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CARUSO: Great. Perfect. So I’m going to do just a little bit of an introduction, and we’ll start getting into some of the questions. Today is September—I’ve lost track of the date— September 22, 2020.

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This is an oral history interview with Norm Augustine. We are conducting this virtually via Zoom. I’m David Caruso at the Science History Institute. Also participating are Kirstin Matthews and Kenny Evans from Rice University.

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This is part of the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology project. So thank you again for agreeing to speak with us. And as I mentioned, I am going to start at the very beginning. So I know you were born in 1935.

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I’m not going to ask you about the birthing experience. I don’t think you probably remember that. But you did... you were born at a time—the Great Depression—when America was

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trying to get back on its feet. So I’d like to hear a little bit about what it was like for you in those early years, maybe if you could tell me something about your parents. What did your parents do? Did you have siblings?

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Something along those lines to get us started. AUGUSTINE: Sure, I was born in Denver, Colorado, July 27, 1935, St. Luke’s Hospital. I had an older sister who died by the time I was born, and unfortunately, in those days, tragedies were not that uncommon.

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I went to public schools. My parents were wonderful people, loving people. I was very fortunate choice of parents. Given that my sister passed on, I was raised basically as an only child, and I

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know psychologists psychiatrists say that only-children tend to be interested in “things” because there aren’t a lot of people around them, and so I was interested in “things.” I liked to take watches apart and so on... They tend to become scientists and engineers, which I did not start out to be, but I will

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say I had an interest in those things. My recollection of those years... well, I should say, my family—my parents—I was the first one of my family to go to college; I was the second one to go to high school.

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My mother graduated from high school, and my dad worked on the wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Denver for most of his adult life. Later in life, my mother, when I was in junior high school, took a job that proved to be a disaster for me because she took a job as the attendance clerk

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at the junior high school I was attending! She recognized all the parents’ handwriting, so this was a big problem. Putting that aside, the times were difficult—as you said, or—not on this part of the tape—but it was coming

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off the heels of the Depression and people tended to be relatively conservative, to be thankful they had a job and to look out for each other. Shortly after the Depression wound down, World War II started. I was six years old when the war started.

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I remember the day very well—even now—when it happened and how I heard about it. It ended when I was around ten, and I remember that day very well, too. I don't know how much more detail you want to... CARUSO: Sure. I’ll ask some questions.

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So you grew up in Denver. Were your parents from Denver as well? Did they—were they born and raised there? AUGUSTINE: My mother was born in Denver in 1893, at which time, life expectancy was

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forty-seven in this country. She lived to be 105. My dad was born in Illinois in 1894 and lived to be ninety-six, and he served in World War I. My family—I’ve traced the family history back to 1574—in Ellmendingen, Germany, and

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I’ve tracked them throughout history. The times in those days were tough, particularly with a war going on. you didn’t have gasoline very much and certain kinds of food you didn’t have, and you collected scrap metal and you collected newspapers and anything that might help the war effort.

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Another thing I particularly remember was in the windows of houses down the street—the older boys were all disappearing, they were going somewhere—and there were the stars in the window. The silver stars or the gold stars for people serving in

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the military from that home. I lived on the very east side of Denver, just about on the prairie. There's about six more blocks—let’s see—and then there was prairie, and out on the prairie a ways was Fitzsimmons Army Hospital, which of course was jammed at that time.

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And every Sunday afternoon, my father would take me and we would his old Terraplane car, drive to Fitzsimmons and pick up three or four soldiers who were in good enough shape to get out for dinner Sunday afternoon, and they would come to our house and have dinner. They had different soldiers every week, and the thing that I remember about

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them and learned from them was how positive they were. I mean, these were folks with real problems, and they were very positive they were mostly eager to get back with their old units and fight in the war. Anyway, I got out of high school—went to high school in Denver...

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and that was it—in 1953 that I graduated from high school the week that the Korean War ended. Otherwise I would have been drafted for sure. And so I’ve had a lot of cases that in my life where the fork of the road presented

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itself and through blind good fortune, I “picked,” I guess, what turned out to be a reasonable fork that I wound up on. CARUSO: So, when you were growing... Sorry, go ahead. AUGUSTINE: I’m sorry.

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CARUSO: No, go ahead. I didn’t mean to interrupt. AUGUSTINE: I was going to talk a little bit about my interests and how I wound up in engineering. Would that be of... CARUSO: Yeah, I just have a few other questions about your childhood.

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So did your father talk about his experiences in the war? AUGUSTINE: Very little. He... let’s see he shipped to—went to training at an

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Army training camp in New Mexico. I can’t think of the name of it, and then shipped through Fort Dix, New Jersey to Liverpool, He said he walked or rode in boxcars across most of France and went up into the front

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lines in Germany with his unit, which was the Fourth Infantry Division. The night that they pulled into the front lines, the cannon all stopped. Became silent, and the people on the front lines had no idea what had happened. It turned out that the armistice was signed.

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It was November 11, and so my dad was very fortunate to never... Then he served in the army of occupation in Germany, and ironically where he served was just a few miles from where my family grew up in the sixteenth century. Just as a kind of a trivial but interesting aside, I visited that little village in Germany and

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there’s a big bronze plaque in honor of the names of the soldiers from that little village in Germany who had fought in World War I, obviously on the German side. There were names of two people who had the same first and last name—except in the German form—as my father and my uncle, who had both fought on the US side.

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Small world, crazy world. CARUSO: Yeah, so when you were growing up, you mentioned that your mother graduated high school, your father had not. Was there a strong emphasis on education for you when you were younger?

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Was that something that your parents wanted for you to excel at school and things like that? Was a general course they wanted you to pursue? AUGUSTINE: I think typical of that generation—my parents’ generation—education was deemed as extremely important—that you should certainly try to graduate from high school,

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and if were possible —it wasn’t clear it was—go to college. And the fact that they had not had a lot of education, they really appreciated the importance of education. There was never any doubt in my mind that studying in school was important, and I

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don’t ever remember them hassling me to study or anything, but it was just... it was clear that was a foundation that you had to study and try to be a good student. I was blessed with going to very good public schools. I had good teachers and particularly had great math teachers, which

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certainly was important to me. As I think about it, we didn’t have many books around the house. Very few in fact. But I had a library card when I was little, and the library was a bicycle ride away.

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So I was always in and out of the library getting books—mostly fiction—and learned to read, loved to read, just as I do today. Don’t have enough time today. We didn’t know a lot of people who had an education, so if you did know somebody who

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had been to college, that was a big deal. Well, I guess that would be kind of it. It didn’t occur to me until many years after I was out of college—I’m an engineer— that I don’t think I’d ever met an engineer until I

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was at Princeton... But the people I grew up with were wonderful people—hard working, decent, honest folks; but not a lot of them had the opportunity to go to college . CARUSO: Were there other things that your parents introduced to you around the house?

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Was music an important component of their lives? Religion? You mentioned you were six blocks away from the prairie. Did you go on evening strolls and find animals roaming in the fields or anything

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like that? Like what else, if anything, was going on in the house when you were younger? AUGUSTINE: Music was not... didn’t play a role in my upbringing, really.

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I enjoyed music, but we didn’t have music in the house. We had an old Victrola, a record player— mechanical type—but I don’t recall it ever being on. Reading was important; reading the newspaper was important.

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Art in the form of painting or anything like that wasn’t something that was around. Outside the house, living in Colorado was a blessing. I loved the outdoors. The mountains weren’t that far away.

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I’m sure I spent at least a year of my life in a tent in Colorado. I worked at the Boy Scout camp as—what’d they call them?—a “member of the staff.” Beautiful camp up about nine thousand feet in the Rockies and lot of outdoor experiences. Of course, you all the animals you see in the mountains, and I was

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interested in that, and I was interested in the trees, the various names for the flowers, and I think whatever I learned about leadership I gained through either the Boy Scouts or through participating in athletics. I loved sports; I always had a ball in my hand.

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I wasn’t great; I was good enough to be competitive and to play. But as it happens, in my adult life, professional athletes in my family. I wasn’t in that league. But I could enjoy sports, and I really did learn so much from sports about leadership,

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about losing with grace, following the rules, treating others with respect, about hard work, and about how little differences make a big difference in outcomes. At the end of every game, you could think of one thing— if I had done that differently, we would have won

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I very much learned a lot and loved sports—still do. CARUSO: You mentioned Boy Scouts. Were you involved as a Cub Scout as well? Did you start that early in life?

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AUGUSTINE: Yes, I was. I was in the Cub Scouts. I had a wonderful Den Mother who I used to visit until she passed on—Mrs. Esbenson—and she put up with six kids who must have driven her crazy.

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They had a dalmatian. We used to put a Cub Scout shirt on the dalmatian at special meetings. It’s interesting, too, that we were all from the same neighborhood with the same more or less kinds of backgrounds.

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And, I’m trying to think, of the six of us, one became a banker, one became a dentist, one became a physician, one created a used car business—an old antique car business—and myself. All did well in life, all good people. CARUSO: There’s also a relatively close association between Boy Scouts and the

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Christian religion. Did religion play any part in your early life? AUGUSTINE: Yes, I’m a Presbyterian and we went to church, I guess I would say occasionally. We were not steady attenders.

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Religion, I wouldn’t say played a big part in my life— in my youth or in general—but it was always there, and you were supposed to live a life that was befitting your religion. But it was never a major factor one way or the other, I would say. CARUSO: Yeah, I mean, I’m curious about various aspects of individual’s lives.

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So you know if anything does come up during the rest of the interview, please feel free to share that. So I have a general impression that... a general impression of what things were like for you when you were younger.

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You mentioned you also—I think you’d mentioned—you remembered where you were where or you remembered when the end of the World War II was announced, is that correct? AUGUSTINE: And the beginning as well.

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CARUSO: Yeah, so what do you remember from when the end of the war was announced when you were ten years old? AUGUSTINE: Well, the end of... by that time, I was very aware that there was a war going on and what that meant.

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At least I had some idea of it. Each day on the front page of the Denver Post—our newspaper—there would be a map, and it would show where the battle lines were in Europe. When the battle lines moved to the right, that was good; when they

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moved to the left, that was bad. You watched each day what was happening in the war. One day, finally, it was announced—VJ Day—that the war was over. I remember my parents thought this would be a historic event that they wanted me to

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experience, so we took the streetcar—the old electric-driven streetcar—from the far east part of Denver to downtown Denver. Denver was a city of about four hundred thousand people at that time— Western city. And downtown, the place was jammed.

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There were people everywhere. There were people throwing confetti and pieces of newspaper, and I can remember that... Denver was a big military town—a lot of air bases and Army facilities—the soldiers

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running up and kissing the girls on the street; the girls seemed to go along with it. And one thing I still remember, people were climbing through the windows in the streetcars when they would stop.

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They’d climb in and climb out of the windows—younger people. The thing that struck me that I saw they weren’t paying to get on the streetcar. People were singing, and everybody was everybody’s friend.

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It was just a great celebration. Going back six years, or five and a half years I guess it would have been— on the beginning of the war, my parents had taken me to an Italian restaurant on the edge of Denver—a place called

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Louisville—that we used to occasionally go for Sunday lunch. We were having our lunch and all of a sudden, a guy pulled the door of the restaurant open and yelled, “The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.” I didn’t know what was meant by “Jap,” nor did I know what Pearl Harbor was.

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He slammed the door and wound up running down the street with his Paul Revere-like message. The restaurant went silent. Then all of a sudden, there was this outburst of conversation. That was when I first learned about Pearl Harbor being bombed.

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Interestingly enough, I was at Pearl Harbor for the occasion of seventy-fifth anniversary. We used to, for treats, go to a restaurant. That was rare. We always had plenty of food—not expensive or fancy food—but plenty of it. My mom was a great cook.

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And basically, I had a very happy youth. CARUSO: So just one other question about wartime. When the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, did you as a child have any awareness that that happened or what atomic bombs were?

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AUGUSTINE: Really, I did not. I knew it was a big bomb, and it had been dropped on two cities. But at that time... It’s hard to put in context today—the national mental attitude.

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We’d been through Pearl Harbor and all the losses in Europe, battles going up the cliffs of Normandy, fighting the islands in the Pacific, and kids going away never came back. We had air raid drills in Denver, of all things; I’m not quite sure whoever would

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have got to Denver in those days, but we had a curtain over the bathroom window and a red light bulb. Every now and then, there’d be an air raid drill, and we’d—my mom and dad and I—would go in the bathroom, shut the door, pull down the curtain, and turn on the red

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light, and wait until the siren said it was okay to come out. There was a neighbor who was the neighborhood “enforcer” who would walk around looking for light leaking out. He wore a white helmet, I remember, and he was the most important person in the world

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out there braving the dangers of the streets of Denver in the middle of the war, I don’t think a bomber could have got within a thousand miles of us. But that was the way it was. CARUSO: So just to switch back towards your education.

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Do you recall what classes you were most interested in or not interested in at all when you were in elementary school and middle school? Like were there some subjects that you prefer over others? AUGUSTINE: Yes, you like the ones you do better in, so I

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liked math, I liked physics. I was not crazy about chemistry, although I sat next to the girl who became Miss America, and that was a good part about it. I liked speech...

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I think it came down to who was the teacher, who was a good teacher. For example, I was not fond of history. But subsequently, today, I read every history book I can lay my hands on I can find time was a course in

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sociology I took, which I didn’t like because it was too intangible for me. You pretty much had to take the courses you were told to take; you didn’t have a lot of choice. The schools I went to were, as I mentioned, very good public schools.

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The high school I went to, my class in high school—the class of 1953—was larger than my class at Princeton. It was a huge high school, and that had ramifications because if you wanted to really excel, it was very difficult.

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For example, I used to fancy myself as a basketball player. I got into school with that many students and discovered I was not a good basketball player. A lot of things like that. It was hard to really be first at anything because the school was so huge, and it was

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a very, very good school. CARUSO: So when you're going to high school, '49 to ’53, those are clearly postwar years and I think maybe this is a little too early, but the US and started to make a big investment in science and engineering education, trying to make sure that we

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weren’t going to be falling behind, compared to other nations. Were you seeing anything or can you recall anything specifically in your high school years that, you know, maybe there were some classes that teachers were able to, you know, go maybe a little bit off topic and address more contemporary interests—US

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interests—in terms of science and engineering? Were you maybe being taught by someone who had received a master’s degree or a PhD in mathematics or physics or anything along those lines? Is there some...

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anything you recall from your high school experiences that would be along those lines? AUGUSTINE: Every teacher that I can recall a bachelor’s degree, mostly in teaching. And at the end of the war, those years, I went away with the impression that we didn’t win the war

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because of technology; we won it largely because of the production capability of the country. We just out-produced everybody else. And in more recent times, I’ve come to realize that—of course with the atomic bomb being a huge exception and radar and things like that— I now know we had a bigger lead

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in some technologies than we realized. Technology—with the exception of the atomic bomb—in our view hadn’t played such a huge role in the war; it was mass production and well-trained troops that made the difference. I should probably give a little perspective.

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People used to say to me, “You’re good at math, so you should be an engineer.” But I really didn’t know what an engineer did, and I had no intention of being an engineer. If you’d like, I’ll give a quick description of how I wound up in that line.

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Is that relevant? CARUSO: Yeah, I mean, I wanted... so one of my next questions was going to be when you’re in high school, what were you thinking about what it is you wanted to do in the future?

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I’m also curious to know how you got to Princeton and why you chose Princeton? So if you want to talk about that now, great. I leave that up to you. AUGUSTINE: Okay, I’ll do that.

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I guess I didn’t give a lot of thought to what I wanted to be when I was in high school. I did know that I should try to get as much education as I could. I don’t think I had any particular interest in engineering or science, although I was decent at it.

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People would say, “You’re good at math; you should be an engineer.” I guess I, sort of, drew the connection, but I really had no particular interest in being an engineer. And I can remember the conversation very vividly. My senior year in high school, beginning of the year, there was a teacher at our high

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school, his name was Justin W. Brierly, and he always had the W. Mr. Justin “W.” Brierly! I had never had a class, but he was known as being one very tough guy, and he also was, sort of, our self-appointed guidance—college guidance counselor at our high school.

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So one day I get a note that Mr. Justin W. Brierly wants to meet with you in his classroom immediately. He was so well-known, that when I saw the “immediately,” I knew that meant like right now. So I went to his office, which was his classroom with his desk at the front of it.

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It was a period during which he had no class, no students, so I went in to see him. He said, “Well, what do you want to do when you get out of here?” I said, “Well, I think I’d like to be a forest ranger because I love the mountains.” I grew up in

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them, camped, still love the mountains, still camp. But in any event, that was the wrong answer. He literally swore at me. I’d never heard a teacher swear—nothing terribly violent, but a few damns and so

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on—that I had no ambition and what was wrong with me and I was wasting his time—and get out of here. So I left, and I was very offended, because I hadn’t asked to be there in the first place, then I got thrown out. Anyway, a few days later, I get another note.

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Justin W. Brierley wants to meet with you immediately, so I traipsed down the hall. I can still remember thinking, “I know he’s going to want an answer from me, and I know one wrong answer. And I don’t know what the right answer is.” So when I went in, he was very pleasant,

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didn’t ask me any questions. He had two envelopes and said, “This is an application to Williams College, and this is an application to Princeton. That’s what you’re going to do.” I said , “You know, even if I could get into a place

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like that, we couldn’t afford it.” he said, “If you can get into those places, they’ll pay your way through. Go fill out the applications.” As it turned out, there was a younger man in Denver who I happened to know moderately well who had attended Princeton, so he started

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talking to me about Princeton. And that sounded like a pretty neat place, so I applied. I filled out the application, and at some point in the application process, I was asked what I...

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No, I guess...I don't think I'd been admitted. But anyway, I was asked what I wanted to study. So, I said—this is at Princeton; they’re interviewing me. “What do you want to study?” I said, “Forestry.” It was the

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funniest thing they had ever heard. And to this day, I think I was admitted as an experiment. But in any event, they said they don’t teach forestry I said, “Well, what do you teach that’s like forestry?” Whomever I was speaking with—and I don’t recall who it

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was—said to me after thinking a moment, “Well, geological engineering is like forestry.” So I said, “Well, do you teach geological engineering?” “Yes, we do.” “Okay, I’ll take geological engineering.” So that became my major my freshman year. Fast forward to the end of my freshman year—and of course, freshman year, your

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engineering courses are pretty general —I did have a course in geology, which frankly I didn’t enjoy because it wasn’t exact enough for me. I like exactitude in answers, and geology— there’s a lot of judgment and guessing that goes into it.

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I don’t mean to demean the subject, but... Anyway, I wasn’t sure I really was cut out to do that. I got a...let’s see—how did this happen?—I guess I was a little uneasy about it, and one Saturday night I was on a

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train coming back to Princeton from New York where I’d had a date. I must confess that it was probably the only date I had freshman year. Of course, there were no women at Princeton in those days, and I was scared to death about my academics.

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I was coming from East Denver High School to Princeton; this was, kind of, a leap for me. When I left, the Denver Post, I think it was, carried a little article about me. The headline was, “Denver Youth Attends Princeton.” Anyway, I got a fourteen on my first exam at Princeton; that was 14 percent.

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A physics exam. I remember thinking that the headline would be, “Denver Youth Returns from Princeton.” So I was pretty frightened and studied very hard. And it turned out later that the class average was 11 percent, so they were trying to get our

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attention. It succeeded in my case. Anyway, I’m on the train coming back from New York... which was unusual because we usually hitchhiked. But anyway, I was on the train, and I ran into a guy going through the vestibule in

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the train between two cars. In those days, there was a chain link fence kind of— you had to walk through in the open air to get from one car to another. This other fella that I met, I didn’t know, but I recognized him.

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He had been a senior at East Denver High, and he was now a senior at Princeton, and I’m a freshman. And I recognized him. To be candid, he had more to drink than he should have, and I was worried about him

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falling off the train and was trying to help holding him. In moments of visiting and semi-sobriety, he told me he was studying aeronautical engineering, and that that’s what I should be studying because that’s where the real future was, was aeronautical engineering.

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The following Monday morning, on the advice of this drunken student, I switched my major to aeronautical engineering. As you can see, this is not a story that I use to inspire young people who are trying to design a career, but...

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I studied aeronautical engineering, and to leap forward four years—three more years—the very week I began graduate college in aeronautical, aerospace engineering, Sputnik went up. And so my timing was perfect... If you want to go back to college years or something, fine,

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But anyway, that is how I wound up being an aerospace guy. CARUSO: So I just had a couple of questions. So, Princeton—was that the only college you applied to? AUGUSTINE: I applied to Princeton, Williams, and Colorado School of Mines.

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CARUSO: And were you’re accepted at the other two? AUGUSTINE: I was, and that was a big problem because by the time I was admitted— by the time I’d filled out my applications and done some research, I knew that it was Princeton that I wanted to go to.

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I was admitted to Williams and given a full scholarship. Williams College, that group, required that you make your acceptance and put down a fifty-dollar deposit—before you heard from the Ivy League schools. Well, they all announce on the same day.

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So to protect my position to Williams, I had to put down fifty dollars, but I knew I’d prefer to go to Princeton—if I got in. So it was a terrible debate because fifty dollars in our family was a huge amount of money. In those days, it was a huge amount of money for everybody, I guess.

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Fortunately, I had this friend who had been to Princeton and had some connections and he whispered to me, and he said he looked into it— nobody will say yes or no, “you got in,” but he said the body language is good, in so many words. It looks like you’re going to get in.

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So I took the chance and didn’t put down the fifty dollars at Williams, lost my spot there. My parents nearly killed me. Anyway, happily, I got admitted to Princeton. As I said, I was admitted to Colorado School of Mines.

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They refer to themselves as— they refer to MIT as the Colorado School of Mines of the West. And it’s a truly outstanding, tough, small, private engineering school, which I later got an honorary degree from, so it all worked out well. CARUSO: When you’d applied to these colleges, did you have any reservations

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about leaving Denver? I mean, would you have preferred to stay home? You...I know you went for hikes up in the mountains. You haven’t mentioned much travel outside of the area growing up, so I didn’t know if

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this was going to be your first experience really outside of Denver. AUGUSTINE: That’s a very good question. We didn’t travel very much. I had an aunt and uncle who had a farm in Wichita, Kansas—near Wichita, Kansas—a

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little town called Mount Hope, and every summer we would drive to the farm and spend a week or so there, which I always enjoyed. I had a cousin there. One time I was during the school year and she invited me to go to her classes with

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her. This is a little farm town—I don’t suppose there were over ten kids in each grade, and the idea that you’d go to class with somebody else and visit—I don’t know why I wasn’t in school, but I wasn’t at this particular point—and after school, I got to practice with the basketball team and I was the star.

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Suddenly, I realized that you want to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond? That was, kind of, the Princeton challenge—I was going to be a small fish in a big pond.

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But given that we hadn’t traveled very much, I wanted to go to college. Although my parents and I were very close, it just seemed like the natural thing to do. I don’t recall it—going off to college—being...I spent a lot of summers at camp and working on the staff there so I was used to being away from the house.

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So I climbed on the train... Take the train—a chair car to Chicago. We spent a day in Chicago. There were a lot of students that would show up on this same train, going to different schools. Then we'd get the Trailblazer out of Chicago toward New York and get off at

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Princeton. I did that twenty-six times, going back and forth, so I got a lot of train-travel in. CARUSO: And what was it like...so you mentioned in your freshman year, you were in New York City going out on a date.

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What was it generally like transitioning from Denver to East Coast? Did you find life different in Princeton? If so, in what ways? Because I can understand that, especially being so close to New York, maybe you were getting different

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experiences or life is just running differently, compared to what it was like out in Denver. AUGUSTINE: It was very different. The people were very nice, welcoming, sometimes more abrupt than people in the West are, but

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Princeton is, kind of, an isolated little country community. Freshman year I didn’t have a lot of occasion to leave the campus, so... But New York, I'd go to New York particularly in later—in sophomore, junior, and senior year. And go to Madison Square Garden or Carnegie Hall or to Broadway show where I could get standing

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room—I think it was fifty cents if I remember right—in the back of the theater. That was such a big treat to me. I mean, New York was, kind of, off my radar scale in terms of being a wonderful adventure. I really settled in I guess pretty easily to East Coast life, although it certainly was different.

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In terms of the students, it was all-male whereas my high school was co-ed. It seemed like everybody was smarter than I. A lot of the kids—at least I thought—they were smarter. A lot of the kids had gone to prep schools, so...

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Were much better prepared than I was. Anyway, it was different, but pleasantly different. I missed not having mountains to go to, but I must admit that I was probably a little out of place.

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I remember talking about going “down” to Philadelphia and up to New York—no, down to New York and up to Philadelphia. Which, of course, from Princeton, was just backwards. Everybody kind of asked, “Where did you get that from?” “Well, because...

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Philadelphia’s closer to the Continental Divide than New York, so you go ‘up’ when you go to Philadelphia.” That would get a lot of laughter, but I didn’t know any better. CARUSO: And so you went to Princeton on a full scholarship?

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AUGUSTINE: I did. I was there six years and never paid a penny. At that time, it cost about two thousand dollars a year total wrap-around to go to Princeton, and tuition was six hundred dollars, which I got from the university.

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My dorm room was ninety dollars, food was 480 dollars a year. I worked as a waiter for Howard Johnson’s restaurant. I could make 480 dollars, and then I had the train fare to-and-back at the end of school year and at Christmas— I'd go home for Christmas—

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I could make five hundred bucks in a summer job and you add it all up and it comes out to two thousand dollars—it works. CARUSO: Were the students that you entered into Princeton with or, more generally, did they come from similar financial situations, or where are they from

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different economic classes when you were there? AUGUSTINE: Really quite a mixture. Money was... as I say, I’ve always had plenty—I’ve had clothes, I had everything I ever needed,

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but I didn’t have any of the luxuries. That was true at Princeton. But my two closest friends freshman year—both football players, both from Ohio—one of their fathers was a foreman in a steel mill; the other one was vice president of a

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large corporation. Those were my closest friends in freshman year. Really, there was... I never felt any particular distinction. There were the DuPonts, Firestones, and so on there, but I never felt any

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particular thing. Your junior year you became a member of what was called an eating club. We didn’t have fraternities at Princeton, or sororities today. And you joined an eating club, and there was one eating club you pretty much had to come from a fancy background.

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Other than that, we were all in it together, I would say. CARUSO: Okay, you also mentioned that your graduating class from high school was larger than your entering class at Princeton, and you said that you know when you’re in high school, when you went, you know, you thought you could maybe play

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basketball, but there are so many other kids that were better that comparatively, you weren’t as good. When you went to Princeton, did you try to join sports teams while there, and did you try to rekindle your interest in basketball or some other sports to join an official

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team, or did you just focus on your academics? AUGUSTINE: Between the academics and having a job waiting tables and a few other little jobs I had from time to time, just picking up a nickel here or there parking cars at football games and things like that—I didn’t have time to

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participate in athletics at the intercollegiate level, nor was I good enough. But I played some intramural basketball and volleyball, but my athletics dropped off a lot. And I must confess my knowledge of what was going on in the world.

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During those four years...I read now about things that I was hardly aware of. There was only one TV on campus and that was in the club, the eating club, which I couldn’t join till junior year, so we didn’t watch TV, really. I couldn’t afford newspapers—didn’t have time to read them.

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It was really kind of contrary to what you would expect of a university— we were fairly isolated from the news of the world during those four years. CARUSO: So I... so like things in terms of the escalation of the Cold War, communism, concerns of

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communism in the US, you weren’t being exposed to that on the campus or necessarily hearing about it while you were at Princeton? AUGUSTINE: Being— studying engineering at Princeton, they require engineers to take a lot of liberal arts courses, but I did not take history courses and so somehow I really

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wasn’t immersed in that... The Korean War was over; Vietnam was a place we had never heard of at that point. The Cold War was on, and we were well aware of that. But it certainly was not...

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We were pretty much in what they would call your cocoon today—or your bubble around the campus. Of course the space program among the engineers was of particular interest, the fact we were losing to the Russians in the space program in almost every regard was of interest and concern.

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But not anything we could do about while we were students. I'm afraid we weren't very tuned in to what was happening in the world. Much later, of course, I became more involved. CARUSO: So you mentioned the fortuitous meeting of someone on a...

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a student on a train— a senior at Princeton—who you had been aware of back in Denver and you know after speaking with the individual, you know, the next day you’re switching your major to aeronautical engineering. And I’m guessing at this point in time, you probably had a better sense of what an

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engineer was, right? You mentioned that in Denver, you don’t think you ever actually met an engineer, but you’re getting a sense of what engineering is, what an engineer does, you’re now moving into aerospace engineering.

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What were the classes like when you started... when you moved into that major? Was it still pretty standard intro engineering courses, or were you being introduced to something different, specific to your area of interest?

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AUGUSTINE: My freshman year, of course, was physics, chemistry, math... I took a course in Shakespeare, and descriptive geometry. What else—there was one other course But by sophomore year, we were starting to do things that had to do with aeronautics.

