm here.

NEEDELL: My feeling is that we have gone over many of these things in our earlier interviews. One of the things that I would like to is tie together some of the larger things that we talked about in an earlier interview, with some of the more specific things that are reviewed in these two books. 1

WEBB: Go right ahead.

NEEDELL: That is, to talk about the development during the Apollo period, and afterwards, of this capability of industry, government, and university to work together towards large, especially technical programs, and to talk in those terms about some of the specific management issues that are discussed.

WEBB: You ask it the way you want to ask it and I'll try to answer.

NEEDELL: Please feel free to interrupt if at any point there is something you would like to get on the record and talk about.

WEBB: All right.

NEEDELL: First of all, why don't we begin talking about the legacy, what you discovered at National Aeronautics and Space Administration when you came, in terms of those larger issues. That is, did you find that the organization you inherited was more specifically task-oriented than you wanted to implement when you came in, or did you view your job as simply implementing the specific projects that had been approved or would be approved?

WEBB: The legacy was good, Glennan and his associates had put in place a well conceived foundation and begun the erection of element of the upper structure on sound theoretical and practical policies. He built for his time and within the framework which President Eisenhower and his administration set, with the goals set by President Kennedy substantially enlarging the effort, we had a different job, but he left us a well-constructed foundation. We built our program on this well-conceived foundation.

    You must remember what I told you the first time we met, namely that this is over 20 years ago, and I just don't remember completely. And further, there are things that impressed me and matured over the intervening years, that may not have been exactly what seemed to be the most important salient points at the time we made the decision. I want to be fair to everybody involved. I don't want to indicate that there are not many elements of intimate personal and substantive relationships that would need to be covered to get at the flavor of an answer to a simple question, such as "Why did Homer Newell have difficulty getting along with George Mueller in planning?"

    I don't want to have you consider that my answer is the total of the responsibilities those men had. I think Newell was expressing a difficulty with respect to a specific factor in a complex relationship, the difficulty of getting George to surrender certain prerogatives and power that Mueller felt were necessary to do his job, and which he held onto, just like I did for all of NASA, in connection with the problems in relationship with the Defense Department and others. I, along with Dryden and Seamans and senior decision makers in NASA held onto the things we felt were really necessary to do our job, and were conscious always not to lose that position. That was our policy and we supported Mueller in his decisions, although we wished the two men could have worked it out with less personal strain.

    Mueller could not give up his need and assigned responsibility for control of the final configuration of the manned space mission and Newell felt that the word "science" in his job description literally meant he would be the arbitrator and final decision maker in rival positions taken by scientists and engineers of flight assignments. My view is that the relationship would have generated less strain if both had tried harder to act within the lines indicated in the McKinney lectures I gave in 1978 at Columbia University. 2

Now, I think the important thing about the Rosholt book and the Levine book is that these historians were brought into the agency as historians and were given full access to everything. When Rosholt implied in his report that we had made a mistake or had not really considered all the factors in the 1961 reorganization, because we had to do it over again in 1963, I did not agree with him. Instead of trying to argue it out with him and get him to change, I simply wrote the foreword to the book and had his language published exactly the way he felt it should be. But I stated my own point of view, which I think illustrates one very important thing, namely that there were a lot of very strong, able characters in NASA, some with more know how in substantive areas than in administration, and Dryden, Seamans and I had to keep working at getting them to see the NASA as a whole.

At the end of the Glennan administration and the beginning of the time I was there, you still had a number of people both in program management and in the Centers who felt that they were qualified to serve as leaders for all of NASA, or wanted to develop a center that represented everything NASA was doing. Many were not really interested in just taking responsibility for one part of it, and having NASA build the specialized facilities the agency needed at the center. Wernher von Braun always sort of thought of himself as representing those people that understood and worked on and were very innovative and forward looking with respect to the total of man's efforts to enter space and interplanetary travel and all of that. He would have liked to have a part of each NASA program at Huntsville. But he did his part and worked hard to present to the public the really important parts of space work. There were others who had a long interest in the whole subject of space.

On the other hand we didn't know too much about the space environment and had very important unmanned programs. NASA learned a lot from sounding rockets and the V-2 Experiments and so forth, but we still had to go out there and measure certain parts of the environment and find out what would work and what wouldn't work. Things like the outgassing problem with respect to potting material, things like that.

So I think you have to bear in mind that a lot of the things that the historians record seem to be Dr. Dryden, Dr. Seamans and myself reaching out and saying, "You can't do it that way, you've got to do it this way because you are a part of NASA, NASA is a bigger program than the manned program, it's bigger than the unmanned program, it's bigger than the work done in any one center, as important as it is". This was particularly true when you saw the emphasis shift from the ability to build a big rocket and get out with heavy payloads, to the time when you paid more attention to how you used those rockets, what the payload should be, what should be measured. You called in the scientists and engineers to look very carefully at what each flight would produce in the way of scientific and engineering information, as well as that related to the flying of men in space.

So I think the important thing about these books is that the historians were given complete freedom to move around, look at what was done, as John Logsdon was, in writing The Decision to Go to the Moon. 3 He was given complete access, and I invited him in to a number of meetings where substantive discussions were taking place as to what the program should be, so that he could get the flavor of the men and the issues, just as we saw them in NASA.

I would say that the detail with which these men reported ought to be valuable to scholars in the future. As people get older and some pass away, there are going to be fewer people who were here in those days, and I think it did help allay the feeling that NASA was just a rambunctious driving kind of a one issue show, that the US has to get out in space and we are the boys to do it. I think that these books presented NASA as a group of men trying very hard to organize a new governmental activity, that had the possibility of great accomplishments and advances, great expansions of knowledge, great understanding, better understanding of the solar system of which we were a part, and of the relations of the sun and the earth. But also, considering very, very carefully the risks that were involved how you used the resources, and how you conducted the program in such a way that if you ran into a road block, at any point, you still would have gotten your money's worth out of the money that had been spent. I'm thinking particularly about Gemini. If we had found an insuperable obstacle to doing Apollo, and simply weren't able to schedule flights to go on out to the moon, we still would have learned a great deal from the flying of Mercury and Gemini. Things like rendezvous, precision launching and recovery, and all of that. So we consciously, quite deliberately at the top, kept looking very hard at what we would do if this turned out to be the last flight that we could make in this series.

    The flying of men is a dangerous thing, and we recognized that. I stated in some of my remarks that it was dangerous, and that it would have a lot of publicity. A catastrophic result of a Gemini or Apollo flight would have unknown effects. I mean, the public in the United States, indeed all over the world, is very sensitive to these catastrophic things. And we were very conscious not only that you might run into a physical limitation, which simply said "you can't go out there with men yet, you don't know enough," but also the question of how you could make sure that public sentiment could do an intelligent job of helping make the decision, that they wouldn't demand an unreasonable accommodation to catastrophe, a level of safety which you couldn't achieve.

