Hail to the Chief Tech-heads - Government Activity

Michael Beschloss

Lincoln held his own patent. Kennedy aimed for the moon. What should the next president do? Maybe nothing.

Americans learn almost at their mother's knee about John Kennedy's passion for the moon-landing program and Franklin Roosevelt's deep involvement in the development of the atomic bomb. From such tales, you might imagine most American presidents as technologists-in-chief; sleeves rolled up, crouching over tables and blueprints with the inventors of the telegraph, the electric light or the computer, asking how government could help.

Indeed, presidents have done much to influence some of America's greatest technological breakthroughs: the transcontinental railroad, the atomic bomb, interstate highways, men on the moon, the Internet.

But throughout American history, such achievements have been more the exception than the rule. In the absence of war, economic crisis or an exceptionally visionary and effective executive, presidential influence on technological advancement has been marginal.

In contrast, Abraham Lincoln was enamored of technology; he was the first president to hold a patent, received in 1849 for a method he devised to buoy sailing vessels over shoals using inflated cylinders. During the Civil War, he established the National Academy of Sciences to "investigate, experiment and report upon any subject of science or art." And he oversaw the transformations in armaments, transportation and battlefield medicine required to defeat the South.

Although Thomas Jefferson was famously inventive, intrigued by science and worried about industrialization, he did little more to support technology during his presidency than correspond with Robert Fulton about the steamboat and Eli Whitney about the cotton gin. In the 1870s, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, President Rutherford Hayes provided nothing more than a White House ceremony as workers linked a phone connection from his mansion to the Treasury.

But Lincoln's greatest contribution to America's technological growth may be that he was the "driving force" behind the transcontinental railroad, as Stephen Ambrose writes in Nothing Like It in the World. The onetime railroad lawyer championed "internal improvements" -- the great infrastructure challenges of his time -- such as canals, roads and trains. As president, Lincoln helped decide the great cross-country project's route, financing, even the gauge of the tracks -- 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches. It is probably no coincidence that the man who fought to bind a fractured union politically also sought to do so physically.

Still it was not until the 20th century, after decades of generally weak and peripheral presidents, that Lincoln's successors grew beyond their passive role in technological change.

The great departure was heralded by, of all people, Herbert Hoover. As secretary of commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge in the 1920s, Hoover sought increased private-public cooperation to hasten technological innovation in factories and farms.

But it was Franklin Roosevelt who was the first president to fully exercise his executive powers to advance U.S. technology interests. Like Lincoln, Roosevelt exercised those powers in the face of war.

In 1940, with the Nazis and imperial Japanese looming, he warned the Pan-American Scientific Congress that "great achievements of science and even of art can be used in one way or another to destroy as well as to create. ... If death is desired, science can do that. If a full rich and useful life is sought, science can do that also."

Roosevelt -- in some cases almost single-handedly -- orchestrated the production of the ships, planes, guns, bombs and more esoteric inventions like radar and atomic weapons that would ultimately bring an Allied victory.

He also established a National Defense Research Committee, which included the presidents of Harvard and MIT. The panel used government money to explore the possibilities of atomic fission. In 1941, during a secret briefing just before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt ordered members full-speed ahead: If in six months the project was making serious progress, he would throw any industrial and technological resources at his command behind crash production of an atomic bomb.

To preserve secrecy, FDR kept direct control of what became the Manhattan Project. He returned reports from his science adviser, Vannevar Bush, without making copies for White House files. To his private secretary, Grace Tully, the president said, "I can't tell you what this is, Grace, but if it works, and pray God it does, it will save many American lives."

The Cold War enshrined the notion that presidents must be experts in technology, which might sometimes make the difference between victory and defeat.

Dwight Eisenhower, who felt that the innovative Higgins landing craft won D-Day, knew what a crucial edge new developments in intelligence gathering, arms and transportation could bring to armies and navies.

In November 1954, a half-dozen members of Ike's national security establishment asked him to authorize $35 million for a spy plane developed by the "Skunk Works" -- Lockheed's secret projects operation. The plane was to fly covertly over the Soviet Union, photographing tanks, airplanes and missile sites.

Knowing that crossing Soviet territory was tantamount to an act of war, the president insisted on approving every flight. He tinkered with routes and interrogated his men on the chances that Soviet technology had progressed enough to detect and down an American plane -- as the Russians finally did on May Day 1960, when Francis Gary Powers fell into their hands.

Ike was also the president who demanded construction of the interstate highway system. As supreme commander during World War II, while studying reconnaissance photographs of Hitler's autobahns, Eisenhower mused how far behind the United States was in responding to the needs of the automobile that Americans themselves invented.