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There were the classic courses one takes in the field—a lot of aerodynamics. Princeton, was, at least at that time—and I think still does—heavily emphasize fundamentals of theory. Practice came in later.

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I had a very strong fundamental background, but as I discovered when I later went to work, there were a lot of graduates from other universities that had a lot more real-world practical experience. On the other hand, the theory served me well because that part lasts forever.

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The courses were heavy in math, needless to say, and I enjoyed them. There were only nine aeronautical engineering schools in my class—students in my class. Princeton had a huge faculty but there were only about nine or ten students in any given year. So...it was almost like getting private tutoring. Aeronautics classes would have nine people in them.

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Later we did get into some more practical things; we did flight testing, which I particularly enjoyed. We had an old Navion, it was a single-engine propeller plane, and Princeton had a grass runway out at the research center for aeronautics, and one of the professors—Professor Perkins, “Court” Perkins, who later became chief scientist

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for the Air Force—would pilot. The airplane would hold three people, and we would go up and pull Gs and measure what you would measure. He liked to pull a lot of Gs, and we had a little instrument we had devised that you

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held in your hand and it would tell how many Gs you were pulling. The fellow in the front seat—in the co-pilot seat—would call out the number of Gs, and the back seats we would write down the data. We finally worked out a deal where we added half a G to whatever it was to get him to back

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off on how many Gs he was pulling. But that was fun, and we did a lot of wind tunnel work, which was fun, I enjoyed. We had good teachers, some of them moderately well-known in the field.

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It turned out to be the right choice for me. CARUSO: So while you were there... so I’m familiar with work in the sciences more specifically, I was... I did my undergraduate degrees initially in biomedical and chemical engineering.

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And I know that while you were doing your courses you were also encouraged— not required—but encouraged to do independent research—you know, work with a faculty member in her or his lab. When you were an undergraduate, were you doing any close specific research with

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faculty members that was taking place outside of the classroom? I know you were busy with working jobs and things like that. You didn’t have time for sports, but I was wondering if there were these opportunities and if you participated in opportunities to work more closely with a professor on an

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independent research project during your undergraduate years. AUGUSTINE: There really wasn’t until senior year. Senior year I became a research assistant, and that was, kind of, a strange story in its own right. I had become what was called a “waiter captain” at Howard Johnson’s where

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I was working in the restaurant. It was a step up from waiter; you, kind of, were in charge of other waiters. And so, I was offered this job as a research assistant, which I was really excited about. The research that we were going to do was interesting, so I accepted that,

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turned down the continuation of my job as a waiter captain. I left that job. Being a waiter captain was a high-paying job. Because you got paid by the number of people you waited on, and so on. Anyway, I accepted the job at the research lab and hadn’t remembered

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to ask what it was going to pay. So I asked...I had been averaging probably two dollars an hour as a waiter, and the pay as a researcher was fifty cents an hour. I thought, “Yeah, getting all this education, and my salary is going down at

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every step.” During my summers in college—I spread tar on roofs was my job— I got $1.69 for spreading tar on roofs in Denver. So now I’m going to be a research assistant, and I’m going to get fifty cents an hour!

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Anyway, I managed to put the pieces together and make it work financially. Worked lots of hours and loved it. The project that I was doing was one in aeronautics. It involved some theory and a lot of wind tunnel work.

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I entered in a contest for aeronautics for all the schools in the northeastern United States. I took second place. My professor, at the end of the semester, who had become kind of a friend and a mentor, gave me the equivalent of a B on it.

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I said, “How can I have the second best project in the northeastern United States and get a B here at Princeton?” He thought for a moment and then he explained, he said: “Because that’s the way it is,” and he walked off. But I really enjoyed the research part.

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Wrote it up, and... Of course, in graduate school, I had a research project which was pretty much done on my own—not an awful lot of faculty guidance. We had a contract with the Navy

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and basically I was carrying out part of this contract for the Navy. CARUSO: So that was something else I was going to ask about is whether or not the professors that you were taking courses with, the professor that you end up working with for your research project in senior year...

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were you aware that, or did they have government and possibly also private contracts that was funding their research? AUGUSTINE: I was. Much of the research that I was involved with was funded by the ONR—Office of Naval Research.

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Once in a while somebody from the Navy would show up, but it was rare, and the things we did would basically be incorporated into reports the faculty put together. We were doing little pieces of the projects. The faculty mostly were doing consulting work for companies.

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They were writing a lot of books. That was viewed as good from our standpoint because they had all these interesting experiences and stories they could tell us about based on their work outside of the university. There was a visiting faculty member from Boeing who was there for a year taught a

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course in aeroelasticity. That, kind of, gave us on what the real world might be like outside of college. CARUSO: So you mentioned that your class had nine individuals. I’m assuming that that discipline didn’t have too many more people per year in the

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classes that were ahead of you, right? Roughly similar numbers? AUGUSTINE: That was pretty typical. It was nine. There were graduate students at that time. But I'm an undergraduate during the years I'm describing.

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There were some graduate students... The Air Force and the Navy used to send one or two officers—young officers— to get a master’s degree at Princeton in aeronautics each year. We had a fair amount of time —particularly in my senior year—with those fellows who

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were pilots in the military—test pilots—and were learning the theory of what they did in the real world. We, kind of, learned the opposite from them. CARUSO: The reason I was asking my question is I was curious I’m assuming that the

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classes that were ahead of you, you were hearing about individuals who either decided to continue on with an education and pursue a master’s or PhD. But there are I’m assuming there are also many that wound up leaving and going out for jobs. And I was curious to know what were you hearing about the potential job

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opportunities for someone leaving Princeton with the degree that you were pursuing? AUGUSTINE: Let’s see. About a third of the engineering class at Princeton completed their degree in a field outside of engineering. About 98 percent of those who started received a degree in four years.

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So there was filtering by subject, but everybody graduated, and we had summer jobs in industry. I worked in two different—junior and senior summers— I finished putting tar on roofs and got jobs at companies—General Dynamics and then Boeing.

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So I had some perspective of what was happening out in the industrial world. It was a perfect time to graduate from college in my case because the Cold War was on, the space race was just beginning, and, interestingly, of the nine of us who were aeronautical engineers, nobody dropped out. All of us stayed with it. We did talk to students who graduated. They

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were making more money than I knew existed in the world. I also remember when I got—I went to work for Douglas Aircraft when I graduated. That’s a story I should tell too about research. Anyway, when they quoted my...when they gave me my job offer

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They quoted my pay based on a sixty-hour week. We really worked sixty-hour weeks in those days, to begin with. And it was time-and-a-half for the 40 over 60, so if I got the arithmetic right, you were making

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about three quarters more than the really high salary to begin with. So money was no longer a problem for the first time in my life. I was working in Southern California—I’m getting ahead of the story here, but... So when I was in graduate school and undergraduate school, it was clear that

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this was an exciting profession leading edge of the state of the art. If you wanted at the edge of the state of the art, you went to work on militaries. You didn't work for Amazon and Intel, and so on.

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You became involved in national security, so that’s what drove us to that direction. CARUSO: And I’m also curious to know. So why is it that you decided not to end your education with a bachelor’s degree but decided to pursue the master’s?

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AUGUSTINE: Good question. The faculty I talked to at Princeton pretty much urged you to get a master’s degree. I never even dreamed of a PhD. For one thing, I was out of money, and I was also I was tired of studying.

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I guess it was mainly the faculty that, sort of, said, “You really ought to get a master’s degree.” I believe that most everyone in my group of nine did. I applied to MIT and to Princeton, and was admitted at MIT for a master's and I intended to go there— and then, another fork in the road, just happens in life,

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Princeton got a nice grant from the Navy to perform some research that I was particularly interested in, and it would pay for my expenses and so on at graduate school. I had a fellowship for tuition, so I decided to stay at Princeton.

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rather than go to MIT. Also, at that point, MIT was known as a very heavy engineering school, whereas I’d had a lot of liberal arts and the likes in college, and I wasn’t sure that I was up to, would be capable of performing in a really tough engineering-focused school.

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And so I decided to stay at Princeton. I think my logic was very poor, but I was happy there, and it worked out. And I got an honorary—no, I didn't, I'm thinking of another school. But it worked out.

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CARUSO: The master’s curriculum at Princeton, you mentioned that you had a research project, it was for government, it was paid for through a grant. I know that the thesis that you wrote was on a supersonic trainer, correct? AUGUSTINE: That was for undergraduate senior.

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CARUSO: That was for undergraduate, okay. The supersonic trainer was undergraduate. Then what was your focus for graduate school? AUGUSTINE: See if I can remember...My thesis was the dynamics and aerodynamics

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vectored slipstream aircraft with a double-slotted flap—pretty exciting stuff! The good thing about it was it posed interesting theoretical questions which I was interested in. But it also—I’m a woodworker and I've had a workshop and I like to use my hands.

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So I could build models and put them in the wind tunnel. As a matter of fact, I had to modify a wind tunnel so that it could what I was trying to do. I spent a lot of time in the wind tunnel collecting data.

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CARUSO: So this is the first time that you mentioned that you are woodworker. When did that start? Was that something that you’d been interested in as a kid, or was it something more of a college experience?

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AUGUSTINE: I had a grandfather who lived with us until he died when I was about, I think, four or five years old. Probably more like four. And he was a carpenter and had some tools and even at that young age he would show me how you use a saw or something.

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And being as I had no brothers and sisters, he was, kind of, my best buddy. I could remember—I think it affects me to this day—that when he died, I couldn’t figure how my best friend could just leave, and not say goodbye or anything. Four years old, you don’t figure those things out.

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Anyway, he got me interested in woodworking, and then after he was gone, the house we lived in had an old coal bin—it was a room in the basement where they poured coal through the window at ground level and coal for the furnace. Our furnace had been converted to gas, so I cleaned out this coal bin

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and converted it to a woodshop. And so I did woodworking. I could go up to the grocery store and they would give me the boxes that oranges came in—the orange crates—and I could use that for wood.

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I built all kinds of stuff. And to this day, I still do woodworking. I was on the board of Black and Decker so I got a world-class shop. I enjoy that very much; it’s a tangible thing.

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CARUSO: So I have to ask this as a follow-up question. So I did Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, and I remember having the races like you would—I forget what they were called—you would make the little cars and run them down the tracks, you had the regatta where you would build the boats and run them, you know,

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and have races with them. Did you do that in Boy Scouts? AUGUSTINE: I did, and I continue doing it through my grandsons. In the last year, I was helping build the cars. CARUSO: And so I was wondering how well you did in those races given that I don’t know

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like I never had woodworking skills when I supposed to carve these things and race them. How did you actually do in those races? AUGUSTINE: Did very well. But the secret to that is getting very good lubricants.

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So, with my grandkids, it is legal—you can use whatever lubricant you want. For my grandkids, I got the lubricants they use to oil the bearings on jet engines, and boy, I’ll tell you, the cars move. CARUSO: Sorry, I didn’t mean to...

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so you’ve mentioned the woodworking, model-building, working in the wind tunnels. So that’s what you were doing for your graduate degree. During the master’s program, did you have to take courses as well, or was it really

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just a focus on that research project? AUGUSTINE: There were courses —by and large, very theoretical. I don’t remember labs in graduate school. May have been, but I don’t remember that.

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You had your thesis that was a hands-on project also involving theory. Our undergraduate projects were done as a team whereas your graduate project was just yours; you were on your own. CARUSO: Okay. Now I know that you mentioned that Princeton—I think it was

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up until the mid-sixties—was... their undergraduate institution was men only. I know Hopkins and a number of other institutions were very much the same during that period of time, but I’m also aware that Hopkins did allow

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females in their graduate schools. Did Princeton allow women to enter their graduate school? AUGUSTINE: Not until I think it was about ten years after I graduated. There were no women faculty, no...

01:16:11.140 - 01:16:39.360

it was a monastery at that point. On weekends—studies were pretty demanding—but on weekends, we could hitchhike to the various women’s schools on the East coast, and a couple weekends a year, the clubs would all get together the same weekend have big parties the people would have

01:16:39.360 - 01:16:54.520

dates for the weekend. They would stay at people’s homes in the town. The townspeople at Princeton were nice enough —knowing that we weren’t allowed to have cars—so people close enough to the campus, you could walk for two dollars a night.

01:16:54.560 - 01:17:12.760

You could put your date up in these houses...towns. It sounds pretty quaint today, but it worked very well. CARUSO: So you mentioned that you were, kind of, done with education. You weren’t going to pursue a PhD.

01:17:12.760 - 01:17:30.640

How did the opportunity... so, I mean, you mentioned you started working for Douglas Aircraft in California. How did you either learn about or encounter the company? Did they send recruiters to campus?

01:17:30.640 - 01:17:49.400

Was this something like your thesis advisor is like, “You know what, you should go work for this company” and just send you off? How did it come about that you wound up working for Douglas Aircraft? AUGUSTINE: There were a couple of factors—one of which I probably shouldn’t

01:17:49.400 - 01:18:08.890

be proud of —but Southern California sounded like a great place to be as young bachelor. So that certainly had a major bearing. The other was that...two others: one was that companies sent a lot of recruiters. We were very much in demand.

01:18:10.560 - 01:18:28.220

You could have all the job offers you wanted. At that time— it shows how things change, and this is a story in its own right— Douglas Aircraft was, kind of, the New York Yankees of the airplane business.

01:18:33.820 - 01:18:55.400

They were the ones who built the DC-3, the DC-6, and you go down the line. The Thor missile and Nike Zeus. They really were kind of the dominant company. People from Boeing would be offended by my having said that,

01:18:56.130 - 01:19:22.560

and certainly Lockheed-Martin Marietta would, but I think the truth of the matter was it was a very good place to work. So I applied for a job in the aeronautics part of the company because my thesis was in aeronautics. And the job offer...when I got out there to go work was in the Missiles and Space Division.

01:19:22.560 - 01:19:39.790

Which was up the road ten miles from the aeronautics part of the company. I was in a division I really hadn’t intended to be in, but I got interested in what they were doing right away. And one other problem occurred...

01:19:42.480 - 01:20:07.520

and this is kind of contrary to my later experience. Hard to explain. When I got there I was really eager to build something, to fly airplanes, or as it turned out, fly missiles. They wanted to assign me to the research group, which was a small group of about ten people in aeronautics...

01:20:07.520 - 01:20:23.880

part of the company. I didn’t know it at the time, but everybody in the group except myself had a PhD. And they wanted me to go in that group. Well, I was tired of researching and the like.

01:20:23.880 - 01:20:44.240

I wanted to build something. I remember complaining to my boss: “That’s not where I want to be. I want to work on a project somewhere.” They were building a lot of neat stuff at that time. Finally, he said, “We’ll take you down to meet the “Big Boss”, and you

01:20:44.240 - 01:20:59.360

can make your case.” So I went down and met the “Big Boss,” Jim Gunkle, and told him I really didn’t want to do research, and if I’d wanted to do that, I would have stayed at the university. He said, “Well, we really need you in the research group.

01:21:00.320 - 01:21:27.680

And if you’ll go do that for a year, then you can have your choice within his part of the company of any job that was at my level that I wanted.” So I said, okay. And so I went to work at this little research group of a dozen people doing very fundamental aerodynamic research. Really liked the people, enjoyed what I was doing, tumbled to kind of an

01:21:27.680 - 01:21:53.880

interesting little theoretical idea. It was one of these very elegant mathematical things where terms cancel out... And it led to just an interesting ability to analyze a certain kind of problem. I wanted to run a wind tunnel test of this theory to prove that it was right, which I got

01:21:53.880 - 01:22:15.080

to do, and it worked out really well. So I enjoyed that. At the end of the year, they said, “Okay, do you still want to leave?” I said, “Well, I think I should.” I had no intention of getting a PhD; I was going to night school,

01:22:15.650 - 01:22:37.480

but not for a degree—just taking courses in aerodynamics and so on. And a lot of electronics. So they said, “You can work one of the projects.” I worked on the Thor for a...no, the Skybolt—for a little while and then I worked on Nike

01:22:37.480 - 01:23:09.480

Zeus, which was a fabulous assignment, Nike Zeus—this was 1959—was flying Mach eight-and-a-half in the atmosphere and it was pulling 20Gs off the launchpad, and pulling 20Gs laterally both in the atmosphere and out of the atmosphere. I mean, there was nothing even vaguely approaching that.

01:23:10.120 - 01:23:31.960

So it was true pioneering, and we were flying missiles about once a week either at Kwajalein Island out in the South Pacific or at Point Mugu in California or at White Sands, New Mexico. Unfortunately, we were having lots of failures, and I was put in charge of a

01:23:31.960 - 01:23:48.080

little group within the aerodynamics section that had six or eight people working for me. Our job was when there was a flight failure to figure out if it had anything to do with aerodynamics—why the failure occurred.

01:23:48.740 - 01:24:02.530

And I just loved the work— probably the best job I ever had. It was like detective work where you knew the answer but you didn’t know the reason, and you had to work back to figure out what had happened. It was somebody twenty-two years old had every bit as much

01:24:03.300 - 01:24:21.360

And it was just fascinating to do. The other advantage, particularly in the space program, which this was not yet there, But in the space program, somebody twenty-two years old had every bit as much experience in space as somebody sixty-two.

01:24:22.370 - 01:24:41.160

“In the Valley of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king.” It was really true. CARUSO: I mean, you’re going to work in aeronautics at a very interesting time in US history, right? You... your undergraduate you received your bachelor’s degree around the same time as

01:24:41.160 - 01:25:06.000

Sputnik, if I—I’m trying to remember my space history—I believe that in this period of time as well was when the US was trying to launch things. They had some very spectacular failures happening where missiles would just, sort of, collapse on themselves and fire explosions, or they would

01:25:06.000 - 01:25:23.280

take off and then flip and crash. And so while it was an exciting time, it was also what I assume might be a very stressful time given the failures happening. Were you aware of that? Were you feeling that?

01:25:23.280 - 01:25:39.600

Was that being expressed while you were at Douglas Aircraft, or was that, well, you know it happened, but it wasn’t necessarily a big deal? AUGUSTINE: Very interesting. There was kind of a division here...

01:25:42.070 - 01:26:08.200

In the space work, there was indeed an immense feeling of pressure because when Sputnik went up that was a terrible shock. There are certain things in your life you remember—9/11, Sputnik, World War II. We thought we were—of course Russia was a big threat.

01:26:08.220 - 01:26:29.600

There were thousands of nuclear weapons out there by this time. Ballistic missiles, intercontinental range... Russia was a scary threat and outnumbered us on tanks in Europe, and so on. We thought our big strong suit was technology; and all of a sudden, the Russians were able to do

01:26:29.600 - 01:26:45.760

something we weren’t able to do. Our space program early on depended on the Redstone rocket, which was being built in Huntsville, Alabama in Werner Von Braun's group. It was blowing up a lot.

01:26:51.440 - 01:27:16.360

No, it was the Viking. I'm mixing it up. Anyway, as you see it, it was not the Redstone. I'm giving it a bad name. Anyway, rockets were blowing up and the Russians were clearly ahead of us in space. Then President Kennedy, of course, made his major announcement that we were going to place,

01:27:16.360 - 01:27:41.960

he said, men on the moon within a decade. That really turned emphasis in that direction. The other side was the military's program. Once again, the program was designed to stay ahead of the Russians, and one of the

01:27:43.680 - 01:28:10.280

consequences of that was there was a much greater willingness to take risks. We tended to learn by our failures. To launch a rocket or an airplane and have it fail wasn’t the end of the world. Every airplane airplane that was developed would lose four or five test pilots.

01:28:11.730 - 01:28:29.560

Rockets would fail. The task was to figure out what went wrong and then fly again soon as you could. Whereas today, if an airplane fails in a test program, the whole program will be canceled. It was a totally different kind of engineering.

01:28:29.560 - 01:28:41.480

The Russians did something very akin to what we did; they launched in groups... Their rockets—they had to launch three of them. All three would fail. And then they'd stop, and figure out why they failed, and three more would go up.

01:28:41.790 - 01:29:05.720

And it was a different kind of engineering. CARUSO: So I know that you are at Douglas from ’58 to ’65, correct? AUGUSTINE: Yes, you’ve done your research. That’s correct. CARUSO: So, are there things about those years that you’d like to discuss as they

01:29:05.720 - 01:29:27.240

either relate to the work that you were doing then, or what may be relevant for us to know in terms of your future career? AUGUSTINE: I guess a couple of things happened. One was that although I was working on what they called “projects,” like developing a

01:29:27.240 - 01:29:50.000

missile or airplane or something—mostly missiles and space—I was still very fascinated by the theory, the foundational background of why what we were able to do worked or didn’t work. I maintained close contact with the people in the research group.

01:29:51.560 - 01:30:12.320

Some of the things I’d been interested in I continued to do, sort of on the side. There were usually a couple professors at universities who spent summers with us in this little research group, and I’d get to spend time with them and learn about what they were doing.

01:30:13.960 - 01:30:46.640

That was one of the vectors that I found myself on. Oh, I've got to plug in my machine here, it just went dead. OK, back in business. The other thing that wasn’t particularly

01:30:46.640 - 01:31:07.760

anything that I planned, but it just turned out— I started having people working for me. I was sort of drifting into management without realizing it. This initial group I had six or seven people or so...

01:31:10.640 - 01:31:32.400

the next group, I had maybe twenty people working for me. And so...as I say, totally without ever making a decision that I wanted to move in the direction of management, I was doing it. I was trying to balance my regular day-to-day —the management aspects—and my

01:31:32.400 - 01:31:49.920

fascination with research at the same time. That certainly impacted me in terms of where my career and my interests headed as the years went on. CARUSO: How was it switching into management?

01:31:49.920 - 01:32:02.600

I’m assuming... so when I started working here at the Science History Institute, for example, I’d never had people reporting to me before, so I, kind of, had to figure out how to be a manager on my own.

01:32:02.600 - 01:32:25.720

How was it for you learning to become a manager? AUGUSTINE: Gosh, there were no such things as management courses at Princeton, or a business school—they don’t have a business school. Nobody I knew when I grew up was a manager, particularly.

01:32:26.420 - 01:32:59.400

My college roommate’s father was an executive, but I guess on the job training. I remember watching other managers in the area, not with the intent of learning from them in particular, but watching them. Some of them I thought were pretty good; some of them were pretty awful. There was one that ran a group just on the other side of one of these little

01:32:59.400 - 01:33:24.150

walls—six-foot- high walls, five-foot-high—who berated his people, used foul language, but had moved up a fair height in the company. I was really disappointed to see that; not a person you’d want to emulate. I tried to be as different from him as I could.

01:33:24.830 - 01:33:47.800

And then I had a good boss, his— my boss’s boss— was a great boss. Highly respected guy, highly ethical, a good engineer, that people just loved to work for and would work hard for him.

01:33:48.960 - 01:34:13.240

If I get too far off here, please, David, feel free to interrupt me—but one experience I particularly remember, we were launching Nike Zeus—that was a very high-performance vehicle —from White Sands. It was to be the first launch from an underground cell with no venting.

01:34:13.240 - 01:34:40.880

Just set it down in the cell and you lit the candle. The rocket motor—this ginat motor— burned only four-and-a-half seconds, and that was it for the boost phase. When the missile started out, coming out of the cell, the hot gases from the motor were

01:34:40.880 - 01:34:55.480

going out of the cell faster than the missile was, so the missile was flying backwards for the first part of its flight. Now this was before the days you had microelectronics and integrated circuits and all these things that make things fly.

01:34:58.600 - 01:35:21.000

I was given the job of figuring out how do we get this thing to fly backwards as it flies out of the cell. My little team of people—seven or eight people at that time—it was a very tough job. Believe it or not, we made a little model thing bottled air canisters

01:35:21.000 - 01:35:40.640

and a broomstick for the missile. The program had lots of money, but that’s what we did because we could do it fast. We did a lot of theoretical calculations. I went down to White Sands for the launch.

01:35:43.490 - 01:36:04.840

We had figured out that the loads on the fins on the missile would be so great—the tail fins—that they would break off. So we went to the structures people and said, “The tail fins are going to break off coming out of the cell.” So they redesigned the tail fins, did a quick fix, if you will, to strengthen them.

01:36:05.430 - 01:36:33.440

So I go down for the launch they do the countdown...the rocket comes flying up out of the thing, and it looks like the world’s largest Roman candle, coming out in thousands of pieces. And we're watching safely from a launch site a mile away. Ugly sight.

01:36:36.120 - 01:36:50.830

I, sort of, was responsible for figuring out, OK, what happened. I figured maybe the fins must have broken off. It was our fault. After the poisonous gases allegedly escaped the cell, they put me on a Bosun’s chair

01:36:50.830 - 01:37:10.440

from a—what do you call it?—a crane and lowered me down into the cell. I’m afraid of heights, so it was a bad deal to begin with. They lowered me down the cell. I have a flashlight. I’m looking for any pieces or anything and the grease from the rocket motor exhaust

01:37:10.440 - 01:37:31.000

that collected on the side of the cell. There were two marks going up the side of the cell, parallel—and it was instantly clear to me what had happened. The fins had not broken off, it had not occurred to us that the loads on those fins

01:37:31.000 - 01:37:53.680

would be transferred to four bolts—twenty-five cent hardware bolts—that held the missile on the rail that it was supposed to slide up as it went out of the cell. Well, those four bolts failed, and so the missile— the loads on the fins banged the missile up against the other wall. And cracked the grain

01:37:53.680 - 01:38:12.920

of the rocket motor, and, so, the solid propellant, so of course it blew up. The evidence was very clear. And so I did quite an analysis with my group I went back to see the big boss—John Thomas—who we all respected so much and went through with

01:38:12.920 - 01:38:31.640

him exactly what happened, what we had missed, and I figured this is the end of a great career. John looked at me said, “You’ve done a great analysis; you’ve been very honest.” He said, “I’m sure you learned a lot from this.

01:38:32.090 - 01:38:56.600

Let’s hope the next one does better.” As I said, this is the kind of guy I want to work for. He would not have been tolerant of negligence, but it was an honest oversight—the people in the structures section didn’t catch it either, I might mention. So I learned from people as I went along.

01:38:56.600 - 01:39:19.800

I never had any training in leadership or management. CARUSO: You raised something else that I guess maybe people who’d be reading this interview at some point in the future may not consider, but what was it like doing these calculations prior to having modern computers, right?

01:39:19.800 - 01:39:35.840

Did Douglas Aircraft have their own computer, or did they have what computers originally were, which were people who ran the calculations for you? Can tell me a little bit more about the mathematics and figuring out the answers at that point in time?

01:39:36.100 - 01:39:58.920

AUGUSTINE: It was totally different world, obviously. In one of my summer jobs at General Dynamics, I was calculating a transfer orbit to Mars. And the first transfer orbit to Mars I calculated was done with three pieces of wood and two pieces of glass—called a slide rule.

01:39:59.380 - 01:40:16.560

And I have it here on the wall in case— right now it's in a frame, in a box, with a little hammer— gold hammer— that says, “In case of power failure, break glass.” Most of our calculations were literally done on the slide rule.

01:40:17.400 - 01:40:45.320

There was a small digital computer... Oh, then there was a little hand—which I still use—great little thing. The first Hewlett Packard little hand calculator. It was expensive as the dickens. The slide rule was 19.95 with your name engraved in it...

01:40:45.540 - 01:41:00.240

This was like 190 bucks. I mean, it was something... And it still works! This is the one I had. And I used it today. Inverse Polish notation. Anyway, for a tougher problem, this was the answer.

01:41:00.240 - 01:41:16.240

Then the company had a small electronic digital computer that came in a little later. But we also had a group that were called computers. They were mostly women at that time.

01:41:16.860 - 01:41:38.960

They had two kinds of computers, either a Marchant or a Frieden. They were like a typewriter except they were a calculator—a mechanical calculator—with gears, and so on. They were electronically run, but there was nothing electronic about it except to move the gears.

01:41:41.920 - 01:41:54.480

They would sit in a group—they happened to sit next to me when I was in an aeroelasticity group briefly. And they would solve aeroelastic equations, which had these awful matrices you had to invert.

01:41:56.040 - 01:42:11.320

They would sit there and they worked in pairs—two people in the group. There were about twenty or thirty people. And if you had a problem to be solved, you would fill out a matrix that would say add column one to column three, divide

01:42:11.320 - 01:42:34.680

by column seven, subtract column two, and they would go through and fill out the matrix using these mechanical calculators that made a terrible racket as they whirred and so on. They worked in pairs on the same problem. They would do the identical problem, side by side.

01:42:35.360 - 01:42:54.800

They would have an alarm clock there, and every ten minutes the alarm clock would go off, and they would check with each other to see if they had the same answer so far. And these big fights would break out every ten minutes, “You got it wrong again; you keep getting it wrong.” And if they didn’t agree, they’d go back and do it again until they got the agreement.

01:42:55.200 - 01:43:03.560

And if they got agreement they would do the next ten minutes of the calculation—see if they agreed... and so if they got clear through the calculation, there was a pretty good chance it was right.

01:43:06.610 - 01:43:19.890

If you were an engineer, you’d give them the problems in the morning and then you’d wait and hopefully get it back that day or the next day or something like that. Pretty primitive. Blueprints were literally blueprints.

