Engineer Memoirs
A:
It wasn't that bad, no. I think the relations were good. But since the program had
contracted, they were concerned about costs. They were having to trim their efforts in
order to provide full effort where they needed it. The net result was that they didn't
think they should be paying for a large Corps establishment. Under the Corps'
approach, if we had an office set up to support them, they were bearing the cost of it.
That's right. All up-front costs. The NASA historians wrote a book called Moon Port
Q:
about the Johnson Space Flight Center three or four years ago. We were kind of
surprise that they only mentioned the Corps of Engineers twice in 400 pages, and we
wondered if that reflected a long-standing animosity.
A:
I don't think so. Of course, the best source of that kind of information would be people
like [Major General Robert P.] Rip Young and Bill Starnes, who were very much
involved. But I think generally the relationship was excellent. It's just that they didn't
need us any more.
Q:
What was General Raymond like?
A:
General Raymond is a man I admire a great deal. He is very bright. He had a
tremendous capacity for getting things done. He could make up his mind on things; he
didn't waste time. He was an awfully nice guy, and he didn't get in fights with people
unnecessarily. He was very straightforward. You knew where he stood on things. I
enjoyed working for him. I learned a lot from him.
The most difficult thing that was going on, and the most important thing during the time
that I was in military construction was the question of the Corps' S&A [supervision and
administration] rate because it had crept up.
In the case of NASA, this was because we had a very small program. The smaller the
program gets, the larger the overhead becomes relatively. You still have a district
engineer, you still have a personnel officer, and you still have finance and accounting.
As you get quite small, supporting all these functions makes your overhead large in
proportion to the work. This had happened throughout the military construction
program. It was at a fairly low level--very low compared to what it is now, for
example.
We had a nucleus of military construction in just about every district in the Corps, and
we didn't have enough workload for that. [Lieutenant] General [Frederick J.] Clarke
decided on a major redo of the Corps. I was put in charge of the work on this.
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