White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, 25th Anniversary Symposium (pt.2) MIT

SKOLNIKOFF: I just want to add my voice of appreciation to Bill Golden for all that he's done for this field and this subject and this position. There's a wonderful article-- I think you've seen it-- in The New York Times today about him. And he's one of those people-- indefatigable. It's incredible.

But the I'm sure others have had the experience of publishing something, books or others, and suddenly discovering a letter in the mail-- how come a copy wasn't sent to him. And how he ever saw it or where, I don't-- never quite clear. But and I suspect he not only asked for them but reads them all as well. It's a remarkable feat and a remarkable career.

I'm Eugene Skolnikoff, professor of political science, emeritus now here at MIT. I have had the wonderful experience of actually joining the staff of the original science office in 1958. The only person here today I think that preceded me in that office directly is David Becker, who some place around, who was the first staff person in the office.

I joined that office in 1958 and stayed through most of the Kennedy administration-- left in '63 and returned later as a senior consultant to the OSTP when Frank Press was a Science Advisor. And I spent about half time there every week.

I must say that first office at the very beginning was something of very unusual and great excitement. Because it was quite clear that this was a really quite-- seemed to be at least a new innovation in American government that was, obviously, the White House's, the science operation OSID idea under Vannevar Bush during the war.

But this was the first time this has been attempted in the civilian economy. And even though we were in the midst of the Cold War and that was the original motivation, in fact, it was a very special place to work with an office with very considerable influence at the time in part because of the weakness of the various departments in being able to deal with science policy issues. I had the great pleasure of working with Jim Killian, George Kistiakowsky from Harvard, and Jerry Wiesner from MIT again.

And just a slight personal anecdote-- the I was-- happened before that office was created. But after Sputnik, I was then-- I don't know what the right term is today, but I was dating one of Robbie's daughters in New York. Went to pick her up one day and was bombarded with questions from Robbie about Jim Killian with whom he knew I'd worked with at MIT. And I could not understand what was going on.

He just kept on pestering me with questions about what Jim was like in person, how he manage things, et cetera, on and on. Of course, within a week, discovered why when Killian was appointed to the new post. And then shortly after, I was asked to join him in that job, which set the pattern for my own personal career and scholarship later, working particularly in the science and international affairs area which is what I've been doing here at MIT since.

By the way, I should mention there is another existing Science Advisor, Senior Science Advisor in the US government today-- Science Advisor to the Secretary of State, Norman Neureiter, who was unfortunately unable to be here today, but who actually is in office. He was appointed at the end of the last administration but on a Schedule B appointment, which is a three year appointment. And he's still there.

And he, in fact, is proving to be quite an influential and very interesting person. And Jack Gibbons had a lot to do with his finding and selection and appointment at that time. Let me go on, and our panel today where this is being done chronologically. And our two speakers are first, Phil Smith subbing for Frank Press who is the one science advisor was unable to be here today.

But Phil Smith was Associate Director under Frank Press during the Carter years. And we'll follow with Jay Keyworth. And I'll introduce them both right now so not to have to interrupt afterwards. Phil has a long association with science policy issues.

In fact, he was on the staff of the IGY in the late 1950s. He worked in National Science Foundation, was director of polar research, polar programs and, in 1973, was the chief of general science research in OMB. I think Guy Stever's already mentioned that Phil worked with him at the National Science Foundation as assistant to the director in the White House role in 1974 and then became-- when the office OSTP was created, became the associate director both for Guy Stever and then stayed on with Frank Press through the Carter years.

Phil comes a doctorate from North Carolina State. And he's presently a partner in McGarry & Smith and holds a whole variety of other science related posts and activities today. Jay Keyworth followed after the Reagan administration started, was appointed in May 1981-- so about roughly mid-month.

So I guess there's still hope that we haven't reached the end of May in this administration. So that he also was in these terms a, quote, "late appointment," unquote. He was Science Advisor to President Reagan right through to January of 1986. Prior to his appointment in the White House, he was Director of the Physics Division of Los Alamos.

And he's presently chairman of the Progress and Freedom Foundation and of the firm that he started, the Keyworth Company, which consultants to industry, particularly on innovation and strategic planning to cope with new technologies and emerging technologies. Dr. Keyworth comes from Boston, glad to say, but not from MIT, studied at Yale, and has a PhD from Duke. Let's start off with Phil-- Phil.

