Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire by Alex Abella

Author:Alex Abella [Abella, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2009-05-04T07:00:00+00:00

Community activists got wind of the supposedly confidential rent control reports by the end of 1969, even while housing officials denied the existence of them. In February of 1970, the mayor's office finally acknowledged the existence of the studies but claimed that they had not been completed. Less than ten days later, the New York Times ran a front-page article describing the full set of RAND recommendations.33 Again, critics—among them future New York City mayor Abraham Beame—charged New York City–RAND with being the intellectual minion of city hall, instead of being an independent analysis group.

The health division of the New York City–RAND Institute conducted well-received research in areas like lead poisoning, venereal disease, and nurse training, but a lack of stable leadership in the group impeded it from implementing many of its recommendations.34 By contrast, RAND's alliance with the fire department was an unqualified success, attributable in part to the fact that the fire department was the most centralized, hierarchical, and disciplined organization that RAND dealt with in New York City—that is, it offered the closest equivalent to the environment of the Pentagon, where efficiency could be pursued without the messy problems of partisan politics, social value judgments, and personal ethical considerations.

RAND's success at the FDNY was also a matter of coordination and, especially, luck. RAND actively sought to become part of the FDNY team, placing researchers at station houses, developing results desired by the department and relevant to their mission, such as reducing the total number of false alarm responses and streamlining procedures for answered calls. In addition, the fire department was profoundly grateful to RAND for bringing them "slippery water."

New York City–RAND's top fire researcher, Edward Blum, was a chemical engineer who had consulted for Union Carbide years earlier. He was aware of a polymer product developed by Union Carbide that, when added to water, increased dramatically its flow rate through hoses. He convinced the department to try the additive in 1968, which gave spectacular results—by reducing the friction in hoses, the product increased the amount of water discharged by up to 80 percent without any corresponding increase in pumping pressure. Slippery water became a fixture of the department, and other firefighting organizations across the nation soon adopted the innovation.35

These varied studies, useful to New York as they might have been, were not enough by themselves to prolong the life of the New York City–RAND Institute, nor could they sustain the Lindsay administration through its many political crises. By 1973, Lindsay had switched to the Democratic Party and run unsuccessfully for president. Faced with a disillusioned electorate, and as tired as his opponents had been in 1965, he opted not to run for a third term as mayor of what he had once optimistically dubbed "Fun City."36

While city comptroller in 1970, the new mayor, Abraham Beame, had blasted the Lindsay administration's expenditure of $75 million on outside consultants and refused to honor $2 million worth of RAND contracts. Now, having replaced Lindsay, he moved to terminate all RAND

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