This is the grave of James E. Webb.

Born in 1906 in Tally Ho, North Carolina (what a name!), Webb grew up pretty well off. His father was county superintendent of schools, segregated of course. He went to the University of North Carolina, graduating in 1928. He then joined the Marines, which was not a common move in 1930, when he signed up. There was hardly any room to move up, this was the isolationist period of America, so the military didn’t have much funding. But it did need pilots and that was Webb’s job. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and was on active duty until 1932.

Upon leaving the Marines, Webb decided on politics as his future. He became an aide to a congressman named Edward Pou, who was hugely powerful in his day and had done a lot of work to overturn the Red Scare after World War I. Pou was at the very end of his time, though still chair of Rules Committee. The Roosevelt administration needed New Deal legislation to get through Congress and Pou made that happen. Given Pou’s age, young men like Webb played important roles in keeping all this together. At the same time, Webb enrolled in George Washington Law and got his degree in 1936, being admitted to the DC bar soon after. In those last couple years, he was working privately for Oliver Gardner, another today unknown but then powerful Democrat, who was the former governor of North Carolina and who had a prominent DC law firm.

In 1936, Webb was hired by a company called Sperry Gyroscope. They did all sorts of electronic equipment. The firm expanded rapidly during World War II. Webb rose rapidly and became VP by the time he rejoined the Marines in 1944. This meant a huge expansion in radar systems, setting the company up to be a major player in the military-industrial complex then forming. He actually wanted to join the Marines in 1941, but he was declared too important to developing weapons to fight, which actually seems like a very reasonable position for the government to take. But he kept persisting and so he was let back in as a captain and soon was a major, commanding a Marine air wing and finishing his time as lieutenant colonel. He was then put in charge of planning the radar program for the upcoming invasion of Japan, but of course that didn’t happen.

Perhaps Webb wanted a career change anyway. Instead of going back to Sperry after the war, he went back to his old mentor Gardner, who was then Undersecretary of the Treasury. He got a job there and was very shortly recommended to Harry Truman as a good candidate to lead Bureau of the Budget in the president’s office, which was mostly in charge of dealing with budget issues in relationship to Congress. He did well enough at this that in 1949, Truman named him an undersecretary of state. He was a good organizational man and Dean Acheson tasked him in reorganizing State. He proved a pretty influential insider. He helped convince Truman to support Paul Nitze’s NSC-68 memo to build up NATO, which was opposed by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, among other more powerful figures. Webb was also a knife-wielding insider. He soon had his revenge on Johnson, using his congressional friends to pressure Truman to dump him and replace him with George Marshall.

But Webb found himself outmaneuvered, mostly by Nitze, and decided to leave government in 1952. He returned to the private sector and spent the next nine years mostly in defense work, but occasionally doing bits of government work too. But in 1961, John F. Kennedy named Webb the head of NASA, a huge undertaking as Kennedy also pledged to get Americans to the moon. He would stay in that position until 1968, making him the second longest NASA head to the present (Charles Bolden was in there for the entirety of the Obama administration). It’s almost impossible to overstate Webb’s importance here. NASA was still a new agency. It was decentralized. Its mission wasn’t that clear. Webb transformed all of this. Sure, he’d push the Apollo program, but he also made sure to work Congress hard for funding for the interplanetary missions in the Mariner and Pioneer programs. He centralized operations at what would later be known as the Johnson Space Center in Houston. He was so well-connected and had the full backing of both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and so he worked Congress lobbying for the agency very hard and quite successfully.

There’s another key aspect to Webb’s leadership. Like LBJ, Webb was a southern white boy who turned his back on white supremacy as an adult. He actively supported the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and determined to make NASA a leader in hiring minorities. Once Webb and (of all goddamn people) Wernher von Braun confronted George Wallace in public over this, I think over hiring black workers at the NASA facility in Huntsville, Alabama. Under the Eisenhower administration, almost no black workers were hired but by 1968, NASA was a leader in all the government for hiring black workers and that’s especially true compared to the other highly specialized scientific agencies.

Webb also took personal responsibility when Apollo 1 blew up and did all the PR work to save the agency and convince Americans that NASA was safe. He led a very public safety investigation and made himself point person, much to the relief of LBJ, who did not need more headaches in 1967. He also started writing a book about administration. I doubt it’s a very exciting read, but 1969’s Space Age Management: The Large-Scale Approach is in some ways a classic of Great Society liberalism. It took the managerial approach, placed himself as an ideal leader who could be emulated (anyone who writes about this stuff basically sees themselves as the ideal) and stated that the enormity of running NASA was a good model. But unlike basically all managerial books, he didn’t mean it was a good model to run a corporation. He meant that people fighting and other social problems could work for government agencies with as much money and power as NASA and fix those problems through management. Again, Great Society liberalism in a nutshell. Maybe a bit of a dream, but don’t we all wish this was how things had worked since 1969?

