Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what

In the midst of that environment, DuBridge still tried to play the good soldier for his boss. Along with ABM and Vietnam, Nixon’s other major scientific fight was over the SST, or supersonic transport — an extremely expensive, extremely fast airplane, really. In April of 1970, a member of the House of Representatives accused the White House of suppressing a report on the SST; DuBridge acted as the deflector shield.,Nixon replaced his high priest of science with a virtual unknown, Edward E. David, Jr., described as being “well outside the main channel of the American scientific establishment.” Perhaps the idea was to move that dividing line between presidential policy cheerleader and scientific advocate toward the former and away from the latter — if the scientific community didn’t know the new advisor, they couldn’t expect much of him.,By midnight the party will be completely out of control. By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames. But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family’s generations will all come bubbling to the surface.,Malibu: August 1983. It’s the day of Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over — especially as the offspring of the legendary singer Mick Riva.,Once more, DuBridge showed what it meant to be a science advisor to the White House: sometimes, one must defend the indefensible. Apparently though, the SST incident represented one of the final straws he could tolerate: on August 19 of the same year, 1970, he submitted his resignation.,But he too couldn’t penetrate Nixon’s wall, a situation that undoubtedly only got worse as the Watergate scandal began to blow up. In early January, 1973, David as well submitted his resignation. The Times reported, damningly, that while serving as advisor “he had never managed to play an important role in shaping Federal research and development policy.”,Neal Lane told me it is an unfair metric to measure a science advisor by the federal research budget alone, but for better or for worse that tends to happen. In David’s case, it was for worse: by 1973 the federal support for science had dropped to its lowest point in a decade, and it would drop again the next year. Soon after David’s resignation, Nixon simply abolished the advisor post, dispensing even with the façade of support for a scientifically defensible White House policy apparatus. A number of other scientifically relevant officials — the assistant secretary for health, the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, even the director of the National Institutes of Health — all either resigned or were ousted around the same time.,“So, you have a situation — “ He stopped, pondering. “There have been a lot of science advisors who have been more influential than they got credit for.” He told me that early in his career, he had been mentored by some of the first presidential advisors, including George Kistiakowsky (Eisenhower) and Jerry Wiesner (Kennedy). “They all told me, you get more done if you don’t care who gets the credit.”,Journalist Daniel Greenberg wrote a long essay at this time regarding Nixon’s pugnacious relationship to the scientific world. “Mr. Nixon, who is demonstrably not above grudgery, does not like the academic world, including its substantial scientific component,” he wrote, “probably for the well established reason that the academic world long ago decided that it did not like Mr. Nixon.” It is fair to say that the disconnect between science and government has never been so clearly on display.,Behind every woman who stays with a man who can’t commit is that man promising her they have a supernatural connection. Behind every man who stays with a woman who doesn’t love him is a woman who does care, sometimes, just enough. Behind every person who stays despite the verbal abuse is a partner promising that they’ll do better, and proving it just long enough to be convincing. Behind every lukewarm couple is a flame that flickers just bright enough, just often enough, to keep it sustained.,In one sense, it worked, as David lasted longer in the role than his predecessor did. He spent his 28 months at the White House again pushing for increases to federal funding for science, helping negotiate international collaborations, and continuing some of DuBridge’s policy fights that smoldered on past his exit. (That suppressed SST report was finally released more than a year after the Congressional complaints, and it did indeed recommend against further government support for the plane.),The only person not looking forward to the party of the year is Nina herself, who never wanted to be the centre of attention, and who has also just been very publicly abandoned by her pro tennis player husband. Oh, and maybe Hud — because it is long past time for him to confess something to the brother from whom he’s been inseparable since birth.,The report supposedly showed the super-fast plane to be “economically wasteful and environmentally harmful,” which theoretically might have helped opponents scuttle further funding to the project. DuBridge, in a letter, wrote that the report was not finalized and “was used as part of a direct input to the President.” That president had asked Congress for $290 million that year for continued development of the SST.,When I asked John Holdren what it really means to “have the president’s ear” in this role, he seemed a bit agitated by the question. I had suggested that certain advisors seemed to be lauded for that influence while others disappeared into the background.,The president, of course, didn’t take kindly to a scientific community so diametrically opposed to his actions. For DuBridge, that community’s primary representative in Nixon’s orbit, that meant diminishing access. A few years later, he would say that White House staff “gradually built an impenetrable wall around the President.” In an essay written for a book compiled much later by William Golden, one contributor put it another way: