Word: panels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When President Nixon last year appointed his special "Blue Ribbon Panel" to study organization and operations of the Defense Department, he asked the members to be unsparing in their criticism. He has no reason now to be disappointed. The group, chaired by Gilbert Fitzhugh, the cruelly candid board chairman of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., came out last week with one of the most sweeping -and critical-studies of a U.S. Government department ever undertaken. The result of a full year's work, the three-pound, 237-page report contains 113 recommendations and forms a blueprint for the total administrative...
Organizational Nightmare. Covering every phase of Defense Department operations, the panel found the Pentagon an organizational nightmare in which conflicting loyalties, vaguely defined responsibilities and excessive centralization of authority hamper civilian control and prevent efficient operation. "It's just an amorphous lump with nobody in charge of anything," said Fitzhugh at a news conference. "There is nobody you can point your finger at if anything goes wrong, and there is nobody you can pin a medal on if it goes right, because everything is everybody's business. What is everybody's business is nobody's business...
...panel also opted for partial disarmament of the powerful Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Chiefs now function in a triple role, serving not only as commanders of their respective services and as military advisers to the President but also as military staff in the chain of operational command between the Secretary of Defense and forces in the field. The Fitzhugh panel would relieve the chiefs of their operational responsibilities, reassign the job to a single senior military officer with a separate staff...
...choices were hardly so narrow. Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff, resolutely opposed invasion since Japan was "already thoroughly defeated." The Interim Committee itself was not fully convinced that the surprise bombing of a major target was the only way to use the Bomb: it asked its scientific panel to consider other alternatives. The panel ultimately endorsed the committee's decision, but others did not. From the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, the cover name for the atomic research center there, came the outspoken Franck Report, formulated by Physicists James Franck and Leo Szilard and Chemist Eugene Rabinowitch. Dropping...
...E.C.S. asked a panel of reviewers to comment freely on the science report. Most expressed cautious hope that the country's schools will take a hard look at the results and sharpen their teaching accordingly. But one commentator, Curriculum Consultant Dr. Richard J. Merrill of California, livened his remarks with a list of "Pleasant and Unpleasant Surprises." A sampler of the Unpleasant: "Only 38% of nines and 49% of adults could time ten swings of a pendulum. Only 41% of 17s and 45% of adults knew the function of the placenta. Only 18% of 17s knew that nuclei...