James Webb - do we really know anything? Remember anything? Show us our past.
Not sure I will ever know who James Webb was, the truth is always somewhere in the middle. But I know this, rename the telescope. Let’s look into the past more deeply, deliver a brighter and clearer future. Thankfully the James Webb telescope enables us to look back literally and figuratively, to learn and grow from, hopefully not repeating, the mistakes of our past.
Just like they did on Family Feud, a great gameshow from yesteryears that I watched (along with Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy every day), I surveyed 100 people to see what we really know about the nameplate on the new billion-dollar telescope surveying far-off galaxies and providing first glimpses into new places in the universe. The answers were enlightening, not a single person I asked knew who James Webb was, but every one of them had heard of and seen pictures from the James Webb telescope. The exercise shows how little we know about our past and present, our universe and how and why things happen, not to mention our elementary-at-best but ever-growing understanding of the stars in the sky. For me the irony is maddening seeing breathtaking images of a lavender purple spiral galaxy (thanks @gbrammer) coming from a slick telescope named after someone nobody knows anything about. All we can comment on is the vivid color and clarity of the images. There is so much more to the story, there always is.
We don’t know who James Webb is - survey says ZERO strike 1 - X. We have no idea about the Lavender Scare apparently either – while I didn’t survey 100 people on that, I asked a few, and I can interpolate the answer: I know the survey says ZERO strike 2 - X X. And finally, we lose the family feud when we miss the irony underneath all of this – X X X.
Who is James Webb – the greatest photographer in history (well the telescope with his namesake sure looks to be)? One of NASAs greatest scientists or executives who propelled us forward to the moon, beat the Russians, showed us what the moon and space look like? A homophobic discriminator who changed thousands of lives for the worse, directly via the Lavender Scare and continually in our minds by developing psychological warfare practices the government uses to this day (and the private sector)? OR all of the above – ding ding ding – survey says Top Answer! Now let’s move on to the final feud.
So James E. Webb was the second head of NASA in the 1960s and served as Undersecretary of State briefly from 1949 to 1952. During his time at the helm for NASA, appointed by President John F. Kennedy to return to government service from private sector roles after nearly nine years, Webb oversaw the first manned missions to space and the moon from Mercury to Gemini and Apollo. This was the beginning of the golden age for NASA and space exploration. After leaving NASA in 1968, potentially pushed due to fallout from the Apollo 1 accident, Webb wrote Space Age Management: The Large-Scale Approach in 1969. This book aimed to show how his administration in NASA and the space program could be a model for other industries and addressing societal problems. IF ever there is a book-burning opportunity this may be it, but the rationale is still to come. Hold that thought as we get more into how he solved other problems in the workplace. But going back to Webb’s exit from NASA, the more common theory is that he left with outgoing President Johnson (with whom he had a close relationship), just as many other appointed government positions turn over with the elections. And turn up in high-paying private sector jobs based on what wheels they greased for whom while in office. Webb did just this, leaving government work for a position with Kerr-McGee Oil Corporation in Oklahoma City. He wasn’t turning valves there I’m sure.
However the exit from civil service came about we won’t truly know, what we do know is Webb took a nice job at an oil company and while the head of NASA Webb was accountable for a horrific mishap. This was the Apollo 1 fire during a pre-launch test that killed the crew of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chaffee, a pretty significant issue for the NASA administration and federal government. Since the rocket was not fueled up for this test, emergency preparedness was not up to standard and there was an inability to respond to the fire which was ignited by an electrical malfunction in the cabin. The crew outside Apollo 1 was unable to open the hatch due to a design issue that sealed the cabin hatch and could not be quickly removed until the high pressure in the cabin was purged.
This was a tragic event where a purge issue caused loss of life under Webb’s watch, but he was also a lynchpin for another purge when serving as undersecretary of state during the Truman administration. Webb was a lynchpin when the federal government systematically purged its ranks of LGBTQ employees in the ‘50s. Webb met with President Truman on June 22, 1950 to determine the coordinated plan of attack on homosexuals between the White House, State Department and the Hoey Committee. The Hoey Committee was a subcommittee chaired by Senator Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina, designed to determine the prevalence of homosexuals in government service, understand why and how their employment is detrimental to public safety and national security – and so they determined methods to deal with the issue.
