TAPE 1, SIDE 1

DR. MAUER: This is the completion of a series of interviews with Mr. Duff. I think we covered some of this in the last one, but in order to get some continuity in this interview, let's pick it up with Robert Allnutt calling you, and your accepting the position to come back to NASA for the third time, in a very different capacity than previously.

MR. DUFF: Right. The third time I got the job, which apparently I'd always wanted, certainly for at least half the time I'd been at NASA. From the time that I left NASA, after the Apollo period, if I'd allowed myself to think about it, I would probably have said, "Gee, if I ever go back to NASA, I'd like to see what I could do if I was in a position to direct the public affairs program." Up to that time, NASA had not done that. Most of the public affairs directors were brought in from outside, which isn't the pattern they used in programmatic areas. They would very often bring people up form inside. Flight directors would move up and engineers would move up from project to project, but public affairs was seen as a political appointment and very much policy, and on that basis I can certainly understand what the logic was. Maybe it wasn't a bad idea, because my comeuppance ultimately was probably based on the fact that my philosophy--though I certainly felt loyal to NASA and loyal to the presidency--was in conflict with the new administration in terms of the best way to carry out what I thought was the NASA mission.

    Bob [Robert Allnutt] called me. The first time he called me, I said no because I was really so fond of what I was doing at Amtrak. The second time he called me, which was about a year later, I had a sense that this was destined to be. I told him I would come over, and I did within a week or two.

MAUER: This was in 1980.

DUFF: Yes. I arrived at a time which was a rather long and agonizing period for NASA, before the shuttle worked. Everyone remembers the success, but when I arrived, NASA felt a bit beleaguered and a bit sorry for itself. It felt that it was doing a good job and getting no credit whatsoever. Everybody, particularly the press, which I was expected to tame and make docile and friendly, was being very unfair.

    I think in the last interview we talked about what often happens. The press can be likened to a group of starlings: they all flock together, they fly together, and there tends to be very much a group instinct in the press. They had taken to describing the shuttle always with the same handy adjectives, something like 20 billion dollars over schedule, tow years late, ill-fated, all the various adjectives that they hang on a technical project that isn't going well. It had reached the point where they were almost automatically applied every time the word shuttle was used in print. And NASA felt that was unfair.

    NASA had several real problems. One of them was the tiles. The problem of the tiles had not been solved. It also had problems with the engines.

MAUER: More specifically, it was the problem of adhering the tiles.

DUFF: Yes, the tiles were fine but they didn't stay on.

MAUER: Which is a major problem if you want to go into space and come back.

DUFF: It was feared that they [the tiles] wouldn't stay on. Phrases like "the zipper effect" will go into history. People ten years from now won't know what you're talking about. We worked with Graham Ferguson to make a nice Imax movie about the shuttle program in which John Young was interviewed about the zipper effect. He said, "It isn't a zipper effect. The tiles are all applied independently," and so forth, but the zipper effect for a while was it. Everybody was talking about the zipper effect like the dust on the moon that was going to make all--

MAUER: --perhaps up to ten feet of dust and the spacecraft would sink in--

DUFF: --sink into the dust, yes, that's right. Well, all those things turned out ultimately either not to be or to be exaggerated.

    When I arrived at NASA, the title had changed in the years since Julian [Scheer] had left, and it had been a series of intentional downgrading of the public affairs position. That usually means that it's being aboragated to some other office.

MAUER: How do you mean?

DUFF: Everyone has to do public affairs, in any kind of organization. The public affairs officer doesn't have to do it,though. That's a fallacy. It can be an assistant to the president. It can be a special assistant to the president. The job has to be done, in any place which is as visible as NASA, but it doesn't have to be done by the "public affairs office." I've often bumped into cases where the public affairs office begins to be identified too closely with the press. Then he becomes part of the problem. And the boss wants someone a little tougher, so he appoints one of his assistants, and then that situation goes on for awhile.

    To some extent Bob Allnutt may have been getting that job and didn't want it, and so when I came over I didn't have any doubt in my mind that I was going to be given the job of director of public affairs. They had decided that what they really needed was someone who understood the NASA programs and style, and was going to revitalize the public affairs program and bring it back to what it was.

MAUER: Which was what?

DUFF: The Apollo days, back to the Apollo days. That's why they went looking for someone who'd been there.

MAUER: How was that visualized? When you say "back to the Apollo days," can you be explicit as to what they meant?

DUFF: It was an attitude, what's the style?

MAUER: What's the attitude, what's the style?

DUFF: You're putting me on the spot here. I know I could do it if we had five more interviews to go. But the attitude was basically that the best defense was a good offense, that you should always stay ahead of the problem instead of behind it. You should anticipate things and meet them, rather than having them catch you and having to react to them. I think that's proactive instead of reactive. Whatever you said should be as accurate as you could make it.

    This makes it sound as if we were all on the side of the angels, but we had become convinced that this was the only workable modus operandi. It sounds like we were patting ourselves on the back, but we actually found that the other way doesn't work, any more than bad engineering works. Cheating and lying to yourself is as counter-productive in public affairs as it is in engineering or in science. Ultimately you will be caught in your lies, or you will be caught short by your own short cuts. Like anything else, it's a lot better to be in control than to be controlled.

    So we began to do things that we had done before, and which I had actually put into effect both at HEW [Department of Health, Education, and Welfare] and at Amtrak, and that is get out in front. Find out what you're doing and get out in front.

MAUER: You had a sense of public service.

