Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–180
it is very interesting to hear words that you wrote, or that you caused to be written, coming out of
the president’s mouth. It’s a good feeling, tempered by the fact that one of the findings of this
report was that a lot of the pieces are good, will work—and the system will fail at nearly every
boundary. Because of the timing, we used the word “Katrina” many, many times. We said that
no matter how good the pieces are, if they don’t work together and the information doesn’t cross
boundaries, the president will have nothing to make a judgment on. Many of the
recommendations are totally classified, but the upshot was, You people have to figure out how to
work together. You’re going to have to do a lot better than Katrina. I know it was a low blow to
keep mentioning Katrina in there, but the director of Homeland Security didn’t have any
objection to it.
John Gordon is a very interesting man. I enjoyed working with him. I didn’t expect
much. I’ve known a bunch of four stars in my varied career, and they may be good at military
but they can’t write. They think in PowerPoint and that kind of thing. But not John Gordon. He
wrote at least as well as I did, if not better. He edited extraordinarily well. Livermore got spun
off from UC because of reasons that don’t make a lot of sense, but it’s now run by Bechtel and
the University of California, and so they have a board and John Gordon sits on that. I was lucky
enough to get him on this red team. But that gives you an example of the kind of thing a red
team might do.
Then I got pulled back onto the committee that I had started. I’m not the chair. A friend
of mine is. In some ways this is a lot better. You’re responsible for writing a lot less and you’re
less responsible for pulling the whole report together. I had a philosophy, which they loved. So
many committees will meet, take notes, listen to testimony and presentations, and then the report
takes forever to get out. I demanded, successfully, that a draft of the report be written before the
end of the meeting. So when you have your final debriefing with the laboratory management,
you’re going to tell them exactly what you found, and they’re going to hear it in real time.
Because one thing I’ve learned is that a report that comes out more than about a month after the
fact is dead on arrival. This way, they may get their final report a week or two weeks after the
last meeting, but they have heard it all at the last meeting. It’s all been pulled together. It’s all
been integrated to the extent that you can. It’s a snapshot in time. Nobody expects these reports
to be anything more than a very good snapshot by people who are good at getting details right
then, and therefore it has to be immediate. I’m a great believer in this. The lab got terribly
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