Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 13, 1992 TAG: 9202130198
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
BUSH FIRES NASA ADMINISTRATOR
President Bush on Wednesday fired NASA Administrator Richard Truly, apparently at the recommendation of Vice President Quayle and others in the White House."I'm floored. I can't explain it," Truly, a former astronaut, said Wednesday. "It was not my idea."
Truly, 54, like Bush a former Navy man, played a major role in the agency's return to space flight after the 1986 Challenger accident when he was named head of the shuttle program.
Since taking over as administrator in 1989, he has seen the agency through some of its roughest battles. He has had a running feud with the National Space Council, which Quayle chairs.
Insiders said that the decision to ask for Truly's resignation was made when Bush and chief of staff Truly Samuel Skinner joined Quayle in a realization that, as one administration official put it, "Truly wasn't doing the president any good," either politically or in terms of furthering Bush's space policy goals.
A major point of difference was Truly's persistent support of the space shuttle, said John Logsdon, a space policy analyst at George Washington University who advises the space council.
The president's long-term plan calls for a new system of more-efficient launch vehicles.
An administration official rejected the notion that firing Truly served some political need.
Industry insiders said the impression the space council has given of what it wants in a NASA chief is, as one put it, "Someone who will call reveille every morning and and ask those [NASA employees], `What did you do for George Bush today?' "
"It was felt," one official said Wednesday, "that he was a captive of his bureaucracy and incapable of making the changes, the reforms, the administration wanted."