DUFF: Yes, and that may have come from within, but over the years we had matured. A lot of it was driven by Webb, who had this great sense that we were a public activity that belonged to the citizens, the taxpayers. He really did, with no apology, think that ultimately our employers, or board of directors was the Congress,a but our shareholders were the taxpayers. Ultimately, those were the people we had to answer to, and those were the people we were doing this for. Therefore, once you developed that attitude it's like any business strategy. It makes your individual decisions easier because you have this sense of strategy. I mentioned to you earlier that he didn't do this out of some theoretical "public's right to know." He did it because he thought it was effective for getting the job done in the long run, and because it would build public support. We had to have public support, we had to have public sympathy, and we had to have public trust. It would be nice to have public friendship--that may not be the best word--affection, and it was very nice to have public understanding. So we built each of those by making ourselves available. I would counsel astronauts--none of them listened to me--but I'd say, "There's nothing wrong with saying you're human, you know. You do not have to get angry if someone suggests that you made a mistake. You're much better off to say, 'Yes, we made a mistake, but we learned a lot from that mistake.'" Remember that the public affairs function goes on over a long time and it's a long continuum.

    Another thing we learned was that--if I were teaching this sort of thing or if I went into consulting, I would always say the same thing: "Don't judge yourself on the basis of any individual incident. You've got to judge yourself on the basis of a continuum, a stream." At the end of the season, you add up the score and decide whether you won or lost.

MAUER: I think now something is coming out in the way you're expressing it that's very important to put this whole series of interviews into perspective. You told me the important things about the open program of the Apollo year which, you say now, was what was being looked for when you were brought back in.

DUFF: I believe that's true.

MAUER: This continuum that you're talking about, this flow of information--if you develop a context, then when there areproblems, the problems themselves aren't the only things being talked about. There's a whole body of discussion, a context in which the problems will fit.

DUFF: Yes, that's very true. Actually, it's important to everyone involved in the whole process, including the media. We had about a year to get ready for the first shuttle flight, the first successful flight, and we used that year in an intensive regluing of ourselves to the professional media, reinstating a series of regularly scheduled briefings and so forth. We were trying to get the media to think in the long term too. We wanted all our engineers to think in the long term, to think of these things as links in a chain and not as failures or successes but as a structure that was being built, that would have both failures and success. We wanted the process of getting the media to think of what we were doing in those terms, not like a failure--a success, when it comes, shouldn't surprise anyone. It should be seen as something that results from a long series of building blocks and so forth. Yes, a long answer, but yes, the answer is yes.

MAUER: Let's go back for a moment. The position had been an assistant administrator. You came in at a lower level. Did that bother you?

DUFF: No. It bothered some people. I mentioned one of the senior people in the office who was feeling a sense of distancing of the public affairs office from the NASA management, he said "Don't come. They've downgraded this job so it isn't worth a damn." I talked to Allnutt, and I'd talked to [Robert] Frosch and I'd talked to [Alan] Lovelace, who was the deputy, and my sense was that wasn't true, It didn't really make a difference what they called it, they wanted the old style public affairs. My sense was that ultimately they would reinstate the old title. That didn't make too much of a difference, but I thought that at some point they would.

    It turns out that I was right. Allnutt was doing the public affairs job with the title of deputy associate administrator, and he didn't want to do it anymore. He was looking for a public affairs person in the old style because he had other things to do. And Frosch wanted a public affairs counsellor. He wanted a public affairs executive. He wanted somebody to come in and think for him in these areas and give him advice. He wanted someone who understood what his objectives were. That's what the true public affairs executive does. He in effect thinks for the boss in that narrow field and then gives the boss advice. He has the luxury of worrying about it full-time, whereas the administrator can only worry about it 1/30th of his time. But they do come together, because the administrator does worry aboutit 1/30th of his time. The problem is that if he doesn't have a good public affairs person, he has to begin worrying about it 1/2 of his time, because you can't push public affairs problems away. If they're not being handled by a subordinate, they end up being handled by the administrator.

MAUER: As a public affairs person, you've worked for both Democrats and Republicans. you've worked for Jim Webb. You've worked for [Elliott] Richardson, John Garner, and you came back to NASA working under Frosch. For you, as a public affairs officer, it is the fact that your supervisor is Republican or Democrat. There are other things that seem to be more important in terms of how they approach public relations and what they expect from a public affairs officer?

DUFF: Party politics actually is not important, in my view. Elliot Richardson and James Webb are about as close as you can get. Their styles were different. Their backgrounds were different. But their view of public service was very similar. Richardson, of course, presumably is Republican. He certainly came in with the Republicans. He probably wouldn't have been comfortable inside the Nixon White House, and that became obvious at the end. John Gardner served Lyndon Johnson as Secretary of HEW and he was president of the Carnegie Foundation. And yet, when the Republicans needed a leader in the riots, they turned to Gardner. I think most Republicans thought of him as a man with a very pragmatic view, charisma but a pragmatic view. Gardner had this same sense of public service.

MAUER: What do you mean by that?

DUFF: It's the sort of thing we've been talking about in all these interviews. Richardson said something which I always thought spelled out the difference between these two people. Richardson said one day at one of the operational meetings he had with the senior staff--I'll paraphrase it because I don't remember it exactly--"Remember, fellows, that we only have this job on loan. We only have this responsibility on loan. We only have this agency, if you will, on loan. We won't be here long and our job is to do the job when we're here and make it better when we leave, or leave it to the next people in better shape than we found it." That's much different than the fellow who thinks he's won this privilege by winning an election, and therefore he and his camp followers have the right to do anything they damned please as long as they're in and as long as they don't get caught.

