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Science and Public Policy: The Steelman Report and the Politics of Post-World War II Science Policy

William A. Blanpied

On September 13, 1948, President Harry S Truman delivered an address at the opening session of AAAS's Centennial Meeting in Washington. He took advantage of the occasion to propose a national science policy consisting of five principal elements:¹

First, we should double our total public and private allocations of funds to the sciences. We are now devoting, through federal and private expenditure, little more than $1,000,000,000 for research and development per year. With a national income of more than $200,000,000,000 annually, we should devote at least $2,000,000,000 to scientific research and development each year.

Second, greater emphasis should be placed on basic research and on medical research.

Third, a National Science Foundation (NSF) should be established.

Fourth, more aid should be granted to the universities, both for student scholarships and for research facilities.

Fifth, the work of the research agencies of the federal government should be better financed and coordinated.

Truman noted that these recommendations were drawn from Science and Public Policy, a report by the President's Scientific Research Board (PSRB), which he had appointed in October 1946.² The first volume of that report was released on August 20, 1947. The PSRB has often been referred to as the Steelman Board after its chair, John R. Steelman, an economist then serving as, in essence, White House Chief of Staff.

At least a few people in Truman's audience 50 years ago must have been curious about why he included a recommendation to establish a National Science Foundation, because a year earlier he had vetoed an Act of Congress that would have done exactly that. Indeed, he had vetoed that Act on August 6, 1947, precisely 3 weeks before the release of the first, summary volume of the Steelman report. The reasons for the veto of the National Science Foundation Act of 1947 and those for the creation of the Steelman Board 9 months earlier were closely related. Taken together they provide interesting insights into the political context of U.S. science policy during the 5 years between July 14, 1945, when Vannevar Bush submitted ScienceThe Endless Frontier³ to the President, and May 10, 1950, when that same President finally signed a National Science Foundation Act into law.

The Policy and Politics of ScienceThe Endless Frontier

Celebratory pronouncements on Vannevar Bush and his famous (if seldom read) report have often tended to distort both past and present realities. As a case in point, ScienceThe Endless Frontier was never intended as a complete science policy blueprint. Rather, its primary objective was to advance the bold and novel proposition that the U.S. government had not only the authority but also the responsibility to support the self-directed basic research of university scientists. The Bush report recommended that a single new agencythe National Research Foundationshould be established to provide all such support, including defense and medically related research.

The novel proposition that the U.S. government should support academic research became common currency within the next 2 years, as the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)both created in 1946began to provide research support to university scientists. By 1948, the National Institutes of Health was also beginning to do so. But the new agency Bush proposed as the centerpiece of ScienceThe Endless Frontier (by then the National Science Foundation⁴) was not to be created until May 1950almost 2 years after Truman's AAAS addressand then in a significantly diminished form.

ScienceThe Endless Frontier had envisioned several functions for what was to become the National Science Foundation, in addition to the support of basic research. Its suggestion that the proposed agency could be a unique source of science policy advice and coordination favorably impressed key officials within the Bureau of the Budget (BoB). They were to remain committed to the broad outlines of Bush's concept up to and beyond the time NSF was created. However, Bush and the scientific leadership were not overly concerned with questions such as the impact of science on society or, more narrowly, on governance (or what Harvey Brooks later referred to as science-for-policy). Rather, the primary emphasis of ScienceThe Endless Frontier was on the support of research (what Brooks was to call policy-for-science).

Unfortunately, ScienceThe Endless Frontier made what is in retrospect the naive assumption that a government agency with the broad authority of the research support agency proposed by the report could function in virtual isolation from normal political processes. This assumption led to consequences that neither the scientific leadership nor BoB desired. Arguably, the Bush report's failure to strike an appropriate balance between policy-for-science and science-for-policy and, more tellingly, its failure to recognize the inescapable political character of science disqualify it as an adequate guide to the present. In contrast, the long-forgotten Steelman report might still provide some useful guidance.

