“My term as science advisor was not a very productive one,” DuBridge wrote. “Although Mr. Nixon himself was always cordi

The idea for a scientific advisor to the president arose in the immediate aftermath of World War II. As the radiant glow of the Manhattan Project faded and the specter of a Cold War began to rise, the idea of a permanent centralized science apparatus began to take shape. Vannevar Bush, the general visionary who had helped launch the Manhattan Project and founded Raytheon, among a laundry list of other achievements, answered a 1944 call from President Roosevelt on the matter with a hugely influential report: “Science: The Endless Frontier.”

Though it would take a few more months for this to made clear, DuBridge’s resignation and David’s soon after represented the low point in the history of presidential science advising. Instead of replacing David, President Nixon simply abolished the position and disbanded the President’s Science Advisory Committee, effectively banishing scientific expertise from the executive branch of government.

In it, Bush argued for increased funding for basic research, an increase in military-based research even during peacetime, and made recommendations that would eventually lead to the founding of the National Science Foundation in 1950. He also suggested that “a permanent Science Advisory Board should be created to advise the executive and legislative branches of Government on these matters.”

The OSTP’s actual offices sit next door to the White House, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. If you look closely, you can see that the tiled floors actually contain outlines of fossilized creatures, scattered haphazardly around the hallways. Holdren met me in his outer office, eager to completely avoid discussing the President-Elect and just as eager to discuss some of the history of the science advisor position, a favorite topic of his. We sat at a conference table in a larger inner office, a room that looked about as one would imagine a lifelong nerd’s to look: NASA models sat atop a bookshelf, and piles of folders and papers lined most surfaces. It was December, and the afternoon light through the windows faded quickly after we sat down.

In Golden’s memorandum explaining the recommendation, he noted that “more than ten” independent government departments and agencies were conducting scientific research, at a cost of $1.3 billion (nearly $13 billion in 2016 dollars). Those agencies all reported separately to the president, so Golden wrote that “[t]here is need for centralization of knowledge of all these scientific programs in one independent and technically competent individual to whom the President can turn for advice.”

Among Golden’s confidantes while thinking through and preparing that original recommendation was Vannevar Bush himself. Bush complained to Golden that, contrary to his role under Roosevelt, he found himself on the outside looking in when it came to the government’s treatment of science. He apparently found Truman’s lack of interest in his own advice more than a bit frustrating, and told Golden that though a science advisor might sound good, the role’s efficacy would depend entirely on the specific president he was advising — in Truman’s case, his stubbornness would mean he simply wouldn’t make use of the advisor’s expertise.

In those early days, Golden’s idea was to have the advisor be a part-time position, and that whomever inhabited the role “be actively engaged in some other fulltime pursuit so that he would naturally be currently posted on goings on in the scientific world and in fact, be a part of them.” President Truman did appoint an advisor in 1951, Bell Labs president Oliver Buckley, and that part-time status held until 1957, when the Soviet launch of Sputnik sent American science into overdrive and sent the advisor into a full-time White House office.

If you created a mold that would somehow generate a human with all the best possible qualities of a presidential science advisor, John Holdren is what would pop out. Trained as an aerospace engineer and theoretical physicist at MIT and Stanford, Holdren taught for decades at Berkeley and Harvard, while also serving on a huge array of public policy-related committees and commissions. He served as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology under President Clinton, and even gave the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on behalf of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (which won for work on nuclear disarmament). In 2009, President Obama tapped him to be his science advisor, and to run the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the White House.

Truman, of course, did not have long left in office to make that prophecy come true. But over the next seven decades, the prediction that a science advisor to the president could work only so well as the president allowed — and only as the big issues facing the country would dictate — would prove far more accurate than the position’s progenitors could have imagined.

The idea of a board or of a single advisor was thrown around for a few years, until William Golden, an investment banker who had served in Washington with the Navy during the war, was tapped as a consultant to President Truman in late 1950. Golden had helped organize the Atomic Energy Commission, and was familiar with many civilian and military scientists around the country. He spent months talking to those prominent experts before sending Truman a recommendation in December 1950 to appoint “an outstanding scientific leader as Scientific Adviser to the President.”

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Nixon, of course, was our foremost paranoiac president, and in general it may be wise to avoid pinning historical trends to his turbulent tenure. But the expulsion of his science advisors paints a useful picture of the entire run of that office, and that office, for better or worse, has often acted as a reflection of science’s treatment within government as a whole.

It was at the tail end of his time in that office, as the most anti-science president in U.S. history prepared to take over from arguably the most pro-science president, that I visited Holdren to talk about his tenure and the history of his position.

Brief but cloudy indeed. In August 1970, DuBridge had resigned his post as science advisor to the president, citing his age (68, at the time) as the driving factor. But by all accounts, that wasn’t the only reason. “It has been apparent for some time that his White House position was becoming an unhappy one,” claimed a New York Times editorial, adding that numerous scientists had made DuBridge a “scapegoat” for cutbacks in government funding of research. “Scientists tend to regard the President’s science adviser as their friend and advocate in a high place, and the impression has been widespread that Dr. DuBridge has had relatively little influence on or even contact with the President.”

DuBridge may have been “unhappy” in his toothless role, but perhaps he took some solace less than three years later, when Nixon’s second science advisor, Edward E. David, Jr., also resigned the post. This time, a report in the Times quoted a White House source saying “Ed feels less than useful.” And, much like when DuBridge left the White House: “Dr. David’s resignation buttresses the uneasy feelings of scientists here that their opinions and needs are not being given a fair hearing by the administration.”