[APPLAUSE]

SMITH: Thank you, Gene. And thank you, President [INAUDIBLE] and Professor Hastings, for organizing this conference. Let me start by expressing Frank Press' deep personal regret that he could not be here today. He extends his best wishes to all of his fellow science advisors and all of you.

I thought that I would divide my remarks into two parts today. The first part will be mostly focused on the operating environment for OSTP during the Carter presidency. And the second part will be focused briefly on some of the work that we did in the major issues that we worked on in the late 1970s.

I did do a longer written paper that may be in a colloquium about volume that discusses some of the interplay between the offices and the executive office, the White House staff, and work with the Congress and with the cabinet. You'll find, for example, a note that I have in that paper that describes the cabinet room budget session we had with the president and the Energy Secretary.

And the Energy Secretary didn't like our analysis. And he tried to dismiss it by saying, "Mr. President those arguments are the fuzzy headed thinking and analytical analysis of the MIT professors." And in that instance, at least, the president sided with his Science Advisor. Well, as we're discovering and we will continue to discover as we go through this morning session, each presidency is a kind of a remarkable collage.

A complex painting that starts with the campaign, the voters' decisions, the very early decisions that a president has to make that start immediately in dealing with the unexpected and unanticipated activities that forced their way into the presidency. And it's in this environment that each Science Advisor has to kind of find his way or, hopefully, someday her way into the operating environment and learn how to be an effective player in the White House staff.

Now, our transition from Ford to Carter was really the first test of the OSTP Act. And it was the first transition after the legislation was passed. We had a lot of good things going for us.

One of them was that Frank was appointed very early-- identified and actually appointed and confirmed. And so as a consequence, the whole participation in the machinery of the White House, the daily meeting in the Roosevelt Room in the morning, meetings with the leaders of the other executive office groups like CEA, the economic advisors, OMB and so forth. That all began to flow very early.

President Carter had a personal interest in science and technology as well as a deep understanding of the fact that science and technology is needed in a lot of decision making. So he would turn to us on technical and scientific questions. But he also would turn occasionally to us to ask a question that had to do more with his personal curiosity about science and engineering.

And he would sometimes, embarrassingly, so he would stop a cabinet meeting, for example, to get into some issue of basic research with Frank that caused all the other advisors to wonder what in the world was going on at that moment. Now, in addition to the fact that we had early appointments, another important thing that was valuable was the access. A lot of the press in the science community only thinks about the access to the presidency.

And in the old days, there used to be a kind of a measurement amount of how many times the science advisor saw the president. Access is very important, and Frank had good access along with the other senior advisors. And we got very fast turnaround on memos to the president, sometimes overnight. But equally important is the way in which the science advisor and his staff is able to begin to work with the other offices in the White House and bring technology and science advice together with the other kinds of advice.

The economic advice, the financial and budgetary advice that all has to be put together in what ultimately becomes a presidential decision. And so the early setup and the early operation helped us a great deal on that front. Another thing that was very important was that by the early appointment, Frank was able to participate in the selection of the R&D agency heads for most of the other R&D agency leaders of the Carter presidency. And that was a very important.

Now, President Carter decided that he did not want to have a science and technology committee. There was this committee that been put in place for the two year period to study the idea of the future of the organization of science in the government and the feasibility of a permanent committee. But President Carter felt that there had been a proliferation of presidential committee, standing committees. And he wanted to trim down the total number.

So as a consequence, we discharged the committee that just the matter of a year before I helped set up in the Ford presidency. And we operated with ad hoc committees, many appointed by the president himself. Many panels, we convened ourselves. And we also use the National Academy of Sciences on several quick turnaround studies.

Now, the science community and many of the congressmen who had been involved in the setting up of the OSTP legislation were, of course, angry about the fact that we weren't going to have a committee. But the reality is that if the president does not want to use a piece of the OSTP legislation, it's counterproductive to try to use it.

So we did not try to do that. There are on all presidents these unexpected events. Some of which have science and technology components. In our period, we dealt with mount St. Helens, the volcanic eruption with the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident and with a mysterious light fly show over the South Pacific that a satellite had picked up that could have been a nuclear explosion by a testing nation.

