NASA'S “NIXONESQUE PURGE”

The Washington Post's “Racism, Sexism, and Space Ventures” editorial of 24 November 1973 was forceful. “Civil rights advocates have been fond for years,” they wrote,

What had happened? NASA's top two administrators – James Fletcher and George Low – had fired Ruth Bates Harris, “the highest ranking woman in the agency and the deputy director of NASA's equal opportunity [affirmative action] programs” on 11 October. “Mrs. Harris' dismissal,” the Post continued,

NASA administrator James Fletcher flatly denied the Harris firing had “anything to do with the starkly candid internal report.” He said, rather,

The final months of 1973 were a very bad time for executive-branch agencies in a national capital that had recently increased from one-half to two-thirds black to claim lèse majesté while making tactless comments about degrees of skin coloration. Richard M. Nixon's presidency, most notably, was unravelling. On 10 October Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned over a bribery scandal. Simultaneously, Nixon waged his own battle for presidential survival in the Watergate case. From 15 to 19 October Nixon told Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox to cease demanding White House tapes that might prove Nixon's involvement in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. After Cox refused, Nixon fired him in the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 20 October.Footnote ⁷

Full-blown Constitutional crisis then commenced. In a pre-Internet world, 250,000 to 300,000 telegrams cascaded into Washington demanding Nixon's impeachment. Conservative Time magazine editorialized that he had “irredeemably lost his moral authority, the confidence of most of the country, and therefore his ability to govern effectively.” Important regional papers joined the New York Times in editorializing that Nixon should resign. The Washington Post called for impeachment.Footnote ⁸

NASA'S CHANGED POLITICAL CONTEXT

The Harris firing of 11 October 1973, then, catapulted NASA to wider power struggles. Three Senate committees announced investigations of NASA's firing as the Washington Post's scathing “Racism, Sexism, and Space Ventures” editorial appeared. The story of Harris's hiring, firing, and forced rehiring by NASA shows how America's human space exploration program really became female as well as multiracial. It also demonstrates why that process took almost twenty-five years to begin.

NASA was born in an era of all-pervasive Cold War. Between 1965 and 1975, however, political priorities in the US shifted. External military and diplomatic concerns gave way to domestic sociopolitical and economic issues like the women's movement, civil rights, and environmentalism. American politics was opening up to major new constituencies.Footnote ⁹

New priorities, programs, and political constituencies, however, spelled trouble for an agency that had legitimized itself on Cold War power and prestige grounds. NASA budgets peaked by 1966 and then halved, in purchasing-power terms, in the decade following. By 1974 the agency had also lost a third of its civil-service workforce. Only foreign aid was more unpopular than space exploration. Even welfare spending fared better.Footnote ¹⁰

As an environmental era replaced a space age, race and gender debates echoed and elaborated. What began as a push for equal social and political opportunity shifted into arguments about preferential educational and jobs treatment after 1965, and especially after the riot-filled late 1960s and the stagflationary 1970s. Exclusionary laws were now much less important than exclusionary customs; “southern” problems became national ones. “Affirmative action” (compensatory activity for those previously excluded by rules or custom from occupations or training) became a defining political issue.Footnote ¹¹

NASA long ignored such race and gender issues. As late as September of 1971, NASA had no systematic program for civil rights in employment, even though many of its dozen research centers were located in segregated southern states like Virginia, Texas, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. “The EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity – the bureaucratic name for affirmative action] function,” NASA later told a Congressional committee “had been carried out by NASA's Director of Personnel in Washington on a part-time basis.”Footnote ¹²

Civil rights in employment issues almost never featured at NASA because NASA existed in a sector of the economy almost completely Caucasian and male. A Wharton School report of 1966 noted that blacks were excluded from the aviation industry until World War II. Just as there were no black military aviators until the wartime Tuskegee Airmen proved to segregationists that blacks were mentally capable of flight, pre-1941 anti-black policies were not disguised in corporations. Blacks pushed brooms; whites built airplanes. Even twenty-five years later, only a third of 1 percent of managers and seven-tenths of 1 percent of “professionals” in aerospace companies providing data were African American. The largest changes – many forced by unions – had taken place in semiskilled and unskilled labour ranks, where 8 and 14 percent of workers, respectively, were black. Office and clerical staff, however, were not even 2 percent African-American; and skilled workers just below 3 percent. In comparison, 20 percent of janitors were black in 1966.Footnote ¹³

After the civil rights era began, change remained slow. Aerospace companies argued “direct experience in the aerospace industry” was necessary for managerial and technical advancements. Because the pool of such technically experienced and qualified blacks was very small – and also because the companies did little to provide enhanced training those skilled minorities as did exist – progress stayed minimal.Footnote ¹⁴

Women fared as badly and worse. Despite a “Rosy the Riveter” interlude during World War II, after the war (Caucasian) women disappeared from aerospace – except as clerks and typists. Women were also not normally admitted to technical schools or to undergraduate or graduate training in engineering and the physical sciences until the late 1960s. Female engineering Ph.D.s, accordingly, were under 4 percent of the total twenty-five years after sputnik and twenty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Levels of 10 percent were not reached until 1990. In that year, female Ph.D.s were 40 percent in biology, and 50 percent in the social sciences and humanities. Just as there was a gender gap in aerospace, there was a racial gap. African Americans received only 2 percent of doctorates in all fields of science and engineering in the 1990s. They earned 5 percent of bachelor's degrees in aerospace, electrical, or mechanical engineering in 2002, compared with 3 percent of the total in 1980. Native Americans and Hispanics have stayed as low or lower.Footnote ¹⁵

