The Daily - When the Culture Wars Came for NASA

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

The James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful ever made, has revolutionized the way we see the universe. The name was chosen for James E. Webb, a NASA administrator during the 1960s. But when doubts about his background emerged, the telescope’s name turned into a fight over homophobia.Michael Powell, a national reporter for The Times, tells the story of Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, an astrophysicist whose quest to end the controversy with indisputable facts only made it worse.Guest: Michael Powell, a national reporter covering free speech and intellectual debate for The New York Times.Background reading: Dr. Oluseyi tried to refute the accusations against Mr. Webb, only to find himself the target of attacks.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. The James Webb Space Telescope has revolutionized the way that we see the universe. But naming that telescope sparked an unexpected firestorm within NASA and the wider scientific community. and the wider scientific community. Today, my colleague Michael Powell tells the story of the astrophysicist whose quest to end the controversy only made it worse. It's Friday, May 19th. Michael, welcome to the studio.

Thank you. My pleasure. I want to start by talking about your beat. Because your beat did not exist even five years ago, right? Right. It's a new beat, and I think it's worth explaining what exactly it is. It's not easy to describe. I colloquially think of it as the third rail bead. Do not touch this rail bead.

Yes, but essentially looking at free expression, free speech, and intellectual debates very often around ethnicity, race, gender. So yeah, all of the hot buttons in our current cultural climate. Right, a pretty thorny bead. And just so listeners understand, So yeah, all of the hot buttons in our current cultural climate. Right. A pretty thorny beat. And just so listeners understand, what actual kinds of stories are we talking about here? The broader landscape is, look, we are in the middle of ferocious battles over book banning, over transgender identity, whether transgender athletes can compete. So these are the sort of stories that I'm looking at on a regular basis.

Some of those are these kind of broader questions, and then some are because these are the ones that galvanize our attention. What happens to an individual who finds him or herself caught up in these battles? And you're here, Michael, to talk about how this kind of a battle came to, of all places, NASA, the nation's premier space agency. Recording going. So where does that story start? Okay.

Can you tell me your name and who you are? Yes, I'm Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi. It starts with this, frankly, very impressive man, Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi. I am an astrophysicist, and I'm newly a research faculty fellow at Princeton's Plasma Physics Laboratory. So he's a member of the small elite club of black physicists. In fact, he's the president of the National Society of Black Physicists. National Society of Black Physicists. And he himself comes out of a background that really kind of made it unlikely that you'd ever see him as a scientist. Explain that.

So he had this kind of itinerant childhood. His father was a drug dealer. His mother had a very tough time of it. His parents divorced when he was only four years old, and he was never in the same place for more than a few years at a time. New Orleans, Los Angeles, Houston. Eventually, his family settles in rural Mississippi. When did you first realize you were going to be interested in science? You know, as far back as I can remember, I was interested in the natural world, and I was also interested in

everything that's weird. And his interest in science came very young. When I was 10 years old, I decided that I was going to read our family set of world book encyclopedias from A to Z. I get to E, and I encounter Albert Einstein and relativity. All right. So this brings together everything that interested me. So I vowed to teach myself relativity, never thinking that one day I'd be a scientist. I didn't see. And his mom sees this burning desire to learn in her son. She does the best she can to encourage it.

So my mother did factory work. So there were times, you know, she'd work 3 she can to encourage it. So my mother did factory work. So there were times, you know, she'd work 3D 11, 11 to 7. And there were, you know, sometimes on certain weeks based on her shift, I wouldn't see her at all. But I'd come home and on the dining room table, she had gone to either the Laurel Library or our little library in Heidelberg, Mississippi, and brought two or three books on either Albert Einstein or relativity for me to consume. And, you know, I'd get so excited. It was like Christmas for me. And he just had this preternatural ability with mathematics and physics. He graduates from high school. Then he gets his Ph.D. at Stanford University.

