Authors: David Beers
All of us are variations on who you might be if you had “flourished” as a boy or girl in blue sky suburbia but had been given no encouragement to replicate life within the tribe. None of us was ever given cause to imagine a desk for ourself within the windowless walls of Lockheed. None of us today presents the specter of a boomerang child. Gary Kolegraff is the organization son my father and mother never had.
T
he phone rang and it was Gary, calling my home in Vancouver two months after I’d seen him at his place. He had been feeling a little blue, he said in that eerily chipper voice of his. He wanted to tell me about what had happened at the dinner table of his parents.
“I pretty much broke down. There was like an emotional outpouring of mine. The father of a friend of mine died last Friday and I went to the funeral. I was there and it suddenly hit me. That could be one of my folks. And being laid off, what would I do without them? I’ve been eating there a lot, pretty much every night now, just me and my mom and dad. And I pretty much broke down and told them how it felt.”
Gary had been into the Career Transition Center three times a week since we had talked. The staff continued to offer him coffee and tips on “self-marketing.” He was applying for any job that paid ten dollars an hour. He was considering redefining himself as an airline clerk because they used computers. He had quit a data entry class after three days because he was typing when he should be looking for work. Among the ranks of the unlucky at the Career Transition Center, he was noticing a thinning out, a
giving up. He was hearing that Lockheed had just laid off another 2,000 workers in Georgia and that morale among those left at the Sunnyvale complex was very bad.
“A lot of backstabbing is going on. A lot of people are working eighty, ninety hours a week from fear they’re going to be the next one.”
He was spending his time reading books about the stock market in the library of Santa Clara University, though he was not a student there; waiting by the phone at Lockheed, though he was not an employee there; sitting alone in the quiet of his rented tract home with an “incredible feeling of disconnect. You’re floating around in space. You’ve got an oxygen tank, but nothing else.” This is what he had been trying to explain to his parents the night he broke down.
“It was almost like a movie. I realized that I had never told my dad that I loved him. I had never hugged my dad. I asked him if I could give him a hug. And I did. It was real moving.”
After he left, his father broke down, too. His mother told him so later. The next time he was at the dinner table of his parents, they told him not to worry.
“They said, ‘We’re not going to tell anyone.’ I was afraid my brothers would know about it and think I was crazy. But now I think I shouldn’t be ashamed. It’s amazing, but I felt better afterward.”
He told me this as if emotional catharsis was a phenomenon previously unknown to him.
M
y father’s hugs are such crushings of pleasure that he seems to want to close every seam of light between, to merge two into a single lump of whiskery warmth. When a hug is finished and his face comes back into view, his beaming affection is something his sons and daughters have come to laughingly chide him for, his “dopey grin,
big!
” He has been a hands-on father from the time we were babies, a father who liked a child on his shoulders or on
his lap or carried under his arm like a football on the way to the bathtub. All our lives, he was a father more than generous with hugs, except, of course, when he was lost to those bouts of petulance, when those down-pulled eyebrows and tightened lips formed that map of danger we all recognized.
There was the time during my adolescence when those bad moods threatened to push me beyond reach of my father’s hugs. His tantrums had become too common and heedless of effect upon me, upon my brother and sisters and mother. Plainly we did not deserve the vehemence of his outbursts, so randomly did they come, so puny were the provocations. Too matter-of-factly did he expect our indulgence afterward, as if a father’s authority naturally extended to bullying. Shouting back seemed only to redouble his attack. I was tempted to leave the bully to himself, for I had been told that bullies were best ignored.