Technically trained minorities and women, therefore, came to NASA and the aerospace sector rarely and late. Between 2 and 3 percent of the technicians and engineers NASA hired from 1958 to 1970 were women; female scientists were rarer still. NASA had only 146 females employed at professional grades of GS-12 or above when it had 35,000 civil service employees in 1964.Footnote ¹⁶

Between 1968 and 1972, however, a quiet legal revolution occurred which made further benign neglect impossible. In the Griggs v. Duke Power Company case of 1971, for example, a clear compensatory action and preferential-treatment argument was enunciated by the Supreme Court. A previously segregated southern utility was using competency tests that had a “disparate impact” on minority groups. The court ruled it could not do so unless those tests had a very clear relationship to advertised jobs. “Business necessity” claims for certain educational attainments or literacy levels were not enough. No intent to discriminate against individual applicants needed to be proved if a pattern of group exclusion was demonstrated. Given the long history of educational and occupational apartheid, the utility had to make up for the effects of such past structural impediments.Footnote ¹⁷

Griggs was only one of a series of preferential or compensatory affirmative-action rulings in the federal courts. In voting, education, job training, hiring, promotions, job testing, and other areas, disparate impact and results replaced equal access and non-discrimination as the new legal test. Groups which had previously had job scales weighted in their favour now had the scales weighted very heavily against them. Urban violence and race riots in major cities from 1965 to 1972 made what one Supreme Court justice called “transitional inequality” more acceptable.Footnote ¹⁸

Women also benefited from such legal shifts. “Second-wave” (or multicultural) feminism began by the 1970s. Groups like the Women's Equity Action League joined the NAACP Legal Defence Fund and others in bringing suits against federal contractors and, by 1971, against organizations taking federal money in any form. Suddenly, elite meritocracies like Harvard and the University of Michigan were in the same legal position as aerospace contractors. By 1972 Congress had further extended the scope of affirmative action when it ordered all executive-branch agencies, like NASA, to obey the same civil rights in employment rules as private corporations and state governments.Footnote ¹⁹

NASA SEEKS TO CHANGE

NASA started getting the message in 1971. In March a Mormon aerospace engineer and former University of Utah president, Dr. James C. Fletcher, took over as NASA's fourth administrator, with career official George M. Low as his deputy. Fletcher handled NASA's outside relationships, and Low was the inside man at the agency. Both men knew NASA had a large political credibility gap and an uncertain future.Footnote ²⁰

James Fletcher reacted, accordingly, with bold moves, one aimed at improving NASA's standing with racial minorities and women. On 24 August 1971 NASA issued a press release signed by Fletcher announcing that a fifty-two-year-old African American woman, Mrs. Ruth Bates Harris, would become NASA headquarters' new “Director of Equal Employment Opportunity.” She would “provide direction” for all the “approximately 29,000 NASA Civil Service employees,” including top managers at all dozen NASA centers. She would also oversee “contract compliance”: the hiring of women and minorities by the many private firms providing products or services to NASA centers. The new head of an agency whose “social center of gravity,” as Bettyann Kevles should later call it, was “exceedingly conservative” had just acted decisively.Footnote ²¹

A “HARLEM PRINCESS” GOES TO NASA

The woman Fletcher hired was no radical. A graduate of Florida A&M University, with an MBA from New York University, her career included service as the executive director at the District of Columbia Commission on Human Relations, a civil rights oversight and implementation group. Then, for two additional years, she was the human relations director for the public school system of Montgomery County, Maryland, one of the most affluent counties in the US, where, between 1969 and 1971, only 4 percent of the populace was African American and only 7 percent non-Caucasian. Harris's constituents included top political policymakers in Washington and NASA staffers from the agency's Goddard Spaceflight Center. It was via her Goddard connections that NASA headquarters heard of her and recruited her.Footnote ²²

Major problems with Ruth Bates Harris's appointment, however, developed even before she got to NASA. Only a week after publicly announcing Harris's future status as a change-agent with power, Fletcher demoted her and rehired her. Instead of overseeing and enforcing expanding civil rights in employment for racial minorities and women within a largely southern NASA system, Harris became a manageress reporting to the white male who oversaw private companies. Instead of regulating NASA, and in particular the heads of NASA labs, Harris was sidetracked into an office overseeing NASA contractors. Enforcing virtues upon itself very suddenly ceased being a NASA priority.Footnote ²³

Harris's lowering in rank before she even arrived for work on 4 October 1971 was a warning signal. It was also what George Low later privately admitted was “the weakest part” of NASA's official position. Nobody at NASA headquarters then or later ever accepted responsibility for the action.Footnote ²⁴

What had happened? Harris had already passed security checks. She was a self-described “Harlem Princess.” But she was also a street-smart affirmative action implementation officer for city government, notably the fire and police departments, who increasingly thought about civil relations issues in inclusive terms and as they affected African Americans, women, Hispanics, the aged, and the disabled. Congress was also the overseer of DC government. So, during her nine years at the DC Commission on Human Relations, Harris had learned to work well with congresspeople and senators including Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin and the Congressional Black Caucus (formed in 1969). “I'm never,” Harris told a civil rights oral-history interviewer in March of 1971, “just talking about people being nice to each other. I'm talking about changing the system.” “We ought,” she continued, “to have one big coalition” of blacks and “all our minorities” – including women – with which “we could change anything in this system.”Footnote ²⁵

NASA, then, may have thought that it was getting a low-keyed educator, when it was in fact getting an experienced woman nicknamed “the Civil Rights Lady” who was networked into Washington on both the local and the national levels. This fact may very well have shocked directors at the eight NASA labs which had created EEO or affirmative-action teams just before Harris was hired. Four of those center directors only worked part time, all were under the administrative control of low-level procurement officers, and no fewer than six of the eight new civil rights in employment offices at NASA's labs were all-white.Footnote ²⁶

