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Perspectives
Wanted: Good Presidential Advice or
Where have you gone Bill Baker?
By Wil Lepkowski
Good
Presidencies need good advice. And in troublesome times, good
Presidencies need advice well beyond the petty, the self-serving, and
the political. The next U.S. President is going to be facing sets of
enormously critical and complicated problems--extensions of those that
are obvious today--and the confidence of the public will be utterly
necessary. Those problems hardly need any recounting here: global
warming, the accelerated but carefully planned transition to an energy
system independent of fossil fuels, health coverage for all, education
so that no children actually are left behind, immigration policy that
ensures the development of solid citizenry, rebuilding of the country’s
critical infrastructure. And on, and on. The country needs to be remade.
The social fabric is too badly rent.
What this all means is that the next President will be needing a
lot of good advice, a lot of brainpower offered with high intelligence,
breadth of vision, generosity, and with the public good in mind. The
Bush Presidency needed science advice but saw no point in it and colored
the issues it did choose not with aggressive curiosity but with
ideologies too deliberately narrow for the breadth of the issues. That story has been well and
frequently told as a tragic failure of governance.
What I’m offering here are a few reflections about an individual
who, to me, epitomized the kind advisory model the next President might
well look for. There is no guarantee that the next President will
actually locate such a combination of talent and technique, but the
standards nevertheless are there. They resided, once, in an individual
named William O. Baker who headed research at Bell Telephone
Laboratories for around 30 years (1950 to 1980) when it was part of
American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
Baker was one of many brilliant and distinguished technical
people who came together at a special time in contemporary history to
craft what became the world’s best system of scientific research and
development for national security and domestic tranquility. Names such
as I.I. Rabi, Edwin Land, Hans Bethe, Eugene Fubini, Herbert York, James
Killian, George Kistiakowsky, and Jerome Weisner all easily come to
mind. They and numerous others were influential at a time when it was
recognized that their counsel was indispensable. Something new was being
constructed, something that was learned from World War Two, reflected in
the Vannevar Bush report of 1945, “Science—the Endless Frontier.”
That report established what became the basic structure of
government support for science. But what was already being separately
set in motion was the need for scientists themselves to become actively
engaged in policy issues—first, through the development and deployment
of the atomic bomb and the many political and ethical issues that rose
from it; second, through the Cold War’s demand to transform through
science the system of espionage to prevent nuclear catastrophe; third,
through the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik which had many
ramifications but which through satellite technology and the landing on
the moon brought Russia and the U.S to the point of recognizing that
their common dwelling place was Earth, the ecologically fragile blue
planet, our mutual home.
And so the system grew through part of the first Administration
of Richard Nixon, after which it began to decline. The decline came when
it became clear to Nixon and his immediate staff that the fissures
generated by the Vietnam War had created a public activism at high
scientific levels that he wasn’t able to tolerate. So in 1973 Nixon
decided to do away with his science policy apparatus by abolishing both
the post and office of science adviser and the group of outside
scientific advisers known as the President’s Science Advisory Committee.
We have not yet recovered from this diminution of science advice
to the Presidency. Science entered the current phase of ensuring that
its fiscal trough be adequately filled, while Presidential
Administrations less and less sought out individuals with special wisdom
to advise on issues affected by technological change. The result was
that with such wisdom not nurtured, fewer and fewer individuals seemed
equipped to provide the kind of wisdom needed to engage problems as they
arose. What we were left with—and their importance should not be
minimized—were separate clusters of experts specialized along
disciplinary lines. In other words, a stovepipe array of advice,
adequate for the disciplines but too unsystematized for larger
understanding of essential relationships among issues.
I raise this brief (though incomplete and admittedly debatable)
early history to raise the question of what sort of new apparatus might
be needed for the next President to explore in the wake of the latest,
current, phase in the decline of scientific advice. Baker and others
helped establish the original structure, and indeed process. But what
concepts, ideas, and personages are needed to set up and sustain the
next apparatus?
If you compare Baker with Edwin Land, Kistiakowsky, Killian, and
all the other great names in science and technology in the post-war
years, Baker through some combination of his own mental and
physiological DNA could do much of what each of each of those others
could do. And he understood the fundamentals of what they were
doing--not only the technical fundamentals but the political
fundamentals. And that was probably the magic of his advice.
Land, Killian, Kistiakowsky (and earlier, James B. Conant and
Vannevar Bush) were men of great breadth and accomplishment in their own
right. But nevertheless Baker brought the humanities, psychological
insight, and political philosophy along with his considerable technical
expertise into his public service.
Baker thought in several dimensions. His conversation consisted
of several layers of meaning. He easily understood the politics of any
area of science that bore on policy. He was often a “fixer.” When a
friend in the government needed some help with a program, Baker through
his high-level connections could usually ensure a solution. Such a
method of operating is, of course, no novel technique in the arts of
policy. But the difference Baker seemed to make was his recognition of
issues that had the highest future implications.
Baker played a pivotal role in bringing the National Security
Agency into the modern era of electronic espionage through the Baker
Report, which remains classified but established him as a trusted
adviser to President Eisenhower. Baker was instrumental in designing the
National Reconnaissance Office, the hyper-secret satellite surveillance
agency. Baker was a pollinator, working the system of knowledge,
bringing fruits of one table to the agenda of another. He was not alone
in this, by any means. But he was the broadest and most ubiquitous, and,
I’d submit, endowed with the deep sense of the human elements involved.
