This is an edited transcript of an oral history interview of Malcolm R. Currie conducted by Peter Westwick. Topics mentioned in the interview include: electronics in aerospace; support of research by industry; relation among research, design, and manufacturing; electronics manufacturing in Southern California; defense business vs commercial business, e.g. communications satellites; role of international markets; tech transfer concerns; relation between engineering and finance; role of local universities; secrecy and classification; GM and Hughes; auto industry and aerospace. Malcolm Currie was a Hughes research scientist, DDR&E in the early 1970s, and chair and CEO of Hughes in the late 1980s. Currie was born in 1927 and raised in the Bay Area. He enlisted in the Navy during World War II and entered flight training. After the war he attended UC Berkeley on the GI Bill and received an undergraduate degree in physics and a PhD in engineering physics. He accepted a job at Hughes in 1955 as a research scientist, working on traveling wave tubes, and in the 1960s rose to director of Hughes Research Labs, whose programs included lasers, millimeter waves, and ion engines for satellites. He left Hughes for Beckman Instruments from 1969 to 1972, and then from 1973 to 1977 he was Undersecretary (Director) of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) in the U.S. Department of Defense, where he oversaw early work on the Global Positioning System, Stealth aircraft, and cruise missiles. He returned to Hughes in 1977 and in 1988 was named Chairman and CEO, soon after General Motors purchased the company. He retired in 1993. [Object file name], Aerospace Oral History Project, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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