In those issues and many other issues, the president turned immediately to the OSTP and Frank and asked us to be the lead on working on those issues. Our staff number to 32 only. We had a science advisor, three associate directors, Ben Huberman, who handle national security and had a dual appointment with the NSC staff.

Gill Omenn, who's now a vice president at the University of Michigan for Health, who handled health and biomedical research. And I handled natural resources, energy basic research, and university industry relations. The four of us had White House Mess privileges. And for those of you who have not been there, you cannot appreciate the importance of The Mess as an instrument of policy making. It is very important

Now, we had some problems with the Carter presidency. And it's long ago enough now that it can be talked about, perhaps, a little more analytically than Jack or our Neal would be able to talk about the Clinton presidency. We had much strength, but we had some weaknesses. The first weakness was, as is in many presidencies, we had a number of people who were fiercely loyal to the president who had been in the campaign.

They were more loyal to the president than they were interested in governance. And they came in often-- many of them were young. They had come out of small state government. Some of them actually were in the first jobs they ever had.

They had been campaign workers and came to a job in the White House. And that was their first job. Some were ill equipped. For example, the first Director of White House Personnel knew nothing about the structure of the government, what the mission of the agencies were. So this required a good deal of patients and tact to kind of nurture and tutor these people.

Somewhat reminiscent actually of something Jack faced in the early part of the Clinton administration. I remember going to a meeting with Jack in the EOB about six months in. And our combined ages were equal to the eight other people in the room.

[LAUGHTER]

The enduring weakness, however, was a serious weakness. And it affected us on many things we were working on from setting up an International Institute, that I'll mentioned in a minute, to getting a structure in place to handle radioactive waste, which is still a problem. And that was that even though both houses of Congress were under Democratic control, President Carter and the Congress did not get along well with each other.

And this lasted over the whole four years of the presidency. And so when we would go up to the Hill to talk the committees and staff, we would frequently find ourselves being pin cushions for the first 5 or 10 minutes while people on the Hill were taking out their anger on the White House legislative staff on us. So you would sit there calmly and absorb that and then you would get on with your business.

Now, that unfortunately endured over the whole time. You have to understand that in part it was also a tension and a relationship that carried over from the Watergate period and the Nixon impoundment battles that he had with the Congress over the budget over a period of a couple of three years. So there was a great deal of hostility toward the imperial presidency that had been built up. And then when you had a president whose congressional relations were not as smooth as they should have been, it just sort of exacerbated the whole thing.

There were four big things as I look back now on what we did 25 years ago. And I'll mention one or two points about some of our successes and failures. The first issue was that we focused a good deal of energy on increasing funding for basic research not only for NIH and NSF but for all the mission agencies of the government. To Ford budgets had turned around the decline that had begun in 1968.

So we continued the build up of basic research in the mission agencies. We continue to program a guy had started in agriculture for competitive grant program and were frustrated there, as were many of our successors because Congress was not enthusiastic about that program. We had great success in the work we did with the Defense Department.

Bill Perry was the Director of Defense, Research, and Engineering. And we started a lot of basic research activities, for example, in material science that directly led to the kind of stealth technologies that saw their deployment in the Gulf War. There were concerns about the decline in American industrial innovation.

This was right after the bicentennial. And we were perceiving that Japan and the European countries and companies were rising. We organized an NSC-like review that involved all the cabinet officers of the government to review government policies on innovation. And out of that flowed a whole large list of administrative changes-- for example, a number of changes in the patent office, a change in the ERISA Act that allowed pension funds to be invested in venture capital, clarification of antitrust policy so that pre-competitive research could be undertaken.

Some of these matters required continued support in the Reagan presidency. And I'm happy to say that Bruce Merrifield, Jordan Baruch's successor, he was the point man on this in commerce for us. He carried on and Merrifield carried on and there were things passed then in '81 and '82, such as the Bayh Dole Act that now we look back on is ancient history.

We worked a great deal on the regulatory front and also on energy, science, and technology. By the late '70s, we had been 10 years into the regulatory and environmental regimes that had fallen into place in the late 1960s. And it was beginning to be apparent that the science base needed a checkout and an improvement. There were a lot of areas where we were really just simply making regulations on the basis of inadequate understanding of science.

