He ranked the engineer as first among equals, a sort of super-citizen who could master virtually every activity essential to the smooth functioning of a modern nation.  What distinguished the engineer from other experts was his breadth. Bush saw the engineer as a pragmatic polymath; the engineer, he once wrote, “was not primarily a physicist, or a businessman, or an inventor but [someone] who would acquire some of the skills and knowledge of each of these and be capable of successfully developing and applying new devices on the grand scale.”

—     Endless Frontier by G. Pascal Zachary