At times the younger man would remark to Pierce, empathetically, that it must have bothered him that he didn’t get to run Echo’s day-to-day operations. “I don’t know what I said, but it certainly wasn’t the full truth,” Pierce later wrote. “The Echo ground terminal would never have got built or worked had I been the project engineer. Through a mixture of ineptitude or boredom, I would have flubbed.”
