320 ORGANIZING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR WAR 



Budget to permit the transfer of funds to support its activities. Bills were 

 then introduced in Congress to establish the Board on a statutory basis, but 

 there was no real effort to get action because of the expectation that legisla- 

 tion to support scientific research on a broader basis might soon be con- 

 sidered by Congress. 



Two bills to effect this were introduced in the Senate. The first (S. 1297, 

 79th Congress), by Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, had gone 

 through several revisions; it proposed, among other things, the creation of 

 a National Science Foundation, one of whose duties would be the promotion 

 of military research. The second (S. 1285), by Senator Warren Magnuson 

 of Washington, was based largely on the Bush report entitled Science — the 

 Endless Frontier and was designed to carry out the recommendations in 

 that report. Among other things, it proposed a National Research Founda- 

 tion, with a division devoted to military research. The bills differed in a 

 number of important respects, but finally after joint hearings on the two 

 bills a compromise bill was worked out (S. 1850) which was approved by 

 the supporters of both the Kilgore and Magnuson bills. The OSRD and its 

 constituent committees were to be transferred to the National Science 

 Foundation under the compromise bill. The compromise bill passed the 

 Senate, but Congress adjourned while the bill was still before a commit- 

 tee of the House of Representatives. 



OSRD was created to do an important but temporary job. The organiza- 

 tion was built on a temporary basis, drawing upon the best available men 

 for relatively short periods of time without disturbing their regular academic 

 or industrial connections in most cases. This was possible largely because of 

 the pressure of impending and actual war which made men available whose 

 services could not have been obtained on any comparable scale in normal 

 times. The leaders of OSRD were always keenly conscious of this fact, 

 which, however, completely escaped many people on the outside who, seeing 

 the success of OSRD, called for its retention into peacetime. There was 

 never any chance that this could be done. Once the pressure of war lifted, 

 the key men upon whom its success depended responded to the more urgent 

 calls of their regular activities and not all the king's horses nor all the king's 

 men could hold the group together. While the name and a shell of an 

 organization could be passed on, OSRD as it operated during the war 

 definitely ceased with the end of hostilities. Had the inevitability of this 

 fact been appreciated in high quarters, the question of a successor might 

 not still be open at this late date. 



