White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

John T. Conway: A Remembrance

by Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King

John T. Conway, who died on Feb. 12 at the age of 92, was a force. And he triumphed in many things — as a Navy engineer, an FBI special agent, an attorney, a congressional staffer, a presidential appointee, a utility executive, a husband and a father.

I am glad to say that John was my friend, and that I was the beneficiary of his joy and generosity.

I knew him for more than 40 years. And I knew him to be a man for whom everything was an adventure. He sought it and it sought him.

If you were lucky enough to know John, you were swept along in his adventure. I was swept along in the corridors of the Capitol, which he knew inside out from his days as a staffer on the storied Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. I was swept along in the labyrinth of offices at Consolidated Edison Company in New York, when he was executive assistant to the chairman. I was swept along into the arcane and essential work of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, when he became its first chairman, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, in 1989.

And I was swept along on K Street in Washington, when John was headed for a favorite watering hole. He was an Irishman from New York, where his father was a policeman for 30 years. John was Irish in the best sense of that: He enjoyed a drink and loved the companionship that went with it.

John was a raconteur who took time to ask questions. You always felt he knew a lot more than you did — and this was for the simple reason that he did. An evening in his company was a time to laugh, but also a time to learn.

A 42-page interview that FBI historians conducted with John in 2009, as part of an oral history of the agency, can be found online at http://www.nleomf.org/assets/pdfs/nlem/oral-histories/FBI_Conway_interview.pdf In this remarkable document, John discusses his attempts to see active duty in World War II and his extraordinary career at the FBI.

John had told me a lot about his life as an FBI special agent, including how close he had come to turning a Soviet spy. He said he felt cheated not to have closed the deal.

He was both an engineer and an attorney – with degrees from Tufts University and Columbia University School of Law — so he was well-suited to the nuclear business in Washington. From the 1950s, the nuclear world was populated with giants. John stood tall even among that august company.

He joined the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in 1958 as an assistant staff director, and became its executive director in 1968. It was the only joint committee of Congress that has ever had the power to introduce legislation — and as such, it was something of a law unto itself. It had very private offices in the Capitol, accessed by a discreet elevator that was almost under the dome.

All the committee members were there because of their devotion to nuclear energy. They sought their assignments because they believed in nuclear energy for defense, electricity generation and medicine. Democrat and Republican were as one where nuclear was concerned. The chairmanship switched between the House and Senate every two years, but the committee’s policy of collective aims never varied. Many of its members were national figures such as Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.), Sen. John Pastore (D-R.I.), Sen. Clinton Anderson (D-N.M.), and John Anderson (R-Ill.), who ran for president as an Independent.

Because of the secrecy which surrounded it and the depth of knowledge among its members, Congress was usually swayed by the committee. In short, it got what it wanted.

Making sure that happened was John Conway. As staff director, his influence in Congress and in its vassal agency, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), was considerable. He was at the right hand of members during an expansion of nuclear power and in dangerous days of the Cold War. He circled the globe as the quiet man who smoothed things out — some critical, as in Moscow with Sen. Jackson, or in Rome with Sen. Pastore.

When Pastore was chairman of the committee, he took John with him on a trip to Rome. Now Pastore was a short man, and John was a tall, raw-boned one. They traveled together at a time when Europe was littered with what were called “counterpart funds.” This was local currency that had accumulated in U.S. embassies in payments, but could not be repatriated and converted into dollars.

At the U.S. Embassy in Rome, John was given a big roll of lira — a common practice at that time when congressmen visited European countries. With the roll in his jacket pocket, John accompanied Pastore for an audience with the Pope. Pastore was a devout Catholic, and John told me he thought this was the highest point of the senator’s life.

The audience began in curtained room in the Vatican, and involved Pastore, John, the Pope and his aide. Before they left the room, the Pope handed a glass-and-metal crucifix to Pastore, who clutched it to his chest, profoundly moved.

Then the Pope indicated that he and Pastore should go to another room where, presumably, the senator received a papal blessing. John and Pope’s aide stood looking at each other in the curtained room. He was so grateful for his boss’s audience with the Pope and the gift of the crucifix that he felt some reciprocation was needed. Having brought no presents, John handed the Pope’s aide the roll of lira.

