A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (27 page)

One of my biggest disappointments was the reluctance of both Democratic and Republican legislators to expand the ability of our citizens to vote. As governor, I had sponsored a law that authorized all high school principals to be deputy voter registrars, and I had a contest each year to
see which schools registered more upcoming eighteen-year-olds. At the national level, when I proposed this or other moves toward more universal registration, there was a persistent opposition that I didn’t understand. House Speaker Tip O’Neill finally explained to me that few incumbent congressmen wanted the voters’ lists expanded because they were satisfied with those who had put them in office.

More intense efforts by Republicans to restrict registration of students, minorities, and elderly voters by imposing identification requirements have been (unsuccessfully) criticized and legally challenged, especially in the South after the voting rights legislation was weakened by Congress in 2013. The conservative Supreme Court has refused to take action to guarantee the right of Americans to vote, or to end the gerrymandering of congressional districts to favor whichever political party dominates a state government.

Progress on the Korean Peninsula was frustrated by reluctance among both the Koreans and some of my own military leaders. As a submariner during the Korean War, I had felt frustrated when it ended with an arbitrary line drawn between North and South Korea plus merely a cease-fire and not a permanent peace treaty. When I was president, South Korea was still governed by a dictator, General Park Chung-hee, but was making notable economic progress with massive assistance from the United States and other nations. Communist dictator Kim Il Sung ruled the North with an iron hand, and this region was isolated and suffering from strict economic sanctions, with many people starving. Both leaders paid lip service to reunification. We had about thirty thousand American troops in South Korea, and these and the Korean forces were commanded by an American general. With Secretary Harold Brown and other advisers, we decided it was time to begin reducing our military presence. The South was affluent and technologically capable of defending itself. The American major general John Singlaub made a public statement in Seoul condemning the
plan, and I summoned him to the White House. I described that meeting in my diary:

“5/21/77 I met with Major General Singlaub about his statement that if we withdrew troops from South Korea a war would result. He denied making the statement. He said he was just quoting from Korean officials. Then he said that the reporter was not given authority to quote him. I don’t think he was telling the truth, but I felt sorry for him. He emphasized over and over that he was not disloyal, that he’d meant no insubordination. So instead of reprimanding him I just told him that we would transfer him out of Korea.”

Amazingly, the next Defense Department intelligence estimate of North Korea’s military capability was abruptly twice as great as ever before! I was deeply skeptical, but the assessment was shared with congressional leaders and I had no way to disprove it. I decided to back down on my decision to withdraw U.S. troops but to remove nuclear weapons. Under President George W. Bush a reduced number of military bases were concentrated farther south, but about the same number of American troops are still there. North Korea has retained its army strength and now has a threatening arsenal of nuclear weapons. There were six-power talks under President George W. Bush involving the United States, North and South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia designed to promote peace and restrict development of nuclear arsenals, but these have not been continued by President Obama.

I was delighted when Admiral Rickover and I established a close friendship from the beginning of my presidency. He told me that he would never mention to me anything that related to budget allocations or priorities for any ship in the nuclear navy. He insisted that I throw the switch that started operation of a prototype “breeder reactor” at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. It operated for five years, generated about twenty-five
megawatts of power and, as planned, produced more fissile material than it consumed.

Secretary Schlesinger, Admiral Rickover, and I decided that it was not necessary to launch a program of producing electric power from large breeder reactors, although I realized that the technology might be needed in the distant future, when uranium became scarce and the advantage of “breeding” fuel would be more important. There was a strong move in the Congress to continue the effort, initiated under President Nixon, to build a full-scale model alongside the Clinch River in Tennessee. Originally estimated to cost $400 million, the projected price for completion had increased eightfold by the time I made my decision to cancel the project. Although I was familiar with its prospective use of liquid sodium as a cooling agent from my submarine days and believed the design to be safe, I was concerned about the by-product from breeder reactors being massive quantities of plutonium that could be used by us or others for nuclear explosives. A group of senators, led by those from the region, were successful in appropriating enough money to maintain a caretaker staff, and President Reagan attempted to restart the project. By that time the Congress had adopted my position and finally withheld all funding for breeder reactors in 1983.

In May 1977 Rosalynn and I flew down to Cape Canaveral and spent the day with Rickover on the nuclear submarine USS
Los Angeles.
He and the captain put the new ship through extreme maneuvers, and he pointed out that all the U.S. atomic-powered ships would stretch for more than ten miles if lined up stem to stern and that there had never been a nuclear incident that caused any damage or injured a person. I was surprised when I asked him how he would react to a total elimination of nuclear weapons—and nuclear power production—from the earth. He said it would be one of the greatest things that could happen.

With Admiral Rickover alongside the USS
Los Angeles
, May 27, 1977.

