Piercing the Horizon. Sunny Tsiao
worked with some two hundred experts who were concerned with what they thought would be the condition and needs of the country a decade or so into the future. Many predictions had to do with the condition of the cities—a topic that was seemingly escalating in importance with Washington on a weekly basis. Under President Lyndon B. Johnson, the new Democratic national leadership had a lot of questions that involved urban planning, urban renewal, and modernizing the inner cities. Most of the interest directed at TEMPO, however, still had to do with national security. TEMPO thinkers created “what-if” scenarios and projected their possible impact on the United States. An issue might be how a major breakthrough in the field of disarmament would affect the country. Perhaps a critical trade secret might be compromised. Another scenario was how vulnerable US cities would be to a surprise attack by a devastating secret weapon.
His group forecast that communist China would detonate a nuclear weapon some time between 1963 and 1965, most likely in late 1964; the actual explosion occurred in October of 1964. This brainstorming on the direction of US national security accounted for some 75 percent of TEMPO’s work under Paine.18
In 1970, Time Life correspondent Robert Sherrod asked him what was so special about the group and the work that they did. He sat back, reflected briefly, and recounted a rather unusual story that had Sherrod smiling by the time it was over.
His longtime friend, Ed Schmidt, was an independent consultant who worked for TEMPO. Schmidt was an eccentric, in terms of both personality and profession, a diversely educated, modern-day Renaissance Man. He had degrees from Georgia Tech and MIT, and had an unusually broad range of knowledge on everything from the technicalities of civil engineering to the nuances of the effects of foreign trade variances on domestic affairs. Paine found him very pragmatic and practical, and used him as an adviser, confidant, and sounding board partly to help in his own thinking. They spent many afternoons in Paine’s office tossing around ideas. This sometimes resulted in unconventional ways of doing things.
In the early 1960s, the US was trying hard to provide aid to the Republic of Yemen. Yemen was one of the poorest and most unstable countries in the volatile Middle East. But its location at the mouth of the Red Sea made it uniquely important geographically. For this reason, the Soviet Union and communist China were also giving it large-scale assistance.
The State Department asked TEMPO to take a look at what they called “the worst foreign aid situation in any country” in the world. Washington had installed a radio station there only to see the Egyptians capture it to transmit anti-American propaganda year after year. Food shipped by the Red Cross was not reaching the Yemenis. Supplies entering the country had to first dock in Soviet-controlled ports, where they were stolen. They were then transported on a road where they were further pilfered by Chinese communists. The same thing happened at roadblocks set up by the Yemenis. Local warlords helped themselves to what they could. By the time the trucks arrived at the American Embassy, only a sack of grain was left. One sack was always left to encourage the US to try again.
Paine’s office could not come up with a good solution for the State Department. Analysts had no answers, and the program dragged on and soon got Paine’s personal attention. He took the project over from the program manager and began talking directly with the State Department. One day as they discussed the problem in his office, Schmidt looked out the window and asked, “Tom, why not send me there?” He turned around; Paine looked at him with a big grin. His experts had worked for months to a dead end trying to get intelligence on the situation. They needed someone on the ground. So Paine said why not, and sent his friend into the middle of a war zone. Schmidt talked to the villagers and gathered information from the locals on the supply route, conditions of the roads, and the strength of the resistance. He scouted locations where the US could implement further aid projects. A week later (after claiming that he had dodged a hand grenade, no less), he came back with exactly the kind of information that Paine needed. He wrote up a report and hand-delivered it to Washington. He told Sherrod that it was a rather unorthodox way of getting something done. But it worked.19
By the fall of 1967, Paine had been with General Electric for seventeen years. A year earlier, NASA had brought its second manned spaceflight program, Project Gemini, to a successful conclusion with the splashdown of Gemini 12 in the Atlantic. It was the final flight of NASA’s two-man spacecraft program. By now, the United States had been launching astronauts into space for six years. Space probes were also venturing near Mars and Venus for the first time, sending back tantalizing black-and-white pictures of Earth’s nearest planetary neighbors. Four robotic Surveyor spacecraft had already soft-landed on the surface of the moon. America was now building the most complex rocket and spacecraft ever made in an attempt to land the first human beings on the moon. “Go Fever” was in the air. The country was in a full-blown race with the Soviet Union to put a man on the moon. NASA was in the news and making headlines. While TEMPO had a few small study contracts with the agency, he himself had nothing to do with them.
That was all about to change.
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