And eventually he gets a job as a professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. at the Florida Institute of Technology. And one day in 2015, he's reading this online article. You know, I'm doing my normal, you know, take a break between work and just go get lost on the internet, right? Go down some rabbit hole. And he comes across this rather stunning story involving NASA's Deep Space Telescope, most powerful such telescope ever made. And it's named after James Webb, former administrator of NASA during the whole moon

launch effort. And the article argues that he is absolutely not deserving of that honor. In fact, the title of the article is The Problem with Naming Observatories for Bigots. Would you mind kind of, in a sense, walk through the accusations, like one by one? What's the bill of indictment against James Webb? They were pretty explicit. They said James Webb was a homophobe who ruined the lives and careers of gay federal employees in the 1940s and 50s. That article argued that before coming to NASA, James Webb had led purges of gay employees while at the State Department. And it quotes him saying really inflammatory things about getting rid of gay employees. And the writer, who's a journalist and a physicist,

says that this is a sort of moral reckoning, that we cannot, in the 21st century, honor a man such as this by putting his name on a space telescope that is going to be used the world round. So, for instance, this journalist writes, it's easy for white male physicists like me to ignore the less savory aspects of our scientific heroes, but it's long past time we stopped. So, James Webb is facing pretty serious allegations of discriminatory behavior that would not seem to make him a great candidate to have his name emblazoned on NASA's premier super telescope.

That's right. I mean, it looks, on the face of it, pretty bad. Right. And what does Hakeem Oluseyi make of these claims? You know, I'm appalled, right? I'm like, oh, you got to be kidding me. The James Webb Space Telescope? You know, this is biggeralled, right? I'm like, oh, you got to be kidding me. The James Webb Space Telescope? You know, this is bigger than Hubble is going to be. Hakeem is completely taken aback. He's on a Facebook page with other Black, Latino, and gay physicists. Everybody's worked up about this.

I saw people in that Facebook group talking about how they felt about seeing this and how they felt about NASA and their nation. And what about the youth coming up, right? I felt like they too would even be more tortured by it, right? You're newly coming into this field. This is the latest, greatest data. And you have to deal with someone that you feel, you know, literally would hate you and persecute you if they were alive today. And there is a request, because he is a prominent physicist, that Hakeem join them in denouncing this and pushing NASA to do something to change this. And that request is basically, take Webb's name off the telescope. Off the telescope, yes.

And Hakeem gives that some thought. So the first thing I do is I decide, let me research this, not deeply, just do a Google search. And I found another article that had been written five, six months earlier by Dan Savage in Seattle that basically said the same thing. But I still know that I don't know until I confirm for myself, right? But I'm certainly sympathetic to it, because if it is true, this is terrible. And then says to himself, you know, if I'm going to do this, I want to know what the real story is here. And so? So as fate would have it, he takes a job at NASA. And when he gets there, he goes into the office of some of his higher-ups. And he says, look, you know, what do we make of this?

I took it to the head of strategic communications. And I said, hey, are you aware of this? And they said, no. Oh, my goodness. Let's go talk to Gregory Robinson, who basically led the James Webb Space Telescope to completion. He was concerned. He's like, oh, this is not good. Let's look into this. And he said, Hakeem, please send me everything you have. And so I sent him the two articles. I sent him the Wikipedia article. And that's all I could

find up to that point. And so I had another meeting with him a week later. And he said, Hakeem, this does not provide any actual evidence of what happened. All I see here is accusations. Would you mind looking into it and finding out what actually happened? And I said, sure, I'd love to, right? Because I had the exact same curiosity, and I love the research. So, you know, that sounds great. And according to Hakeem, they tell him, would you please take a look at it? So what starts as a kind of personal curiosity about who James Webb really was and what he did

has now become kind of official business from NASA. Get to the bottom of this. Yes, at this point, it's Hakeem with certainly the help of NASA opening some doors and starting to really delve into the archives. So once empowered to carry out this inquiry, what does Hakeem find? He starts researching the entire life story of James Webb, and he discovers the biography of a lifelong, high-level technocrat. And after World War II, Webb was asked by President Harry Truman to go to the State Department and help in what is essentially a global battle with communism. Webb gets there

just as the Red Scare is really taking off in the United States with accusations that many people at the State Department are either communist sympathizers or closet communists. An accusation that could and did destroy the careers of thousands of people. Thousands of people. Yes, yes. It was an absolutely toxic accusation and it destroyed many, many lives. Layer on top of that, the Republican senators who were leading the Red Scare also were going after State Department officials as homosexuals. And that was a, you know, sort of a double mark of cane for anyone working at the State Department. that at that time, if you were homosexual, that would have made you sort of doubly susceptible to being blackmailed, to possibly being turned into a double agent. I should say, there's no proof that this ever happened with anyone, but that was certainly the, in that day and age, the late 1940s, that was the anxiety.