    I would liken the latter point of view to what tends to happen in the White House, in the various White House organizations, partly because, except for the president and veryfew people next to him, the White House staff very often tends to have very little experience in public service. They tend to be PR [public relations] men, business leaders, big contributors and so forth, or people who didn't do much and just happened to have enough free time to join a presidential campaign. If they join the right one, they end up having a job in the White House with immense power and very little experience in using it.

    This is a digression, but I've always thought that one of the reasons presidents don't use their Cabinets is because the Cabinet officers tend to be senior, responsible men with their own track records, often having been elected to public office on their own, whereas the staff tends to be a real staff. The White House staff tends to be former paid employees of large organizations, and they act like employees, as opposed to senior managers. But that's a digression.

    I ran against the grain several times when I got an administrator like Alan Boyd, whom I admire very much, or Jim Beggs, whom I also admire very much and think he's a tremendously able and ethical human being and a great leader. But both of these men had a more corporate view.

MAUER: By what meaning?

DUFF: The good corporate executives work for the corporation. He doesn't see this [working for NASA] quite as much as a public service. I hope that Jim Beggs and Alan Boyd would not be put off by that, but I think that that basically was their attitude. They tended not to have the same sense. It impacts the public affairs officer more perhaps than other things, because they [corporate executives] tend not to have that same sense that the taxpayer is basically the shareholder and that his is a publicly owned corporation as opposed to a privately owned corporation. That may just be a personality difference.

    I was schooled by men like Richardson and Webb, and I saw the public affairs responsibility as one that weighed very heavily on the agency and had to be met. I didn't see it as something that we--we had a very serious need to keep reporting to our ultimate bosses, and it wasn't enough just to do it, and say, "There, we did it." We also had to keep reporting on the process. Interestingly enough, Beggs told me once that that was his view of the agency too, that ultimately my job was to make the American public understand that NASA belonged to them. But I didn't see in practice that he torqued the agency in that direction quite as much as Webb did. Webb was a political corporation, and most corporate executives do not believe that their first responsibility every morning is to call up all the newspapers and tell them what they're doing. Webb probably didn't either, but he certainly understood that that was part of his mandate.

MAUER: What about Frosch?

DUFF: I like Frosch, in the same way I liked Bob [Robert] Gilruth. Frosch really wanted you to run your operation, and once he hired you, he trusted you and liked what you were doing. He was interested and approved of what you were doing and didn't try to do it himself. I found Dr. Lovelace to be the same way. I liked working for both of them. They didn't do what Webb did, though, or Richardson did or Gardner did. They weren't in themselves highly interested in the subject. Gardner, Richardson, and Webb could all have been masters in public relations if they'd wanted to. They simply had bigger jobs. So in a sense you were always working for someone who probably, if he put his mind to it, could do a better job than you did. Frosch was the scientist, and, like Gilruth, was an engineer. He appreciated what you did and supported you but didn't want to do it. That's probably the difference, he's a little impatient with it all.

MAUER: In a moment I'd like to move on into the subject of that impatience. Is there anything that particularly stands out in that period in which you were working under Frosch?

DUFF: No, just a sense that you really had--remember, it was Fosch, and in this case Allnutt was my link to Frosch. Allnutt made it very clear that any time I wanted or needed to talk to Frosch, I had instant access. If it ever came to a point where I had a disagreement with Allnutt, I would have certainly gone to Frosch. The fact was, my style was never to go to Frosch until I had all the subordinate units convinced, or at least neutral, and then to go to Frosch with, in effect, a joint recommendation if possible.

MAUER: With what particular approach?

DUFF: It's more effective. The public affairs office, in the words of Jim McDivitt, must only suggest, and it has relatively few resources. Any big or different project requires resources, in some cases money. That money can only come from one place, from the program officers.

    An example which actually occurred later when I was working for Jim Beggs was the recommendation to take the shuttle Enterprise to the Paris Air Show. That involved a million plus dollars. Certainly it wasn't in my budget, and the ability to make it happen wasn't in my mandate. By the time we went to Mr. Beggs with the recommendation to take the shuttle to the Paris Air Show--Bob Allnutt and I went in together--we were already able to tell him that his had been looked at by the pilots and that the flight plan had been scooped out. They knew exactly how much gasoline they needed and had a proposal already in line to fly a weather scout plane ahead of the 747. We were ready to go to the CIA [Center Intelligence Agency] and look for threats of terrorism.

    Beggs' reaction was, "That's the craziest idea I've ever heard. You're risking one of the few single point failures in the whole federal program, the 747. I don't give a damn about the Enterprise, it's not going to fly again, it's nothing but a white elephant hanging around our neck, but the 747 is a vital piece of equipment." We were able to tell him that the pilots who flew the 747 had actually thought it was quite an easy flight, that the total flight to Paris in the individual segments was less risky than flying the shuttle back from Edwards [Air Force Base]. He said, "That's right, but we've got to fly it back from Edwards. We don't have to fly it to Paris." There was another "yes but" and it had ultimately to be accepted on the basis of its impact on the American people and on the Europeans and as an example of our willingness to take a chance. We thought it was part of the NASA image.

    I have no way of knowing whether Bob Frosch would have agreed the same way, but Beggs did. Once Beggs' mind began to grasp what would happen if we did this successfully, he was all for it. He actually overrode some very serious objections from other agencies like the CIA, who said we couldn't afford to take the chance. The State Department didn't want to do it. The Defense Department didn't want to do it.

MAUER: But there was an internal debate over this. Beggs was initially against it.

DUFF: Yes, he thought it was absolutely nuts.

MAUER: But once you'd done all the background work necessary to convince him, and once he was convinced, then he became an enthusiastic supporter, an advocate within the larger political system of the United States.

