A blunt New Yorker born in the Bronx, Frosch had taken the NASA job almost by accident: he and his family spent their summers in a house on Cape Cod next door to Frank Press, Carter’s science adviser, who one day casually suggested that Frosch might like to join the government as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. But when Frosch arrived in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1977 as part of the group of new appointees meeting at the White House, Press took him aside and explained that the NOAA job was no longer available; he’d had to give it to Richard Frank, a
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