And this becomes known as the lavender scare. And the allegation is that James Webb was a central actor in this controversy, that he really led the prosecution from within the State Department, working hand-in-hand with Republican senators in going after and purging gay employees at the State Department. And what specific evidence is put forward about Webb's role in this lavender scare? Well, it's twofold. One, there's this quote that he allegedly wrote in a government report, and it goes like this.

It is generally believed that those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons. As kind of a justification for forcing out gay workers. Precisely. The second is that Webb personally fired 91 gay employees from the State Department. Serious claims. Serious claims, and if true, you can understand very much why people today would look at that with a sense of horror. And what does Hakeem find about all this?

So, he systematically goes about this. He delves into the NASA archives. He delves into the congressional archives. And after reading every piece of information on Webb, he still can't find any evidence that Webb wrote this damning, bigoted quote. But eventually, he does find the quote. And this exact quote that was horrible that was put in his name appeared in a Senate report, not in James Webb's words. Webb didn't write it. It's actually from a report issued by the Senate that Webb had absolutely nothing to do with. What about the second accusation that Webb fired gay employees?

It wasn't James Webb. Put simply, he didn't do that. So it was a case of mistaken identity. That appeared to be the case to me. Everything was done by John Purifoyle and Carlisle Hummelstein. Who were two other employees at the State Department. That's right. It was done by other officials at the State Department who were essentially in charge of working with the United States Senate in prosecuting both this red scare and the lavender scare, the lavender purge. So in other words, getting rid of people both because they might be

communist sympathizers and because they're gay. You know, James Webb was the undersecretary of state. They were like deputy undersecretary of state. So what Hakeem has found is that the central allegations that first materialized in those articles he had read a few years earlier and drummed up all this anger at Webb, that those central allegations are basically not accurate. That's correct. That's correct. And what's also particularly interesting is he finds in looking at Webb's tenure at NASA in the 1960s, that Webb had played a key role in helping to racially integrate this massive agency, particularly at its famed research facilities in Huntsville, Alabama. The South. Alabama puts a lot of pressure on Webb and President Johnson not to do this. And Webb says, no, we're going to integrate this agency. He even at one point threatens to move key parts of that facility out of Alabama, which is a strong shot across the bow to Alabama. Right. And to its extremely prominent and powerful segregationist governor. Right. And in the end, George Wallace backed down. When you come across this and you're

told of this background, how does it make you feel? I have to be honest in the sense that it did endear me to Webb a little bit to see that he stood up for African-Americans in that way. That was close to my heart. NASA, Kennedy, Johnson, Webb, they were doing the right thing. So according to Hakeem's research, not only is Webb not a bigot, he is actively working to make the United States government more inclusive. Yes. Once I had those two things together, oh, I love Webb now. And what does Hakeem do with this information that clearly undercuts everything that's being

said in this moment about James Webb? Well, first, of course, he goes back and he tells NASA what he's found. And then he writes an article in which he lays out at some length all of his findings. in which he lays out at some length all of his findings. And he's, you know, tough in that piece. I mean, he says, look, there have been accusations made by essentially people within my community, that is physicists, that he is a homophobe and had led this lavender purge. And he's saying that's all wrong. And in fact, his article was entitled,

Was NASA's Historic Leader James Webb a Bigot? And can you read me your conclusion? Sure. Let me find it. Hakeem Olushe Webb. That'll find it. Yes. I wrote, in full disclosure, I have never met James Webb, who died in 1992. I have no idea what was in his heart and mind. But what I can say conclusively is that there is zero evidence that Webb is guilty of the allegations against him. And he makes very clear no, no, and no. He's very unequivocal about what he found. When you hit publish on that essay, what did you expect? Do you think there would be blowback?