DUFF: Exactly. The 747 doesn't belong to NASA. In a sense it does, but--any more than the program belongs to NASA. If we had wiped out the 747 and one of the fueling staff or something like that, we would have put the shuttle program back a year.

    But your question was about Frosch. Actually, I didn't work for Frosch very long. I worked for Frosch for a while and I like him very much. My recollections of him are very good. I gotalong very well with Lovelace, who was a crusty engineer, and became genuinely very fond of him. Lovelace loved to examine things.

    At one point, we were trying like hell to get ready to go to some place, the Paris Air Show, or the Peaceful Uses of Space Conference in Vienna. We didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough money, we didn't have enough people, and we were going crazy. Lovelace wanted a review of the whole thing, and I had said to Jerry Griffin, who was at that time in Allnutt's job, "I hate these meeting where somebody keeps pulling up the radishes to see if they're growing," which was a phrase that I'd stolen from somewhere, and Griffin repeated it to Lovelace. Lovelace was famous for his temper, and you could see the color start up from his collar and go midway up to his ears. Finally he figured out who had said it, and he said, "Is it OK if I just pass my hands gently over the tops?" I got to be very fond of Lovelace. I've seen him a couple of times since. I'm always glad to see him.

    Beggs came in, and a number of things were unfortunate, because I ended up resigning ultimately. From my view, I resigned to limit what I thought was an embarrassing situation for Mr. Beggs. It wasn't his fault, but he got the heat, unfortunately, from the White House. He got blamed by the White House for something that wasn't his fault, because it certainly didn't fit his philosophy.

    Beggs figured I was a holdover from the Carter Administration. I didn't think of myself as a holdover from anything except maybe the Kennedy Administration. I'd been in and out and in and out through Republicans and Democrats. To me, was old line NASA, and that may have been part of it. I was old line NASA public affairs, and I probably felt more strongly and I had more confidence that I was right. But I had confidence in the advice I was giving the agency, and if you're ready for me to talk about this, the issue was, of course, Jane Fonda.

MAUER: We can do that, but I want to come back and talk about some of these other issues as well.

DUFF: This would be the last chapter.

MAUER: There are a number of important things I think that lead up to it, so let's hold off on Jane Fonda.

DUFF: Okay, because the Jane Fonda incident really epitomized the whole thing.

MAUER: It certainly does.

DUFF: When you talk about the Jane Fonda incident, you talk about the whole philosophical approach to NASA public affairs. It didn't work, in the case of Jim Beggs. I didn't work for Jim Beggs.

MAUER: Yes, but I think that it's going to be important to put into perspective your relationship with Jim Beggs before we talk about Fonda, because if we just talk about the Fonda issue in itself, it will appear somewhat different.

DUFF: Okay.

MAUER: Because you had something of a stormy relationship with Beggs, and yet Beggs kept you on.

DUFF: Right.

MAUER: Let's talk about a number of the conflicts. Maybe "conflict" is too strong a word and I don't want to put words into your mouth, but certainly you and Jim Beggs had some rather different ideas about important public affairs questions along the way, before the denouement of Jane Fonda occurred.

DUFF: Right. That's certainly true. Where do you want to start?

MAUER: Two issues that I can think of are the George Will incident and Voyager.

DUFF: I don't think we had any problems with Voyager. Voyager was an example of the NASA Public Affairs Program taking its responsibility for public education very seriously. I haven't got my timing quite clear in my mind. I'm not sure, would Beggs have been there then? Probably. But you know, we did get 100 and some thousand dollars out of the program, and we did put on a television operation to support Voyager. But there was no problem with management on that one.

    The Will incident was probably an example. First, I had all my arguments with Hans Mark, but those weren't important, because Hans Mark was arguing on the basis of an academician arguing theory. Beggs wasn't arguing, but if I'd realized it, I probably should have been spending more time with Jim Beggs and less with Hans Mark.

    As I may have told you, Hans was of the view that the public affairs program was madness. Why in the world were we doing what we were doing? He wanted to throw all the--this is overstating it a bit--well, it isn't. He actually didn't understand why we had a press corps at launches. He didn't understand why we made all this information available ahead of time. At one point, he actually said, "Why don't we have a launch ant take a picture of it? If it's successful, release the picture and say, 'This is a launch, we launched this spacecraft today.' If it isn't successful, just don't say anything about it." He said, "I don't see how we ever got ourselves in this position." Actually he asked me at one point for a plan to slowly peel off all the public affairs "stuff" and get back to the good old days when none of it was necessary.

MAUER: He was serious in this?

DUFF: I think he was serious. It's very hard to know. But I know that he never objected to an argument about it. I think he expected an argument. He may very well have been asking the questions to find out what the arguments were. He and I exchanged--I wish I could find them--he and I exchanged marvelous memos about what was the basis for what we were doing. I would write these memos, and they'd come back looking for all the world like a college paper. They had everything on them but a grade. They had marks in the margins, underlining, circles, exclamation points, and question marks. It was the sort of thing that you'd turn in and you'd get it back with "not convinced" or "you may be right" or "perhaps so" at the bottom of it. As it turned out, it was all academic because we never did anything.

    At one point I said to Dr. Mark, "I'm absolutely convinced that this is public policy. Back in the days of Jim Webb it may have been NASA policy, but now it's public policy, and three or four presidents have endorsed it." Most presidents, if asked, would say it was one of the strengths of our public posture. Presidents and congressmen and senators have bragged about it publicly time and time again. It is public policy now. It's no longer the property of an individual administrator, and if any administrator ever tried to dismantle it, he probably wouldn't survive the effort, let alone whether he'd be successful. Mark said, "You may be right. It's too late. The damage has been done."

