Bill Anders and the Space Council

Since the beginning of the Nixon administration in 1969, the National Aeronautics and Space Council at the principal’s level had met infrequently, and its staff had not become closely involved in policy decisions related to human space flight. There had been proposals to eliminate the council during 1970, and in mid-1971, its future remained very much in doubt, although by that point the council staff members had developed good working relation­ships with their peers in the White House and the Office of Management and Budget and had become involved in policy choices related to NASA’s robotic space science and application programs and aeronautics program and to other government aeronautics and space activities.

Although the council’s executive secretary, Bill Anders, had carved out a personal role as adviser on space issues to the Office of Management and Budget’s Deputy Director Cap Weinberger, he was somewhat frustrated by the marginal role being played by the Space Council and its staff in the decisions regarding future human space efforts. He shared his frustration with Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater; Goldwater relayed that concern to Richard Nixon during a June 17, 1971, Oval Office meeting:

Goldwater : “I hate to burden you with a problem, but this young Bill Anders, who I think is one of the smartest boys around, I spoke to him today and I think he’s thinking of quitting. . . He’s in charge of the Space Council.”

Nixon : “I’ve got to use him someplace else. He’s bright as a tack. . . Let’s put him in that new deal [the ‘new NASA’] where we’re trying to develop the new, the water and all that sort of thing, the NASA management approach and so forth. Anders has got to be held.”5

Anders told George Low in early August that he had “about decided that a staff function without an active council had reached its point of diminishing returns” and that “he might propose to the White House that the National Aeronautics and Space Council should be abolished.” (He would make such a proposal in late 1972.) By the end of August, Anders had also become “extremely pessimistic” regarding White House staff attitudes, especially within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Science and Technology (OST), with respect to the human space flight pro­gram. Meeting with NASA Administrator Fletcher, he suggested that NASA “drop the shuttle completely and focus on evolving a space station out of Skylab.” Anders thought that “a vastly trimmed down manned space pro­gram, presented simultaneously with the closing of one of our centers, might make NASA more credible (and incidentally, more popular) with the ‘White House.’”6

As it became clear that the FY1973 budget process would be conten­tious, Tom Whitehead suggested that Vice President Agnew loan Anders to Peter Flanigan’s office to help Flanigan work with David, Don Rice, Al Haig (Henry Kissinger’s deputy at the National Security Council), and Whitehead “to square away coordination between the various elements of the Executive Office and the White House in the space area.” Whitehead thought that Anders’s help in “getting the various Executive Office agen­cies working along the same track” and “tiding us over a bit of confusion among all the players” was “almost essential.”7 Although Whitehead’s sug­gestion that Anders temporarily become part of Peter Flanigan’s staff was not pursued, Anders was one of those over the next several months working to bridge the gap between the views of OMB and OST on one hand and NASA on the other, hoping to arrive at a sensible presidential decision on the space shuttle.