Webb and other government officials, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy created the stigma that homosexuals could not be trusted - that they were the enemies operating within our government, just as Communists. At this time, homosexuals and communists were for some reason painted with the same brush. Countless hours of committee meetings, wastes of exorbitant amounts of public funds, and misconceptions growing up into a full-blown witch hunt that led to the Lavender Scare.
And 100 out of 100 surveyed did NOT learn about this Lavender Scare in school:
Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 in 1953, the investigation, interrogation and systematic removal of gay men and lesbians from the federal government became policy. Known as the “Lavender Scare,” the policy was based on the unfounded fear that gay men and lesbians “posed a threat to national security because they were vulnerable to blackmail and were considered to have weak moral characters,” says historian David K. Johnson. According to him, this aspect of American history has largely been overlooked.
And here I thought Dwight Eisenhower (you know We Like Ike) was a reasonable dude. I mean he had to be pretty good if they named our Navy’s finest 5-star flagship nuclear-powered aircraft carrier after him – the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69). A $679 million ship built just down the road from my hometown in Virginia in 1970 to 1975 (that’s $4.7 billion in 2021 dollars). Oh wait, this all started with an improper naming of a $20 billion telescope didn’t it.
Somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 government workers lost their jobs as a result of the Lavender Scare. That’s just the tip of a purple iceberg when you consider the many more who were screened out of employment altogether or missed opportunities from unfounded rumors of homosexuality in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s (yes this had a long tail). Not to mention the lasting and devastating psychological effects on those who were never outed directly, the lucky ones living in secrecy. The Lavender Scare often intertwined with the Cold War and Second Red Scare is a little messy where stomping out communism somehow tied into homosexuality. They were of poor morals so we couldn’t trust them, and at that time everyone was under suspicion of being a Russian spy thanks to McCarthy. Yes, very hard to understand and full of ironic twists, and somehow relates back to James Webb, Joe McCarthy and Prince’s Purple Rain (and no Prince was not a homosexual, he was a Gemini and fluid beyond any label).
Going back to the premise of the Lavender Scare: A threat to national security, how could that be? Explained by the chair of the Republican National Committee in 1950 by Guy George Gabrielson: ‘Sexual perverts who have infiltrated our Government in recent years’ were ‘perhaps as dangerous as actual Communists.’ For homosexuals are more likely to be blackmailed and are psychologically disturbed, morally weak and twisted – this psychological imbalance is consistent between communists and gays, known as subversives. Irrational at best, but hey its coming from our government so par for the course.
Inexplicable how gays were considered not only threats to national security, but were also thought to be communist sympathizers getting intermingled with the Red Scare Part Deux. Then there is the irony of Joseph McCarthy, the senator responsible for the Red Scare and the 1950s witch hunt against suspected communists in government that we are more familiar with. McCarthy’s direct quote is telling:
"If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you've got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker."
Oh and more irony – McCarthy hired Roy Cohn to be his right-hand man (a gay man who died from AIDS, also a Columbia University lawyer and son of a New York State Supreme Court Justice), to fire scores of gay men and women in the government. And Joseph McCarthy was also believed to be a closet homosexual, a closet gay many say, frequenting the White House Inn of Milwaukee, engaged in illicit acts and also was investigated for rape, had a relationship with a young senator. Oh the confusion we have here, horrible. And much more on Roy Cohn an our present and future looking just like our past. Roy Cohn, went on to destroy so much beyond the careers of homosexuals in government. He became the muse for Donald Trump, as his personal counsel in the 1970s and 1980s as Trump was building his real estate business. Cohn spent countless hours teaching Trump the ways of McCarthyism, those bullying and sensationalist tactics we saw so often in Trump’s rise to the top job of President. Disparaging others and marginalizing many, the playbook of McCarthy was dusted off for Donald. A recent biography of Joe McCarthy sheds light on this replay of scare tactics and false accusations used to garner political support. The Red Menace, in Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy by Larry Tye, a book he nearly didn’t write until choking on the tactics of Donald Trump during his run for the Presidency, we look into the past to see the present right before our eyes. Says Tye, Trump is the latest in a long line of “fanatics and hate peddlers who have tapped into America’s deepest insecurities.”
