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In these diary entries written between January and December 1943, Hollywood screenwriter Charles Brackett lists his activities: conferring with Dodie Smith regarding her revisions in the script for The Uninvited; waiting to see Peter Van Eyck act; having a talk with Richard Haydn, whose proposed marriage was to be postponed till after World War II; reading The Uninvited to Lew Allen; telling Lew Allen the possibility of taking him on as director for The Uninvited; collaborating with Billy Wilder in writing an introductory title to Five Graves to Cairo; talking to Wilder about the possibility of getting Greta Garbo for Olympia; having a consultation with Wilder and Raymond Chandler; lunching with Frank Partos; and calling on Buddy De Sylva in recognition of Brackett's contract with Paramount.

This chapter focuses on Murray's successor as director of JPL, Lew Allen. A native small-town Texan, Allen had graduated from West Point in 1946 and served in the Strategic Air Command. He then obtained a PhD in nuclear physics at Illinois in 1954, under a new air force program aiming to produce technically trained officers. Allen's career rewarded the investment. After stints working on nuclear weapons design and effects for the air force, Allen joined the defense research and engineering office of the DOD in 1961, where he focused on space technology. His subsequent exposure to the reconnaissance satellite program led to his appointment in 1973 as deputy director of the CIA and soon thereafter as head of the National Security Agency. After four years Allen returned to the air force as a four-star general, and in 1978 he was named air force chief of staff, a position he held until his retirement in June 1982.

This chapter discusses the reasons for Bruce Murray's resignation as director of JPL; he perceived a turning point in the history of the lab, from the Mariner-Voyager era of planetary exploration to the era of a combination NASA and military lab no longer sustained by planetary projects. This transition would entail changes in JPL's internal management, starting at the top, and also in the lab's relations with Caltech and NASA and with an increasingly mature aerospace industry. Murray, however, underestimated the prospects for the planetary program, and the subsequent revival of the primary mission on top of new programs made growth a key issue in the 1980s. When Lew Allen arrived at JPL in October 1982 he did not perceive any great mandate for change and undertook no sweeping reorganization. That itself represented a change from Murray's tenure, as did Allen's pragmatic management style, which departed from Murray's more visionary initiatives.

This chapter focuses on the period at the end of 1990, when Lew Allen stepped down as director of JPL. To replace him, Caltech turned to Ed Stone, who like Pickering and Murray was a Caltech professor already familiar with the lab. While project scientist on Voyager, Stone had remained on the campus faculty, honing his administrative skills as chair of the physics, math, and astronomy division and then as head of the California Association for Research in Astronomy, the partnership, including Caltech, to build the ground-based Keck telescopes. Stone continued his research in space science, including his service on Voyager, through his tenure as JPL director. A wiry, bespectacled man with considerable enthusiasm for space science, Stone had seemingly boundless energy, but his tenure as JPL director would test his ability to juggle a number of different tasks.