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would draw the ire of American labor unions, with whom Nixon already
had a prickly relationship. Nixon's staff was in the process of trying to curb
what the president considered “inflationary” wage increases proposed by
manufacturing unions, and Nixon had no interest in further alienating
workers by cutting high-profile American aerospace jobs during his first
few years in office.18 18 That those jobs were mostly in Washington State—
again, the home of two powerful Democratic senators— made the prospect
of terminating the SST even less palatable.
Unlike the Johnson administration, Nixon and his staff actively sought
to preempt criticism of the project. The administration released informa-
tional fact sheets on the benefits of the SST to American consumers, to the
nation's balance of payments, and to the economy in general. In addition,
having created (and handpicked members) of the Council on Environmen-
tal Quality (CEQ) in August of 1969, Nixon sought to quiet his critics'
fears about the environmental effects of SST by incorporating that body's
recommendations into the plane's development. 19
The administration's strategy backfired. Acting head of the CEQ, Rus-
sell Train, whom Nixon had tapped as much for his ties to the Republican
Party as for his knowledge of and concern for the natural environment,
apparently took his job more seriously than the president expected him
to. In May of 1970, at hearings convened by Senator William Proxmire
of Wisconsin to capitalize on the success of Earth Day, Train summa-
rized the SST's myriad potential environmental problems. He vowed that
the administration would put the craft into production only if it could
resolve these heretofore irresolvable issues. 20 Compounding the dam-
age, the respected physicist Richard Garwin, who had chaired Nixon's ad
hoc Office of Science and Technology Committee on the SST in 1969,
also attacked the program, both for its environmental impacts and for its
economic liabilities. 21 Train committed to an environmentally acceptable
SST, but Garwin concluded that such a plane could not be built. By the
time Nixon's 1971 funding request hit the Senate floor in November of
1970, most of the nation's renowned scientists and economists, the CEQ,
Nixon's own science advisor, Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Gal-
braith (prominent economists who rarely agreed on anything), perhaps a
majority of the American public, and even some inside Boeing all opposed
the program. 22 The Senate killed the program's funding by a narrow vote
on March 24, 1971. 23
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