To ensure that the Committee received the latest and most comprehensive reports of European aeronautical activity, the NACA appointed a technical assistant to head an office in Paris. Military attachés in Europe objected forcefully to this arrangement, labeling the NACA representative "the fifth wheel to a wagon" and insisting that they could do their job better without such interference. These protests won some adherents within the Air Service in Washington and led to considerable pressure to eliminate the NACA post. The first incumbent fed this discontent by several times overstepping his bounds and by getting on rather badly not only with U.S. military attachés but with French and Italian officials as well.7

The NACA, convinced of the importance of technical advances in Europe, was determined to retain a Paris office through which news of these developments could be funneled quickly and directly to its Office of Aeronautical Intelligence. In 1921, the Committee replaced the first appointee with John Jay Ide. A descendant of the first chief justice of the United States, Ide was wealthy, aristocratic, and cultured, with considerable charm and savoir faire. He was also an accomplished diplomat in the mold of the distinguished ancestor for whom he was named. Within months of his appointment, he had smoothed the feathers ruffled by his predecessor and had established such cordial relations with the European aeronautical community that the NACA could cite his achievements as proof against the army's insistence that the office be abolished. Although Ide never got the diplomatic passport he wanted and never entirely succeeded in eliminating the suspicions of some military attachés that he was encroaching on their domain, he was so successful in eliciting information from Europeans-often over expensive lunches apparently paid for out of his own pocket-that even the military services came to depend on the information he dispatched to the NACA. As one visitor to Europe reported in 1922: "The Committee has a tremendous asset in Mr. Ide. He knows everybody, and everybody likes him. He knows what he wants, and speaks this scientific language so that people find it a pleasure to discuss their work with. him."8

Ide's operation rounded out the Office of Aeronautical Intelligence, and that office in turn rounded out the staff and committee structure adopted by the NACA in 1919. Other committees added through the early 1920s were in general mere elaborations of the structure already established. Only one-the Committee on Patents, formed in 1926 and retitled the following year as the Committee on Aeronautical Inventions and Design-deviated much from the pattern. This was the only committee the NACA ever formed in response to a legislative mandate. The Air Commerce Act of 1926 required the NACA to review patents for the military services, a function it had in

any case been fulfilling since the war.9 The NACA saw fit to appoint a committee to oversee this essentially staff function.

With the committee structure taking shape, the need increased for someone to run the show. As early as 1915 the NACA had been warned that its "first and most important step was to secure the services of a suitable technical assistant who could devote his entire time to the purely theoretical and scientific problems involved in aviation, preliminary to the establishment and development of a laboratory." 10 The Committee simply did not have the technical expertise to run a research program; indeed, its failure to obtain a technical director during World War I accounts in large measure for the NACA's erratic record at war's end. The failure, however, was not for want of trying. During the war the Committee had offered the post of director of research to several established scientists and engineers. Each time it met rejection, perhaps because then the NACA had very little research to direct and a very uncertain future to promise. With the war over and a laboratory under construction, the NACA decided to lower its sights and simply hire an executive officer, an individual admittedly less qualified and less experienced in science and engineering but capable of managing the day-to-day routine of the NACA.11 For that position, George W. Lewis seemed ideally suited.

Lewis came to the attention of the NACA through Clarke Thomson Research, a private Philadelphia foundation established by its sponsor in 1916 for research in aeronautical science, especially propulsion. After taking bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, Lewis had taught for seven years at Swarthmore College before joining Clarke Thomson as engineer-in-charge in 1917. Late in that year, Thomson placed the services of his organization at the disposal of the NACA to direct as the Committee saw fit. Lewis quickly came to know William F. Durand, the engine research staff at the National Bureau of Standards, and others connected with the NACA program in engine research; in 1918 he became a member of the Subcommittee on Power Plants. Eighteen months later, Joseph Ames recommended Lewis to the NACA as executive officer partly on the basis of his professional experience and talent, but largely because of his "forceful personality" and "leadership." Ames judged that at age 36 Lewis had the right mixture of youth and maturity to get along with the young NACA staff and grow with the job. Furthermore, Lewis provided a nice counterbalance to John Victory. He was physically plump where Victory was thin, temperamentally cordial where Victory was abrasive, and self-effacing and reserved where Victory was priggish and garrulous. Lewis joined the NACA in 1919 and rose quickly. Like most of the NACA staff, he was brought on young and inexperienced and trained up to take on all the responsibility he could handle. Within

five years he was promoted to director of research, a title that described what he had been doing almost from the start.

THE BUDGET

12

One of Lewis's first duties as executive officer was to prepare the Committee's budget. In the years immediately following World War I, the NACA budget grew steadily. In 1918, the last year of the war, it had surpassed $100,000; in 1926 it passed $500,000. Only once in the intervening years did any year's budget fall below that of the previous one, and then by only $30,000.13 This record was due partly to the procedure by which the NACA was funded and partly to the nature of its research program.

