Immediately after the war, Clinton P. Anderson, Senator from New Mexico, a former member of President Truman's cabinet, became one of the most interested, knowledgeable, influential, and effective proponents of the uses of nuclear energy. He was instrumental in helping the Los Alamos Laboratory and the associated big installation in Albuquerque, the Sandia Laboratory.
I became acquainted with him during one of his early visits to Los Alamos, enjoying his confidence and — it seems to me — his trust in and reliance on my opinions, not only in the area of nuclear energy but also in the field of space activities. Several times he invited me to testify before Congress on specific space matters, such as the organization of NASA and whether it should be part of the military establishment or an independent organization.
When it was decided to do something in earnest about Project Rover, Wiesner named a Presidential Committee to look into the matter. I was one of its members. Among some members who were chemists I noticed a degree of skepticism about its worth and feasibility, again motivated in my opinion by their apprehension that it might compete with the already existing chemical rocket propulsion systems which were being developed. Some of the discussions reminded me of the big debates at the beginning of the century between lighter-than-air and heavier-than-air advocates, or even of the earlier competition of steamships versus sailing vessels. And indeed the committee wrote a report which by faint praise, essentially condemned Project Rover to a de facto death by proposing to make it a purely theoretical study without funds for experimental work or any investment in construction. The physicist Bernd Matthias was the only member of the committee who joined me in writing a dissenting opinion.
Senator Anderson was chairman of the congressional Space Committee. He knew my position on Rover. With his feeling for the psychological and political motivations of committees, and his vital interest in the new technology and its importance for the nation, he took me one day to the office of the then Vice-President Johnson. Together we walked to a nearby building to see Wiesner. Since Jerry and I were friends, it embarrassed me a little to be present at a meeting in which Johnson and Anderson were pressing him hard to change the attitudes of the Scientific Advisory Committee on questions of nuclear propulsion. They supported my views in opposition to his. Ultimately the minority opinion prevailed, and the Rover Project was saved. Funds were allotted for Los Alamos work and over the years it became an extremely successful venture. Unfortunately it was stopped again later by economies in the space program.
I was also invited to join an Air Force Committee on a similar subject: general problems of plans for space and the Air Force's role in it. The Committee was chaired by Trevor Gardner, a former assistant secretary of the Air Force during Eisenhower's presidency. Gardner was a very interesting person of whom I became very fond. His vigorous and lusty personality, his great energy, the wide scope of his imagination appealed to me very much. I found him very congenial.
The committee originally comprised a number of persons important in science and technology. The only other mathematician, Mark Kac, was present at a few sessions. Among the "big shot" members, I remember Harold Brown, director of the Livermore Laboratory, later Secretary of the Air Force, Charlie Townes, who received the Nobel Prize for the invention of masers, General Bernard Shriever, a frequent visitor. Vince Ford, an Air Force colonel who had been Johnny's aide on the von Neumann ICBM Committee, was now Gardner's assistant. He organized the meetings of a working subcommittee which met in Los Alamos. These meetings involved many people from the newly born aerospace industry. Sometimes we met in Los Angeles where the headquarters of the ballistics division of the Air Force under General Shriever were located. At other times we met in Washington where General Shriever, Gardner, Ford and I discussed among ourselves during restaurant lunches how to plan the exploration of space and more generally the problems of space study for the Air Force.
Early at one of these meetings, somebody from industry presented plans for retrieving rocket engines, which would save money by making them reusable. The real problem, as I and some others saw it, was to do something important in putting up the satellites and do it quickly rather than to start by saving money. Also it seemed to me that boosters, namely the engines, were a small part of the overall cost, and that it would be awkward, to say the least, to start by reusing second-hand engines, perhaps damaged. When the proponents droned on about their ideas, showing their plots and graphs, I whispered to Gardner, "This sounds to me like a proposal to use the same condom twice." He burst out laughing and sent the remark around the table in repeated whispers. Perhaps this joke saved the United States some millions of dollars in expenditure for what would have been pointless and impractical work at the time.
Orion was also discussed by the Gardner Committee. At my suggestion Ted Taylor became the executive director of a group working on it. Starting in 1957, Taylor developed the Orion idea as a reaction to the Russian Sputnik, as he said. He assembled an impressive group of bright young men at the General Atomic Laboratory in La Jolla, Calif. The physicist Freeman Dyson became very interested and enthusiastic and took a leave of absence from the Princeton Institute to work for a year with Taylor. A few years later he wrote an eloquent article describing the project and how it was put on a shelf. It appeared under the title "La Vie et Mort d'Orion" in the Paris paper Le Monde.
Somehow the Gardner Committee report got lost at a high level in the Washington maze. Wiesner disagreed with Gardner about the role of the Air Force in space. Somebody in Washington managed to bury the report, and I don't think President Kennedy ever saw it. The whole thing is still a mystery to me. After the Gardner Committee finished its work it was succeeded by another one called the Twining Committee. Its members included some hawkish types like Teller and Dave Griggs. General Doolittle of Tokyo air raid fame was also a member.
I became connected with Trevor Gardner later in a more private capacity. He asked me to join the scientific advisory board of the Hycon Corporation in California which he headed. The company manufactured highly secret military equipment including special cameras. Fowler, Lauritsen, Al Hill, a physicist from MIT, and Jesse Greenstein the Palomar astronomer, were the other members of the board. I learned that Wiesner and his group in Hycon East and Gardner in California had had some serious disagreements about financial problems concerning the corporation, and apparently Wiesner and Gardner were barely on speaking terms.
To some Gardner was a controversial person because of his quick temper and his strong opinions. He had great political ambitions (he would have liked to become Secretary of Defense), but he was at cross purposes with some members of the Kennedy Administration. He died of a heart attack shortly before Kennedy's assassination. It was Gardner who had established the von Neumann ICBM Committee. This had been of immense importance for the U.S. space effort; I think it really got it off the ground. The military and national importance of this and other Gardner initiatives can hardly be exaggerated.