So we put a lot of work in on that, had some cross agency teams that looked at a framework for assessing carcinogen risk. We spent a lot of time, as I mentioned, on nuclear waste, a lot of time on diesel emissions. Because that was a point when diesel emissions were coming into the fleet. A third area in which we put a lot of emphasis was on international matters.

President Carter was interested in building up the capacity of developing nations in science and technology. Our biggest pay dirt success may be of the Carter presidency was the mission Frank led to China of government leaders to set up the formal agreements that were signed by Deng Xiaoping and the president in 1979. When Frank was in China, he cautioned the vice premier that some of the students had studied in the United States would probably want to stay here.

Without missing a beat, the vice premier said, "Dr. Press, we have plenty more." The fourth area that we worked on-- we had one big defeat I should mention in the international area. And that was this organization that where Gene Skolnikoff worked very hard on as did others to set up something called the Institute for Scientific and Technical Cooperation. And it was to be an agency that would build infrastructure in developing countries and science.

The Senate Appropriations Committee did not like the idea. And so it did not come to pass. We did get some part of it built into aid later on, but that I can tell you about at coffee break if we want to. Let me make an observation or two in conclusion. One is that we benefited a lot in our time because of the work that had gone on with the prior science advisors and with people like Bill Baker, Sai Raimo, Saw Bucksbomb.

So there was a kind of a transitional-- and it's typical of science and engineering and policy. There is a kind of a bipartisanship. To be sure, there's some partisanship. But by and large, there's a kind of a continuity. Several speakers have mentioned that.

It carried on into the Reagan presidency. Art Biku was in the Reagan transition team, and I had known him when he was an officer in the industrial Research Institute. So I worked a great deal over the first months of the Reagan presidency with him as I was exiting OSTP on passing forward the mantle so to speak.

The second interesting thing, and this is a particularly this was it was very provocative comments by Ed point this up. The issues we worked on in that period of time in many instances are the same issues that are important now at the beginning of the 21st century. And somehow we still have this mismatch in our government between the longer horizons of scientists and engineers and the solutions required and the short horizons of the political process that makes for this rocky and erratic course that we go forward on anything like energy technology where a slow, steady sustaining course would probably be the course. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

We're running a little slow. But I think we have time for one or two brief questions if there are any. Yes, right here. Yes? Yes?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, if I could ask you a specific about nuclear waste. You mentioned that a lot of things-- asking about nuclear waste-- that a lot of the issues you dealt with then are still very much for today. What do you think a more permanent solution looks like for the United States as we try to deal with this?

SMITH: I'll tell you in a nutshell what happened. I didn't know that the timer was able to ask questions, but--

[LAUGHTER]

I'll be brief in answering the timer. The framework that we put in place that ultimately was enacted in '81 and '82 for high and low level waste was a very good framework. It had all the right technical parameters. For example, going forward with the exploration of a number of geologic media-- not just one-- confidence building with the state and local governments, so that you began to get more confidence in the fact that the process would in effect lead to a publicly arrived at decision that included the public.

What happened was that, as often is the case, succeeding Directors of Energy-- Secretaries of Energy-- utility companies-- they all get anxious to go forward quickly. So we immediately went back to the idea, by fiat, of declaring two waste sites-- the plant in New Mexico and the Nevada site.

So there was no comparative geologic investigation-- those two states felt that they had been singled out to be the dumping grounds-- so the process immediately broke down. It then got going again and variously, but meanwhile the public attitudes changed, and there was an increasing resistance to nuclear power. So that remains today an issue that we are a long way from getting worked out. And we, ironically, at this moment-- there is a prospect of nuclear power getting a restart for a whole lot of reasons, but we do not have the waste problem solved. And that's a big issue.

[APPLAUSE]

KEYWORTH: Well, it's good of MIT and of the Sloan Foundation, both, to sponsor this symposium, because clearly it is a timely topic.

Now the issue of just how science advice can be most effective to the White House remains a challenging one, probably not much less so than when the Congress first created OSTP 25 years ago. OSTP remains somewhat of an anomaly among executive offices-- viewed by some White House staffers as an asset, but by some others as an imposition. How a consensus among these diverging views emerges-- assuming it does-- will have much to do with how the office will be able to function.

And circumstances differ. Each of us has advised different presidents, at least at different times. Priorities varied, pressures were different, and personalities created very different relationships. In my comments today, I'm going to dwell somewhat-- primarily, in fact-- on some of the actual relationships that developed during my tenure. Because they, in fact, were essential to how I was able to be effective.