01:43:23.600 - 01:43:41.120

Slides were called—they were eight-and-a-half by eleven—they were called "greasies" and you wrote on them with crayons. With that, we developed a missile that could fly Mach eight-and-a-half and pull 20Gs, and did a pretty good job of it.

01:43:43.520 - 01:44:07.990

CARUSO: So I know that you finished your time at Douglas Aircraft in ’65. You enjoyed the Southern California life for about seven years. What made you decide to move on from Douglas Aircraft and begin serving in the Office of the Secretary of Defense?

01:44:10.400 - 01:44:28.360

AUGUSTINE: To be perfectly candid there were several things. One was that Donald Douglas Sr. who had founded the company retired and turned the company over to his son, who I’ve come to know in later life.

01:44:28.880 - 01:44:49.160

But was probably not equipped to run a company like that and made a couple of decisions that were mind-boggling in retrospect, how bad they were. It was driving the company into the ground. And it wasn’t that I

01:44:49.160 - 01:45:23.160

was so worried about the company failing, it was just so frustrating. I think the classic thing that impacted me and an awful lot of other people is an example of a management error that really harms the company that was, till then, as I said, the gold standard of the business. One day, my boss’s boss that I liked so much—we all did—John Thomas, Friday

01:45:23.160 - 01:45:42.670

afternoon, at the end of the day, at that time we all worked in the upper level of a hanger. When companies went into the missile and space business, they didn’t need these huge hangars, so they would another put deck on a hangar and all the engineers would work on the upper deck in this hangar.

01:45:42.980 - 01:45:54.880

We referred to acres of engineers, there were probably three four hundred of us up there with desks lined up side by side. And even birds would get in the hanger and fly through it and every now and then, you’d hear somebody scream or something!

01:45:57.370 - 01:46:12.160

John, late one afternoon on Friday, called us all to get together. And—he motioned to everybody, so we all gathered around, And he climbs up on the desk And John said "I have some very bad news for you that I really

01:46:12.160 - 01:46:31.880

don’t like to have to convey.” And I should give as a way of background, the industry is doing great; business is great at this point. And he said, “Starting Monday, you’re making 15 percent less than you are today.” There’s this silence in the room.

01:46:32.850 - 01:46:52.720

Then somebody realizes it’s April 1 and yells, “April Fools!” John turns purple, and we’re all cheering and yelling, “April Fools!” John said, “I wish this were an April Fools, but this is not.” Well, we all think he’s really pulling this off, so we’re still really cheering.

01:46:53.010 - 01:47:14.760

Finally, he convinces us, and the newspaper the next day convinces us it was not a joke. What had happened apparently was the company's new CEO got told we needed to control our costs and that the major cost element was personnel. He said, “Cut everybody’s pay 15 percent,” which they did.

01:47:15.720 - 01:47:31.680

Within a week, we had an engineers’ union, which is totally contrary to the attitude of most engineers. The headhunters and others—this was Los Angeles, where you could go to any one of four or five aerospace companies in those days and

01:47:31.680 - 01:47:51.480

not move your home—just by driving a different direction. The very best people started bailing out, particularly the younger best people. Most of the people I was working with bailed out and went to other companies. That was one big factor.

01:47:51.480 - 01:48:10.480

The next big factor was that the company decided the way to write proposals was to get people who basically professional proposal writers. Because they would get to be really good, which is a great idea, except proposal writing is a killing experience.

01:48:10.480 - 01:48:26.840

It’s twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week job. Anyway, I was assigned to this proposal writing group to bring in new business. We would write a proposal I thought was pretty good, and we’d lose. We’d write one that I was kind of ashamed of, and we would win.

01:48:27.400 - 01:48:47.760

And I remember saying to myself, if I’m going to make a living in this business, I better find out how you tell the difference between a good proposal and a bad proposal. Maybe what I ought to do sometime is learn to write proposals by evaluating proposals, and somehow maybe get a job with the government where I could evaluate proposals.

01:48:51.640 - 01:49:14.640

I mentioned this to one of our marketing people who happened to work in Washington, most of the time. A fellow by the name of Dave Halloran. Dave—His Washington contacts had been told that Robert McNamara, who had just become Secretary of

01:49:14.640 - 01:49:39.200

Defense, was looking for young, enthusiastic, inexperienced people—and I fit the description to a tee. My friend David said he’d mentioned this and that he thought they’d probably like to have me come to work the Office of the Secretary of Defense,

01:49:39.550 - 01:49:58.300

which is a big office. I mean, it sounds like you're...it's big. Still, it was...there was an organization there called the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, which was sort of one of the two most powerful elements in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and it too was very small in those

01:49:58.360 - 01:50:17.280

days; it’s huge now. Anyway, they offered me a job, it turned out to be a very inopportune time. We had a two-year-old and a baby about to be born, so I negotiated that I didn’t have to show up for work until the baby was born.

01:50:17.460 - 01:50:40.160

Two weeks after she showed up, we packed up, sold our home, moved into a rental home in Washington, took a big pay cut, and I went to work in the Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which was a career-changing event.

01:50:40.750 - 01:51:03.320

I think one of the lessons is that a lot of things in life aren’t very convenient. A fellow who used to run Lockheed to say that if opportunity knocks, try to answer the door. This was one of those cases of trying to answer the door. Anyway, we settled down in Washington.

01:51:04.680 - 01:51:25.600

The folks at Douglas weren’t at all happy with me, kind of, bailing out, but everybody else was bailing out, too. Then they rescinded the 15 percent pay cut and six months later, Douglas was owned by McDonnell. True management...

01:51:25.600 - 01:51:47.920

that was one of a couple examples I could give. That was the most existential. I guess that sort of wrapped up my career at Douglas. CARUSO: So you haven’t mentioned being married. When did you meet your wife?

01:51:48.560 - 01:52:06.670

AUGUSTINE: I was in graduate school at Princeton. This part of the story is not a particularly good part of the story! She was dating my roommate in the graduate school. I first met her on a weekend.

01:52:06.670 - 01:52:18.760

There was a lake not far from Princeton—this is the only time I ever did there, but I went water skiing. And there was a group of people and my roommate was there with this attractive

01:52:18.760 - 01:52:45.160

young girl from Sweden. She was born in Stockholm. She was working as an au pair in New Jersey and had just come to America. I particularly remember the day because when I worked at Boeing, I had done some water skiing in Lake Washington. I’d never—

01:52:45.160 - 01:52:59.960

being from Colorado, I never learned to swim. There’s nowhere to swim in Colorado. So they had these little belts—it was called skier’s belt—and so that day in New Jersey, I wanted to water ski, so at the little shop there I bought a skier’s belt.

01:53:00.800 - 01:53:22.120

The first time I fell, I fell hard, and the belt disintegrated, and I can remember going to the bottom of the lake. It wasn’t that deep. Pushing off, and they came back to get me as the tow rope went by, the tow rope was low enough in the water that I could see it, I climbed up the tow rope because I didn’t know how to swim a stroke.

01:53:22.730 - 01:53:38.140

I climbed up the tow rope and got back in the boat, and that was the day I met my wife to be. Memorable for two regards. Incidentally, after that, when I got to California, I took a course in scuba diving and got a license to scuba dive.

01:53:40.960 - 01:54:08.800

Anyway, so now I’m at Douglas Aircraft and this pretty girl I met in New Jersey is still in New Jersey as an au pair and is about to finish her commitment to that. She came to America with nothing in the way of financial stuff. She had gotten a job at the UN as

01:54:08.800 - 01:54:26.640

an interpreter, but it wasn’t going to start till the end of the summer. So she wanted to see California—see America, so she got a job driving a car for Avis or Hertz or somebody to California that they wanted delivered there.

01:54:26.980 - 01:54:42.800

My roommate, who is still on the East Coast, writes to me and says, “Meg is going to be out in California and would you show her around while she’s out there?”—so she comes out there, and he didn’t say how long I was to show her around. It’s now been 58 years.

01:54:44.260 - 01:54:59.960

Anyway, he and I are still friends. He met another girl from Sweden, interestingly, and he married her. And we had the two children and have had 58 years of a happy marriage. CARUSO: Yeah, so I just wanted to follow up on that since you mentioned you know

01:54:59.960 - 01:55:11.180

essentially when you’re moving out to the to the DC area, it was I think you said a two- year-old and a newborn. Is that the ages? AUGUSTINE: Right. CARUSO: Right.

01:55:11.400 - 01:55:26.770

And so that must have also been a complexity getting out from the west coast—Southern California—to the east coast with two little ones. AUGUSTINE: It was very difficult. As I said we had taken a pay cut to work for the government.

01:55:27.990 - 01:55:40.680

We arrived in November, so winter was coming on. It turned out it was a tough winter. Going to work for the government, they don’t fly you to look for a house before you take the job.

01:55:41.370 - 01:56:04.200

We didn’t have enough money built up yet for me to fly to the east coast and find a house. We had a friend find a house for us that they thought we would like and rent it for us, so I signed the rental agreement sight unseen. Anyway, the four of us—my daughter was two years old—two weeks old—

01:56:04.940 - 01:56:20.920

We arrived in [Virginia], in this house out in the woods of McLean, It was a wooded area at that time. There were horses in the place which our friend thought we would like. The house was old.

01:56:24.240 - 01:56:48.320

The guy who owned it, it had been his getaway home from Washington in the olden days! That was McLean. He'd go to McLean and spend weekends at this house they had in McLean. Of course, McLean today is a suburb of Washington; it’s part of it. Anyway, we got through the winter, which was terrible.

01:56:48.320 - 01:57:08.320

We were sick all the time. Everybody had colds. Terrible winter storms. Come spring, we were robbed one day.

01:57:08.750 - 01:57:25.760

Whoever broke into the house tore the place up and tore a door down so much so they tore the door jam out of the door—I had fixed it—to make it hard to get in because I’d been worried. Anyway, we immediately said, “We got to get out of here,” because if you could do

01:57:25.760 - 01:57:41.360

that, no way we can have the two little children here. Fortunately, I was able to work an arrangement to get out of the lease and we moved into an area with lots of children, lots of people. But yes, it was one of the worst years—it was a tough year.

01:57:41.360 - 01:58:03.440

On the other hand, the work was fascinating. And by now, unfortunately, the Vietnam War had broken out. I was there ’65 to ’70, which was, kind of, the height of the Vietnam War. Each Tuesday morning you would go to the Secretary’s intelligence briefing where

01:58:03.440 - 01:58:23.800

they’d tell us how the war was going. It was a different world. The relationship...Secretary McNamara had a management style that I didn’t particularly agree with, but he had done very well.

01:58:24.360 - 01:58:55.120

I would characterize as creating—what’s the word?—conflict is probably too strong—but competitiveness between people in organizations so that if you made a mistake, you knew somebody was going to point it out very publicly. It was that kind of environment, and the two groups, there was a department, the Defense Research and

01:58:55.120 - 01:59:20.640

Engineering crowd that I was with, and then there was the Systems Analysis crowd that were known as the Whiz Kids. We fought... the war in Vietnam must have been mild compared to the war that went on in the Pentagon. It was a constant “gotcha” we took different views on everything, it seemed like.

01:59:21.550 - 01:59:40.960

Ironically, somehow I made a lot of friends with the people in Systems Analysis. I seemed to be one of the few people to get along with them. As a result, I became kind of a conduit. I have friends today who I worked with in Systems Analysis that really was viewed as

01:59:40.960 - 02:00:00.120

kind of the enemy. It was a wonderful working experience. I learned a lot. I was learning about major issues, new fields, but it was an antagonistic environment With the war going on, and people dying.

02:00:02.120 - 02:00:19.880

CARUSO: So I didn’t think to ask at the time, but when you were at undergraduate, graduate school and you were working on projects, your professors were working on military projects. Did you have to go through security clearance in graduate school, or did you

02:00:19.880 - 02:00:39.720

have to go through it at Douglas Aircraft with the things that you were working on? AUGUSTINE: I didn’t have to do with graduate school because I was doing fundamental research, but the condition of my job at Douglas and elsewhere was I had clearance. There are various levels, of course.

02:00:39.720 - 02:01:11.920

My clearance level demands kept going up. When I was working in the Defense Department—the period you’re describing— One day, the head of administration in the Office of the Secretary of Defense was a three-star general, Air Force. One day he stopped by my office, and said,” You know, we noticed your wife’s not a

02:01:11.920 - 02:01:35.280

citizen. It would sure be nice if she were.” I said, “Well, she would love to be, but it takes a lot of time.” He said, “Well, we’ll see what we can do.” Anyway, Meg then was sworn in as a citizen. They had a nice ceremony at the courthouse in Alexandria, .

02:01:35.990 - 02:01:50.590

And my boss threw a big party that night for my wife. She is the most avid American citizen today that you would ever find. She took the exam. She studied.

02:01:51.720 - 02:02:06.600

They asked her the first question, “Who is the oldest person House of Representatives?” She named it like that! They said, “Oh, you pass.” She was disappointed because she wanted to show off her knowledge.

02:02:08.120 - 02:02:32.200

CARUSO: So you’d mentioned that a part of the reason that or part of the way that you made your way over to the Office of the Secretary of Defense was that your experience with writing proposals and you thought that the good ones weren’t getting funded, the bad ones were getting funded and so you wanted to learn more about what made a good

02:02:32.200 - 02:02:51.240

proposal and what made a bad proposal. When you were in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, is that what you were doing for your main role, that you were assessing proposals coming in for funding and then determining who was going to receive it, or were

02:02:51.240 - 02:03:11.920

you doing something else? AUGUSTINE: It was kind of like at Douglas, turned out that wasn’t what I was doing at all. I don’t think I ever evaluated a proposal in the five years I was there! My job was...I worked in the Defense and Space Office of

02:03:11.920 - 02:03:41.760

Defense Research and Engineering in which... my particular role was ballistic missile defense largely—not entirely— and all three services were kind of working in that area at that time, but mainly the Army. Also, I got involved in some strategic space programs that were part of our...

02:03:41.900 - 02:04:01.320

I had a little group of programs I was kind of responsible for in budgeting and calling the Secretary’s attention if something wasn’t going right or something needed to be done. When I was at Douglas, I knew of this group and how much power DDR&E seemed to have.

02:04:02.060 - 02:04:21.280

I remember asking the marketing guy who told me that they would probably offer me a job, I said "Well how many people work in the Defense and Space Group of DDR&E?" I’d figured he’d say 120 or something like that. He said, “Well, there’s Charlie, and there’s Ron..."

02:04:21.280 - 02:04:39.680

I think there were five or six of us. For a guy who was—I don’t know—thirty years old or something like that, it was a huge learning experience—heavy duty—and there were consequences because there was a war going on.

02:04:45.610 - 02:05:00.600

I, sort of, got into the systems world doing systems analysis myself to kind of hold my own with the people in the Systems Analysis group. One of the things that I had the good fortune— that’s my fax. I’m sorry.

02:05:00.600 - 02:05:26.160

One of the fortunate things I had was...in high school I had taken a course in journalism, and I learned more about writing from that course in journalism than anything else I've—courses I’ve taken in English and the likes. So I’m a fairly decent writer, and that gave me a chance

02:05:26.160 - 02:05:47.610

to write documents for the Secetary and so on. Until McNamara got there, there really wasn’t much of a system for managing; he really put in the system. I give him great credit for that. One little piece of that system was how do you decide what to fund in research and

02:05:47.700 - 02:06:12.400

development. One Friday night, he had to make a decision the following Monday and I was given the job to write a paper with the various options and the background so he could read the paper and make a decision. It was to be no more than twenty pages long, double-spaced, and it was to present both sides

02:06:12.400 - 02:06:26.810

of the issue in a very balanced manner. And so I did that. McNamara really liked it, so that became for his approach to managing research and development. Pretty soon everybody was writing these papers...

02:06:26.810 - 02:06:47.960

They all hated me. You shouldn't use sarcasm, but...they did. Anyway, we wrote lots of those papers, and I was involved in providing background papers for the Secretary to use to make decisions on a lot of the

02:06:47.960 - 02:07:16.160

systems that are in being today, in fact. That seemed to work out well. After about two years of doing that, I was in the strategic office—main focus on Russia. An opening came up at the next level up in the organization in the tactical systems

02:07:16.160 - 02:07:37.240

office that dealt with tactical missiles, close air support aircraft, things of that type, tanks, trucks, rifles—stuff I knew nothing about. I’m an aeronautical engineer.

02:07:37.930 - 02:08:08.600

Anyway, my boss went to bat for me and they asked me to take that job. It was a promotion, but that immersed me suddenly into the Vietnam War. I became responsible for the development of many of the tactical systems that would be used, and I wound up spending a little time in Vietnam—as a civilian, of course, during the war.

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CARUSO: I’m wondering, so you’re taking a military job at a time where I think and I know there’s a lot that comes later with the Vietnam War, but you’re taking a military job at a time where I think America is starting to question the—I don’t know if reasoning is the right word— but is possibly starting to question the Cold War

02:08:42.880 - 02:09:08.400

itself and the investments in military spending, ideas of or the roles of nuclear weapons. Part of the reason why I’m asking these questions is because I know Dr. Strangelove, for example, Stanley Kubrick’s movie came out in ’64, and that’s really a criticism of the military establishment. What was it

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like working at a period of time when the American public wasn’t necessarily completely supportive of military, military decisions, military environments, Cold War and things like that? AUGUSTINE: Absolutely.

02:09:30.270 - 02:09:47.560

It was not infrequent that there would be demonstrations on the steps of the Pentagon or the main concourse inside the Pentagon. Truly, the Pentagon was not a secure building— you could walk through it and walk into the individual offices, except for a few that were down

02:09:47.560 - 02:10:00.480

underground that were highly secured. My wife could come and see me in my office. We were in charge of controlling our documents. It wasn’t the world it is today.

02:10:01.120 - 02:10:12.700

You could actually drive your car through the tunnel under the Pentagon and actually park down there right up at the concourse. There were the stores in the concourse the public could come into. Different world.

02:10:13.040 - 02:10:31.160

The Vietnam War was becoming very unpopular, and a lot of the people I was working with were military. They were told to go fight there, which they did; some of them died. It was hard.

02:10:35.140 - 02:10:53.800

The public didn’t separate the decisions made by national leadership and the role the military played. They blamed our soldiers for the war in Vietnam, and our soldiers when they would come back, they’d be mistreated.

02:10:54.310 - 02:11:12.520

I can tell stories of personal friends who were mistreated because they had served in the military. Incidentally, it was a draft at that time, so they hadn’t volunteered to serve in the military; they were told you will serve in the military, you will go to Vietnam, and

02:11:12.520 - 02:11:26.760

here’s your rifle. Whether or not one agreed with the war or not, there were good reasons; you could make arguments on both sides. I’ll try to make the argument McNamara would have made.

02:11:30.070 - 02:11:53.040

Unfortunately, unlike today where we somehow have been able to separate wars that are not all that popular—Afghanistan, Iraq— the second war and so on—from our military. Our military today is held in very high regard—may for interesting reasons, probably, but at the time the Vietnam War

02:11:53.040 - 02:12:17.960

started, I remember seeing maps, and helping make some of them, where it would show the part of the world that was controlled by the communists—in 1945, and then the part in 1950, 1955 and ’60, ’65— and the the map keeps getting red and the kind of attitude was somewhere we’ve got to

02:12:17.960 - 02:12:37.240

stop, we got to draw a line. At this point, the communists had taken over Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam; so the view was you gotta draw a line somewhere. That's where it was drawn.

02:12:39.600 - 02:12:55.370

Another question comes up. I spent a good part of my career doing military things and space things. The military things—would it have been nice your career on something other than the military?

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The answer has to be yes. I wish we didn’t need a military. But I’m absolutely convinced we need a military, and if we do have a military we owe the people in it the best equipment we can give them.

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Therefore I felt comfortable going to work every day, but it was a difficult time, no question. Dave Packard became Deputy Secretary of Defense; Dave ran Hewlett-Packard, founded it, That was one of the best executives I’ve ever worked for. Melvin Laird was Secretary, also a great secretary.

02:13:39.280 - 02:13:52.800

They were combination. Dave was a guy who... if you came in with an analysis of a situation... I’ll give an example.

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He wanted you to have looked at it firsthand. I went in with an analysis of something that wasn’t working very well in Vietnam—some equipment. Dave said, “Well, have you been over there to see it?” I said no. The next thing I know I’m in Vietnam with an Army uniform.

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No insignia, no rank, no nothing, my name—last name. The good guys didn’t know whether they should salute me or not, and the bad guys didn’t know whether they—I guess they knew they should shoot me! I spent just a brief period there in which it was obvious I was a civilian, out of

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place, and moderately senior. I remember when we landed they had assigned a young captain to keep me alive, I guess, keep me out of trouble, and we landed in the middle of night, got in a helicopter, landed somewhere. The grass was about three feet high.

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As we were getting ready to get out—jump out—the helicopter was hovering a couple feet off the ground, the captain, as he jumped out, yelled at me “Watch where you land.” It was dark, and the grass is three feet high, and the wind from the helicopter—downdraft— And I yelled “What do you mean?”

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He said "watch for snakes and mines!" That was my introduction. I thought this is not going to be a good experience. But I have a great deal of admiration for the people who put in their tour there and did what

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their country asked them to do. But it was a hard time. CARUSO: So I had introduced I asked my question about reactions of the American public and feelings about the war just after you said that you were being shifted into or moving up a level in terms of positions at the...

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in the secretary in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. So, I’m sorry for that interruption, so if you want to tell me a little bit more about that shift in positions, I’d love to hear that. I also have one other question.

02:16:17.280 - 02:16:41.040

You’d mentioned that when you were at Douglas Aircraft Company, you...you know, that’s when you first mentioned your interest in woodworking and woodshops, and you, kind of, missed doing some of that research, that testing, the models. I’m assuming that when you were in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, you

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weren’t going home at night building models to test things. And I was wondering how you felt not having that as part of your position in the office. So those sort of two things to turn back to you. AUGUSTINE: Let me back up a little.

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When I was at Douglas, my wife and I rented a little apartment in Santa Monica. We didn’t have any furniture, so I set out to build furniture. I signed up at the local high school—they had a great workshop in this high school— and so I signed up to work there.

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Very quickly, the teacher there saw I had some experience, he said “Look, if you want to just come in night and work in the shop, you don’t have to go to classes or do anything.” So I built our furniture—a bunch of it—while I was in the workshop. So I got to do that. And you’re quite right, I didn’t get to do any of that during the years at the Pentagon

02:17:52.360 - 02:18:10.840

And I missed it a lot. I love to read. I did very little reading for fun. Sadly that's been true of a lot of my time. At work, I had a new boss. Another great boss.

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I’ve had great bosses in my life—direct bosses, immediate supervisors—and he was a person to tell you generally what he wanted and leave you alone and let you do it. It was also kind of awkward in the sense that the people who worked for me were all older—in my second job in the Pentagon, they were all older than I was.

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One was a very senior Navy captain. One was an Air Force colonel who rose to three stars. It was an interesting group. Something we’ve lost today in our government.

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Back in those days, if you were asked to take a position in the government—particularly in Defense—you didn’t turn it down; it was your duty to do this kind of thing. I remember how proud I was to be a public servant, a civil servant.

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That time I thought what finer thing is there in the world than to say I serve the public; I’m a servant of the public. That’s the enthusiasm I went into the job with. Our little group where I was working, I guess there were a dozen of us at this point

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at the most—had senior officers from each of the military services. A third of us were military—uniform, active duty. A third of us were civilians, career civil servants, GS scale. And then about a third of us were people like myself who would come—I'd agree to stay two years

02:19:58.480 - 02:20:21.920

I wound up staying five. But agreed to come and work for the government for a few years and then leave and go back to the private sector. Today it’s very hard to do the latter because of conflict-of-interest concerns. I must say, hardly ever—maybe once—I saw some case of a conflict of interest of a

02:20:21.920 - 02:20:43.320

person coming from the private sector to the government, . People knew where you were from; people were watching you. I think by and large, the people I worked with were genuinely there to contribute, and by having these people with three very different backgrounds, you had the

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continuity of history, you had the hands-on military people, and you had people coming in from the outside with a new perspective, with fresh ideas. It was great mix—good lesson for managing. CARUSO: And so what were your overall responsibilities in that new position?

02:21:02.530 - 02:21:26.920

AUGUSTINE: They were a little like the previous position, except one level I now had people doing what I used to do. I was sort of overseeing what they did, and the job was to decide on behalf of the Secretary of Defense’s office what systems should be funded, how much, what systems should be

02:21:26.920 - 02:21:47.360

started, what ones should be stopped. We had very little to do with “who” was selected —like a company —who was selected to build a system or like that. It was kind of the role of integrating what the services proposed.

02:21:52.400 - 02:22:16.280

CARUSO: So I’m trying to be mindful of the time I know we’re approaching the end of the time for today. I know that you wind up leaving you said that after five years and you go to LTV Missiles in Space Company.

02:22:16.720 - 02:22:31.520

I don’t know how much you have to say about... well, maybe I should start there. How... at what point did you decide, or was it decided for you that you were going to be leaving the Office of the Secretary of Defense?

02:22:33.570 - 02:23:09.600

AUGUSTINE: When I left college I really wanted to work in industry and build things, apply things, so when I took the job in the government I agreed to stay two years. I viewed it strictly as a brief stop in where my career might turn out to be. So when I put in—as I said— it turned out five years, when the five years came up, I

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really wanted to go back to industry and do something different. I also noticed that some very talented people in the government that put together the budget year after year got very stale, and I didn’t want that to happen. Also, I was getting a lot of job offers.

02:23:28.660 - 02:24:02.600

It was, again, people with technical backgrounds were in demand. So I—trying to think—at that point, LTV Corporation was, I don't know, maybe the tenth largest company in the country or something like that.

02:24:03.350 - 02:24:26.680

It was started by a fellow by the name of Jimmy Ling, who at the end of World War II bought a bunch of copper wire that was excess and sold stock in his copper company at the Texas State Fair and built a company. I think we owned 126 other companies, if I remember right, a giant conglomerate.

02:24:26.680 - 02:24:47.800

It was one of the first giant conglomerates. They had an aerospace company; it was in Dallas, . Anyway, we thought Dallas would be a decent place to live for the children. Also, we weren’t too thrilled about having the kids grow up living the beach in

02:24:47.800 - 02:25:12.260

California. We were living not too far from the beach. It sounded like a good time to leave. So we packed up one hot July day And went to work at LTV, and bought a home in Arlington, Texas, which

02:25:12.260 - 02:25:38.800

turned out to be just a wonderful place to raise a family. I guess I should say that LTV, being a conglomerate, pretty much left the aerospace company to run its own affairs. Conglomerates soon came out of favor, and LTV—well, I’m getting way ahead of the

02:25:38.800 - 02:25:55.920

story—but eventually many, many years later went into bankruptcy. From the very top to the very bottom. I guess I was building a reputation of going to companies that got bought by somebody else or went broke. It’s a wonder anybody would hire me!

02:25:59.550 - 02:26:21.000

The job was a good job, and Dallas was— or, Arlington— was a great place to raise children. CARUSO: I guess your reputation is that if you leave the company, then it’s going to get bought, right? So they should do everything to keep you around so that way someone else doesn’t...

02:26:21.000 - 02:26:37.960

AUGUSTINE: In all these years, I never thought of that rationalization. That is really good. CARUSO: So I do want to spend some time talking about your time at LTV but I know we only have a few minutes left, so I’m going to leave it up to you.

02:26:37.960 - 02:26:48.480

Do you want to spend a few minutes talking about LTV, or do you want to wrap it up for today and then pick it up next time? AUGUSTINE: David, let me look at my calendar and see what’s happening here. CARUSO: Sure.

02:26:49.680 - 02:27:04.760

Kenny, do you want to pause it? EVANS: Okay, great. Okay, so you were talking about your time at LTV, and I was wondering if you wanted to, kind of, pick up where you left off about talking about the work you were doing

02:27:04.760 - 02:27:34.160

there and your life in Dallas and Arlington? AUGUSTINE: Arlington was a fairly small town at that time—halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth—and the work that I was doing was in the missiles and space group where I was in charge of the advanced programs and marketing.

02:27:35.120 - 02:27:54.480

Which was, kind of, collecting new business, and the advanced programs meant if we were building a prototype of something. I was not involved in production in any way, manufacturing— this was more the front end of the business.

02:27:59.280 - 02:28:30.590

The group I had was modest size— almost all engineers. We were bidding on—well, the main thing we bid on was a cruise missile during that period of time. The fellow that I worked for had just joined company; he’d been a—I think—vice president of IBM and had come to work...

02:28:30.960 - 02:28:57.360

The company was run by Paul Thayer, who was a fighter pilot—an ace in the Korean War—later became Deputy Secretary of Defense. The work was very interesting and very technically oriented, which I liked. A lot of systems work— systems engineering.

02:28:57.360 - 02:29:18.590

It appealed to me. And I guess I always enjoyed tying pieces together from different fields. EVANS: And so at that time, that was around 1970 that you moved? AUGUSTINE: Seventy to ’73, it would have been, yes.