The Issue of Presidential Accountability

Two weeks after the release of ScienceThe Endless Frontier, Senator Warren Magnuson (DWA) introduced a bill to create a National Research Foundation.⁵ The administrative structure of the agency incorporated into this legislation echoed ScienceThe Endless Frontier's formulation. It vested authority to determine the allocation of congressionally appropriated funds and to appoint and discharge the foundation's director in a part-time board that was representative of the scientific community. This body was soon to be referred to as the National Science Board (NSB). The President was, in effect, to be almost entirely out of the loop.

On October 9, 1945, in testimony before a Senate committee, BoB director Homer Smith emphasized that he could not advise the President to accept this administrative arrangement. He noted that "an agency which is to control the spending of public funds in a great national program must be part of the regular machinery of government."⁶ The President, according to Smith, could not delegate his constitutional authority to oversee the disbursement of public funds to a part-time board of private citizens. Only the President and officials directly responsible to him could be held accountable for the expenditure of such funds.

In June 1946, the Senate passed a bill to create an NSF whose administrative structure was acceptable to the Truman Administration. This meant a director responsible to the President, with a part-time NSB acting in an advisory rather than in an administrative and policy-making capacity.⁷ The bill died a month later when the House committee that would normally have taken it up declined to do so, acting on the advice of the scientific leadership, which regarded the proposed administrative arrangements in the bill as anathema.⁸ Policy-for-science, they insisted, should be only minimally subject to presidential authority, if at all.

The President's Scientific Research Board

During his October 9, 1945, testimony BoB Director Smith had asserted that "the President, and the Bureau of the Budget in his Executive Office, need scientific advice. The proposed foundation can fulfill a valuable function in supplying such advice."⁹ After the House declined to consider the Senate's NSF bill, midlevel staff in the Executive Office of the President (EoP), including Elmer Staats, William Carey, and Charles Kidd in BoB, and J. Donald Kingsley in the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion (OWMR), explored other options to carry out the policy-related functions they had hoped NSF would fulfill.¹⁰ Accordingly, they persuaded President Truman to issue, on October 17, 1946, an Executive Order to create a President's Scientific Research Board (PSRB) that was charged "to review current and proposed research and development (R&D) activities both within and outside of the federal government." On the basis of this review, the PSRB chair was to submit a report¹¹

setting forth (1) his findings with respect to the Federal research programs and his recommendations for providing coordination and improved efficiency therein; and (2) his findings with respect to non-Federal research and development activities and training facilitiesto insure that the scientific personnel, training, and research facilities of the Nation are used most effectively in the national interest.

Members of the PSRB included the Secretaries of all Cabinet departments with significant science and technology programs, as well as the heads of several non-cabinet agencies, including the National Aeronautics Advisory Board (the precursor of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the Atomic Energy Commission, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Veterans Administration and, importantly, Vannevar Bush's Office of Scientific Research and Development. John R. Steelman, then OWMR director, was appointed chair. With the liquidation of the emergency OWMR in December 1946, Steelman became The Assistant to the Presidentthe first individual so designated.¹² Kingsley, a member of Steelman's OWMR staff, was designated as executive secretary of the PSRB and head of an ad hoc EoP task force to coordinate its work. Kidd, whose official title was Assistant Executive Secretary of the PSRB, also served informally as secretary to a disparate group that included interested staff from BoB and elsewhere in the government who were vitally concerned with the work of the Steelman board.¹³

No doubt Steelman agreed to chair the PSRB to underline the President's interest in its work. However, he did not play an active role in preparing the report that would bear his name. Rather, Science and Public Policy was produced through an interagency process coordinated by Kingsley's EoP task force. The work of this group was to lead, in approximately 10 months, to what was by far the most complete and detailed description and analysis of the U.S. research system that had ever been produced. Indeed, few if any government science policy documents that have appeared since that time compare with Science and Public Policy in scope, depth, and vision.