    I don't think Beggs ever thought that I was disloyal but he may have thought that I was too liberal, that my view of the agency's responsibilities to the public had become so obsessive that I was not serving the management quite the way he would have liked to see, and that he'd like someone who was more management oriented.

MAUER: Once again, can you define that a little bit?

DUFF: I think he wanted a corporate public affair person. If I had worked for a corporation, I think possibly I would have been a corporate public affairs person. A corporate public affairs person knows he works for company X. He doesn't work for the public, he works for the company, and his job, like every other paid executive of the company, is to show a profit for the company at the end of the year or get a bigger company share of the market or whatever their company strategy is. But it's the company's rather more narrow objectives that are important, rather than these. He'd be considered very fuzzy if he began spouting speeches about the larger view. He'd be the kind of guy who in the corporate boardrooom would be arguing for what was the corporation's responsibility as far as pollution goes or something like that. There are places in some companies for those people, but they'd better know damned well what their mandate is, and I think there was a difference. I'm not trying to make it black or white, but I think Beggs wanted someone who thought less about NASA's long-term role in the body politic and more about the specific problems and issues of the day--someone who had a sensitivity to the objectives of our boss in the White House.

MAUER: Would another aspect of this also be to be more in the mode of selling NASA?

DUFF: Possible. Of course, I thought I was selling NASA too. But yes, it's the approach.

MAUER: Clearly you were selling NASA, but my view of corporate is that you speak only about the positive. Your view of NASA was to get all the information out and create a track record. I don't think that's the way the corporations generally try to run things.

DUFF: Right. Again, here's my prejudice. The best of them do. The most successful of them do. But that's a hard thing to sell inside a corporation, where the minority stock holders are biting at you at every meeting, and where the bottom line is when someone says, "Fine, I'm sure that's wonderful, but you're fired. We're going to get some guy who can jack up the profits." In someway, in government service, if you get a guy who knows he's there for a year, he knows he's got to make a record.

TAPE 1, SIDE 2

DUFF: Let's talk about the George Will incident, because that's specific. Mr. Beggs called me one time and said he'd had a conversation with George Will, and that he had promised George Will permission to interview Sally Ride in flight. This was to be Sally Ride's first flight, and of course the first flight of an American woman in space.

    The concept had a lot of things wrong with it, from my point of view. The biggest one was that I saw it as an abrogation of a long-term unwritten agreement with the media who covered NASA, that we would never let anyone have an exclusive from the spacecraft, period. There were a lot of other unwritten rules that we all followed, and I felt they were important.

    Sometimes we made the decisions on a case-by-case basis. For instance, if you made an astronaut available to one network, you'd try to make an astronaut of equal stature available to the other two networks. These days it's three or four or five networks. In addition, all major information to be released would be released in a press conference and not to individuals. On the other hand, we also had a very careful and sometimes difficult role of protecting individual initiative on the part of reporters who found out something on their own. We wanted to give him or her a reasonable amount of time to take advantage of that particular initiative. It was diplomacy in a sense, these carefully worked out protocols that we had all evolved in order to live together. We were in a relationship, to supposedly adversarial institutions, but we found an accommodation, over the years.

    What Mr. Beggs was proposing in all innocence was something that absolutely flew in the face of these things. First, he was offering an interview with a spacecraft, which theoretically couldn't be done. He was offering direct access to the astronaut, which theoretically, under our complicated protocols, couldn't be done. Remember, we had won all the things we had won against opposition from within NASA. In each case, we--the public affairs people--had a stake in maintaining this status quo because every one of these points of access, for the media as a whole, had been won after considerable argument and often over some evolutionary process.

    We were proposing to give one person, the worst person of all--George Will--this kind of access. First, he's a columnist, he's not a working writer. Second, he was going to do it for a television show which he had just acquired, and he want' considered to be television. Television didn't consider him television, they considered him a writer. The writers didn't consider him a writer, they considered him a columnist. And, from the point of view of people who would be infuriated by this, he was known to be a friend of the President and a friend of the First Lady, he wasn't one of the regular members of the press corps. He had a special status with the Reagan White House. If there was one individual who would maximize the alienation, it would be George Will. I would have to think a long time before I could find someone who would be worse, from my point of view. From Jim Begg's point of view, you couldn't think of anyone who would be better, because Jimm Beggs is a Republican, and he's appointed by a Republican.

MAUER: He was appointed by Ronald Reagan, so Ronald Reagan was his boss.

DUFF: Exactly.

MAUER: This is a man who articulates a point of view that's very sympathetic to Reagan and who is a personal friend of Reagan, which means a lot of good reasons from Jim Beggs' point of view.

DUFF: From Jim Beggs' point of view it was great. And when he told me about it on the telephone, I said, "Gee, Mr. Beggs, I have a lot of problems with that." And he said, "Just do it," or something to that effect. I think this all happened as we were all ready to go to the launch. When I got down to Florida I thought, in my naivete, that I had convinced Beggs against it. But Beggs called Will, and Will said he knew that he knew he had a scoop on his hands, and so he insisted.

MAUER: Let's get this clear if we can. You initially said that Beggs said, "Just do it." Was it in your initial conversation that he said that or do you now remember it otherwise?

DUFF: I can't be absolutely sure about what happened. I know that Beggs related the request, and his tentative agreement with Will, to me. In effect, he was telling me to set the thing in motion. I may have surprised him a little by my reluctance. I was flabbergasted, because it was something I couldn't imagine doing. So I must have remonstrated.

