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1972: Choose your Future(s)
It’s 1972. What does the American future look like, right through the early years of the 21st century? Fifty years ago, President Nixon’s panels of trusted advisors offered him a range of options regarding funding for new technological initiatives. These were big long-term projects, with effects over as much as a half-century: medicine, nuclear research, telecommunications, and transportation engineering, from space to subways.
The proposals: A famous inventor foresees a “New Rural Society”, where work, banking, and socializing are done from home with two-way TV, and home is wherever you want it to be. NASA wants the go-ahead to create a land-able, reusable spacecraft that will be the first step in opening space to private commerce. America’s cities are eager to build a new generation of automated urban mass transit, to be run on cheap, abundant, nuclear-generated electricity. Supporters of federal funding for supersonic transport airliners point to government-funded SSTs being built in Europe and Russia and ask if we’re going to sit this one out. This jumble of 70s visions is now largely settled—proven to be good or bad investments. Some are still in progress, a half-century later. And there’s still a remainder, a handful of technological question marks whose futures are unknown even now.
The Nixon administration placed its bets. I’d like to examine some of those bets in retrospect. How did it turn out? Do they make sense now? Did they make sense even in ’72? This post is part of the March 2022 Group Writing project “Now and Then”.
The Space Transportation System—the Shuttle—had emerged as NASA’s pick for its next major project after Apollo. The key idea was reusability: the shuttle would be the first orbital “airliner”, making access to space routine, at a much more affordable pounds-to-orbit price than then-current one-use, “throwaway” spacecraft. Shuttles could land at civilian airports and someday be leased to private businesses. Mathematica, then a think tank of technology consultants, projected a launch rate high enough to pay back the government’s investment.
Superficially, it seemed like not only a winner, but a no-brainer, but getting a compromise design through the aerospace industry and the federal bureaucracy to Nixon’s desk took most of his first term. The result was bigger than NASA needed, big enough for Department of Defense secret payloads, as well as the National Reconnaissance Office’s biggest spy satellites. That’s how the funding to build the Shuttle finally got put together.
The White House verdict: George Schulz, Nixon’s budget chief, signaled his approval, and his boss went along with an $8 billion plan to get a shuttle flying by 1978. It made sense for Nixon politically: with Apollo and the LBJ defense buildup fading, defense contractors were hurting badly, especially in Richard Nixon’s political heartland, rock-solid Republican southern California. After the Democratic congress made clear that with social needs unmet, the manned space program was lucky to get anything, that shuttle development budget would be chopped to $5.5 billion for a 1979 debut, “take it or leave it”. NASA took it. They knew that Nixon had cut them the best deal that they were going to get.
The aftermath: Despite a lot of manufacturing challenges, the first flight, STS-1 took place in early 1981 and the Space Transportation System’s ambitious design seemed vindicated. It worked, and for the early years of the Reagan administration, it was America’s pride and joy. But it turned out to an unforgiving, fragile system, much riskier than planned, and extremely expensive, failing in its main goal of making space more affordable. Each routine flight to low Earth orbit ended up as costly as a three-man Apollo flight to the Moon. Nixon’s people deserve little of the blame. Even the people who put them up to it, at NASA, DoD, and the intelligence community, acted with the best information they had. Transitioning the space program to private industry would eventually start to happen, with later generations of technology and of business leadership.
Another file on Nixon’s desk: Supersonic airliners had been in development since the early ‘60s. In the US, the center of the planet’s densest web of airline routes, it was accepted as a matter of course that air travel would inevitably get faster and faster. After all, that’s what had always happened. It was only expected that America’s airframe and engine manufacturers would lead the way. So it was a mild shock when Britain and France announced plans to build the Concorde, the USSR unveiled the supersonic Tu-144, and it seemed like we were dithering on the sidelines. Nixon was pressured to loosen the purse strings and catch up.
