Many issues about the future of the new agency remained unresolved, but one thing was already clear: it would differ greatly from the NACA. It would operate under a new head unfamiliar with NACA traditions, and the staff would incorporate new personnel from outside the field of aeronautics. The new organizational structure would strengthen the head of the agency and reduce the advisory board to a powerless appendage outside the mainstream of agency activities. The addition of new groups-specifically the Vanguard staff of the Naval Research Laboratory and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology-would bring a new style to the laboratory work of the NACA, as would the new research facility to be,built just outside Washington. NASA would be an operating organization conducting entire programs and missions, in contrast to the more limited research role performed by the NACA. The new agency would soon be contracting out up to 90 percent of its budget, in contrast to the minor contracting done by the NACA. With its far-reaching mission and the public attention being focused on space, the new agency would operate far more in the limelight, would move more often in the highest councils of government, and would command a far larger budget than its predecessor had. One wag represented the transition as:

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But while changes from the old aeronautical-research agency to the new civilian space agency would obviously be drastic, there was no telling how much of the NACA influence would stay, how much would be swept away.

The NACA Executive Committee held its last meeting on 21 August 1958. On 30 September Chairman Doolittle sent the 44th and last annual report of the Committee to President Eisenhower. At close of business that day, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics ceased to exist.

CONCLUSION

If the NACA was so good, why was it laid to rest? First-was it so good? The evidence examined in this study does not support a conclusion one way or another. The NACA was the premier aeronauticalresearch organization in the country that came to lead the world in aeronautical development. The position the NACA held, however, does not necessarily establish its contribution, any more than position establishes the credit of the Guggenheim laboratories, or the military air branches, or the design and development teams of the aircraft manufacturers. More needs to be known about the nature of aeronautical

progress before the contribution of the NACA can be isolated and evaluated with confidence.40

Still, some tentative conclusions can be drawn from the circumstantial evidence uncovered in this study. The men and women of the NACA were not as creative, innovative, and effective as they said or believed. Like other government employees competing for scarce funding to perform a job they believed in, they found it necessary to blow their own horns just to stay in existence. They read their own clippings and may have become victims of their own propaganda. Even so, they were better than is generally recognized. Letters of praise, congratulations, and appreciation fill their records and spill over into John Victory's private card file of kudos. Many of these, of course, were pro forma, even self-serving, submitted by customers and clients with a vested interest in the continued existence of the NACA. But many of the endorsements have the ring of sincerity too, and many are from individuals and institutions with no back to scratch. Furthermore, the thousands of copies of NACA reports sent out by the Committee every year were sought after, used, and cited by aeronautical engineers and designers around the world. The NACA's reputation in the world of aeronautics was usually secure, at times transcendent.

That it boasted overmuch suggests two conclusions about public institutions. First, organizations without a firm and continuing political base believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have to engage in selling themselves, often to a degree that is unbecoming, self-deceptive, and finally counterproductive. Second, people who stay with an agency all or most of their careers develop loyalty and experience, but they also get the institution's reputation confused with their own self-esteem. The result can be sentimentality and corporate narcissism.

The NACA enjoyed an enviable reputation for efficiency and economy, largely because of the fastidious and conscientious John Victory. "We were the most law-abiding organization, mind your own business type of organization, in the Federal Government," 41 he boasted with some reason, and though he offended many with his conceits and his compulsions, he pleased those in the Bureau of the Budget and Congress who worried over what return the taxpayer got on his dollar.

On balance, the NACA was a good agency-if not as good as it thought, at least as good as other agencies that outlived it. Why, then, was it eliminated? There are at least seven answers to that question, in roughly the following order of importance.

First, it was a committee. This peculiar organizational structure always rankled people who cared about organizational arrangements— the successive Hoover Commissions, the Brookings Institute, the Bureau of the Budget. But what to do about it? The two most popular suggestions were to merge it with the Department of Commerce or the

military establishment, but this always seemed to entail favoring either commercial or military aviation to the detriment of the other. So the NACA remained an independent committee not because there was much liking for that structure, but because its critics failed to come up with a compelling alternative. Sputnik changed all that, providing an ideal opportunity to remodel the agency in a more conventional and hierarchical pattern. This was the solution that the Committee's critics had missed over the years, because they disliked its independence almost as much as its committee form. To leave the agency independent while eliminating the committee structure was to eliminate the main irritant without taking away the autonomy that the NACA insisted it needed.

Sputnik pointed up another problem closely related to organizational structure: size. Committee management of the NACA might have been allowable in the 1920s and 1930s when budgets were never more than a few millions and the staff never topped 500, all housed in a single laboratory and a small headquarters. Since World War II, however, the NACA had been a large and expensive organization spread across the country, employing thousands and spending as much as $100 million in a single year, far more than in its first 25 years combined. Gone was the simplicity and ease of operation that characterized the early years when a close-knit organization could operate out of George Lewis's hip pocket. In the 1950s the NACA was a large, complex, expensive enterprise, requiring the most modern of management techniques. A committee did not fit that requirement.

Third, during World War II the aviation industry and the aviation branches of the military services had grown so large and powerful that they began to encroach on the NACA's domain and compromise its claims to be unique and indispensable. This intrusion was largely unavoidable, because no clear dividing line exists between fundamental research, development, and testing, the areas claimed respectively by the NACA, industry, and the services. The NACA had set up an artificial division in order to stake out for itself a research field that it could monopolize without antagonizing any of its potential clients. The intrusion of the services and the industry into the NACA's domain after World War II was also the result of jet propulsion and the discovery after the war of other German advances that cast doubt on the NACA's ability to anticipate the future course of aeronautical development and keep the United States in the forefront.

A fourth cause of the NACA's demise was its conservatism. Committees are conservative by nature, especially when one seeks of them unanimity as the NACA chairmen often did. Decisions become still more conservative when made from a precarious political base where a bold step in the wrong direction can be fatal. Over the years the NACA

became increasingly a service agency, responding not so much to its own considered judgment about the future course of aeronautics as to the day-to-day demands of industry and the services, not to vision but to routine. For every X-15 program there were a dozen others that were pedestrian and unexceptional.

Another shortcoming of decisions by committee is that they tend to endorse those projects that have sponsors on the committee and overlook those that do not. This tendency accounts for a number of skeletons in the NACA closet, some of which contributed to the Committee's demise. Failure to discover jet propulsion was the most famous and damaging of these, because it came to the attention of Congress and because it upset Hap Arnold so. But other shortcomings tempered the praise the industry and the services gave to the NACA. The Committee stayed too long with airships and seaplanes, for example; it came too late to structures and helicopters.

By 1956 the NACA had also lost the Progressive purity that distinguished its beginning. It was an article of faith in the early years that representatives of industry should not sit on NACA committees or subcommittees lest they exert undue and self-serving influence on research policy. But over the years, as industry grew more powerful, its representatives slowly won memberships and even chairmanships, first on the subcommittees, then on the main technical committees, finally on the Main Committee. However scrupulous these men may have been, their presence nurtured the impression in some circles that the NACA was a captive of the military-industrial complex.

Finally, aviation was no longer the infant technology it had been when the NACA was formed. Surely research was still needed, but with the industry and the military services engaging in so much of their own, the need for a separate agency was less obvious than at the outset. In many ways the NACA had achieved what its founders set out to do: contribute to the establishment of a thriving technology in the United States, a technology that could now survive without a government agency devoted exclusively to its nurture. Thus, in a most significant way, the NACA was laid to rest because it had accomplished what it set out to do.