What happened instead, however, is that all of us, my brother and sisters and mother and I, entered into a conspiracy of joshing humor against my father, a conspiracy he completed by gradually joining in. We learned to mimic his tics of irritability, the way he poked his glasses up the bridge of his nose, the way he rammed the heel of his hand against his forehead just before exploding. We repeated back to him his own voice muttering, “What now, damnit? I’ve got a blue million things on my mind!” We invented new names for him, “Daddyman” (a lampoon of Waltons-speak on TV) and “Tuttle” (after the super repair man in the movie
Brazil
). The names, like the jokes, were methods of diminution, a thousand tickles eroding his dour self-seriousness. As we wandered into this strategy, I believe we were encouraged along, at some level, by my father. The best in him always had been able to recognize the absurdity in a situation, even a bad situation, and play it for a laugh. That part of him seemed to welcome our teasing now, as if he were eager to turn his wit on himself in some show of surrender.
Over time the petulance, while never wholly gone from him, faded in frequency and intensity. Over time, as he told me his cautionary stories about life in the organization, he did so less
with bitterness and more with self-deprecating humor. In these tales, never had he cast himself as the hero, but more and more I was invited to join my father in having a good laugh at the antihero’s expense. Those stories, as I have said, had the effect of binding us closer with each telling. In the end, it proved no tragedy of alienation that my father would not, could not, share with me the details of his craft, the equations and accomplishments of his secret engineering at Lockheed. It was enough that he shared with me his regret about having chosen the work in the first place.
We are back on earth, my father and I. He has made a perfect landing at the Watsonville airstrip and we are sitting in the Mexican restaurant by the tarmac, tucking into two enormous burrito platters. As we do, my father tells a story, new to me, set in the last few years of his career.
He tells me that one day he received an order to take a polygraph test. This was routine for “people associated with certain kinds of projects,” my father explains in his carefully vague way.
“You’d report to some outlying, nondescript building. The machine would be on a table with a chair beside it, in a little room with blank walls, and you’d be introduced to the operator. He’d strap you in, run a strap around your chest to measure breathing, attach fingertip pads to detect perspiration, put a sensor over your heart. Then he’d ask questions. Not about your lifestyle, but about the caretaking of classified materials. Have you ever taken classified documents home from work? Have you always stored your classified documents appropriately? Have you ever divulged classified information to a nonauthorized person?
“I think that last was the one I triggered the little squiggles on.”
The polygraph test then became very much other than routine.
“I began to think of the conversations you and I had been having. I didn’t really have this glittering recollection of how detailed things had gotten. Even acknowledging a black program
existed was at one time not allowed. My mind wandered, and that’s the wrong way to take a polygraph. With a wandering mind.
“There was also the matter of some notes I had been keeping which could be interpreted as classified information. Whenever you transport classified information, you’re to double wrap it and carry it accompanied by another person cleared on your project. But on a few occasions I had carried those notes by myself, in a plain folder. I knew I’d been doing that. I acknowledged this. But this piqued the interest of the polygraph operator. ‘If he’s doing that, what else?’ His questions kept getting more probing.
“I was called back for a second polygraph and I didn’t do acceptably well on that one, apparently. Time goes by and I get a phone call from the local security office. ‘You’re to be in Washington Wednesday.’
Another
polygraph. So I got on an airplane and went out to Washington. In the morning of the interview day I was chatted up by a couple of men in the so-called Program Office. They said, ‘The issue is the transportation of classified information, so tell us about it.’ I told them what I had done, that it was a matter of convenience with zero risk. They said, ‘Everything’s fine here. Have a good lunch. Relax. And be at a certain building at one o’clock.’
“But how can you relax? So I walked into this building, an ordinary office building with six people in the waiting room all sitting there, nobody speaking. I was ushered into this little room where I was introduced to the man who was going to be my host for the day. He was weird. He had this Bob Dole quality about him. He was trying to be friendly, but it just wasn’t happening. You could tell that he felt he was in the presence of the enemy.
