10

New Genius, Old Bottle, 1945-1950

The task of staking out for the NACA a defensible field of activity in the postwar world of American aeronautics fell largely to Jerome Hunsaker in his role as chairman of the Committee. The task of working that field fell largely to Hugh Dryden, who succeeded the failing George Lewis in 1947. Dryden's job fell into four major categories: first, to institute organizational and procedural reforms to adapt the agency more closely to his own style of management; second, to clear up unfinished business from World War II; third, to respond to industry demands, some of which he was independently in sympathy with; finally, to identify new areas of research into which the NACA could and should move. Some of these tasks were already under way when he arrived. Some he initiated. All came to bear the stamp of his administration.

DIRECTOR OF THE NACA

Hugh Latimer Dryden wrote his first paper on aeronautics in 1910, when he was 12 years old and the airplane was not yet 7. In "The Advantages of an Airship over an Airplane," he argued that the former was better suited to commerce, the latter to sport, a conclusion that his teacher prophetically found "illogical" though at the time it was a thoroughly sound judgment.1 He got an F on the paper, making all the rest of his 55 years a refutation of his maiden essay on aviation.

Dryden was nothing if not a fast learner. In fact, he was something of a prodigy. He completed high school in Baltimore at the age of 14, then went directly to Johns Hopkins, where he had already been taking courses. He took his baccalaureate in three years, his master's in two more. His master's thesis on "Airplanes: An Introduction to Physical Principles Embodied in Their Use," placed him among only a handful in the United States to be formally educated in this new field; most of the others had studied at MIT with Jerome Hunsaker.2

One of Dryden's instructors at Hopkins, physics professor Joseph S. Ames, recommended the newly fledged physicist to the National Bureau of Standards as "the brightest young man he had ever had, without exception." 3 At the Bureau, Dryden was tutored by Ames and allowed to conduct experiments in the wind tunnel on his own time, completing the requirement for the Ph.D. in less than a year while holding down a fulltime job. In 1919 he took his doctorate in physics and mathematics at the age of 20, the youngest doctor ever at Johns Hopkins. His dissertation on "Air Forces on Circular Cylinders" stimulated sophisticated research in the field for more than a decade.

Dryden's career at the National Bureau of Standards spanned almost 30 years, during which he specialized in research on windtunnel turbulence and boundary layer, contributed to other fields of research, worked closely with the NACA, and published often in NACA reports. During World War II his career broadened dramatically and drew him into an ever widening range of activities. He served on the National Defense Research Committee, and personally administered a guided-missile development program in cooperation with the navy. He was deputy to von Kármán in the Scientific Advisory Group's mission to Europe and became a charter member of the Air Force Scientific. Advisory Board. In 1944 Dryden was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, where he would later head the engineering section and serve as home secretary for the last decade of his life. At the National Bureau of Standards he became assistant director in January 1946 and associate director a few months later.

His record-coupled with his years of service to the NACA, where he was vice chairman of the prestigious Aerodynamics Committee at war's end, and would soon become chairman of its subcommittee on high-speed aerodynamics-made him a natural choice to succeed George Lewis. He was in fact Lewis' choice, quickly endorsed by Hunsaker and the rest of the Main Committee. The director of the National Bureau of Standards, an ex-officio member of the NACA, reluctantly let him go.

By prearrangement, Lewis stayed on as consultant to the Committee, and the research staff at headquarters was enlarged slightly to provide expert technical advice for the new director of aeronautical research. By design or happenstance, Dryden brought no close associates with him to the NACA and thus assumed his new position surrounded by a predecessor and staff schooled in the old ways. Nevertheless, Dryden soon made it clear that his mousy appearance and mild manner camouflaged a firm will and a determination to run things his way. After less than two months in office, he advised the Main Committee at its annual meeting in 1947 that he was planning "a better formulation of the Committee's research programs." That euphemism

was his way of announcing some sweeping revisions in the internal workings of the NACA.6

The revisions began with a formal delineation of Dryden's authority and responsibilities and his relationship to John Victory. The roles adopted by Lewis and Victory over the years were not entirely to Dryden's liking; he preferred an arrangement more in keeping with the one he had known at the National Bureau of Standards.

The change was precipitated by external events. Since 1944, when Lewis was overburdened with war work and his health was already failing, the rules of the NACA had provided that Victory "upon authorization by the Chairman, may exercise functions required by law to be performed by a head of department or agency." Hunsaker described this revision of the rules to President Roosevelt as a "perfecting amendment" that did not "involve any substantive change in policy or procedure." It merely allowed Victory to sign on behalf of Hunsaker the reams of paperwork that nominally required approval by the head of the agency. Victory was the chief administrative officer and the logical one for this pro forma function."

