Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–175
And then in the summer of 1971—so now we’ve moved ten years forward—I’d been
doing some work on accelerator design. The people at Los Alamos got interested in some of
those designs and invited me to come. At the same time, I was on a time-allocation committee
for an accelerator that was just being built there called LAMPF [Los Alamos Meson Physics
Facility], which was a high-energy nuclear physics facility, with a big linear accelerator. The
whole family went, and it was a wonderful experience that was repeated for the next two
summers, most of which I spent on this accelerator design project. It didn’t go anywhere, but it
was a lot of fun, and I published some papers on it. And of course, the scheduling committee at
LAMPF continued, so I continued going back and forth to Los Alamos after that. It all worked
well until the early eighties, when Jay [George] Keyworth, who was head of the physics division
at Los Alamos, went off to be Reagan’s science advisor. I think that they wanted to burn all
trace of Jay and anybody who had had anything to do with him. Suddenly, I discovered I was no
longer welcome at Los Alamos. They canceled my security clearance—not that I’d been doing
very much that had anything to do with national security at that point. But a friend of mine, Tom
Sugihara, who had been dean of science at Texas A & M and had gone on to become a kind of a
guru to the head of the chemistry directorate at Livermore, realized suddenly that I was up for
grabs. He got me involved with Livermore. I’d been up there; I’d given talks. I knew people
there, but I’d never really had any relationship with them.
What he wanted me to do was some organizing. They had two new visiting committees
there, but they were rather haphazard and really didn’t do much. Tom said, “I’d like you to
come here. Organize a committee—two committees; one for the materials science half of this
directorate and the other half for the chemistry side. I want them to look like the reviews of
Argonne National Laboratory.”
At the time, actually, I was on the Argonne review committees, so I knew about how it
worked. At Argonne, you had a number of diversely organized committees, reporting to the
University of Chicago, but at Livermore we were reporting to the lab’s upper management and
the University of California. I agreed to study it and to set up the two committees. All this
began to really happen about the time I went to Schlumberger. So I was doing it while I was at
Schlumberger, too.
ASPATURIAN: Two management portfolios at once.
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Tombrello_T