It will not have escaped the attention of the alert reader that this is a technological appendix to a postblogging installment which hasn't posted yet. Why? A difficult work schedule and my own stubborn refusal to face the reality that I wasn't reasonably going to finish the installment before Tuesday.
Fortunately, we have a science-policy-politics story this week which deserves its prominence at every level, the "AD-X2 controversy," and another story, slowly rolling on to its 1958 denouement, the Chance-Vought F7U Cutlass, announced this month in an attack variant that Chance Vought expects to produce after completing its contract for 90 of the air superiority type.
Our historical memory of the Eisenhower Administration has over the years veered between a roseate nostalgia for the President of interstates and Brown Vs. Board of Education and an increasing disquiet as the damage done by the Guatemalan and Iranian coups keeps on compounding. There is, therefore, something revelatory about descending from our 20,000ft historical view into the trenches to find incoming Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks receiving a well-deserved bayoneting from Drew Pearson and the 400 employees of the National Bureau of Standards who threatened this week to quit if their boss, Allen V. Astin, were fired.Wikipedia has most of the details. I am a bit disgruntled with the National Bureau of Standard's willingness to play along with the McGraw-Hill syndicate's taste for cheap advertorial content, but it was, and is, one of the most essential and innocuous of American bureaucracies. If it were not for con artists' relentless activity, it would not have been involved in testing "lead storage battery additive" effectiveness at all, and it was clear enough by 1953 that there was no magical white powder that could be dumped into a wet battery to extend its life, including the AD-X2 powder marketed through the mails by Jess M. Ritchie, "CEO" of Pioneers, Incorporated, an Oakland-based firm that apparently had enough pull on the Oakland Chamber of Commerce, and they upon Sinclair Weeks, to have Dr. Astin fired for having the temerity to provide scientific support postal fraud charges against Pioneers.
Weeks' Wikipedia biography might be a parody of the life of an old New England Republican, spending more words on the family estate in New Hampshire than on his tenure as Commerce Secretary. I cannot begin to speculate on whether his 1958 departure from the Cabinet was his ineptitude catching up with him, or the state reason, his first wife's last illness. (It seems as though the wife was the one with the pull, anyway.) I would personally regard the whole "AD-X2" story as fatally wounding, but as we'll see when the postblog installment goes up, the Administration had bigger problems. Besides, the President's incapacitating "flu" this month looks awfully like early indications of his first major heart attack on 24 September 1955. Senator Taft, the Administration's unwilling white knight, is definitely sick, and Dulles' first cancer surgery is less than three years away. These are not well men, so I guess it is a mercy for American politics that Joe McCarthy is self-medicating his own issues.
By LanceBarber (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24002787 |
Government mismanagement of science and technology policy: that's my through line here, and the view from the weeds, before we get back to 20,000ft views of "who won the week" with the political press. A rogue political appointee thinking that he can get away with firing the head of the fucking National Bureau of Standards over some Oakland con artist's magic battery juice is surely a sign of rot at the top. But is it more than that? I think it is.
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