ScienceThe Endless Frontier and Science and Public Policy

"A Program for the Nation," the first, summary volume of Science and Public Policy, was released on August 20, 1947. The analysis, conclusions, and recommendations contained in its 68 pages span the entire range of federal and nonfederal science and technology activities, including the international aspects of U.S. science policy. Much of this material was supported with imaginative graphics. The contents of this first, summary volume were based on more extensive and detailed analyses provided by the report's four succeeding volumes.¹⁴ All four volumes included substantial amounts of quantitative data, much of it based on survey results conducted by external contractors. Several, including one titled "Options of Scientists About Their Work" and another one, "Opinions on Science Teaching," were novel at that time.

Comparisons between ScienceThe Endless Frontier and Science and Public Policy reveal a good deal about the rapidity with which the political context of science policy was changing during the late 1940s. As a case in point, the differing objectives of the two reports were largely determined by their timing. The principal objective of ScienceThe Endless Frontier, written during the final months of World War II, was to sketch out a design for postwar science policy at a time when few besides Bush, his inner circle, and a handful of individuals within BoB had begun to focus on postwar relations between science and government.

In contrast, by the time the PSRB was created, the growing significance of science and technology in both the government and nongovernment sectors had become obvious. The PSRB's principal objective was to provide the descriptive and analytical background necessary to devise a system that would: (1) permit the government to manage its own burgeoning research and development system, and (2) establish effective coordination between the activities of the government, industrial, and academic research sectors.

An additional, telling difference between the two reports had to do with their underlying ideologies. Vannevar Bush was a classic laissez-faire conservative who distrusted large bureaucracies, whether in the government or in corporate spheres. While he and his colleagues recognized that private sources were no longer adequate to support academic research, their proposed system for providing universities with research support was designed to be both nonbureaucratic and apolitical.

In contrast, the members of Kingsley's EoP task force, as well as other key BoB staff, had come to Washington during the Roosevelt Administration and were primarily New Deal liberals, at least in sympathy. While recognizing the pivotal importance of the nongovernment research sectors, they drew on their wartime experience to argue in favor of a coordinated approach involving government, industry, and academia. Thus, for example, although "A Program for the Nation" made a stronger case for the primacy of basic research than ScienceThe Endless Frontier, it took great pains to point out that academic research had to be regarded as only one element of a broader national system. But the mere articulation of this truism was anathema to scientific elders like Bush.

The extent to which the reports differed in their reliance on data is striking. The four committee reports, which served as the basis for ScienceThe Endless Frontier, made considerable use of data where available and appropriate (e.g., estimates of prewar research expenditures and scientific personnel). Bush, however, made little use of these data in his synthesis of the committee reports, basing his case for government support of basic research primarily on powerful and effective rhetoric.

In contrast, the analysis in "A Program for the Nation" was grounded consciously and explicitly in the extensive quantitative information contained in Volumes II through V of Science and Public Policy. Much of it was new data developed explicitly for the report. All five volumes, as already noted, made extensive use of imaginative graphics to emphasize their analyses and conclusions. As one result, the Steelman report was able to make a considerably stronger case than the Bush report in favor of federal support for academic research, basing its argument on the academic sector's steadily declining share of national research expenditures since 1930, as well as the erosion in the capacity of universities to conduct research due to the heavy teaching loads of their faculties.

"A Program for the Nation"

Because they attempted to span the entire range of federal and nonfederal science and technology policy, "A Program for the Nation" and the four succeeding volumes of Science and Public Policy provided considerably more substance and scope and offered a more expansive vision than ScienceThe Endless Frontier.

Research Expenditures

One of the most striking features of the Steelman report is its use of 10-year projections to illustrate the ways in which the U.S. science and technology enterprise needed to expand. No doubt its most significant projection (which was to become the first of the five science policy elements in the science policy proposed by Truman in his AAAS address) was its recommendation to double national (i.e., government plus private) research and development expenditures by 1957. According to this scenario, those expenditures would then reach an annual level of $2 billion through a "planned program of expansion" that would require greater increases in public than in private spending.¹⁵ The report went on to propose that R&D expenditures should be linked directly with national income, noting that its 1957 expenditure target would amount to 1 percent of the projected Gross National Product (GNP) for that year.¹⁶ It then recommended explicit functional targets for federal R&D expenditures that ought to be achieved by 1957: 20 percent for basic research, 14 percent for health and medicine, 44 percent for nonmilitary development, and 22 percent for military development.

