[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 45 (Thursday, March 28, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3164-S3165]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        TRIBUTE TO DAVID PACKARD

  Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, the Nation lost a great leader 
Tuesday with the death of David Packard. He was the first and greatest 
of the acquisition reformers in the top reaches of the Pentagon. As 
Deputy Secretary of Defense in the first Nixon administration, he 
fostered competition in a wide range of programs, including the Air 
Force fighter program that produced the F-16 and F-18. He helped found 
the Defense Systems Management College at Fort Belvoir in order to 
bring modern management techniques to the defense acquisition system. 
And throughout the almost quarter century since he stepped down as 
Deputy Secretary of Defense, he continued in an advisory capacity to 
the most senior reaches of Government to argue for the need for change 
in the way the Pentagon develops and buys weapon systems.
  It is perhaps fitting that under Secretary Bill Perry's leadership, 
the reforms which Mr. Packard advocated for so long are now taking firm 
root throughout the military services. Dr. Perry and all the reformers 
with whom I have had the pleasure of working during my 13 years service 
in the Senate

[[Page S3165]]

point to David Packard as the first to show the way toward a more 
rational acquisition system.
  Mr. President, I am grateful that I was able to work with David 
Packard over the last decade on several important issues. He was at an 
age when most people stop work and take up retirement. But not David 
Packard. He would answer the call of public service whenever it 
sounded. He suffered from a bad back, and taking transcontinental plane 
flights forced him to endure real pain to serve his country, but serve 
he did.
  David Packard always was focused on the art of the possible. He knew 
that change was incremental and he would take what progress he could 
make today to build for another day. I first met him in 1985. He came 
to me, a Democrat then in the minority here in the Senate, because I 
had indicated an interest in a report he had written in 1983 for the 
White House Science Council. Its topic was how to improve the Federal 
Government-operated research laboratories. He had called for 
significant changes in personnel policy, in acquisition of laboratory 
equipment, and in improving laboratory infrastructure.
  The most important change he and his panel had advocated was to allow 
all the laboratories to go to a more flexible personnel system along 
the lines of the system then in place at the Naval Weapons Center at 
China Lake, CA. Mr. Packard had been frustrated by the slow pace of the 
Reagan administration in considering his panel's proposals. He wanted 
to jumpstart congressional consideration with my help and that of then 
Congressman Don Fuqua, another Democrat.
  Unfortunately, all we were able to win in the short run was the 
adoption of a flexible personnel system at the National Bureau of 
Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology. As 
predicted, that personnel system has worked very well and helped NIST 
maintain its leadership in a broad range of technologies. As usual, 
David Packard was ahead of his time. What he recommended more than a 
decade ago on lab personnel reform is now part of the effort to 
reinvent the Pentagon's laboratories.
  Mr. President, I will miss David Packard's wisdom and guidance, and 
so will many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. There's a 
passage from T. E. Lawrence's book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which 
reads:

       All men dream, but not equally. Some dream by night in the 
     dusty recesses of their minds, and wake in the day to find it 
     is vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men. For 
     they act their dream with open eyes to make it possible.

  David Packard was a dreamer of the day who deserves to be remembered 
by a grateful Nation for the dreams he made possible. I am glad to have 
known him.

                          ____________________