    So we were always balancing all these factors. That went right on from the beginning, from the evaluation of the men, the ones we put in charge, to the evaluation of the program, to the spending of the three billion dollars that we invested in capital plant expansion to add to the one billion dollars that we already had, and to the decision such as that we wanted the contractors like Boeing to take responsibility for building the Saturn V, first stage. We didn't want to perpetuate the kind of feeling that von Braun and his group had developed, namely, that they built the first one, two or three, proved them, and then you could make a contract with somebody to duplicate it. We wanted from the beginning the best brains of these important American companies like Boeing, Douglas, North American, Grumman right from the beginning in the assigned production of flight equipment such as these great big rockets, rather than to have the NASA centers develop the first one or two. We wanted the NASA centers to develop the capability to work with the industrial and university sector so that they would learn to do research at a profile when there was not going to be any large follow-on production.

At that time, the aerospace industrial sector was just emerging from a period when there were more requirements than there were contractors, and therefore a contractor could assemble a good team of people, bid on work, lose the contract to some other company, but he wouldn't get rid of those people. They wouldn't go back into the work force, he'd hold onto them, because he'd know there's a shortage of facilities, and he'd likely get the next contract if he could show he had the trained workers. The more he lost, in those early days, the more he could be assured that if he had the capability, he would get a contract pretty quick.

Now, we had to deal with that, and get our work done, and we had to develop new ways of working at it, in our Centers. Dryden, Seamans and I personally maintained a fairly close contact with the program managers, the procurement people, and the administrative people; with the important leaders in the contract area. I think we were quite successful in developing an ongoing thrust, where we got the work out to the contractors. Many things that were being said -- such as, NASA is going to take all the engineers in the country and there won't be any to service other industries -- we proved were not true by letting the contractors go to work, and from our knowledge of the industry, seeing it proven that they got the work done with about two-thirds of the people it was estimated by our enemies would be required.

NEEDELL: On specific issues that are gone into by Levine, it seems to me that there may have been two things going on. That is, the developing of the functional organization to take care of various agency wide services, and assigning to the various program officers the work that they would be responsible for carrying out specific jobs. In trying to find the balance between how much should be centralized and standardized and how much would be sort of sent down the line, or decentralized, how much of that was looking for a general scheme, a way of dealing with large projects, and how much of it was specific response to the day to day situation, having to get one job done? In other words, were you trying to build a model consciously during this time?

WEBB: We were trying to build it, but we were not trying to build it in some theoretical or formal, stylistic way. What we were doing was getting the work out, and guiding it until it began more and more to fit into a pattern that was workable, and with feedback showing what was workable and what was not workable.

NEEDELL: You didn't want to build a blueprint?

WEBB: No.

NEEDELL: You just wanted to have a successful job that other people could copy?

WEBB: That's right. Remember, we had outstanding people at JPL. But they didn't work the way Wernher von Braun and his people worked. We had an outstanding group at Goddard that were very successful in their flights, but wanted to get away from the procedures that we knew were necessary to account for our NASA agency program, to the General Accounting Office and to Congress. When the director out there was removed, he said, "I never thought this would happen to me, because I have such a successful flight record," and my answer to him was, "But you've got to do it right as well as produce success."

So we were constantly bringing, by precept and example and discussion, the ongoing stream of activity within a pattern that fitted theoretically to the concept that I mentioned to you, of being able to go to American industry and American universities for both scientific and engineering work, where there was not going to be a large follow-on production, where we had to work together with the contractors to find a way that they could make a reasonable profit, without any large production order, which departed from the previous practice. The contractors frequently, in the military setup, would lose money on the development contract, knowing that they could make it up on the production contract. We moved from the kind of contracts that we could get out and get done in a hurry, cost plus, that kind of thing, as rapidly as we could toward incentive contracts, toward bonuses.

NEEDELL: In this case, there's both that and the specific NASA problem, to get a specific NASA job done. But you were also on the Bell Committee which looked at these things government-wide.I guess always in the back of yours, Dryden's, and Seamans' mind were the larger models you were developing for future programs? Or is it really specifically goal oriented?

WEBB: We were developing a capability for the United States to be preeminent in space. We were conscious of building an organization that could do the total job of assuring that we could operate in any way our national interest required. Such decisions, for instance, to put the Lunar Orbiter at Langley, were key to this business of developing increased capability for such projects in NASA. We were giving Langley an outlet for a strong drive they had for a flight program, and giving recognition to the fact that Langley in the aeronautical field and Boeing in the aeronautical field had worked very well together, and that we could trust them, looking very carefully at the fact that Boeing was teamed up with Eastman Kodak, which gave us a the best possibility of success, and then we put it on an incentive contract, out of which Boeing, with a perfect flight record on the Lunar Orbiter, obtained a substantial bonus, about one million dollars.

Now, all of that fits together. We didn't just sit down one afternoon and figure all of that out. We guided the stream of events that came to us for decision in this direction, and we always had to talk to people at JPL, people at Boeing, people at Langley; they didn't see this picture always exactly as we did. We had to sort of guide them toward an understanding of what we saw and be guided by the input of the three of us, in the total. Does that point answer your question?

NEEDELL: Yes. The only part that I want to press a little bit further is, did you see that this way of operating would be something that might be emulated, let's say, by the Air Force or by the National Institutes of Health or another organization that was trying to solve a difficult problem with the technical components and a large federal investment? Or did you see it as just simply your job was to get to the moon and to meet NASA's mission of establishing its capability of operating in space?

WEBB: See, I could not serve as Director of the Budget and work directly with President of the United States every day, sometimes three or four times a day, on the problems of the President with respect to getting the government's work done and getting the right people in charge of it and so forth, without having it become a pattern of thought that I have in mind when I examine the requirements of an organization like NASA. And it's perfectly clear that nobody knew exactly how to do this job. They went through 18 or 19 people before they got to me to manage it, and Kennedy said to me, "I want you because you understand policy. You've been in the White House and the State Department, and this is a program that involves great issues of national and international policy."

He didn't say, "I want an efficient organization that saves every dollar possible. He didn't say, "I want to make a model I hope the Air Force will follow." He said, "I want you to take it over because you understand policy," and here and on that basis was my own strong desire to run things right from the experience I'd had in industry, the experience I'd had in the Bureau of the Budget and so forth. I had seen the importance of a proper emphasis on Administration. Dr. Dryden and Dr. Seamans had the same strong intent.

NEEDELL: This brings up the thing I think we wanted to talk about at some length, the criticism of Levine, I guess you'd have to call it, about the the NASA organization and your decision not to emphasize follow-on programs, or cement NASA into a commitment to long term Mars landing or manned space flight space station, or something in the following years.

WEBB: Well, first of all, I felt, and I think Dryden and Seamans and a good many other people in NASA felt, that if for any reason we did not finish Apollo, catastrophic failure in flight or some inadequacy of equipment or some unknown hazard in space, you'd have a lot of rusting structures all around the country that the public would look at for a long, long time as a monument to the failure to do something that the President of the United States had said we should have as a goal.

So we felt it was very important to have the image of success, and to not only get all that we needed for understanding and operating and obtaining preeminence in space -- including the fact that you couldn't fuzz this objective, you either went to the moon or you didn't -- but to set ourselves the goal that we had to perform. We didn't say we'll build a big space station which we can reduce the weight of if the rocket doesn't carry enough, or we can increase if the rocket turns out to be more powerful.