The Verdict: To the surprise of many, the Nixon White House refused to take on the burden of subsidizing the creation of an American SST.
Why did they turn thumbs down on it while they turned thumbs up on the Shuttle? Unlike manned space travel, passenger air transportation had (almost) always been civilian, funded by private industry. The postwar airplane makers’ biggest indirect subsidy was the ability to turn military freighter and bomber airframes into civilian airliners, and then jetliners. That progression stopped at the supersonic border; planes like the B-70 Valkyrie weren’t adaptable to passenger use.
Now, to be sure, it was also true that the politics of the decision weren’t helpful to Boeing’s fledgling 2707 SST. State of Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, widely mocked as “the senator from Boeing”, would be a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, as he would be in 1976. There was no great eagerness to do Scoop any favors. But the primary driver of White House indifference was a general feeling that if the airlines and the plane makers want this to happen so badly, between them they’ve got plenty of money. Let them work it out themselves.
The Aftermath: The European and Soviet SSTs were money pits; Nixon’s planners turned out to be right about that. The technology wasn’t ready for the market.
The snapshot effect of one single time threshold isn’t a complete way to capture change when most big projects, private and public, are in progress for a decade or more. But there are times when, by chance, critical go-or-no-go decisions on several of the more significant national choices line up. 1972 was one of those times.
One consistent theme is Nixon’s genuine wish to enforce GOP austerity; he was the first White House penny pincher, the first would-be government shrinker, in decades. He was a populist. Paradoxically, that was combined with a Wall Street lawyer’s eagerness to prove that lofty, utopian Democratic goals could best be achieved by practical, free-market Republican means. There’s nothing wrong in that. It’s admirable when it creates success stories. That’s provided that, at the outset of a spending decision, you wonder from time to time if you’re too tacitly accepting those goals without examining them. With Richard Nixon sailing towards an easy re-election, he was looking to burnish his legacy.
This is where another proposal–mass transit–comes into the story. It was then accepted as a fact of economic life: business required proximity to other businesses, the denser the better. Successful cities had densely packed downtowns, so once a city reached a certain size, commuters needed weekday alternatives to driving. The first generations of subways and elevated trains were built and run by profit-making private businesses. From the onset of the Depression forward, though, hard times and misguided New Deal policies turned almost all of them into wards of the state.
That’s where things stood, forty years later, when Nixon listened to a growing chorus of big businessmen who were alarmed at the deterioration of America’s major cities, where their corporate headquarters were. They didn’t romanticize transit; they regarded it the way they regarded elevators in tall buildings, unglamorous but essential to getting the workers to the job. This issue wasn’t as politically polarized as it is today. More metropolitan areas were run by Republicans back then, and mass transit projects involved lucrative GOP specialties like bond issues and capital investment, as well as enriching constituents like attorneys, accountants, large electrical contractors, construction, real estate, and land development companies.
By then, as critics frequently complained, many cities in Europe, Canada, and even the USSR had cleaner, faster, more modern subways than New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. Montreal, which had just hosted a spectacular show at expo67, had quickly built itself a fairly standard-issue subway system in time for its opening, but had endowed it with some strikingly handsome station designs at low cost. That’s the combo that every city administrator wanted. When Nixon was sworn in, two American cities, San Francisco and Washington DC, had already started building ambitious new mass transit systems, with a third—Atlanta—ready to join them in a few years.
The Verdict: Instead of opposing them, the Nixon administration gave them a surprisingly sympathetic ear, and skeptical Republicans in Congress went along with the White House. This was the sometimes-seen, sort-of liberal side of Richard Nixon, but it was also shrewd politics.
Nixon approved federal funding of then-current proposals as well as several pilot projects, because he had a plan—convince aerospace companies suffering from the post-Apollo 11 funding letdown and defense cutbacks to create subsidiaries that would make subway and light rail transit vehicles, hardware, and software. The idea was to preserve their skills and physical facilities until the next (inevitable) defense funding surge by giving them profitable, government-funded sidelines that would exploit their capabilities of manufacturing passenger transportation with high technology content.
