tee lost an exclusive hold on one end of the aeronautical research spectrum. Nor was this new condition an inadvertent outcome of congressional oversight. The House Armed Services Committee made explicit what it was about:

It would be fruitless to criticize or to impute blame to the able and devoted scientific personnel employed by the NACA during the prewar years for their failure to keep pace with German aeronautical research. . . . But it would be the height of folly to close our eyes to the obvious lesson to be drawn from that experience-the lesson that we must not place the bulk of our aeronautical research eggs in one basket-the NACA basket. Even the most competent and best qualified scientists and research workers can always profit from the stimulating effects of healthy outside competition.50

Finally, the air force ended up with pretty much what it asked for at the outset. Its new center, soon to be named the Arnold Engineering Development Center, was approved even though Congress was critical of the military services for their failures before the war, and even though Congress was deeply skeptical of air force plans for the center. "A serious question may very well be raised," noted the Armed Services Committee, "as to whether the military may not be stepping outside of its proper sphere when it enters into the arena of research as distinguished from development and evaluation." The committee then presented an informed commentary on “Differentiation between Research, Development, and Evaluation," assigning the first to the NACA and private institutions, the second to industry, and the third to the services, concluding that "the services, by their very nature and organization and the training of their personnel, are not well qualified to undertake activities in the fields of research and development as distinguished from evaluation." 51 The committee nevertheless authorized facilities at AEDC that were clearly for development and conceivably for research.

So the NACA came out third in the battle for facilities after World War II. In some respects this was not as serious as the Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan Act made it look; later experience would show that the original plans for supersonic facilities were grandiose to a fault, the older tunnels were not as outdated as had been feared, and the workload in the supersonic tunnels never prevented the NACA from getting ample time in the tunnels it operated nominally for industry. Furthermore, there is a point (which the NACA may have already reached in the 1930s) when highly sophisticated research tools can lure the researcher into too much experimenting and not enough thinking. Hugh Dryden reported after a trip to England in 1948 that "their lack of money has forced them to make the best use of their brains." 52 The

tyranny of the tunnel was real for the NACA, chaining the staff to a kind of problem-solving research that might well have been supplemented by more time spent at the blackboard or just staring out the window. The real tyranny of the tunnel is that it can lead to busy hands and idle minds. The defeat of the unitary wind tunnel plan was not in itself a fatal blow for the NACA, but it was a harbinger of the Committee's diminished standing with agencies and individuals who would control its destiny.

HARD TIMES

George Lewis had seen the drift of things as soon as the war was over. Writing to an old friend of the Committee in 1945, he said:

Unfortunately, after a great war that has been overstrenuous both mentally and physically to everybody concerned, there is a general let-down; and unfortunately, this let-down is accompanied by a very critical mood. The dear old NACA is coming in for its share, so we will again have to depend on our friends for all the support they can give us.53

The truly unfortunate aspect of this predicament for the NACA was that too many of its friends were disappearing from the scene just when the Committee needed them most. This was especially true on Capitol Hill. The NACA's best friend in the Senate, Hiram Bingham, had been defeated in 1933, and the NACA never found his like again. In the House the situation was worse still. Judge Woodrum retired in 1945, after 22 years of representing the 6th congressional district of Virginia and looking after the interests of the Langley laboratory. During 16 of those years he had chaired the Independent Offices Appropriations Subcommittee that reviewed-one might say rubberstamped-the NACA budget. Victory confided to the congressman that his departure was a "calamity to the public interest" that left his "friends in the NACA heartbroken."54

Part of the calamity for the NACA was that Woodrum's successor, after the Democrats regained control of Congress in 1949, was a young Texas congressman unfamiliar with the NACA's golden days and harboring no NACA laboratory in his home state. Albert Thomas inflicted on the NACA in 1950 a painful and unexpected blow by singlehandedly reducing the Committee's already shrunken share of the unitary wind-tunnel plan. The act had authorized the NACA to spend $136 million on its share of the tunnels, plus $10 million in university tunnels; Thomas tricked the Committee out of almost half when it came before his subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. As a Bureau of the Budget office explained it:

The hearing lasted about 15 minutes. After a very brief discussion of the purpose of the wind tunnels to be built, Mr. Thomas asked NACA how much of the total authorization of $146 million they expected would ultimately be required. When NACA hesitated to reply, he suggested a figure of $75 million. After hurried consultation NACA representatives estimated about $100 million.

Mr. Thomas then asked whether that meant that if a $100-million cash appropriation was made in 1950 to be available until expended, it would then be unnecessary for NACA to request further funds under the Unitary Plan program. NACA representatives had to agree, and that was the end of the hearing. 55

That was bad enough, but Thomas immediately followed up by appropriating only the $75 million he had suggested, maintaining that the NACA had agreed to this reduction. The NACA protested that it never made any such agreement, but it was powerless to deter the congress

man.

This was no isolated instance of Thomas's hostility to the NACA. In later years Thomas would lead the campaign to make the Committee submit its budget annually to authorization hearings, a practice that the NACA had avoided in all its earlier years, claiming that its organic legislation provided a continuing authorization. Thomas would have none of that. In his book, any agency with a budget of more than $50 million a year (such as the NACA had enjoyed consistently after 1940) should justify itself annually to Congress. In fact Thomas had grave reservations about the wisdom of letting a committee administer a budget that size in the first place, and he bluntly-as it turned out, prophetically-warned John Victory in 1950 that the Committee's days were numbered. 56

Nor was Thomas alone. Not only were many of the Committee's old friends gone, but many old enemies-and some new ones—were still very much around. In one of his last major acts of public service, Herbert Hoover took yet another swipe at the NACA. His Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government recommended (as he himself had recommended as president in 1932) absorption of the NACA into the Department of Commerce. The same old objection was at work: "This agency is not directly in the basic line of Presidential authority, and it is unsound organization for it to be governed by a committee. We doubt whether it is sufficiently important, despite its size, to warrant independent status."57 Even the NACA's defenders, like Willis Shapley in the Bureau of the Budget, conceded that the Committee form of organization was undesirable, but the Hoover Commission recommendation was rejected for the time being because Congress had no enthusiasm for restructuring the Committee merely as a matter of principle. Furthermore, there was no

agreement on where the NACA should be put if it were incorporated into one of the executive departments.58 The NACA owed its independence in the late 1940s not so much to its record or its reputation as to general disagreement about where to put it. That could only be cold comfort to the loyal staff and friends who remembered the golden days and believed in the Committee's unique (and unappreciated) contributions to the advance of aeronautics.