Leaders of some major NASA installations, then, clearly looked less than enthusiastic about hiring more women and minorities. Harris, however, accepted her scaled-down position at NASA headquarters in the belief that NASA agency leaders were finally going to move on key issues like opening the Astronaut Corps to women and minorities to gain greater degrees of popular interest, understanding, and support.Footnote ²⁷

She was speedily disappointed. Middle managers at NASA headquarters responsible for personnel and administration policy refused to do anything about affirmative action. NASA kept on employing fewer minorities and women than any other agency in the executive branch. George Low and others at NASA expressed satisfaction that some early NASA statistics showed it was doing as well as private companies at employing racial minorities and women in the technical half of its operations (at 3·5 percent). He did not go on to ask why NASA employed only 6 percent of racial minorities in the non-technical half of its operations (as compared to a 20 percent average in all federal agencies). Ruth Bates Harris did pose this and other uncomfortable questions.Footnote ²⁸

NASA'S ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Harris also offended against the social folkways of a high-technology agency. At NASA the mission mattered; personnel (and personal) issues did not. George Low, for example, was so private he did not even have a listing in Who's Who in America when he was a top manager of the Apollo program and of NASA. Even his closest aides did not know he was an Austrian Jewish refugee from Hitlerism.Footnote ²⁹

A reason for Low's cloak of privacy shared offices at NASA headquarters with him when Ruth Bates Harris arrived in 1971. Dr. Wernher von Braun, NASA's premier missile man in the 1950s and 1960s, had earlier designed military rockets for a Nazi regime which cost Low's family their homeland and loved ones. Low's favourite managerial advice was for people to “put their emotional hang-ups aside.” “Identity” issues, past or present, were off limits.Footnote ³⁰

Harris's approach to von Braun's past was quite different. She was not intimidated easily. So, after reading a newspaper story sometime in 1971 or 1972 that von Braun had used slave labour to build rockets for Hitler's regime, she went to von Braun's office and asked him whether the story was true. “The silence between us,” she recalled, “was deafening and awesome.” Von Braun replied there were journalistic distortions. Harris then said that it was not her role to judge, but that she was also going to refer the story to the “appropriate office” at headquarters. Von Braun, Harris recalled, was both sad and understanding. Both knew racism was not restricted to Nazis, and Harris respected von Braun's later actions on behalf on minorities and women. In even bringing up von Braun's past, however, Harris had demonstrated far more forcefulness than many of her male contemporaries at NASA felt comfortable with.Footnote ³¹

PRESSURE BUILDS

Moreover, Harris began bringing other uncomfortable issues into NASA policymaking councils, via her connections with the Congressional Black Caucus and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). NASA's spacecraft tracking stations in South Africa had hired Africans over government opposition in the early 1960s, but apartheid customs such as having African employees eating outside under trees – while whites monopolized dining rooms – continued. Given growing numbers of African Americans in Congress, and a majority of non-whites on earth, this was politically bad.Footnote ³²

Concerns like this did not endear Harris to many who believed space exploration was a transcendent good. But NASA leaders' major difficulty with Harris was that she wanted to run NASA headquarters' new effort on Fletcher's original terms. This meant that Harris wanted to report directly to Fletcher to ensure that she had bureaucratic stature. Harris had succeeded at the DC Council on Human Relations via community networking, risk-taking, and cooperation with activists. She wanted to do the same at NASA.Footnote ³³

Such “bridge-leadership” strategy surfaced eighteen months after her arrival. Key context here included initial passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and new laws requiring executive-branch agencies to obey affirmative-action laws. New civil service regulations also required affirmative-action directors to report directly to the top administrators of government departments to pry open civil rights in employment doors when necessary.

NASA could not simply ignore Harris – or the law. It had 5·6 percent minority and 18 percent female employees in 1973, versus a government average of 20 percent minority and 34 percent female. But of the 4,432 females at NASA, only 310 were in science or engineering, and just four – including Harris – were in the highest civil service grades.Footnote ³⁴

NASA leaders, however, still did not want Ruth Bates Harris to formulate or implement standards for the agency. Instead, they offered to promote Harris one step in the bureaucratic hierarchy. But this promotion would still leave her one step below where they had originally hired her. She would be number two in an equal employment opportunity office, and number two in yet another office overseeing NASA contractors. She would chair a council of affirmative action officers from NASA's installations. She could use persuasion, not power, to upgrade the pro forma programs at some NASA centers. She would not report directly to either Low or Fletcher. Harris did not like this offer, may have threatened to quit, and warned against an approach to civil rights in employment which meant that the uninterested at headquarters led the uncommitted in NASA's research centers.Footnote ³⁵

To George Low, meanwhile, Harris was an administrative lightweight lacking the qualifications expected of a non-technical assistant (rather than deputy assistant) administrator. This made NASA's first hire of her doubly curious. Given that NASA's assistant administrators for public affairs and for international affairs were, respectively, a Chicago businessman and a labour lawyer who had once worked for the International Labour Office in Geneva, NASA's non-technical standards appeared elastic. Harris's proposals, not her skills, were the primary issue.Footnote ³⁶

By March of 1973 Low's private comments became harsh. The whole affirmative-action organization at NASA headquarters was a “dumping ground for poor people” who “could only say yes, not no.” It and the contract-compliance office, however, were “too low in the administrative hierarchy” and there was a “lack of management support and no leadership.” Low now agreed with Harris that something significant had to be done, without agreeing that she should be the one to do it.Footnote ³⁷