    At some point I must have fallen into the trap of thinking that I had succeeded, because when I got to the Cape, I got a call from Jerry Griffin, who was the director of the center at Houston. Jerry said, "Brian I've to a problem here. I've been told to set the lines up for the Will interview. I thought you ought to know about it." I said, "I thought that was a dead issue. I'll talk to Mr. Beggs when he lands at the Cape, and tell him we can't do it." Mr. Beggs landed at the Cape and I said to him, "I have to see you." We went to the news room, which is the big inflatable building at the Cape. It looks like a big bee hive, and of course, at a time like that, it's buzzing with reporters.

    Beggs came walking in. I walked him through the media village that exists there at the Cape. He had to do an interview, so we waited. As soon as he got off of the stand--it was an outdoor interview--we walked over to the news center, which is a big building surrounded by trailers occupied by thevarious media. We went into one of the small offices behind the news room--which is like a big supermarket with people at the counter answering queries. We went into one of the small offices and closed the door,and I said, "Mr. Beggs, we can't do it. We simply can't do it." I had written down all the arguments I had against it. Beggs said something which I remember exactly. He said, "Brian, public affairs doesn't run NASA." I said, "No, sir, I never believed that it did. But this would do a great deal of damage to NASA." And he said, "All right. You call George Will then." I called George Will, and he was unhappy.

MAUER: Wait a minute. It must have been more involved than that. I'm sure it's foreshortened because of memory, but I would expect that there would have been more interchange.

DUFF: Oh, there was. But my style was the same as it was when I had the only single argument that I had with Webb over the speech in the south, on the eve of the Medgar Evers trail. I just wrote a list of all the reasons I could think of that we shouldn't do it. I didn't even mention the reasons that we should do it, and I don't know whether I showed them to Beggs, but I certainly would have referred them. I said, "There are reasons why we cannot do this, and I've got to tell you that I feel this in the strongest terms." I can't remember the conversation exactly, but I think I would have said, My job requires me to tell you in the strongest possible terms that this is, in my view, something that we should not do." I do remember that I said, "The problem is that the whole new industry will turn on George Will. Then they'll realize that Will didn't do it, but they'll be angry at Will. Then they'll be asking how this happened. They'll look first to you. Then they'll be asking how this happened. They'll look first to you. Then they'll go straight to the White House. I said, "In effect, you're damaging the agency's relationship which has taken 25 years to construct, and ultimately they'll hit the White House. you will unify, in one stroke, the whole news industry against both NASA and the White House, and it won't be considered a decision that you made by yourself, it will be considered something that you were directed to do by the White House." I had never even speculated about that before. That's when he said, "Brian, public affairs doesn't run NASA."

    In fairness to Beggs, I think he did understand that there were nuances to this issue, that it was a nonproductive effort, and that the small amount of grain that he or anyone would get from having George Will interview Sally Ride wasn't worth it. You have to walk yourself back to the times. This was a very big story. It's amazing now when you think about it that the Fonda problem happened hours after this. I never thought of the two together, connected, but it was all the same flight.

MAUER: So he told you to call George Will. What was Will's response when you called him?

DUFF: It was exactly what you'd expect. But Mr. Beggs told me he would do this, and I think it's a good idea. I did the only thing I could think of, I appealed to him as a newsman. I don't know that I convinced him but I suspect he understood the philosophical arguments. I said, "Mr. Will, I just talked to Mr. Beggs. We can't do it. It's something that the agency just can't do."

    At one point Will said, "I think you're taking a very professional attitude." It wasn't rancorous. He didn't scream at me. I want to be careful about what I think I might have said, but we had a relatively short conversation and he was obviously disappointed. I think he tried to make sure that I really had Beggs' authority to make the phone call. But he did accept it as something that wasn't going to happen.

    There was a launch. To my surprise now, this probably led directly into the Fonda incident and probably had a great deal to do with it. The Fonda incident, in Beggs's mind, was probably just another example of this rubbing our Republican friends the wrong way.

    I'll quickly sketch the things that led up to the Fonda incident. We were about to fly Sally Ride in Space. It is fairly well known, I am sure, that it took a long time to get women in the position of trust in the astronaut program, unless they were nurses, dieticians, or in other traditional roles. A number of the old NASA people fought that movement and predicted all sorts of bad things would happen if women flew. We had commissioned a very serious public opinion study by the National Science Foundation on attitudes toward the space program, toward NASA, toward the shuttle. It proved to me and I think to most of us, that we had no constituency whatsoever among women of this country. By "We," I mean NASA, the space program, the shuttle program, and manned flight.

    According to the NSF study, it was seen by most women as a white enclave macho engineers playing with expensive toys, and the perception was that there was not real future for women in this area. Interestingly enough, even women with scientific training felt pretty much the same way. Their interest in science tended to go towards areas other than space, into medicine and things like that.

    The same thing was true of minorities, particularly blacks. In the case of blacks, we didn't even have males on our side. The minorities, especially blacks thought it was a white man'sarea, according to the NSF survey. In the absence of any other evidence, I was convinced that this was something we should take seriously.

    We had an opportunity to do something about it in the Shuttle flights. We had Sally Ride flying on flight X, whatever it was, and we had a Guy Bluford flying immediately afterward. Well in advance of the flights, we put together a plan whereby we would invite prominent members of both of these groups [women and minorities] to launch. We invited and got acceptances from 600 prominent women. Most of them paid their own way. Very few of them didn't. Among them were many women who were prominent in the women's movement, including Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Betty Frieddan. We invited women who we felt were most likely to have been critics of NASA, and NASA also women who had access to the media, who appeared on talk shows, and who were in senior positions in corporations, government, and so forth. We had a general and a number of bankers. I don't know where we found them all, but we made a real effort. One of them, of course, was Gloria Stenem, as I said. The NOW organization [National Organization of Women] had just come out against Reagan.

