Hail to the Chief Tech-heads - Government Activity

Industry Standard, The, Oct 23, 2000 by 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.