Low then had to select someone else to get more women and minorities hired. He quickly and aggressively selected Dr. Dudley McConnell, the only African American in a “super-grade” high-level scientific and technical position within NASA. A physicist, McConnell then headed NASA's Scientific and Technical Information Office. McConnell, not Harris, became NASA's new assistant administrator; he, not Harris, got direct access to Fletcher. NASA had made its second try at creating a civil rights in employment chief in eighteen months.Footnote ³⁸

McCONNELL VERSUS HARRIS

Crude racism played no part in Low's decision, but the organizational culture of NASA clearly did. In 1973 George Low had been with NASA (and a government aerospace research lab that had preceded it) for twenty-five years. He trusted sixteen-year NASA man Dudley McConnell far more than he trusted personnel specialist and civil rights implementer Ruth Bates Harris. Low thought that physics Ph.D. McConnell understood the “problems of technical management” in NASA far better than MBA Harris ever would. Low, in fact, had hired McConnell into NASA in Cleveland, Ohio in October of 1957. So he was taken out of a senior science and technology track where he was unique and put in charge of an office where blacks were not rare.Footnote ³⁹

Low's logic helped explain why NASA in this period did no better at hiring female or minority lawyers (3·7 percent) than it did at hiring female or minority scientists and engineers (3·6 percent). Even though minority and female lawyers were far more numerous than 3·7 percent at the time, NASA's technical culture excluded them – just as it excluded Harris. In 1973 NASA did not even employ a single female janitor. Such customary aerospace exclusions, however, came at a steadily increasing political cost. Dudley McConnell came across to a reporter for Science magazine, who shortly thereafter interviewed him, as “soft-spoken, ingratiating, exceedingly articulate, and strong-willed.” He also “compared himself to the captain of a ship” with “unruly crew members.”Footnote ⁴⁰

McConnell took over in April 1973. Only four months later Low received strong criticisms of McConnell's managerial style from two departing staffers. McConnell did not relate well to women, went for appearances not substance, and was “not communicating concerns to top management.” As “seven or eight” more staffers “might soon be leaving,” Fletcher and Low both met with McConnell. Low later privately concluded that McConnell might indeed have problems with women and communication. He used, for example, to summon female secretaries with a little bell his wife had given him. This promptly earned him the nickname “Mr. Ding-a-ling” (a silly, affected person) in an era of women's rights. Ruth Bates Harris, additionally, had now been denied the job she was originally hired to do for a second time. McConnell, however, refused some of Harris's early offers of cooperation.Footnote ⁴¹

Frustrations accordingly rose. Harris and her supporters believed headquarters would enforce nothing on balky southern labs. They knew that established organizations like the National Urban League and new ones like the National Organization of Women were alienated by longstanding exclusions of females and minorities from NASA's Astronaut Corps, based in Houston, Texas. They knew – in Harris's later words – that NASA had an unadmitted “pasteurized and insulated from the real world” reputation it needed to change. Dudley McConnell, meanwhile, was operating in unfamiliar and turbulent terrain. He moved slowly, said little, and ordered his staff not to undermine him by complaining to his sponsor Low or to Fletcher.Footnote ⁴²

The latter was precisely what Ruth Bates Harris and two of her associates – Joseph M. Hogan and Tuskegee Airman Colonel Samuel Lynn – did five months after McConnell's too-gradualist tenure began. In September 1973 the three sent an internal report to Administrator Fletcher, saying NASA's actions about women and minorities badly lagged behind its words.Footnote ⁴³

The Harris, Hogan, and Lynn report began dramatically. NASA's equal-employment opportunity program was “a near-total failure.” NASA was denying and avoiding problems. Minorities and women were clustered in the lowest civil service job-ratings. Thirteen of the thirty-five minority hires in the 1972 fiscal year were in the lowest government pay scale (GS-2). Three NASA centers in Virginia, Texas, and Florida had not hired any minorities to do anything in 1972. Despite cutbacks, these NASA facilities had hired ten, twenty-four, and twenty-two people respectively.Footnote ⁴⁴

Affirmative action was a “sham” at NASA because of “uncommitted” top management, “insensitive middle management” and “unqualified uncommitted persons” at NASA's centers. Some NASA installations simply were not going to hire blacks or women until they were forced to. There was a “striking anomaly” between NASA's technical genius and its “total insensitivity to human rights and human beings.” The only three females so far sent into space by NASA were two spiders and a monkey. “During an entire generation – from 1958 until the end of this decade – NASA will not have had a woman or a minority astronaut in training.” Continued exclusions would only further diminish support for NASA's space programs in Congress and country alike. Dudley McConnell, finally, should be removed. He was no honest broker, and he demonstrated “immaturity in relating to people.” If NASA listened and acted, it would demonstrate that human-relations skills complemented its proven excellence in engineering and science.Footnote ⁴⁵

NASA's James Fletcher listened to his three frustrated affirmative-action staff. He said vaguely agreeable things about further absorbing their message. Then, axes fell. Fletcher fired Harris, transferred Hogan, and told Lynn to work with EEO chief McConnell or resign. Fletcher claimed Harris's firing had nothing to do with her policy recommendations, all of which were “already well documented.” Instead, Fletcher said Harris was “a seriously disruptive force.” In a four-page single-spaced memo subsequently sent to all NASA headquarters staff, Fletcher elaborated: Harris was a good advocate, but an uncompromising ideologue, who had disloyally sabotaged McConnell and hurt NASA. NASA's minority and female hiring “over the 15 years of our existence is not a record in which we can take pride,” but the future would be a marked improvement on the past.Footnote ⁴⁶