Anyway, Webb resigned when Richard Nixon won the presidency, he became a regent of the Smithsonian, served on tons of big boards for companies and non-profits, did the rich and powerful old person thing. The Webb telescope was later named for him. That became somewhat controversial in 2021 when a Scientific American article said it should be renamed because Webb didn’t fight the expulsion of homosexuals from the space program in the 50s. But there’s no evidence Webb had anything to do with those decisions and the whole thing seems pretty dumb and overwrought to me. It’s not a bad way of thinking about changes in liberalism–from the belief that we can come together and pick everyone up through the managerial state to pure identity politics that is more about symbolism than effective action. Now, if he was Robert E. Lee or something, sure, or, like, had actually played a role in these firings, but this was taking the renaming craze a bit far.

Webb died in 1992. He was 85 years old.

James E. Webb is buried on the confiscated grounds of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other heads of NASA, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. T. Keith Glennan is in Manns Choice, Pennsylvania and Thomas O. Paine is in Santa Barbara, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,094 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

shadowen:

This is an anti-despair checkpoint! You must share something you’re looking forward to before scrolling on.

marzipanandminutiae:

wrishwrosh:

wrishwrosh:

wrishwrosh:

ive said it before and i’ll say it again not enough historical romance focuses on technicalities

really for this kind of thing it’s no use going to published trad romance and i should know that. the really good shit is 400k on fanfiction dot net for a heterosexual pairing you’ve never considered from a piece of media you havent thought about in years written by a bored doctoral candidate who’s read a lot of primary sources from the long 18th century

recently rediscovered my absolute favorite entry in the genre: customs and duties by tortoiseshells, which is an insane technicalityromance set in 1738 boston, ft the stuffy british navy guy from pirates of the caribbean/ofc, smuggling, puritanism in the john calvin sense, the legal realities of widowhood, several real historical governors of massachusetts, debts, accounts, and of course customs regulations

I would also like to nominate and psyche’s lamp shall darkling be, a story based on the 2025 Frankenstein movie that gets into the intricacies of 1850s convent school life, the process of Catholic ecclesiastical courts verifying miracles, multiple points of mid 19th century marriage and inheritance laws pertaining to property, and also spells the word connection with an X so you know the author has been in the 19th century literature trenches 

Hannah Arendt, in the year the Nazis came to power

From Eichmann in Jerusalem:

Now and then, the comedy breaks into the horror itself, and results in stories, presumably true
enough, whose macabre humor easily surpasses that of any Surrealist invention. Such was the
story told by Eichmann during the police examination about the unlucky Kommerzialrat Storfer of
Vienna, one of the representatives of the Jewish community. Eichmann had received a telegram
from Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, telling him that Storfer had arrived and hadurgently requested to see Eichmann. “I said to myself: O.K., this man has always behaved well,that is worth my while . . . I’ll go there myself and see what is the matter with him. And I go toEbner [chief of the Gestapo in Vienna], and Ebner says – I remember it only vaguely – If only hehad not been so clumsy; he went into hiding and tried to escape,’ something of the sort. And thepolice arrested him and sent him to the concentration camp, and, according to the orders of the Reichsführer (Himmler], no one could get out once he was in. Nothing could be done, neither Dr.Ebner nor I nor anybody else could do anything about it. I went to Auschwitz and asked Höss tosee Storfer. Yes, yes [Höss said], he is in one of the labor gangs.' With Storfer afterward, well, it was normal and human, we had a normal, human encounter. He told me all his grief and sorrow: I said:Well, my dear old friend [Ja, mein lieber guter Storfer], we certainly got it! What rotten luck!’

And I also said: Look, I really cannot help you, because according to orders from the Reichsführer nobody can get out. I can't get you out. Dr. Ebner can't get you out. I hear you made a mistake, that you went into hiding or wanted to bolt, which, after all, you did not need to do.' [Eichmann meant that Storfer, as a Jewish functionary, had immunity from deportation.] I forget what his reply to this was. And then I asked him how he was. And he said, yes, he wondered if he couldn't be let off work, it was heavy work. And then I said to Höss: 'Work-Storfer won't have to work!' But Höss said:Everyone works here.’ So I said: ‘O.K.,’ I said, I'll make out a chit to the effect that Storfer has to keep the gravel paths in order with a broom,' there were little gravel paths there,and that he has the right to sit down with his broom on one of the benches.’ [To Storfer] I said: `Will that be all right, Mr. Storfer? Will that suit you?’ Whereupon he was very pleased, and we shook hands, and then he was given the broom and sat down on his bench. It was a great inner joy to me that I could at least see the man with whom I had worked for so manylong years, and that we could speak with each other.” Six weeks after this normal human encounter, Storfer was dead – not gassed, apparently, but shot.