I did not expect blowback. Not at all. I thought there would be a big sigh of relief from the astronomy community and we'd move forward. And what was the initial reaction? Well, the initial reaction was exactly that. There was like immediately, you know, 400 or so astronomers quote tweeted that article with, hey, now we can move on. It's not true. But then a few days later, things changed drastically. We'll be right back. Michael, what does Hakeem mean when he says that the initial reaction to his piece changes drastically?

At first, many physicists look at his article, look at the research, and there's a sense of relief. Oh, okay, we don't have to worry about that. We have not named this spectacular telescope after a homophobe. Then the criticism comes, and it is aimed at Hakeem personally, and it is historical research.

And one of my colleagues colleagues who I had known since 2008 published an article with the title, The Straits Are Here to Save Us, about me and this article and this research, you know, and I'm just like, wow. Personal element boils down to who are you, a straight male physicist, to tell us, queer, gay physicists and employees of NASA and other universities, what Webb was about? Who were you to tell us our history? This is basically a criticism that Hakeem is not qualified as a non-gay, non-queer person to even carry out this inquiry. Yes, not qualified by dint of his identity.

You know, and I'm just like, whoa. First off, I thought we had a cordial working relationship. Why, you know, why are you dissing me like this personally? And what about the historical critique? Because from everything you've said, his research is pretty clear cut and it's pretty compelling. Well, they say that my research changes nothing. All I did was look at a quote and who actually said it, but that was it, right? And, you know. Look, critics say he missed a few things, including something that happened in the early 1960s when Webb was chief administrator at NASA.

A gay employee at NASA was caught in a sting by police in Washington, D.C., and was later fired by NASA. And the accusation was that Webb should have known about this, could have known about this, and should have stopped it. Because he ran. Because he ran NASA. And what does Hakeem say about that? Hakeem points out several things. One is there's no particular reason to think that Webb would have known about this. This was not a top employee at NASA.

NASA is a very large federal agency. But even more to the point... The head of federal agencies take directions from above. There was an executive order signed by President Eisenhower, and that was enforced for the next 20 years, saying that openly gay Americans could not work for the federal government. It was not a NASA policy. It was a federal government-wide policy that applied to every federal agency. It was wrong-minded. It was wrong-minded.

I 100% it was wrong. And there are bad actors. And we know their names. And James Webb is not among them. So the relevant context is that Webb may or may not have known about this firing. There's no evidence he played a role in it. And that the firing more or less followed the law of the land. Yes, he would have literally had to disobey a executive order by the president of

the United States. They didn't admit that he didn't do what he was accused of. They just said, oh, what Hakeem does not understand is that Webb was complicit because he was in management. And this gets to this broader critique of Hakeem's work, that James Webb had a responsibility at various places, both when he was at the State Department and when he was at NASA, to speak up for gay rights and to speak up for gay Americans, and that if he failed to do so, he had failed morally, that he had failed in his moral obligation to history. Hmm. So this is intriguing. This criticism of Hakeem's research is that whether or not Webb himself did any of the things he'd been accused of doing, which Hakeem has found he

didn't, the fact that as a leader, he didn't do more to stop it makes him worthy of condemnation. Yes, precisely. There's a word in historiography, presentism, which is this idea that one can apply the moral lens of our current day to past events. I mean, it's raised around our civil war, it's raised around any kind of really urgent, certainly the civil rights movement. In this case, it would be applied to James Webb and saying, look, in 1949, 1950, when you're at the State Department and gay employees, or potentially gay employees, because no one quite knows who they are, are coming under attack, that you should have understood this as a moral civil rights issue and stood up and said something and resign if you needed to.

Let me give an example. There's a professor at the University of New Hampshire, Dr. Chanda Prescott Weinstein, a well-known physicist. She's been very critical of Hakeem. And she argues that James Webb, in fact, had a choice that, as she wrote, he could have been a radical freedom fighter and simply refused to serve in the Truman administration. So how should we think about an argument like that? Well, the problem is that if you talk to historians, including some very prominent gay historians who've studied this period, I mean, there was not a gay rights movement at that time. Presentism in this sort of a case is seen as asking people to anticipate where history is moving in a way that is simply kind of beyond their ken at that time.

