The NACA prepared this chart in 1947 to illustrate the increasing volume and complexity of work it faced in the postwar period. (LeRC)

its own right, soon to be anointed with independent status equal to that of the army or navy. Although the NACA had also grown tremendously during the war, it was dwarfed by comparison.2 Worse still for the Committee, industry and the air force-the two traditional allies and clients of the NACA-emerged from the war with some old and new bones to pick with the NACA. Not that the Committee had been immune to criticism in its first 30 years: far from it. But now the criticism was coming from its customary friends and supporters (and other new sources as well), just at the time when those allies had achieved the power and influence in national affairs hitherto denied them. The national aeronautical-research policy that Hunsaker wanted to formulate in the wake of the jet-propulsion revolution was going to be hammered out by an aeronautical community that was not as neatly in the NACA camp as it once had been.

Two other trends in national politics were to intrude upon the shaping of a new national policy for the NACA. First, World War II had made the United States keenly aware of the importance of science and technology in the modern world and led to numerous attempts to institutionalize these suddenly indispensable ingredients of national

The new west area of Langley laboratory as it appeared in 1948. All the facilities pictured here represent growth brought on by World War II, but even this was not enough to keep pace with the needs of the military services and industry. (LaRC)

existence. Second, the performance of the military services in the war came under close scrutiny and inaugurated a restructuring of the entire military establishment to fit the atomic age.

The postwar institutionalization of science and technology flowed from the experience of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Historian A. Hunter Dupree has stated that 1940 marked a clear dividing line in the history of Science in the Federal Government, and "many of the characteristics of the wartime research effort were in fact permanent changes in the government's relation to science." 3 Institutionalizing science and technology within the federal government was one such change. Before the war was over, bills appeared in Congress to continue the functions of the OSRD, and President Roosevelt asked Vannevar Bush to prepare a report for him on the subject. The bills reflected congressional receptivity to the idea of perpetuating something like the OSRD, but it was Roosevelt's request that set in motion the machinery leading ultimately to the National Science Foundation. Bush's report, Science, the Endless Frontier, recommended a scientific advisory body, consciously modeled on the NACA, to do for science what the NACA had done for aeronautics. Parts of this scheme came to fruition, but not before a protracted, often heated debate that divided

Washington and the scientific community and warned those who cared to listen that the NACA was no longer the ideal it had once been.4 One group-counting in its ranks Vannevar Bush, virtually all of the NACA, a large majority of the scientific community, and most of the contributors to Science, the Endless Frontier-favored a foundation controlled by a 24-man board appointed by the president. The board would select its own director to function in much the same capacity as George Lewis had for the NACA. This plan was in fact drafted by Bush, with help from John Victory. In the NACA files, across the top of one bill embodying this philosophy, is a penciled note, probably by Victory: "Organization to be run just exactly as NACA.” 5

In the opposite corner was another group-including President Truman; his director of the budget, Harold D. Smith; and other old Washington hands-who were just as anxious for a national science foundation, but wanted the director to be head of the agency, being immediately answerable to the president and advised by a subordinate consultative board. The opponents were primarily concerned with chain of command, lines of authority, and precepts of efficient and responsible organization. They discounted the scientists' misgivings that such an arrangement would interject politics into the scientific process, as the NACA had maintained for years in defense of its system.

Congress passed a NACA-style strong-board bill in 1947. Truman vetoed it. Two years of intense, often acrimonious debate ensued before compromise legislation could be formulated. As finally instituted, the National Science Foundation embodied a director and a consultative board with parallel and complementary powers and functions. Even at that, disagreement on subordinate points was so strong that many issues had to be ignored or papered over in the legislation, to be worked out in practice in future years.

Most importantly for the NACA, the act itself (and Truman's rejection of the original scheme) signaled that the committee form of organization had fallen from favor in much of Washington, even in as esoteric a field as scientific research. When the NACA was formed, science may have been a small and curious enterprise worthy of an exceptional organization, but science was now big business, calling for careful organization and administration like other activities of government. In fact, the NACA form of operation had evolved over the years into something the government had never intended but had never repudiated. By the late 1940s it was found wanting, at least as a model for the National Science Foundation.