02:29:18.910 - 02:29:43.880

EVANS: And so around this time here, your kids were—let’s see—five-and seven-ish. They were in... starting grade school? AUGUSTINE: Let’s see...yeah, toward the end of that period they would have been. I'm trying to put the various moves together, but...

02:29:44.320 - 02:30:04.400

I remember when we moved to Texas, my wife, on the airplane, carrying a— having a plastic bag in her purse with the kids’ goldfish in it because they wouldn’t leave the goldfish in Washington! I was thinking that would have been a shock to some security checker today.

02:30:04.400 - 02:30:18.240

They didn’t have security checks in those days. EVANS: You’d probably have to buy it a seat. AUGUSTINE: That's right. The children were in school there...grade school

02:30:18.840 - 02:30:47.440

Quite near to our house, close enough so that they could walk to school. Oh, we added a Labrador retriever and were pretty much settled into the home life. One of the challenges, of course, is always how do you balance a home life with a work life? Texas was a very family-oriented place—a lot to do.

02:30:49.840 - 02:31:14.320

I became a Cowboy fan, which, having been a Redskins fan, years before, was quite a switch. I remember going with the management club to the first game watching Cowboys play, and they insisted I wear a hat with a feather in it to symbolize being the only Redskin person in the place.

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Today we’re known as the Washington Football Team. EVANS: Yeah, it sounds... you know, growing up, I was...I just hated the— so I’m from Arlington, Virginia, and just every Cowboys fan was my mortal enemy.

02:31:29.760 - 02:31:56.080

So, I imagine you were very brave to take on that role. AUGUSTINE: Well, I could—a number of stories, I’m getting way off the subject here, but one occasion It was at the president’s prayer breakfast here in Washington, and there many, many tables. At the table we were at there were about eight or nine people.

02:31:57.240 - 02:32:14.240

My wife, who knows nothing about football, having come from Sweden, was seated by somebody she didn’t know him. When he introduced himself, she didn’t register the name of John Riggins, who at that very time was of course the most famous person in Washington, slightly more

02:32:14.240 - 02:32:36.720

so than the President—running back for the then Redskins. John asked her... Let’s see, I’m on another step into Washington here. Anyway, she asked John, “What do you do?” And he said, “I’m an athlete.” I

02:32:36.720 - 02:32:47.880

guess he decided to play along. “Oh really,” she said, “I like tennis. What’s your favorite sport?” He said, “I, kind of, like football.” She said "Oh, really? My favorite team’s the Cowboys.

02:32:47.880 - 02:33:11.270

What’s your favorite team?” By now, everybody at the table, including myself, was in hysterics. But Dallas was a good place to live. It was a good choice. Unfortunately, it was again one of these management decisions

02:33:11.290 - 02:33:30.330

that I didn’t particularly get along, agree with it Our part of the company had bid for the first phase of the cruise missile—the missile part—and we were clearly the underdog. We won one of the two final contracts in a run-off to build the cruise missile for the Air

02:33:30.330 - 02:33:55.280

Force. Which was a huge win for us. The management...I suspect I can understand their point of view—decided that it was too big for the division I was in and that they would move it to the aircraft division. That meant all the people I worked with, who worked like a dog to win this thing, were cut out.

02:33:56.320 - 02:34:23.280

So it moved to the aircraft division and they wound up losing the shoot-out—the competition. That was, I guess, one of those, very tough management decisions I probably didn’t agree with but management makes tough decisions, they do. ANyway, I worked there, I worked on a lot of other stuff, enjoyed it—a lot electronics—all

02:34:23.280 - 02:34:42.970

applied, no research there. EVANS: But you were...so one of the threads that I was listening to you talk with Dave about was this being able to build things get your hands dirty. Were you able to, kind of, fulfill that itch, you know, scratch that itch while you

02:34:43.050 - 02:35:05.600

were at that company, or was it more of a management type of position? AUGUSTINE: I was getting to the point where it was mostly management, I was able to get involved in engineering analysis. I guess you’d call it systems design, systems engineering, systems architecture.

02:35:06.200 - 02:35:29.880

At that point, software wasn’t as big a deal as it is today, but it was beginning to show up. I was beginning to learn a little about that, and I’d become very interested in radar, so I read all the books on radar

02:35:29.880 - 02:35:53.760

that I could lay my hands on. I’d had a lot of electronics when I was in college, so I was pretty well-suited to cut across those various kinds of fields. They were doing some work in space there; it was still pretty...

02:35:56.540 - 02:36:29.080

at that time—let’s see—’70 to ’73 would have been right after—am I getting this right?—yeah, right after Buzz and Neil had landed on the moon. Because of my work, I got to know them very well. But, anyway, that's the...sort of the experience at LTV.

02:36:31.100 - 02:36:55.280

They had a factory they were building things in, and I loved to walk out on the factory and in the test labs and so on, but I guess , as my engineering friends say, I descended into management! EVANS: Was there a point...I’m wondering in your transition back from moving out of the

02:36:55.280 - 02:37:07.880

Pentagon back into the private sector. Were there things you missed about working in that environment? I know you had said it was quite competitive, and at times combative, that you were fighting battles.

02:37:08.580 - 02:37:31.400

Did you miss that environment or was that did you find a similar type of culture back in the private sector? Were there things you took with you from your experience from the Pentagon back to the private sector? AUGUSTINE: The workplace tone was somewhat different in the sense that you didn’t have

02:37:31.400 - 02:37:55.440

this fierce competitiveness, that you were all kind of in the same boat trying to make it float. Most people have a tough time leaving a job in the Pentagon and going back to industry because...I remember my wife, the first day I came home from work, “How did it go?” I’d been working in the Pentagon where the

02:37:55.440 - 02:38:09.240

round off was a hundred million dollars, and, now I’m out in industry—and you won't believe this—but I spent all day saving the company forty thousand dollars. You have to recalibrate what’s important in your own bailiwick.

02:38:09.520 - 02:38:29.520

You're dealing with issues that are not global issues; they’re not world-impacting; they’re not dealing with of millions and billions dollars. But they’re very important to your responsibilities, and so the shift was very easy for me.

02:38:30.960 - 02:38:48.280

I had worked very hard at the Pentagon continued to work very hard. Probably the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life was when I was a public servant. I used to comment that to some my board members later in my career and they didn’t particularly like that, thinking I should have been working harder for them than any

02:38:48.280 - 02:39:16.840

time! It was a challenging period of time, and it just a different level of challenges. I think the main thing I gained from—two things from the Pentagon: one was dealing with broad systems as opposed to a component in the system, or a single missile or a single rocket, a part of a huge system.

02:39:18.790 - 02:39:45.360

That appealed to me, and I learned a lot about that from it. And I also got a very useful understanding of what drives our government and the challenges it faces. Most of the people that I know in industry who had lost the competition for a new system,

02:39:47.240 - 02:39:57.750

it was always because the government “cheated” and they didn’t do right, they didn’t do the analysis. And the people in the government’s attitude is "Oh, people in industry, all they care about is making

02:39:57.830 - 02:40:16.200

money." Neither are true, and it helped me a lot to get an understanding that government people have a lot of constraints on them don’t have in industry. That causes to move more slowly, more cautiously, more deliberately; it frustrates people in industry, but there’s a reason for it.

02:40:16.200 - 02:40:37.720

And similarly, I came to learn that people in industry—particularly in the defense industry—are very dedicated to providing good equipment to our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen, and our marines. that the people in industry still have shareholders that they have to worry about.

02:40:38.830 - 02:41:01.670

It gave me a whole new respect for how you make the system work together, with people from idustry and from government...when they have very different sets of constraints. EVANS: So you spent, I guess three years then at LTV. Is that correct?

02:41:01.990 - 02:41:11.850

AUGUSTINE: That’s right. EVANS: Was there something... you’d mentioned earlier too this kind of sense of duty and your, kind of, pride that you took in being a public servant.

02:41:11.850 - 02:41:28.970

Is that part of what led you back into government service? AUGUSTINE: I really hadn’t planned to go back to the government. With the children in and out of school, I didn’t think it was a great thing to be doing. And we were very happy in Texas.

02:41:28.970 - 02:41:42.640

My wife loved it there. Made a lot of friends. It was a welcoming environment, and I think we basically had no plans of going back to government; we were pretty much settled in.

02:41:42.640 - 02:41:54.600

That was going to be it for us. I guess you could say, “What happened?” EVANS: What happened? AUGUSTINE: I’d been there about

02:41:54.600 - 02:42:16.390

three years, minding my own business. The corporation wasn’t doing that well. The company that I was part of—involved with was doing okay. The corporation owned everything from airlines to car rentals and ski resorts to you name it—steel companies.

02:42:17.180 - 02:42:38.600

It was struggling; as were a lot of conglomerates at that point, but we were doing okay, and I liked the people I worked with. So, there was really no reason to make a change. Well, I was sitting at my desk one evening after hours, and I get a phone call from...

02:42:42.140 - 02:43:11.120

I guess he was the special assistant to the secretary...and said... Let’s see. At this time, Nixon was in office and Watergate was... Get my story straight here: Nixon was in office, and Watergate was just bubbling. Anyway, I get the phone call, and he said they were looking for somebody to come back

02:43:11.120 - 02:43:37.320

to Washington and be Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Research and Development and would I consider the job and would I be kind enough to come back to Washington and talk to the people there about doing it. I said, “No way I could do that.

02:43:37.320 - 02:43:50.800

My family’s here. I’ve got a job with responsibilities I’ve taken on for the company. And for the first time in my life...make a note, since I first got out of college, the first time I was making a little bit of money. And

02:43:50.800 - 02:44:12.510

there was just no way.” The person I was talking with said, “Well, you probably know a lot of people who would be good candidates... Would you consider coming back to Washington and talk to us and maybe you could suggest some other good candidates while you were here?”

02:44:13.330 - 02:44:24.880

And how do you say no to that? So I said, okay. And they said, “Well, this whole... this discussion is extremely confidential that we’re having because the Congress

02:44:24.880 - 02:44:37.880

doesn’t like for leaks to get out who’s going to be the... the White House doesn’t like leaks who’s going to be nominated for what, so very confidential, so make your own airline reservations and so on.” I said, “Sure, I’ll do it.”

02:44:39.400 - 02:44:56.640

I get home that night, and as I’m going in the front door, I’m thinking how am I even going to tell my wife that I’ve even agreed to go Washington and talk to them, because she loves Dallas and Arlington, and the kids are in school and... wrong everything. How am I going to tell her?

02:44:56.690 - 02:45:20.520

So I come in the front door and she said, “The strangest thing happened today.” I said, “What was that?” She said, “A realtor from Dallas called and wanted to list our house because he understood we were moving to Washington.” That’s how the system leaks. So I was in the back of my foxhole right away!

02:45:20.520 - 02:45:45.120

Anyway, I did go back. Talked to them. They asked if I would... They wanted me to visit with Jim Schlesinger who’d just become Secretary of Defense. I went into Jim’s office to talk to him; I didn’t know him.

02:45:48.470 - 02:46:11.600

We talked for a little bit, and he said, “How... would you rank for me—at this point in time how you would rank the quality of the management of the three services in research and development?” I said, “Well, the Navy’s probably the best and the Air

02:46:11.630 - 02:46:35.280

Force pretty close behind, and the Army’s the worst.” He looked at me and said, “Do I have the job for you." He said "I want you to go talk to Bo Callaway,” who had just been appointed Secretary of the Army. So I went to Bo’s office and said, “Look, I’m here under false pretenses.

02:46:35.280 - 02:46:57.400

There’s no way I can do this kind of thing. I’m an aeronautical engineer, aerospace engineer.” Bo is one of the most convincing people in the world and totally dedicated. The Vietnam War is still grinding on, and Bo said, “I really need you.

02:46:57.400 - 02:47:20.400

Will you join the team? And I built a great team.” Bo was so committed and dedicated and such an honest person; I was so struck by that. So I said, “I’ll go talk my wife.” Anyway, it was a very painful decision for her and for me.

02:47:21.120 - 02:47:55.640

Fortunately, the kids were small enough at that point that their life was built around us, not a location, not even a school so much—to some degree, it was easier than later moving kids. So we decided we’d make the move, we went back to Washington. I took another big pay cut and I took the job of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for

02:47:55.640 - 02:48:14.520

Research and Development. I had to go through a congressional hearing, a confirmation hearing, so I lived at the Army Navy club for a week or two while I waited to get the hearing. And because of conflict-of-interest issues, I had to leave the company

02:48:14.520 - 02:48:35.480

immediately, which I did. I was, sort of, unemployed for a couple weeks while I waited for a hearing. I had my hearing. I probably elaborated too much here, so please tell me...

02:48:37.610 - 02:48:49.440

I knew nothing about politics. I didn't even know my own congressman. So here I’m going to have to go to a hearing. I’ve never been to a congressional hearing; I didn’t even know what they did.

02:48:50.240 - 02:49:06.280

I was given by the Army a book about so thick with questions and answers that might get asked that I ought to be ready to deal with. I show up at the hearing, and you sit at a little table.

02:49:06.280 - 02:49:28.070

The members of the Congress all sit in chairs up above you; you’re pretty minimized in your position here! I also had to remember there was a matchbook laying my place on the table and the cover on the matchbook said, “You could be making more

02:49:28.150 - 02:49:51.560

as an electrician.” That’s always stuck in my mind. I don’t know if that was somebody’s idea of a joke, or what. The hearing started, and most of the members of the Armed Services Committee were from the South, which was where most of military bases were—many of them.

02:49:51.960 - 02:50:07.400

And also at that time, with the Cold War going on and Vietnam, to be on the Armed Services Committee was a primary job in the Congress. And so the jobs were assigned, I guess, largely by seniority.

02:50:08.320 - 02:50:22.320

You had a very—most of the people up there, the congressmen were— the senators—this was a senate confirmation— were from the south. The chairman, if I remember, was...

02:50:25.200 - 02:50:40.120

Oh my goodness gracious, how could I ever forget? Well-known senator at the time, who happened to have been the father of a classmate of mine at Princeton. I didn’t know the classmate very well, or the father at all.

02:50:40.120 - 02:51:02.240

He didn’t know me from Adam. So the hearing began, he hit the gavel and peered down at me through his glasses and said, “Mr. Augustine, I wonder if you would share with us your views on the War of the Southern Insurrection.”—

02:51:02.790 - 02:51:21.600

the Northern Insurrection. I figured what I say in the next minute is going to determine the future of my career, and all the Southern senators up there... Excuse me, I'm saying it wrong...it was "The War of the Northern Incursion." There was an "incursion."

02:51:21.840 - 02:51:39.440

The Civil War. I thought for a minute said, “Well, Mr. Chairman, I’m from Colorado, and frankly, we didn’t have much to do with that.” He looked to his left and everybody was nodding; he looked to his right and they were nodding. He said, “I guess that will be all right.” Then I was asked a

02:51:39.440 - 02:52:06.400

few perfunctory questions... In those days, that's the way a confirmation hearing at that level of government went. Pretty much a done deal. Friendly, and so on... I went to work in the Pentagon the following Monday and on the way in the Pentagon, a federal

02:52:06.400 - 02:52:32.800

marshal comes up to me and says, “Are you Secretary Augustine?” and I said, “Yes, I am.” He said, “Well, I have a subpoena," I think it was, "for you.” “What’s that?” . He said it has to do with such and such an Army program that some citizen is suing and you’re the Under Secretary so they are suing you. So I didn’t even know anything about that.

02:52:32.800 - 02:52:56.720

So I get to my office, I have an executive officer— wonderful man, soldier. I said, “I came in here and I’ve been given a subpoena." He said, “Oh, they must have a new federal marshal down there. They’re supposed to not bother you with those; they’re supposed to just deliver

02:52:56.720 - 02:53:11.120

them in the mailroom; we’ve arranged that. I said, “Well, do you mean I get more than one of these?” He said, “Oh, you’ll get several a day.” I thought, “What kind of job have I gotten myself into?” And he said, “Don’t worry. The Justice Department will defend you.

02:53:11.120 - 02:53:41.240

You don’t have to do anything.” Anyway, that was my introduction. I worked for the Secretary, and as I mentioned earlier, the war is going on and anybody in town can walk into our office. There’s no security. There had been, I guess, at some point, but many, many years ago.

02:53:41.240 - 02:54:04.080

But there was no security. It was quite a strange thing. I had a very small staff—I think maybe four, five people. Well, no, more than that. Seven, eight people. Most of them uniformed military from the various branches of the Army, two

02:54:04.080 - 02:54:32.590

secretaries. Which is a lesson I learned in life later: have two secretaries so you can stagger the hours they work, and my military assistant, was a colonel in the Army—aviator—highly qualified, fine man. I was working good people; Bo Calloway was a great boss—very positive person.

02:54:33.220 - 02:54:49.680

It was a privilege to be there. EVANS: So at that point were you planning to stay in Washington? Did you think you were going to continue to serve the public and work in the Pentagon, or did you...

02:54:50.070 - 02:55:04.240

was it a job that you liked and wanted to continue doing? AUGUSTINE: No, this was a political appointee, a presidential appointee. So you were there as long as the president wanted you—nominally four years or as long as that administration stayed.

02:55:05.840 - 02:55:22.440

The most I would have stayed would have been four years, and that was, kind of, the understanding at the beginning. At my level almost nobody would get asked to stay over . One of the nice things I liked in the engineering world .

02:55:22.440 - 02:55:44.880

I was in research and development—highly nonpolitical; the Pentagon was highly nonpolitical in those days, believe it or not. Particularly under Mel Laird ; Mel kept the politics away from the Pentagon. You did your job for the military and for national security.

02:55:48.280 - 02:56:05.710

Occasionally, somebody might try to put a little pressure on you from outside the Pentagon—from the Congress or the public or... But within the Pentagon, it was really nonpolitical. We tried to do the best job we could do, and I was with a very capable group of

02:56:05.710 - 02:56:24.980

people, very hard working, honorable folks—a great place to work. It was a bad place to work in sense there’s a war going on, and my office window looked out on Arlington Cemetery, and every morning I’d look out and they’d be digging new graves out there.

02:56:25.060 - 02:57:03.120

When you flew out on a military aircraft out of Andrews Air Force Base, they’d be bringing in medevacs for soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines to go to Walter Reed or Bethesda, or what have you. So it was the real world. There were demonstrations still going on. Typically, a demonstration would involve anywhere from three to ten people and about

02:57:03.120 - 02:57:25.160

twenty newspapers and television cameras. They were all peaceful; just people who didn’t agree. EVANS: So this job you are... at one point you were undersecretary for the Army, was it then your term ended or

02:57:25.160 - 02:57:49.720

Nixon resigned and that’s when your job, kind of... you start to transition out of the Pentagon? AUGUSTINE: Backing up just a little bit, I had been assistant secretary for probably two years. The person who was the undersecretary at the time was having problems— management

02:57:49.720 - 02:58:15.560

problems, frankly—and he left. The Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Defense asked if I would become the Undersecretary of the Army, which cuts across everything, it's the number two civilian in the Army, and when the Secretary’s away, you act as the secretary.

02:58:15.670 - 02:58:36.000

It’s a role that I would never...I’m an engineer. I did a little management in my life. I was vice president at LTV. It was an enormous responsibility. Anyway, I went to the confirmation hearing and was confirmed.

02:58:36.730 - 02:59:13.600

So now, I had, kind of, an interesting situation. Right after the Secretary of the Army left to take a position working directly for—I’m a little ahead here—but the Secretary left to take a position working for President Ford, and so I became the Acting Secretary of the Army.

02:59:13.840 - 02:59:32.800

At this point, I’m Acting Secretary of the Army, I’m Undersecretary of the Army, and they hadn't replaced me as Assistant Secretary yet...for Research and Development. The good news was that we made decisions very quickly! Instead of coordinating through three levels, you went to have one meeting and boom,

02:59:32.800 - 03:00:06.960

the decision was made. You just hoped you got it right. I served as Undersecretary for a few years, and then the Nixon troubles blew up. I hope I’m getting my sequence here right. Anyway, I remember standing at the window watching Nixon’s helicopter leave when he

03:00:06.960 - 03:00:26.440

resigned. The Pentagon basically stayed out of that. I give Mel Laird the credit for that. The impact we got was we got a memo saying “the new chain of command is..." It was no longer Nixon; it was now Ford.

03:00:30.310 - 03:00:46.960

At least from where I was sitting, which was a fairly high level at that point in time, life went on every day. I guess the military is used to losing people for one reason or another, and “the next man up”...Pentagon continued to do its job.

03:00:48.350 - 03:01:05.800

The following day, after Nixon left, were all called to a meeting in the East Room at the White House. Now President Ford gathered the presidential appointees which at that time there were quite a few, but nowhere near the number there are today—not

03:01:05.800 - 03:01:31.440

even close— President Ford said that he would like “most” of us to stay on and for us to not to bail out on him—please stay. I had no reason to [leave], as far as I was concerned, my job hadn’t changed. So I continued on for a while as Acting Secretary.

03:01:33.130 - 03:01:55.600

Then as Undersecretary for the rest of my term. Then the four years came up, and President Ford’s term came to an end. By now, I was planning to leave anyway. Finding a job—leaving from there if you’re an engineer and work in aerospace—you’re an aeronautical

03:01:55.600 - 03:02:13.040

engineer—most anything you’re going to do is going to have to do with the Pentagon. So I had to be extremely careful with what I did in the way of a job and so on. So I, of course, got the general counsel, and said I’m thinking of leaving and so on; I’m talking to these three companies, or whatever it was.

03:02:16.200 - 03:02:41.650

One company that was not on my list was Martin Marietta. I was decided on the company I wanted to go to work for. I was in a meeting in my office. I get a telephone call from the CEO of Martin Marietta, “We understand you’re thinking of leaving, and you haven’t talked to

03:02:41.670 - 03:03:01.000

us.” I said, “No, I’ve worked with your company some, and I think I’ve got a conflict of interest. I couldn't do that.” He said, “Well, I don’t think that’s true, but if that’s the way it is, okay.” So I went back to the meeting I was having.

03:03:01.000 - 03:03:16.040

Which— the Defense Department’s General Counsel happened to be at the meeting, which is a bit uncommon. After the meeting, he came back to me. He said “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. Maybe you don’t want to work for that company, but you can work for them.

03:03:16.040 - 03:03:33.000

You just can’t work on anything that has anything to do with your job here in the Pentagon.” I said, “Oh really?” Anyway, I guess I called the CEO of this company back, and said I was going to take another job tomorrow, but I’m told I can talk.

03:03:33.420 - 03:03:49.360

The understanding is that for a few years—or permanently—I have nothing to do with anything I worked on in the Pentagon. That may make you not be interested in me. Secondly, just my own criteria, I would not want to have to do anything on behalf of

03:03:49.360 - 03:04:03.790

the company—have any contact with the government for two years. He said, “No problem.” Anyway, I wound up going to work for that company totally by chance once again. Not something I...the company I knew fairly well and it

03:04:03.810 - 03:04:19.080

honored those conditions that the government and I imposed; There was never a problem. One of the advantages of that company was that I didn’t have to move the family. I didn’t have to move our house.

03:04:19.340 - 03:04:36.800

I could stay in the house that we lived in. They had just moved their headquarters to Washington, so it was ideal for the kids; they were at the age now where you didn’t like to move them from school. That was it.

03:04:39.680 - 03:04:57.440

The Army had a very hard time developing new systems at that time; they would start something, get halfway through, it would develop a problem, which all these systems do, then somebody would come in with an idea for a new system that didn’t have any problems.

03:04:57.440 - 03:05:13.160

They’d cancel the one that was half-done, and start on the new one. It was a period of not producing anything—like a twenty-year period, twenty-five-year. Just before I got there—credit the person before me—the Army had picked five systems that

03:05:13.160 - 03:05:31.400

really mattered to the future, and those are the ones we were going to make work. They were sort of the key to the Army in the future. So, kind of my role...they all had problems, incidentally, in their development phase.

03:05:33.620 - 03:05:54.000

But my commitment to myself was unless something was really, really wrong, my role there was going to be to try to get these things through the system and make them work. Most of these things—would take years to develop and, even though we ran into problems, I tried to stick with it to be sure that we worked our way through the

03:05:54.000 - 03:06:12.000

problems. I’m very proud that all five systems went in the inventory, and all five systems are really the main systems the Army is fighting with still today. It’s time to get a new five systems, but our Army today fights with these same systems.

03:06:15.630 - 03:06:25.760

EVANS: That’s incredible. So this is still... the systems were then developed in the seventies and are still employable? AUGUSTINE: They've all been upgraded a lot.

03:06:26.480 - 03:06:46.400

I suppose you probably would hardly recognize them, the aircraft all have new engines and they’ve got new electronics and so on. But they are the same name. There was a tank, a fighting vehicle , an air defense missile, and two helicopters,

03:06:46.400 - 03:07:03.580

and they’re all out there today—main line. And as I say, they’re all systems that had troubles. I can remember one morning—a Saturday morning— about five o’clock. I’d been asleep but the phone rings and it’s Jim Schlesinger and he says, “When are

03:07:03.580 - 03:07:18.040

you going to cancel that— It was called SAM-D, air defense missile. Turns out it’s the Patriot that they use today. And I was half asleep.

03:07:18.850 - 03:07:36.160

I said to Jim, “I’ve only been here a short time. Give me sixty days; I’ll dig into it, see if it’s got a problem and if we can put it back on track. If not, we’ll cancel.” So I took sixty days and the group I worked with— we really scrubbed it.

03:07:36.160 - 03:08:04.920

We put it on a different track, and it’s turned out to be a great success. And was a major factor, actually, in the outcome of the Mideast war a few years later after that. The Patriot really is very successful system and is, I guess, today about to be deployed to Japan against ballistic missiles. It was a successful tour, from my standpoint.

03:08:07.670 - 03:08:28.840

EVANS: I’m wondering, as you read, kind of, science policy history textbooks, there’s often this discussion of Nixon that has his disdain for scientists and one point you know kicking out all members of PSAC before his second term. When you were in the...

03:08:28.840 - 03:08:45.680

were you in the Pentagon, did you have... you said that the Pentagon maintained its, kind of, independence and apolitical status. Was there... obviously there was pressure from the White House on various issues, I guess, a very

03:08:45.680 - 03:09:06.640

general question, but were there instances, one where you interacted with these members of PSAC, or two with Nixon himself in terms of these battles over weaponry and political agenda surrounding those during those times? AUGUSTINE: I had very, very little interaction with Nixon.

03:09:06.640 - 03:09:35.480

He was a couple levels above me, but I did interact with PSAC quite a bit in those years. The Pentagon really was very apolitical. I give Mel Laird a lot of credit for that. During Watergate, Mel basically told us, “If somebody calls you and

03:09:35.480 - 03:09:48.160

says ‘the White House wants...' you tell them the White House is a building, and buildings don’t want. And if the president wants something, have him call me; but you stay out of all this." So he really kept us all

03:09:48.600 - 03:10:02.000

totally insulated from...The only thing I knew about Watergate was what I read in the newspapers. To his great credit... frankly, today the military is trying to take that stand too. Difficult situation.

03:10:02.700 - 03:10:29.600

But putting that aside, the PSAC—President’s Science Advisory Committee—I first started working with while I was working for McNamara and Laird, way back in the first tour I had at the Pentagon. Candidly, the PSAC was difficult to work with.

03:10:35.930 - 03:10:52.970

To be very candidly they were deemed by many of the people I worked with as being somewhat arrogant. And would show up and tear apart everything we were doing. I never really associated it with the time, it may have been their stance on the war, or not

03:10:54.080 - 03:11:14.080

but the issues we dealt with were purely technical and they were— candidly—rather demeaning to the civil servants. I had a couple squabbles with the PSAC myself, and I take pride in both cases I turned out to be right.

03:11:14.080 - 03:11:40.760

It took years to prove that. But I took a considerable beating. But they were were very senior scientists, mostly scientists, highly respected in their fields, who'd agreed to do this... In early years, I dealt with them in my first tour of the Pentagon, as I say

03:11:40.760 - 03:11:57.880

it was somewhat difficult. The second tour I was in, it was less difficult, for some reason. I dealt a lot there with the Defense Science Board a lot throughout my career. Which was, I think, terrific, made a major contribution.

03:11:57.960 - 03:12:16.920

I have to disclose I was once chairman of the Defense Science Board, so I’ve confessed to that! But it was very effective. The PSAC less so; it became more a matter of critiquing what was done and not always in a very constructive manner.