The Aftermath: With mixed results, Boeing teamed up with Vertol to make subway trains for Chicago, and Grumman switched from lunar landers to city buses. Major defense contractors like Rohr, Raytheon, and General Dynamics worked on automated train control systems. This heavy bias towards electronics and high tech seemed to make sense but it was misguided; the most successful start-up transit systems, like Baltimore, Buffalo, and Los Angeles, would be frugal and use conventional rail technology. So far at least, more futuristic forms of mass transit are still mostly seen in theme parks, airports, and a handful of other locations that lend themselves to high-end modern design and modest passenger volume.
The last Nixon-era proposal we’ll review claimed the virtue of minimizing the need to spend money on transportation, either long distances by supersonic air or short distances through downtown subway stations. The New Rural Society (NRS) was a set of proposals by Peter Goldmark, who had just retired as CBS’s director of research. What NRS suggested, using phone and cable connections to enable large numbers of people to work, shop, bank, and socialize remotely, has long since become reality. Although it was much in common with the internet we know, NRS wasn’t digital. Goldmark emphasized that it could be implemented with existing early 70s analog tech and upgraded later.
He was smart enough to specify that he wasn’t claiming that everybody could work from home. Most of the nation’s work—manufacturing, food, retail, you name it, would still be done at job sites, but much office work could be decentralized, making dense downtowns of office buildings less and less needed. A west coast think tank with the ponderous name of Institute for the Future ran estimates of the millions of travel hours that would be saved by teleconferencing, one of the key parts of NRS, and found that the need for urban mass transit would plunge. This has recently been proven, in 2020-’21. Just as NRS predicted, downtown office rents would plummet.
The Verdict: Nixon punted, deferring Peter Goldmark’s New Rural Society proposal for further review. The potential public savings were enormous, as was the prospect for changing city life, but the technology was premature. Since the eventual profits would largely go to AT&T and the makers of the equipment, for the time being they could bear the cost of research. In the meantime, the White House ordered Cabinet agencies to start making greater use of teleconferencing to slash lavish travel budgets.
The Aftermath: If the federal government had gone full speed ahead on NRS, it might have hastened the birth of online society by roughly 15 years. We would have had services like CompuServe, Genie, and Prodigy somewhat earlier. Changing people’s patterns of living and working still would have taken time. But it’s an interesting what-if question.
Those were some of the major choices made by the Nixon administration over a two-year timeframe, a half-century ago. There were ideas that just didn’t make the cut, would emerge later, or were benched. One of the latter was artificial intelligence, a longtime darling of university and federal funders, which was about to be exiled to “AI winter” for consistently overpromising and underdelivering. Another was a 1981 manned flight to Mars, wildly expensive even by Apollo standards. Some promising cancer research led to dead ends, but Nixon was generous with medical funding. Fusion reactors had always been ten or twenty years away and still were in 1972. They still are today, but who knows? There’s talk that it’s different now. This time, it could be for real.
The pace of change is hard to guess. Some people spend their careers working on things that take decades longer than expected. On the other hand, one day you wake up, and videos of an earthquake in Nepal are posted within moments by legions of teenagers with iPhones. It’s a different world. What could 2072 bring?
This post is part of Ricochet’s Group Writing Project, administered by Clifford A. Brown and open to all members. Participation is not only welcome, but encouraged!
Published in General
The broadcast networks did disempower their formerly too strict Broadcast Standards and Practices execs in the 1990s, largely in response to cable. My personal assessment is that they hit just the right balance of freedom and morality around the time ABC negotiated language etc. permissions on NYPD Blue, which took a year or so, and NBC let Seinfeld conduct a linguistically discreet Contest. Frasier certainly benefitted from an expanded palette of double-endres available to TV’s great farceur of the 1990s, writer Joe Keenan. His episodes will endure the way Moliere, Shakespeare, and Feydeau’s comedies have. Great art has always benefitted from granting great artists the freedom they crave, especially when it’s just inside the borders which a reasonable society should tolerate.