    Another guest was Jane Fonda, and Jane Fonda was even more complicated, because she is a personal friend of Sally Ride's. They knew each other, and Fonda's husband [Tom Hayden] represented the district that Sally Ride's parents lived in. It was a very close relationship. Fonda's husband was the chairman of the Science Committee of the Lower House of the California legislature and his office had requested the invitation for both of them. It was our policy that we would honor any request from an elected official, state or local. So there were several reasons to invite Jane Fonda. But we would have considered her in her own right, because she was a prominent activist who had been quite vocal about her opposition to these kinds of activities in the past. Gloria Steinem was even more so. To me, they were the tow big coups.

    I was not unaware of the potential for embarrassment on the part of Jane Fonda, and we very carefully cleared this with the White House Press Office and made sure they knew about it. We actually called the White House and suggested that, in view of the fact that we had invited some very prominent Democrats, it might not be a bad idea to get some of the heavy hitters from the Reagan White House down there, specifically Elizabeth Dole and Margaret Heckler, Secretary of HEW.

    Those were the two most prominent Republican women in the administration, and we suggested that one of them, or both of them, should be brought down there for the launch. The White House said neither one of them could make it because of other commitments, and that they were sending another representative.

    We had a party for these women the night before the launch, which was a very moving experience, even for us males who were there. John Denver flew in at his own expense, and sang songs that he had written that were dedicated to women. Congresswoman [Lindy] Boggs got up and made what I thought was a very touching speech about women having waited so long for recognition in so many fields, and how the barriers were coming soon. The press came over, of course, from the press site. The launch was not till the following morning, and we had a bus that brought anyone over who wanted to come. Among the people who came over was Tom Zito of the Washington Post. Tom, whom I'd known for some time, asked me, "What does NASA think about Jane Fonda being here?" I was feeling very good abut the whole thing, because our plan had come together, and I said, "We're pleased." We talked at some length. I said, "This is a constituency that we have not enjoyed up to now, and besides, these women are role models for many young women coming up." Apparently it was the phrase "role model" that caused problems.

MAUER: Did you say it in general, or did you specifically mention Jane Fonda when you were talking about role models?

DUFF: Beggs asked me that later. I'll tell you exactly what happened. I had a long, rambling conversation with Zito, during which I certainly conveyed a general satisfaction with the fact that we had gotten so many women there, and certainly didn't disavow any of them, and expressed pleasure that the women we got were as prominent as they were. Of course the prominent ones, unfortunately, were not Republicans, from the point of view of the White House. They had not bothered to come or had not been able to come. Beggs asked me later to give him a written report on exactly what I had said. I read the article in the Post and I said, "There's nothing in this that I would ever be able to deny having said. I can't say that I said it exactly that way, but that was the sense of it."

MAUER: Was it the general statement that then was made specific?

DUFF: I don't know.

MAUER: I haven't read that article. Did Zito say, "Brian Duff says that Jane Fonda is a role model?"

DUFF: Yes. That's what Zito said, "She is a role model." I think he also mentioned something about the constituency, and he said either "she" or "they" but I think it was "she". It may not even have mattered what the story said. My sense of it was that he said that she [Jane Fonda] was a role model. I had also seenan article about the same time that showed that consistently, three years running, she [Jane Fonda] and Margaret Thatcher and Indira Ghanda were considered role models by readers of Teen Magazine,a girls' magazine. So as far as I was concerned, sh was a role model.

    What I said to Beggs was that there was nothing in the article that I would deny saying. I cannot remember everything I said, but the sense of it was certainly accurate. I tried to explain that we had done this deliberately and that we had informed the White House in advance, an that we had also petitioned the White House to get women other people down there so it wouldn't be dominated by people who were seen as, in the case of Fonda and Steinem, hostile to the administration. Beggs never really replied I don't think I expected him to. But the whole thing deteriorated.

MAUER: When he asked you abut this--let's see if we can recrate the flow of events. You had the party, the night before, the launch.

DUFF: I stayed for the launch. (When I was in Houston, I sued to go to Houston before, but when I was head of public affairs, I actually stayed in the launch control center.) This whole thing must have happened, the Post must have come out--I know it was a Saturday morning, because I didn't hear from Beggs and I didn't have any inkling that this had happened until I got to Houston.

    I'll never know exactly what happened, but my understanding is that Mrs. [Nancy] Reagan called Don Reagan, and Reagan called Beggs. Beggs was angry. Beggs took what I would consider a Republican view of the situation. He didn't like Jane Fonda, and in his view, nothing justified saying anything nice about her.

    This is a case of what I called the corporate public affairs person versus the public affairs person. If I'd been a good corporate public affairs person, I would have smelled that [the problem] a mile away; I might have invited Jane Fonda, but I never would have bragged about it. I would have said, "We're glad to see 600 prominent women her," or something like that. I would not have singled out Jane Fonda.

    My successor was a true corporate public affairs person, brought in from General Dynamics by Beggs, and I can't imagine him ever saying anything like what I said. I don't think he would have insulted Jane Fonda, but I think he would have found a way to make it clear that Jane Fonda was one of 600 prominent women and that she was there because she was a woman and not because of her politics. That's the difference. That's why I always thought, in a sense, I deserved what I got, not because Iinvited Jane Fonda, not because of the plan to being the 600 women, but because I didn't have the sensitivity to understand women, but because I didn't have the sensitivity to understand that I was a spokesman for NASA in a Republican administration, and my response wasn't a good response. It was motivated too much by my own personal philosophy and not by what should have been my sense of the administration's position.

MAUER: So you got to Houston and Beggs called you. Nancy Reagan had called Don Reagan.

