Scientific Advice And Presidential Choice: A Reminder From Their Cold War Childhood

A Reminder From Their Cold War Childhood The massive advance of science since V-J Day has been accompanied by no visible advance in the abilities of presidents of the United States to find and use the counsel of the scientific community. In most great issues of policy, such as those surrounding nuclear arms and arms control, there can be no wisdom without respect for the possibilities of the real world, which simply are not comprehensible without science. While science has expanded enormously since World War II, it seems to this unscientific observer that the breadth and strength of scientific advice to the White House has actually declined. This thought is stirred by reading a remarkable record of inquiries conducted on the subject in 1950-51. The inquirer was a young man named William Golden, who was working for the Bureau of the Budget, which advises the president on matters of organization and management in the executive branch. He asked leaders in science policy how the executive branch could do better in responding to the claims of their field. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has now published selected memoranda from that inquiry (W.A. Blanpied, Impacts of the Early Cold War on the Formulation of U.S. Science Policy: Selected Memoranda of William T. Golden, October 1950-April 1951, Washington, D.C., American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1995, 97 pages), and they have the shock value of a fire alarm. The leaders Golden interviewed agreed on the importance of science to a government caught in the Cold War, but they agreed on almost nothing not on what subjects mattered most and not on the right scientist to take the lead. Some concentrated on the need for the government to strengthen science for its own sake. Others were driven by the sense that the first requirement was for the government not to fall behind in dealing with a world full of new danger-the nuclear arms race was young and fierce. Nearly all of them were concerned about the surrounding politics of it all, especially the politics of choosing the right man to take the lead. (Alas, there were no women in these discussions.) But what is most interesting today is what was not discussed: to whom this advice would be given. The unexamined assumption in almost every conversation here reported is that the target of this counsel would be the president himself. No one since Benjamin Franklin has combined scientific and political leadership in one mind, so it was a given that the president must have strong scientific advice. These men also took for granted a belief that has faded in recent years: Scientific advice to a president was a much larger and more difficult matter than advice to any one of the departments and also much larger than the support of science itself. The relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and his chief scientific adviser, Vannevar Bush, made it clear that to make modern war and to keep the modern peace, the president and commander-in-chief must never be second in science. This was a matter of science and survival, and it was natural and indeed indispensable that scientists should be consulted about both the promise and the danger of science. It does not work that way today. There is a committee with a presidential name, the President's Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology-shorthand, PCAST. Its leader, John Gibbons, is an excellent man, but he does not advise on danger and opportunity as Vannevar Bush and his successors advised their presidents. Gibbons advises President Bill Clinton on the management of the government's massive science establishment, and he does that very well. While Vice President Al Gore, who is a scientifically knowledgeable man, offers sound counsel, President Clinton gets most of his advice on the scientific side of questions like arms control and arms procurement from competing interested parties in federal agencies and departments. This process is not at all the same as giving science advice directly to the president himself. It means that the conduct of nuclear policy has been marked by a series of ad hoc contests in which no one can be confident that policy is steady from one decision to the next. The final authority of the president remains clear, but it lacks the sustaining force of a well-informed and continuous presidential presence. The president is absent except when there is an interdepartmental difference to be refereed, and that absence is no adviser's fault. McGeorge Bundy is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Scientific Advice And Presidential Choice: A Reminder From Their Cold War Childhood

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Mcgeorge Bundy

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June 1996

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