"A Program for the Nation," like ScienceThe Endless Frontier, singled out basic research as the principal arena for concerted federal action. However, it went further by basing its case on quantitative data. Moreover, whereas the Bush report had recommended an annual steady state appropriation of approximately $122.5 million for NSF to be reached 5 years after its creation, the Steelman report recommended that the agency should be authorized "to spend $50 million in support of basic research its first yearrising to an annual rate of $250 million by 1957."¹⁷

Human Resources

Science and Public Policy assessed national scientific personnel requirements at both the bachelor's and doctoral levels through 1957. It went on to project the availability of personnel during that 10-year time span, based on the number of students in the education pipeline. Significantly, it recognized explicitly that scientific-personnel deficits resulting from World War II, a concept introduced by ScienceThe Endless Frontier, constituted the limiting factor on the Nation's scientific capacity.

Program Coordination

ScienceThe Endless Frontier had assigned responsibility for coordinating "research programs on matters of utmost importance to the national welfare" to its proposed National Research Foundation. "A Program for the Nation" recognized that ongoing, routine coordination within the federal research system had become essential. It stressed that "a central point of liaison among the major research agencies to assure the maximum interchange of informationmust be provided."¹⁸ It went on to suggest that for some elements of science policy, coordination should be elevated to the level of the President.

International Dimensions

The prescience of "A Program for the Nation" is remarkable, given the benefit of 50 years of hindsight. Nowhere is this more telling than in its treatment of the international aspects of science policy, a feature almost entirely missing from ScienceThe Endless Frontier. The Steelman report asserted, for example, that "the future is certain to confront us with competition from other national economies of a sort we have not hitherto had to meet."¹⁹ Despite this, it was in the national interest for the United States to lend:

every possible aid to the re-establishment of productive conditions of scientific research and development in all those countries [of Europe and Asia] willing to enter whole-heartedly into cooperation with us.

The report asserted, in effect, that science should be one component of the plan that Secretary of State George Marshall had sketched out less than 3 months earlier in his June 1947 commencement address at Harvard University (what was soon to be known as the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of the infrastructure of Europe).

The National Science Foundation Act of 1947

Even as Kingsley's EoP task force was completing its work on Science and Public Policy, another attempt was being made to create a National Science Foundation consistent with ScienceThe Endless Frontier's original formulation. In November 1946, less than a month after the PSRB was created, congressional elections returned Republican majorities to both Houses of Congress for the first time since 1930. The leadership of the 80th Congress was far less inclined than the more liberal 79th Congress to heed the wishes of a President from the opposition party who, in any case, was almost certain to be defeated for reelection (assuming he even won his party's nomination). Accordingly, on July 22, 1947, legislation was enacted to create an NSF in which virtually all authority would be vested in a part-time, presidentially appointed National Science Board representative of the scientific community. On August 6, President Truman vetoed the National Science Foundation Act of 1947 for precisely the reason that then BoB Director Smith had given in his October 1945 Senate testimony: The President could not delegate his constitutional authority to oversee the disbursement of public funds to a part-time board of private citizens.²⁰

The extent to which the scientific leadership and its congressional allies misread the firmness of the White House position on the administrative structure issue remains unclear. Perhaps they reasoned that a successful compromise would certainly be reached during the next session of the 80th Congress. "A Program for the Nation" was released exactly 3 weeks after Truman's veto. That BoB remained strongly supportive of an administratively acceptable National Science Foundation is indicated by a recommendation that must have been inserted after the August 6 veto that: "the Congress be urged to establish at its next session a National Science Foundation within the Executive Office of the President."²¹ However, although probably not recognized at the time, the opportunity to create a National Science Foundation incorporating the essence of ScienceThe Endless Frontier's vision for a single agency to support all basic research outside of government had been lost forever, in part because by that time other government agencies were becoming deeply involved in providing such support.

