Copyright © 1999
by Robert G. Morris
SECTION III. ORGANIZING
GOVERNMENT TO DEAL WITH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ISSUES IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
"Few people would live in Washington, I take it, who were not obliged to live there..."
Charles Dickens
CHAPTER 15.
Organization Takes Form
"He [The Secretary of State] drew up an enormous and impressive chart with myriad boxes in orderly array."
Robert E. Sherwood, quoted by Dean Acheson
Special Assistants
and Science Advisers
The first scientist-diplomats
were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who carried out their duties
primarily abroad. Although men of science, their diplomatic duties
focused on obtaining political recognition and financial aid for their
new country. Scientific issues in the conduct of affairs by the United
States did not cause any organizational response until after World War
II when U.S. science was undergoing vast changes as a result of its mobilization
for national defense.
The first designated science officer in the Department of State was the Special Assistant to the Secretary for Atomic Energy in 1946, Edmund GullionGullion:Science special assistant GullionScience special assistant GullionScience special assistant GullionScience special assistant GullionScience special assistant .11 His position was of obvious need since atomic energy (or more precisely, nuclear energy) had revolutionized the conduct of war and brought peace with Japan far earlier than anticipated. Future U.S. foreign policy could scarcely be formulated without taking nuclear energy into account, particularly with respect to the initial U.S. monopoly. The special assistant's scope later included space affairs.
Overseas, the United States established a mission for science and technology at the embassy in London in 1947 to continue close cooperation carried out during the war. President Truman's Scientific Research Board in 1947 had recommended that "...development of this kind of foreign service be considered an essential part of the national science program." Dr. Earl A. Evans was appointed mission director; Dr. Joseph Koepfli, a chemist from Caltech, and W. R. Woolrich, Dean of Engineering at the University of Texas, were among the first staff members. They were charged to relate what science policy Britain was pursuing to what U.S. science policy might be.
The London office operated without a focal point in Washington since there was not yet an administrative unit for science and technology in the Department of State, only the special assistant; other recipients of London's reports apparently didn't know what to do with them. By 1949 the London effort had withered.12
Upon recommendation of a study group headed by Dr. Lloyd Berkner the State Department in 1951 established the Office of Science Adviser in the department, and Dr. Koepfli was appointed as head although the old special assistant's role continued until 1962. At the same time science officers, then called attachés, were assigned to embassies in Bern, Stockholm, Paris, Bonn and Tokyo. The appointment of Koepfli and these attachÈs overseas was the genesis of the science function in the Department of State.
The Berkner report placed heavy emphasis on the overseas science officers' reporting of foreign scientific developments. Little if any mention was made of a need for scientific information for the formulation of foreign policy or even of science policy. Yet information on science policy was exactly what the overseas attaches were trying to provide. Budget restrictions made the overseas appointments moribund after 1953 when Koepfli resigned, and the last science attaché came home by 1955. There was then no science function in the State Department in Washington or overseas until after the Russian Sputnik was launched in 1957. In that year the Office of the Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology was established at the White House. This was the first of the presidential science adviser positions, a post that remains today but which has undergone change and suffered hiatus. An advisory committee chaired by the presidential science adviser recommended reestablishment of the science adviser's position in the Department of State, which was carried out in 1958.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles selected Wallace Brode, associate director of the National Bureau of Standards, as the new science adviser. Skolnikoff writes that "the emphasis of the office during Dr. Brode's tenure and, indeed, during the tenure of his successors, was again on international scientific activities."13 Brode was succeeded in 1960 by MIT's chemical engineering department chairman Walter WhitmanWhitman:science adviser at State Whitmanscience adviser at State Whitman, who retired in 1962.
Science Office, Bureau
Confirm Science Function
The name of the Office of
the Science Advisor at State was changed to the Office of International
Scientific Affairs in 1962. It became in 1967 the Office of International
Scientific and Technological Affairs, but was still referred to within
the State Department as SCI. The director of the office, by 1970
designated a bureau, was the equivalent to an assistant secretary.
It took its place with other bureaus like EUR (European and Canadian Affairs)
and EB (Economic and Business Affairs) until it was reorganized and renamed
in 1974 the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific
Affairs with designation OES.
The establishment of the Office of International Scientific Affairs is documented in Foreign Affairs Manual Circular, no. 84, of Sept. 14, 1962. The key function of the office was "to provide advice and guidance...on matters concerning science and technology in foreign affairs." Ragnar Rollefson, a physicist from the University of Wisconsin, was announced as the new Director of SCI late in 1962. When he retired in 1964 he was succeeded after a short time by Herman Pollack, a career officer, as acting director. After giving up a search for another scientist to succeed Rollefson, the Department appointed Pollack as director in 1967.
From 1946-1962 the main purpose of the science officers at State in Washington was liaison with the scientific community. The community provided advice to the Department and also supported classic exchange programs that involved scientists. Such programs, as mentioned, had been around for decades and revolved around the not altogether vain hope that putting American scholars, students and teachers in foreign countries, by public and private means, would foster the general internationalization that underlies so much of our foreign affairs and which intensified after World War II. The accommodation of foreign scientists in the United States completed the exchange.