That Frasier could go as far as it did has an antecedent in the pioneering Showtime comedy of the 1980s, Brothers. There’s a direct connection between the two Paramount comedies. The actor who played Donald, the openly gay and always amusing character in that mid-1980s comedy, Philip Charles MacKenzie, went on to direct loads of great Frasiers including the naughty but brilliant “The Adventures of Bad Boy and Dirty Girl.” It might interest Ricochetti to know that this same PCM today co-hosts a conservative political podcast “Entering Stage Right” on Substack.
As much as the more permissive cable industry with its uncut movies etc. lubricated the broadcasters’ thrust into free expression in the 1990s, so also did demographics. At one point NBC seemed to go beyond even my own limits of good taste. I mentioned a particular instance of this to Don Ohlmeyer, a Notre Dame grad and Jack Welch golf buddie who was heading up NBC’s programming at the time. Don acknowledged that guys like us might cringe but (nodding across the room towards a young woman recently awarded executive rank) “it doesn’t bother her generation at all.” Don is no longer with us, but that young lady has spent most of the last quarter century in entertainment EVP and presidency posts for the top broadcast networks and studios. Her instincts then have made for a very successful now.
For me, however, NBC peaked in the Tartikoff-Littlefield-Ohlmeyer 1990s. To this day I believe that Boomers did TV best.
I had almost forgotten about ISDN. It was very important to my workplace and my job for a few years, but it was not our department’s very first connection to the internet.
I remember that one. I enjoyed it, although I always had trouble buying those three actors as brothers.
Great images there, Percival! I had a longtime neighbor who worked for RAND. When they got of some surplus office furniture, he snagged a bunch of file cabinets that he used to store wine. They were convenient, and above all, free. But I had to say, it looked mighty impressive to see a drawer’s worth of $20 bottles of Bordeaux protected by a double combination lock and a rotating ring of color-coded access clearances.
Re two way TV, here’s a shot of Lady Bird Johnson in Washington calling New York’s Mayor Wagner.
There must be or ought to be a history of costly business blunders that actually escaped the laboratories, seemed to fill a demand, reached the market and flopped, like Bell Picturephone. Polavision’s instant home movies almost sank Polaroid.
Peter Goldmark, the gentleman visionary who is mentioned in the OP, had a number of very successful corporate inventions to his credit, the biggest one being LP (vinyl) record albums. But he was notoriously associated with two of CBS’s biggest marketing mistakes, an early form of color television, 1940-’51, and then in 1965-71 the EVR video cassette system. Neither was his fault, really. He wasn’t in charge of the business end. Like Steve Jobs, he had a showman’s knack for demonstrating a new invention so compellingly that his bosses failed to run the numbers intelligently, or make the deals that would have made those numbers work out.
And now the slightly not-so-young woman must mind her P’s and Q’s or she’ll be replaced by a gender-fluid, purple-haired, nose-ring-wearing avocado toast muncher who can’t even, and thus television comedy dies.
Long live Dave Chappelle.
In high school AP history we made a China Card by writing the word “China” on an index card, and successfully used it to force our teacher into detente, thus delaying a test for one day.
The SST debate was a lot more “anti” than Boeing and other industry forces expected. They’d fooled themselves with low quality “surveys” that told them that the general public would hardly notice sonic booms.
These measures of public opinion were conducted at various places around the nation, giving them a seeming authority. But every one of those places was near an Air Force base. These were people long used to aircraft noise, and more than usually supportive of progress in aviation. A patriotic group. But not representative of the general public. When they brought these unexpectedly friendly surveys to congressional hearings, they were all but laughed at.