The Failure of the Steelman Report

Science and Public Policy, like the NSF Act of 1947, was essentially dead-on-arrival. The reaction of the scientific community ranged from indifferent to hostile. Vannevar Bush did not hesitate to voice his distaste for the entire PSRB exercise, primarily on the grounds that Steelmanan economisthad no understanding of science. His visceral distrust of large bureaucracies also led him to be wary of any purely internal government attempt to formulate science policy, particularly an attempt conceived of and carried out by closet New Dealers!

An additional, probably more important reason why the Steelman report was stillborn was the unreceptive congressional environment. The Republican leadership of the 80th Congress was determined to dismantle, or at least limit, many programs created during the Roosevelt Administrations. Given this political environment, Truman and his advisers must have recognized the futility of trying to convince Congress to enact any significant portion of "A Program for the Nation"'s ambitious 10-year program, since it was premised on the quasi-New Deal assumption that the government should allocate financial resources for research in both the public and private sectors on the basis of coordinated planning and rationale management.

Nevertheless, the fact that Truman, in his September 1948 AAAS address, urged his scientific audience to support five of the principal recommendations of the Steelman report suggests that he may not have given up entirely. The President delivered his speech to AAAS less than 2 months before the famous November 1948 election that everyone except Truman himself was virtually certain he would lose. In view of his optimism, the President may also have been certain that his party would also recapture both houses of Congresswhich, in fact, it did.

But the President and the new, 81st Congress were destined to be too preoccupied with other matters, including an increasingly hostile foreign policy environment, to consider the comprehensive science policy proposed by the Steelman Board. The one element of the science policy outlined by Truman at the AAAS meeting that did, in fact, materialize during his Administration was the thirdthat a National Science Foundation should be established. However, the NSF created in 1950 was only a pale reflection of what it might have been in 1947 had the scientific leadership been prepared to negotiate a compromise at that time along the lines finally agreed to 3 years later. By 1950, ONR and AEC had been supporting university research for 3 years and the National Institutes of Health for 2. Additionally, by that time a Cold War mentality had become pervasive in the United States. Given these circumstances, legitimate questions were raised about the need for still one more agency to support university research. The NSF legislation managed to win Senate approval only after amendments had been added, one of them excluding the agency from supporting medical research, another limiting its annual appropriations to $15 million.²² By comparison, federal nondefense R&D expenditures during 1950 were estimated to have been approximately $600 million, with defense expenditures slightly more than double that amount. By the end of 1951, those expenditures had more than doubled.

Science Advice to Government

That the idea of an NSF did not expire with Truman's August 6, 1947, veto was due in large measure to BoB's assumption of a more proactive role for science policy. Within BoB, William D. Carey (whose services to science both in government and, later, at AAAS are recalled annually on the occasion of the Carey Lecture) emerged as the principal champion for an NSF. Between 1947 and 1950, Carey managed to maintain the interest of his colleagues in the concept of an agency that would both fund research and provide policy coordination and advice to the Executive Office of the President. He worked closely with the scientific leadership and key congressional leaders and staff to pave the way for the National Science Foundation Act of 1950, which was signed into law on May 10 of that year.²³ The administrative compromise embodied in the actthat responsibility for managing the organization would be shared by a presidentially appointed National Science Board and a director appointed by the President with the consent of the Senatecould probably have been arrived at 3 years earlier. If so, a National Science Foundation could have been created much more in keeping with Vannevar Bush's original vision.

However, Carey and his colleagues did not persist in their efforts solely to establish an agency whose primary purpose would be to fund academic research. From October 1945 onward, BoB had made it clear that it supported the NSF concept primarily because of the coordination and implied advisory functions envisioned for it in the Bush report. Indeed, Carey and his colleagues were largely responsible for ensuring that these functions were mandated by the NSF Act of 1950. According to that legislation, the National Science Board (NSB) was to be composed of 24 members "eminent in the fields of basic sciences, medical science, engineering, agriculture, education, and public affairs."²⁴ BoB anticipated that this body would provide the advice and guidance it so earnestly desired in its task of formulating a coherent, coordinated national science policy.²⁵

