THE EARLY MILLER YEARS 



107 



Boone proved to be a good staff member on the scientific and technical 

 side, but others showed that the greatest talent provided by the com- 

 mittee staff was in the area of management. The best staff members 

 were those who sensed the right policy and management questions to 

 ask, could challenge bureaucratic practices and see through efforts to 

 gloss over problems, and could write clearly and simply traits not 

 always possessed by the technical "experts." 



At the final executive session of the committee for 1962, held on 

 September 26, Chairman Miller expressed the "hope that in the not- 

 too-distant future we can get physical facilities that will allow us to 

 expand the staff. We could have expanded the staff, but we would 

 have no place for them to work. We examined this quite thoroughly. 

 They would be sitting in one another's laps." 



In the final analysis, Chairman Miller simply resisted the efforts 

 of his committee members to gain more staff assistance, and he was 

 chairman in the days when revolutions were generally unsuccessful. 



THE COMMITTEE AND THE MERCURY PROGRAM 



The Russian cosmonauts were the best thing the American space 

 program had going for it. Gagarin jolted America toward speedier 

 action leading to the May 25, 1961, decision to go to the Moon. After 

 the successful suborbital flights of Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, 

 NASA hoped to go for a three-orbit flight to beat Gagarin's one-orbit 

 effort. Then along came Cosmonaut Gherman S. Titov with a day-long, 

 17-orbit flight on August 7, 1961. Instead of a drop in public support 

 for the Mercury program, the Titov flight seemed to rally public 

 opinion behind John Glenn as he prepared for three orbits of the 

 Earth. 



Delays plagued the Glenn blastoff during January and early 

 February. Some members of the committee were irked at some more 

 headline-grabbing by the ranking Republican, Jim Fulton, who re- 

 marked after an unsuccessful launch attempt on January 27, 1962, 

 that the Mercury capsule and Atlas booster were "a Rube Goldberg 

 device on top of a plumber's nightmare." Trouble had developed in 

 one of the bulkheads of the Atlas booster. Dr. Robert R. Gilruth, Direc- 

 tor of the Manned Spacecraft Center, had no recollection of Fulton's 

 statement, which made the front page of the Washington Post. But 

 Gilruth did remember one Congressman who made no public state- 

 ments or press releases at the time: 



Mr. Tcague was with us during those real key times — like just before we or- 

 bited John Glenn. We had so much trouble with the Atlas rocket with the bulk- 

 head. * * * He was always right there, and he was always supportive. It was good to 

 have somebody who could understand and help you like he did. 