03:12:17.320 - 03:12:41.040

As you alluded to, Nixon finally got fed up and said I don’t need that kind of advice. Also, I think one of the things that bothered Nixon—and I don’t know this firsthand— but members of the PSAC would publicly criticize what he was doing. They certainly had a

03:12:41.040 - 03:12:57.630

right to do that; but then the issue came up were they using information gathered by virtue of their serving on the PSAC to publicly criticize him. On that, I would say, no, they didn’t. But, while they had a right, I think,

03:12:58.710 - 03:13:18.440

I’m not a lawyer, but I think, legally, they had a right to serve and still to publicly criticize. I'm sure they did, because you can go vote against the president. But...It’s awkward. It’s kind of a conflict of interest, and I do think that if you take on a position

03:13:18.440 - 03:13:33.600

that you’re going to advise somebody—this is a personal view—and you don’t agree with what that person is doing, you should argue like the dickens in favor of what you think is right. If you’re overruled, then the other person is the boss, not you; you back them up;

03:13:33.920 - 03:13:50.200

unless it’s an ethical issue, in which case you resign. You’ve always got the option to resign. And so that’s my personal view how you handle a situation like that. And whatever the case was, it got so bitter between the president and

03:13:52.460 - 03:14:07.920

the PSAC that the PSAC ceased to exist. I don’t recall for how long, but it was a few years before it was restarted. EVANS: Yeah, that’s, that’s correct. I’m wondering if you read...

03:14:07.920 - 03:14:25.160

and there’s, kind of, been... you had mentioned the Defense Science Board and I think I want to get back to that too because I was curious about your experience there. But also in terms of advisory committees, another board that

03:14:25.160 - 03:14:39.080

comes up is JASON, were you... did you work with them as your time... your first tour in the Pentagon or the second tour? Were... and what was your experience working with them as opposed to say PSAC where you had

03:14:39.080 - 03:14:59.400

more trying times with... AUGUSTINE: I worked with JASON a modest amount, and it was a very constructive relationship. They didn’t always agree with us; often they were right and told us so. And once again, it was principally on highly technical matters, but of course

03:14:59.400 - 03:15:17.260

that all spills over. It’s hard to draw a line at some point, but dealt with JASON, dealt a lot with the Defense Science Board. The Defense Science Board was quite different from PSAC.

03:15:18.760 - 03:15:32.720

The Defense Science Board had an office in the Pentagon, not far from the Secretary’s office. The Secretary took a personal interest in the Defense Science Board, and what it did, and what it had to say. It was very available.

03:15:33.330 - 03:15:55.080

The head of the Defense Science Board essentially reported to the Secretary of Defense. The chairman of the Defense Science Board, which as I say, I was for a period—this was after I left the Pentagon— has an office, literally their own office in the Pentagon, so

03:15:55.590 - 03:16:16.500

they spend Saturdays, Sundays, or evenings there. They have another job, generally, so they don’t show up during the day. You have your own staff. The Defense Science Board has members pretty similar to PSAC, I think, in terms of

03:16:17.450 - 03:16:43.640

career accomplishments and scientific backgrounds and so on. When I was chairman, at one point, one administration, proposed two or three people, who were obviously being proposed for membership in the Defense Science Board for political reasons. This was handled by the staff, not by the President or anybody like that.

03:16:43.930 - 03:16:59.560

I remember going and saying, “If you want to see the whole Defense Science Board resign, push those three people.” And so it ended. That was the only time I ever felt there was something that was inappropriate that was put to bed overnight.

03:17:00.640 - 03:17:19.400

The Defense Science Board worked on problems across the defense spectrum. We tried not to do things that were just Army or just Air Force or just Navy, but, kind of cut across. We often had maybe four or five, six projects at one time that people worked

03:17:19.400 - 03:17:40.880

very hard on. We were able to gather a really talented group of people —committed people, independent—at no cost to the government other than the cost of the office and our travel expenses. I think the Defense Science Board made a significant contribution.

03:17:40.880 - 03:17:54.880

I think the same about JASON. And PCAST... Probably did as well—did I say that right?—PSAC I'm talking about... I want to distinguish between PSAC and PCAST.

03:17:57.160 - 03:18:18.720

PSAC certainly had the talent somehow the relationship never developed, from what I could see, but I was a couple levels down and probably didn’t have the perspective that many people would have had, or many people would have had. EVANS: That’s really interesting and helpful, and I want to return, I guess

03:18:18.720 - 03:18:37.330

later, back to your... I guess maybe in the next interview you talk a bit more about PCAST and your work on the Defense Science Board. But I also want to be conscious of time because we’re about fifteen minutes out.

03:18:37.380 - 03:18:46.640

AUGUSTINE: I think we’re both near the end of it. I need a few minutes to get ready. Maybe if you want to wrap up in five minutes here that’d be good. EVANS: Yeah, sure.

03:18:46.640 - 03:19:09.480

I think, I think we’re at a decent stopping place. I think if there’s comments you want to add about your experience as Undersecretary of the Army and Acting Secretary, then we can end on that, if you’d like. AUGUSTINE: Yeah, that probably would be a good topic.

03:19:12.170 - 03:19:31.960

As Undersecretary, you basically have the same responsibilities as Secretary, and I’ve never been in favor of having deputies or “unders.” It seems duplicative to me, and it confuses people who is the boss and who could say okay.

03:19:34.290 - 03:20:06.240

But in this case with Bo Callaway, I had a relationship. Bo had been a congressman, he ran Callaway Gardens, came from a very admired family in Atlanta, and Bo knew how the system—the political system—worked, which I didn’t. I was learning, fast, but I had kind of a business, engineering background

03:20:07.350 - 03:20:22.170

and parts of the Army were business and engineering, like the finance part and logistics and research and development. Then there was legislative affairs and public affairs and recruiting and some really major...

03:20:22.280 - 03:20:43.280

and Bo basically said, “We’ll have an arrangement that you do the business and engineering part; I’ll do the...” Obviously, he’s the boss and in the end he gets the say. He was such a person—such high integrity—there was never an issue us. We didn’t agree on everything, but he’d hear me out, no problem.

03:20:43.280 - 03:20:56.960

If we didn’t agree, I mean, these were difficult issues, and it wasn’t obvious what was right. It was fabulous working relationship. As I said, I’ve had great bosses in my life, and he was one of the best.

03:20:58.260 - 03:21:21.520

As a pair, it worked pretty well, and the Army knew that on certain areas if I said it’s okay to do that, then it was okay. I kept Bo informed, obviously, what I was up to, but I had my own little piece to work. When I became Secretary—I was only Acting Secretary for maybe three months or something like that.

03:21:22.120 - 03:21:45.990

In that role I became much more involved in like the volunteer force. The Volunteer Army was basically created at that time. I give Bo an awful lot of credit for the volunteer force. When people say what's the difference in the public’s attitude toward

03:21:46.010 - 03:22:08.040

the military today and toward then I was looking the other day, the military has just about the highest rating by the public in terms of confidence—public confidence, today. You see that in airports, how people are treated, where it was just the

03:22:08.040 - 03:22:22.720

opposite in the sixties; yet the role of military has not changed; it’s identical. So, what happened? Well, I think one thing that happened was the Volunteer Army. You had people in the Army that wanted to be in the Army; you didn’t have people in

03:22:22.720 - 03:22:33.600

the Army didn’t want to be in the Army. And the Army has done... the military has done a pretty good job of staying out of politics. So you have a totally

03:22:33.600 - 03:22:59.960

different environment today than was the case at that time. It was much harder then. Much easier today. The Vietnam War basically ground down by the time I left my second tour. It’s a strange world...

03:23:02.280 - 03:23:26.280

I have a very dear friend who runs a major corporation in Hanoi. He’s Vietnamese, was in North Vietnam during the war, finest person you’d ever hope to meet, and it’s kind of true around the world. I’ve traveled to 129 countries from the North Pole to the South Pole, literally.

03:23:27.060 - 03:23:48.800

And it’s rare you meet somebody you don’t like and can’t get along with. Yet, as countries, we just can’t seem to do it, and it’s a mystery to me; it’s a tragedy, and the amount of effort that goes into building military rockets, that could have gone into building space rockets, or doing other things

03:23:51.030 - 03:24:12.400

As individuals in this world, that I’d have a friend from Hanoi—a good friend—would have been unthinkable to me at that time. Individually, we can get along; collectively, we’re, sorry, lost. That’s probably the place to leave the discussion.

03:24:12.630 - 03:24:29.080

EVANS: No, I know it’s really... it really is, yeah, like you said, a strange world that way where it's... You know, yeah, we can talk offline, but it the same way that it’s been really affecting for me—so many of my friends through graduate school were Chinese.

03:24:29.330 - 03:24:42.920

AUGUSTINE: Yeah. EVANS: It’s hard to see them villainized in some sense, and that is... so people we can be best friends. AUGUSTINE: I think back—I don’t want to run over our time here—on my mother’s one

03:24:42.920 - 03:25:00.000

hundredth birthday. One of my friends sent her one hundred long-stemmed red roses—giant. You can’t believe what one hundred long-stemmed red roses would cost. And he's a friend from Saudi Arabia.

03:25:00.400 - 03:25:24.280

Another dear friend of mine from Israel— Israeli general—a dear friend, sent her a certificate that he had had one hundred trees planted in Israel in her name. So my mom—a hundred years old—she said, “Who are these people?” I said, “Oh, they’re friends of

03:25:24.280 - 03:25:45.560

mine.” She said, “Are they good friends of yours?” I said, “Very good friends.” “Do they live near each other?” “Well, actually, they sort of do.” She said, “Oh, are they friends?” I said, “No, I don’t think so.” I tried to explain to a one-hundred-year-old woman something that was irrational and try to defend it.

03:25:47.060 - 03:25:59.680

It’s a hard task. I guess, as you get older in life, you get wiser. Maybe, I don’t know. Good place to stop.

03:25:59.910 - 03:26:12.190

EVANS: Yeah, good place to stop. I’m...really it was very interesting to talk. That reminds that I need to go find my old box car, my Boy—my Cub Scout box car. I think I still have it somewhere and...

03:26:12.220 - 03:26:18.560

AUGUSTINE: Did you win? EVANS: Excuse me? AUGUSTINE: Did you win? EVANS: I don’t think I had any jet fuel lubricant.

03:26:20.770 - 03:26:31.250

And it reminded me too my... there’s a neighbor down the street, his dad was a NASA engineer and he always won. And so now... AUGUSTINE: That often happens.

03:26:33.280 - 03:26:45.640

EVANS: Well, it was really wonderful to talk to you, Norm, and I look forward to our next session. I think it’s next week. AUGUSTINE: Well, hey, it’s good to talk to you. And I think our other project’s coming together here now, so...

03:26:47.730 - 03:26:56.080

EVANS: I think it is. I think we finally have a date, and the report will be published. AUGUSTINE: That’s great to hear. Well, you take care, be safe.

03:26:56.470 - 03:26:59.720

EVANS: You too, Norm. Thank you so much. AUGUSTINE: Thank you. EVANS: Take care.

03:27:19.420 - 03:27:36.560

EVANS: Okay, great. So last time, if I recall correctly, we were...we, kind of, came to a natural stopping point where you were transitioning out of your post in the Army. So I think during that time, I’m sure that you were getting lots of offers to go back

03:27:36.560 - 03:27:57.480

into the private sector. But you wound up at Martin Marietta, and so I was wondering maybe you could walk us through what you were looking for in your next position, why Martin Marietta was so attractive to you, and, kind of, your experience transitioning out of the

03:27:57.480 - 03:28:22.550

Pentagon back into the private sector. AUGUSTINE: Okay, all good questions. As I recall, I mentioned the circumstances why I left the Pentagon. It was a transition to a new administration, the election had not yet

03:28:22.550 - 03:28:40.920

occurred so we didn’t know what the new administration would be. I clearly viewed my career as being in industry, not in government tours of government were, kind of, a public service. So I had told them win, lose, or draw in the election I was—wanted to leave.

03:28:41.830 - 03:29:14.740

So, I had...actually within one day of accepting a job with another firm than Martin Marietta. Then, as I described, I wound up going to work with Martin Marietta because of a phone call I got one afternoon before I was going to take the other job! Interestingly, the other company was Fairchild Aircraft, which has gone nowhere

03:29:14.740 - 03:29:34.320

but straight down and Martin Marietta has gone straight up. So, once again, I made a lucky decision. I had no way of knowing that that was what was going to happen. I left the government on one day and went to work the next day at Martin Marietta.

03:29:35.080 - 03:29:59.120

We were out of money again. I’d spent so much of my career at that time in the Pentagon— or, in government, so my expenses were generally exceeding the income. For example, the government said they would pay my way to move the family back to Washington,

03:29:59.120 - 03:30:15.640

when we got there they said they had made an administrative error: they couldn’t do that. So I remember it cost me, I think it was seven, eight months of pay just to move my family back to Washington. So, anyway, I went right to work the next day at Martin Marietta.

03:30:16.170 - 03:30:38.840

The reason I went there was I wanted to work someplace where, it had to be in aerospace, where I would not be placed in a position of conflict of interest with my prior government job. And I knew the people at Martin Marietta quite well, and I considered them to be people of

03:30:38.840 - 03:31:00.960

integrity. When I told them I couldn’t have any contact on any project I had been involved in the government, and that, personally, beyond what the government requires, for a couple of years, I didn’t want to have any contact with the government on behalf of Martin Marietta. And if they wanted to hire me under those

03:31:00.960 - 03:31:21.480

circumstances. They said, “We’ll give you a job that’s totally focused internally.” So I said, “That’s great. What’s the job?” The job was to be... I forgot the title—but it was basically vice president

03:31:21.480 - 03:31:46.330

of operations, which meant that I would oversee engineering within the corporation, oversee our capital facilities, our capital assets, . I would be dealing with the various divisions of the company rather than with the government, which suited me perfectly, and

03:31:46.330 - 03:32:05.400

it worked out really well because I learned a lot about the company. I remember you said "How was it different?" The first night home from work... I had been working, of course, in the government where the round-off error was

03:32:10.300 - 03:32:30.520

Maybe ten million dollars or something like that. I got home and my wife said "Well, what did you do today?" And I got thinking and I said "You know, I spent the whole day saving the company $40,000." Which—you've got to look at as your new role, that's just as important as the ten million were.

03:32:30.960 - 03:32:58.590

In the previous role. Or more important, maybe. So, I got back doing...I was closer to technical work, which I like, being an engineer The other factor that was very important, wasn't a decider, but was close to, that was the headquarters of both these two companies that I was considering at the very end

03:32:59.160 - 03:33:17.320

were within seven or eight miles of our home here. We wouldn't have to move again. And our children were at the point that...our previous moves were when they were very young And I think I mentioned their focus was on family, so moving as long as the family went wasn't a big deal

03:33:17.320 - 03:33:36.120

but that was no longer the case. So we wanted to be in this area where we now are. And that worked out with either of the two, so that was good. CARUSO: Yeah, and according to my records, the position was vice president of

03:33:36.120 - 03:34:00.600

technical operations. AUGUSTINE: That was it. Anyway, that’s, kind of, the answer to that question, I think. EVANS: Was there...so there was a...so it looks like...maybe first before we jump

03:34:00.600 - 03:34:24.400

into your time in the...So this was 1977 that you joined with Martin Marietta. Could you maybe describe some of the projects you were working on and, kind of, the job as you remember it, and whether or not you kind of...it fit with what you’re looking for moving back into the private sector?

03:34:25.420 - 03:34:52.720

AUGUSTINE: Yes, it fit very much and...the company, of course, had a broad variety of projects and I tended to deal a lot with the Air Force and Navy projects as opposed to the Army projects because I’d come from the position with the Army. There were a number of classified space programs that I was involved

03:34:52.720 - 03:35:15.240

in— the Titan launch vehicle. We were just building the new Titan IV, which was a gargantuan launch vehicle at the time—for its day. The Space Shuttle was just getting going as I recall and we—

03:35:15.240 - 03:35:43.880

yeah, it was, because we were building the giant external tank for the space shuttle at one of the plants in Louisiana. We were building a bunch of fire control systems and electronics for the Air Force, building the launch system for the Navy’s Aegis Surface-to-Air Missile, we were

03:35:43.880 - 03:36:14.600

building parts for some of the new commercial engines for commercial jets. We were building a ramjet—actually called a scramjet—that at the time was quite unique, scramjet sort of went out of favor for thirty years and now they’re

03:36:14.600 - 03:36:38.960

very much back in favor. China and Russia are flying them and we’re about to in this country. So it was, kind of, a variety of things from systems at sea to systems in the air to space, but it was very technically oriented...

03:36:43.570 - 03:37:08.160

that includes, obviously, managing financial matters, schedules, and so on. But it was an engineering job CARUSO: So one thing that I’m curious to know a little bit more about. Were...was your company responsible for designing the parts or were you also

03:37:08.160 - 03:37:33.040

building the parts yourself, that you had plants and you were operating the plants where the devices were physically made? AUGUSTINE: The company was basically a systems company that built systems that you put in the hands of the user. So they built air-defense missiles, space launch vehicles, spacecraft.

03:37:33.530 - 03:37:54.240

They had, just when I got there, a little before, landed the first two soft landers on Mars. Very successful. They mostly built systems, but then there were things, for example, the launch system for Aegis was a major component or subsystem of Aegis.

03:37:55.060 - 03:38:14.960

The aerospace industry kind of breaks into two pieces—those who build major systems and then those who build parts of systems then subcontract to the major system suppliers. But some of the major system suppliers, for historical reasons or competitive reasons

03:38:14.960 - 03:38:36.760

or whatever, also built some subsystems too and sold them to other suppliers. One of the very interesting things about the aerospace industry that I have found to not be true of the other industries I’ve been associated with was that the leadership of the aerospace industry were all friends.

03:38:36.870 - 03:38:57.880

We all knew each other well outside as in the business world. Including in the business world. One reason for that was that we all had contracts with each other. At one point, Boeing was our biggest subcontractor, and we were Boeing’s biggest

03:38:57.880 - 03:39:24.640

subcontractor. That has a great policing effect, because when people are looking for other companies to team with, they know who was honorable when they were on your team—and who was not—and so your reputation counted for a lot because it followed you around. I think another thing, the companies were almost

03:39:24.640 - 03:39:45.280

all run by engineers in those days and also, we were doing stuff that was exciting at the leading edge of engineering technology...so the industry was extremely competitive in spite of what a lot of people might want to have one believe.

03:39:47.060 - 03:40:16.000

There are a couple reasons for the competitiveness. One is if you were, for example—as we became Lockheed-Martin—in the military fighter aircraft business, a new fighter only came out maybe every fifteen, twenty years or more. And the contracts were huge, but there was only one winner.

03:40:16.720 - 03:40:46.040

If you won it, you were in great shape for twenty years; if you lost it— for example, when we competed with McDonnell Douglas... no, that was for the Navy-Air Force Vertical Take-off fighter combat aircraft. When we bid with McDonnell Douglas and we won,

03:40:46.840 - 03:41:07.610

McDonnell Douglas was out of business—a couple months later, as big a company as it was. So the competition was a mess. But somehow the people in the industry, and —as I say—it wasn’t true in most other industries I’ve run around. We're friends, we're very competitive.

03:41:08.360 - 03:41:27.440

I know when we would beat McDonnell Douglas, the first person who called me to congratulate would be Sandy McDonnell. Sandy and I had gone to the same school, we were both presidents of the Boy Scouts, and so on. It made it a very pleasant industry to work with in that regard.

03:41:29.950 - 03:41:55.640

I remember visiting the headquarters of one of the major grocery and commercial products firms. When you went in the headquarters of most companies—we didn’t do this, but a lot did— You have a picture of the CEO and the chairman on the wall. When we went their they had pictures of their competitor’s CEO and chairman on the wall!

03:41:56.390 - 03:42:15.120

Because, they want to know, "these are the guys we got to get!" It just led to an interesting situation, but we were basically in the prime business... and that had important consequences for us later on. We can come to it.

03:42:16.640 - 03:42:38.760

CARUSO: One of the things I was asking about manufacturing is thinking about the 1970s, developing high tech equipment, spaceflight, military weaponry, things like that. Obviously, specifications are very important, right? If something needs to be a certain number of

03:42:38.760 - 03:42:54.960

millimeters, if it’s not that, something could blow off. You talked about your experience early on in your career where you had something blow off because of something that wasn’t taken into account. I’m also thinking of the conversation that we had briefly

03:42:54.960 - 03:43:21.100

about computers and your slide rule. I’m curious to know in the 1970s, or I was curious to know in the 1970s—late 1970s—before the advent of the personal computer, you know, what was it like manufacturing these devices that needed to be within very tight specifications or

03:43:21.100 - 03:43:33.880

you’d run into some big problems, right? You don’t want a plane falling out of the air because something was a centimeter too big. So that’s where my question is. I...maybe you don’t have much to say about that topic, specifically,

03:43:33.880 - 03:44:00.200

but I just wanted to raise it. AUGUSTINE: Well, the manufacturing came under me in my job there at Martin Marietta. In some ways, it was a lot different from today; in other ways, it was not. At that time, many of the materials we use today were just pioneering; alloys of

03:44:00.200 - 03:44:18.280

aluminum were just being introduced, by and large. We’d used aluminum for a long time, but some of the special alloys... There was, of course, no such thing as additive manufacturing. We couldn’t even have imagined such a thing—"printing parts"—

03:44:20.270 - 03:44:44.540

And parts that you can print today—I’ve got some here on my desk; I’ve got...we never could have...that would have cost us a zillion dollars to make. Well, that was printed, no big deal. The idea that...you were missing a wrench on the space station, you can transmit through a

03:44:44.560 - 03:45:03.000

through electronic waves to the space station, to a machine that would build the wrench on the space station. In other words, you could electronically transmit a wrench, in essence, through additive manufacturing. That was revolutionary.

03:45:03.000 - 03:45:22.000

As you say, we weren’t equipped to deal with some of the tolerances, particularly high temperatures. I remember on the ramjet we were building, the inlet from the heat—the pressures—would swell significantly, and its dimensions would change. would change the aerodynamics.

03:45:22.490 - 03:45:58.800

So you were essentially flying something that moved depending on the temperature. The old SR-71, Mach 3.2 —the fastest manned aircraft. That was a long time ago, but it swelled up so much, expanded so much from the heating when it flew, that it was designed so that it would be at the proper configuration when it was really hot.

03:45:59.460 - 03:46:20.800

When you landed it, brought it into a hangar where it was cooler, it would shrink. And so it would leak fuel and oil. So when you put these huge airplanes in a hangar, you had to put a giant cooking dish under them because they dripped the whole time.

03:46:20.960 - 03:46:38.480

When you walk in the hangar and see these airplanes dripping fuel I mean, once again, you couldn’t imagine that today. That was done back in slide rule days to get those tolerances, those calculations, I marvel at what they did.

03:46:42.320 - 03:47:18.480

Manufacturing, of course, is much more automated today. Printed circuits by then were in existence, but orders of magnitude larger line widths and so on that we deal with today. I forgot, but I think that today you could put about a million times more circuit

03:47:18.480 - 03:47:48.240

elements on a chip than we could back in those days. The first item like a chip that I worked on had twenty-four elements on it; whereas today it would have millions. We still had analog computers in those days— believe it or not—where you ran

03:47:48.240 - 03:48:11.080

wires and used plugs and stuff. The early digital computers were available at that time but fairly primitive. Of course, the first digital computer was in the late 1940s and, as I recall, had eighteen thousand vacuum tubes,

03:48:12.010 - 03:48:37.080

which today would be a minor piece of a chip the size of your fingernail. Just before the period we’re talking about now... When you put chips and some of these things, they were so sensitive, on something that vibrated a lot like a rocket, I think a solid rocket...

03:48:39.060 - 03:48:59.000

after they were assembled, we put them in a bowl, and then poured plastic in them so that they couldn’t flop around and bang into each other and break wires. The only problem was is if one of the chips failed, someone would take dental equipment and dig the plastic out to

03:48:59.000 - 03:49:21.800

replace the chip that had failed in this cup of chips. So maintenance was a true nightmare. Today, you throw the chip out and put a new one in, because it dropped by six orders of magnitude in cost in the last fifty years. But many requirements were similar to today...

03:49:23.940 - 03:49:46.530

Just cost more, less forgiving, more waste...than we deal with today. CARUSO: When you started that position, it was right at the beginning of the Carter administration, right? 1977? AUGUSTINE: That would be right, I guess.

03:49:46.530 - 03:50:14.080

CARUSO: Okay. And it was just, I think it was 1979 when we had the oil crisis. I’m curious to know if anything about working where you were during the Carter administration or during the oil crisis had an impact on what it was that you were

03:50:14.080 - 03:50:34.890

meant to be doing at the company, right? Having a democratic president, you know, obviously if you’re dealing with military materials, while there is the stockpile of oil meant to make sure that our military and other things keep running, when there’s a crisis and you’re working in an industry

03:50:34.890 - 03:50:56.560

that relies heavily on fossil fuels, I’m wondering if there was any impact on the company that you needed to address or that you needed to think through. AUGUSTINE: Well, to our company—Martin Marietta—it was a very big deal because we were in five different businesses, several of which were enormous energy consumers.

03:50:57.490 - 03:51:15.010

One, were in the cement business, which is notorious for the amount of energy that it requires; we were the rock crushing business—aggregates, it was called. We were in the chemicals business. We were in the aluminum business, which requires lots of energy, and we were in the

03:51:15.010 - 03:51:37.480

aerospace business. So we were the least dependent than the rest of the company on energy. But from a military standpoint, it drove home just how dependent we were on the Middle East. And also how important fracking has been, people don't even realize it.

03:51:37.790 - 03:51:57.560

It’s changed the whole geopolitical equation that we now can do fracking, but we didn’t know how to do that in those days so we were very dependent upon foreign oil. I think —I’ve forgotten how much—I think it was a billion dollars a week we were exporting for fuel in this country.

03:52:05.800 - 03:52:24.200

In terms of the aerospace industry, I wouldn’t say the impact was overwhelming. It was a huge inconvenience to our employees trying to get to work—couldn’t get gas. If you did, you had to stand in line forever—a lot of wasted time.

03:52:26.950 - 03:52:52.160

We were very conscious, of course, trying to help the military train with less fuel. There are some classic stories about that. Between World War I and World War II, there was a ration put on oil for the Navy for financial reasons.

03:52:52.820 - 03:53:11.400

At one point there were six destroyers that were supposed to sail from San Francisco, to San Pedro, I think it was. It was on the West Coast. They were given an extra ration of oil so they could sail at flank speed, which

03:53:11.400 - 03:53:27.150

destroyers hadn’t done in several years because of the fuel consumption. Anyway, it was a foggy day they were going down the West Coast. There’s a point that sticks out from the near Vandenberg Air Force Base called Honda Ridge, I think. Honda Point.

03:53:29.700 - 03:53:49.070

It was foggy; the six destroyers, the one in front was navigating and the other five were following closely behind watching its running lights. The first destroyer went aground, and all five did. It was a lack of training caused by lack of fuel. And this was on people's minds still.

03:53:50.560 - 03:54:08.160

That changed the way the military operated during that period. And, of course, it had a big impact on the economy. In terms of the change of administration—I’m having to think who came when.

03:54:08.760 - 03:54:25.180

I think I've worked for every president, going back... I've met every president I think since Truman I’ve worked for every one in one capacity or another, I think, since Carter. No, who was before Carter?

03:54:30.810 - 03:54:51.400

Well, I go back...I've got my sequence out of place here... I guess I worked for everybody since Johnson in one capacity or another. I just missed Kennedy. For sixteen years, I was on the president’s science advisory board in chunks of four

03:54:51.400 - 03:55:12.600

years for presidents of both parties. And the surprising thing is the best of times and the worst of times were under President Reagan. It was the best of times because defense spending was rising significantly.

03:55:15.500 - 03:55:37.580

The defense industry was the leading edge of technology; that was a place you wanted to be if you’re an engineer. And the reason it was the worst of times is that Cap Weinberger felt that if he was going to get all this money for defense, he had to make clear he was a very good

03:55:37.580 - 03:55:53.760

steward of that money. And so under Cap, who’s a friend, the Defense Department started all these attacks on industry: Lockheed for charging too much for a toilet seat—you may remember that—

03:55:54.280 - 03:56:14.080

Whenever the cartoon showed a picture of Weinberger, he had a toilet seat around his head. They got after General Dynamics for charging too much for a screwdriver. They got after us for charging too much for a roll of tape—six rolls of tape—and we became the villains of the world.

03:56:14.430 - 03:56:34.480

And if you looked into each of these things—I could walk you through the six rolls of tape because I know it by heart—the industry was doing what the rules required. But we really became the villains. Even though times were good financially, they were terrible in terms of our image.

03:56:34.740 - 03:57:05.480

Trying to encourage people that they’d like to work in our industry, other than engineers... Is this where you want to be? CARUSO: Now I know that...So there are two things: I know that you were elected CEO in ’87. You also mentioned that when you when you took up your position, you wanted to

03:57:05.480 - 03:57:25.120

stay away from military things for ethical reasons—right?—you’d just come out of the military. You felt it would not be good for you to be managing things happened to do with military contracts. I’m just curious to know if sometime between when you came on as vice president

03:57:25.120 - 03:57:52.790

of technical operations and when you were elected CEO in 1987 and chairman in ’88 did you start working with military contracts again and if so, in what capacity? AUGUSTINE: In 1982—five years after I left the government, so I was clear of most government restrictions.

