'What Do You Care What Other People Think?'

by Richard P Feynman

  Then I offered a compromise on the tenth recommendation: “If they want to say something nice about NASA at the end, just don’t call it a recommendation, so people will know that it’s not in the same class as the other recommendations: call it a ‘concluding thought’ if you want. And to avoid confusion, don’t use the words ‘strongly recommends.’ Just say ‘urges’—‘The Commission urges that NASA continue to receive the support of the Administration and the nation.’ All the other stuff can stay the same.”

  A little bit later, Keel calls me up: “Can we say ‘strongly urges’?”

  “No. Just ‘urges’.”

  “Okay,” he said. And that was the final decision.

  Meet the Press

  I PUT my name on the main report, my own report got in as an appendix, and everything was all right. In early June we went back to Washington and gave our report to the President in a ceremony held in the Rose Garden. That was on a Thursday. The report was not to be released to the public until the following Monday, so the President could study it.

  Meanwhile, the newspaper reporters were working like demons: they knew our report was finished and they were trying to scoop each other to find out what was in it. I knew they would be calling me up day and night, and I was afraid I would say something about a technical matter that would give them a hint.

  Reporters are very clever and persistent. They’ll say, “We heard such-and-such—is it true?” And pretty soon, what you’re thinking you didn’t tell them shows up in the newspaper!

  I was determined not to say a word about the report until it was made public, on Monday. A friend of mine convinced me to go on the “MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,” so I said yes for Monday evening’s show.

  I also had my secretary set up a press conference for Tuesday at Caltech. I said, “Tell the reporters who want to talk to me that I haven’t any comment on anything: any questions they have, I’ll be glad to answer on Tuesday at my press conference.”

  FIGURE 18. The Commission Report was presented to the president in the Rose Garden at the White House. Visible, from left to right, are General Kutyna, William Rogers, Eugene Covert, President Reagan, Neil Armstrong, and Richard Feynman. ( © PETE SOUZA, THE WHITE.)

  FIGURE 19. At the reception. ( © PETE SOUZA, THE WHITE HOUSE.)

  Over the weekend, while I was still in Washington, it leaked somehow that I had threatened to take my name off the report. Some paper in Miami started it, and soon the story was running all over about this argument between me and Rogers. When the reporters who were used to covering Washington heard “Mr. Feynman has nothing to say; he’ll answer all your questions at his press conference on Tuesday,” it sounded suspicious—as though the argument was still on, and I was going to have this press conference on Tuesday to explain why I took my name off the report.

  But I didn’t know anything about it. I isolated myself from the press so much that I wasn’t even reading the newspapers.

  On Sunday night, the commission had a goodbye dinner arranged by Mr. Rogers at some club. After we finished eating, I said to General Kutyna, “I can’t stay around anymore. I have to leave a little early.”

  He says, “What can be so important?”

  I didn’t want to say.

  He comes outside with me, to see what this “important” something is. It’s a bright red sports car with two beautiful blonds inside, waiting to whisk me away.

  I get in the car. We’re about to speed off, leaving General Kutyna standing there scratching his head, when one of the blonds says, “Oh! General Kutyna! I’m Ms. So-and-so. I interviewed you on the phone a few weeks ago.”

  So he caught on. They were reporters from the “MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.”

  They were very nice, and we talked about this and that for the show Monday night. Somewhere along the line I told them I was going to have my own press conference on Tuesday, and I was going to give out my report—even though it was going to appear as an appendix three months later. They said my report sounded interesting, and they’d like to see it. By this time we’re all very friendly, so I gave them a copy.

  They dropped me off at my cousin’s house, where I was staying. I told Frances about the show, and how I gave the reporters a copy of my report. Frances puts her hands to her head, horrified.

  I said, “Yes, that was a dumb mistake, wasn’t it! I’d better call ’em up and tell ’em not to use it.”

  I could tell by the way Frances shook her head that it wasn’t gonna be so easy!

  I call one of them up: “I’m sorry, but I made a mistake: I shouldn’t have given my report to you, so I’d prefer you didn’t use it.”

  “We’re in the news business, Dr. Feynman. The goal of the news business is to get news, and your report is newsworthy. It would be completely against our instincts and practice not to use it.”

  “I know, but I’m naive about these things. I simply made a mistake. It’s not fair to the other reporters who will be at the press conference on Tuesday. After all, would you like it if you came to a press conference and the guy had mistakenly given his report to somebody else? I think you can understand that.”

  “I’ll talk to my colleague and call you back.”

  Two hours later, they call back—they’re both on the line—and they try to explain to me why they should use it: “In the news business, it’s customary that whenever we get a document from somebody (he way we did from you, it means we can use it.”

  “I appreciate that there are conventions in the news business, but I don’t know anything about these things, so as a courtesy to me, please don’t use it.”

  It went back and forth a little more like that. Then another “We’ll call you back.” and another long delay. I could tell from the long delays that they were having a lot of trouble with this problem.

  I was in a very good fettle, for some reason. I had already lost, and I knew what I needed, so I could focus easily. I had no difficulty admitting complete idiocy—which is usually the case when I deal with the world—and I didn’t think there was any law of nature which said I had to give in. I just kept going, and didn’t waver at all.

