TO DATE, the origins of Science-The Endless Frontier, the celebrated report issued in 1945 by Vannevar Bush and subsequently so influential in the shaping of the National Science Foundation, remain obscure behind the veil of memory. Bush, the director of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), later attributed the conception of the report to a casual conversation with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who asked for it when Bush remarked that science might well languish in the postwar United States. More recently, Oscar M. Ruebhausen, the general counsel of OSRD from 1944 to 1946, has attributed the initiative for the report to Oscar S. Cox, an influential government lawyer, who wanted the administrative techniques pioneered by OSRD for defense research adapted to a peacetime program.' Though Ruebhausen's quarter-century-old recollections are closer to the truth, neither account squares with the contemporary documentary record. More important, both ignore that the report was written in a highly political context which was generated by a growing debate over a major policy issue-the issue of how the federal government should advance science for the general welfare in peacetime.2 The debate began early in the war and originated in a cluster of concerns among Americans of a liberal political persuasion about the extent to which defense research was dominated by big business in alliance with the leading universities. Vociferous complaints had cropped up charging unfair evaluation