TIU OYI RTON BROOKS YEARS, 1959-61 



$5 



minor positions. Brooks also borrowed on reimbursable detail a series 

 of officers from the Army, Navy, and Air Force who came over, one at 

 a time, to assist the committee staff. These officers were generally of 

 high caliber, and the committee gained substantial support through 

 their technically competent staff work. 



In terms of arranging hearings, producing a monumental number 

 of professional staff reports, and keeping the 25 committee members 

 briefed during a very fast-moving situation in a technically complex 

 field, the staff performed remarkably well during the Brooks chairman- 

 ship, 1959-61. Ducander assumed the dual role of briefing the chairman 

 and directing the staff. Because of the difference in backgrounds of 

 various members of the staff, there were serious and voluble disagree- 

 ments over countless points of jurisdiction, leadership, direction, and 

 quality of performance. Occasionally, these disagreements erupted 

 into public print, to the horror of Chairman Brooks. 



Perhaps the most serious attack publicly made on the committee 

 was printed in the widely read editorials of Robert Hotz in Aviation 

 Week and Space Technology. Hotz had printed some highly compli- 

 mentary remarks in his editorial columns about the select committee 

 during 1958, and in 1959 he began to compare the new committee, its 

 staff, and its leadership very unfavorably with the select committee. 

 Then on February 1, 1960, Hotz blasted the committee and Chairman 

 Brooks in particular. On the staff, he leveled these charges at Brooks: 



He has failed to appoint a technically qualified professional staff, without 

 which the committee cannot hope to be taken seriously, and has apparently used 

 residency in his home district of Shreveport, La., as the sole qualification for what 

 staff appointments have been made. This failure to provide the committee with a 

 professionally qualified staff and the curious practice of Chairman Brooks forbidding 

 staff members to provide questions to other committee members has turned the current 

 hearings into a series of petty squabbles and allowed them to drift into bayous of 

 technical stagnancy rather than keeping sharply in the mainstream of current space 

 problems. 



Chairman Brooks was stung by the editorial. He telephoned 

 Hotz and invited him to have lunch with him at the Capitol, where he 

 discussed at length these and other accusations. He wrote a lengthy 

 rebuttal to the editorial which was a masterful response covering 

 every point which Hotz raised (the answer was printed in the Feb- 

 ruary 22, 1960, issue). Among Brooks' comments on the staff were the 

 following: 



Knowing as we do that Members of Congress are, generally speaking, not 

 experts in science and in space technology and exploration, this committee has tried 

 to gather together a competent and experienced staff. We feel that we have done so. 

 It is headed by a career congressional employee who is regarded as one of the foremost 

 professional staff experts on Capitol Hill, with more than 11 years' experience. 