In other words, one could adjust the goal under those conditions, but we chose a goal you couldn't adjust. You either went there and you landed, or you didn't, and to the public it was visible. This had the benefit of showing how serious we were about this, and generating a lot of people's willingness to come in, like AT&T and Bellcomm, like many of the best companies. IBM came in on the instrument unit. They came in because they saw this objective and they thought it was important for them to understand the technology of the future. They believed that we were going to do it right as a management team. I think they had confidence in us, and we talked to the top people in those companies right along.

But as we moved along with this, it became clear that some of the people who had supported us in the first wave of enthusiasm began to say, "Well, you know, this is pretty expensive and I'm really for the military program, I don't know that I can staywith you."

Senator Symington was a close friend and strong supporter, but he told me frankly that after Apollo he felt the time had come for him to support the military. He was among those who just said to me in the beginning, "Look, you can count on me." I knew him well. He'd been a client of our law firm. He was a wonderful person. But he began to feel that his record in the Senate would be better if he supported the military program rather than something like a manned landing on Mars. And there were several like that. Albert Thomas told me that in the House there were a number of people there who simply would not support NASA in the things we needed to finish Apollo, if they felt that we were trying to get a foot in the door for a large follow-on project and that some key supporters were concerned that our planning was really aimed at going to Mars.

So we had to be very careful not to let the impression get out that our planning exercise really meant the beginning a commitment to something beyond Apollo. Dr. Dryden, Dr. Seamans and I were willing to go through the normal processes of decision, a recommendation in the budget and having it thoroughly discussed rather than assuming, as some of the people in NASA wanted to, that space was so important that the way to plan was to take a planning figure like ten billion dollars a year and say, "We must spend that much on space because it's so important." And that our job was in essence to figure out what to do with ten billion per year.

Well, my judgment, and that of Dryden and Seamans, was that this would kill us in the Congress. The idea that we were expecting to get ten billion a year right on would not have set well with some of the people who were very, very important to us. I'd say that the process of planning for the future in NASA is largely based on work done at the Centers. When I first went there I tried to position Abe Hyatt with his organization called Planning and Evaluation as a strong unit in my office. I found that the operating people and program managers resisted telling them what they were doing, because they didn't want to be second guessed by Hyatt or anyone not in the line of authority. They wanted to talk to Dryden, Seamans and me, but they were not willing to have us see their operations through Hyatt's eyes. So both on evaluation and planning, Hyatt's group simply couldn't get results. If you look at it and take that as given, and then say, well, how did it get done, you find that the Centers were always putting part of their resources on thinking about the future. Sometimes it was the future that they thought they would be particularly good at, or that was particularly important. There was a constantly growing backlog of projects, so a new program could be assembled from this stockpile. Seamans describes it well on page ix - x. 4

NEEDELL: Did you see these studies regularly? Did you have to ask for them? Or, if JPL came up with a plan for advanced planetary probes--

WEBB: My recollection is that they came in through the review process. I think you can't read either Rosholt or Levine without realizing that Dryden, Seamans and I were deeply involved in a feedback reporting system. So we were thinking from the very beginning of the problems we would face in picking a contractor. We were looking very hard at how our Source Evaluation Boards learned to evaluate these very out in front positions, and then how well they learned to apply the method selected in any one case. The first thing we asked them to do in these sessions was to say, "What system have you chosen to differentiate between the various proposals here?" Then we would say to them, "what did you get as a result when you applied the system? In numbers, not in adjectives."

    Then they would explain this fully. We'd have questions. Our staff was sitting on our side of the table asking questions, and there would be the Source Evaluation Board on the other side of the table. Every contract over five million dollars was approved in this manner.

Now, what that meant was that they had to talk a little bit about their plans for the future, as they considered the daily business of moving ahead, say, to select hydrogen as a fuel, rather than some other fuel. In 1968 as we were in the final stages of flight-testing the re-engineered Apollo Capsule, there was another problem! Timing. We could not wish an all-out effort to gain support for a major post-Apollo mission at the very time we were flight testing the re-engineered Apollo. During my last weeks as NASA Administrator I was conscious that Apollo 7 (first manned test of re-engineered capsule) was to come only 3 weeks before the national election.

    All NASA engineers and managers had very strong confidence that North American and its subcontractors had accomplished the re-design and organized a splendid system of manufacturing and testing the new Apollo. We felt that the presence at Downey of Eberhard Rees (loaned by Von Braun to stay at the factory and as a very senior and experienced observer and questions with the authority of reporting to me and other senior NASA officers whether he judged the capsule was ready for flight testing) and with Dale Myers (project manager for North American) having assigned an experienced team leader to each capsule; and with the additional monitoring being done by Boeing we were as ready as we would ever be.

    However, the fact remained that the test flights beginning with Apollo 7 would put every unit of the Apollo flight system and every unit of the ground support and control system to a thorough test culminating with a flight that would attempt a lunar landing. If any part of this most complicated system failed or tested as marginal we, the President, Congress and a large part of the aerospace industry could be severely analyzed and the same kind of erosion of support as we now see in the Challenger disaster would likely ensure. We had to move rapidly because the decade specified by President Kennedy was fast running out. The risk that one or more difficulties would show up as we put the entire system through a vigorous flight test series was very real, although our NASA image was increasingly strengthened as test after test proved the valuability of the system.

    The kind of thoughts very much on my mind can be understood when I asked myself late what our position and level of support would have been if Apollo 13 had preceded Apollo 11, and could then be judged in the light of the success of 2 landings. We had sunk costs of 12 or 13 billion dollars in the Apollo flight and ground equipment. I could not know that the landing would be accomplished on the first attempt. I did not want to have the burden of getting approval for a major follow on in the same period we might be faced with one or two unsuccessful attempts at the landing. A number of prominent and respected scientists were looking to the end of Apollo as the time to re-examine Apollo and press for less emphasis on manned space flight and larger funds for an unmanned program much larger than here-to-fore.

In such a situation every man must assess his strength as compared to the tasks he believes he can do successfully. As to mobilizing a new base of support for a major post-Apollo mission before NASA had proven the value of its system for bringing such large projects as Apollo to success seemed to me to be beyond the strength that we could count on from the President, and those national leaders seeking a position clearly beyond that of the USSR, and the specialists who saw such large value in a national space capability and a recognized preeminence. One thing was evident: many strong elements that were in Apollo's base of support were not willing to commit to an Apollo follow on, making use of the NASA facilities. Tom Paine tested the assumption. He fought hard for a commitment to such a mission. He could not get forward motion. It remained to Jim Fletcher to get the shuttle commitment. Homer Newell's conviction that space science missions would he approved if only NASA would ask for them proved to be much too optimistic.