Before 1962 there was little direct involvement of the science function and its practitioners in the formulations and execution of science policy in foreign affairs, at least at the State Department. Enabling legislation for postwar technical agencies like the Atomic Energy CommissionAtomic Energy Commission Atomic Energy Commission Atomic Energy Commission Atomic Energy Commission Atomic Energy Commission in 1946, as amended in 1954, (later incorporated into the Department of Energy), the National Science Foundation in 1950 and NASA in 1958, specifically provided for international activity. What is now the Department of Health and Human Services has also had in its various organizations strong provision for international R&D activity for obvious reasons. Agriculture had always been research-oriented and international in outlook, as shown by its assignment of an agricultural attaché to the American Embassy in Berlin in 1898.14 Eventually, scarcely any U.S. government agency would remain outside the thrall of international science.
As agency international programs grew, the international offices of the agencies were formed and expanded. Increasingly, the State Department became aware only indirectly of agencies' undertaking projects abroad. In the few cases where they impinged on the overall foreign relations between two countries, State was poorly positioned to influence the outcome, failing heavy-handed veto. Even later, the much-enlarged science function at State was dwarfed by the bureaucratic array of assets around Washington, and much of State's goal remained monitoring and guiding the programs of others so that they remained consistent with U.S. foreign policy goals. This was particularly true for agency programs in the USSR and Eastern Europe, in Spain and in India.
At first persons filling positions in the science function at State were scientists. If permanent employees, they were usually civil servants, not foreign service officers. Some came from science agencies like the AEC. It made sense to recruit scientists to link the department with the S&T community and to obtain expert advice.
Some of these scientists fared poorly in the bureaucratic milieu of the department, Washington as a whole and the embassy. They were often temporary and inexperienced in how the government worked. They were helpful in coordinating government support of international scientific congresses like the International Geophysical Year in 1957-8 but found it hard to make an institutional impact.
Congress Redesigns
Science Bureau
Congress adopted in 1973
legislation that was the first such action to create a bureau at the Department
of State: The Bureau of International Environmental and Scientific Affairs
(OES), in large part the handiwork of former foreign service officer Claiborne
Pell, member and later chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The Department of State generally opposed efforts to establish by law this
or any bureau, but finally issued regulations calling upon OES to perform
"functions relating to international scientific, technological, environmental,
weather, oceans, atmosphere, fisheries, wildlife, conservation, health,
population, and related matters."
The department assigned to OES, although unmentioned in the legislation, the responsibility for "atomic energy and energy-related research and development, space technology, and other advanced technological developments except those that are primarily defense related." The bureau's responsibilities, particularly in the field of energy, have been contested, diluted, traded, shared and even transferred (under duress) since the new bureau's formation.15 For example, in the departmental reorganization of 1993 all responsibility for nuclear energy was transferred to the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.16 Even though the legislation creating OES dates from 1973 the new bureau did not exist until October 14, 1974, nearly a year after Public Law 93-126 creating it was passed.17
The bureau was headed by
an assistant secretary, as most other departmental bureaus are; the first
one was to be Dixy Lee RayRay, formerly Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission
(merged into the Department of Energy), later governor of Washington.
Although, as mentioned, the new bureau had nominal responsibility for "atomic
energy and energy-related research and development," the October 15, 1974,
departmental press release18 announced the creation of only three deputy
assistant secretaryships and the first appointments to fill them:
Herman Pollack left the post of director of the old SCI bureau on August 1, 1974, to make room for the new assistant secretary of OES. He had directed SCI from 1964-1974. He was able in this time to see the science function that he had built in the Department of State grow in influence along the lines that he indisputably set down. What Harold Ross was to The New Yorker, Herman Pollack was to SCI. No one more dedicated ever headed SCI or OES, notwithstanding his lack of scientific training.19 Indeed, one can make the unexpected argument that the best leaders of SCI and later OES have been professional officers, not scientists or political appointees from the outside. Pollack was the prime example of a career officer who mastered the science policy side of the job while controlling the foreign policy and administrative sectors. Members of SCI knew that Secretary Kissinger, no advocate of establishing the new bureau, had nevertheless been "a little crude" in dismissing Pollack. Pollack became a professor at George Washington University and served on many boards and committees until his death at 73 in 1993.
Early in 1975 the new assistant secretary, Dixy Lee Ray, designated a fourth deputy assistant secretary20 -- for nuclear energy and energy technology affairs. Reorganization of SCI into OES was thus complete and lasted essentially until 1993. There was a subsequent addition of a principal deputy assistant secretary who served as assistant and substitute for the assistant secretary in all the OES areas of competence and a coordinator for population affairs along with a continuing shifting of responsibilities in the energy area.
