Paine’s Departure

Just before these delicate and complex negotiations got under way the Europeans lost one of their most trusted allies: NASA administrator Tom Paine.

Paine was convinced that if NASA was to going to sell its post-Apollo pro­gram, it had to adopt what he called a “swashbuckling, buccaneering, privateer­ing kind of approach.”114 He tried to enroll the White House in his ambitions plans by writing several letters to the president, encouraged by Nixon repeating publicly in March 1970 that he hoped for “greater international cooperation.”115 His energetic advocacy was not, however, matched by the administration’s sup­port for NASA.

NASA’s ambitions were reined in by transformations to the decision-making process on the budget. Nixon elevated the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) into the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in July 1970, and gave it wide – ranging powers to evaluate program performance and budgetary requests before they were submitted to Congress. This arm of the administration was thus a cardinal player in the assessment of budget requests coming up from the various government agencies (only the CIA and the DoD were apparently able to over­ride their strictures), and its officers had a crucial role in transforming general policy statements into concrete programs with a realistic (in their eyes) dollar amount attached to them.

These changes had palpable effects on NASA’s budget. Indeed between the time that Paine made his ebullient speech in Europe in October 1969 and the Congressional debate on the budget in the first six months of 1970, he saw NASA’s future funds cut by over 25 percent. His proposed budget for FY1971 was $4.25 billion, a sum that he had already reluctantly reduced by about $0.25 billion. The BOB lopped $0.8 billion off that. Senior White House staffers Peter Flanigan and Thomas Clay Whitehead pruned it further. Flanigan was an invest­ment banker who had been Nixon’s campaign manager in 1968 and who had been given oversight responsibilities for space. Whitehead was a systems analyst from RAND who was asked by Flanigan to assess NASA’s budget and planning procedures. Flanigan and Whitehead reduced the BOB figure to $3.53 billion, and then, even as Paine was announcing this to the press, cut it by a further 2.5 percent to $3.3 billion as part of an across-the-board reduction to present a balanced budget to Congress for FY1971. Paine’s budget proposal thus suffered a massive reduction of some $1.2 billion in a few months.116

Then there was the situation in Congress. A survey of Congressional opinion covering the first 11 months of 1970 remarked that ‘‘[ijnflation, increasingly pressing domestic social problems, urban decay, environmental pollution and growing popular disenchantment with Federal programs that could possibly be called technological luxuries” had pushed space well down the list of national priorities. This was exacerbated by the success of Apollo 11 and 12, which sug­gested that the United States was well ahead of the USSR in the “space race.”117

The Cold War rationale for a major space program had lost its bite, and the sat­isfaction of domestic social needs was uppermost in the minds of both Congress and the Senate.

President Nixon was also less committed personally to space than was President Johnson, who had, of course, made the conquest of space his signature item in the run up to the 1960 presidential election. What is more when Nixon spoke of international collaboration he had the communist bloc foremost in mind. European matters took second place to his concern to establish east-west detente. This was translated into the signature of major international agreements intended to stabilize the international order, including a collaborative space ven­ture that involved the docking in space of an Apollo and a Soyuz spacecraft (see chapter 7).118

In a climate where interest in space was rapidly declining, where financial restraint was imperative, where the old Cold War arguments for a major space program had lost their punch, and where the budget process was dominated by people who were determined to clamp down on expenditure and were very reluctant to authorize new open-ended projects, support for a major post-Apollo program was anything but assured. Paine was not particularly good at adapting his proposals to this political reality: he rather naively believed that his enthu­siasm and the self-evident (to him) merits of NASA’s proposals would persuade the White House to endorse them and Congress to fund them. He was even less able to manage the internal dynamics in the White House and the power that the BOB had over preliminary budget estimates, nor the hostility felt by people like Tom Whitehead to his ambitions.

In August 1970 Thomas Paine decided to return to private life. One of the last things he did was to thank Henry Kissinger for his “strong and effective sup­port” in their “joint efforts to increase international participation in the space programs of the United States.” He also expressed his “deep appreciation” to U. Alexis Johnson (State Department) for his “help and encouragement” in the past, and urged his continued “strong support [. . .] to increase substantially par­ticipation by other nations in our space program.”119

As Joan Hoff puts it, Paine’s departure from NASA on September 15, 1970, “came as a welcome relief to both the legislative and executive branches of government.”120 The reaction in Europe was just the contrary. Paine’s “convic­tion and enthusiasm,” his “friendliness and open-mindedness,” would be missed. So would his recognition, not generally shared in Washington, that “we cannot have significant international cooperation without some real dependency, each side upon the other.”121 The secretary general of ELDO spoke for all on that side of the Atlantic when he wrote to Paine that “[w]e will [. . .] be deeply affected by your leaving NASA which will mean the break in an important personal link which has been of the greatest value at this still rather provisional stage of our common enterprise.”122