Nixon’s people wouldn’t have so much as yawned if Park Avenue in Manhattan had objected to the noise. But Council Bluffs, Iowa, or Elkhart, Indiana, and Provo, Utah weren’t known as bastions of the NIMBY left. Part of this is class friction: if they were the people taking advantage of the fast planes, that might have been one thing. But few of the protesters were ever likely to spend $4000 to fly from San Francisco to Miami. The supersonics would do them no good at all.
That’s an admirable accomplishment, to be sure. You have every reason to be proud. But let’s give some props to the mainstream media. They collectively wrote “Russia” on an index card and lived off it for nearly three years.
The Soviet supersonic plane scared everybody involved. It’s unbelievable how bad it was.
The only thing like this that I think we should be doing is building models of thorium pebble bed reactors. Compact nukes. We could’ve had them 10 years ago if we had any common sense.
The future isn’t easy but the bigger the government and the more abundant the taxpayer funding the bigger the rip off and the fewer the successes. The space program, the atom bomb were successes, expensive but did what they set out to do, at least for a while. The fact is government isn’t good at much and with time gets worse, but taxpayer funding is useful, if limited enough to be competitive and run by folks borrowed from the private sector. It’s hard to do anything well and innovative from a big top of hundreds of millions of people and trillions of dollars spent by self interested bureaucrats. Small and competitive and ground up worked. That is why the US was so successful and is headed for top rot and decay. Folks play with ideas, notions, to see if they can make money. Most don’t but the some that do change the world and will continue to do so as long as there is bottom up freedom, a solid legal system that allows it, and competitiveness in all aspects. A shame we’re dumping it all.
Japan was way ahead in the cell phone business. Their hardware and service providers made lots of money, and began farming their captive flock as usual for Japan. They stagnated and fell ten years behind, and now are bit players even in their own home market, the only place where their ugly and cantankerous home-grown handsets are used.
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, ten years ago cell phones were in everybody’s hands. Higher penetration than a lot of developed countries. Why? They had little else, and wired infrastucture was trivially vulnerable to the simplest of attacks (say, a man with an axe). That story rapidly diverges, but there’s something to be said for being fashionably late to the tech game.
Zilch, to my knowledge. Source: I did consulting work for them in the late 90s and early ’00s. In house, it was always ‘IFTF’. The ponderous handle was a gift of the founders, who included Paul Baran of early Internet fame, and it was not ironic.
Meta-comment: IFTF positions as doing objective, ‘descriptive’ vision work. In fact, what they are doing is very much prescriptive and ideologically flavored. They got it reasonably close to right in terms of network impacts on life, business and society. They’ve since veered off into new urbanism, greenery and other woke causes, and I doubt history will work out so well for them.
The way I recall it, the telcos and cable companies had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the open network world. In the early to mid-’90s their execs were fixated on building walled content gardens, and their highest business ideal was “we can eat Blockbuster’s lunch”. They all got rolled by IP based networking, in spite of their goals, since it evolved and grew so much more quickly than closed networks. As late as 1996 I had both AT&T Labs and Nortel (remember them) trying to sell me ‘switches’ that would meter Internet data by the packet.
In the event, it was upstart ISPs that showed the traditional carriers what they had to offer, or go under. And history shows that Blockbuster’s lunch was eaten, but not by them.
One thing the Nixon administration had to deal with was funding for liquid metal fast neutron breeder reactors, which created new fissionable material. (the “liquid metal” was sodium, which flowed as silvery metal at the right temperature.) They didn’t have a great track record–Met Edison’s Fermi plant at Lagoona Beach, Michigan came close to a meltdown, and never became operational. The White House was tepid, and kept a low level of funding. In the Reagan administration, Clinch River was the next demonstration project, and IIRC that one also was abandoned, this time for economic reasons. It turned out that, like many other things, when you raised the price of uranium, it wasn’t nearly as scarce anymore.
That was more or less my impression. Their early seventies work wasn’t exactly devoid of a political perspective, but in a time of utopian kooks, IFTF was relatively objective about costs and market penetration.