Harris was purged on 11 October 1973. For two weeks things were quiet. After 27 October, however, this situation changed decisively in the wake of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre of 20 October.Footnote ⁴⁷

NASA's timing, bluntly, was awful. Science magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, three US Senate committees, Washington, DC radio and TV stations, and major African American newspapers all featured the Ruth Bates Harris case shortly after Fletcher fired her. NASA's press was so bad that a Fletcher aide forwarded a “much more elegant than usual” article in Science magazine for 23 November which Low should read.Footnote ⁴⁸

NASA'S POLITICAL BEATING

Science's article showed how badly NASA had flunked politically. Its author investigated NASA's public claims and broad verbal hints that Harris was a radical and found them unpersuasive.Footnote ⁴⁹

“Fletcher's Nixonesque purge,” the Science article continued, had also caused unrest within NASA. Seventy headquarters staff had protested the firing. Civil rights and women's groups at several NASA centers had pledged support for Harris. A group called MEAN (Minority Employees at NASA) was formed to protest employment conditions. The prestigious NAACP Legal Defence Fund was about to take on Harris's case to enforce the 1972 law regarding executive-branch agencies obeying affirmative-action statutes.Footnote ⁵⁰

Things only got worse. Three Senate committees began preparing investigations. An eventually fifty organizations protested, including the National Conference of Catholic Charities, the Urban League, La Raza, and the National Organization of Women. As political complaints proliferated, Fletcher ignored a request from Congressman Fernand St. Germain of Rhode Island for an explanation of Harris's firing. St. Germain then wrote Fletcher a scathing note on 12 December saying, “I think if you watch my voting on subsequent [NASA] appropriations measures, you will find it equally unsatisfactory.”Footnote ⁵¹

Two days later Fletcher so badly wanted proof of Harris's radicalism that he paid personal attention to a man who had written a note saying, “We Black People do not want this Subversive person representing us – she is a known ‘Trouble Maker.’” Via deniable intermediaries, Low checked into possible seditions. All such efforts proved futile.Footnote ⁵²

While top NASA managers investigated illusory charges, Ruth Bates Harris talked to reporters as her NAACP lawyers petitioned against her dismissal as an illegal reprisal. NASA leaders had carelessly presumed Harris was a political appointee, not covered under US Civil Service Commission rules, whom they could dismiss at will. Harris's NAACP lawyers argued that James Fletcher could no more fire Harris than Richard Nixon could fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. In a climate of Constitutional crisis, presidential agencies claiming lèse majesté was dangerous. NASA lawyers promptly retreated. The agency paid Harris her full salary throughout her legal appeal.Footnote ⁵³

Meanwhile, George Low was souring on the physicist he had selected to run NASA's affirmative-action effort six months before. “Apparently,” he noted privately at the end of December 1973, “McConnell has all the right ideas but he is not really pushing very hard insofar as implementing these ideas is concerned.” Despite Low's urgings, McConnell was “still very slow.” “I think Fletcher and I will have to ‘lead him by the hand’ … until he can really run the show on his own,” Low concluded.Footnote ⁵⁴

By January of 1974 NASA had a yawning credibility gap and was in deep political trouble. NASA's lawyers secretly told Low and Fletcher that NASA was probably going to lose its case against Harris and the NAACP Legal Defence Fund.Footnote ⁵⁵ Crucial, here, was the unwillingness of those NASA people who had attacked Harris verbally and anonymously to risk public exposure or legal repercussions. Despite requests to “come forward voluntarily when the [NASA] counsellor or the [civil service] inspector sought more information” they refused.Footnote ⁵⁶

NASA, moreover, still lacked any agency-wide plan for recruiting women and minorities. Low pushed the centers to get started by hiring “at least one minority or female at the executive level [apiece] in the next six months.” Three southern labs refused. Charges that Harris was a radical ideologue were not persuading anybody. NASA was being flayed in editorials in the Washington Post and elsewhere for vainly trying to combat “institutionalized racism and sexism” via “simple pieties.” Worse, NASA was headed for hearings with three powerful Senate bodies that oversaw and funded everything NASA did. First on the list was Proxmire's Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, meeting 11 January.Footnote ⁵⁷

Proxmire was trouble, and NASA knew it. A notable critic of the space agency for a decade, the Wisconsin Senator was not impressed by NASA promises, and he knew Harris from earlier DC government work. Both Fletcher and Low, therefore, absented themselves – sending Dudley McConnell and two other headquarters managers in their places. Low, however, “wrote Dudley's [preliminary opening] statement since his was rather weak.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Harris and her associates Hogan and Lynn, meanwhile, came to Proxmire's Senate hearing well prepared. Hogan argued that NASA's approach to hiring more minorities and women was “calculated to provide the appearance of compliance while not doing so.” Harris added that NASA was taking credit for proposals Harris and Hogan had made – such as recruiting women and minorities for the Astronaut Corps – after firing them and without having yet done anything about the proposals. McConnell, she added, had also told Harris and others, “We should not try and get equal opportunity by saying it was the law, because NASA always breaks the law.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Proxmire speedily pounced on this verbal indiscretion. After a political mauling, McConnell finally sought refuge in saying he did not remember using words he later publicly apologized for. McConnell and the other NASA representatives did not dispute Harris's main contentions that NASA's hiring and “contract-compliance” performance was bad. Proxmire refused to accept NASA's bald claim that it had not excluded minorities and (especially) women from the six groups of all male and all-white astronauts it had selected up to that time. The colour line in professional baseball had fallen in 1947, said Proxmire; the civil rights era was over fifteen years old. NASA was wilfully ignoring social change all around it.Footnote ⁶⁰

