0.9 Crisis or expanding agenda? 1968-1974

Presidents, in my judgment, need to show more interest in what the specific results of medical research are during theirlifetime, during this administration. I am going to show an interest in the results.

—Lyndon Johnson, 1966

For $18 billion per year, there ought to be something to say at least once a week.

—Lyndon Johnson, 1968

Years of chaos

From 1968 through 1974—characterized in a subsequent congressional report on science policy as “crisis” years U.S House of Representatives Science Committee, A History of Science Policy in the United States 1940- 85 , a Report to the Congress by the House Committee on Science, 1987. —the scientific communities, the presidential science advisory system, the principal federal R&D agencies, the Bureau of the Budget (renamed the Office of Management and Budget in 1970), and Congress struggled toaccommodate the science-government relationship to an expanding, shifting, and often bewildering national agenda.

In 1967, federal R&D expenditures, which had risen steadily since 1945, began to decline both in terms of constant dollarsand as a fraction of the total federal budget, and would not begin to increase again until 1976. PSAC and OST, whose influence declined during the later yearsof the Johnson administration, were abolished in January 1973, at the beginning of the second Nixon administration. Edward David, Nixon’s second scienceadvisor, had been forced to resign and leave Washington a month earlier. David convened a short meeting of the OST staff in December 1972, informing them that he would leave Washington the nextday and that the president would make public his decision to abolish the presidential advisory system shortly after his inauguration on January 20,1973. White House disaffection with science was driven by outspoken public opposition by several PSAC members in congressional testimony to theantiballistic missile (ABM) and the civilian supersonic transport (SST), among other administration initiatives; PSAC also had come to be regarded by thepresident and his senior advisors as a lobbyist for science. David Z. Beckler, “The Precarious Life of Science in the White House,” in Gerald Holton and William Blanpied, eds., Science and its Publics: The Changing Relationship (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1976), 115-134. And the scientific establishment came to be visibly identified with opposition to theVietnam War; the war largely reversed the assumption among many scientists and members of the public that science in the service of the national defense was apublic good.

National political turmoil aside, there was also a nationwide decline in the technological optimism that had been pervasive in theUnited States since World War II. The fulfillment of John Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s proved a hollow achievement in1969, with the July 20 moon landing a remarkable achievement with no long-term benefit. Back on earth, the idea that technological “progress” can haveunanticipated negative consequences began to take hold. The 1963 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring , which documented the long-term environmental damage wreaked by DDT, was a watershedevent in that respect. A subsequent cascade of similar revelations led to the creation of new regulatory agencies (including the Environmental ProtectionAgency and the Consumer Protection Agency) during the Johnson and Nixon administrations.