[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 156 (Tuesday, October 16, 2007)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E2141]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     IN MEMORY OF WILLIAM T. GOLDEN

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. MAURICE D. HINCHEY

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, October 16, 2007

  Mr. HINCHEY. Madam Speaker, I am deeply saddened by the news that one 
of America's greatest thinkers has passed away, my friend and 
constituent William T. Golden. Although his name may not be well known 
to many Americans, his influence on our government, scientific 
community and countless charitable causes is broad and deep.
  Mr. Golden was born in New York in 1909, the son of a wool trader who 
later went on to become a banker. He was raised in Washington Heights, 
but left New York to study English and biology at the University of 
Pennsylvania with the intent of becoming a physicist.
  After finding that he disliked mathematics, he attended Harvard 
Business School for a year and then followed his father's footsteps to 
Wall Street. He went to work with a Harvard acquaintance, Harold 
Linder, who became a lifelong friend, neighbor and colleague.
  In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Golden said of this 
period of his life, ``The idea was to make a lot of money on Wall 
Street and then do interesting things.'' He set about achieving that 
goal with great zeal.
  On the brink of World War II, he joined the Navy's Bureau of 
Ordnance, spending most of the war in Washington where he developed a 
reputation as a great strategic thinker, as well as an inventor. He 
spent time at sea testing a device of his own invention that controlled 
antiaircraft machine guns. After the war, his experience in government 
led to his appointment as assistant to Lewis Strauss, a member of the 
fledgling Atomic Energy Commission. He served in that capacity for 
three years, traveling around the world to atomic test sites, bringing 
together the finest minds in American science, and becoming a skilled 
operator in how to get things done in government.
  These efforts led to perhaps his greatest achievement in government, 
the creation of a national science advisor to the president. In 1950, 
on the eve of the Korean War, Mr. Golden was asked to advise President 
Truman on the reactivation of the wartime Office of Scientific Research 
and Development. In a pattern often repeated in his storied career, he 
set out to gather the information from the most distinguished 
scientists in the public and private sectors, traveling across the 
country and interviewing more than 150 people. Upon returning to 
Washington, he concluded that a new OSRD would be an impediment to the 
work of the many new research-oriented agencies established in the 
post-war period, including the AEC, the Office of Naval Research and 
the National Institutes of Health.
  Bill Golden offered President Truman an alternative: the 
establishment of a presidential science advisor, who would coordinate 
all of this groundbreaking work and make direct recommendations to the 
commander in chief. Although meeting initial resistance from the 
National Science Foundation--an agency that he was instrumental in 
founding--and the Pentagon, he employed his political skills to pacify 
the objectors, expanding his original proposal to make the president's 
science advisor the chairman of a committee that would include the 
heads of the existing research agencies. The presidential science 
advisory committee went on to become extremely influential in the 
1950s, providing critical information to President Eisenhower on the 
Cold War arms and space races.
  Although Mr. Golden left government and returned to New York after 
this achievement, this was not the end of his contributions to 
government and science. Among his accomplishments, he is responsible 
for decades of service to the American Association for the Advancement 
of Science, where he established a congressional fellowship program to 
send scientists to Capitol Hill and whose headquarters are named for 
him. As a leader of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and 
Government, he orchestrated private, biannual meetings of the science 
advisers of the G7 nations. He also remained, throughout his life, a 
strong supporter of his brainchild, the presidential science advisor, 
and published numerous books and articles about science policy over the 
years. For all of these efforts, Mr. Golden is credited as a key figure 
in the development of our national research triumphs in the 20th 
Century. As John Gibbons, science advisor to President Clinton, told 
the New York Times, ``Without people like him, there would be no 
infrastructure, no research.''
  Mr. Golden, of course, was not content to rest on his laurels. As his 
financial career flourished, so did his philanthropy. He was an active 
and engaged leader of nearly 100 nonprofit organizations and 
institutions. Among those to which he was most devoted were the 
American Museum of Natural History, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, 
which he helped to establish, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 
the New York Academy of Science and the Hebrew Free Loan Society, which 
had lent his Lithuanian immigrant father money to get started in 
America.
  I had the pleasure of getting to know Mr. Golden because of his love 
of the great outdoors, which led him to purchase a weekend home in 
Olivebridge, New York, in the district I represent. He continued his 
activism there, donating land for a local park and becoming involved in 
the community. One of the great achievements of his later life was 
saving from development the Black Rock Forest in the Hudson Highlands, 
which is now preserved in perpetuity as a field station for scientific 
research, education and conservation.
  I consider it a great privilege to have known and had the opportunity 
to work with Bill Golden, one of the greatest minds of our time and one 
of the most important figures in American science. Although he will be 
truly, deeply missed by his hundreds of friends and colleagues, and 
most especially by his wife, Catherine Morrison and his daughters 
Rebecca and Pamela, his legacy lives on.

                          ____________________