In 1949, 1950, to have expected essentially someone to intuit that there would be a gay rights movement that would arise in the next two and three and four decades and come to flower is not reasonable. That is their argument. Michael, no matter what intellectual framework you subscribe to when it comes to James Webb, it feels like what has happened in the case of Hakeem's research is that an original critique has been transformed and changed. And in a sense, the goalposts have moved. First, the accusation was that he did something very wrong. That was disproven. And so the critique transforms into he was complicit. So how does Hakeem start to think about that? I mean, Hakeem finds himself frustrated, frankly, at this shifting of the argument from one thing to the next to the

next. They started with, he initiated it, he's a homophobe. Then they pull back to he's complicit. Then they get a hint of something. It's never quite clear where this ends. And at some point, And at some point, Hakeem, a scientist, a man who loves to research, starts to realize, you know, facts are probably not going to be the end of this. You know, there's not going to be one finding, one set of facts that is going to put this to rest. So sometimes the truth of the data is so obvious, but because of politics or some other reason, people will claim that they don't see what is obvious. And that's why this episode feels very relevant to our current cultural moment. There is, I think indisputably, a growing tendency by progressive forces in our culture to revisit the past with disapproving eyes. It often comes from a place of justifiable anger over a historical wrong. But at times, it can seem uninterested and pretty unforgiving of the values that existed in the past.

and pretty unforgiving of the values that existed in the past, and it can be dismissive of the facts and the nuances that don't conform to the ultimate judgments of those who disapprove of it. Does that feel right? Yes. I see this all the time in my writing and reporting and in talking with Hakeem. I mean, he confronted, in a sense, the conundrum, right? I mean, on the one hand, it's enormously frustrating to see facts ignored or perhaps shunned aside. On the other hand, as he talks about himself, he gets it. He gets this sense of pain and

aggrievement as you look back at history and try to make sense of history. You know, when I first saw this, I thought about, what if it was me? What if I lived in my town and there was this Confederate statue? And this dude, not only was he Confederate, he was like an overseer and a murderer of African people who were enslaved back then. This is what I think my whole life. And now this white dude in the community goes and does the research and says, hey, you know what? Turns out it wasn't that guy. He didn't do that. And as a matter of fact, he saved the lives of hundreds of Native Americans. I would be in no hurry to unhate that guy, right? If all this time I thought that dude was that evil person, even when I found the truth,

I still would feel some kind of way. That's a natural feeling. I get that. So what ends up happening next in Hakeem's story? It takes a decidedly nasty and personal turn. He is offered a job at George Mason University, and there is an accusation. And there is an accusation. What I heard people were saying was that I had sexually harassed a woman at my university. I was at Florida Tech. And that in my federal grants that I received, that I had absconded with federal money, that I had stolen money. Stations are made in a roundabout way on Twitter and in a phone call to another physics professor at George Mason University, who properly takes them to the administration at George Mason.

And George Mason, in turn, gets in touch with the Florida Institute of Technology. It's very important to note that there is no there there. Florida Institute of Technology had investigated these accusations a couple of years earlier and reinvestigated those, found nothing there. I spent a good three weeks of reporting time trying to track down these allegations, talking to many former students, and I could find nothing. And nor did Florida Institute of Technology, nor did George Mason, which went ahead with its hire. And in fact, Hakeem Oluseyi is now a visiting professor at George Mason. I have to point out something that I'm sure occurred to you, Michael, while you were reporting

this, which is at this point in the story, you're looking into the reputation of someone who was attacked after looking into the reputation of someone else who was attacked. And perhaps all these attacks are coming from the same set of sources. Yes. This is the politics of personal destruction that accompany so many disputes these days where one challenges the consensus around a particular issue, and it's not enough to argue with that, to say, no, no, no, you're wrong because of X, Y, and Z.

You need to take that person down. And personal reputations are destroyed. It's an unfortunately common aspect of intellectual debate these days. So we know how this story ends, of course. The James Webb Space Telescope is up in the skies. We know it is named the James Webb Space Telescope. But has NASA itself ever officially weighed in on this entire saga and debate about Webb and about his past.

