190 ORGANIZING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR WAR 



highly classified information and convincing the scientists that they could 

 function within the limits of military security. It meant devising means of 

 insuring the protection of the public interest in the patentable aspects of 

 new developments as well as stimulating reluctant contractors to action in 

 various ways. It meant handling the administrative relations common to all 

 Government agencies and also the governmental contacts involved in over 

 2500 contracts with several hundred contractors. It meant finding ways by 

 which a group of outstanding individualists could be satisfied to work 

 within the framework of decades of "red tape." It meant setting seemingly 

 impossible schedules of performance in "paper work" and then meeting 

 those schedules. It meant struggling against a growing work load with a 

 staff increasingly inadequate in numbers. It meant working under the 

 constant demand for speed in every operation because of the recognition 

 of the cumulative effect of delays. 



It meant these and a thousand other things, all directed toward speeding 

 improved equipment to the battle front and all handled by a temporary 

 staff, for the most part trained on the job in the things they had to do. 



Flexibility was the keynote of the operations of the Administrative Office 

 as it was of the whole of OSRD. There was little, if anything, unusual in 

 the formal organization; there was much that was unusual in the spirit 

 which dominated it. The same spirit, derived in part from the pressure of 

 war, prevailed throughout OSRD and was one of the most important fac- 

 tors in its success. 



