Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–86
because they knew Feynman and Christy. Matt had certainly been involved in all that, because
the fast electronics had to have been used in stuff like that. He was either on the radar project or
the bomb project. So he was here. Bob Walker was nominally in charge. Alvin Tollestrup was
here for a long time until he went and built, basically, the superconducting magnets that make up
the Tevatron. But he’d gotten his PhD in Kellogg [1950] and was kept on. As I say, it was not
so unfriendly, though there were clearly, slightly below the surface, old antagonisms. You hired
Kavanagh instead of Telegdi, you know, and this was something that was never going to go
away.
I see Murray [Gell-Mann] every few months now, and I am sure if we got to talking
about the old days at Caltech, he’d probably mention it. “You know what Willy did!”—they all
had things like that. I gather that Feynman and Gell-Mann at first had worked together and then
later didn’t. Different styles. The place didn’t begin really to diversify in what I’d say were
interesting ways until the mid to late 1980s. And I think the staffing committee had a lot to do
with that. It made it also a necessity that you couldn’t hire everybody you wanted to, which
meant that you could make a committee like that work, because there really wasn’t much
alternative. If you just got into gridlock where nobody could agree on a candidate, you wouldn’t
get anywhere. The only exception to that had been in 1975, when we had the three powerful
PMA groups that basically said, We’ll each get one, and we’ll get best of show for the three, and
we will hire them all at once, and we will shove it down Harold Brown’s throat. [See Session 2]
ASPATURIAN: So, like a museum acquiring three masterpieces at once.
TOMBRELLO: So that you don’t have to choose among an old master, a Jackson Pollock and, you
know—
ASPATURIAN: —an Impressionist.
TOMBRELLO: The full spectrum. You get your Monet. Everybody gets something. But you
have to be careful, because, you know, art museums that aren’t willing to diversify get into
trouble. This is a good analogy for universities. I remember looking at the art of a friend of
mine who used to run the Pasadena Art Museum before Norton Simon acquired it. Bill Agee
went on to run the art museum in Houston, where they have a huge collection of Frederic
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