DUFF: I don't know that. Some of the news men who were involved said that that's what happened.

MAUER: But you had no personal knowledge?

DUFF: No personal knowledge, and Mr. Beggs never told me. I'm not sure Mr. Beggs ever told me that he'd been chewed out by the White Hose, but I understand he was. He'd probably tell you if you asked him.

    John [Noble] Wilfort of the New York Times called me at home after I got back to Washington. The shuttle had already landed. Wilfort said something like, "I understand you've been fired because of Fonda." I wish I could remember better. My immediate reaction was to get off the phone and try to find out what had happened before I said something stupid.     

MAUER: So when he called you up, you had not heard that you were out?

DUFF: Yes, I knew, but I didn't realize that it had reached that point.

Mayer: In your conversation with Beggs, Beggs was mad and felt that you had not done the right thing?

DUFF: He wanted a report on what had happened, and I gave him the report. Jim Beggs never asked me to resign.

MAUER: But Wilfort had heard something that indicated that you were already out when he called you?

DUFF: Yes, and I said, "Where'd you hear this, John?" He said, "I called the White House. I got it from the White House." His story, which broke the whole thing, said, "A highly placed White House official"--Wilfort might tell you who it was--"confirmed that they had asked that Duff be replaced because they wanted someone there who knows the right people to invite to a launch." I've got the paper at home. You can read it if you want. I always thought that that was the ultimate, that they wanted him to know the right people to invite to a launch.

    In very short order, a former advance man for the campaign came over to our office and I thought, "That's great, because wait 'till they see the list for Guy Bluford. If they didn't like the Sally Ride list, they wouldn't like the Guy Bluford list, because we'd done exactly the same thing. We'd gone out and tried to find the mst prominent, most vocal black Americans we could find, and we'd invite them all to the launch, and most of them were Democrats. But the White House did send someone over. He arrived, and one day he disappeared. I don't know what ever happened to him.

MAUER: How much longer did you stay?

DUFF: Wait awhile. My replacement, Frank Johnson, came in from General Dynamics, which was Beggs' old company.

    Before Frank came in, I went to the person who had replaced bob Allnutt. Bob Allnutt was gone, too, of course. Those senior jobs were filled by Republicans. I went to Pat Templeton and I said, "Pat, my sense is that the best thing for everyone is for me to got." The statement we'd issued to the press was that I'd been reassigned. I said, "I don't really see a practical reassignment. I don't see any place you can put me where it really will work." MY sense was that the best way to get on with it, and to make the White House feel that Beggs had responded promptly and adequately, was for me to leave, period, rather than be reassign. Pat said, "I'll talk to Jim and see if he agrees with you." The next day, Pat said, "Yes, it would be better." I didn't get the sense that I was being forced out. I got the sense that if I'd dug my heels in I probably could have stayed, but I didn't want to do that. Interestingly enough, I did stay through at least tow more flights, because Templeton wanted a transition. I was still there, I think for the Bluford flight.

MAUER: Any changes in the guest list?

DUFF: I don't remember. There may have been some changes. The list did go to the White House, and they may have added some Republicans. But we didn't base the list on politics, of course. We based it on visibility. At that time there was a black mayor of Chicago, a black mayor of Washington, and a black mayor of Atlanta. There were a number of people invited, the ones who were going to get the ink were the people who tended to be critics.

MAUER: I think we're bringing to a close the thins we've talked about. Is there anything else that you can think of that would be worth covering.

DUFF: No, I don't think so. If someone asked me what was the best performance of NASA's public affairs, when it worked the way it was supposed to work, I would say Apollo 13. We were helped by the fact that they ultimately rescued the astronauts. There is no question that it's always easier to look good on a story which has a happy ending. But even before it was clear that the astronauts--well, it wasn't clear that the astronauts would be saved until they were saved, but even before we knew they were safe, the thing worked like a fire drill. Everything worked the way it was supposed to work. We were giving out information before we had to give out information. The key people were available on a regularly scheduled basis. And they were the people who were really doing the job, not spokesmen for the people who were doing the job. The press never had the sense that they were being kept from anything. We had a pool at mission control. We had a change-of-shift briefing. I don't think we ever missed a change-of-shift briefing all through Apollo 13, which means every eight hours. Not only did we have a chance to monitor all that was going on, but we had the key people from mission control, many of whom were very tired, of course.

    Before the staff went home, they would submit to an exhausting press briefing exhausting press briefing by the media in Houston. After the flight was over and the astronauts were back safely the same discipline applied to the investigating team. In the case of the investigating team, not only did we make them available but we even held press conferences in a circle in order to keep the press conference as close to a non adversarial experience for everyone as possible. The senior people form the investigating team met on a regular basis. The briefings were always done on schedule, something I think is important. You say you're going to do them every day at noon, rather than doing them ad hoc or dong them when you want to do them, and it works. It's useful for both sides. It lets the press relax and lets them come in on a fairly regular schedule, without a sense of panic. It also lets the engineers and the managers know that they don't have to worry about the press until noon, but that they'd better begin to get ready for them, because they're going to have to do it every day at noon. It works as a discipline in both directions.

    Apollo 13 was in my experience, the way it ought to work. It really did pay off and was viewed by a lot of people as the most accurately covered catastrophe that NASA ever had. Again, there were a lot of things that made it work that way. Part of it was that it was stretched out over a period of time. Another one was that ultimately the astronauts were saved. But I'm still convinced that even if they hadn't been, it would still go down in history as an example of how to handle something like that.

MAUER: We're coming to the end of this tape, and I think that's a most opportune place to stop. Thank you very much.

Rev. 09/06/96