The agency was so clearly on the defensive about what one of its representatives termed its “somewhat poor performance” that Proxmire made no pretense at political courtesy. First, he said that “congressional monitoring” of NASA's minority and women hiring programs would take place, effective immediately via his subcommittee. Then, he said that NASA's equal-employment budget for the next fiscal year should be doubled (to one-five-hundredth of the agency's budget) because of NASA's “extremely poor record.”Footnote ⁶¹

Back at NASA, Low ignored McConnell's mauling, and used phrases like “not really unfavourable” and “in reasonably good shape” to describe NASA's standing. Denials did not, however, lead either Low or Fletcher to want personally to attend the next Senate committee hearing. Aides now protested. NASA's top leaders absenting themselves looked bad. Fletcher, Low, or both should appear before the Senate's upcoming space committee hearing to defend NASA.Footnote ⁶²

James Fletcher flatly refused. A Utah Mormon, Fletcher had “local political allegiances and religious priorities,” and feared political and religious embarrassment for both himself and NASA. “Fletcher,” Low recorded on 20 January 1974, “is particularly concerned because of his Mormon Church affiliation and the fact the new ‘prophet’ of the Mormon Church has made statements that can be interpreted to be against women and has also reemphasized that the Mormon Church will not admit blacks to ‘priesthood’” and full membership in the faith.Footnote ⁶³

Low and others then argued Fletcher would have no trouble separating his own beliefs from those of his church. Fletcher, however, had no wish to be pilloried – by liberals in Washington or by conservatives in Salt Lake City – over racial exclusion practices that were not ended until 1978 (when Mormon leaders received their first divine revelation since polygamy had been abolished almost a century before).Footnote ⁶⁴

Low, then, attended a second Senate hearing into the Harris case. As he became higher-profile politically, Low also began cutting himself loose from McConnell. First, he said McConnell was “overwhelmed and overworked.” Then, Low pushed McConnell to get a deputy. McConnell bridled at Low's preferred candidate: Harriett Jenkins, a black educator. Jenkins, McConnell complained, was not a “professional in EEO.” Neither, of course, was he. Low began wondering whether McConnell was “a little bit afraid” of Jenkins as a woman.Footnote ⁶⁵

To test this hypothesis, Low sent a staffer to talk with two senior black women at nearby NASA Goddard center in Greenbelt, Maryland. One had no confidence in McConnell's abilities and the other said McConnell had “turned her off completely.” “Apparently,” Low concluded, McConnell “still has to learn how to communicate with people, especially with women.” Moreover, one of the two senior black women and a Hispanic section head also told Low's representative that minorities and women really did feel NASA was discriminating against them regarding promotions. At Kennedy Space Center, for example, to keep women out of management, there were then forty-three job classifications for secretaries.Footnote ⁶⁶

Low's optimism about the interest of the NASA leadership in hiring or promoting women or minorities began to fade as NASA's political grilling about unmet promises, and belated claims about future goals, continued. On 24 January NASA and Low faced frank disbelief at hearings of the Senate Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee. Ruth Bates Harris's performance was terse, calm, and understated. Watergate, after all, was consuming most senatorial energies. Harris told senators a valued institution simply was not enforcing laws passed by Congress. She and her supporters had “pricked the conscience” of NASA. “Institutional racism and sexism” existed there.Footnote ⁶⁷ NASA's basic problem was that it was letting some of its centers evade the law. It had not yet begun internal training and promotion programs for women or minority staff. It also claimed it could not do what a minority of aerospace firms had already done: increase percentages of minority and women employees even as overall workforces declined.Footnote ⁶⁸

Harris received compliments from the Senate committee chair. Low and McConnell then got rough treatment. Senators doubted NASA's centers had any intention of doing what NASA headquarters said it wanted. The director of federal contract compliance said it looked to him as if every NASA lab director followed their “personal view as to appropriate [affirmative-action] compliance policies and procedures” instead of following the law. Democratic senators said NASA was “groping for sympathy” after just setting “modest” goals about hiring eighty minority and eighty female professionals it was not really committed to. Low later recorded that a senator he respected “thought our performance was lousy and made no bones about it.” The full committee then elaborated proposals earlier begun by Proxmire. One doubled NASA minority and female hiring, training, and promotion funding. Another required NASA to report on every major professional position it filled. A third wanted minorities and women put on NASA hiring and promotion boards.Footnote ⁶⁹

NASA FIGHTS ON

Still NASA leaders fought on against a woman they saw as a saboteur and “little more than a lobbyist for the cause of minorities and women.” Ruth Bates Harris and her supporters, they believed, were not lightning rods, but thunderbolts. Harris's NAACP lawyers wanted NASA not to appoint Harriett Jenkins to fill Harris's position until Harris's appeal had been decided. NASA's chief counsel, however, said NASA's only requirement was to restore her to a “comparable” position. Even though Harris would probably win, she could still be isolated and marginalized.Footnote ⁷⁰

Dudley McConnell, meanwhile, had become an administrative embarrassment. Low began easing him aside. McConnell still did not want Harriett Jenkins as a deputy. So Low got Fletcher to hire her himself. McConnell still resisted, belatedly offering at least one other female candidate the job. Low then forced Jenkins on an unhappy McConnell. Harriett Jenkins's arrival at NASA was almost as messy as Ruth Bates Harris's had been, and demonstrated the same organizational ambivalence and infighting.Footnote ⁷¹

As Harriett Jenkins began working as McConnell's deputy in February 1974, external and internal frictions increased. The chairman of the Civil Service Commission, for example, told NASA its record of processing racial and sexual discrimination complaints “was not very good.” The Department of Labour contract-compliance office agreed. Recruitment teams Low had ordered for minority and female scientists and engineers were not in-place in at least four centers. Low's orders to have entry-level jobs offered to likely candidates “on the spot” were not being obeyed. At a meeting of deputy center directors called to jump-start affirmative action, Low said that “most of our technical managers [running the agency] were not accustomed to handling human problems.”Footnote ⁷²