The first to modernize is the first to become obsolete.
More like it came their way and they sold it as fast as they could build it.
Today with Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, wireless subscribers are the modern equivalent of the original Bell system, the utility that everyone had and which oldtimers invested in for the dividends. Cable operators came in between, and can take credit for the majority of wired home internet subscriptions since the web explosion of the 1990s.
Historically, cable focused on expanding channel capacity to accomodate as much profitable content on linear video channels as possible, with side orders of PPV and VOD.
Cable Labs in Denver masterminded the industry’s technological magic. They knew that optical fiber could do more than just carry video with the existing infrastructure. Cable was founded by engineers but later dominated by marketers, so when it became feasible to sell customers broadband subscriptions and IP telephony, bundling became all the rage.
The idea of “walled garden” environments like old AOL or Apple wasn’t a priority in cable, it was just that a cable visionary (John Malone) coined the term. There were a few minor early experiments, but cable operators were and are happy just to provide the fastest pipe in town and keep everybody on autopay from churning off into cordcutter land.
Now, of course, they’re allowed to own broadcast networks. It’s shameful to see what Comcast has done to NBC News. Cable’s own creation, CNN, has become an absurdist parody. The once daring outsider entrepreneurs who challenged the broadcasters’ content monopoly are now in their own high castles, building moats to keep the peasants at bay.
@jimkearney, if you Don Ohlmeyer, punch him in the gut and tell it’s from one of Norm MacDonald’s deeply closeted fans. Thanks.
GPS began its long tortuous history during the Nixon administration. The Deputy Secretary of Defense issued a memo on establishing a Joint Program Office headed up by the Air Force. The name GPS was given sometime that fall (sounds better than the Defense Navigation Satellite System). Brad Parkinson, first head of the JPO, claims that he and twelve others designed it over Labor Day weekend 1973. I beg to differ. https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3093/1
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3596/1
I recently found out that the JPO stayed at the Spring Hill Motel when they visited Washington which fits in perfectly with my story. The initial configuration of GPS was approved that December. The first atomic clock was launched into orbit in my father’s NTS-1 in June 1974.
Well, I sat in meetings with execs from Time-Warner, TCI and Cable Labs in the ’92 – ’94 period and they were certainly keen on building closed video and shopping environments, and proprietary set tops, at that point.
Things started changing in ’95 – ’96 when it became obvious that IP networking was going to roll over all the old proprietary online services, and even the telcos. Cable cos certainly the better infrastructure to adapt to open networking, given the limits of first ISDN and then DSL.
There were some funny ads, 20-30 years ago.
Remember “Web Hogs”, the telcos’ BTTF II-like comical dystopian vision of a town torn by violent conflict over logging in via shared cable?
Or the cable companies’ ridicule of the Satellite Dish man, a wimpy character in a weird suit who’d sit on your rooftop acting obnoxiously conspicuous?
An AT&T ad showed a mildly futuristic video call made from a phone booth? “Ever been face to face with the person you’re calling? YOU WILL!” Of course, by the time video calling was widespread, phone booths were largely obsolete.
I think of Parkinson as something of an evil character, a thief. Maybe that’s a little harsh, maybe not. I’ve seen that there’s a somewhat deluded woman who thinks she’s the “Hidden Figures” of GPS.
I read on Twitter (yes, I waste time) that Gladys West invented GPS in 1986. That’s at least thirteen years too late. But these people know nothing about its creation.
This post and the comment section illustrate what has been and is great about Ricochet.
This post is part of the March Group Writing Theme: “Now and Then.”
There are two major monthly Group Writing projects. One is the Quote of the Day project, managed by @she. This is the other project, in which Ricochet members claim one day of the coming month to write on an announced theme. This is an easy way to expose your writing to a general audience, with a bit of accountability and topical guidance to encourage writing for its own sake.