Yes, they have. Their in-house historian did a quite complete report that essentially ratified everything Hakeem had found. Now, the report's very careful. History's complicated, right? We can't know with 100% certainty what James Webb really believed in his heart, but the report goes through every accusation against him, and the historical record just doesn't back those up. So where is Hakeem right now in his career, and has any of this in his mind changed his life changed his trajectory i think when one goes through a crucible like this and and it was a crucible for hakeem in his telling it certainly has left him with a sense of of precisely how fraught and charged our cultural moment is precisely how fraught and charged our cultural moment is. But when I've asked him, if you could go back knowing what you know now, would you still do this? Yeah, I'd definitely do it again.

I mean, you know, there's not a regret for having looked into this. I mean, I think he feels that he did what he felt he had an intellectual obligation to do, which was to look at these charges as clearly as he could and come to some conclusions. That turned out to be right. That turned out to be right, yes. I had no personal connection to James Webb. There was nothing that made me want to exonerate James Webb. There was nothing that made me feel like I could somehow gain an advantage from doing this. If anything, I knew that there was only a downside.

There was nothing in it for me, period. But once I found out the truth, I was now bound to reveal that truth. It's my duty. It's my responsibility. My honor could have it no other way. You know, in reflecting on this whole saga, you have to imagine that there are other consensuses,

that's the right word out there, that aren't right. You know, other moments where lots of people think that a James Webb, someone like that, did wrong. But there isn't a Hakeem-like figure devoting the time, and in this case, reputational cost, to challenging those narratives, because it's just not worth it for them, as we can see. And so, in that sense, it strikes me that

Hakeem's story is inspiring, right? The lengths he went, the years he devoted to it, the risks he was willing to tolerate. Or it's a kind of extreme cautionary tale, because who wants to endure all of that just to correct the record for some dead guy, right? Absolutely. And in fact, in my reporting, I talked to many physicists who did not want to go on the record talking about this. They said to me, you know, Hakeem got it right, and I ain't going there. Because if I go there, I'm going to get attacked. And one hears this, frankly, all the time in academia and i know that there are those you know number of very prominent you know liberal scholars and activists who say that this doesn't happen but i'm just saying like i'm in those conversations and when you say this is happening. What you mean is a form of fear and self-censorship that makes people fear articulating the truth. Yes. So to that view, right, Hakeem Oluseyi is either an inspiring tale of an intellectual

who stood up for what he believed in and what he had found, or he's a cautionary tale, as you say, of where you don't want to go. Right. Now, the other way to think of this entire story, Michael, is that the people who are mad about the Webb telescope from the start were making a larger point. And that a factual error here and there, a reputation that maybe gets trampled, isn't ultimately as important as communicating a message about fairness and equality within an institution like the State Department or NASA, and that you don't make omelets without

breaking eggs. You don't change the world without occasionally bruising people. Yeah, I suppose if you're not the egg being broken, that's perhaps a more comfortable position. But I think it's fair to say that we venture into dangerous waters if we say that, well, truth can be sacrificed for a greater good. It seems to me, in looking at the life of Hakeem Oluseyi, you see the downside risk pretty profoundly. Well, Michael, thank you very much.

Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Times reports that Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, whose prolonged absence imperiled Democrats' agenda in Congress, has returned to work despite a set of serious medical setbacks that have left her in poor health. Feinstein was first hospitalized with shingles in February, which spread to her face and neck, causing vision and balance impairments and facial paralysis. At the same time, it brought on an undisclosed case of encephalitis, a swelling of the brain that

can cause memory loss, language problems, and bouts of confusion. The new information suggests Feinstein was unready to resume work and is now struggling to function in the job. And Disney is pulling the plug on a $1 billion office complex in Florida, following a set of relentless politically motivated attacks on the company by the state's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. The office complex would have brought more than 2,000 jobs to the region, with an average salary of $120,000. Disney's decision highlights the economic risks of DeSantis' presidential aspirations.

Today's episode was produced by Muj Zaydi and Will Reed. It was edited by Michael Benoit. Fact-checked by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Mary Lozano, Dan Powell, Alicia Baetube, Diane Wong, Romy Misto, and Brad Fisher, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lanford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.