Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–181
spoiled by that. The new chair of the committee has bought into this completely, which is,
“Gentlemen and ladies, we’re going to write this thing right now. When we talk to them, these
are going to be the conclusions and they’re not going to change between now and the final
report, which is going to be a week or two weeks from now.”
I used that approach also on the Argonne committee. I remember one time I was not
chairing the Argonne committee, and the report came a year late. It came about the time of the
next meeting of the committee. It was of absolutely no use whatsoever. I like committees that
are tightly run and controlled, with a well-defined set of goals and an immediate product and
don’t worry about whether it’s perfect. Get it out. We first have to have a good relationship
with the people who are doing the typing and the integrating of it. I found that in setting up these
meetings, the best thing to do was give them a framework. It doesn’t have the pieces people
have written, because they haven’t written them yet. But you have a framework, and the typist
sets us up on the computer and knows where the things come in and just puts them in those spots
in the framework. They come up with a report that doesn’t have to be sorted. That was a
breakthrough for them, and they got terribly spoiled by it.
ASPATURIAN: To the extent that you can talk about this, what was your most interesting
challenge in overseeing these projects and committees for nearly two decades?
TOMBRELLO: Predicting the future is always very hard, per Niels Bohr. The biggest challenge is
getting people to think strategically and not tactically. That is extraordinarily difficult. We’re
going through a process now at Livermore with a directorate that has broadened beyond belief.
It includes people working on climate, geophysics, biology. It’s got environment, energy,
chemistry. It’s got physics. It’s got everything.
ASPATURIAN: This is up at Livermore?
TOMBRELLO: Yes. We are being frustrated by the group that includes basically geology, energy,
and climate science. They don’t think strategically. And yet these are important fields, from a
national-security and national-goals perspective. They’re growing—they’re growing rapidly,
partly because this administration believes in them. The energy, the alternative-energy things,
the climate things—very important. There’s one extraordinary man up there named Ben
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