"We Have to Be in Space"

By Hugh Sidey

Bill Rogers knew what he had to do. He felt it in his gut, a gut conditioned by nearly 50 years at the center of public crises of one kind or another. He walked out of Ronald Reagan's office having agreed to run the Challenger investigation ("Because the President wanted me to do it . . . somebody had to") without a staff, office or any real technical expertise on space. But experience whispered to him.

"We had to establish congeniality in the commission," he said last week, looking back on four solid months of some of the most intensive work he has ever done. "We had to pick people who fit the work for the different parts of the investigation. We called on everyone. We listened to everybody. And they wrote the report. It may be a little uneven, but that is worth it.

"It was important to get started immediately, otherwise Congress would want to take the investigation over," continued Rogers, in his first public comments on his commission stewardship. He called a meeting of the group within hours, set the first hearings in a few days. Congress, which relishes such a spectacle, was for once almost speechless. Rogers' commission took the high public ground and never relinquished it.

In those early hours when there was talk of keeping the investigation secret, | Rogers quickly squelched the idea. Indeed, one of the first questions he asked the White House was if the President had any problems with "full disclosure." None, came the answer. "Otherwise it would have been a running sore," Rogers said. The wisdom in that decision was emphasized by Soviet secrecy in the Chernobyl accident.

Rogers desperately wanted to be able to pinpoint a cause of the Challenger explosion so the nation could move on in space. But he also knew that most investigations never arrive at firm conclusions. Events and the nature of the tragedy played his way, however, and it became apparent in the first few days that a mechanical failure might prove to be the fault. Yet something nagged in the back of the lawyer's mind. When he heard that the technicians had based their O.K. for the shuttle flight on the premise that "there were no conclusive data against it," Rogers understood that there was a management problem behind the accident. Evidence that a rocket will work properly, not the absence of evidence against it, should be the basis of a flight decision. "When I heard that, I knew there was more than a mechanical failure," Rogers said. It was then he spoke out publicly, saying "the process may be flawed," words meticulously chosen so that no individual was blamed prematurely, but words that signaled a revolution for NASA.

Day after day Rogers made minor corrections in his commission's course, added and subtracted subtleties, coped with small explosions (Pilot Chuck Yeager's absence from commission meetings became a public issue). The commission's speed and competence have been praised on all sides. Rogers' experience is no small part of the success.

He was one of Tom Dewey's young prosecutors in New York before World War II, counsel for Senate postwar investigations of Truman-era scandals. He was the young G.O.P. lawyer who won seating of Eisenhower's contested convention delegates in 1952, thereby assuring Ike the nomination. Rogers helped Nixon through the Checkers crisis, counseled the shaken Vice President when Ike had his heart attack in 1955. Rogers was Attorney General for Ike and Secretary of State for Nixon. His public career rivals almost any other living person's, but he never sought acclaim.

His hope now: "We have to be in space. We've got to get NASA going again. And we've got to get everybody in the nation behind them."