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Story Musgrave
Dean of American Astronauts
Story Musgrave: Space is a calling of mine, it struck like an epiphany. That occurred when NASA expressed an interest in flying people who were other than military test pilots. And when I was off in the Marine Corps in Korea, I had not graduated from high school, yet and so I could not fly. And so, I was not a military test pilot, but as soon as NASA expressed an interest in flying scientists and people who were not military test pilots, that was an epiphany that just came like a stroke of lightning. And, I saw that everything I had ever done in life could be used in that endeavor. It just fit and it felt just right.
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Story Musgrave
Dean of American Astronauts
I work for perfection, for perfection's sake. I don't care what the external reasons are. And it's much more like a ballerina on opening night. You've done what you've got to do. When you go out, the purpose is to turn a perfect turn. You are not thinking about the future of the company, you are not thinking about your future, you're not thinking about the critics, it is you and the perfect turn. It is an Olympic high jumper and the bar, there is nothing else there. And it's taking that form, and those steps, it is doing the pattern, the rhythm that you have built to accomplish the job. And so, getting ready, I choreographed the thing right down to where every finger, every toe, where 300 tools are. How the tools are going to move around. Every work site, what is the right body position to get in? How you restrain yourself, how you get the job done, and not really even touch the telescope.
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Ralph Nader
Consumer Crusader
I would be reading the early muckrakers' books. Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil, or Upton Sinclair on the meat plants in Chicago. And I would be quite young reading these books, ten, eleven, twelve, and trembling with excitement. I remember how exciting it was to read the books. Teachers? There were about five or six teachers who really had an impression on me. One history teacher, one day we were walking into the class and she had right on the blackboard a message. It said, "Gone: One minute, sixty seconds. Don't bother looking for it, for you will never find it again." And her point was, don't waste time because if you waste time, you are never going to recover that time that you wasted. A good lesson.
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Ralph Nader
Consumer Crusader
Too many people who go to the best schools, and get great grades, are confronted with a choice of trivial work that is very high paid, and has some sort of surface status, like senior partner in a law firm, or corporate executive, but most of the work can be done by anybody. If they didn't do the work, there would be somebody sliding right in to do the same work. And, it's work where you don't often take your conscience to work with you every day. You leave your conscience at home, and you apply your talents to clients, or whatever demands the business or profession makes of you. On the other hand, there is an enormous amount of exciting work that needs to be done in this country. It may not pay as much, but it will still give you a decent standard of living, but you take your conscience to work so you apply your value system and your talents. That is real job enrichment. Nothing can compare with that one. I see senior partners at age 65 or 70, who have made millions of dollars in law firms, come up to me and say that they are pretty disappointed in their life and could they do something else in the years that they have post-retirement. You can just see that they look back, and basically they did it all for the money. They didn't really enjoy that much. They could rationalize it; it was intellectually challenging, and they met important people, but they didn't really come close to making the contribution they could have made, given their power, leverage, status, and intellect.
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Ralph Nader
Consumer Crusader
The beauty of citizen involvement is that when your horizon expands and you think more of your own personal significance, then all your little personal hang-ups, which loomed so large in your daily life, suddenly begin to recede and fall and melt away. And you look back and you say, "How could I have ever been bothered by whether my appearance was just right according to the latest Vogue magazine, or the Revlon ad?" That's why it's so important to look at citizen action as a form of human happiness. It is a form of human happiness. It is a discovery of human happiness to go into this society of ours and grapple with problems and come out looking back and saying, "Well, the life of a lot of people is better because of what I did." If people will look at citizen action as a source of joy, I think they are more likely to go into it. There are tremendous rewards. You can't put a dollar figure on them, but you can put a permanent impression on them. You'll find they are the most enjoyable times of your life.
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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
So, I went back and talked this over with Teller, and he said, "Well, you ought to talk to Dr. Lawrence of Lawrence Radiation Laboratory because he's the one who's really done more work with young scientists in this field than anybody else3. So he'll tell you all about what makes those fellows work, how this business runs." So, I got hold of Lawrence and he came over, flew to Washington and saw me. He said, "One thing I will guarantee you and that is the - Oppenheimer's point - that because of the practice of the American scientists to publish, that this will make a difference." He said, "Nobody in this field today is worth a damn who's older than 27. Most of the people who are producing the new ideas in the field of nuclear reactions are 19, 20, 21, up to 27. But, I don't know of any new and brilliant person older than that in this field. All these people that are working for me and others, they're all working on classified projects. They can't publish in any case. What makes them tick? What makes them tick is the thrill of feeling that you are breaking through the frontiers of knowledge. The satisfaction of working on new things where you are really at the front end of exploration, and they do value the respect of your peers. But, you don't need to publish for your peers to know what you're doing. The same is undoubtedly true in the Soviet Union. Their scientist, just like our scientists don't publish. They are not permitted to publish. But, they don't need that. They work in the same way our scientists are."
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Paul Nitze
Presidential Medal of Freedom
When I started to work for him (Reagan), I came to the conclusion this was really a man who deeply felt the things that he believed in and that he really deeply believed in the superiority of a liberal democratic system to a totalitarian system and that this was an unmovable and unshakable belief which he could radiate. After the last summit meeting that we had in Moscow, he then went on to the Pilgrim Society in London and delivered himself a speech about the superiority of the liberal system to the totalitarian system, which was a brilliant job. He had a good speech writer. A fellow by the name of Tony Doyle wrote that for him. But in any case, he delivered it well and all the sentiments were right, and Tony Doyle, sure, had written the speech, but he'd followed the instructions from the President. And he won that intellectual battle, that battle for the mind of the world, as to which system really was the system of the future. That of the liberal democracies or that of the totalitarian Marxist-Leninism, and he won that battle hands down. So, any man who is that effective at winning the major battle, the battle of ideology -- more than ideology. He won that hands down, and therefore I ended up with great admiration for President Reagan.
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