1972: Choose Your Futures

It’s 1972. What does the American future look like, right through the early years of the 21^st 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 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 then?

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 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 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?