    By the time Apollo came to an end, NASA had the flight equipment, the capability to overcome difficulties and produce mission success, and the need for continued use of the Apollo capabilities and facilities (sunk costs of $3 billion) if they were not to atrophy through lack of continued use. Arguments were made that such use would be too expensive. My view is that a fairly low level of Saturn V missions--say 2 or 4 per year, would have kept in being the Apollo demonstrated capability to launch the very large Saturn V and attention could then be given to the best payloads. We would have had a program that was on-going and may have given us more for our money than we now have. The costs of a launch failure now are greater than the costs of such a Saturn V launch system for the period we are in to plan the next step, and the knowledge base built up would be of great value.

NEEDELL: These Source Evaluation Boards invariably had representatives of different field centers on them?

WEBB: They had some field centers. It depended on what the job was. If it was a contract to be administered by Huntsville,they would have all the appropriate disciplines at Huntsville, and perhaps a man from the procurement section of NASA or the legal office or the accounting office. We had very good people there. I mean, Al Siepert had come in from the Public Health side. We had a number of people that Keith Glennan had done a very good job of assembling. The Source Evaluation Board system was clearly tailored to giving us the best evaluation of the proposals.

Now, you recognize that once they give their judgment across the table to the 3 senior officials with maybe a dozen, 15 people there, some on each side of the table, and the three of us accept the information and depart to make a decision, those people that made the recommendation will have their own judgment as to whether we did a good job in applying the evaluations. You follow me? So you've got a self-policing system.

MR. COLLINS: How did you use the long range plans that the Centers developed? What did they mean to you?

WEBB: I don't know the details of what I was thinking at the time, because it escapes me. It's all in the past. But I think most likely what I said is, "Fine, I'm passing them the plan to those who need to study it. But in-so-far as committing the United States Government to a program and putting it in the budget and having the President put it in his recommendation, that's another matter. In other words, we were perfectly willing for them to roam a good bit, to test their imaginations, to talk and discuss what might be done with some new kind of exotic controls or fuel or something.

    But when it came to the question of whether you're going to build a spacecraft or fly five missions connected with meteorological satellites and the data net, by one means or another Dryden, Seamans and Webb were very well aware of the fact that they were thinking of this, discussing it. I think probably we gave them guidance as to whether the way they were thinking about it would be well received in the Congress and in the press. So we had a combined judgment of the centers and the top people in HQ. I can assure you, we were aware of the big things they were doing, and usually would get some feedback as to what a senior person like Newell, or like Harry Goett out at Goddard, or Wernher von Braun, or Gilruth was thinking, which way they thought they should go. We talked to these people a lot on the telephone.

NEEDELL: Levine claims that you tried to develop in them some of the broader perspectives about what could be expected from Congress?

WEBB: That's right. They knew a lot of members of Congress, too. They gave me feedback from their operations, I gave them feedback from mine. I gave them a pretty clear indication of whether I was willing to pursue the matter or not willing to pursue it.

But that judgment wasn't just my personal judgment. It was the judgment of three men as long as Dryden was alive, and two men after that.

NEEDELL: I know there is discussion of your plans to sort of educate the administrators, to take those technical people who had the capacity and the interest to be involved in administration, to bring them into Headquarters and shuffle them back and forth. Is this part of a long range plan to build up a cadre of people who were managers, that is, to provide an organization that would be effective after you and Dryden and Seamans left?

WEBB: I wasn't thinking about a long range, 10 or 20 year program. I was thinking, an agency like this, if it's successful, is going to play an important part in the research and development operations of the government. It should be so set up that it can do the very best job, have the best credibility, have the confidence of the press and others, so that there's enough valid information flowing in the circuits that you don't get a lot of leaks.

NEEDELL: Did you find the source of capable, interested, trainable people was inadequate, that you really had to do sort of affirmative action and bring people along?

WEBB: Yes. I'd say yes.

NEEDELL: That goes for industry and universities and government centers as well?

WEBB: Most of the people had relatively narrow points of view in certain areas. Some of them were very broad in some areas. We found Ray Bauer up at Harvard who made the studies on social indicators and on the railroad industry was a very broad-gauge fellow. You had others who were quite narrow. But by and large, we had a lot of very broad-gauge people.

And you can't judge a man like von Braun and say he was narrow. He was very broad in his thinking. But when it came to administrative matters, when I took President Kennedy down there and President Kennedy looked at the center and listened to the roar of those motors and everything, he walked back toward the plane and he said, "Wernher, I'm impressed. What can I do to help?" Von Braun said, "Just give us the money and let us go." I said, "Now, Mr. President, we know we have to operate under the budget because --"

But you see, he couldn't resist telling the President of the United States, "I'll get it done for you".

So we had to enlarge their view with respect to operating under the proper procedures of the government. There was at one point, much to my concern, a certain tendency when a program wasput forward, it began to run into difficulties, it would slip a little, they'd have a meeting, consider all the factors, and push the launch or work schedule forward but not readjust the funds in a proper, valid way with signatures on the pieces of paper. And I woke up and found that I did not think that our administrative record would bear close scrutiny. So I immediately took strong steps to make sure that when we revised any part of the program, like the launch schedule, that all the rest of it was suitably revised, and this ultimately came out in the Project Approval Document. The PAD went through an evolution, that constantly moved it toward insisting that everything related to this, including the research projects that were to be used in it, as well as the money, be kept in a double entry bookkeeping system. I insisted that we have one or two Project Approval Documents that carried the overages from all the other programs, so that the total of our projects matched with the budget.

Does that answer your question? I mean, these were very broad-gauge men in thinking about how important it is to go to Mars or go to the moon, or what can you learn from this, but they were not necessarily keyed to the importance of procedures. And procedures will trip you up, especially when you're handling large sums of money. If you ever find that your opponents can show that you were careless with the money, then you're in trouble.

NEEDELL: So you were able, by switching people from headquarters to the Centers and bringing people in from industry and various other things, to build up a cadre of people who had this broader experience?

WEBB: I'd say all of the people in senior administrative jobs at the Centers or in NASA were aware that competence and leadership was what we wanted at the top, and they worked towardit, but didn't do everything we wanted. I can't say they became enamored of it. But they recognized that we thought it was important, and that they'd better do it.

NEEDELL: And so again, in the specific long term planning you were confident that when the nation through its political process, decided what they wanted to use this kind of technical capability for, that NASA and the organization would be able to respond?

WEBB: Yes, but it's different than that. Put it this way. Whenever I ran into a good man who understood the technology, but who also learned to take an interest in the administrative side, like Harry Finger, I immediately tried to bring him forward, where he could consider both administration and substance. I said, the first day I went there and took the oath of office, that that was what I was going to do. I announced my intention. I said, I'm going to try very hard to make sure that we are as good in administration as we are on the substantive side."

NEEDELL: This was more than just because that's the only way you could get to the moon or the only way that you could succeed.

WEBB: It's good government. Government has a responsibility to do things in such a way that you can have confidence in it. That the ordinary voting public can have confidence has something to do with this question of whether you just simply say, space is so important, we ought to have a ten billion dollar a year commitment, and then our planning job is to find out how to spend it. I took the view that the planning job was to take out of the many fluxing opinions and studies and suggestions those things that could fit together into a viable program which we could do, and which we could get the money to do.

You take Harry Finger. He was assigned to do a six months study, working out of my office. He didn't particularly like this and he said, "I'd like to go back to my own office." I said, sure, but I hope you will come back.