However, BoB and, no doubt, the many scientists who had long supported the creation of an NSF, were destined for disappointment. The invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, barely 6 weeks after the agency was created, relegated civilian research to a subordinate position relative to defense research. The White House, preoccupied with the Korean conflict, did not forward its nominees for charter membership on the NSB for consent by the Senate until November 1950. Even before the NSB held its first meeting on December 12, the White House was considering a proposal by William T. Golden, who was then serving as a special consultant to the White House, to create the position of presidential science adviser who would also chair a presidential scientific advisory committee.²⁶

By the time it was created in April 1951, Golden's proposed presidential-level committee was to be downgraded to the status of a Scientific Advisory Committee to the Office of Defense Mobilization (SAC/ODM) within the EoP.²⁷ Nevertheless, at its second meeting on January 3, 1951, the NSB recognized that it had been excluded from defense research policy, which was then, in effect, the only game in town. Thenceforth, with rare exceptions, it did not attempt to fulfill the broader science policy advising and coordinating functions mandated by the NSF Act of 1950, despite the continued urgings of BoB.²⁸

In contrast, SAC/ODM slowly emerged as a significant element in the government science policy structure, particularly in the early years of the Administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. In November 1957, in the wake of the Sputnik I launching by the Soviet Union, Eisenhower reconstituted SAC/ODM and elevated it to the status of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). At the same time he appointed James Killian, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as chair of PSAC and his full-time science advisor. Thereafter, PSAC began to fulfill many of the functions that Carey and his colleagues had envisioned for the NSB as early as 1947.

"A Short Window of Idealism and Optimism"

In March 1951, President Truman nominated Alan T. Waterman, Chief Scientist at the Office of Naval Research, as NSF's first director; Senate confirmation took place during the same month. In May, NSF received BoB's approval to submit a budget request of $13.5 million to the Congress for FY 1952, due to begin on July 1 of that year.²⁹ On October 20, Congress agreed to appropriate only $3.5 million, on the grounds that the Korean emergency precluded more than nominal expenditures for basic research and science education.³⁰ By FY 1958, the agency's appropriations had risen to $49.75 millionless than 20 percent of the level that the Steelman report had recommended for that year.³¹

But NSF's fortunes were about to change. One result of the October 4, 1957, Sputnik launching by the Soviet Union was widespread concern about alleged deficiencies in U.S. scientific capabilities and resources relative to those of the Soviet Union and, even more acutely, the lack of sufficient numbers of adequately prepared and motivated young people selecting scientific careers. Congress, finally convinced that support for science and science education was good politics as well as wise policy, appropriated $136 million for NSF for FY 1959. It is unlikely that many pointed out that that appropriation, although impressive, was only slightly more than half the $250 million that "A Program for the Nation" had envisioned for 1957, for the simple reason that by 1958, few would have recalled that the Steelman report had ever existed!

Congress, it seems, did not take NSF seriously until it decided that university basic research might contribute to the Cold War, or at least bolster the U.S. position in its rivalry with the Soviet Union. On the other hand, ScienceThe Endless Frontier and Science and Public Policy had both envisioned an NSF that would function in a peacetime context. William Carey was later to recall the heady environment of those immediate postwar years:³²

You have to think of the atmosphere. This was postwar, most of the world in ashes, the U.S. riding very, very high, dreaming great dreamsthe Full Employment Act, United Nations arrangements, Point IV, the Marshall Plan. And then, along in parallel, there was to be a new age of science, of creativity.

The atmosphere was that we had a new world, and all would go well. There was a very short window of idealism and optimism that closed very abruptly. And then you had Korea! And everybody woke up! Everybody woke up! The world was not going to be perfect ever.

The National Science Foundation almost certainly would have evolved into a very different agency had it been created in 1947 (the year of the Marshal Plan and the Full Employment Act) rather than in the Cold War environment of 1950, although whether for better or worse can, of course, never be determined.

Beyond the National Science Foundation, a wide-ranging debate in 1947­48 on science-government relations would certainly have been in the best long-term interests of both science and government and, more broadly, U.S. society. The long-forgotten Steelman report would have provided an admirable point of departure. That such a debate never occurred certainly qualifies as a significant opportunity lostone whose impacts are still discernible after 50 years.

