Word: helpful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...House Correspondent Chris Ogden, who raced to buttonhole civic leaders and senior White House aides as they arrived back in Washington: "However frustrating a sequestered summit is for reporters-and it is indeed frustrating-they seem to be the vogue for the Carter Administration. And if Carter feels they help him reflect more clearly and plan more thoroughly, then who are we to complain...
...with constituents who are also neighbors and acquaintances can be sticky. Charlotte Baldwin, her town's first woman mayor, dresses with a certain flair in Lexington, but sighs that back home in Madisonville she cannot wear her chic sandals on business calls. She feels that conventional pumps will help encourage citizens to take her seriously. Joe Viens remembers a voter who came in to remind the mayor of his campaign support, then presented a traffic ticket to be fixed. Viens said sorry, the only way he could help would be to pay the fine out of his own pocket...
...counseled Presidents as far back as Truman, were at first stunned, then fascinated by this attempt to lead by learning, to make new policy from a cram course in national attitudes. All of the guests seemed carried along by that small, warm figure who implored them to help him set the U.S. right again before the future fell in on the country...
...political and military expediency ("Beat the Commies"), rather than any scientific motivation. In aligning itself in the public eye with Johnson and Nixon, the Pentagon, and other symbols of conservatism, NASA unintentionally hurried its own decline. For these "friends" of the space program aided it only when such help was good policy...
With the decline of the manned program came an equal lack of enthusiasm for automated missions to explore the planets. In 1972, with help from the White House, Congress eliminated the "Grand Tour" project, which would have taken advantage of a rare (once every 180 years) planetary alignment to survey the entire outer solar system. Those missions that were approved often did not receive funding for complete analysis of the return data. Others--to map the moon and check it for metal deposits, to research solar phenomena, to rendezvous with Halley's Comet--never got past appropriations subcommittees...