In 1974 there were about forty professionals in Washington and twenty full-time science officers in embassies overseas. By 1986, the number in Washington had increased to ninety, the number overseas to about forty. Twenty-four officers in Washington had S&T degrees and twenty overseas.21
Other Science and Technology
Agencies
Nearly every department
and many agencies have S&T mandates that permit or encourage international
cooperation. This is particularly true of the "new" agencies that
had it in their charters. These included NSF and NASA, but nearly
every other agency was active in international cooperation by precedent
and practice. Although actual staffing varies, it has often been
remarked that some individual S&T agencies have numbers of personnel
in their international offices comparable to what the Department of State
has in its entire science bureau.
Indeed, the S&T agencies must take policy guidance from the Department of State, and they do. Only occasionally do they make a misstep in their eagerness to cooperate, say, with a country that State does not want to "reward" with American science and technology. In the 1970s the United States withheld cooperation from Czechoslovakia for its mistreatment of intellectuals; later it would have been hard to imagine approval of any kind of an S&T program with Cuba or North Korea. But as political relations have soured or prospered in the past, withholding or extending S&T cooperation was either a barometer or leading indicator of the relations. One year's deprived nation is next year's winner: consider the recovered fortunes of the USSR, East Germany, China, Vietnam; technology club members can as rapidly fall out of favor.
White House
As mentioned, President
Eisenhower moved the Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) into the White House
in 1957 when he established the post of Special Assistant to the President
for Science and Technology. The committee established a panel on
science and foreign policy.
The precipitating incident for these moves was the Soviet launch of the small earth-orbiting satellite Sputnik in 1957. The committee was to advise the president on how to organize space research in the United States and how to assure the health of U.S. science. Establishment of NASA in 1958 was a direct result of its recommendations. The Committee members also served as science advisers to the President and the Department of State from 1958-1963 on nuclear test ban negotiations that led in the latter year to the limited test ban treaty. The first five years of PSAC thus were very auspicious for the recognition of the use and value of science in foreign affairs by the Executive Branch.
A vast amount of material exists on the establishment, successes and failures of the White House science function.22 Each step along its tortuous bureaucratic development path had implications for science and foreign affairs. Organizationally, the committee's panel on science and foreign policy successfully urged recreation at State in 1958 of the science adviser's office that had fallen on hard times two years after its 1951 inception. The president's science office assumed even greater importance as reorganized after the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy. It remained active in foreign affairs proposing how to take advantage of science in the Alliance for Progress, foreign aid and other initiatives to advance U.S. interests overseas.
It was at the recommendation of the White House that executive departments reorganized and increased their efforts to develop and use science and technology in pursuit of their missions. The special assistant and the committee were instrumental in establishment (1961) of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). In 1962 President Kennedy set up the Office of Science and Technology (OST) in the Executive Office of the President approved but not established by Congress. The special assistant became director of OST.
President Nixon abolished the Office of Science and Technology in 1973. In 1976, however, on the recommendation of both President Ford and Vice President Rockefeller, Congress reestablished OST by law, renaming it the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). This mechanism of S&T policy formulation continues to the present day: the special assistant for science and technology (also termed the president's science adviser) also serves as director of OSTP.
The Federal Council
President Eisenhower set
up the Federal Council for Science and Technology (FCST) in 1959 to coordinate
S&T policy among government departments and agencies with S&T missions
(including State). The committee underwent administrative changes
and later was known as the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering
and Technology (FCCSET, pronounced FIX-SET), chaired by the director of
OSTP. Its purpose remained the development of uniform or integrated
science polices throughout the government, including, of course, the Department
of State.
Of most foreign affairs interest was the standing committee on international science of the federal council, first chaired by the Department of State because it had the obvious task of coordinating agencies' international S&T programs. As OSTP and FCCSET evolved, power shifted among the members according to personalities, bureaucratic bent and issues involved. For example, for a time in the late 1980s OSTP denied State the chairmanship of the international science committee, then called the Committee on International Science, Engineering and Technology (CISET). State chose not to contest the bureaucratic power play.
Congress
Congress, of course, makes
decisions on government S&T programs in foreign affairs via legislation,
particularly appropriations that originate in the House of Representatives.
Several committees and subcommittees share congressional oversight of science
and technology and their impact on foreign affairs. The committee
lineup can change with the session, the leadership and the majority party.
In the 1990s three key Senate committees shared much of the work:
In the House of Representatives, a larger membership permits an entire committee devoted to science and technology called simply the Committee on Science. The International Relations Committee provides international oversight in the House.
On the House Committee on Science forty-six members serve on a number of subcommittees that varies with the chairman, the issues and the majority party. Generally taken up by these subcommittees are issues divided according to subjects like energy, space, technology, environment and research.
But in Congress international S&T issues can arise almost anywhere, and often do in Senate or House committees concerned with commerce, education, resources, transportation or agriculture. Thus legislative oversight is no more simple or straightforward than oversight of science and technology in the executive branch.
End of chapter 15.