Endnotes

1. "Address of the President of the United States," Science, Volume 108, pp. 313­14 (September 24, 1948).

2. John R. Steelman, Science and Public Policy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, August 1947). Reprinted by the Arno Press, New York, NY, 1980.

3. Vannevar Bush, ScienceThe Endless Frontier: A Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research, July 1945. Reprinted by the National Science Foundation, Washington, DC, 1990.

4. During his October 1945 congressional testimony on legislation to create a National Research Foundation, Harlow Shapley, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard, suggested that since the new agency would support science education as well as research, it should be referred to as the National Science Foundation in recognition of this broader scope.

5. The legislative history of the National Science Foundation is recounted in detail by J. Merton England, A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation's Formative Years, 1945­57 (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, [year]), pp. 9­112.

6. Ibid. p. 30.

7. Ibid. pp. 56­59. The administrative provisions of the Senate bill were derived from legislation introduced by Harley Kilgore (DWVa) as an alternative to the Magnuson legislation.

8. Howard A. Meyerhoff, "Obituary: National Science Foundation 1946," Science, Volume 104, p. 97 (August 2, 1946).

9. England, op cit. (ref. 5), p. 30.

10. Charles V. Kidd, interview with William A. Blanpied, May 13, 1997.

11. Steelman, op cit. (ref. 2), Volume I, pp. 70­71.

12. Steelman himself insisted on being named The Assistant to the President to indicate the unique authority and access accompanying his position.

13. Kidd, op cit. (ref. 10).

14. These four volumes, published between September 27 and October 18, 1947, were: Vol. II: "Science in the Federal Government," Vol. III: "Administration of Research," Vol. IV: "Manpower for Research," and Volume V: "The Nation's Medical Research."

15. Steelman, op cit. (ref. 2), Volume I, pp. 26-28.

16. This appears to be the first time that the now familiar R&D/GDP ratio was used in any official U.S. government document.

17. Steelman, op cit., (ref 2), Volume I, p. 31.

18. Ibid. p. 61.

19. Ibid. p. 5.

20. England, op cit. (ref. 5), p. 82.

21. Steelman, op cit. (ref. 2), Volume I, pp. 31­32.

22. England, op cit. (ref 2), p. 101. The $15 million appropriations cap was abolished in 1954.

23. Ibid. p. 106.

24. National Science Foundation Act of 1950, Public Law 81-507 (64 Stat.149): Section 4 (42 U.S.C. 183).

25. After reviewing existing federal research programs in his September 1948 AAAS speech, Truman went on to remark, "I sincerely hope that these programs will be further developed and coordinated by the early passage of a National Science Foundation bill." op cit., (ref. 1).

26. William A. Blanpied, Impacts of the Early Cold War on the Formulation of U.S. Science Policy: Selected Memoranda of William T. Golden (Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1995), pp. xxv­xxx.

27. Ibid.

28. On March 17, 1954, President Eisenhower issued "Executive Order 10521 Concerning Government Scientific Research," drafted by Carey, which included provisions designed to compel NSF to carry out the advisory and coordination functions mandated by the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. NSF Director Alan T. Waterman largely ignored its provisions, presumably with the concurrence of the NSB. The text of Eisenhower's Executive Order appears in England, op cit. (ref. 5), pp. 353­55.

29. England, op cit. (ref. 5), p. 152.

30. Ibid. p. 160.

31. From FY 1955 through 1959, NSF also received supplemental appropriations to support U.S. participation in the International Geophysical Year (IGY, which occurred in 1957 and 1958) as follows: FY 1955: $2 million, FY 1956: $37 million, FY 1958: $2 million, FY 1959: $2.5 million.

32. William D. Carey, interview with William A. Blanpied, November 19, 1986 (unpublished).

William A. Blanpied is senior international analyst, National Science Foundation. This article is based on remarks delivered at the 23rd Annual AAAS Colloquium on Science and Technology Policy, held April 29­May 1, 1998, in Washington, DC.