Transcript
Introduction
On his death in 1974, the New York Times honored Bush with a front page obituary, calling him the engineer who marshaled American technology for World War II and ushered in the atomic age. Jerome Wiesner, science adviser to President Kennedy, judged Bush's influence on American science and technology so great that the 20th century may not yet produce his equal. Acts of importance were the measure of his life, and they are the reason that his life deserves study today.
He was a contrarian skeptical of easy solutions yet willing to tackle tough problems without a compass. He was a pragmatist who thought that knowledge arose from a physical encounter with a stubborn reality. Suspicious of big institutions, Bush objected to the pernicious effects of an increasingly bureaucratic society and the potential for mass mediocrity long before such complaints became conventional wisdom. He believed the individual was still of paramount importance. "The individual, to me, is everything, he wrote. I would restrict him as little as possible. He never lost his faith in the power of one."
That was an excerpt from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, and it was written by G. Pascal Zachary. Okay. So this is the second podcast I'm doing on Vannevar Bush. Last week, I covered his autobiography, Pieces of the Action, that was episode 270. And this is actually the second time that I've read the book that I'm holding in my hand. The first time I read it, I did not feel I understood Vannevar Bush enough to make a podcast on him. After reading his autobiography last week, I have a better understanding of him, but it's still not perfect.