As NASA lawyers kept advising settling with Harris, protest levels within NASA also increased. The first training workshops for senior center leadership regarding racial and sexual issues, scheduled for April, quickly got postponed. Late in March, replacing McConnell with someone “more acceptable to women and minorities” got under way. A selection panel of NASA's General Counsel, three of NASA's highest-ranking females, and a Hispanic should “probably” pick a minority. Trouble brewed at NASA centers in Virginia and Texas as Low addressed all thousand of NASA's headquarters staff at lengthy morale-building “communications” meetings. Employees had “little faith” in NASA's promises and were “still very much concerned” because of a “generally unstable headquarters situation” in the eight months since Ruth Bates Harris had been terminated, an outside consultant confirmed. Low and Fletcher had not managed their people well.Footnote ⁷³

NASA MAKES A DEAL

So, in June of 1974, as Nixon's presidency entered its last weeks, the logjam at NASA finally started to break. NASA- and NAACP-appointed lawyers fought over issues of two types: organizational and personal. Organizationally, Harris got enhanced female and minority hiring, a start at NASA research and development awards to universities and colleges with predominantly minority students, and training and promotion programs for those minorities and women NASA already employed.Footnote ⁷⁴

NASA refused, however, to give way on a key point. Harris had always wanted strong headquarters civil rights controls over the centers in order to speed change. This was the job NASA had originally hired her to do. Fletcher and Low, however, refused because of “NASA's decentralized management concept.” Southern centres, accordingly, got a breathing space.Footnote ⁷⁵

Regarding Harris's personal administrative future at NASA, NASA fought just as hard. Harris wanted her original job back, the one she had been hired for in 1971. Low, however, wanted to give her no policymaking power at all. Instead, she would attract more females and minorities into applying for NASA jobs.Footnote ⁷⁶

The same set of private notes that recorded Low's judgment of Harris, as an “advocate” not a “manager,” ironically also talked about how a longstanding senior management discrimination case at headquarters had gotten explosive because of “three levels of poor management”: all-white male supervisors who refused repeated suggestions to take training in dealing with minority or female workers. Low also got “rumbles, rumours, and letters” indicating that “middle management” at a number of NASA centers were “standing in the way” of civil rights in employment. That Harris's public style might complement Low's behind-the-scenes approach never occurred to Low.Footnote ⁷⁷

As the NAACP Legal Defence Fund threatened class action lawsuits on behalf of groups of employees at NASA centers, and one of NASA's strongest Congressional allies warned NASA that its political standing was slipping, the agency could not win, but would not settle either.Footnote ⁷⁸

HARRIS'S “PARTIAL VINDICATION”

Finally, Richard Nixon's resignation as President in August of 1974 seems to have persuaded Ruth Bates Harris and her lawyers to settle on terms Low and Fletcher could live with. McConnell returned to technical work after sixten unhappy months. His deputy, Harriett Jenkins, replaced him. Ruth Bates Harris came back to NASA, but only at a “deputy assistant” rank and only on the fringes of the affirmative-action office. Harris would advertise NASA to “community groups across the United States.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Harris had what Science called “at least partial vindication.” James Fletcher welcomed Harris back on 17 August, admitting that a woman he had called a disloyal ideologue had “a genuine ability to communicate to members of communities whom NASA has not reached in the past and whom we need to reach.” Some of the “forward movement” NASA had made had been stimulated “by forces she so eloquently set in motion.”Footnote ⁸⁰

NASA leaders climbed down. The news release about Harris's return, however, was as vague as her new job description, and Harriett Jenkins and Harris did not work together. For several years Harris helped identify and recruit black astronaut candidates using organizations like the Tuskegee Airmen. But managerial marginality, a dissolving marriage, and a family tragedy helped cause a nervous breakdown. Harris temporarily lost hold of the narrative of her life. She returned to New York in November of 1976 “to attend to pressing personal family needs.” By 1978 she was back in Washington, working, but never again at NASA.Footnote ⁸¹

The Harris deal ended further senatorial hearings and negative headlines. To ensure this, all NASA's records regarding Harris's case were sealed via the rehiring agreement. NASA quickly began congratulating itself on its performance hiring women and minorities. The values, norms, beliefs, and practices within NASA's “human spaceflight culture,” however, only changed modestly. Women or minorities in supervisory positions remained rare until the 1980s. An exhausted and ill Low had to do repeated “needling” to get spaceflight managers in Houston to involve women and minorities in NASA's astronaut program. A false start in 1976 (the year Harris and Low left the agency) was finally carried through in 1978. Skepticism and distant toleration of female astronauts only gradually turned into acceptance by male colleagues. NASA eventually did the right thing, after stubbornly denying it had anything significant to learn.Footnote ⁸²

The new headquarters head of civil rights in employment, Dr. Harriett Jenkins, meanwhile, promptly ran into trouble. At a long-delayed affirmative-action meeting for top center managers, a white manager “lost his temper” and was “quite rude” to Jenkins. Jenkins broke into tears, and asked Low for managerial support. Low gave it, but after talking with the (all-white) deputy center directors at the meeting, he later privately dismissed female and minority members' objections to Jenkins's treatment as overreaction. Here was exactly the kind of groupthink denial which had landed NASA in deep political trouble in the first place.Footnote ⁸³