The interstate highway system became the largest public works project in history. After steering it through Congress as an essential measure for national defense, Ike was proud of it, but later regretted he had not been enough of a visionary. To get the program passed, his congressional leaders appeased members with large urban constituencies by offering disproportionate funds for construction in the cities.

By 1960, Eisenhower complained that he had "never anticipated" that so many interstate routes would cross highly populated city neighborhoods and that so little money would be spent on rapid transit. It was "very wasteful," he groused, "to have an average of just one man per $3,000 car driving into the central area and taking all the space required to park the car." But by then it was too late.

In his acceptance speech at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1960, John Kennedy touted his New Frontier as a means of exploring "uncharted areas" of "science and space." But after his election, JFK refused NASA pleas for a $20 billion program (in 1961 dollars) to land on the moon by 1970. He worried it would unbalance the budget and upend the existing space program then neatly divided among scientific, communications, meteorological, military and other purposes. He also feared the possibility that astronauts might die in space -- and tarnish his presidency.

Nevertheless, in April 1961, stunned by the first Soviet-manned space flight and his humiliating failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy revived the plan. He wanted to rally national support for himself and give the impression that the United States had seized the initiative back from Moscow. Republicans were horrified by the expense, but JFK managed to convince most of them (not Ike, who thought it "a stunt") that the program was essential to win the Cold War.

Kennedy quickly saw that the moon program presented a public relations bonanza. He flew to Cape Canaveral to quiz scientists on future missions, hectoring them to move faster. He monitored each flight and basked in the reflected glow of each returning hero.

Kennedy's moon-landing program shows how altered a presidential decision can look when viewed from different horizons. Today it seems questionable whether this was the best way to spend a king's ransom in the 1960s. But 500 years from now, earthlings may view the moon landing as the most important American achievement of the 20th century

Beyond their Cold War role of overseeing (usually in secret) technological developments such as those in satellites, nuclear weapons, planes and missiles, later presidents dabbled only sporadically in technology.

In 1964, nervous about the popularity of the VW Beetle, Lyndon Johnson asked his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, former president of Ford Motor, to feel out the Big Three automakers in Detroit about patriotically combining to build a competitive American small car. They were unenthusiastic.

LBJ also secretly authorized planning for a Cold War communications system that -- anticipated by almost no one -- would lead; in 1989, to the World Wide Web. If any president deserves to seize the title of father of the Internet -- however accidentally -- it may well be Johnson.

Richard Nixon denounced Congress when it refused to fund a supersonic transport plane. Jimmy Carter covertly authorized development of stealth aircraft, then, under attack by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign as soft on defense, allowed aides to leak the secret to the press.

Possibly the most fateful presidential intervention in technological development since FDR and the Manhattan Project was Ronald Reagan's demand for a space-based strategic defense initiative. Had anyone been president in the early 1980s other than Reagan, with his memories of Flash Gordon and his genuine desire to abolish nuclear arsenals, it is almost certain SDI never would have been considered. Some former Soviet officials argue if Reagan hadn't threatened Mikhail Gorbachev with the prospect of bankrupting Soviet society in an effort to build a competitive strategic defense, the Soviet leadership might not have been so eager to make a fire-sale deal to end the Cold War. Such is the power of vaporware.

Both of this year's presidential candidates have watched the link between presidents and technology from a front-row seat. Al Gore's father, as a Tennessee senator, led the fight to finance Eisenhower's highway system. George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was one of the Republican senators who denounced Kennedy's moon-landing program, warning the price tag would "unleash the forces of inflation."

With the campaign racing to a climax, we are about to witness the first inauguration of a new president in 72 years that does not fall under the cloud of economic crises and wars that compelled earlier presidents to be great technologists-in-chief. Out of habit, the next president may be tempted to emulate Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy or Reagan.

But, in an era of relative peace and unparalleled prosperity, welding himself to great private-sector initiatives may not be the most helpful thing a president can do.

The unique powers of the presidency will always be needed at crucial moments to ensure fairness, national security and technological explorations not driven solely by the profit motive. Presidents can sometimes spot those moments more acutely than anyone else.

But in their absence, the best contribution the next president can make to the telephones, televisions and Internets of the future might well be to do what most of our presidents have done throughout American history: Stay on the sidelines and cheer.

Michael Beschloss has written six award-winning books about American presidents, including Taking Charge, the first volume in a trilogy about the Lyndon Johnson tapes.

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