Opinion | NASA Refused to Cancel James Webb. Good.

Frank Kameny was a 32-year-old astronomer with a Ph.D. from Harvard when, in December 1957, the Army Map Service fired him due to his sexual orientation. It was only two months after the Soviet Union had launched its Sputnik satellite, inaugurating the “space race,” but the Department of Defense’s cartographic agency was simultaneously engaged in another Cold War-era struggle that apparently took precedence: the purge of homosexuals from every nook and cranny of the federal government.

Beginning in 1947 with the firing of gay employees from the State Department and widening in 1953 with an Executive Order signed by President Dwight Eisenhower, the “Lavender Scare” resulted in some 5,000 to 10,000 gay employees losing their jobs due to the belief that they constituted “security risks” liable to blackmail. So thoroughgoing was the government’s campaign to eradicate “sexual deviants” that rooting out and firing a gay, Harvard-trained scientist outweighed its interstellar competition with the country’s main geostrategic rival.

Kameny became the first gay government employee to challenge his firing in the courts, and while his effort at reinstatement was unsuccessful, he played a crucial role in overturning the government’s anti-gay discrimination. In 1975, largely due to Kameny’s efforts, the Civil Service Commission removed homosexuality as a prohibition to federal employment, and 20 years later, President Bill Clinton lifted the ban on gay people receiving security clearances.

Kameny’s story is worth revisiting in light of a recent controversy concerning the legacy of the Lavender Scare within the space program. Late last year, NASA announced that it would not reverse its decision to name its deep-space telescope after James Webb, the administrator who led the agency throughout the 1960s. The announcement came after years of lobbying by a group of young scientists who claimed that Webb, first as a high-ranking State Department official during the Truman administration and then as NASA chief, had been complicit in the firing of gay employees while serving at both agencies. A petition demanding NASA rename the telescope earned nearly 2,000 signatures, and the Royal Astronomical Society in Britain insisted that astronomers submitting papers to its journals use the acronym “JWST” when describing the telescope, Webb’s disrepute reducing him to the level of the fictional Lord Voldemort, “He Who Must Not Be Named.”

Webb’s contributions to the cause of space exploration were vast. Taking the reins of NASA at the outset of the John F. Kennedy administration, he spearheaded the Apollo program that fulfilled the president’s mission of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And while he stands accused of purging gay people from NASA, Webb put the agency at the forefront of government efforts on behalf of another marginalized minority. Under Webb’s direction, NASA was the leading federal agency to promote racial integration, aggressively recruiting and promoting Black scientists. In 1964, when Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace attempted to block the hiring of African-Americans at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Webb threatened to remove personnel from the facility. That same year, he declined to speak at the Jackson, Mississippi Chamber of Commerce after two Black activists were denied entry to the event.

In March 2021, NASA assigned its chief historian to investigate the claim that Webb was responsible for the firing of gay employees. In an 89-page report released late last year, for which he surveyed some 50,000 documents spanning a 20-year period, the historian found no evidence to substantiate this allegation. On the contrary, at least during his tenure at State, Webb could actually be credited with reducing the damage wreaked by the Lavender Scare. The crusade to cleanse the federal government of “sexual deviants” was led by Senator Joe McCarthy, who blamed “communists and queers” at the State Department for a series of early Cold War setbacks. According to the report, as under secretary of state, Webb’s “main involvement” in this episode “was in attempting to limit Congressional access to the personnel records of the Department of State” by claiming executive branch privilege over personnel matters. As for his time at NASA, though Webb presided over the agency when a budget analyst fired on account of his homosexuality, Clifford Norton, sued the Civil Service Commission, according to the NASA historian, “No evidence has been located showing Webb knew of Norton’s firing at the time.” Citing this study, the Royal Astronomical Society announced last month that it would no longer require authors to use the abbreviation “JWST.”

The NASA investigation absolving Webb is a welcome contribution to the historical record. But it also obscures several important points about the severity of the Lavender Scare. For even if Webb cannot be tied to the dismissal of an individual gay employee, he occupied positions of authority in a government that was firing gay people left and right. While Webb may not have been aware of Norton’s situation, there were surely many more gay NASA employees who were terminated yet whose cases received less attention because, unlike Norton, they did not want to assume the risk to their reputations that going public with a lawsuit would entail. “It is highly likely that [Webb] knew exactly what was happening with security at his own agency during the height of the Cold War,” four leaders of the campaign to wipe Webb’s name from the telescope wrote last year. “We are deeply concerned by the implication that managers are not responsible for homophobia.”

And yet, no matter how well-intentioned, to single out a bureaucrat like James Webb for the Lavender Scare would accomplish the opposite of what it intends by minimizing just how vast and ruthless was our country’s policy of anti-gay discrimination — a policy so vast and ruthless that it mandated the outlay of massive amounts of money and manpower in a whole-of-government effort aimed at firing patriotic and highly-educated employees just because of whom they loved. If Webb’s level of involvement in this decades-long purge is to be the threshold by which we cancel an historical figure, then we are going to have to rename everything named after pretty much anyone who served a role in the federal government from 1947 (when the State Department began firing gay employees) until at least 1975 (when the Civil Service Commission lifted its ban on gays), or even 1995 (when Clinton removed homosexuality as a cause for denying a security clearance). Every president, cabinet officer, deputy assistant secretary of housing — all were in some sense complicit in the structural oppression of gay people that existed during the second half of the 20^th century.

Ultimately, the primary argument against renaming the James Webb Space Telescope is the same argument against renaming buildings and other landmarks honoring historical figures — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln — who espoused views that we rightly consider abhorrent by today’s standards, which is that these men also accomplished great things deserving of our recognition and praise. To argue otherwise, to contend that there is nothing worth venerating about morally complex individuals from our past, is to fall victim to presentism, the narcissistic penchant for imagining oneself morally superior to those who came before.

Those defending Webb have faced blowback themselves. In January 2021, Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, the president of the National Society of Black Physicists, published the results of his own investigation exonerating Webb from the charge of homophobic bigotry. Later that year, after Oluseyi was hired by George Mason University, a leader of the anti-Webb campaign tweeted that he had championed a “homophobe.”

According to the New York Times, that July, a professor at another university told an astronomy professor at George Mason that Oluseyi had sexually harassed a woman and mishandled a government grant. (Officials at Oluseyi’s former employer, the Florida Institute of Technology, launched an investigation and found nothing to substantiate the charges.) Last year, while Times reporter Michael Powell was working on an article about the Webb controversy, he received accusations from an anonymous person about Oluseyi. “Several of these claims were demonstrably false, and others could not be substantiated,” Powell wrote.

The debate over whether NASA should honor the legacy of James Webb offers us an opportunity to consider how best to commemorate a dark episode in our nation’s past. While our country has made valiant efforts at atoning for its abhorrent treatment of other minorities, we have barely begun the process of recognizing the oppression its gay and lesbian citizens endured. I cannot think of a better way for NASA to do this than to name its next space telescope after Frank Kameny.