“If you want to understand how Donald Trump operates, the best thing to do is read a biography about Joe McCarthy”
The senator was far more effective, Tye says, in intimidating fellow politicians and browbeating, from a distance, an uncountable number of ordinary citizens “into a tongue-tied silence” — in the process stifling the open discussion of issues that’s supposed to be a hallmark of our democracy.
Sounds familiar. Writing about McCarthy during Trump’s presidency, notes Tye, was a reminder of the dangers posed by any demagogue with a powerful platform. “There were so many days when I had trouble distinguishing between what I was reading in 70-year-old congressional testimonies and today’s headlines,” he said.
So many things I wish I had learned earlier in life. No curriculum covered McCarthy in detail, I didn’t learn of that Executive Order 10450 in school either. All I knew of Dwight D. Eisenhower is that there was a great aircraft carrier named after him, and that was because I grew up near Newport News where they have a mega shipbuilding port and give birth there to all the nuclear subs and carriers that are not made up in New England at Electric Boat.
All of this started for me with a beautiful purple galaxy spiral Galaxy NGC 628. What causes the purple hue – polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which only emit specific wavelengths of light – they discriminate against others apparently. Hmmmm, even the images coming from the James Webb telescope are discriminating.
Is this like when there is blood in the sky – like in Prince’s hit Purple Rain. Judgement Day is near? Sure does feel like it sometimes. The more I read and ‘learn’ the worse it gets.
“When there’s blood in the sky… red and blue = purple. Purple rain pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith/God guide you through the purple rain,” prince said of the song’s meaning.
Prince died at age 57, in Minneapolis where he was also born and lived for most of his life. Born in 1958 a year after McCarthy died at 48 (of either Hepatitis or a slow-self-inflicted suicide by alcoholism and depression). For he could not escape the man he was. And Prince also could not escape the pain that besieged him and led to an opioid addiction. We can never truly erase or escape, no matter how hard we try.
It is very ironic that someone who helped us break through, show us what is possible leading the NASA space program to the moon, ho’s namesake telescope is taking us farther into the future, is someone who lived in the past and prevented progress in so many other ways. Now I understand why NASA waited until July to release the first stunning colorful photos from the James Webb telescope – for June was PRIDE month, and that would have just been too much. More than ironic, this is painful for many others. American astronomer Phil Plait said it best:
“A lot of astronomers are very unhappy the observatory is named after him,” wrote the American astronomer Phil Plait in his Bad Astronomy newsletter. “It’s difficult to want to use an instrument when you know you’ll have to write about it using the name of someone who worked to negate your very existence.”
“The observatory will produce amazing science and gorgeous images, certainly the equal of anything Hubble has done,” Plait tweeted. “But it’s named after someone irrevocably tied to bigotry and homophobia, and moreover Nasa has botched the way they handled the situation.”
This is all almost as backwards and inconsistent as our policies on marijuana use vs. alcohol that I remember as a teen. Growing up and thinking how dangerous drunks were compared with stoners, where the messages didn’t match the reality (and I proved that out many times myself). Ok, so I was usually high when we had these deep conversations but that is not material to the issue. But at the same time back in the 90s you couldn’t get away from the accepted and glamorized, highly-commercialized alcohol culture if you had to. Yet if anyone found a little bud on the floorboard of your car or a joint in your pocket it was world war 3. I found that out in a convenience store parking lot once, lucky for me I wasn’t treated like everyone else.
But truly, the only things in any grave danger from zombie stoners I thought were star crunches, pizzas and 7-elevn Slurpee machines. And day after day drunk drivers would plow into innocent victims, drunken rages would destroy families and nobody batted an eye. Nobody wanted to embrace the truth and instead we distract ourselves or fight other lesser wars, identify other scapegoats to make ourselves feel satiated. Its almost as twisted as being a gay man and spending your days systematically ruining the life of other gays, then jumping to the use of psychological warfare.
Webb sought or at the least enabled and allowed destruction, discrimination – probably not, but he let it happen, looked the other way at best, pushed ruinous policy at most likely, was such a bigot at worst. We will never know, and was it his own belief, was he forced, was he duped? He is at the least complicit. He did not change NASA's policies as countless were fired, discriminated against in his time leading the space program. He should not win any prize. No hero is perfect and many heroes are monsters when viewed up close.
“bestow this honor on someone whose legacy befits a telescope whose data will be used in discoveries that will inspire future generations of astronomers.”