03:57:53.400 - 03:58:12.880

I went to work... I was still at Martin Marietta, and I was asked to run our astronautics business, which was located in Denver, Colorado, which of course is where I had grown up and where my parents were living, and I love the mountains.

03:58:13.760 - 03:58:32.480

So, for me, that was like being thrown into the briar patch as Br’er Bear would say. So I went to Denver. And there the business was all with Air Force and NASA, which I had no conflicts with. So I was free.

03:58:36.000 - 03:58:56.920

There was an interesting story there. By now my son was off in college at Texas A&M . My daughter was starting her senior year in high school, and they asked me to go run the plants around the country.

03:58:57.110 - 03:59:14.720

The group—the astronautics group—was headquartered in Denver. It was a tough decision because my daughter was “settled” in school and to pick her up her senior year...she had been given opportunities by several of her

03:59:14.720 - 03:59:34.000

friends’ parents for her to live with them for her senior year, so she didn’t have to move. Or one option was for my wife to stay in Washington and for me to go to Denver for a year and commute on weekends. Or we would all pack up and go. We left the choice up to our daughter.

03:59:34.080 - 03:59:53.320

She chose to pack up and go—all of us—and it worked out great. In fact, she said later it was a plus because the following year, when she went off to college, she was used to moving and making new friends as well as leaving your family two steps rather than the one step.

03:59:53.370 - 04:00:14.350

She was probably being a good sport, but anyway, she felt it was a good thing. So we did that. Anyway, moving...fast forward I commuted during the logistics of buying a house and so on. I came back to Washington on weekends to close down the place here, we get to

04:00:14.350 - 04:00:44.000

Denver, my wife and daughter moving van pulls up in front of our house in Denver, and I get a call from the CEO who is predecessor CEO—Tom Pownall is his name. Tom called and said that our company was the victim—intended victim, important distinction—the intended victim of a hostile takeover attempt by the Bendix

04:00:44.000 - 04:01:07.310

Corporation. Which, in the business world, I always describe it as the equivalent of nuclear war, but without the dignity. Bendix, that morning—I don’t think I told this story, did I?—a lawyer for Bendix shows up at our headquarters here in Bethesda,

04:01:08.530 - 04:01:31.960

with a letter to our board from the chairman of Bendix—CEO of Bendix—saying that they had just bought 5 percent of our stock—at which point they have to confess publicly that they bought 5 percent of somebody’s stock. And they intended to take over out company—buy all of our shares, take it over.

04:01:36.780 - 04:02:01.680

Tom told me that was situation. And the next few days, Bendix managed to acquire 72 percent of our shares of our stock. So they owned us; the Bendix Corporation owned Martin Marietta. And so, my wife says, “Do we tell the moving van to keep on moving, or what do we do?” I

04:02:01.680 - 04:02:24.910

said, “Let’s keep moving.” So we put my daughter in school and moved. This battle went on for—I don’t really remember—three or four months. The...that’s my fax. The story was a grand story that I’ll condense here, but

04:02:25.750 - 04:02:45.760

Bendix literally owned us. And so, none of us—the managment at Martin Marietta—wanted to work for Bendix. First of all, we didn’t admire companies that did hostile takeovers. Secondly, we to work for a systems company, Bendix was a subcontractor, by and large.

04:02:49.120 - 04:03:10.540

So we were either going to get fired or resign, one way or the other. It was clear our time at Martina Marietta was over. Our board gets together with Tom, our CEO, and says, “What’s our strategy? What are we going to do?” And somebody, a brilliant guy on Wall Street, who was

04:03:10.540 - 04:03:22.600

representing us, came up with a strategy that before Bendix could stop us, we would buy Bendix stock! We would buy bendix. I guess you haven’t heard this story.

04:03:23.440 - 04:03:49.000

So, we started buying Bendix stock as fast as we could. So we had just about a majority of Bendix’s stock, and it turned out that a huge chunk of their stock was held by the Bendix employees’ pension fund. We had made such a good offer that the pension fund...

04:03:49.740 - 04:04:21.480

We took it to court, Bendix's pension fund, to sell their employees' shares to us. Anyway, we finally got the majority of Bendix shares and we literally owned each other. We wanted to use their boardroom and they wanted to use our boardroom. We were competing with each other on some things, and it was a strange form of competition

04:04:21.480 - 04:04:37.880

because we wanted to lose. Because if we lost, they won, and we owend them so we got the money. If they won...David, you just disappeared. I don’t know if you’re still with us. CARUSO: I am. I’m just shifting...

04:04:39.000 - 04:04:58.320

AUGUSTINE: But the problem was that Bendix wanted us to win and for them to lose, because they would get the money if we won. And so we’re both trying to lose, and that’s hard to do. As hard as for one of you to win. Anyway, it was on the evening news every night.

04:04:58.320 - 04:05:22.040

It was called the Pac-Man Defense after...in those days, the second video game where these little fish-like creatures swam around and ate each other up. And so we were eating each other up. We finally settled it where we got the Allied Signal Corporation to join with us and buy

04:05:22.040 - 04:05:40.320

up the rest of Bendix’s shares. So, we owned Bendix —almost entirely. The Bendix Corporation ceased to exist, and Bill Agee got fired. We got our independence and life went on.

04:05:40.510 - 04:05:59.520

This is when I first arrived in Denver. At that time the group I was running the biggest profit maker for Martin Marietta, and took on an 82 percent debt to capital—debt to equity, excuse me—debt to equity ratio.

04:06:00.280 - 04:06:25.880

I’m pretty conservative, when it into the thirties, I got worried, but this was eighties. This is the kind of stuff that the guys in Silicon valley do; it’s not Warren Buffett kind of stuff. Anyway, we managed to survive. We got very lucky our stock did really well.

04:06:26.560 - 04:06:47.760

The stock market as a whole went up, we bought ourselves back. The next step in my career... I was in Denver for three years. We had a little barber shop in the plant there so that our employees get their

04:06:47.760 - 04:07:06.440

haircuts and not have to spend their weekends waiting in barbershops. So I’m in the barbershop, which we referred to as “rumor central” because that’s where if you wanted to know what was going on in our plant, that’s where you went! So I always looked forward to getting my hair cut—as much as there was!

04:07:07.990 - 04:07:21.420

I’m in the barbershop one day, visiting with the barber. I said, “So what’s new around here?” I always liked to get the news. He said, “Well, we understand you’re going back to Washington.” I said, “Oh no, the deal was I stay at least

04:07:25.570 - 04:07:48.560

five years, and we’ve only been here three years. That’s not part of the deal, so your rumor is wrong for once.” About a week later, I get a call from the headquarters—the CEO said the board has met and would like to come back and become corporate vice president of the information systems group,

04:07:48.750 - 04:08:06.800

which I knew a little about but not a lot. You know, when you take a paycheck from somebody, you sort of try to do what you can...we packed up and moved, now my daughter's off in college at Duke.

04:08:07.280 - 04:08:21.680

So that my wife and I packed up and flew back to Washington and so I did that job for about six months. It was really interesting. It was very different; of course, information systems just skyrocketing in

04:08:21.680 - 04:08:46.400

the world, and we were writing more code at that time in Martin Marietta than Microsoft was. Anyway, I was in the job for about six months. Let’s see if I get my sequence right here. One day my secretary said that they want you to come in the boardroom; the board is

04:08:46.430 - 04:09:04.100

meeting. So, okay, that happened occasionally. Not a lot. So I go in the boardroom, and everybody in the room stands up and applauds. I look behind me to see who came in the door behind me, and they said, “Congratulations!

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You’ve just been elected CEO.” I frankly had no idea that since my boss was a level above me... I had two bosses actually, guys I really admired and were friends until they both passed away, sadly.

04:09:20.480 - 04:09:39.780

We were dear friends and they said they'd stay and work for me for a while. And that they were going to retire, and so they did. Totally out of the blue, I go home to my wife and say, “Guess who’s the new CEO of Lockheed Martin.” She says, “Who?

04:09:39.780 - 04:10:12.740

‘K’?” I said, “No, me! But thanks for the vote of confidence.” Anyway, that’s the way I got the job, I believe that was ’87, ’86—December of ’86, I think. And then in early ’87—I think it was June maybe or something like that—I became chairman as well as CEO.

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Then—let’s see that would be ’87— then it was in ’89 that the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the defense industry collapsed. I’m kind of rambling. Do you want me to continue in this vein, or is it...?

04:10:36.690 - 04:10:55.940

CARUSO: Well, yeah, I’d love to hear more. I think the only other question I have, and we can return to it later was when you originally went into government, I think you had mentioned that part of the reason you wanted to do so was to get a better understanding of, for example, you know,

04:10:55.940 - 04:11:17.700

how is it that you...like navigating contracts and putting in bids and understanding that process. So it’s not something that we need to discuss now, but I am curious how your time in the military maybe played a role in how you were envisioning things once you became

04:11:18.110 - 04:11:35.910

CEO and stuff like that. So please continue with the story, and if that comes up, just talk about it. AUGUSTINE: Well, I’ll pick that up. When I had become Undersecretary, I assigned myself the task, I made it my

04:11:35.910 - 04:11:56.830

mission the first hundred days to visit every active duty division in the Army. Which meant traveling from Panama to Alaska, from Hawaii to Germany... To try to get a feeling for what life is like out there.

04:11:56.830 - 04:12:18.780

What are the problems they run into? Wherever I went, I always tried to find an occasion to sit on a log somewhere with a bunch of soldiers or climb in a tank with some soldiers and talk them about what life was like, what their equipment was like, and what kind of problems they had.

04:12:22.660 - 04:12:45.500

Very often, there were things that could have easily been solved in industry... because industry wasn't aware of the problem—they had no way of knowing. I’ll give an example; it goes way back before Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin. One of the companies I was working for was building a fighter airplane

04:12:45.500 - 04:13:10.020

used in Vietnam—an attack airplane. When the airplane was hit by anti-aircraft fire, all the control cables and electronics ran down tubes on one side of the airplane, and if it got hit on that side, it knocked everything out.

04:13:10.020 - 04:13:25.020

Well, if you go back to the drawings, the drawings showed half the cables going down one side and a redundant pair going down the other side. So if one side of the airplane took a hit from anti-aircraft fire that didn’t damage the other side.

04:13:25.020 - 04:13:38.900

You could still control the airplane. Well, when they were building the airplane in manufacturing they say, “Dumb engineers. It’s a lot easier to just put all the wires down this one tube and not have to install another tube.” There are a bunch of stories like that.

04:13:38.900 - 04:13:56.490

Almost an identical circumstance had caused the walkways at the Kansas City Hyatt Hotel to collapse during an afternoon tea dance. That many people died in. It was a decision just like that. Well, the people in the engineering department...

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or, in the factory weren’t thinking of what happens if you get hit on one side of the airplane and all of the wires are on that side that matter. But it was just little things like that that I learned as I walked around and talked to people and thought we to find a way to get those messages back to people in

04:14:12.780 - 04:14:33.350

industry because they could do a lot better job if they just knew. Particularly during the Weinberger administration in Defense, this “wall” had been built where the industry were the bad guys and the government guys were dumb guys, or what have you.

04:14:35.460 - 04:14:55.900

I discovered that neither was true—that the people in the government were some of the smartest, most dedicated people I’ve ever worked with...worked in our government. Still do. Some of the finest people in industry care about our country. I just developed an understanding for each other’s problems .

04:14:56.120 - 04:15:20.300

I also understood that in industry, if you’re in the aerospace industry, there’s no asterisk on your listing on the stock market that says, “This is a defense company and so is particularly important.” We had to get our employees from the same place as Intel,

04:15:20.300 - 04:15:36.780

Google, Amazon, you go down the list. We had to compete for the same talent. When we went to the banks or the stock market for equity, we had to sell our story just like any other company or any other business.

04:15:37.280 - 04:15:49.500

We had to make a profit. There was no question about it. And a lot of people in the government, at that time at least, didn’t understand that. It was a valuable experience for me in that regard.

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Just...you know the old saying: walk a mile in the other guy’s moccasins. There’s a lot of truth to it. CARUSO: One thing... So you’d mentioned the fall of the Berlin Wall and the impact that it

04:16:05.980 - 04:16:34.580

had on the defense industry. I also know that you had done some work for NASA—right?—at Martin Marietta. Did the 1986 Challenger disaster have any impact on Martin Marietta? Were any of your parts or designs part of those systems?

04:16:35.960 - 04:16:57.580

AUGUSTINE: Another great question. It had a huge impact. Losing crew and embarrassing the nation and knowing some of the crew personally, you can imagine the impact it would have on you.

04:16:57.950 - 04:17:13.980

One of the things that we—NASA used to do would have astronauts walk through our factories and engineering areas and talk to our employees, not in groups, they walk up to you and talk to you about their family and so on.

04:17:14.450 - 04:17:30.960

I’ll tell you, it brought home to you that we’re not making peanut butter in this plant. When the Challenger—I remember exactly what happened, when it happened. Anyway, what had happened...the initial video, if

04:17:30.960 - 04:17:53.540

you may recall, showed the side of the external fuel tank—this giant fuel tank that I’ve described, which we built at our plant outside of New Orleans in Michoud. We built it for NASA, and I think I mentioned, it was so large if you put it on its side, you could fly the Wright Brothers' flight inside of it—the whole flight—

04:17:53.540 - 04:18:29.300

The airplane and all. And we built it. Those early flights...what number was it? Is it twenty-seven?—but anyway, when Challenger failed, the early videos— the solid rocket motor that we did not build—was attached to our fuel tank. The fuel tank was the structural backbone of the Space Shuttle stack, and the solid

04:18:29.300 - 04:18:48.700

rocket motors were fastened on either side of it. When you look at the video, you can see this flame coming out of the fuel tank—liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen—not good stuff to mix. You can see the flame flying out of our fuel tank—the hole in our fuel tank—

04:18:48.890 - 04:19:07.300

hitting the solid rocket motors and then the whole thing blows up. So, initially, it looked like there was a failure in our fuel tank; somehow it had developed a hole. Well, when we got more data, it turned out the problem was, as you know, was an O-ring

04:19:07.300 - 04:19:25.260

on the solid rocket motor, not on our fuel tank. Actually, the flames had gone from the solid rocket motor, from the seal that had failed between the two elements of the stack and burned a hole through the lithium —at that time was just aluminum—through the

04:19:25.260 - 04:19:44.060

aluminum side of our fuel tank. It got to the oxygen and hydrogen and set off the explosion or added to the explosion. There was that initial period where we thought we caused it and there was some relief when we knew we didn’t cause it.

04:19:44.060 - 04:20:07.580

On the other hand, the loss was immense. The company, and particularly in our space work, we tried to permeate it through the company. We have what we call “mission success,” and honest to goodness mission success was more important to us than profits, jobs, you name it.

04:20:08.940 - 04:20:24.420

We were just so committed. Like, if you get two chances to put two spacecraft on Mars twenty-one days apart, launch from the same launch pad, and you won’t get another chance for a couple of years because the position of Mars and the Earth...you want it right.

04:20:25.460 - 04:20:47.020

Everybody was so committed to get it right. And when you get it right, you usually make a profit too, incidentally, because you don’t have to fix things that blew up. So...a very sad impact, but it had a very positive impact on the future.

04:20:47.740 - 04:21:02.660

Because everybody was checking and double checking. Nobody wanted to be the one who made the mistake, and it was a very sobering experience. CARUSO: Part of the reason I asked was again, I think you mentioned the fall of

04:21:02.660 - 04:21:28.180

the Berlin Wall and the impact that had on the defense industry. I was wondering if you, or if other companies...I mean, you mentioned fact that the aerospace companies were kind of friendly with each other—right?—if that had an impact on the aerospace industry similar to what you then experienced later with the

04:21:28.180 - 04:21:43.980

fall of the Berlin Wall? AUGUSTINE: It did, because you know who you could trust and who you couldn’t. And who you could sit down with. If you and I sit down representing two different companies and start talking about

04:21:43.980 - 04:22:05.530

selling our company—if that word gets out, then all the hostile takeover artists from the financial industry will start attacking your company and try to buy it out from under you. So, you had to have a lot of trust in anybody you talked to about buying or selling your company. Just like if you’re buying or

04:22:05.530 - 04:22:41.900

selling your house, you want to be sure that whoever you’re dealing with is honorable. It was an interesting time up because—backing up for about two years before the Berlin Wall fell—and again, maybe it was my time in the government I became more interested in kind of the big picture. Not just my company, but how did it fit the big picture?

04:22:42.320 - 04:22:58.020

I became convinced times were going to be tough for our industry. That was when the Weinberger/Reagan buildup was at its peak. The reason I became convinced it was going to be very tough was several-fold, multifold.

04:22:58.660 - 04:23:20.740

One reason was that the defense budget had grown so large, and defense needs were getting filled, that there just wasn't a reason to keep going like that—investing was going to have to turn over. Another was that it was clear Russia was getting in financial difficulty and wasn’t

04:23:20.740 - 04:23:32.460

going to be able to spend as much on defense. The idea of the Soviet Union ceasing to exist never even occurred to me. I mean, I would never have even thought of that. But there was enough evidence around that things were going to

04:23:32.460 - 04:23:58.650

be hard for our industry. But that wasn't unusual—we were on kind of a fifteen-year cycle. And so there was reason to expect it. Sometime during this period—I can’t fix the time at this point— I would gather maybe the five people in our company who were most involved in strategic issues,

04:23:58.650 - 04:24:16.650

like what becomes of our company. It would be the chief financial officer, the chief operating officer, myself, the person who ran our mergers and acquisitions business. I'm leaving somebody out...

04:24:16.650 - 04:24:32.540

Anyway, there were five of us, I think, and every Friday afternoon we’d go to my house. And we'd go down in my basement and I had a table down there. And we'd sit around there and discuss what's the future of the industry and how do we fit in this future.

04:24:34.350 - 04:24:54.620

Our company had just been through, of course, the hostile takeover period. To get out of debt, we had to sell three of the five parts of our company to raise cash to buy our shares back. So we were now about a fifth of...

04:24:55.970 - 04:25:15.420

The rocks company—crushed rock, which is a great business, we still owned most of it. Actually, we owned most all of it. But we got rid of chemicals, cement, and aluminum. So now there were just the two elements left.

04:25:16.520 - 04:25:32.420

We would sit there and invite people from Wall Street and futurists and professors to come and sit with us one at a time on a Friday afternoon. You can’t do that kind of thing at the office; there too many disruptions, too

04:25:32.420 - 04:25:48.260

many people hunting for you. And we would talk about the long-term future. Well, then when the Wall fell... I gave a talk during that period of time about how the industry was about to turn over. I remember the audience was almost laughing.

04:25:48.260 - 04:26:02.540

Because things were so good at the time. Anyway, the bottom fell out overnight. And as I mentioned, we lost 40 percent of the employees—about seven hundred thousand people, three-quarters of the companies— in less than five years.

04:26:06.080 - 04:26:34.240

The question became what do we do now. Our strategy was the price of the companies will probably drop severely, which they did. The day before the Berlin Wall, if you wanted to buy a quality aerospace company, it cost—roughly speaking— about a dollar to buy a dollar’s worth of sales in a company; if

04:26:34.240 - 04:26:57.140

it had a dollars of sales, it would cost you a dollars to buy, roughly. Not too long after the Berlin Wall, the price was twenty-five cents on the dollar. So we decided this is when you want to start buying companies. There was one huge assumption behind this, that if it was wrong, you’d bet on the wrong

04:26:57.140 - 04:27:17.940

horse. And that assumption was that defense would come back someday. I’ve always been interested in history. I read a lot of history and biography, and this is kind of sad, but it became fairly clear that as far back as humans trod the earth, people didn’t get along with each other.

04:27:19.910 - 04:27:40.020

It's sad to say... Groups of people particularly. Individuals do pretty well. Groups—particularly nations. And if you look at the history of time, there aren’t a lot of times where there aren’t wars going on somewhere. It was our thought— my conviction, anyway—that the defense industry come back.

04:27:42.570 - 04:28:03.940

Then it was about this time... Did I talk about the Bill Perry meeting in the Pentagon with the leaders of industry that became known as the Last Supper? This is an interesting story.

04:28:04.290 - 04:28:20.810

So it’s right about this time when everything has collapsed and the industry’s strategy, the first strategy, was we'll all get together— there was a new airplane being built about that time. so most everybody in the industry climbed on that airplane and one company would

04:28:20.810 - 04:28:36.140

build the right wing, somebody else the left wing, the vertical tail, the horizontal tail—every company had a piece of that airplane—and they’re all stacking their overhead on it. They’ve all got a CEO, a chief financial officer, a half-full factory, and so the overhead

04:28:36.140 - 04:28:50.980

is going out of sight. And also the cost of the airplane was a nightmare. We weren’t in it—thank goodness. The Defense Department was getting fed up because the cost kept going up— all the

04:28:50.980 - 04:29:12.300

coordination and half-full plants had to be paid for. Anyway, Bill Perry is Secretary of Defense, extremely talented, honorable man— So Bill...no, he was not quite. It was...Les Aspin was secretary.

04:29:12.320 - 04:29:42.940

He had come from being head of the Armed Services Committee for many years. In Wisconsin. So Les is secretary, Bill Perry is deputy secretary, John Deutch is head of research and engineering—whatever it was called then. So Les calls a meeting of the leaders of the top fifteen aerospace companies—not

04:29:42.940 - 04:30:01.460

aerospace—defense companies, because there were shipbuilders there too. One evening he invites us to dinner at the Pentagon in his dining room—no reason given, but anyway when you get invited to dinner by the secretary of defense you’re in the defense business, you probably show

04:30:01.460 - 04:30:15.780

up. We all showed up and all of us wondering why are we here. We had dinner. I happened to be seated next to Les Aspin. I said, “Mr. Secretary, why are we here?

04:30:15.780 - 04:30:29.980

What’s the occasion we’re celebrating?” And he said, “You’ll see when we're going to give you a briefing in the next room.” Said "okay," so we go to the next room after dinner—nice meal—and Bill Perry

04:30:29.980 - 04:30:40.220

gave the briefing. I have a copy of the main chart from that briefing. I made a point of getting it a few days later from the comptroller’s office because I thought it was truly a historical document.

04:30:41.180 - 04:31:02.340

And the briefing, basically Bill put up various charts, but the main chart listed various items of military equipment: submarines, destroyers, battleships, rifles, tanks, mess kits, a list— airplanes, fighter planes, and so on.

04:31:02.580 - 04:31:22.340

The first column was how many companies are now suppliers to the Pentagon of this particular item of equipment. The column next to it is how many we could afford in the future. And you didn’t have to look very long until you saw there were fifteen aerospace

04:31:22.340 - 04:31:41.100

companies, and they needed two or three. I made a particular note that in several areas they only could afford one, which I think is horrible. As a citizen. I think two or three is bad; fifteen strong companies are much better

04:31:41.100 - 04:31:55.260

than two or three strong companies. But that wasn’t the choice. The choice was you could have fifteen weak companies or you could have two or three strong companies.

04:31:55.710 - 04:32:10.780

They’ve made the decision what their choice is, and they’re going with the two or three strong companies. And they said, “The reason we called all of you is that you’re in charge of the industry. And that's where we want to get you—to two or three.

04:32:10.780 - 04:32:27.320

And for submarines there was one, and you go down the list... There are too many of you. We don’t need most of you. And it’s up to you to figure out who goes; the free enterprise system will work.” I

04:32:27.320 - 04:32:49.260

mean, this was very sobering. Most of us were engineers, and Bill is not a guy to joke; I mean, this was serious stuff. By chance, I was seated next to John McDonnell, who was a friend, who was at that time running McDonnell Douglas, and John and I had gone to college together—

04:32:49.260 - 04:33:05.500

same time, we weren't in the same class, at Princeton...always for engineering schools—you probably know— the dean always comes in the first day of freshman year and says, “Look to the person on your left and at the person on your right.

04:33:05.640 - 04:33:20.360

Take a good look, because four years from now, one of you won’t be here.” I’m sure that was going through all of our minds, being engineers. I looked to my left and I was seated on the aisle, so I to turn to John McDonnell and I said, “Too

04:33:20.360 - 04:33:47.500

bad for you.” He smiled because he knew exactly what I was thinking of; he was too. Anyway, the next day—a piece of trivia—a reporter...of course, the reporters were all dying to find out why we were at dinner together at the Pentagon. A reporter asked me, “Why were you there?” On the spur of the moment, I said, “It was

04:33:47.500 - 04:33:58.820

the Last Supper,” and that stuck. To this day they refer to it as "The Last Supper," being the turning point in the industry. The companies had to decide what to do.

04:33:59.770 - 04:34:19.100

By chance, previous to that, Bill Anders, who ran General Dynamics, and I had been friends way back when. Our wives knew each other, and Bill, of course, was an astronaut. He was the first person—among the first three—to circumnavigate the

04:34:19.100 - 04:34:39.620

moon, and very talented guy. Anyway, Bill and I and our wives were having dinner here in Potomac, a little restaurant. I said, “Well, looks like none of us are going to be in business." And he said their strategy was they were going to break up the company and sell it.

04:34:40.460 - 04:34:53.340

I said, “Our strategy is we’re going to try to buy companies, so I hope that there are a lot of people have your point of view!” Fortunately, there were; there were a few buyers and a lot of sellers. So, we bought a lot of companies at twenty-five cents on the dollar.

04:34:53.340 - 04:35:17.700

Toward the end, the price went back up. We combined seventeen companies or major pieces of companies to build Lockheed Martin, including buying most of General Dynamics. We were able to build a company with a capability and we reduced our costs to the

04:35:17.700 - 04:35:33.660

government by billions and billions of dollars. I used to know the numbers; they were audited by the GAO. We would take two or three factories that were a third full and combine them; shut two or three factories and have

04:35:33.660 - 04:35:52.380

one factory that could operate with a critical mass so it was full and efficient. Saving money was easy; the painful part was there were a lot of people we need; they paid the price. They were the ones that suffered. So that was my introduction to the CEOing world.

04:35:54.900 - 04:36:16.180

Then we sold our aggregates business; we spun it off as a private company because it’s a fabulous business—much better than aerospace—you didn’t have government procurement never had a rock blow up that we didn’t mean to blow up! Of course, rock is just a good business.

04:36:16.180 - 04:36:33.300

But it had nothing to do with anything else we did— no value added, so we sold it. With the money we got, we could pay for some of the things we were buying. All during this period from the meetings in our basement until the Berlin Wall fell we were saving money and building up cash.

04:36:33.580 - 04:36:53.140

We referred to it as our powder magazine. So when things did go down—way more than we ever anticipated— we weren’t as smart as we looked...we had a big pile of cash so we could buy companies at 25 cents on the dollar. Anyway, the result was Lockheed Martin and two or three other companies.

04:36:53.140 - 04:37:15.140

Most everybody else went out of business or became part of Lockheed Martin or Boeing. We had bought Northrop Grumman as the eighteenth company. The deal was done, the shareholders had approved it. I had already planned to retire.

04:37:15.890 - 04:37:31.410

So I announced that the deal had been put together for us to purchase Northrop Grumman—the Defense Department had encouraged us to do this kind of thing. Then I retired shortly after that, because I had planned to retire anyways. I had already announced it.

04:37:33.140 - 04:37:46.940

At that point...Am I getting into areas that are too business-like or...? CARUSO: No, no. I was going to just...one point for clarification. When did the Last Supper meeting take place—what year?

04:37:47.080 - 04:38:06.300

Is this late eighties, or is this into the nineties? AUGUSTINE: Let’s see. I became...let’s see the collapse was in '89, if I remember. The Berlin Wall was ’89; then the Soviet Union ceased in ’91, I think.

04:38:07.360 - 04:38:28.780

So, this probably would have been ’93. CARUSO: Because...So one thing that I do want to ask about and we can talk about it later since it did happen a little bit earlier. I know that, you know, there was the Advisory Committee on the Future of the US

04:38:28.780 - 04:38:49.180

Space Program, and that was in 1990. And so I’m wondering if I want to hear more about that, how that came about, your time, you know, as you know, part of this project is focused on your time as a member of PCAST, so I want to spend more time talking about that.

04:38:49.180 - 04:39:12.460

But I wanted to know if any of that stuff that had happened serving on these...on PCAST or on this committee if that played any role in what you’re describing now or is happening in the 1990s, and if so, what role was it playing? AUGUSTINE: I would say not.

04:39:12.460 - 04:39:39.170

Most everything PCAST dealt with was... I’m thinking back to things that I worked on—high energy lasers, microcircuits, K-12 education, employment policy of the Defense Department... Nothing that...

04:39:39.820 - 04:39:58.500

CARUSO: Okay. Well then, I’m happy to hear more about you know what your...the years you’re describing now. Maybe once we wrap up that section, we can move back and talk a little bit about PCAST and your involvement there.

04:39:59.100 - 04:40:22.220

AUGUSTINE: Well, I’ll just finish the last piece of this because it...to me, it was the second most disappointing piece of my professional career—the next piece to come. The first piece was having to lay off so many people who were talented, dedicated people who helped bring about the end of the

04:40:22.220 - 04:40:47.540

Cold War and then got laid off when it ended. That was the worst part of my career; we lost a lot of employees. The second worst...while we were still buying companies and being encouraged to do so by the Secretary of Defense, we had an agreement to buy Northrop Grumman.