Now I joined the Reagan administration just about now-- in early May, four months after the inauguration and shortly after the assassination attempt. During the first few months, as well as during the transition planning, there had been a lot of debate over whether a science advisor was, in fact, needed.

The opposition stemmed largely from the perception that OSTP was created to represent the scientific community, while White House staff was there, in fact, to serve the president. In other words, a number of the president's closest and trusted friends and advisors viewed a science advisor as somehow likely to be different from them and likely to come with an agenda that might differ from the president's.

The countervailing view, which eventually prevailed, was simply that since so many of the administration's top priorities-- for example, defense, energy, and the economy-- were deeply rooted in science and technology, they would need a team member with competency in science. Without expertise on the president's policy team, the White House would be dependent upon the external agencies. And by the time I was invited to Washington as a candidate for science advisor, the debate was over and resolved. And I really felt welcome.

Now in its first term, the process of policy development in the Reagan administration was conducted in a somewhat more centrally organized manner than in some administrations, if not most. Edwin Meese, bearing the title of Counselor to the President, coordinated all policymaking-- whether domestic, defense, or foreign. This wide ranging power, along with Ed's real talent for the job and his uniquely close personal relationship with the president, led to him being referred to as deputy president.

One of the means Ed used to coordinate policy development was to hold meetings each evening in his office with leaders of each White House office involved in policy matters, including OMB-- a crucial one-- to discuss both tactical issues as well as strategic areas of opportunity. As a member, Ed Meese made it possible for me to, early on, develop a relationship with the president-- as I will explain-- and with the president's senior staff.

Now a president has, in fact, many assistants, but few bona fide advisors-- and only he makes the distinction. My relationship with Ronald Reagan began with his light reference to me as his personal Merlyn.

[LAUGHTER]

Ed Meese was to play a major role in how I and OSTP were to move beyond that simple perception.

In the summer of 1981, one of the Reagan children began to appear frequently in the press, in a parent's sympathy, with a number of anti-nuclear activists. Worrying about her being exploited, the president turned to Ed Meese for advice. Ed suggested that I might help. The president then called me to ask if I'd mind coming over to talk about a personal matter. I did. Sensing that she would probably not react well to his own counsel, the president simply asked me if I would go out to California and talk with her. And I did. And that became the first step in developing a relationship with the president.

Just a few weeks later, the president called unexpectedly-- also, I'm sure, at Ed Meese's suggestion-- on a Saturday morning, and asked if I'd mind coming over to discuss an issue that he was pondering. He put the question quite simply-- a lot of good people were suggesting to him that we commit a hundred billion dollars-- or lots more-- to this new technology called stealth. And he needed to know some basics before going along with that. In particular, he asked me, does it work? And if so, will it continue to do so?

Now this was a turning point for me, because I started to give an answer. And I suddenly realized that this wasn't exactly the kind of scientific dialogue I was used to at Los Alamos. You see, here there would be no opportunity to revise my first estimate. Fortunately, I deferred an answer until I could be more confident. As it turned out, it took several months. In fact, it took several man-years.

As a result of that simple question as to the viability of stealth and the challenge that responding to it entailed, we were able to develop, within OSTP, some substantial expertise in some of the more arcane and more sensitively classified areas of defense technology. In stealth, in anti-submarine warfare, in space-based surveillance, and other key technologies that underlay our defense modernization efforts, we became credentialed and, I think, a valued component of the president's team. We had been assigned a role in defense-- the administration's top priority. And as a result, I became a regular attendee of the National Security Planning Group-- the pared down version of the cabinet that dealt with issues of national security.

And one point worth noting here in passing is that some of the inherent constraints faced by OSTP's external advisory process, previously known as the PSAC and now PCAST and what we call the White House Science Council, or the WHSC-- now since it was unthinkable to obtain clearances for each of the WHSC members to many of the really sensitive areas that we were involved in, it became a real challenge for me to find a way to carry on a much needed dialogue with my respected advisors-- but to do so, within at least some reasonable respect for the rules. Perhaps Ed David or Allan Bromley may recall my discussing with WHSC in 1983 the idea that we just might have operational aircraft with certain hypothetical radar-evading capabilities-- that this was a chronic problem.

