on how to empower a new agency. Simplicity and power were the watchwords: the legislation should not encumber the new agency with needless complications and restrictions.

With that philosophy the NACA was in warm accord, but inevitably there arose the specific issue that would divide the Committee's representatives from the other drafters: would the new agency be a committee, or would it be organized hierarchically with a single head answerable to the president? To the former scheme Dryden, Doolittle, and the other NACA representative were firmly committed. To the latter, the BoB staff was equally committed. In fact, this had been the pet grievance of BoB for years, especially in the Government Organization Branch. In 1951, when the NACA was trying to have Dryden included in the Executive Pay Act, the only comment made by William Finan of Government Organization on the proposals was: "This looks like a good reorganization plan prospect to me." Now Finan was a key member of the team drafting the new legislation. Even Willis Shapley, constant defender of the NACA against BoB suggestions that the Committee be transferred to another agency like the Department of Commerce or Defense, was not averse to changing the organizational structure of the NACA if the opportunity arose. On the same executive pay issue in 1951, he wrote to his boss recommending that "we continue to raise with NACA the organizational question at every appropriate opportunity." 25

No opportunity in the previous decade had been so appropriate as the drafting of new legislation and the formation of a new agency in 1958. BoB spoke with one voice on this issue and most others in the executive branch concurred. Doolittle and Dryden went to the wall, for they feared the elimination of the one attribute of the NACA they considered most responsible for the Committee's success. So strongly did they feel on this issue-no doubt they were speaking as well for John Victory and all the rest of the Committee staff-that they overstated their case and unwittingly revealed the very myopia that had brought the NACA to this pass. Doolittle wrote to Killian on 24 March protesting that "we should not tear down something that is working perfectly in order to try out a derogation of the Board that both Hugh and I are convinced is unwise." 26 The NACA had real friends and admirers throughout Washington and the country, but few outside its own cloister would have claimed that the Committee system worked "perfectly." By embracing that conceit, the members of the NACA had deafened themselves over the years to the real misgivings about its organizational arrangement that friends like Shapley had been trying to express to them. Had they been more alive to the perceptions of others, they might have been better prepared in 1958 to counter the proposals of those who were determined to bring the NACA into line

with conventional wisdom about how to organize a government agency. As it was, the NACA protestations brought more heat than light to the debate and did nothing to dissuade the reformers. The space act drafted under Killian's general direction and approved by Eisenhower for submission to Congress provided for a National Aeronautics and Space Agency headed by an administrator appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. As a gesture to the tradition of collective leadership, the act provided for an advisory board-one that could advise, but need not consent. The NACA experiment in government organization was being abandoned.27

FROM NACA TO NASA

The space act settled once and for all the organizational structure of the new space agency. It did not determine what the new agency would do. Clearly it would continue the aeronautical-research function of the NACA, but its role in space was specified nowhere in the act. Therein lay a new controversy that pitted the NACA and its friends in the Pentagon against the Congress and the president's staff. The outcome was of no one's choosing, least of all the NACA's, but it extinguished the old NACA and its traditions more thoroughly even than had the discarding of the committee system.

Nothing in the administration bill convinced the NACA that it could not operate as the new space agency much as it had operated in recent years: that is, as a research organization serving the industry and the military. Nor did Eisenhower give clear directions about what the new agency would do, how it would proceed, or what programs it would control, for the simple reason that neither he nor his staff had the answers to those questions. Rather, he directed the NACA and the Department of Defense to work out the issues between them.28

While the NACA began the prescribed coordination with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a newly created branch of DoD initially assigned overall responsibility for space activities, it also took unilateral actions looking toward business pretty much as usual. It projected the addition of an 800-man Space Flight Research Center to its existing laboratories, but the latter "would not be greatly expanded." With the air force it planned and executed a joint agreement to develop a manned recoverable space vehicle on the pattern of the X-15 program: that is, a cooperative venture, with the air force in charge (and picking up the tab) while the NACA ran the technical and research aspects of the program. The X-15 program had become the NACA's model for a successful joint program and its first choice for conducting major projects in the future, including space projects.29

To the extent that this agreement between the NACA and the air force reflected a willingness and an ability to coordinate the civilian and military requirements of space, it was surely welcome in Congress. But the agreement itself lacked the sweep and the enthusiasm that Lyndon Johnson for one-now chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Space and Astronautics-brought to his consideration of the administration space bill. He said that "seldom, if ever, [had] a Congress and an administration faced a more challenging task," and that their actions could decide the future of the United States for the next century. He wanted nothing less than "to convert outer space into a blessing for humanity." Alongside such cosmic visions, the NACA's modest proposals looked half-hearted, even negative.30

Johnson and his colleagues were also alive to the military potential of space, and they dreaded Armageddon as much as they sought the "millenium of peace." Naturally, they wanted cooperation between the new space agency and the Department of Defense, to ensure that the U.S. would not be found wanting should space become a new arena for war; but they also wanted to keep the new agency from being dominated by the vast and voracious Department of Defense. So Johnson and his colleagues rewrote the administration bill, adding two provisions particularly displeasing to Eisenhower. First, the congressmen called for a civilian-military liaison committee to ensure regular and formal coordination between the civilian and the military space programs, and they prescribed a free exchange of information between the NASA and the DoD. Second, they added to the act language establishing a National Aeronautics and Space Council to be chaired by the president and to consist of heads of all agencies concerned with space: i.e., NASA, DoD, AEC, State Department, and such other agencies as the president deemed necessary. The purpose of the council was to ensure that the president would take a personal interest in the space program and that space matters would be examined in the highest councils of government, where the voice of the new space agency would be equal to those of the established giants. And the council replaced the advisory board that had been included in the administration bill as a sop to NACA sensibilities; Johnson considered the board too weak for the task at hand, a sad measure of the NACA's reputation on the Hill.31