04:40:52.010 - 04:41:13.540

I took retirement right after we announced it. The negotiations went on for about a year with the antitrust people. They were nitpicking pieces of the deal that they thought might be conflict of interest. We said we would sell those pieces to solve the problem.

04:41:15.270 - 04:41:39.640

The antitrust issues what they were worried about. Anyway, about a year later I'm now retired, but as a courtesy, I guess, one evening, one Friday, the antitrust folks called and told—couldn’t have been a Friday, must have been a Thursday—told the

04:41:39.640 - 04:41:56.370

Northrop Grumman management and the Lockheed Martin management that they wanted us both teams in the Pentagon for a meeting with the Justice Department antitrust people Friday afternoon at five. The Lockheed Martin people asked me to come along, I think as a courtesy, because I

04:41:56.600 - 04:42:22.560

actually put the deal together along with the head of Northrop Grumman, Kent Kresa. During the year, I'd been kept posted to whatever was public... I sort of knew...there didn’t seem to be any major problems. So the night before the meeting the Lockheed Martin team gathered —I don’t think the

04:42:22.560 - 04:42:38.810

Northrop Grumman people were there, I might be wrong, but there are all these lawyers. And the only question I asked was, “What’s the worst thing that they could tell us tomorrow?” The lawyers— we literally between the two companies had three hundred lawyers who

04:42:38.830 - 04:43:01.420

worked on the deal—the lawyers kind of mumbled and said the worst thing that could happen is they’re going to make you sell the infrared business of the company in New Hampshire...that we were gonna have to sell the infrared business, which we already said we would if we had to.

04:43:01.980 - 04:43:18.260

So we go wandering into the meeting the afternoon the next day to put the deal together. Another thing that happened, that is Bill Perry left the Pentagon, and there was a new Secretary of Defense . There was also a new head of research and engineering who actually I had recommended

04:43:18.290 - 04:43:35.260

for the job— very capable guy—but the two of them came in and said that we’ve got to get the system’s attention and things are going to be different . We happened to be the first people to walk through the door; Boeing had walked through the door a few weeks before and bought Rockwell and that went through no problem

04:43:35.260 - 04:43:50.660

even though Boeing Rockwell was a lot bigger than Lockheed Martin. We thought there’s no way we’re going to have a problem. Well, we walk in, and the first thing the antitrust guy tells us from Justice is that not only is there not a problem of small scales, but there’s no solvable problem and they’re

04:43:50.660 - 04:44:05.220

stopping the deal. That’s the end of the deal; there will be no acquisition. CEO of Northrop Grumman said, “Look, I’m not selling my company because I want to. I'll be out of a job.

04:44:05.650 - 04:44:23.860

The reason I’m doing this is that there’s only been one competition for new aircraft in twenty years, and we lost it—it was called the F-22.” He said, “The next one"—They weren’t bidding on the F-35.

04:44:24.420 - 04:44:36.840

"The next time we’re going to have something to bid on is twenty years from now, and do you think we’re going to spend money getting ready for something that’s going to happen twenty years from now? when that happens, we’re going to compete against Boeing and Lockheed Martin and

04:44:36.840 - 04:44:53.970

people like that.” And he said, “We need to sell our company.” Well, anyway the antitrust people said, “No way.” Northrop Grumman sued the government; we did not. It took Northrop Grumman a few months to discover that it’s not a good idea to sue

04:44:53.970 - 04:45:05.840

your best customer. So they folded. It took a while... At the meeting—just to close it out, I was the angriest I’ve ever been in my life, by far,

04:45:05.840 - 04:45:19.500

I’m not one to get angry. So I didn’t say anything because I knew if I said something I would regret it, and I knew the people in the room—the Secretary and everybody. The Deputy Secretary is a much admired friend.

04:45:19.710 - 04:45:32.840

He was actually the guy running the meeting. Still a much admired friend. Anyway, they changed the rules without telling us. And so the deal was dead; that was the end of it.

04:45:32.930 - 04:45:47.710

And I’ve learned a lesson and that is—from a number of things— that when you deal with our government, get it in writing, because people come and go. What one person tells you, very honorably, the next person may, very honorably, reverse it.

04:45:49.580 - 04:46:02.500

There’s no carry-over, particularly if there’s a change of parties—then it’s almost sure it will be reversed. So get it in writing. I learned that. You say "did I learn anything?" That’s what I learned.

04:46:03.180 - 04:46:23.170

And it’s a sad thing to have to say, but I learned it the hard way—a couple times. That was the worst. Going back to the PCAST and the like—oh, you asked about the space study. That was the first I chaired two space studies for our government.

04:46:23.930 - 04:46:47.020

The first one was for President Bush Senior, 41, I think. Is that the one you were...the first one...? CARUSO: Yeah, I know that it was under Bush in 1990 that the...I mean, PCAST had a long history. It reported to different people at different times, but it

04:46:47.020 - 04:47:12.850

was really under George Bush—H. W. Bush—that it was renamed PCAST, and it reported directly to the president and that was in 1990. And so you’re involved immediately. I want to hear not only about what you worked on, but how are you asked to serve?

04:47:12.850 - 04:47:22.460

What was it described like to you? Why did you want to serve? So like that beginning information that, you know, we’d like to hear as part of the record.

04:47:23.060 - 04:47:46.940

AUGUSTINE: Okay. Since I...let's see—I was still at Martin Marietta, I guess, at that time. Throughout my career, I’ve been asked—when I wasn’t in government—I’ve been asked to take on tasks for the government.

04:47:47.150 - 04:48:03.330

I’ve always done it for no compensation, often paid my costs out of my own pocket. It cost me a fortune. One reason is I chose because I didn’t want to have a problem I sold all my Lockheed Martin stock except one share.

04:48:03.330 - 04:48:20.660

And I think I told you about... And that's cost me a fortune—if I had kept my Lockheed Martin stock, but I sold it all Just so I wouldn’t have any issues. But anyway, at this point I'm still working for Martin Marietta and I get a call

04:48:21.260 - 04:48:37.340

that...of course, the Challenger had just failed a little before that, and they put together a commission to figure out why the Challenger failed, and the President wanted to put together another commission to figure out what do we do now,

04:48:37.340 - 04:48:53.340

where do we go from here? They asked if I would chair that. I said, “You know, I think I’ve got conflicts of interest that I can’t deal with here.” Running Martin Marietta, we were building the fuel tank for the shuttle

04:48:54.140 - 04:49:15.460

and, I guess, other stuff for NASA—I don't think during that window of time, but so I said, “I don’t think I could do it. They said, “Well, will you talk to the President?” I said, of course. I’ve been asked various times so this was not altogether unusual.

04:49:15.980 - 04:49:39.300

Anyway, I go to see the President, and President Bush asked me if I would do this. Of course, normally, I would have said yes at the moment. But I said, “I am concerned that this could touch on some of the issues I have; I believe I can separate myself from them, I will...

04:49:39.700 - 04:49:54.940

Recluse myself, just not participate in those parts where I have a conflict like the external fuel tank, which is a tiny piece of the big picture." He said, “You know, Norm, you could really help me.

04:49:55.770 - 04:50:15.860

I’ve got a bunch of problems with agriculture.” He said, “They’re serious problems for the nation. There are a bunch of farmers who have offered to help me... no, he said—how would he say?— You could help me a lot, but you don’t know anything about agriculture.” He

04:50:15.860 - 04:50:33.250

said, “I’ve got farmers all over the country who could help me with the space program, but they don’t know anything about space.” He said, “I’m sure you can figure it out.” So how do you say no to the president? I said, “I’ll try to figure it out.” I went straight from there to the Office of

04:50:33.250 - 04:50:55.800

Government Ethics, which is a part of the government that really works. And I said, “I’ve got this problem that I’ve agreed to do something that I would like to do and I feel I should do, but I’ve got to be awfully careful that this is handled properly.” The Office of Government Ethics is not one of these

04:50:55.830 - 04:51:15.820

that quotes section 1633 of law #12... They sat down and wrote a letter to me on exact issues I was going to be dealing with and said, you can do this, you can’t do that, you can't do this. I had an exact list, put it back through the White House lawyers, they said okay.

04:51:18.600 - 04:51:33.260

I shared it with everybody I worked with and with the lawyers for the committee and then NASA. It was agreed that I would leave the room when these topics came up—they didn’t come up very much—but when they did, I’d leave.

04:51:37.240 - 04:52:06.500

What was I going to say? There was another funny aspect of this thing... I agreed to do the job, and so we put together a committee of people, and we tried to have a committee that was very balanced, as I’ve always when I do these things. I’ve chaired over one hundred committees for the government in my life, and try to get

04:52:06.500 - 04:52:30.460

people who have been on all sides of the fence; so we had people from academia, we had astronauts, we had people in industry. We former NASA employees. You name it. A really good group that worked really hard and made a series of recommendations as to what

04:52:30.940 - 04:52:55.860

the future of the US space program should look like. It’s been so long ago I can barely remember all the recommendations, but some were implemented, some were not, as is usually the case. When it was announced that I was going to do this, Al Gore was a senator at the time.

04:52:56.900 - 04:53:17.380

And so, Al Gore starts giving speeches about this guy Augustine from Lockheed Martin who is going to design the future space program, and it’s going to obviously all be done at Lockheed Martin! I went to see him, and said, “I didn’t ask for this job, and I’m going to do it as

04:53:17.380 - 04:53:31.380

honorably as I possibly know how. I’ll probably lean over too far the other way, and anytime you want to have one of your attorneys sit in any of our meetings or any other discussion I have with anybody on this subject, you’re welcome to do it.

04:53:31.800 - 04:53:49.460

From your committee or your own staff attorneys.” So anwyay, he kind of "harumphed" and I didn’t hear much more from him. When we did our final report, to his great credit, he came with me and introduced me

04:53:49.460 - 04:54:06.270

to the committee and said I was here to present the final report, and he just wanted to acknowledge that we had done a fine job. I thought that was pretty special. And I’ve always admired him for that. CARUSO: Sorry.

04:54:08.200 - 04:54:51.260

When you started talking about the committee, you were using first person plural: “we pulled this committee together.” Who is the “we”? AUGUSTINE: It was the administrator of NASA, the president’s science advisor, myself, and the legal counsel from NASA.

04:54:53.160 - 04:55:06.390

That’s the best I remember. There may have been others. There certainly were others. CARUSO: Yeah, I was just curious how broad or how big the “we” was. AUGUSTINE: Yeah, four or five people.

04:55:07.110 - 04:55:23.700

CARUSO: And now so, I mean, you have President Bush asking you to serve on this committee, to lead this committee. Did you have a broader sense of what it is that he wanted to accomplish with bringing this group of individuals together?

04:55:23.700 - 04:55:49.460

You know, he’s the one that in 1990 said, “Okay, we’re going to form PCAST, the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.” Do you know...did he mention to you why he wanted to go down this road, why he was pursuing things this way when, you know, I think it was Nixon eliminated the whole idea of science

04:55:49.460 - 04:56:03.380

advisors in the White House? I know it made a comeback a little bit under Reagan. Did you know what he wanted to accomplish with doing this stuff? Why bring people from outside government, outside policy to talk about these issues?

04:56:04.760 - 04:56:20.020

AUGUSTINE: Nixon did eliminate PCAST mainly over, as I understand it, I think it's right, annoyance that the members—some of the members of the PCAST had gone very public opposing the ballistic missile

04:56:20.020 - 04:56:48.340

defense system at the time, which was a major political controversy as well as the toughest technical issue I was ever involved in. Fast forwarding, President Bush 41 becomes president. Challenger has failed; the space program had been a source of great pride during a very dark period for the nation,

04:56:49.170 - 04:57:13.000

and I can’t speak for the man, but I think he felt it was important and wanted to see a space program continued. But it was somewhat in disarray, given the failure of the Challenger, which— and I don’t point fingers here particularly— which, in my view, was preventable.

04:57:17.410 - 04:57:42.020

Anyway, I think he thought it was important. He wanted to have it done basically outside of government so it would be independent, but report to the White House and indirectly to NASA. And the fact he took a personal interest in it was a big help to us in recruiting

04:57:42.020 - 04:57:52.220

members. Because if it was something that the president cared about, more people were willing to devote their time to it. And it was clear this was going to take an awful lot of time.

04:57:52.820 - 04:58:11.340

A lot of my evenings and Saturdays and Sundays for a year or so were devoted to the project. It was a good group of people. CARUSO: So, how often did individuals So you mentioned just now, how often you were working on it.

04:58:11.420 - 04:58:27.300

I’m curious to know were there official meetings? How often did the official meetings happen? Where did they happen? Just, sort of, the...I guess the basic aspects of how all this was working

04:58:29.300 - 04:58:52.500

AUGUSTINE: Yeah, you’re asking me to remember back twenty years here, and I don’t even buy green bananas at my age! I would guess that we met once a month for the better part of a year. And we probably had telephone conference calls—you didn’t have Zoom in

04:58:52.500 - 04:59:13.500

those days—periodically. We had little subgroups that would go off and attack a particular area in more depth than the whole group could deal with. Then there semi-infinite number of telephone calls between subsets of the

04:59:13.500 - 04:59:31.740

members: one on one or one on many or what have you. And there was a lot of conversation as with all groups, some of the people devoted a huge amount of time to it; some devoted less, but everybody contributed significantly, I would say.

04:59:32.790 - 05:00:00.700

There were no laggards in the thing. Anyway, we looked at—what did we learn, where were we, what were our optionsfor the future, and what did we recommend. We came up with unanimous recommendations that I think had meat on them and offered

05:00:00.700 - 05:00:14.420

them to the President. As I say, I hope we made a contribution. CARUSO: Kenny, do you have any questions specifically? EVANS: About the Augustine committee?

05:00:14.420 - 05:00:30.040

No, I was.... I don’t. I think I mean, it’s a very interesting story about how that happened. My only, kind of, follow up is you had mentioned the president’s science advisor

05:00:30.040 - 05:00:51.240

who at that time was Allan Bromley in helping, kind of, shape this committee, and I was wondering about—just in general—your relationship with him and impression of him and working relationship during that time. AUGUSTINE: I think I’ve known probably all the science advisors going back to the

05:00:51.240 - 05:01:15.700

sixties. I knew Allan. I knew him less well than most of the others, but I knew him. He helped us put the committee together but was not deeply involved in it once we got started. I don’t know whether that was because the President wanted sort of an

05:01:15.700 - 05:01:36.620

independent look or whether he had other things to worry about—probably the latter. I don’t recall a lot of engagement with him as we went along. There was no secrecy to anything that we did; our meetings were in the public domain, and we had reporters at most of our meetings.

05:01:38.900 - 05:01:57.410

So he certainly knew what was going on. I suppose—I don’t remember—I undoubtedly briefed him occasionally; I certainly saw him from time to time for one reason or another. I guess one question that never occurred to me, your question suggests,

05:01:57.430 - 05:02:25.380

is why did he ask PCAST to do that? I think probably two reasons. One was that I think he really did want something that was really remote from the White House and government, and I think the other was that a task of this immensity was way

05:02:25.380 - 05:02:36.820

more than most of the PCAST people—certainly as a group it didn't have the right skills. But you could have picked a member of the PCAST to chair it. I don’t remember if I was a member then or not. I don’t think I was.

05:02:39.580 - 05:02:51.820

He could have picked a member and said, “Go chair it.” I’ve seen that. I'm chairing something right now that's sort of like that. But for whatever reason he chose not to, and I think it worked.

05:02:53.920 - 05:03:16.100

But another reason, too: PCAST has varied from time to time, cycled between heavily science-oriented, like when I first was involved, and then during the Bush eras, it became not only science but there were a few people with business backgrounds— more engineers, put it that way.

05:03:20.640 - 05:03:42.940

I think PCAST changed its character with the tasks that it took on, what it did. Depending on that somewhat. CARUSO: So maybe, and Kenny, if you have things to say...maybe this is good time to start getting into your involvement—direct involvement—with PCAST and trying to

05:03:42.940 - 05:03:59.820

understand what you were just talking about—how it changed over administrations and roles and things like that. Does that sound like a good plan, Kenny, or...yeah. AUGUSTINE: If I can chime in here, one of the reasons I was hesitant there was a

05:03:59.820 - 05:04:18.220

second so-called Augustine commission that I chaired on the future of the space program that was for President Clinton that was on the future of the human spaceflight program. Because human spaceflight program was kind of lost and didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

05:04:18.810 - 05:04:39.960

That was the more recent one I chaired. That one...that was the one we recommended shutting down the shuttle and we recommended letting new firms compete for hauling stuff into space.

05:04:40.660 - 05:05:03.470

That left the door open for the startups in Silicon Valley to enter the arena, which incidentally was very damaging to my personal interests, but was the right thing to do. Anyway, there was a second commission too that was the

05:05:03.470 - 05:05:24.180

equivalent amount of effort and had clear impact. I mean, shutting down the shuttle was not welcome in NASA, or a lot of other places. The traditional aerospace industry wasn’t thrilled about having the “bandits from Silicon Valley” in their backyard, there were other things like that.

05:05:24.300 - 05:05:58.340

But if you want to switch to PCAST...I think I had mentioned I served a total of sixteen years under several presidents—both parties— took on various tasks. One just popped into my mind. Was I on PCAST then? I think I was.

05:05:59.460 - 05:06:26.300

It would have been under George W. when 9/11 occurred. Anyway, on 9/11—just as an aside—I was traveling on a train on the border of Afghanistan, traveling alone as a tourist.

05:06:27.020 - 05:06:58.420

Not a great place to be at that particular moment, and it’s an interesting story but irrelevant. Anyway, I made it back to United States a couple weeks later and was asked...I don't think I even lead a group, I was just asked as part of PCAST I think... to draw up a possible organization chart for the

05:06:58.420 - 05:07:17.950

Department of Homeland Security. In the science and technology area. There was no Department of Homeland Security, of course, before 9/11. So, I drew up—then I was appointed, I think my title was PCAST representative. I was the ad hoc member

05:07:18.240 - 05:07:37.340

of the Secretary of Homeland Security’s advisory board. I participated in all meetings, but I was not a voting member. My role was how do you form Homeland Security’s R&D, which was going to be significant. And it’s funny how these things cycle—if you let me back up.

05:07:39.060 - 05:08:02.420

Just before 9/11 there had been a two- or three-year study requested by the Congress that was chaired by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, the two senators, and the question was, “What should be the US policy in the half-century ahead or quarter- century or whatever?” I had served on that.

05:08:02.900 - 05:08:23.340

One of our recommendations was that we create a Department of Homeland Security. We didn’t call it by that name, but that’s what it was—a new department. We said what should go into it. Anyway, at that time just as we turned our report in for a couple years’ work...

05:08:26.300 - 05:08:49.500

the election, the Gore-Bush, Gore-43. Gore-43...was so closely knotted the whole attention of the government was focused on counting chads and butterflies on ballots. Our report just flopped. I mean, it got zero attention.

05:08:50.020 - 05:09:04.580

It was pretty esteemed group, aside from myself, but the report just died. It had been requested by the House and the Senate. In law. It had gone on for a couple years. Anyway, I’m now sitting in PCAST.

05:09:09.940 - 05:09:22.720

I’m now sitting at the Department of Homeland Security on their advisory board—nonvoting. Later, when I left [PCAST], I became a member of their advisory board for a couple years...several...a number of years.

05:09:26.060 - 05:09:46.060

So that was one of the things we did that I was involved in. There was another issue that came up during that period of time that... I don't even remember what the issue was—Chuck Vest and I worked together on it. Chuck was the president of MIT.

05:09:47.940 - 05:10:13.620

We were asked to take on a two-man task that had to do with something out of the old former Bureau of Standards, and we had managed to get... Somehow to get the president to put a $50 million startup shot in the budget...

05:10:13.640 - 05:10:22.680

Who's the—I can't think of the name, the former Bureau of Standards What are they now? CARUSO: NIST? EVANS: NIST?

05:10:23.620 - 05:10:36.020

CARUSO: National Institute of Standards? AUGUSTINE: NIST—National Institute of Science and Technology. We managed to get some money and we got it all the way through the House and the Senate.

05:10:36.480 - 05:10:51.700

It turned out that the people that NIST thought it was going to attract a lot of attention...or something, they declined to take the money. I’ll never forget that, because Chuck and I went to a lot of work and some other people too.

05:10:53.580 - 05:11:26.860

We worked some on ballistic missile defense in those years—the technical aspects. There was a group of us that were supposed to serve as, kind of, referees. Where, between when the US strategic offensive people were told to attack Russia, and our defense people were told to pretend you're defending Russia.

05:11:28.090 - 05:11:47.380

How would you do the attack, and how would you do the defense? Then there was a group that was supposed to sort of referee it—the red team—and point out what the mistakes and what could have been done. During the latter eras, it was more systems questions that were at the

05:11:47.380 - 05:12:17.620

forefront of national issues. Then were...where the earlier days, as I said, were more science-oriented. CARUSO: So, I know you’ve had a lot of experience with PCAST under different administrations. One thing that I’m curious to know more about it is so you mentioned

05:12:17.760 - 05:12:36.020

when you’re working on that first committee for Bush Senior, it was to provide information to him, but you were also interacting with members of Congress, right? Al Gore was calling you out. But, you know, it ended well, right?

05:12:36.020 - 05:12:55.380

He introduced you when you were giving the committee report. Did you have a broader sense of what PCAST was meant to do? Was it simply an arm of the president to find out more information, or was it meant to be something bigger?

05:12:55.380 - 05:13:18.590

Was it meant to be communicating ideas, more broadly, getting the American citizenry engaged in discussions about science and science policy and things along those lines? Like, what did you see as PCAST’s goal when you first joined, and did you see those goals or see those

05:13:18.590 - 05:13:38.780

roles change broadly over time as you served on it? AUGUSTINE: I’m glad you worded it the way you did because I don’t remember anybody coming in ever—they probably should have—and said, “This is why we’re here, these are our goals,” which would have been a good question for me if I thought of asking it.

05:13:42.300 - 05:14:02.720

But [PCAST] was there. My answer is going to be what was my perception, which may not have been the right perception, but I can share my perception. It varied over time, and when I first became involved, I had previously chaired

05:14:02.720 - 05:14:18.380

the Defense Science Board for a number of years. I thought it was kind of a Defense Science Board for the President, just like the Defense Science Board served the Secretary of Defense. that time, the Defense Science Board dealt with not only highly technical

05:14:18.380 - 05:14:49.740

issues—high-energy lasers—but it also dealt with issues like how much logistics you need to provide water for an Army fighting on the desert. It dealt with a lot of issues that went way beyond science, so I assumed that... And I think probably, maybe rightfully, that the president, first of all

05:14:49.740 - 05:15:06.540

only I think three times in history has been an engineer. I don’t know that there’s ever been a scientist. I may be wrong—probably am—you would know. The three engineers, many people would say, were not our greatest

05:15:06.540 - 05:15:25.260

presidents—or some of them. But you have a president...you have a Congress that today, I think, has nine people in it that are scientists or engineers out of 535. You don’t have a—you have a Department of Health, you have a Department of

05:15:25.260 - 05:15:44.100

Transportation, you have a Department of Labor. There is no Department of Science and Engineering. Yet, science and engineering the economy today; there are Nobel prizes that have indicated that seemed to me that it just made sense that the President should have a

05:15:44.100 - 05:16:06.100

scientific advisor who should have a lot more clout than he or she normally has, and that they might want to have a group of outside advisors to give them independent opinions, advice, or to ask questions, just ask dumb questions— based on their own experience that may be different

05:16:06.100 - 05:16:21.440

from your own experience. Where else is the president going to get advice about science and technology, because almost everybody around him is a lawyer or maybe a banker? And it just seemed like a very sensible thing to me.

05:16:25.740 - 05:16:50.340

I assumed as you moved up the ladder, so to speak, the questions would be less deep science and would be more issues that would be a public interest. I don’t think I ever sensed in any of the sixteen years that one of our purposes was to try to get the public more aware of the sciences or scientific issues and so on.

05:16:51.900 - 05:17:17.700

But rather was to help fill a vacuum for independent information in the fields of science and engineering. And there weren’t many other places for a president to turn to get that — certainly not formally; there were probably ad hoc ways where

05:17:17.700 - 05:17:45.940

the president had known people he trusted in prior lives that were engineers —maybe—I don’t know. But PCAST, to me, became basically the private independent source of experience in science and technology for the White House, the President in particular, through the head

05:17:45.940 - 05:18:00.500

of PCAST. Also it's probably worth mentioning that as changes went on— my recollection might be the problem here—but in the early days, I recall PCAST—PSAC—being chaired by the person that

05:18:00.500 - 05:18:19.540

was the de facto president’s science advisor. Later on I recall being co-chaired by a person who was the president’s science advisor and somebody from industry. You may want to check that, but I’m pretty sure that’s right.

05:18:19.620 - 05:18:50.260

When that happened, there was more of a shift to today’s problems—everyday problems—why did the Space Shuttle fail, why...what was I going to say? Ballistic missile defense through those years was such a highly politicized issue that it sort permeated a lot of the discussions.

05:18:50.450 - 05:19:21.140

Basic research, going back to the beginning, basic research was always a topic of major interest, and I would guess that betwen, say half and 80 or 90 percent of the members were academics. There was clearly a strong interest in research and education and the impact it was having.

05:19:24.000 - 05:19:47.660

CARUSO: So, and I do think Neal Lane when we were interviewing him talked...spoke out about a co-chair when he first started PCAST and the presidential science advisor was also the co-chair. When you were serving on PCAST, obviously there are a lot of other individuals

05:19:47.660 - 05:20:12.300

serving at the same time that you did, did you...did PCAST or did you specifically have regular relationships with other scientific bodies in the United States or abroad? I mean, so Neal, I mean, he was at the NSF, right? Not that he was actively—I’m trying to remember the specifics of his interview—I

05:20:12.300 - 05:20:29.340

don’t think he was actively going over to the NSF to chat with people when he was on PCAST, but, you know, he had a familiarity with that organization. The National Academies, right? There’s this general interaction among various groups to talk about science.

05:20:29.700 - 05:20:44.140

I’m wondering if you had or other members of PCAST, or PCAST generally, had interactions with other scientific organizations in the US and internationally. And what...if there were, what were those interactions like

05:20:44.140 - 05:21:00.900

and things along those lines? AUGUSTINE: I think I need to draw a distinction here. As I recall, there were subcommittees of PCAST that dealt with classified issues where there was no outside conversation.

05:21:01.540 - 05:21:31.220

Most of the work was unclassified—very public— public sat in most of our meetings. In those cases, most of the members—or let me say, at least some of the members of any given [PCAST] probably belonged to the Academy of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine or were familiar with NIH and NSF,

05:21:32.890 - 05:21:52.860

American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and so on. And so there were these networks of people that knew each other. There was no formal use of those that I could recall; I don’t remember saying, “Would you talk to the people at NSF?” or something like that.

05:21:53.380 - 05:22:15.710

But in the tasks that we addressed, if there was something that obviously related to one of these other organizations, there was no inhibition on going and talking about what you were doing with them. To gather background. Certainly, people talked to each other, and knew what we were doing and what we were

05:22:15.710 - 05:22:36.420

studying. I think there was a certain benefit to that because in science, and I sure run into it, very often someone down the hall is working on the same problem as you are and you didn’t know it. This network, kind of, helped solve that.

05:22:36.420 - 05:22:50.860

And the other thing that helped a lot, and I’ve discovered this in other areas I’ve worked, where there are two people that each have half the answer to a problem, but they don’t know each other. Some third party may say, “you got to go talk to so and so..."

05:22:50.860 - 05:23:10.900

And eureka, as the saying goes, you get an answer. There's some great cases of that. I think the advisory committees to the President serve those...but then there's just the fact that the President has group of economic

05:23:10.900 - 05:23:46.100

advisers, the economy is obviously important; he has plenty of legal advice on his own staff; so it just seemed like a natural thing to do, and I think that the breakup of PCAST by Nixon was kind of a sad day in the story of science. CARUSO: When you were serving on PCAST, you’d mentioned when you met with George

05:23:46.100 - 05:24:05.300

Bush, Sr. and he asked you to serve on a committee, that was a direct meeting with the President. When you were serving on PCAST in...over those sixteen years, were you ever meeting directly with the President, or were you just receiving information from

05:24:05.300 - 05:24:31.020

the presidential science advisor about what the president wanted the PCAST to work on? AUGUSTINE: I need to answer this very thoughtfully because I’ve worked on so many other committees... to be sure I sort out which ones were PCAST, but as I recall, once again, the PCAST policy varied an awful lot with who was president, who was the president’s science advisor.