Outside the Committee, however, the amendment created confusion as to who headed the agency, the director of research or the secretary. An executive pay bill introduced in 1949 provided a pay increase for top civil-service executives. Though the NACA was at first not included in this bill, Hunsaker fought with the Bureau of the Budget and won the inclusion of one NACA position. That put a

premium on establishing officially who was head of the agency. Clearly it was Dryden, and just as clearly the NACA regulations needed amendment to settle the issue formally.

On 7 February 1949, Hunsaker submitted to President Truman a set of proposed amendments to the NACA Rules and Regulations. The changes in article 2 elevated Victory to the position of executive secretary and created a new post of associate director for research, to which John Crowley acceded after having served the interregnum between Lewis and Dryden. Most important, the new rules designated Dryden "director" instead of "director of research" and provided that he would "be the head of the agency in all matters except those which by law or regulation require action by the Chairman." This would end the division of labor worked out unofficially by Lewis and Victory, with the director of research managing the technical business of the agency and the secretary handling the administration. Now there would be a single head of the agency, with one technical and one administrative deputy.

This profoundly simple and momentous step became entangled and lost sight of, however, in the politics of the same executive pay act that had precipitated it. While the amendments to the NACA rules were pending, the possibility arose that the pay bill might be amended to include a second position for the NACA. Who, then, should get that raise-Victory, or John Crowley, the associate director of aeronautical research? To the NACA it was clear that Victory was second in line, but the Division of Administrative Management at the Bureau of the Budget doubted whether an administrative officer with "no program responsibilities" should be assistant head of a technical agency. With that observation the issue was joined, and the expansion of Dryden's role was upstaged by a dispute over the history and personality of John F. Victory. 8

The management personnel at BoB looked on the amendment of the NACA regulations as a "subterfuge," "a device for obtaining a better pay rate for the Executive Secretary." When they questioned the logic of the arrangement, they were advised that Victory was a special case: his long and unique service had led the Committee to this organizational scheme; when he retired, the associate director of aeronautical research would become the assistant head of the agency and Victory would be replaced by an executive officer. "At bottom," concluded the management personnel, "the whole matter involves personal consider

ations."9

Not so, said Willis Shapley, of BoB's National Security Branch, the section that handled NACA appropriations. The proposed amendments reflected the NACA organization as it then existed: far from being a subterfuge to get the executive secretary a higher pay rate, it had the effect of preventing him from getting the director's raise, "on which he

had a reasonable claim" under the old regulations. Furthermore, said Shapley, it was not self-evident to him that an administrative man should not be assistant head of the agency. While he conceded that the NACA planned to replace Victory with a technical man when he retired, Shapley wondered about the advisability of giving over such an agency entirely to the scientists. He wrote to the assistant director of BOB:

A specialized scientific agency like the NACA requires somewhere in the top command someone whose qualifications extend beyond the scientific fields covered by the agency, and while some members of the main committee meet this need in part, I believe that it would be desirable if either the head or the assistant head of the agency be a nontechnical person. The Research and Development Board is learning the hard way that the management of a scientific research and development program does not require scientists, but administrators and it is well known that it is very rarely that one finds scientists who are also administrators. In my opinion the Bureau of the Budget would be making a serious mistake to base any action on the assumption that scientific agencies should in all cases be headed by scientists. Specifically, I think there is no merit in the argument that the assistant head of NACA should necessarily be a scientist.

Shapley stopped just short of saying that science is too important to be left to scientists, but his meaning was clear: Neither the NACA nor the BoB should lose sight of the need for sound management and administration in any government bureau, no matter how scientific its mission. For the time being, however, the NACA and Shapley saw eye to eye and the proposed amendments to the rules were approved. 10

As often happened in the NACA's history, Victory's personality intruded on this business and obscured the truly significant issueDryden's elevation to director. Although that personality changed little in the 43 years of the NACA's history, it had undergone a shift in orientation that altered Victory's behavior just at the time of this flap with the BOB. In the 30 years up to the end of World War II, Victory had both grown and swelled in office. The Committee's reputation for efficiency and economy owed much to his fastidious administration, and his expertise in the ways of Washington was admired by even his critics. Unfortunately, he was always officious and priggish, and in his later years he grew downright pompous and oracular. With the war won and George Lewis gone, Victory came to view himself as something of a dean to the American aeronautical community, by longevity and association if not by importance. Though obsequious still to members of the Main Committee and others whom he considered touched by greatness, he would pontificate to lesser mortals on any occasion.