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1032 Walter A. McDougall 



Technological Republic must outfight and outshine the Ideological Republics of 

 Moscow and Peking. 



The symbol and vanguard of the technocratic movement was NASA — efficient, 

 daring, scientific, surely the locus of meritocracy. But the scale of the Apollo 

 program called for more, for what James E. Webb dubbed a "managerial 

 revolution." Not only did NASA pioneer streamlined managerial techniques for 

 integrating its own diverse projects, but it also formalized the links within the 

 institutional triad of the federal agency, corporation, and university on which 

 American society rests. This government-industry-university team, consciously 

 cultivated by NASA, mobilized the nation's human and material resources for 

 "war" on the technological frontier.^' 



For a time in the extravagant 1960s the American imagination exhibited that 

 complacent exuberance attending the belief that one has magic, if not the gods, on 

 one's side. "The technological revolution that is now fully upon us," wrote Webb, 



is the most decisive event of our times. . . . Unless a nation purposefully and systematically 

 stimulates its technological advances into the sinews of the system, it will surely drop 

 behind. . . . The great issue of this age is whether the United States can, within the 

 framework of existing institutions, organize the development and use of advanced 

 technologies more effectively than can the Soviet Union. 



Success would stem from "our almost miraculous capacity to use existing technolo- 

 gy to create new technology. "''* Such encomiums were common. Even Adlai 

 Stevenson proclaimed, "Science and technology are making the problems of today 

 irrelevant in the long run, because our economy can grow to meet each new charge 

 placed upon it. . . . This is the basic miracle of modern technology. ... It is a magic 

 wand that gives us what we desire!"^^ 



Miracles and magic — such faith helped to sustain a sixtold increase in federal 

 obligations for research and development from 1955 to 1965. By the mid-1960s, 

 the federal government had come to fund 80 percent of all research and 

 development performed in the United States, and 90 percent of that under the 

 aegis of the Department of Defense, NASA, and the Atomic Energy Commission. 

 Organized change in the United States had been virtually nationalized. This 

 saltation in the role of the state in creating new knowledge and power was itself 

 transmitted abroad through the international imperative to accelerate technologi- 

 cal, and thus economic and social, change elsewhere. Despite the vast lead and 

 greater resources of the United States and Soviet Union, virtually every other major 

 power on earth struggled to duplicate the rudiments of space technology and foster 

 advanced aerospace industries. Public justifications of the vigorous space program 

 of France or Europe as a whole, or of China or Japan, rested on the maxim that 

 securitv and economic growth in the postmodern age of scientific-technological 



" The stieiKC of mana);ing large systems in fields promoliiig rapid innovaliun owes muth to the cxperieni c 

 of the Uopartnieiit of Defense and NA.SA in developing missile technology. General Bernard Schriever. thief 

 of Air Forte missile programs in the 19.50s. and Kennedy's appointments to head NAS.A and the Pentagon. 

 James Webb and Rot)ert MtNamara. were instrumental. 



" Webb. Space Af^e ManagemetU: The Lurge-Sfale Approruh (New York, 1969). thap. L'. 



" Stevenson. "Stiente and Technology in the Political .■\rcna," in Xerox Corporation, Science and Society: A 

 Symposium (New York, 1965) 