Another indicator of denial occurred late in 1975. Jenkins and her associate, Peter Chen, began pushing a headquarters affirmative-action training session “for NASA's senior management from Fletcher and Low on down.” They proposed a one-day meeting organized by Arthur D. Little, a prestigious management consultancy. Fletcher and Low had a preliminary meeting with the A. D. Little people and came away utterly opposed. Specifically, they did not want discussion where the disagreements within NASA's senior staff might be identified or discussed. Low privately elaborated:

Again, the message was that senior managers leading NASA had nothing significant to learn – or even agree upon. When Low told Jenkins this, she stayed quiet, but her deputy, Chen, protested. Low then “very deliberately got mad” at Chen, and said he was free to risk his career by going outside the chain of command to complain to Fletcher. Given the fate of Ruth Bates Harris, Chen then “backpedaled very nicely.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Low, however, was no villain. He had survived Hitlerism and he knew what racism was. Indeed, his efforts to solve problems others avoided probably exhausted him. His health, like Harris's, and perhaps McConnell's as well, seriously deteriorated. As George M. Low left NASA in mid-1976 with a secret case of cancer, however, NASA was stumbling towards organizational self-awareness. In March of 1976, for example, Low sponsored an unusual three-day retreat for senior NASA managers. At this meeting Noel Hinners of the Office of Space Science was unusually frank. A “successful filtering mechanism in the information channel is a major problem,” he began. “Many people believe that real problems are being submerged” or dealt with impatiently. Problems were then “covered-up so top managers won't know.” “Plus,” Hinners added, “there is a failure to face up to personnel problems by many managers who don't like to discuss such issues with their own people.” Here was most of NASA's unhappy early experience with minorities and women in a nutshell.Footnote ⁸⁶

THE HARRIETT JENKINS ERA

Affirmative action's future at NASA after 1976 was low profile and gradualistic. Harriett Jenkins possessed many advantages Ruth Bates Harris – and Dr. Dudley McConnell – did not. She entered NASA as a NASA generation which had grown up in a segregated and apartheid America – and a society where women also rarely gave men orders about anything – was aging. Like a relatively liberal Low, many would leave the agency by the 1980s. Harris and her supporters had also “lanced the boil,” Jenkins recalled. The first serious headquarters affirmative-action managers had jarred people emotionally. They had clarified the necessities of change. Their casualty rates were also very high. Succeeding organizer–managers like Jenkins operated in a less strife-filled environment. Those who only saw racial or sexual bias when whites or males were disadvantaged did not have law on their side.Footnote ⁸⁷

Organizer Jenkins also benefited in ways Harris did not because she was actually, in personality and in managerial approach, the patient teacher that NASA headquarters may have though it was getting when it originally hired Harris in mid-1971. A Fisk University graduate in mathematics, Jenkins clerked for the Air Force, an insurance company, and the Oakland California Police Department from 1948 to 1954.Footnote ⁸⁸ Her professional career began in 1954, the year the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ruled educational segregation unconstitutional. Neighbouring Berkeley, California was a noted university town. Jenkins applied for a high-school teaching position there, only to be told that such senior jobs were unavailable to blacks. Jenkins did not give up. When one tactic did not work, she tried another. Earning a certification in elementary education, she proved herself with a second-grade class. Rising quickly through the ranks as Berkeley schools slowly and peacefully addressed decades of de facto school segregation, she became the city's first female black vice principal, director of elementary education, and assistant superintendent of schools. Along the way she earned her master's in education at Berkeley in 1957 and her doctorate in education there in 1973.Footnote ⁸⁹ That same year she followed her second husband to Washington, DC, where she worked as a consultant before going to NASA. Less dramatic and charismatic than Harris, Jenkins was also more bureaucratic and patient. Harris talked about “changing the system” that made discrimination against racial minorities, women, the aged, and others possible. Jenkins, in contrast, preferred non-confrontational phrases like “increasing the pool” of qualified applicants, especially in key areas like science, technology, and mathematics. NASA forgot Harris. Jenkins's eighteen-year tenure at NASA from 1974 to 1992 increased the numbers of women and racial minorities in the key science and engineering half of the agency's workforce from 5 to 25 percent, earned her honours from the agency, from women in aerospace science and engineering organizations, and from the Congressionally chartered National Academy of Public Administration. She continues to do “human resources” advising for NASA and for the US Senate, where Jenkins was the first director of the Office of Fair Employment Practices from 1992 to 1997 after her career at NASA ended.Footnote ⁹⁰

Jenkins was honoured for being a gradualist. Key, here, was her willingness to work within a decentralized NASA structure and with a lab-oriented Equal Opportunity Council composed of deputy directors of NASA centers. New York City-raised Harris always strongly opposed this federated approach, seeing it as a cover for noncompliance by southern labs. Native southerner Jenkins entered NASA assuming varying levels of compliance were a given. She thought in terms of gradual progress and plans taking ten to fifteen years to implement. Harris and her allies wanted to force centers to do things; Jenkins wanted to make affirmative action an ongoing responsibility of line managers in all NASA facilities. She wanted sometimes-reluctant centers to buy into the concept that diversifying NASA's labour force was a key part of their jobs, and adopted a nonconfrontational “what-can-we-do-for-you?” approach. Harris was shocked that a twentieth-century science-based agency had significant numbers of people in it with nineteenth-century habits of mind. Jenkins already knew that very smart people could be very ignorant outside of their areas of expertise from her educational experience in a university town. Harris was a primary change-agent whose firing and rehiring forced NASA to have to issue quarterly reports on its hiring and promotion of women and minorities to Senator Proxmire and Congress for three years. Jenkins made it possible for NASA to continue to desegregate space (and itself) once Proxmire's reporting requirements were removed in 1978.Footnote ⁹¹