05:24:31.620 - 05:25:07.940

There were some presidents that we met with periodically. By periodically, I don’t mean every month for sure, but a few times. There were other presidents that I don’t ever remember meeting with in the context of [PCAST]. That may be just my memory, but there clearly was a change in the ebb and flow of

05:25:07.940 - 05:25:25.270

how much direct involvement there was. In all cases—95 percent at least— the involvement was with the president’s science advisor. CARUSO: Okay, and can you tell me a little bit more about how...so when the

05:25:25.270 - 05:25:50.040

presidential science advisor came to PCAST with “this is the question that the president had,” how did PCAST itself determine who is going to be working on that specific question? How were people chosen to lead or, you know, who was put in charge of that?

05:25:50.040 - 05:26:17.620

Like, how did that functioning actually happen? AUGUSTINE: As I recall, [PCAST] has only—at least during my era— only two officers, or maybe even one, but there was no substructure by topic of interest or something like that. It was a very flat organization.

05:26:18.120 - 05:26:38.060

So when the word came down from above—and didn’t have to come from above—it could come from one of the members, saying, “Here’s a topic that we ought to be looking into,” it really fell on the chairman, would be the president’s science advisor, to decide whether we should do this or not—but obviously in discussion with the

05:26:38.060 - 05:27:07.860

President. And it really fell on the president’s science advisor and his co-chair—if there was one—to figure out how to organize a group of people from the council of advisors to attack that particular issue. Most of the people were known pretty well—their backgrounds—to the president’s

05:27:07.860 - 05:27:30.420

science advisor, or certainly to his colleagues. I think that it was —Neal could, of course, answer this better—but my span over sixteen years was pretty much a matter of the science advisor would pick out a handful of people who had some background in the topic at hand and ask them if they would serve on

05:27:30.420 - 05:28:04.900

this particular topic. I never heard anybody say no. Anyway, I think it was a highly informal group—less informal, for example, than the Defense Science Board, where the board itself had a full-time staff and we had an office in the Pentagon, and we met many times a year.

05:28:05.330 - 05:28:27.300

We went off for two-week summer studies as a group, with other people invited. [PCAST] was not like that. It was just very informal; when the president’s science advisor told us there was an issue that should be looked at, we would figure out a way to do it.

05:28:28.400 - 05:28:53.180

Occasionally, you’d report back to the President in person, but usually not. We would prepare written reports, and I suppose pieces of got to the president. CARUSO: And during the time, did you have many interactions with members from Congress like what happened with Al Gore or even more minor things?

05:28:53.180 - 05:29:12.540

You mentioned that these were usually pretty public meetings unless of course there was national security issues, reporters were there so clearly Congress knew—or assuming they were reading what the reporters were writing—Congress knew what the President was interested in pursuing.

05:29:12.540 - 05:29:27.460

Did you ever have contact from members of Congress that wanted to meet with you specifically or meet with PCAST broadly to talk about what you were working on and or to provide perspectives or anything along those lines? AUGUSTINE: I never did.

05:29:29.500 - 05:29:59.660

In my role there, I don’t think I ever had the occasion. I don’t recall any time I dealt directly with the Congress on any issue. I think I probably would have felt it was inappropriate unless the science advisor had said, “We’d like you to do this,” just because of the separation of government.

05:30:01.850 - 05:30:19.740

There was no secret about anything, but it just probably wouldn’t have been appropriate. On other things I worked on, there were many, many briefings to Congress, or groups of Congress or dinners with members or what have you. But in my own experience that wasn't true...

05:30:19.740 - 05:30:50.460

I guess I thought that much about it, but contacts on the Hill would have been through the chairman of the committee. CAURSO: During your time on PCAST, maybe, obviously, you know, a decade and a half is a long period of time, so there’s probably a lot of stuff that you’ve worked on, but

05:30:50.460 - 05:31:11.290

are there any topics that you were asked to investigate that you found more interesting than others or topics that the...whatever report you generated at the end you feel more proud of than others? AUGUSTINE: Hi Kenny.

05:31:12.320 - 05:31:19.590

Kenny's here. He dressed up. Oh, he’s not here. That’s a fake picture. He fooled me.

05:31:19.620 - 05:31:26.460

He's got a necktie. EVANS: I’m still here. I’m just.... I’m rearranging. I’m just...I didn’t want to be distracting.

05:31:28.110 - 05:31:44.420

Just completely like made over in that photo, so I did the opposite thing. I distracted...but, Yeah, no, I think it’s really I think it’s a good question about which reports and which topics you found to be most engaging.

05:31:45.210 - 05:32:13.300

AUGUSTINE: There were so many it’s hard to pick and choose. My interests tend to be pretty broad, so I guess the ones I probably enjoyed the most, being an engineer as opposed to being a scientist, were ones that dealt with applications of technology.

05:32:16.500 - 05:32:44.500

Also, I was interested in some of the ones that dealt with personnel policy, for example: why is it hard for the government to hire the scientists and engineers it needs? We made some recommendations that I think might have been important, most of which—maybe all of which—were disregarded.

05:32:50.140 - 05:33:26.380

I’m trying to think back. Let’s see some of the things I got caught up in of the funding of science that was on the periphery of PCAST; it wasn’t PCAST itself. I don’t recall any discussions of relationships with industry.

05:33:26.380 - 05:33:51.290

There are some on manufacturing capability that were important and I think did have an impact. It was during this era that we're still in of declining manufacturing capability in this country and the implications of that, particularly when you look back at World War II and the

05:33:51.740 - 05:34:07.620

role that manufacturing in the country played. It not only—it comes back to the question you asked earlier— it was not only just the amount of manufacturing that’s being done in this country, which is declining significantly,

05:34:08.060 - 05:34:26.980

but also the type of manufacturing. That, of course, has a peripheral, very important consequence: there a lot of very good jobs in manufacturing that are no longer there, putting a major load on our educational

05:34:26.980 - 05:34:49.100

system to do things other than train people to go to college for four years or eight years or what have you, to train people in the skills. But I guess it was more of those general kinds of things... I think those were the kinds of things they would tend to ask me to do.

05:34:49.910 - 05:35:17.900

I did get involved in some fairly technical stuff, and particle physics and things like that. But I was always there as a referee, not as anybody to add value those kinds of topics. EVANS: I’m wondering, so at least in my own history with science policy and report writing, during the time you’re on G.W.

05:35:17.900 - 05:35:40.220

Bush’s PCAST, the administration had the American Competitiveness Initiative, and I’m wondering, you know, both at least according to some records, PCAST had a number of reports that dealt specifically like you’re saying with competitiveness issues and workforce and broader, you know, science and the economy issues.

05:35:41.580 - 05:36:00.890

What the varying roles in your involvement with both the Rising Above the Gathering Storm report with the National Academies and also how that impacted the American...the G.W. Bush...which I think at one point was part of his State of the Union address as announcing this competitiveness initiative.

05:36:00.890 - 05:36:22.020

So maybe you could walk us through your role there with Rising Above the Gathering Storm and then PCAST and how the birth of this competitiveness initiative happened in that administration. AUGUSTINE: Well, under both President Bushes, competitiveness was a topic of some

05:36:22.020 - 05:36:58.180

interest—significant interest—and PCAST did do work, particularly under H.W., [41]. But, if I get my timing right here, the Gathering Storm study was requested by Congress actually. It didn’t come out of the White House.

05:36:58.180 - 05:37:17.550

It was both the House and Senate bipartisan, believe it or not, if you remember what that means. They asked the Academies to put together a group to take a look at American competitiveness, and that was during the period when the world no longer

05:37:17.550 - 05:37:47.220

flat—people losing their jobs to India and China. It was a headline kind of issue. That was done with the National Academies —and I’m thinking hard whether it’s appropriate to mention this, but I will do so—we had great access to the Congress.

05:37:47.220 - 05:38:04.140

Congress asked for the study and knew a lot of the key people over there. For example, one evening the Senate had a dinner so I could present the results of the Gathering Storm study. Over a third of the members showed up at this dinner, which, I mean, is unheard of.

05:38:04.430 - 05:38:33.020

If we went to war, we couldn’t get that many in an evening! Anyway, that was a great evening; they asked questions and so on and then went back and wrote legislation. But this is very ironic. We were never able to get our briefing to the president, it turned out that the roadblock was

05:38:33.020 - 05:38:50.980

the president’s science advisor. I want to be very careful because he no longer is with us, but why he was so motivated, I don’t know. The only thing I could think of is that he should have been his job to do that study, not

05:38:50.980 - 05:39:01.300

for the Congress to have asked for it. I don’t know. That’s the only thing I could think of because a very capable, good guy. Anyway, he was a roadblock, and we could not get on the president’s calendar.

05:39:01.960 - 05:39:21.140

Fortunately, some of us knew people like the Vice President pretty well and others that were the President’s senior staff. We had no trouble getting to see the President, but it meant going around the science advisor. And when we did, we knew we would pay for it, but we also knew that

05:39:21.140 - 05:39:35.180

if we didn’t do it, we weren’t going to get anything out of the administration to follow up on... The Congress was ready to go. So we got an appointment with the President and a couple of us went in and briefed the President.

05:39:37.640 - 05:39:49.380

Then the President agreed to feature that in some speeches. It turned out that like a week later he had three days of speeches going

05:39:49.380 - 05:40:08.410

through the Western United States, which he adjusted and made a major part of those speeches talking about competitiveness and and science and engineering. I remember one in New Mexico because he invited my wife and I

05:40:08.430 - 05:40:24.980

to go with him and his wife to hear the speech. He devoted a lot of effort to it. Then he left not long after that, as I recall. I think it would have been President Clinton after that,

05:40:25.390 - 05:40:49.740

who really picked up on the topic and was terrific. You mentioned the president’s State of the Nation. I had made a remark on the spur of the moment, which I probably shouldn’t have made, at a hearing, which his staff apparently heard about it.

05:40:49.760 - 05:41:08.100

And included—they didn't attribute it or anything, but included—it was about science— included the remark in the State of the Union message a few months later. So the word was getting around in those days. Of course, we did get a couple big shots in the budget, but they weren’t

05:41:08.100 - 05:41:32.110

sustained, which was the problem. One of the difficulties, as you know from your background, is that there are not a lot of people on the Hill that are involved in science or engineering or business policy. There are very few business people there; .

05:41:37.680 - 05:42:06.380

Occasionally a staffer would show up at a PCAST meeting, but that was pretty rare. And that brings to mind another funny story that probably I shouldn’t tell either, but there’s nothing secret about it; it was a public meeting and it was on cancer research, I happen to remember.

05:42:08.060 - 05:42:31.420

At the end of the meeting, sitting behind me where the public was, a young-ish guy—thirty-five, very pleasant—came up with a broken accent and gave me his card and said he was from the Soviet embassy—military attaché— they were very interested in the work we were doing

05:42:31.420 - 05:42:45.980

on cancer research. I said, “Boy, I don’t know anything about that. I’m a member of this group, but that’s not my field.” So about two weeks later I get a call from the Soviet...my secretary gets a call that this individual would like to

05:42:45.980 - 05:43:06.860

come and talk about how we do research in America—cancer research and other kinds of research categories—who approves it, how it gets done, and so on—very unclassified stuff. Of course, I’m skeptical as the dickens of this; the red flags were flying all over. I asked the security people, “Should I talk to him?” I didn’t want to be

05:43:06.860 - 05:43:22.070

discourteous, said, “Sure, talk to him, but don’t say anything.” I talked to him and didn’t say anything. We had a very pleasant discussion on some of the better Russian restaurants in this part of the world, Washington and so on,

05:43:23.150 - 05:43:38.930

minor questions about the Congress’s role in putting together the research budget. Totally innocuous discussion—a waste of both our time. So, he left—very thankful—I didn’t think any more about it.

05:43:39.010 - 05:43:54.220

About a week later, the FBI calls and said they’d like to come see me. They said, “Do you know who this guy is that you’re talking to?” I said yeah. He's so-and-so. They said, “So what did you talk about?” I said, “We talked about Russian restaurants

05:43:54.410 - 05:44:16.500

and the budget process; how it originates in the House and goes to the Senate and goes through an appropriations and authorization committee—stuff they teach in third grade.” They said, “Well, if he calls you back, let us know.” He never called back. That’s my other PCAST story.

05:44:18.210 - 05:44:38.740

Weird. CARUSO: Kenny, do you have other questions about time on PCAST? EVANS: No, I think that that’s good. I mean, I’d wanted since, you know, we were curious like Dave mentioned and I think

05:44:38.740 - 05:44:55.980

Norm did a good job explaining this—the ebbs and flows of between when PCAST is utilized and how much of a voice it has in policy decisions. So no, I think I’m good. AUGUSTINE: You know, I think a big difference in retrospect—we talked a little

05:44:55.980 - 05:45:22.140

about it—is that there was no sub-organization; it was a very flat organization—PCAST—and, secondly, that the PCAST had no staff of its own. It was served by the staff of the president’s science advisor or OSTP or whatever, whereas the Defense Science Board had its own staff and we could create our

05:45:22.140 - 05:45:39.340

own studies and go off and do them. Sometimes they didn’t like us doing them. The Defense Department On the other hand, they tolerated because we did enough that they wanted to hear, that they were interested in, but we insisted that one of our roles was to be

05:45:39.340 - 05:46:05.380

able to tell them things they didn’t want to hear—and we could do that. We had ample staff; there were usually the equivalent of a Navy commander would be the chief of staff, and there were three or four or five other people— military and civilian. So we were well-staffed with getting things done; logistics were easy.

05:46:08.100 - 05:46:24.900

Whereas PCAST was much more of academically focused. It reminded me more of my time at Princeton teaching than it does of my time in the rest of the government. It’s, kind of, a strange parallel, but it does.

05:46:26.410 - 05:46:42.350

EVANS: Yeah, that’s interesting. PCAST has always had kind of a bare bones staff; they have one or two, tops, kind of, executive secretaries. Do...is that something that in terms of recommendations for if PCAST were able to

05:46:42.350 - 05:47:01.100

make more of a sustained...if there were... PCAST in some sense—I’m asking, kind of, a leading question, but if PCAST is to function better, should it work more like the Defense Science Board in what you’re saying where there’s a dedicated staff and, kind of, a dedicated purpose.

05:47:01.100 - 05:47:27.500

Or is the academic nature of PCAST a benefit in some way? AUGUSTINE: Well, there certainly is a benefit. On the other , the Defense Science Board was probably half people from academia too, and in terms of the impact, PCAST, plugging in allegedly to the President, should have a

05:47:27.500 - 05:47:42.530

lot more authority or impact. But within its sphere, working for the Defense Secretary, the impact of the two organizations were orders of magnitude different. The Defense Science Board was far more impactful.

05:47:44.260 - 05:47:58.260

I could walk in and see the Defense Secretary like I was on his staff. When I was chairman—you couldn't do that as a member of the Defense Science Board. And would come to our meetings and his deputy would come to our meetings occasionally.

05:48:01.320 - 05:48:32.100

Also, and it may be true of PCAST, but I don’t think it ever was. Whenever PCAST changed...no, this isn’t true—let’s see—I served on both; I was chairman of the Defense Science Board. I started under...the Republicans and ended on the Democrats. You just continued on. If they wanted you to—there was no automatic,

05:48:32.100 - 05:48:46.630

“Look, we ought to be changing.” Whereas with PCAST, the chairman would be highly unlikely—the members might stay on, some of them. I think that there were two of us who stayed on at one point— not many.

05:48:47.110 - 05:49:09.660

But it was a turnover on the political cycle. I do recall on one occasion when I was chairman of the Defense Science Board, we got a call from the Office of Presidential Personnel that they had three people they wanted to put on the Defense Science Board—none of whom had a background in science.

05:49:10.550 - 05:49:27.300

So I went back and said, “The one thing I can promise you, if you put those three people on the board, which you could certainly do, you should advise the President the entire board will probably resign.” So they didn’t do it; there was that much of a difference.

05:49:28.650 - 05:49:50.260

I guess what I’m saying is that there was a more partisan flavor to the PCAST than there was to DSB, whatever that’s worth. I think that PCAST played an important role but wasn’t as connected as well as it might be.

05:49:57.070 - 05:50:18.390

I think the effort demanded of the members was less than was demanded of the Defense Science Board members—although probably the PCAST was a little bit more senior than most of the Defense Science Board members. But cut that both ways.

05:50:20.040 - 05:50:39.460

EVANS: So this is, kind of, more of a—I don’t know—general question, but since you were chair of the Defense Science Board, if you were chair of PCAST, would there have been things that you would have done differently over the sixteen years—both in the Clinton administration and the G. W. Bush administration?

05:50:39.460 - 05:51:04.580

AUGUSTINE: No, I was only a member of PCAST, never chair or anything, so my role was very different. I think both were competently led, putting myself aside, others were chairman and the Secretaries of Defense changed, the interest level varied.

05:51:06.600 - 05:51:30.930

Like Secretary of Defense Harold Brown. He might have been secretary—well, he ran Livermore Labs. Bill Perry was secretary; he was an engineer. There was a lot more normal connection between our immediate—

05:51:31.230 - 05:51:46.540

to whom we reported— than there is with the PCAST reporting to the President. But of course, the President has a lot more to do than the Secretary of Defense, so you would expect less connectivity, I think.

05:51:54.990 - 05:52:19.340

I don’t know that the PCAST is denied creating its own studies. I’m not familiar with any, but I suspect it could have, and I’m sure that the president’s science advisor created studies that the President didn’t necessarily ask for. But the DSB, not infrequently, did study topics bubbled up from below.

05:52:25.550 - 05:52:51.660

I remember was Johnny Foster, whom you may remember his name. Johnny chaired for the DSB a study on high-energy lasers as weapons. I’m quite sure that question would never come from most Secretaries of Defense; somebody out there.

05:52:51.660 - 05:53:10.060

Johnny, in particular, was involved in seeing that there’s a real potential for these things that we ought to be thinking about. Other times we’d get involved in things that were cutting across services. That was true also of PCAST, where I think it served a value—

05:53:10.490 - 05:53:46.130

I can remember...I hope I'm not mixing with other elements, but issues between NASA and...NSF. NASA, NSF, and one other organization I can’t think of now, but cross government, where OSTP or the PCAST is ideally suited to

05:53:46.160 - 05:54:06.640

step in and give an independent view of how to deal with those issues. There weren’t many of those, but that would be one... There’s so much that cuts across government. I’m thinking of some of the issues I’m involved with right now that involve huge

05:54:06.670 - 05:54:23.580

pieces of the government and there’s really no referee, other than the President, to deal with them. In science or technology, the normal referees the President would turn to, you can count on one hand.

05:54:28.930 - 05:54:40.660

Well, anyway, that’s just an observation. I’m a huge fan of PCAST. I wouldn’t have spent so much time with it if I didn’t think it were useful. But I do think it has the opportuity to be more useful.

05:54:41.240 - 05:55:06.220

But for that to happen, the president’s science advisor has to have more clout. The problem isn’t with the individuals; most of them, highly qualified. It’s just that— I’m giving myself away here— I think science and technology plays a role

05:55:06.220 - 05:55:20.020

that’s so huge that it deserves more attention in our government. If we’re going to solve climate change, lawyers aren’t going to solve that. It’s going to be scientists and engineers. If we’re going to win the next war, we’re going to be outnumbered four to one or

05:55:20.020 - 05:55:36.660

more, it’s going to be engineers that solve that. If you’re worried about COVID-19, it’s not going to be lawyers to solve that. It will be scientists that solve that. And if you want to improve the economy, 85 percent of the economy comes from

05:55:36.970 - 05:55:57.300

breakthroughs in science and technology. But when you look at the structure of our government, you would never detect that. EVANS: You would you had mentioned earlier your recommendation for creating a Department of Homeland Security.

05:55:58.310 - 05:56:16.340

Do you also feel like there’s a need for...I know they are separate issues...but the same kind of department level for science and technology or innovation? Is that something that has crossed your mind or you would recommend? AUGUSTINE: I’ve thought about it a lot, and it’s a really hard question.

05:56:17.370 - 05:56:34.260

My initial reaction, of course, is yes, anything that important you ought to have a department in charge of it. The problem is that it permeates every other piece of the government. The Department of Transportation, the construction of bridges, air traffic

05:56:34.260 - 05:56:57.060

control, the Department of Health, the NIH. The Department of Energy is mostly science and technology. It makes so much sense, but I’ve ever been able to figure out a way to do it. It’s like saying we’ll have—well, we do obviously—it’d be like having a department

05:56:57.060 - 05:57:08.140

of money because everybody uses money. We do have a department of money, and we have a Department of Justice—, hopefully there’s justice in all of our other departments. This one strikes me as too hard.

05:57:09.300 - 05:57:26.570

But I sure have an open mind; if somebody’s got an idea, I’d love to hear it. I don’t have it. But it does seem to me that there could be a greater role for the Office of Science and Technology, for the president’s science advisor, for the PCAST.

05:57:29.590 - 05:57:51.540

As in the Pentagon—Pentagon has a lot of people; it’s responsible for a lot of missions, but it also has a department that’s in charge of things. Research and development. It has a science board. It has a lot of engineers, scientists working there, whereas the top of our

05:57:51.540 - 05:58:11.180

government, there’s not. Of course, up until recently, China was run almost entirely by engineers— One time I had a meeting.... I don’t think I mentioned this to you but I happened to have a meeting not dealing

05:58:11.180 - 05:58:31.100

with my government affiliation but with a corporate board I was on—not Lockheed Martin. I had a meeting with the President of China, some years ago. And when he found out I was an engineer, all he wanted to talk about was engineering and how you train engineers, what you do for engineering

05:58:31.100 - 05:58:45.020

shortages, and how you get young kids interested in engineering. Our robotics programs—how do they work for kids? He didn’t want to talk about the business issues I wanted to talk about. He was a dyed-in-the-wool engineer.

05:58:45.660 - 05:59:13.740

That’s never happened to me in this country; not once. I think if more of us could run the world, it would be different. We would solve the problem. Just to wrap kind of the end of the story, when I retired...

05:59:17.670 - 05:59:34.340

There's a moral to this story in addition to being kind of humorous... the first call I get, I think, was from Bill Frist, who was Speaker of the House at the time. Bill wanted to set up a Base Closing Commission, which has to be absolutely the

05:59:34.340 - 05:59:50.500

worst thing to work on in human history. I mean, you got to be suicidal to agree to do that. He wanted me to serve on it. Believe me, I didn’t want to do it.

05:59:50.610 - 06:00:15.020

I had just retired, and I have all these hobbies I was thinking I was going to work on. So I get a call from the White House...I told him I’d do it. So I get a call from the White House and they said in going through sixty-two-page form of conflicts—potential conflicts— that I’d submitted, we see you own Lockheed Martin stock.

06:00:15.440 - 06:00:23.540

By now, I had sold it because of other things. I guess I'd been asked to do something else, too. I sold my stock. Terrible mistake!

06:00:24.220 - 06:00:43.020

And they say, “We see on your form you have Lockheed Martin stock.” I said, “Well, that is true.” They said, “How much do you have?” I said, “One share.” They said, “How much do you make?” I happened to remember at that time, it was 63 cents a quarter. And if I sold the shares, I think it was like thirty-four dollars or something like

06:00:43.020 - 06:01:05.260

that. The person I’m talking to in the legal office—the White House—said, “Well, that’s a big problem.” I said, “You mean, you think I can be bought for sixty-three cents a quarter?” I said, “You’d make my wife very happy because I have to pay thirty cents tax on that, and it costs forty-three cents for her to deposit the

06:01:05.260 - 06:01:16.740

check in the bank. It’s costing me money every time I get one of these.” They said, “Well, this is a problem.” What is it called? The perception of the concept.

06:01:16.960 - 06:01:38.420

On conflicts of interest. Serious. So I call Lockheed Martin, their people who manage the shares. “I’ve got a great deal to offer you; it costs the company five dollars a year to send me my sixty-three cents check each quarter and to send me a copy of the annual

06:01:38.420 - 06:02:03.300

report. If you’ll quit paying me my sixty-three cents a quarter, you won’t have to pay any of those expenses to handle me as a shareholder anymore.” So they said, “Okay if you want to do that, fine.” Then the SEC steps in and says, “We notice that there’s a person—a shareholder—that you’re not sending dividends quarterly.

06:02:03.880 - 06:02:16.480

You gotta pay the man if he owns a share.” And so I go back to the government, “Sorry, I can’t..." Anyway, I never served on that commission. On later commissions, the same thing came up every time.

06:02:16.480 - 06:02:27.020

But every time then, I appealed to precedent I have these letters with sixty-three signatures of lawyers saying that they don’t think I can be bought for sixty-three cents. And I still have a share.

06:02:27.020 - 06:02:41.460

Oh, the reason I have that share...they said, “Will you sell the share?” I said no. They said, “Well, why won’t you sell it?” The reason is hanging on my wall over here; it’s share number one of Lockheed Martin. It's got my signature on it, having authorized its issue.

06:02:41.770 - 06:03:05.140

I’ll never sell that. It's worth two hundred dollars now, so it’s a big deal. Anyway, that’s the kind of nonsense you run into doing these things that just makes it harder than it has to be. And those are hard problems to solve. So anyway, since then, since I’ve retired...

06:03:05.910 - 06:03:27.980

My secretary looked it up the other day when she was submitting another Form 5 or whatever it’s called— I think I’ve chaired or co-chaired thirty-nine committees or commissions for the government in the twenty-three years since I’ve retired. That’s about all I do.

06:03:29.380 - 06:03:48.940

Totally pro bono. And it’s been for me the greatest experience working with the best people in the country on various subjects, learning so much, and hopefully making a contribution. It’s just been like going to graduate school for the last 23 years.

06:03:49.820 - 06:04:09.580

So it all ends up—that's kind of the end of the story. I have no regrets. Very few. No big ones. It’ll be funny to hear from Neal Lane whether he thinks he and I served on the

06:04:09.580 - 06:04:23.740

same PCAST together or not. CARUSO: Kenny, do you have any other questions? No? EVANS: No, I’m good. CARUSO: Okay.

06:04:23.830 - 06:04:46.340

Well, I mean, it’s almost six o’clock my time. So we’re pretty much at the end of the session. I know that you spoke a bit about...I mean, looking at your CV, your resume, it was quite clear that retirement for you didn’t mean that you’re going to stop working.

06:04:46.520 - 06:05:14.460

In some respects, you seem to be doing even more than when you were running a company. You know, with oral history interviews, we always want to provide interviewees with a chance to discuss things that maybe we didn’t ask questions about, to go down other paths that we didn’t necessarily go down in greater detail.

06:05:14.570 - 06:05:29.500

Obviously, we don’t have the time to do that right now, but if there are other things that you want to discuss, I want to make sure that you know if we need to set up another session—even if it’s a shorter one or something like that—that we do that because I don’t want to cut your story short, just because the interview

06:05:29.500 - 06:05:53.020

session was...is ending now. AUGUSTINE: Well, there’s just one thing that pops into my mind, and we’ve talked about it but it’s so important to me, and it’s particularly important today. That—what’s the word?—prestige, if it is—

06:05:53.940 - 06:06:10.900

that's assigned to people who work in our government—particularly the career civil servants, but not just those— many of the presidential appointees—not all, are some of the hardest working, most capable people I’ve ever worked with.

06:06:10.900 - 06:06:36.180

And I’ve worked a lot of different companies at various levels. The people I had the privilege of working with in our government not only should be higher paid but they deserve a lot more credit for what they do than they get. Matter of fact, I helped...played a tiny role...in starting up an organization when

06:06:36.180 - 06:06:52.650

I left the government that’s turned out to be very effective. I don’t have anything to do with it anymore—to try to honor people who serve in our government...but they only honor a handful a year. That's just a message I guess I'd liek to leave, that there’s a huge disconnect in this

06:06:52.650 - 06:07:08.860

country. Sure, there’s some people in industry that aren’t the greatest and there are some in government, but the overwhelming majority of people I dealt with in government—civil servants and most presidential appointees—were very dedicated, capable people.

06:07:09.140 - 06:07:23.780

I guess I’d like to get that on the record as somebody who spent ten years in government, thirty years in industry, and five years, or something like that, in academia. CARUSO: All right. Well, thank you very much for your time.

06:07:24.330 - 06:07:41.260

You know, as you may remember from when we were...before we started, what we’ll be doing is we’re going to be transcribing the interview. And once that’s done, we’ll be sending you a copy if there are things that you think need to be added, there’s time to add it; there’s room to add it.

06:07:41.350 - 06:07:53.020

And as I said, you know, if there are things that come to mind and you think that there are a couple more things I’d like to discuss, we can always schedule another session to capture that information as well. AUGUSTINE: Okay.

06:07:53.020 - 06:08:11.980

Well, as you can tell, I’ve enjoyed it. I haven’t had occasion to sit down and talk like this about what’s happened in the past, and I am working about as hard as I did; I don’t have as big a staff as I used to have at Lockheed Martin, but my secretary and I are pretty good together!

06:08:11.980 - 06:08:23.500

So anyway, thank you all. It’s been a pleasure visiting with you, and I hope I haven’t bored you to death. I look forward to continuing to work with you on some of the things we all care about.

06:08:24.220 - 06:08:27.500

CARUSO: Well, thank you very much for your time. EVANS: Thank you, Norm. AUGUSTINE: Take care.