the trajectory of the arms race, what was just over the horizon, and what were the changing needs of national security? Key in all this was selecting weapons (primarily nuclear) that would guarantee America’s survival in a protracted Cold War.13
Richard C. (Dick) Raymond was TEMPO’s first general manager. He had set up the center as an intellectual community that the Department of Defense could call on at any time for special studies and advice. He realized early on that to operate effectively as a “think tank,” they had to have as much autonomy from the rest of GE as possible, both geographically and in terms of the makeup of its people.
Raymond staffed the office with experts from all walks of life. Linguists, psychologists, and economists sat next to mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. Unlike other parts of General Electric, TEMPO delivered no products, only ideas. In just a few years, the Santa Barbara operation became one of the top think tanks in the country. With national goals and priorities changing all the time, the phone was constantly ringing. Washington wanted ever-more visionary solutions to difficult problems, and it wanted them fast.
But by 1960, the group was beginning to struggle as a profitable business unit. In 1961, TEMPO had a major role in the disastrous cancellation of the B-70 Valkyrie strategic bomber program. At the time, the program was one of the largest Defense Department acquisitions since World War II. Designed by North American Aviation in nearby Downey, California, the Valkyrie was a very large, Mach 3, six-engine bomber that could fly well over 70,000 feet. This would have made it invulnerable to the MiG-21 interceptor—at the time the only Soviet defensive capability against the bomber.
TEMPO studies had pointed out, however, that Soviet surface-to-air missiles had advanced to a point that high-altitude bombers were vulnerable. A particular threat was the S-75 Dvina (code-named the SA-2 Guideline) missile that could fly in excess of 80,000 feet to bring down an aircraft. This effected a fundamental defense policy change with regard to ballistic missiles and strategic bombers. The Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which was already in production by the Convair Division of General Dynamics, could also deliver nuclear weapons anywhere into the vast Soviet territory. That March, President Kennedy canceled the expensive bomber. The irony was that GE was already under contract to build the aircraft’s engines. Executives at headquarters in New York were furious. They demanded a change in Santa Barbara.
Paine was looking for a change, too. He recalled that he had reached an impasse with the senior leadership in Schenectady. “It’s hard to get emotional about the GE monogram, and it’s not always a place where you can find the crisp intellectual life. The question is whether you want to devote your life to devising the perfect watt-hour meter or to 37.2% of the electric toothbrush market. It is a model of a rigid hierarchy, though to be fair, the top men try to do something about it, to achieve a more flexible structure. The trouble is that someone always gets alarmed, and the effect is to turn power back to the pope.”14
He knew of the situation at TEMPO and applied for the job. He told his managers that “for family reasons, my geographical preference is for northern California.”15 It was not northern California, but it was close enough. In March 1963, GE headquarters appointed him general manager of the Santa Barbara office.
The first thing he did when he arrived was to change the way TEMPO did business. He started with the office building itself. Since it first opened in 1956, employees had been working out of a rented, run-down hotel building in a rather unsavory part of town. He moved the office into the much more attractive Barbara-Balboa-El Presidio historic downtown district.16 Then he changed the outfit’s business strategy. “We concentrated on areas I thought were important,” he said. “Rural development abroad, urban rehabilitation here, communications, transportation. What we would say was, ‘We have been spending a lot of time looking at the world of the future, and we think we can tell you a lot of valuable things about the problems you will be facing 10 or 15 or 25 years from now.’”17
The corporate office still treated TEMPO as somewhat of an outcast. The bearded, open-collar, “West Coast” look of many of the employees did not sit well with the suit-and-tie corporate management back East. Changing that perception was not easy. Trying to restore TEMPO’s standing took more effort than he had expected, he told close friend Ed Schmidt. But Gerald L. Phillippe, the President of GE, believed Paine when he said that TEMPO complemented the rest of the company and added value to the corporation. During that first year, he spent a third of his time at the corporate office in New York. The board constantly wanted to know from him how he was going to align TEMPO’s business objectives with the rest of GE. Another third of his time was spent on-site in Santa Barbara. The rest of the time he visited customers at different places around the country.
Paine worked with some two hundred experts who were concerned with what they thought would be the condition and needs of the country a decade or so into the future. Many predictions had to do with the condition of the cities—a topic that was seemingly escalating in importance with Washington on a weekly basis. Under President Lyndon B. Johnson, the new Democratic national leadership had a lot of questions that involved urban planning, urban renewal, and modernizing the inner cities. Most of the interest directed at TEMPO, however, still had to do with national security. TEMPO thinkers created “what-if” scenarios and projected their possible impact on the United States. An issue might be how a major breakthrough in the field of disarmament would affect the country. Perhaps a critical trade secret might be compromised. Another scenario was how vulnerable US cities would be to a surprise attack by a devastating secret weapon.
His group forecast that communist China would detonate a nuclear weapon some time between 1963 and 1965, most likely in late 1964; the actual explosion occurred in October of 1964. This brainstorming on the direction of US national security accounted for some 75 percent of TEMPO’s work under Paine.18
In 1970, Time Life correspondent Robert Sherrod asked him what was so special about the group and the work that they did. He sat back, reflected briefly, and recounted a rather unusual story that had Sherrod smiling by the time it was over.
His longtime friend, Ed Schmidt, was an independent consultant who worked for TEMPO. Schmidt was an eccentric, in terms of both personality and profession, a diversely educated, modern-day Renaissance Man. He had degrees from Georgia Tech and MIT, and had an unusually broad range of knowledge on everything from the technicalities of civil engineering to the nuances of the effects of foreign trade variances on domestic affairs. Paine found him very pragmatic and practical, and used him as an adviser, confidant, and sounding board partly to help in his own thinking. They spent many afternoons in Paine’s office tossing around ideas. This sometimes resulted in unconventional ways of doing things.
In the early 1960s, the US was trying hard to provide aid to the Republic of Yemen. Yemen was one of the poorest and most unstable countries in the volatile Middle East. But its location at the mouth of the Red Sea made it uniquely important geographically. For this reason, the Soviet Union and communist China were also giving it large-scale assistance.
The State Department asked TEMPO to take a look at what they called “the worst foreign aid situation in any country” in the world. Washington had installed a radio station there only to see the Egyptians capture it to transmit anti-American propaganda year after year. Food shipped by the Red Cross was not reaching the Yemenis. Supplies entering the country had to first dock in Soviet-controlled ports, where they were stolen. They were then transported on a road where they were further pilfered by Chinese communists. The same thing happened at roadblocks set up by the Yemenis. Local warlords helped themselves to what they could. By the time the trucks arrived at the American Embassy, only a sack of grain was left. One sack was always left to encourage the US to try again.
Paine’s office could not come up with a good solution for the State Department. Analysts had no answers, and the program dragged on and soon got Paine’s personal attention. He took the project over from the program
