  The realization in the early 1980s that weak scale supersymmetry stabilizes
the Higgs sector of the spectacularly successful Standard Model led several
authors to explore whether low energy supersymmetry could play a role in
particle physics. Among these were Richard Arnowitt, Ali Chamseddine and Pran
Nath who constructed a viable {\em locally} supersymmetric Grand Unified Theory
(GUT), laying down the foundation for supergravity GUT models of particle
physics. Supergravity models continue to be explored as one of the most
promising extensions of the Standard Model. After a quick overview of some of
the issues and aspirations of early researchers working to bring supersymmetry
into the mainstream of particle physics, we re-examine early arguments that
seemed to imply that superpartners would be revealed in experiments at LEP2 or
at the Tevatron. Our purpose is to assess whether the absence of any
superpartners in searches at LHC8 presents a crisis for supersymmetry. Toward
this end, we re-evaluate fine-tuning arguments that lead to upper bounds on
(some) superpartner masses. We conclude that phenomenologically viable
superpartner spectra that could arise within a high scale model tuned no worse
than a few percent are perfectly possible. While no viable underlying model of
particle physics that leads to such spectra has yet emerged, we show that the
(supergravity-based) Radiatively-driven Natural Supersymmetry (RNS) framework
serves as a surrogate for a phenomenological analysis of an underlying theory
with modest fine-tuning. We outline the phenomenological implications of this
framework, with emphasis on those LHC and electron-positron collider signatures
that might point to the underlying natural origin of gauge and Higgs boson
masses. We conclude that the supergravity GUT paradigm laid down in 1982 by
Arnowitt, Chamseddine and Nath, and others, remains a vibrant possibility.