Now returning to a specific-- in the fall of 1982, finding a politically acceptable basing mode for the land-based MX missile had become a critical problem for the administration. As the final link in the administration's strategic modernization program, much hinged on solving this one lingering problem. Many options were reviewed-- a process in which OSTP played a prominent role. But finally agreement began to emerge, focusing on a highly arcane concept called Dense Pack.

However, a debate arose over just who would articulate the technically complex rationale behind the decision to the Congress and to the public. In an effort to resolve an impasse between NSC and the Pentagon, OSTP was asked to take on the task. And it took months of effort by a good portion of the OSTP staff and turned out to be a task where, to put it lightly, success was elusive. But with battle scars and all, we did acquire some more legitimacy, and essentially, we had begun to acquire some chips.

About this time, I began to learn some basics about how Washington really works. Fortunately, early in my tenure in Washington, an acquaintance had suggested that I refresh myself in the pervasive wisdom to be found in Machiavelli's writings, especially in The Prince-- perhaps the greatest treatise ever written on the exploitation of power. Unlike business, you see, Washington is much more about power than it is about process. Where we in OSTP most needed power was in the budget process-- and specifically in negotiation with OMB.

While the administration had agreed that funding for basic research, particularly in universities, deserved the protection that Vannevar Bush--

[LAUGHTER]

--with his term of a federal trust-- first defined, there was, of course, a range of opinion as to just what funding increases were needed.

Now the '70s had been a generally tough decade for basic research, especially with the high rates of inflation of the previous few years, and we in OSTP felt that some pretty heroic funding increases were required. And this is where we chose to cash in our chips. The annual increases in NSF's budget of near 20%-- the introduction of a number of new programs, such as the NSF centers and Young Investigator Awards-- new facilities not in agencies' budgets-- were each the results of negotiations where such chips were required.

Now while each of these trusts did represent administration policy, the individual initiatives were in fact obtained only because OMB knew that we were willing to let Ed Meese or even the president resolve differences of how to implement those policies.

Finally, let me come to the single issue that most shaped OSTP in the Reagan years-- certainly the one that had the most impact and which remains to this day the most controversial. From my very earliest days with the president, he often spoke to me about his concerns over the basic premises upon which nuclear deterrence is founded. After being briefed on the prospect of depressed trajectory missiles launched from Soviet submarines off our Atlantic coast-- reducing warning times to less than three minutes-- he asked-- and I will never forget this-- and I'm expected to make the most awesome decision anyone has ever made that fast and on the basis of what you call bits?

Most of all he understood the importance of measuring deterrence by the concept of stability, the all important condition that defines the likelihood of preemption. As did his predecessors, he came to understand the fundamental but largely unspoken implications for stability in the transition from countervalue deterrence-- where population centers were targeted-- and counterforce deterrence-- where the target is the opponent's retaliatory capability-- silos. He came to understand what many arms control advocates had chosen to overlook, and that was the erosion of stability that this entailed.

During his first two years, strategic force modernization and rebuilding the military was the president's top priority, and he was immersed in every aspect of this issue himself. In weighing the various options for modernizing our strategic forces and moving arms control from the salt framework to start-- and simply in trying to understand the Soviet Union's motives and intentions-- President Reagan grappled with all the intricacies of managing deterrence.

As a consequence of all this, he decided to embark upon a path that became SDI, or his Strategic Defense Initiative. Expressed most simply, he concluded that the stability of deterrence was eroding-- that it was wrong-- and that there had to be a better way, in the long term, to ensure our national security. And it never occurred to him that such a thing as a perfect defense did or ever would exist. What he did believe is that any incentive for a preemptive nuclear attack could be removed by even a rudimentary missile defense system, that the ABM Treaty was rooted in pre-counterforce deterrence, and that Soviet doctrine would be threatened by such a strategic shift by the United States. And assuredly, it was.

The SDI was President Reagan's idea. It was his initiative, and it was his faith in technology that drove it. My role was as a trusted advisor and to tell him what was possible.

Much has been written about the fact that the president's SDI speech was conceived in less than a week. In fact, the president began to articulate the rationale behind the speech in late 1981, 18 months earlier. The president wrote virtually the entire speech himself. I did advise him, I did help him edit the speech, and I offered him choices throughout it for restating key points. I did my best to explain the president's intent to other members of his staff and his cabinet.