In a relatively short period of time Finger called me up and said, "I'd like to come back. I find that I'm more interested in improving administration than I thought I was."

Ray Cline did the same thing. We brought him up from Huntsville to do a specific study job. He wanted to go back to Huntsville when it was over. He went back and it wasn't very long before he said, "I'd like to come back. I miss something."

It's a little bit like in the Bureau of the Budget when a person would come in -- maybe I've said this to you before--and says, "Boss, I've got a good job on the outside paying twice as much as I get in the government, I'd like to leave." And you say, "Well, aren't you going to miss this central position?"

"Oh yes, but I'll get the money."

Almost inevitably they come back within three or four months to say, "Boss, I want to come back." And you say, "Why? You're making twice as much money." They say, "I like to work on the big stuff."

What we did in NASA was to put people in places, when they showed interest in administration, where they were working on the big stuff.

NEEDELL: Were you worried about the bureaucratic tendency of people just simply getting into a job and trying to keep the job, rather than thinking in good government terms, efficiency terms?

WEBB: Well, I was worried about it only to the extent that I was determined not to let it happen. Dryden, Seamans, and I picked people that one of us had worked closely and personally with on the basis of a developed confidence that they wouldn't do that. Tommy Thompson, who was the head of the Center down at Langley Field, was a very broad-gauge man. He was not a prepossessing looking person, but he had a great deal of knowledge. He trained a great many of the best people at NASA. He had a close working relationship with the military, in the improvement of military airplanes, a close working relationship with forward looking aerospace companies, and produced a climate within which men like Houbolt were willing to stay there in a government laboratory and produce the AREA rule, the critical wing concept and others. He didn't produce that himself, he worked with the engineers from industry and other government departments. Thompson encouraged research that resulted in a basic way of accomplishing new efficiencies of the so called "coke bottle shape" which enabled our fighter airplanes to go through the sonic barrier, where it would have failed if he hadn't done that.

Creative engineers were not just assigned 100 percent of their time. If he had something really interesting he wanted to work on, he'd tell Tommy Thompson, "Gee, I'd like to have about 5 or 10 percent of my time to work on this". And Tommy would say, "Ok, go ahead."

TAPE 1, SIDE 2

WEBB: Keeping an atmosphere within which a very top man could work in that laboratory and do very valuable work, earning a salary but where he also could come up with an idea that was really out in front that he wanted to try, and he'd get support to do it. This was pretty well throughout NASA.

NEEDELL: Even as far as, not just engineering problems but management problems, at Headquarters as well, someone would feel free to roam a little bit and come up with a better approach.

WEBB: Well, I didn't mind their roaming a little bit in trying to find a better way, but I didn't tolerate their roaming with respect to the procedures that were necessary for responsible reporting to the Congress. And feedback.

NEEDELL: What about this problem that is talked about, about the Manual of Procedures and trying to keep track of all of the official announcements and policy directives and all that? Was that a matter of trying to find a sort of new creative management tool or something?

WEBB: I'm not sure that I'm following there. You're thinking about the Manual that Keith Glennan put in, that was revised in 1964?

NEEDELL: Yes, that's right.

WEBB: Procedures Manual?

NEEDELL: I think that there were episodes there. There were several attempts to devise an alternate scheme for doing this, I think.

WEBB: Well, so far as I'm concerned, I looked on it as the backbone of our work, that we had to have basically sound procedures that gave you complete records of decisions feedback, proper accounting, and that we ought to constantly work on the improvement of the system of management.

NEEDELL: Right. Who did you get to work on that? Did you get in people who were management experts?

WEBB: We had good men in the administrations staff. I didn't spend much time on that. I spent my time making sure that I could live with the actual reports that came out of the system. For instance Margaret Chase Smith, every year, would ask, "What's the run out cost?" In answer to such questions, the people running the budget in NASA would put some kind of figures together, from four or five sources and they wouldn't track from one year to the next. I had to personally go down and make it clear that this ad hoc answer was not good enough. I would say, "Look, we're going to do it this way. It's going to track from this year to the next." And it turned out to be a very wise thing for us to do.

Now, I was perfectly prepared to get a study of procurement made by Bob Charles. I was perfectly prepared to have anyone who had an idea of a better way to do things go forward with it. But I didn't spend my time trying to do that. I figured that a lot of people were working on that. I had too much to learn and to work on substantively with respect to the overall relationship of the agency, the selection of people. Remember, a lot of activity goes on in an administrator's group in selecting the top people.

NEEDELL: Well, that's one of the things that Levine lists as a problem with the reorganization of 1961, because as it turned out, especially Seamans just simply had too much to do.

WEBB: Well, he did, but we all had too much to do. If you think of him in terms of a general manager running 15 General Motors plants with 15 plant managers, then he had too much to do. He had to deal with recommendations to the President, discussions with the military, was co-chairman of the Aeronautics and Astronautics Coordinating Board, he had to keep in close touch with Dryden and me almost every day. He had to learn to use a functional staff along with a line of general managers' responsibility, which he had never seen on this scale before. While he had too much to do, I don't have any feeling that he would have done better if he hadn't had as much to do. I think because of the fact that all of this was pushing and all of us were involved in it, and everybody there knew that it wasn't just Seamans who made the really important decisions, you had the top leadership of the agency together.

NEEDELL: Another problem Levine talks about concerns the problem of getting the program managers to make full use of these functional staff units that you created: the program managers really didn't and the field centers really didn't make full use of them. Often they would set up sort of side chairmen and staff.

WEBB: They resisted it with every bit of energy that they had. The program managers resisted working with Abe Hyatt and the Planning and Program Evaluation Group. They regarded these units and later the functional staff units as sort of like spies from Headquarters tracking them. I looked on these units as people who were available to help anyone who wanted to follow the procedures, teaching them. They were consultants for anyone who said, "I'd like to follow a procedure but I don't quite see how to do it, I'd like to get some help here," like an internal audit section would do in a company. But at the same time I really wanted to know, and got a great deal of information, through the folks on staff and through the secretariat, on ....

NEEDELL: The secretariat is something that you created later on.

WEBB: It is, as a secretariat. But I assigned Rip Young as the executive officer of the agency from the very first.

NEEDELL: I wanted to ask you about that. There's some suggestion that this is based on your experience in the State Department, that more or less you brought over.

WEBB: Well, partly. But Rip Young was with General Groves in the atomic program, and he was from the Corps of Engineers. We decided to use the Corps of Engineers to build our expanded facilities, and I didn't know whether some event would happen within the first year or two that might make it necessary to transfer our facilities to the military. I couldn't be sure that events would permit him to remain with us. If the country had a military need for some of the NASA facilities, they could take him over with the facilities. I wanted a man in my office who knew exactly what we were doing so he would be available and would be trusted should the nation have to turn toward a military use of these facilities. Having him as Executive Officer meant he had full access to all going on in my office. I also used him as a beginning screen on the information channeling toward me, to make sure that the things I got presented a well-rounded picture, that they weren't just one department input rather than all who were concerned and that the decisions from the front office were implemented in the organization in a well-rounded way.