The military services meanwhile had begun a similar effort to institutionalize science and technology. In 1945 a Research Board for National Security was created within the National Academy of Sciences.

Composed of half military and half civilian members, it was intended to be a source of expert advice to the services. Truman and his budget director, however, did not want the Academy dictating military research policy, so the board was liquidated in 1946, to be replaced by a Research and Development Board within the military establishment. The title of this body reflected current opinion on the inseparability of research and development, and its positioning within the defense establishment was in harmony with the military suspicion that the Academy in particular, and the scientific community in general, had let the services down before the war. From now on the military would have its own source of scientific advice.8

Similar disenchantment with prewar mechanisms for scientific advice lay behind General Hap Arnold's creation of the Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) within the Army Air Forces. Vowing never again to be caught off guard as he had been in the early 1940s, Arnold enlisted Theodore von Kármán to organize a group of top scientists, survey the field of aeronautics, and advise the air force on the technical needs of the future. After surveying captured German resources as part of an Army Air Forces inspection team in mid-1945, von Kármán and his colleagues drafted "Where We Stand," a preliminary survey of the state of aeronautical facilities, and recommended building new facilities comparable to Germany's in the United States for the supersonic research that lay ahead. Before the end of the year, SAG completed its major work, Toward New Horizons, a 33-volume study containing detailed recommendations for future research in all areas of flight from power plants to medicine and psychology. One recommendation of the report—that the Army Air Forces maintain a permanent scientific advisory body-led to the creation in 1946 of the Scientific Advisory Board under von Kármán's chairmanship. From then on the air force no longer depended solely on the NACA for institutionalized scientific advice.9

These steps to formalize the integration of science and technology into national policy were taken while the government was also reviewing the role of the armed services in World War II and determining its military policy for the atomic age. In spite of the triumph of American arms in 1945, Congress dealt severely with the armed forces as the war ended. Calls for demobilization, cutbacks in defense spending, and critical scrutiny of military preparedness in 1941 swirled about the Capitol. The most exhaustive inquiry into military activities (and the one with the greatest impact on the NACA) was conducted in the first year after the war by Senator James M. Mead's Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program. Mead's committee examined all aspects of national defense, including the role of aeronautics,

and it reached conclusions of equal import to the military establishment and the NACA. 10

In line with the Mead committee recommendations, the military services were transformed in 1947 by the National Defense Reorganization Act. To the army and navy was added a separate and independent air force, all three unified within a National Military Establishment under a civilian secretary of defense. The newly created Research and Development Board (successor to the Research Board for National Security) was directly responsible to the new secretary. The National Military Establishment, which became the Department of Defense in 1949, was intended to coordinate the services, standardize compatible military policies, and eliminate interservice rivalry; but it had decades of tradition and habit to overcome, and throughout the NACA's remaining years the military services struggled uncomfortably with the new order. 11

The Mead committee also found room for improvement in the NACA record. In fact the hearings served as a clearinghouse for criticism of the NACA, especially by industry. This testimony convinced the Mead committee that, although the NACA had contributed significantly to aeronautical progress and deserved continued support, it had been guilty of "timidity" and "lack of forcefulness" in the prewar years by failing to request adequate funds to keep America abreast of its enemies. As a result, Germany had built better aeronautical-research facilities that had led to jet propulsion, swept-back wings, and other technical advances dangerous to the United States. Though it held the military jointly responsible for these failings, the Mead committee concluded that the NACA, "as the Government agency primarily responsible for the direction and coordination of aeronautical research, must assume aggressive, foresighted leadership in the research field."12 This charge implied an absence of such leadership in the past.

For its part, the air force held the NACA more responsible than had the Mead committee for these shortcomings. Senior air force officers were circumspect in their public criticisms, but censure could be found between the lines of many official statements, including some by General Arnold himself. 13 The NACA defense against these criticisms was not particularly effective: it argued that it was not far behind on jet propulsion, that it had discovered swept wings independently of the German work, that the Germans were ahead because of better facilities, that the NACA was under the control of the military during the war and was precluded by military policy from the fundamental research necessary for advances on a par with the Germans', and that comparing all the Committee's classified work with that of the Germans would show that, as George Lewis put it, "we are not so far behind.” The staff at Langley actually drew up an "Appraisal of German Research