Then the aide, who thought this generosity required major reciprocity, threw back the room’s curtain to reveal a great tub of identical crucifixes. He grabbed a bunch and handed them to John. Big problem. If Pastore had found out that they were given to all, he would be devastated. And if John declined the offer, there might be an international incident. So he stuffed them into his shirt and crossed his arms over his chest to keep them from clinking.

Soon, John was reunited with Pastore. The two left the Vatican — with John suffering painful pricking from his burden.

When they were back on a Roman street and Pastore was distracted, John unloaded his burden into a trash can. “Ask John. He will know what to do,” they used to say all over Washington. And he always did.

A truly great man has passed, paid up in full in the human club.

Llewellyn King, executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS,” was the founder and publisher of “The Energy Daily” for 33 years.

A Tale of Two Technologies

by Leave a Comment

It was the best of outcomes, it was the worst of outcomes.

The nation is awash in natural gas and oil. This did not just happen: It is the result of a long and fruitful collaboration between the government and private industry to develop advanced hydraulic fracturing. But one corporation and one man stand out: Mitchell Energy and its late visionary founder, George Phydias Mitchell.

Whenever I point this out I get a flood of mail, often abusive, claiming that modern fracking was a natural development of the traditional stimulation techniques used in the oil patch for many decades.

I love the story of fracking because it proves a lot of truths about how things get done.

First, the private sector needed to realize there were better ways of doing things, and that scientific resources in seismic and mapping would be essential. They also needed a better drill bit.

Enter Sandia National Laboratory. Government support for advanced drilling and extraction began in 1976 and continued through the 1980s and 1990s. Commercial exploitation began in the 1990s and exploded a decade later.

Previous government ideas about fracking were a little crazy and featured huge underground explosions using nuclear devices. Yes, just a little bomb was what was proposed. There were at least two government programs aimed at nuclear stimulation of natural gas in the 1950s and 1960s: One was called Wagon Wheel and the other, Gasbuggy.

Back in those days, nuclear was popular and people wanted it to have civilian uses of all kinds, possibly as an expiation for the bomb. Anyway nuclear gas stimulation ran into an immutable problem: the gas thus produced was radioactive. Not the kind of blue flame you want on your stovetop.

The nuclear enthusiasts, led by the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission withdrew. Still, many were convinced that there would be a fix if the programs would just be allowed to continue. These programs, well, bombed. There were contractors, but no private partners.

Another tale of the government going it alone in energy had a dismal end. It was a program at Los Alamos National Laboratory to produce geothermal steam in a new way. The idea was scientifically sound. Los Alamos sits on an extinct volcano and deep in the earth there are what are known, rather unscientifically, as “hot rocks.” The plan was to drill into these heated formations, pour in some water and, wham, there would be steam aplenty to drive turbines on the surface.

This program was the brainchild of Los Alamos, and I crawled over the site in the early days. Enthusiasm was abundant. It seemed to be an elegant addition to the geothermal resource base. However, there was too much government, in the form of the national lab, and not enough input from commercial geothermal operators.

After 17 years, the government funding was threatened, and I was invited to what turned out to be the burial for the project.

Finally, the government people met their commercial opposites and it didn’t go well. The scientists knew, down to the smallest microbe, life down the well. They had oodles of data but it was the wrong data. In commercial geothermal, the cardinal question is the projected life of the reservoir. Sadly, Los Alamos had not kept records from which that could be calculated. The scientists had not thought of that necessity.

Then there were questions about what to do with the brine that would be a pollution problem when discharged from the turbine on the surface of the fragile high desert. There will be no brine problem, said Los Alamos. “We’ll not bring the waste water to the surface. We’ll use a heat exchanger ,and the brine will dissipate down the well.” The commercial operators said, “That won’t work. Your temperatures are not hot enough to use a heat exchanger. You’ll have to bring the steam to the surface and deal with it there after it comes out of the turbine. We’ve tried heat exchangers down geothermal wells and the heat degradation is too great. No deal.”

This is tale a tale of huge success and dismal failure, and it has a moral: Public-private partnerships can work. The government, on its own, gets off track and screws up with our money. But private industry needs the government to shoulder the risk and provide its huge resources of capital and science to further the public interest.  — ​This column was previously published in Public Utilities Fortnightly.