“He hooked me up and began to ask a lot of questions about the transportation of documents and the divulgence of classified information. It was then that I told of the chats you and I had had over the dining room table, that I
might
have said to you that I
might
have been part of a black program. This went on for a while. The needle would go scritch, scritch, scritch. He’d tear a sheet off the machine and say, ‘I’ll be right back.’ There I’d be,
strapped to this machine, staring at a blank wall. Except not all the walls were blank. One of them had a glass mirror and you knew someone was watching. It was like being in a monkey cage. I’d close my eyes, drum my fingers. Then he’d come back and ask another ten or fifteen questions.
“It began to get late. I had now spent three hours in this chair. I said, ‘Hey, look, I’ve got an airplane I need to catch.’ He said, ‘You’d better change your reservation.’ I went out to the receptionist, who was packing up for the day. I made a reservation for a late-night flight. The grilling went on. You begin to feel paranoid: ‘They’re going to find out things I didn’t even
know
when I walked in here.’ You’d spilled your guts to this guy, told him things you’d done, might have done, thought about doing, and he’s still pursuing this. I began to think this was a careerender. My security clearance would be revoked. I know of a man who blew his polygraph. He was frog marched out the door. I was thinking, ‘My future could depend on what I’ve already got on this chart paper.’
“I don’t remember whether or not he told me flat out that I did not look innocent. But finally the guy said, ‘We’re not getting anywhere here.’ And then he asks me, ‘How do you feel about all this?’
“I said, ‘Just on the basis of what you’ve asked and how long it’s gone on, I’m assuming the wiggles on the page don’t exonerate me. But I can assure you, sir, that I’m a good soldier and the information has not fallen into the wrong hands.’
“He said, ‘Ahhh, that’s good stuff.’ He shook my hand. ‘Well, good luck,’ he says, as if we were still good friends—just about as good as we were when I walked in.
“On my way home, driving to the airport, I resolved I was never going to take a polygraph again. It was so unpleasant and I was so poor at it, I knew that if I did nothing to violate security regulations, I’d still probably flunk the next one because I’d be so worried about flunking. I said to myself, ‘I don’t care if this is a condition of employment. I will refuse. I don’t deserve it. I haven’t earned it. They have no reason to suspect me.’ So here
was a case where the very mechanism used to identify the loyal employees was driving a dedicated and hidebound organization man like me right out of the organization. I was no longer a willing member of the group because of the way I was treated.
“What finally happened is a letter went into my security dossier, citing carelessness in handling classified material. It said, basically, ‘We admonish you, and don’t ever do it again.’ I did not lose any access I already had.
“And why should I? I was too wimpy and scared to be a real threat. Look at this CIA guy who singlehandedly dismantled the U.S. spy network in the Soviet Union. He passed every polygraph because he had the skills. The people they catch are the honest ones. I’m the guy whose palms sweat!”
“G
reat numbers of professionals from many walks of life, trained to cooperate unfailingly, must be recruited. Such training will require years before each can fit his special ability into the pattern of the whole.”
When Wernher von Braun projected this vision of how the new middle class would make its way in the world of work, when he spoke of this human system perfectly engineered so that his “flotilla” of spaceships would go to Mars while his ascendent tribe of technocrats cheered with pride on Earth, he did not explain how people could be made to cooperate unfailingly. He did not, for example, speak to the problem of the person who has special abilities to offer, yet because of gender or skin color or late middle age, is made to feel a poor fit. He did not say how such recruits might react to the news that they are no longer wanted within the pattern of the whole.
For much of the span of my father’s career, there has been at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company a group of employees united in the accusation that they have been cheated of Wernher von Braun’s promise. They have not found in Lockheed the meritocracy they sought, one ordered by objective measurements of
skill and dedication, this data tallied reliably in each member’s regular performance reviews. Instead, they see in their blue sky workplace a murk of prejudice and favoritism.
Members of the Lockheed Minority and Female Coalition, as they named themselves in 1970, are said to be “vocal” and “radical” in articles about them in the
San Jose Mercury News.
“I’ve covered a lot of labor disputes,” a veteran reporter told me, “and this is the most militant employee group I have ever met.”