That was why, too, he was seen as the expert in organizing scientific
teams—Bell Labs being the site of such teams—to focus on solutions to
specific problems, which meant the clear articulation of goals with
built-in recognition of contingencies. In that he followed in the
tradition of other Bell Labs directors such as Frank Jewett and Mervin
Kelly.
Baker was a polymer chemist. He was hired by Bell Labs in the mid
1930s to apply his training to the development of insulating material
for communication wires and cables. In World War Two he applied that
training to the invention of the technique that made possible the mass
production of synthetic rubber. Much later, in the missile era, he
comprised a team that developed the special heat-shield material that
allowed missile warheads and satellites to return to earth without
disintegrating in the atmosphere.
Baker’s generic field, as it turned out, was communications. I
think that gave him his special perspective on science and policy.
Communication’s root word is communitas, the Latin word for community,
which was defined by one writer as a “fellowship of the emotional sense
of community and unity that is produced from shared experience.” Baker
thought often in terms of social systems and the improvement thereof
through knowledge. The issue always lies in the wisdom with which
science is applied, and there we have the science and public policy
dilemma: honest, un-self-serving advice.
Given these rather scattered observations and recollections of
Baker, here are some thoughts of mine about where we seem to be today in
science and government.
We are in an era of accumulating complexity in science and
technology as they relate to governance. I believe therefore that we
need a rethinking of that compact between science and governance in this
democracy. Because of these new complexities, some new perceptions
relating to the idea of “order” in the “management” of new knowledge
seem needed in today’s policy debates as they engage the choices we need
to make for secure tomorrows. I use the word, order, because the
empirical nature of science lends a necessary discipline to
decisionmaking in a time of vast uncertainties. That is a dictum Bill
Baker lived by, and lived out.
I also underscore the word, management, because of the valid
skepticism that new knowledge can be managed or even regulated in a
climate of disordered data with trivialized meaning. Management, it
seems to me, needs more of systemic approach when so many types of
conflicting information flow out of so many different sources. The
response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was perhaps the best
example of management ineptitude in the face of technical demands. A
mind like Baker’s, I believe, would have grasped the essentials of
relevant decisionmaking in a fast-moving crisis. What comes to mind most
quickly were the decisions being made in the midst of the super-critical
Cuban Missile Crisis, in which Baker played a role in monitoring and
decrypting coded signals between the Kremlin, Soviet Naval Forces, and
Soviet personnel already based in Cuba.
There are many issues ahead that will confront the next
Presidency. Three dominate and they contain many subsets. I’m not going
to elaborate on any of them except to say that they all involve a type
of interconnected systems along the order of communitas for the
solutions to work.
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International security against
catastrophic terrorism and development of a stable international
system.
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Health care for the total
population and a more generic social security system so that the
elderly are kept out of poverty. These, of course, are the most
fundamental forms of security, and might be seen as the true “moral
equivalent of war,” as William James once expressed it.
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An economy that thrives in the
face of globalized technology, factoring down to reliable jobs for
all who can work. Tied to this is the issue of a workable
immigration policy and better education, relating as well to the
issue of full human potential.
Another obvious fourth is mitigating the impact of global warming. But
mitigation (prevention I believe is out of the question) will be a
clear-cut job for several succeeding Presidents. The next
commander-in-chief may well be able to set the basic policy groundwork
for an orderly adaptation to climate change. Market issues are
fundamental here. We shall see who will be assigned to pay for the civil
engineering projects needed as the icecaps melt and the oceans rise.
Problems cannot easily be managed. But knowledge, in today’s
information revolution, most certainly can. It is the application of
knowledge that poses the difficulty and it is politics and policy that
determine whether a country can summon the perceptions and the will to
apply knowledge to the common good. I think this was Bill Baker’s basic
approach to advice. He spoke often of the importance of establishing a
national information policy wherein technical knowledge would be more
efficiently paired with policy issues so the right information got to
the right people at the right time.
Baker never thought in pieces in the way experimental science
must. He assembled information from many sectors of technical and
political life. We have few such individuals today. We have experts in
science and we have experts in politics and experts in national
security. The point I want to make, though, is that fewer and fewer
experts in politics and diplomacy seem to be able to understand and
truly engage the worlds of science and technology as science and
technology affect their work. It seems we have a novel problem around
the issue of the “two cultures.” It was science and the humanities that
were once deeply divided. Now it seems science and politics has become
the new gap. And it may well be getting wider, far distant from Baker’s
perception of science as a harmonizing and humanizing force in the
manner in which it forces integrity on the mind bent on achieving worthy
practical goals. Others may view science as a narrowing, reductionist
way of operating, but Baker saw science in terms of expanding
relationships between unfolding phenomena.
Baker, who sought no accolades for himself, made certain to
bestow many on others, especially the young. He was that kind of model,
I believe, too rare in today’s climate.
Midway in my career of covering science and public policy, a very
close friend of mine whose career was in intelligence would often recite
to me a sonnet written by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. The sonnet,
clearly about the use and misuse of information, was part of a book
Millay wrote under the title, “Huntsman, What Quarry?” It went:
Upon this age, that never speaks its mind,
This furtive age, this age endowed with power
To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar
Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find
What swims before his prow, what swirls behind—
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts…they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric…
The author is a freelance writer in Reston, VA and is currently
working on a Baker biography.
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