  It went late into the night: one o’clock, two o’clock, we’re still working on it. “Dr. Feynman, it’s very unprofessional to give someone a story and then retract it. This is not the way people behave in Washington.”

  “It’s obvious I don’t know anything about Washington. But this is the way I behave—like a fool. I’m sorry, but it was simply an error, so as a courtesy, please don’t use it.”

  Then, somewhere along the line, one of them says, “If we go ahead and use your report, does that mean you won’t go on the show?”

  “You said it; I didn’t.”

  “We’ll call you back.”

  Another delay.

  Actually, I hadn’t decided whether I’d refuse to go on the show, because I kept thinking it was possible I could undo my mistake. When I thought about it, I didn’t think I could legitimately play that card. But when one of them made the mistake of proposing the possibility, I said, “You said it; I didn’t”—very cold—as if to say, “I’m not threatening you, but you can figure it out for yourself, honey!”

  They called me back, and said they wouldn’t use my report.

  When I went on the show, I never got the impression that any of the questions were based on my report. Mr. Lehrer did ask me whether there had been any problems between me and Mr. Rogers, but I weaseled: I said there had been no problems.

  After the show was over, the two reporters told me they thought the show went fine without my report. We left good friends.

  I flew back to California that night, and had my press conference on Tuesday at Caltech. A large number of reporters came. A few asked questions about my report, but most of them were interested in the rumor that I had threatened to take my name off the commission report. I found myself telling them over and over that I had no problem with Mr. Rogers.

  Afterthoughts

  NOW that I�
�ve had more time to think about it, I still like Mr. Rogers, and I still feel that everything’s okay. It’s my judgment that he’s a fine man. Over the course of the commission I got to appreciate his talents and his abilities, and I have great respect for him. Mr. Rogers has a very good, smooth way about him, so I reserve in my head the possibility—not as a suspicion, but as an unknown—that I like him because he knew how to make me like him. I prefer to assume he’s a genuinely fine fellow, and that he is the way he appears. But I was in Washington long enough to know that I can’t tell.

  I’m not exactly sure what Mr. Rogers thinks of me. He gives me the impression that, in spite of my being such a pain in the ass to him in the beginning, he likes me very much. I may be wrong, but if he feels the way I feel toward him, it’s good.

  Mr. Rogers, being a lawyer, had a difficult job to run a commission investigating what was essentially a technical question. With Dr. Keel’s help, I think the technical part of it was handled well. But it struck me that there were several fishinesses associated with the big cheeses at NASA.

  Every time we talked to higher level managers, they kept saying they didn’t know anything about the problems below them. We’re getting this kind of thing again in the Iran-Contra hearings, but at that time, this kind of situation was new to me: either the guys at the top didn’t know, in which case they should have known, or they did know, in which case they’re lying to us.

  When we learned that Mr. Mulloy had put pressure on Thiokol to launch, we heard time after time that the next level up at NASA knew nothing about it. You’d think Mr. Mulloy would have notified a higher-up during this big discussion, saying something like, “There’s a question as to whether we should fly tomorrow morning, and there’s been some objection by the Thiokol engineers, but we’ve decided to fly anyway—what do you think?” But instead, Mulloy said something like, “All the questions have been resolved.” There seemed to be some reason why guys at the lower level didn’t bring problems up to the next level.

  I invented a theory which I have discussed with a considerable number of people, and many people have explained to me why it’s wrong. But I don’t remember their explanations, so I cannot resist telling you what I think led to this lack of communication in NASA.

  When NASA was trying to go to the moon, there was a great deal of enthusiasm: it was a goal everyone was anxious to achieve. They didn’t know if they could do it, but they were all working together.

  I have this idea because I worked at Los Alamos, and I experienced the tension and the pressure of everybody working together to make the atomic bomb. When somebody’s having a problem—say, with the detonator—everybody knows that it’s a big problem, they’re thinking of ways to beat it, they’re making suggestions, and when they hear about the solution they’re excited, because that means their work is now useful: if the detonator didn’t work, the bomb wouldn’t work.

  I figured the same thing had gone on at NASA in the early days: if the space suit didn’t work, they couldn’t go to the moon. So everybody’s interested in everybody else’s problems.

  But then, when the moon project was over, NASA had all these people together: there’s a big organization in Houston and a big organization in Huntsville, not to mention at Kennedy, in Florida. You don’t want to fire people and send them out in the street when you’re done with a big project, so the problem is, what to do?

  You have to convince Congress that there exists a project that only NASA can do. In order to do so, it is necessary—at least it was apparently necessary in this case—to exaggerate: to exaggerate how economical the shuttle would be, to exaggerate how often it could fly, to exaggerate how safe it would be, to exaggerate the big scientific facts that would be discovered. “The shuttle can make so-and-so many flights and it’ll cost such-and-such; we went to the moon, so we can do it!”

  Meanwhile, I would guess, the engineers at the bottom are saying, “No, no! We can’t make that many flights. If we had to make that many flights, it would mean such-and-such!” And, “No, we can’t do it for that amount of money, because that would mean we’d have to do thus-and-so!”