George Shultz, in his book Turmoil and Triumph, argues that the president relied far too heavily on my advice. I don't think so. One need only reexamine how Ronald Reagan carried out his negotiations personally with Mikhail Gorbachev to see just how independent and determined the president could be. He had, from the beginning, a clear vision of where he was leading the country, and SDI was part of how to get there. I believe that he was right-- that he was courageous in undertaking SDI-- and it was certainly my privilege to serve him in that endeavor. But he and he alone made the estimates of the risks and benefits, and he never wavered.

From that point on, though, I did become-- no question-- a single issue science advisor. Those were my orders. The president asked me to be his spokesman on SDI, and in particular, while the diplomatic processes were trying to position SDI as a pawn in arms control, I was traveling the world carrying the president's message that SDI was never and would never be open for negotiation. Only much later, at Reykjavík, was his commitment to SDI established beyond doubt.

Now as you think of how things should be with science advice, I suspect that these experiences are not quite irrelevant. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

PRESENTER: Thank you very much, Jay. Any questions? Granger Morgan.

AUDIENCE: In Hedrick Smith's account [INAUDIBLE] he argues that the recent statement of the Catholic bishops played a very substantial and simple role in the decision. Your account, of course, doesn't mention it. Would you talk a little bit about the extent to which that political setting was a factor.

KEYWORTH: It did play a role. In fact, what occurred at exactly the same time was the whole nuclear freeze movement, which the president had lots and lots of folks-- in fact, he asked us to bring him lots of folks who had been spokesmen in that movement, because the cross-section of concerned parties was a lot broader than in most anti-nuclear movements. And there were a lot of very, very, very rational people.

But let me make a point. The president arrived at SDI for, really, one reason. That was because of trying to find a way to manage the intricacies of modernizing strategic forces to achieve a higher level of stability. Time after time, the president made comparisons to me between the decisions that JFK had to make with Minute Man when he could, with certainty, look forward to 20 years of a very stable condition.

Remember stability is defined as a condition in which preemption is inconceivable. And no matter what we were doing, it was becoming increasingly an action-reaction-- an offense-defense-- challenge-- much more complicated. And that is really the reason why we did SDI.

And Hedrick Smith does not say that it was-- I beg to differ. Go back and read it more carefully. He discusses it much more carefully than that. The Catholic bishops' move was a--

AUDIENCE: He doesn't say it's the cause. He said it was a factor.

KEYWORTH: It's a factor, and I agree it was a factor. I would not place it amongst the top 15 or 20 factors.

[LAUGHTER]

I would say that if you go back and look-- for example, if you go back and look at a visit that the president took before he was president to-- I think in 1978 or 1979-- to the Command and Control Systems in Colorado-- and beginning to really discover the window that one has to make a retaliatory decision-- if you really want to go back to the first factor that affected him, I think that's where it came from.

PRESENTER: I'm afraid this is a topic which we could go on for a very long time. Jay, thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

[INAUDIBLE]

Change roles?

Yep, we're done.

[INAUDIBLE]

MOORE: [INAUDIBLE] our next panel.

While we get going to the next panel, one thing I've learned in Washington is you take an opportunity to miss an open mic, which, of course, I don't have one.

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[INAUDIBLE], because you never know when the next one's going to appear.

I'm Duncan Moore. I was the Associate Director for Technology under Jack and then Neal. And I just wanted to [INAUDIBLE] a couple things, because the last time I was in this room was actually for the Council on Competitiveness meeting. It was here on March of 1998, and I had just been really confirmed in my position.

And that meeting was very profound for me, because the council met to decide what was going to make or continue to make American corporations more competitive in the next 10 years and what were going to be the things that were going to limit the growth of the American corporation in America.

And what came out of that meeting was workforce-- that was a big issue. It had to do with K-12 education. And so I got very much interested in that whole issue as a matter of international competitiveness. And I just want to share with you a couple of viewgraphs that have come out of that that I think are kind of important.

One of the things that came out and we've all heard of, or may have heard about, is over the next decade, we're going to need 3 million-- oh, sorry-- we're going to need about 2.2 new K-12 teachers. We have a total workforce of 3 million K-12 teachers. So if you think it's going to be easy to recruit science and math teachers in the next decade, you're kidding yourself. It's going to be a very, very difficult task, and we really need to address that.