Is this a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity? Or is it simply the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal (Dostoevski once mentions in his diaries that in Siberia, among scores of murderers, rapists, and burglars, he never met a single man whowould admit that he had done wrong) who cannot afford to face reality because his crime hasbecome part and parcel of it? Yet Eichmann’s case is different from that of the ordinary criminal, who can shield himself effectively against the reality of a non-criminal world only within the narrow limits of his gang. Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been inperfect harmony. And that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the. Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character. During the war, the lie most effective with the whole of the German people was the slogan of “the battle of destiny for the German people” [der Schicksalskampf des deutschen Volkes], coined either by Hitler or by Goebbels, which made self-deception easier on three counts: it suggested, first, that the war was no war; second, that it was started by destiny and not by Germany; and, third, that it’ was a matter of life and death for the Germans, who must annihilate their enemies or be annihilated. Eichmann’s astounding willingness, in Argentina as well as in, Jerusalem, to admit his crimes was due less to his own criminal capacity for self-deception than to the aura of systematic mendacity that had constituted the general, and generally accepted, atmosphere of the Third Reich.

***

From The Triumph of Stupidity:

In the first quarter of the 21^st century, it is still easy for us to forget that the idea of universal basic education – the commitment to the idea that the average person should, at a minimum, be able to read and write – remains a practically a brand new concept in historical terms. 

That, perhaps, is one reason why the social ubiquity of stupidity remains relatively unappreciated and under-analyzed, although it would seem that the Trumpist era is rapidly doing its best to remedy this situation.  Indeed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brief essay on the subject, now more than 80 years old, remains one of the few notable exceptions to this rule.  Bonhoeffer was murdered by the Nazis in the year before Donald Trump’s birth, but at this historical moment his words resonate perhaps more powerfully than ever:

“In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

This is, given Bonhoeffer’s fate, eerily similar to the conclusion Hannah Arendt reaches about one of the chief architects of the Nazi mass murder, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.  Adolf Eichmann’s crime, per Arendt, is at its core “the inability to think.”  Eichmann is guilty of genocide and stupidity; or more precisely he is guilty of genocide because of his stupidity.  His malevolence is a product of his stupidity, and vice versa.  History may well reach a similar judgment about the man who is even now leading America into catastrophe.

In a prescient essay entitled “The Triumph of Stupidity,” published in the year the Nazis came to power in Germany, the philosopher Bertrand Russell noted:

“Given a few years of Nazi rule, Germany will sink to the level of a horde of Goths.  What has happened?  What has happened is quite simple.  Those elements of the population which are both brutal and stupid (and these two qualities usually go together) have combined against the rest. . . .  The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Russell’s thoughts – now more than 90 years old – on the contrast between the intellectuals of the 18^th and 19^th centuries and those of his day, are quite gloomy.  It is, he says, true that the most able thinkers of his day have a more intellectually sophisticated and more accurate outlook than their predecessors.  Yet Enlightenment and Victorian thinkers had influence on public affairs, while today’s most gifted intellectuals “are impotent spectators.”

He suggests that “if intelligence is to be effective, it will have to be combined with a moral fervor which it usually possessed in the past but now usually lacks.”

The post The aura of systematic mendacity appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

grecoromanyaoi:

see one of my problems w movies n tv shows is that they often show a character of like a scientist or a historian and try and make them extremely boring but that shit just doesnt work on me. theyll b like ‘well in 13th century turkey…’ n everyone will b like ughhh shut up professor dinglebarry no one cares and like. well excuse me. stop the movie. id like to hear more about 13th century turkey.

1931 saw the publication of a remarkable detective novel. The Floating Admiral had been written by 12 members of the Detection Club, London’s society of mystery writers:

1. Victor Whitechurch
2. G.D.H. Cole and Margaret Cole
3. Henry Wade
4. Agatha Christie
5. John Rhode
6. Milward Kennedy
7. Dorothy L. Sayers
8. Ronald Knox
9. Freeman Wills Crofts
10. Edgar Jepson
11. Clemence Dane
12. Anthony Berkeley

They had written a chapter apiece, serially, without communicating. Each inherited the manuscript from the last and had to make some private sense of the story, including their own complications, before passing it on to the next contributor. To ensure fair play, each writer had to supply a satisfactory solution to the snowballing mystery when they turned in their own chapter.

Amazingly, it worked. Jacques Barzun wrote, “These members of the (London) Detection Club collaborate with skill in a piece of detection rather more tight-knit than one had a right to expect. There is enough to amuse and to stimulate detection; and the Introduction by Dorothy Sayers and supplements by critics and solvers give an insight into the writers’ thoughts and modes of work.”

Here it is.