NEEDELL: The general description that we have from Levine is that one has to look at the 1961 period as trying to get these various centers who had their own agendas to work together on the NASA Mission, that is, the main mission of the lunar Apollo program. Everyone had to contribute; they could have their own thing but they had to contribute.

WEBB: That's a worthwhile concept, but it's not the whole concept. It wasn't the way I thought about it. Actually, what I thought about was, we're going to end up here with a shakedown into a number of organizational units that will be the only centers of strength to do the job we have to do. They're going to be headed by a man. They're going to have a little staff element and large line organizations under each one of these important men. So how can I make sure that we get the right men there, because even if they don't start right and gain the respect of the NASA organization, if they undertake leadership and have character and integrity, and if we have a reasonably and logically developed pattern of organization, and put good men in it, they will then work out whatever difficulties come about, and it isn't going to be just the way we plan it anyway.

Now, that means that I made sure that Dryden, Seamans and I paid a great deal of attention into who we put in charge of the center and program offices in Headquarters. One test that I tried to apply was, would I be willing to go to work under this man or would I send my son to work under him? That's a pretty good test. Through our feedback we found that in little things, some center executives were beginning to reach for the benefits being obtained by commercial company executives. Some of the commercial contractors had used informally a rule that they would only let subcontracts to companies within a 200 mile radius. Then they would buy stock in the bank, make investments locally, which would benefit from this concentration of contracts. Dryden, Webb and Seamans made it is clear that would not be tolerated in NASA. We wanted the best sub-contractor chosen for our work wherever located.

At one time JPL showed a tendency to resist letting someone with a planetary interest at a fine University like Rochester or Chicago come and work with them. I tried my very best to get them to welcome him and say, "He's a first class scientist from the University of Chicago, we'd like him to come in and see what we're doing and work with us. We'd like to help him make sure that he succeeds with his research." They didn't want to do that. They didn't even want a graduate student from Cal Tech, because they wanted to control what they were doing. I tried to break up those confining tendencies. One way I did it was to insist that no organization chart could be issued that involved the top four or five people under a center director unless I approved it. You notice, everyone of those charts has got my signature on it. I worked very hard at this.

The Von Braun group at Huntsville was cohesive and seemed happy, but for instance, one of the senior men came to see me and said, "I can't work there any longer, it's too confining. The committee governs our private and personal lives, and I'm just going to have to leave." I said, "You don't have to do that." I awaited the opportunity to take him out of there and when the opening came in another location a very big job, and he made a great success of it. But you see, I have to avoid undermining the center director, but also about such problems, could watch for a proper opening make sure that a man could tell me that and that I didn't suddenly find the center Director transferring him without my knowing about it. My way of controlling it was to say, "My policy is to keep up with how the director is handling his top personnel, so bring up for my approval the appointment documents on the four or five or six immediate subordinates of a center director."

Headquarters personnel could then work with the center personnel and I could know before a man was transferred or assigned and ask questions about whether the candidate was adequate for that job, or whether he was cooperative. I could ask whether the engineers or the scientists understood the administrative requirements -- I could require them to tell me what deep down they thought overall of the leadership qualities of the guy they were proposing for a job right under the center director, before I signed it. This made it routine. It enabled me to get a feel of how each center director was handling his top associates. I didn't have to have a showdown every time. If I hadn't had some procedural rule about it, then it would look like I was picking on one person as against another.

But the general feeling that we had to put in as bosses really good, big people, that I'd be willing to work under or send my son to work under, that's a pretty good test. You follow me?

NEEDELL: Yes.

WEBB: So I can't say that we were doing it in a humdrum routine way that Levine tends to think. I don't know that he's ever had a top administrative job, has he?

NEEDELL: I don't know.

WEBB: He's a good man. I know him. I've written him about a number of these matters. But it's very different when you sit there and do it, and have the guy say, "I just can't ask my wife to live here any longer." I'd say, "All right, your future will be in my hands. I will see that your concepts of what you'd like to do are not violated." If I said that, I had to be able to deliver the goods. Because these are not small men. These are really good big men.

NEEDELL: It's really quite natural for their immediate supervisors to want people who are loyal to them, rather than going around them.

WEBB: Yes.

NEEDELL: How do you make sure that the top administrators, the center directors, share your mission and your goal, rather than really just biding the time with their own agendas?

WEBB: Well, you judge them by what they do. When Wernher von Braun resisted right to the last having the Boeing Company build the first of the Saturn V first stages--and it still perpetuates in the literature the fact that he built three of them--I just went to Huntsville, went around through the place, I said, "What's this doing here? That's not supposed to be here. That's supposed to be in the Boeing Company."

When I went down to Mississippi and saw the sign on the Mississippi Test Facility, "Mississippi Test Facility, Unit of Huntsville Marshall Space Flight Center," I said, "Take that sign down."

NEEDELL: Wouldn't you rather not have had to have done that?

WEBB: Sure.

NEEDELL: Rather have an alternative, say, get rid of Wernher, but he had too much to ability.

WEBB: That's right. You couldn't get rid of Wernher and get your job done. He had an ability to rise to meet a difficult problem under very difficult conditions that was most remarkable.

NEEDELL: But he cost you a lot of effort that you shouldn't have had to take care of.

WEBB: However, he made all of us adhere to a very high engineering standard. When we had the fire that killed the three men, and we were having trouble at North American with both the capsule and the S-2 stage, Wernher came and met me in the garage down at NASA Headquarters and we walked across the garage. He said, "You know what will probably help the most out there? I'd like to send Eberhard Rees out there as your representative from NASA Headquarters. And don't give him any limited job, just say he'll be there all day every day and see what's going on."

That was a hell of a good suggestion. But where did I first hear that kind of suggestion? When I was director of the Budget, there was an engineer named Colonel Waite who had worked on a lot of the hydrology projects in irrigation and dams and this kind of thing in the Army Engineers. I said, "who is he, why is he there?"

They said, "Well, he's a very distinguished man, he built the railroad terminal in Cincinnati. But he was General Marshall's man when they were building the cantonments for WWII. General Marshall knew that a lot of money was being spent and a lot of questions would be asked, so he'd come to a place, like Georgia where there were millions of dollars being spent, and see the contractors. He'd just look around for a day, take Colonel Waite with him. He'd say, "General, I'm interested in what you're doing, I'd like to stay here but I can't stay. I've got other things to do. So I'm going to leave Colonel Waite. He's from the Bureau of the Budget in the office of the President of the United States and he's my man." You follow me? So I thought of Colonel Waite when Wernher said to me, "let's send Eberhand Rees out there." So I created for Rees the same thing General Marshall created for Colonel Waite. Remember, there was no scandal about the building of the cantonments in World War II, because of this kind of thing that Marshall did.

NEEDELL: What you're saying is that as a public administrator there is really a balance between one, getting the capable people, and two, sort of watching, making sure that --

WEBB: You've got to get the best people you can get, give them a chance to do the job, and then police them and try to get them to enlarge their point of view, and if they can't in a very important area, then you've just got to move them. Get rid of them. We were always prepared to do that. Wernher understood this and was willing to give up his deputy for the job.