Despite the financial loss and frightful scare of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in March 1979, there were no injuries. I was informed immediately and sent highly qualified people to the island to monitor and control the situation. Luckily, I was familiar with the technology and could understand the briefings and make reasonable decisions. The coolant system had failed because of human error, and the reactor core melted, causing the overheating of cooling water and a buildup of high-pressure steam in the reactor container. Radioactive gases were within the steam that had to be released into the atmosphere to reduce pressure. All this was done under carefully controlled conditions, but I advised the governor to remove some children and pregnant women from the vicinity. Although the governor and scientific experts explained the facts,
The Washington Post
and a few other news media presented the situation as horrific, a threat to the lives and safety of millions of people. I called the
Post
executives to correct their mistake, but they were undeterred in their crusade to frighten as many people as possible. Rosalynn and I decided to go to the site personally; there we received a briefing and then went into the plant’s control room adjacent to the reactor, with the highest possible live media coverage. This calmed most of the public fear.

Pressure in the reactor was soon returned to normal levels, and I appointed a panel of experts, on which Admiral Rickover helped, to put in place some safety measures patterned after those he maintained in navy ships. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency made them mandatory for all power companies that operated reactors in America. This was the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, and the financial costs were substantial. I had seen the damaged reactor at Chalk River, Canada, and now this incident in Pennsylvania—with no injury to people—but I remain convinced of the efficacy of nuclear power generation, especially as an alternative to the extremely threatening prospect of global warming caused by excessive consumption of coal, oil, and other fossil fuels. There will have to be an emphasis on simplicity and safety of design and highly trained personnel to operate the reactors.

The primary project of NASA during my presidency was to develop four space shuttles, the most complex aircraft ever built. The first one,
Columbia,
was delivered to its launch site at Kennedy Space Center in March 1979 and launched in April 1981. Later, two of the shuttles were lost in flight, the
Challenger
in 1986 and
Columbia
in 2003.

I was especially interested in
Voyager 1,
a space probe that was launched in September 1977. On March 5, 1979, my science adviser and other space experts joined a group of us at the White House movie theater to view closed-circuit television photographs as
Voyager 1
approached Jupiter and its moons. I still followed its travels as it made close observations of Saturn and then photographed the solar system from outside the farthest planetary orbit. As I write this, in 2014,
Voyager 1
is in interstellar space, now more than 12 billion miles from earth. This is farther than any other man-made object and is beyond the influence of the sun’s gravity.
Voyager
1
is still sending back radio signals in answer to NASA queries, and the round-trip for radio waves, at the speed of light, requires thirty-six hours. The spacecraft is expected to be in contact until about 2025, when its power plant is likely to fail.

I am not in favor of the most costly space projects, such as sending astronauts to Mars, to the moon again, or to other heavenly bodies. Unmanned vehicles with scientific instruments and robotic probes can accomplish the same goals, and many others beyond the reach of humans.

I am often asked about the UFO I sighted in the late 1960s. I was district governor of fifty-six Lions Clubs in Southwest Georgia, and one of my duties was to visit each club during the year. I was standing outside a school lunchroom in Leary with about two dozen men, waiting for our evening meeting, when we saw a light in the western sky, larger than Venus. It grew closer and larger, reaching about half the apparent diameter of a full moon. It stopped, changed color, and then disappeared back toward the west, soundlessly. We all saw the strange light and discussed its appearance and possible explanation at our meeting that night. On the
way back to Plains I dictated on my small tape recorder what I remembered.

Later, in public office, I was asked if I had ever seen a UFO, and I responded with that brief account. I have never thought there was any extraterrestrial involvement but surmised that it was some kind of military balloon or other device from nearby Fort Benning, a major military base. This disclaimer has not dampened the intense interest that some people have in the prospect of interstellar travelers having been seen by one of America’s presidents. It was, indeed, a UFO—an
unidentified
flying object.

There was another experience I have never been able to explain. One morning I had a report from the CIA that a small twin-engine plane had gone down somewhere in Zaire, and that it contained some important secret documents. We were searching for the crash site using satellite photography and some other surreptitious high-altitude overflights, but with no success. With some hesitancy, a CIA agent in California recommended the services of a clairvoyant woman, who was then consulted. She wrote down a latitude and longitude, which proved to be accurate, and several days later I was shown a photograph of the plane, totally destroyed and in a remote area. Without notifying Zaire’s President Mobutu, we sent in a small team that recovered the documents and the bodies of the plane’s occupants.

The most far-reaching and controversial domestic issue I addressed as president was a comprehensive energy policy. Overdependence on foreign oil had plagued our nation for many years, with resulting boycotts, long lines at fuel pumps, and little effort being made to address the basic problems. Prices for oil and natural gas were pegged at a very low rate,
which encouraged excess consumption and discouraged domestic production and competition among producers. There were few substantive efforts, or reasons, to improve energy efficiency in homes, transportation, machinery, or household appliances, or to promote cleaner-burning coal or increase the use of power coming from the sun through wood, wind, or photovoltaic cells. My announced goal was to derive at least 20 percent of our total energy from renewable sources by the year 2000. We introduced legislation to address all these issues and were remarkably successful. In spite of worldwide inflation and economic restraints resulting from a shortage of oil supplies in 1980 from Iran and Iraq during their war, a broad array of job opportunities were created from new energy technology. Because of this and public works projects, there were more jobs created each year I was in office than under any other president since World War II.