The other part is where people are going and what people are choosing for majors, and I have one viewgraph that some of you have seen. But it's one of my favorites, because it shows the history of majors in electrical engineering from 1986 to 1998. And the 1999 number continues along that linear path, and you see, it isn't one of those things that has ups and downs. It's just a straight line to zero. And at the current rate, we'll be at zero sometime in the year 2010.

That's a problem, but there is a major-- that, of course, Chuck knows all about-- which is my favorite major in the whole world-- which is buried behind here and then goes up here and now exceeds the number of electrical engineering majors. And that major is parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies.

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Now, as I've told other college presidents-- and Dr. Shapiro would want to do this, also-- clearly electrical engineering is not a growth industry for you. A growth industry is this new major, and you better get on the bandwagon very quickly. But it points out something about our society. We think of the 1990s as being a highly technological society in our growth-- our economic growth being based on technology-- and yet that's not where students are going. They're going in the fields, and this is true of other physics-based engineering fields.

The only field that has actually seen an upturn-- and so the numbers for total engineering enrollments actually have turned around-- is because of biomedical engineering. BME is solely the one that's going up, not the physics-based engineering fields. And that is a real problem.

Now I want to compare that-- I want to give two graphs of international issues. The United States graduates more baccalaureate students than anybody else in the world-- a little over a million students. And I've given you the top 10 countries in the world. And the reason I got interested in this was actually the number under China.

You notice that China-- in the right hand column, they've normalized the number of 24-year-olds-- and what you see is only 1.4 percent of 24-year-olds in China receive baccalaureate degrees. And I was thinking, what does that mean for a country over the next 20 to 40 years? It has profound impacts on that. And so you'd say, oh, gee, China's not going to be very competitive, but let me show you one more of viewgraph, quickly. And let's order them by who grants the most engineering degrees.

This does not include physics, chemistry, and the other physical sciences. Because the way the data is structured, it's hard to pull that out. So if you include the physics and chemistry majors in China, you're going to get a number that's more like 60%.

Now you have to understand, in China, you're probably not going to major in political science.

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You're probably not going to major in social science. And of course, like other countries-- like the former Soviet Union-- science and engineering was an apolitical major that you go into.

But this has a very profound impact, because notice the United States here is graduating about 40% of the same number of majors in engineering right now as China is. And so as a matter of public policy, this has a very interesting effect.

And then finally, my other viewgraph-- and if anybody wants these viewgraphs afterwards, just give me a business card that with the word data on it, and I'll email them to you. There's only two numbers I want you to look at-- the one of PhDs, which is 45,000-- the number of lawyers. There is almost one lawyer for every PhD being graduated in this country. So if you believe this is going to become a less litigious society over the next decade, they want to be employed, too. Engineers-- 6,200-- and as Chuck has mentioned, about 30,000 of those in that year were foreign students.

And then finally, that other number I want you to show is we think of this being information technology era. Look at the number PhDs in computer science. That is not a typo. It's 857.

The good news is it's only down 1%, and that's only eight people. But the problem is we have a critical workforce situation that's coming up over the next decade.

So now it's my pleasure to introduce the three advisors from the period of 1988 to 2000. The first is Allan Bromley, who was the advisor under Bush from 1989 to '93. Allan, of course, is very, very well known in the physics community. He received a National Medal of Science in 1988. He's a member of the National Academy of Science. He's been president of AAAS and the American Physical Society. He's won the Benjamin Franklin Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London. He's a founding partner of the Washington Advisory Group. And of course, the most important thing is he has a PhD from University of Rochester-- my home institution.

On a personal note, Alan was one of the people I went to when we both serving on the AIP board, when I was thinking about coming to Washington and going to work for Jack. And he really encouraged me to do that, and I really appreciate that recommendation.

The second speaker is Jack Gibbons, who was the first science advisor under President Clinton from 1993 to '98. Previous to that, he'd been at OTA for 13 years. He is currently President of Sigma Xi, he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and his PhD is from some small school down south called Duke.

Something that's not in his write-up that I think is important-- that he raises horses. He has a wonderful farm out in Plains, Virginia, and he's been very, very nice to people in hosting the OSTP family out there on his facility there.