But you see, there's a big difference between 1961, when Kennedy said, "We're going to have this goal of going to the moon," and we see these billions that we've got to take responsibility for, machinery we've got to take responsibility for, going out to a target that is not controllable. It's there, and you've got to do whatever is necessary to meet it.

Now, when you look at this, you begin to say, "How can I be sure we can use Huntsville, and all these other places? How can I make sure that this Space Task Group down at Norfolk gets in proper coordination with the others?"

We developed a concept of flowing all this big equipment down the Mississippi River, bringing it around through the Panama Canal, or going down the East Coast. We developed our pattern of contracts with the fact in mind that water transportation is terribly important. That meant, when we got the Plant, it was a plant that we got for a dollar a year or something like that, the biggest floor space of any plant in the United States, with head room of 33 feet, big enough to build a booster. We got it for a dollar.

Now, we had Huntsville, the Cape, Michoud. It's logical if you're going to have to build something big, so big you have to build it outside. We didn't know how big the things would have to be. Houston was the only city in the radius there that had scientists and engineers. I knew that, because I had been president of a company in Houston and had to move the company to Oklahoma City.

NEEDELL: Unless you have something more to say on this, there were just a couple of short things that I wanted to ask about.

WEBB: All right. Whatever you want.

NEEDELL: One was on this question between contracting out and having the capability in-house. How does the authorization of the Electronics Research Center fit into that? Why is it you thought that electronics development couldn't really be handled outside? I mean after all, all of the communications work and the computers were done by outside contractors? What was the rationale behind that?

WEBB: We found, as we proceeded into this program, that we were getting to a point where we were spending about 60 percent of our dollars for electronic work of one kind or another. When we put the Houston Control System together, and ran a few of the Gemini flights, we suddenly found that it was inadequate. And we had to spend something like 80 million dollars to improve it.

We looked around. There wasn't any basis of competition. It was clear that IBM had the only system that could be fitted in, in time. But to make sure that we didn't make any mistakes and that we had acceptance in the industry, we called in the head of Sperry, General Electric, Honeywell, IBM, Control Data, anybody that had the capability, president and chairman of the board, to talk to Dryden, Seamans and me. "Do you want this work? We're going to expand this thing, give a sole source contract. Up to now IBM is the only company we know of that we think can do it, but if you want to be considered, if you think you can do it, tell us within the next two or three days whether you can or not and what kind of conditions you'd require."

They said right away, except for Control Data, "We can't do it. We can't do it in time. GE said, "Look, we have got a machine that would do this in two years but we can't do it now."

Control Data, Mr. Norris said, "Look, this is exactly what I need, I've got the machine, I just need this contract. By God I want it". I said, "All right, come back and make a proposition." He came back three days later and he said, "I'm just heartbroken, we can't do it."

Now, you see, we then went sole source to IBM. But in the process we called in the top people in IBM and said, "You've been resisting the government's system of asking for cost data, cost breakdown at the time of the contract and estimates. You've got to do this one differently. We want you to adhere to the government regulations."

And we had quite a wrangle. I'm not sure how it all came out. But basically, we faced the issue of how to get that work done, under the best possible means. Doing that with the problems of contracting for spacecraft, and ground control, building this communications network around the globe, making good on the decision which said a very simple thing: we can't have a lot of controllers around the earth, we've got to bring the information in, real time, to one control center. That's the only way you can control these very complex operations. There's no way you can pass information from one controller to another. It's got to come in in real time. So now we were faced with the problem of the control center at Houston and a real time transmission. This kind of contracting requires knowledgeable men on the govern-ment's side of the table.

So we went to the AT&T people, and got them to develop a cross switching, automatic switching system, that when Australia sent a message to Houston, the equipment automatically said, go eastward around the Earth, that's the best circuit. Or go west around earth. And it monitored the circuits with the equipment, and when a circuit became degraded it automatically switched to another system.

That was the only way we could run that complex operation. But we'd been through those kinds of experiences. We had had failures of missions, like the Ranger mission, where it flew six failures before a success, all electronics in one way or another. We saw here, with 60 percent of our money going into electronics, we had to create the kind of capability that we had with respect to engines, propulsion, fuel, structures, science. And at the same time--again, I don't know how much of this I want to go on the record--AT&T was really in those days very vigorous in trying to say that if the government will just allow us, we'll do the whole thing, and yet we thought it was unwise of the government to get into that kind of position. So we were looking for a better way to handle the electronics research development contract, and especially to meet these requirements, of simultaneous availability of information all the way through our circuits outward. We saw these problems coming in of communicating out around Saturn and Jupiter.

NEEDELL: What was the resistance to this, on the basis of--

WEBB: The industry did not want us to have the capability to know enough to know whether they were doing a good job or not, were going to finish a job on time and within cost.

NEEDELL: They were able to influence Congress toward that position.

WEBB: That's right, plus the politicians. I mean, a lot of them felt it was something for the Kennedys, help Teddy Kennedy get in the Senate. But it wasn't, it was because we quite deliberately saw that this was a needed thing to round out. See, we were getting into the "fly by wire" business. Electronics is still tremendously important, and the government would have been much better off if we had that center and they could furnish the same kind of capability to analyze what industry's doing in electronics as we have in other fields with facilities for R6 Testing.

NEEDELL: Were you aware of how difficult it was going to be politically?

WEBB: No. I didn't, I guess I wasn't very smart. I thought President Kennedy's recommendations would carry it. We made these cases that I'm describing to you, that the idea of a center in Cambridge, across the street and within walking distance of the MIT groups, and one subway stop from Harvard. God, it would have been tremendously important to the government and the universities to have that! We wanted to foster this interrelationship between the researchers and the scientific managers and engineers.

NEEDELL: Industry viewed this as antagonistic rather than as cooperative.

WEBB: Well, the big people like AT&T and IT&T and others, hell,they didn't want this at all. This meant that they didn't have a monopoly on information and knowledgeable researchers.

Remember that even though I didn't like what some of these companies were doing, I nevertheless went to AT&T and said, "We need a computational capability in the Manned Spaceflight Office. We need, from my standpoint and from the program manager's standpoint, in Manned Spaceflight, a capability so that we don't have to rely on what Houston and the other NASA people run out of the computers, so that we can check these ourselves or test some of our own ideas. Will you produce that?" They thought about it and they saw that I was playing a fairly important part with respect to the Intelsat, International Communications Satellites and so forth, and they finally came back and said, "Yes, we will. We'll do it just like we do Sandia, as a nonprofit--"

I said, "Oh, no, not for me. You're going to have a subsidiary of AT&T, you're going to make a profit, you're going to transfer responsible people back and forth. We are out to increase the space capability of the United States of America; not in a selfish agency way. And you're going to be judged by the personnel you put in this, but your personnel, if they have a stock option, they're going to keep it. We want them to serve here and we hope you'll keep people transferred in and out."