  Well, the guys who are trying to get Congress to okay their projects don’t want to hear such talk. It’s better if they don’t hear, so they can be more “honest”—they don’t want to be in the position of lying to Congress! So pretty soon the attitudes begin to change: information from the bottom which is disagreeable—”We’re having a problem with the seals; we should fix it before we fly again”—is suppressed by big cheeses and middle managers who say, “If you tell me about the seals problems, we’ll have to ground the shuttle and fix it.” Or, “No, no, keep on flying, because otherwise, it’ll look bad,” or “Don’t tell me; I don’t want to hear about it.”

  Maybe they don’t say explicitly “Don’t tell me,” but they discourage communication, which amounts to the same thing. It’s not a question of what has been written down, or who should tell what to whom; it’s a question of whether, when you do tell somebody about some problem, they’re delighted to hear about it and they say “Tell me more” and “Have you tried such-and-such?” or they say “Well, see what you can do about it”—which is a completely different atmosphere. If you try once or twice to communicate and get pushed back, pretty soon you decide, “To hell with it.”

  So that’s my theory: because of the exaggeration at the top being inconsistent with the reality at the bottom, communication got slowed up and ultimately jammed. That’s how it’s possible that the higher-ups didn’t know.

  The other possibility is that the higher-ups did know, and they just said they didn’t know.

  I looked up a former director of NASA—I don’t remember his name now—who is the head of some company in California. I thought I’d go and talk to him when I was on one of my breaks at home, and say, “They all say they haven’t heard. Does that make any sense? How does someone go about investigating them?”

  He never returned my calls. Perhaps he didn’t want to talk to the commissioner investigating higher-ups; maybe he had had enough of NASA, and didn’t want to get involved. And because I was busy with so many other things, I didn’t push it.

  There were all kinds of questions we didn’t investigate. One was this mystery of Mr. Beggs, the former director of NASA who was removed from his job pending an investigation that had nothing to do with the shuttle; he was replaced by Graham shortly before the accident. Nevertheless, it turned out that, every day, Beggs came to his old office. People came in to see him, although he never talked to Graham. What was he doing? Was there some activity still being directed by Beggs?

  From time to time I would try to get Mr. Rogers interested in investigating such fishinesses. I said, “We have lawyers on the commission, we have company managers, we have very fine people with a large range of experiences. We have people who know how to get an answer out of a guy when he doesn’t want to say something. I don’t know how to do that. If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 10 5, I know he’s full of crap—but I don’t know what’s natural in a bureaucratic system. We oughta get some of the big shots together and ask them questions: just like we asked the second-level managers like Mr. Mulloy, we should ask the first level.”

  He would say, “Yes, well, I think so.”

  Mr. Rogers told me later that he wrote a letter to each of the big shots, but they replied that they didn’t have anything they wanted to say to us.

  There was also the question of pressure from the White House.

  It was the President’s idea to put a teacher in space, as a symbol of the nation’s commitment to education. He had proposed the idea a year before, in his State of the Union address. Now, one year later, the State of the Union speech was coming up again. It would be perfect to have the teacher in space, talking to the President and the Congress. All the circumstantial evidence was very strong.

  I talked to a number of people about it, and heard various opinions, but I finally concluded that there was no pre
ssure from the White House.

  First of all, the man who pressured Thiokol to change its position, Mr. Mulloy, was a second-level manager. Ahead of time, nobody could predict what might get in the way of a launch. If you imagine Mulloy was told “Make sure the shuttle flies tomorrow, because the President wants it,” you’d have to imagine that everybody else at his level had to be told—and there are a lot of people at his level. To tell that many people would make it sure to leak out. So that way of putting on pressure was very unlikely.

  By the time the commission was over, I understood much better the character of operations in Washington and in NASA. I learned, by seeing how they worked, that the people in a big system like NASA know what has to be done—without being told.

  There was already a big pressure to keep the shuttle flying. NASA had a flight schedule they were trying to meet, just to show the capabilities of NASA—never mind whether the president was going to give a speech that night or not. So I don’t believe there was any direct activity or any special effort from the White House. There was no need to do it, so I don’t believe it was done.

  I could give you an analog of that. You know those signs that appear in the back windows of automobiles—those little yellow diamonds that say BABY ON BOARD, and things like that? You don’t have to tell me there’s a baby on board; I’m gonna drive carefully anyway! What am I supposed to do when I see there’s a baby on board: act differently? As if I’m suddenly gonna drive more carefully and not hit the car because there’s a baby on board, when all I’m trying to do is not hit it anyway!

  So NASA was trying to get the shuttle up anyway: you don’t have to say there’s a baby on board, or there’s a teacher on board, or it’s important to get this one up for the President.

  Now that I’ve talked to some people about my experiences on the commission, I think I understand a few things that I didn’t understand so well earlier. One of them has to do with what I said to Dr. Keel that upset him so much. Recently I was talking to a man who spent a lot of time in Washington, and I asked him a particular question which, if he didn’t take it right, could be considered a grave insult. I would like to explain the question, because it seems to me to be a real possibility of what I said to Dr. Keel.