These organizational constraints the Congress could legislate, but it was powerless to infuse the new agency with the enthusiasm that dominated the special committees on space which both houses created to deal with the space act. The new administrator was to be chosen by the president with the consent of the Senate, and though Congress could not really say what it did want-a space cadet-it could say what it didn't want-Hugh Dryden. He seemed the logical choice to head

the new agency, but his testimony before Congress in the spring and summer of 1958 ended any hopes he might have had for that post. His statements contained many of the right words, invoking visions of space stations and manned travel to the planets, but they lacked the enthusiasm and zeal so prevalent in Congress. 32

His most famous and most damaging gaffe illustrates the difficulty. Wernher von Braun, the dynamic and charismatic head of the army ballistic missile program at Redstone Arsenal, had suggested in earlier testimony before Congress that the United States should immediately begin a crash program with equipment already available to launch a man straight up into space and return him by parachute, just for the sake of doing it, for the sake of beating the Russians. When asked about this proposal, Dryden characterized it as a mere "stunt" like shooting a woman out of a cannon, devoid of scientific merit or technological substance. Of course he was right; but what he failed to grasp then-and what the Apollo program would demonstrate in only a few years-was that a stunt was just what the country wanted, a daring and dramatic demonstration of American technological superiority. The engaging and hyperbolic von Braun came away from the exchange looking bold and imaginative. The soft-spoken and correct Dryden came away looking timid and lackluster. So too did the NACA. Not only would a new agency be required, but a new leader as well. 33

Meanwhile, the executive branch of government, led by presidential science adviser Killian, was handling the NACA almost as roughly. It began by abrogating the joint NACA-USAF agreement to develop a manned recoverable space vehicle. Killian wanted ARPA to be the military space agency for the time being, and he did not want the NACA making separate agreements with the air force. In the long run ARPA became just as aggressive and demanding about the military role in space as Killian feared the air force would have been, but at least he could keep the number of players to a minimum. He wanted the NACA and ARPA to work out a division of labor as directed by Eisenhower; then he could adjudicate what they found irreconcilable. 34

At the outset, only two issues were clear. Reconnaissance satellites and other uses of space for military intelligence-gathering were surely an exclusively military function. Space science was a civilian function. For all other space activities envisioned at the time-meteorology, communications, lunar and planetary exploration, and manned spaceflight-both civilian and military programs could be envisioned. 35

The existence of a joint agreement on the manned recoverable satellite suggested that the NACA and its friends in the Pentagon, especially in the air force, would have been pleased to arrange joint projects in these gray areas, along the lines of the X-15 program. But Eisenhower would have none of that. He did not want to hand over to

any group in the Pentagon a large and potentially enormous new area of activity, especially as he seriously doubted the services' ability to handle their current missions. ARPA had been created in large part to eliminate the interservice rivalry over new technologies and the missions that went with them, and on the same day that Eisenhower sent the space act to Congress he forwarded a draft defense-reorganization act designed to clear up the "missile mess" and rationalize the development and employment of new technologies in the Pentagon.36

Killian and the staff of the Bureau of the Budget had other reasons for disliking joint programs on the model of the X-15. Although they encouraged cooperation and coordination between NACA and the services on programs of common interest, they wanted each program to have a clearly identified lead agency with managerial responsibility and sole control of funding. The ultimatum to the NACA and the ARPA was to divide the programs between them along the lines of the evolving space act: programs "peculiar to or primarily associated with weapons systems or military operations" would go to ARPA, all others to the new civilian agency.37

On this ground the NACA and ARPA debated and negotiated through the spring and summer. Finally, Killian had to step in. Every controversy he decided in favor of the civilian agency. NASA would control the development of launch vehicles, meteorology, and most important, manned spaceflight. Only in communications did the military make a case and win a minor concession: the civilian agency would run passive satellite communications (i.e., bouncing signals off a reflecting satellite) and the military would run active communications satellites, those capable of receiving and transmitting messages. The reconnaissance satellite went to the air force, the communications satellite to the army; with that, the ARPA was essentially out of the space program. But, in the few short months since its creation, ARPA had become wedded to space, and it fought to retain a role in space activities. This proved to be a harbinger of future military attempts to alter the division of roles between the new space agency and the Department of Defense. 38

For the time being, however, the debate was over. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed by Congress on 29 July 1958 and signed by President Eisenhower the same day. Within that month the basic division of labor between NASA and the military was determined. On 9 August Eisenhower nominated T. Keith Glennan, president of Case Western University, to head the new agency. At Glennan's request, Dryden accepted the post of deputy administrator. The two men were confirmed by the Senate on 15 August and sworn in at the White House four days later. The space act gave them less than three months to effect the transition from the NACA to NASA.39