Remember, I had done this with GE on the instrumentation, the computer storage and retrieval of information, on all the tests on engines, pumps. I had a relationship with General Electric under which they couldn't bid on hardware but they were going to make a computer storage and input system that had transducers and other measuring instruments, that would enable a computer record of any major piece or component to be looked at from the time it started to the time it was on the launch pad. If you had a rocket sitting there, like a Saturn, and you were trying to decide whether to launch it or not, it's a close case, you can call up through the computer system and get all the information. You won't have analogue data here and some other kind of data there, you've got digital data accumulated by sound procedures which have been followed all the way through the whole development and manufacturing process for that equipment. Not many people realize that. But we had that just like we had the AT&T thing. I had another arrangement with them under which if any contractor or subcontractor was failing and couldn't deliver the goods, and we were being held up by it, at my request they'd come in and take the contract over and complete it. They had all the disciplines necessary, engineering and scientific. They were about the only company that did. And I made that deal with them.

Just like when we ran into the trouble on the Apollo, and had to re-engineer the capsule and the whole system, I got Boeing to come in and do the same thing. I, in a sense, put them in a position where they were going to certify, just like the government men were going to certify, just like the individual contractors were going to certify, the whole system, ready for flying.

Now, you can't tell me that it isn't important to do that. I don't say that we would have failed if we hadn't done it. But I can tell you, it made a lot of difference in the assurance with which we proceeded.

NEEDELL: Meanwhile, the company viewed it as good for them even if they didn't actually get one of these contracts down the line; it put them in a better competitive position?

WEBB: Well, they didn't like the basic contract. Of course, you see--

NEEDELL: I mean Boeing or GE. The reason they did it was--

WEBB: They didn't like it because people like Gilruth and Wernher von Braun fought them on it. They said, "They are just Webb's spies from Headquarters here and we don't need them. What we need is 200 engineers, let them work on it under our direction."

    What I'm trying to say to you is that, in setting up an important administrative system like this, that's got a specific job to do, it's very difficult, and nobody knows whether you can do it or not. You've got to have more than a single approach. You have to look for the kind of men that can have the imagination and the capabilities of engineers and scientists, administrators and managers, to do the job. It's got to be managers as well as engineers and scientists, and the possibility that a company doing the guidance system for Apollo might well do it in such a way as to feather their nest for the future and do away with the competition. So what did we do? We went to Draper at MIT, and had him do the development work, then gave General Motors and A.C. Spark Plug Company the contract to produce them. Halfway through the contract they had some labor strike and had to lay off the bright young men that were making these gyros work. We had to take back three million dollars worth of gyros and redo them at MIT, in order to do the Apollo flight. We never advertised that.

But you see, we created the capability of doing that before we ran into the problem. And that's why Dryden, Seamans and I had such wonderful cooperative relationships with the senior people in the business.

I called up a lot of people every week, said, "We need a little something from your company here." They said, "I'll get it done for you."

NEEDELL: I take it that this is the kind of experience that you think would be valuable to future managers?

WEBB: I think it's valuable, but I don't think it's any panacea. Harry Finger became assistant secretary of HUD, and he found that these techniques didn't work on HUD, or he didn't know how to make them work. When a member of Congress, the Appropriations Committee, said to him, "I cooperate with those who cooperate with me, now, either you're going to do something in my district or you're not going to get my cooperation--"

NEEDELL: That was just a different circumstance that he had to adapt to?

WEBB: Well, this was Housing and Urban Development, and we were going to the moon. In many cases I had as much capability and power to make trouble for an individual member of Congress as he had to make trouble for me! So we sought a solution that we both could live with.

NEEDELL: So that more or less was Levine's conclusion in the book, in the sense that this was a program that had a mission that had public support, that had that kind of constituency, that the real success of the program was to make all of these advantages work towards a single goal.

WEBB: I think that's right, but remember, it's not like that today, on the NASA program or the military program. Times change. You've got to adjust yourself to the times.

COLLINS: Going back to long range planning, Levine makes the point that, contrary to what you said, there were Senators who seemed to be trying to elicit from NASA some kind of long range plans, that there was pressure from Congress to produce a long range plan. He even goes so far as to say, one of the major reasons for the decline in NASA budgets in the mid to late sixties was the failure to come forth with long range plans. Your account and his account seem to present a great complicated--

WEBB: I can understand how he could reach that conclusion, but it's just not true. I mean, for everyone who would say, If you give me a long range plan, I'll support it, you have another who says, I won't support anything beyond Apollo. And you had a lot of very real fluxing situations.

    Well, by that time Dryden was dead and Seamans and I looked at this very, very carefully, everyday almost, certainly every week, and tried to count the votes. I told you that I had developed some capability to get my personal friends to produce a few votes when we were critically short, and I did work very hard to create the image that we were winners, we were not losers, and that when you come to a vote you can be pretty sure NASA would be there, and have a positive vote. I wanted people to realize that if they opposed us they probably would lose, and that that would not be a happy situation. There is a big difference between a senator or a congressman who will give you his vote and those who will work to get you 20 or more.

But how do you judge today? How do you judge whether the Space Station is going to have a lot of supporters because it's based on some long range plan, or is going to lose votes because people think you're committing yourself to a very large expenditure over a very long period of time, which a lot of scientists are not for? They want individual flights tailored to their needs. How do you judge that? Seamans and I were the two responsible people appointed by the President, confirmed by the Senate, to make this judgment. We made it. And I do not believe that the production of a long range plan at that time would have made very much difference in the Congress. Congress was getting tired of this problem. After Apollo 8 there was much more interest.

NEEDELL: In the earlier days, you said one of your strategies was to go to Congress and tell them, vote this up or down. If you vote it up it means that you're involved in it all the way. Why didn't you give them the chance to vote down some long range plan or another? Because you were afraid it would hurt Apollo?

WEBB: Well, I certainly wouldn't want to go up there with a long range plan that I was sure would be voted down. You have to remember that I had a lot of individual conversations and set-tos with individual Congressmen, senators, and staff. I knew pretty well what the temperature was of the important ones. I just think that all that making noise about a long range plan was partly those people who wanted a part of making the plan. It wasn't necessarily that they thought something could be done if we had a plan that included it. I was very clear that many scientists would oppose any long range plan that did not include their projects.

COLLINS: We've reached the end of the tape, shall we call it aday?

WEBB: Well, I'm set for another 15 minutes if you've got something you want to ask.

NEEDELL: I'm really quite set. Thank you very much.

WEBB: I want to come to this question that I mentioned to you: how are we going to make sure that I'm fair to all the people mentioned? What we've been discussing are questions raised in Newell's book about George Mueller--there was much more to George's outstanding overall performance than that.

1 Arnold Levine, Managing NASA in the Apollo Era, (Washington, DC: NASA, 1977 Rosholt, An Administrative History of NASA, 1958-63, (Washington, DC: NASA, 1966

2 James E. Webb, Space Age Management: The Large-Scale Approach, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1969), 136-137

3 John Logsdon, The Decision to go to the Moon, (Cambridge: MITA Press, 1970).

4 Edgar M. Cortwright (ed), Apollo Expeditions to the Moon, (Washington, DC: NASA, 1975).

Rev. 09/06/96