In 1917, the NACA budget was removed from the naval appropriation bill of which it had been a part since the Committee's creation in 1915. Thereafter, the NACA's funds appeared annually in the Civil Sundry Act, later called the Executive and Independent Establishments Appropriation, still later the Independent Offices Appropriation. In

stead of coming before the military affairs committees of the two houses of Congress to have its budget authorized, the NACA appeared only before the respective appropriations committees, where its requests usually received short and sympathetic consideration. The military affairs committees were generally sympathetic to the NACA throughout its history and helpful when they could be. Surely the NACA had not suffered greatly before them during World War I. But the Independent Offices Appropriations bill afforded the NACA an autonomy and freedom from controversy that it probably would not have maintained had it stayed under the umbrella of the navy budget. Furthermore, the title "independent office" better suited the Committee's self-image and kept up the NACA defenses against later suggestions that it be absorbed by the armed forces. Not until after World War II did the NACA come under the congressional scrutiny of the authorizing process; then the blessings of exemption in earlier years became all too obvious. 14

The other key to NACA success in the budget process was its relationship with the Bureau of the Budget. BoB was created by Warren G. Harding in 1921 to rationalize the federal budgetary process and place it on a more businesslike footing. 15 The NACA, like other agencies of the federal executive, had to submit its request for appropriations to the bureau at formal hearings in the fall of each year. This submission usually followed informal negotiations with the BoB staff to determine the general level of funding that might be acceptable to the president. The final decision on the amount the NACA could request from Congress depended on the size of the federal budget and the administration's judgment of the NACA's proper share of the total.

This process gave the NACA its share of headaches, as it did other federal agencies. Congress too felt the sting of BoB interference in an essentially legislative function, and more than once rebelled at the action of the bureau. In 1922, for example, the NACA sent the BoB a preliminary estimate of $400,000 for fiscal year 1924; BoB cut that to $215,000. The NACA protested and won approval from BoB for a request to Congress for $260,000. Congress in turn appropriated $307,000.16

In spite of occasional disagreements like these, the NACA got on well with the Bureau of the Budget, establishing a reputation for honesty and economy that few if any other agencies in Washington enjoyed. John Victory, who was principally responsible for this, personally saw to the mechanics of preparing and presenting the NACA's budget requests, which were notoriously voluminous, detailed, and correct. Aside from swamping BoB in the sea of paper that was its annual budget book, the NACA played it straight with the bureau, which treated the NACA well in return.

From time to time the Committee ran afoul of BoB, as in 1924 when it publicly advocated increased appropriations for the military air services after the bureau had cut these requests. And at times the Committee found the pinch of economy unbearable and sought relief in transfers of funds from other agencies to finance the research its own budget would not allow. But the latter tactic was used only in the early years; until World War II, the NACA got pretty much what it wanted, or at least its fair share. In 1925, the director of the Bureau of the Budget cited the Committee as an example of true cooperation with a degree of efficiency unexcelled in the government; a majority in Congress echoed the sentiment by regular approval of NACA appropriations. 17

Closely tied to the mechanics of getting appropriations was the related issue of how the appropriations were divided between construction and general-purpose funds. In the NACA budgets that went before Congress while the United States was involved in World War I (i.e., 1917 through 1919), the Committee won approval for $147,000 worth of construction. For fiscal 1917, its construction budget was $69,000 and general-purpose funds were $18,515.70. The entire $69,000 went into laboratory construction at Hampton, bringing in its train a requirement for new personnel, first to supervise construction of facilities and then to operate them. Consequently, the general-purpose budget for the following year (fiscal 1918) quadrupled. In the ensuing decade, construction funds varied widely but never regained the levels voted in the enthusiasm of World War I. The general-purpose budget, however, grew with unrelenting regularity from less than $20,000 in 1918 to almost half a million dollars in 1926.18

Most of the increases in general-purpose funding in those years went to personnel costs. When Congress approved the first construction project, the NACA had only one employee, John Victory; by 1926 it had 145 employees, of whom 121 were staffing the laboratory. Each year's increases in staff were justified as necessary to operate the laboratory facilities authorized by Congress in previous years. Whether anyone in Congress realized it at the time, those first appropriations for a laboratory virtually assured two things: the NACA would continue to exist and to grow, and it would conduct a research program with built-in pressures to expand. The staff hired to operate the new facilities soon became an established body with ambitions and designs of its own. Always the researchers wanted new and better facilities, and the approval of these would ensure the further enlargement of the staff to man them. In turn the new and larger staff would demand new and larger facilities. The push and pull between staff and facilities went on throughout the NACA's history. Its foundation was laid in the excitement of World War I, with a modest request for a laboratory.