JFK (31 page)

So Kennedy added Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, a wise old World War II OSS veteran, to the TFX team. He had not confided in Goldberg before the Bay of Pigs decision, a mistake he was not going to repeat. Goldberg had an idea. It was to use this $6.5 billion potential in every possible way, in selected “politically” marginal counties throughout the United States, to strengthen the Democratic party. Goldberg and McNamara began to work together. McNamara set up a suite of offices, one corridor ring in from his own in the Pentagon, with a staff that had nothing else to do than to plot the course of the TFX source selection program.

I had an office a few doors down the hall from this new suite, and I visited them frequently to join its chief, Ron Linton, and other Pentagon “whiz kids” for lunch. I noticed that the walls of this suite of offices were lined with maps of the United States showing all the states and counties. They were political maps. In short order, at Goldberg’s suggestion, one set of those maps was colored to show every county that Kennedy had carried in 1960 and every county that had gone to Nixon.

Then the staff of this office, working with Department of Labor statistics, made detailed studies of each of the major proposals for the TFX. A proposal is an enormous stack of paper. Quite frequently a single proposal for some military item would arrive at the Pentagon in a large delivery truck. This process of “mapping” the proposals included the prime contractors, that is, Boeing or General Dynamics/Grumman, and from them right on down to the smallest subcontractor. These contractors were plotted on county maps. Goldberg’s team marked the site of each facility, taking into account how many people it would employ, how much money would be spent there, how much new construction was involved, and every other political consideration.”
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In a short time it was possible to get a visual plot of the impact of the award of a Boeing contract on one set of maps and of the General Dynamics/Grumman contract on another. Through confidential handling of copies of these charts, senators, congressmen, and local politicians throughout the Democratic organization were able to capitalize on the outcome of these proposals. Within no time, word that these charts were being developed in McNamara’s office reached the contractors themselves.

I happened to visit the office one day when word had been received from one of the prime contractors that it planned to open a new facility in a remote county in Utah. That county had been a Republican county in 1960. Needless to say, the process of wooing future Republican votes in this manner was repeated all over the country. Six and a half billion dollars is a lot of money, and it goes a long, long way in a campaign.

While the studies of the political impact of the award of this huge contract were being made, McNamara was forced to draw out the routine source selection process. He had two of the nation’s industrial giants, with their vast array of subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, locked in the biggest battle in corporate history. He managed to string out four full evaluation studies, each one of which nitpicked every item in each proposal, before he sent the whole package to the Source Selection Board, the final, ultimate arbiter, made up of senior officials from both services.

Later, during the 1963 senatorial hearings on the award of this contract, Gen. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the air force, told a Senate Investigations Subcommittee chaired by Sen. John L. McClellan that some 275,000 man-hours of work had been poured into this selection process.

The selection could have been made during Eisenhower’s presidency. It certainly could have been made in 1961. Everything had been ready for a quick decision, in favor of Boeing, right after the Kennedy inauguration. But, with the addition of the navy money and the Goldberg-McNamara political selection concept, the decision was pushed back month after month in every county across the nation while the politicians wrung every ounce they could out of this process—and to hell with the aircraft companies and the services. The Kennedy team had, as always, its eye on the election of 1964.

Finally, on November 23, 1962—more than two years after the election—the decision of the Source Selection Board was made. Most of the senior officials at that meeting came away believing that the decision had been made in favor of Boeing. Eugene Zuchert, the secretary of the air force, confided to a few friends that evening that the decision had been made in favor of Boeing.

Behind the scenes, however, another decision had been made, and it overruled the entire military system. Any major change of the military procurement system, especially as it pertains to a $6.5 billion contract, is bound to have the impact of someone attempting to rewrite the Holy Bible. It cannot be done without an intense, prolonged, and very heated argument.

McNamara knew that he and Kennedy were playing with fire. On the Friday afternoon that he received the choice of the Source Selection Board in favor of Boeing, McNamara already knew the results of the final political survey of the two proposals, that is, the Goldberg comparison. It indicated clearly that the General Dynamics/Grumman proposal would get a greater return for the Democrats at the ballot boxes.

Moreover, he had an additional major problem to resolve on his own. He had to be sure that the choice he was going to make would indeed fly. McNamara basically did not know one aircraft from another. He had a man on his staff, Alfred W. Blackburn, who was an experienced test pilot; Blackburn had been hired in 1959 by the Defense Department’s Bureau of Research and Engineering specifically for the TFX project. Blackburn, however, favored the Boeing proposal, so McNamara could not discuss his personal problem with him.

To play this card, McNamara called an old friend and asked for the name of a man who could vouch for the design of the General Dynamics model. This friend suggested Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson, head of the famous “Skunk Works,” a shop where many of the finest aircraft built by Lockheed had been designed. Johnson had designed the CIA’s U-2 spy plane, among others. McNamara had the General Dynamics specifications delivered to Johnson and asked him to verify their suitability. Johnson studied the aircraft designs carefully.

The fate of the $6.5 billion TFX project had been placed in the hands of a man who had devoted a lifetime to building superior aircraft, and to building them in direct competition with both Boeing and General Dynamics. Even at this stage of the game, fate played its part.

Years before, Roger Lewis, chairman of the board and president of General Dynamics, had worked at Lockheed. He and Kelly Johnson had been good friends, and still were in 1962. Lewis was an old aircraft professional who had been around the business since its golden years in the 1930s. Kelly looked over the General Dynamics design very carefully—no doubt thinking how much this meant to his old associate.

Johnson called McNamara and told him that the plan from General Dynamics was acceptable, and he assured McNamara that the aircraft would fly. Later, Roger Lewis was to say in a rather low key manner, “The company expects to produce an exceptional aircraft and that its qualifications to do so are unparalleled.”

With the Goldberg review in hand, and supported by the call from Kelly Johnson confirming the airworthiness of the design, McNamara scheduled a meeting for November 24, 1962, to announce the decision. He ignored the vote of the Source Selection Board and all its senior military members and announced his choice of the General Dynamics design. With that he authorized the start of the engineering-design work, wind-tunnel testing, construction of a model of the plane, and all the other actions essential to the development of a total weapons system.

On April 8, 1963, during a period of intense controversy, McNamara authorized the issuance of a contract from the air force procurement offices at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which in turn authorized General Dynamics and Grumman to turn out twenty-two test models of the TFX.

Gen. Curtis LeMay later testified that no one from the original air force-navy evaluation teams on up to the final air force-navy board that recommended the Boeing design—and this included himself—had ever recommended the General Dynamics model. The members of the Source Selection Board, which had voted for Boeing, were stunned by the development. Al Blackburn, who had worked on the project since 1959, resigned. This is to say nothing about the shocked feelings at Boeing and its long list of subcontractors.

The decision sent tremors throughout the entire aeronautical industry and the business world. If Boeing, traditionally the number-one defense contractor, could be set aside, anyone could be excluded from any contract, for what seemed to be arbitrary political reasons. LeMay added, “I was surprised that the decision was made without consultation. I don’t consider this the normal procedure. I thought we had such a clear-cut and unanimous opinion all up and down the line that I was completely surprised at the decision.”
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In the face of the heated opposition, McNamara held his ground. He said he had chosen the General Dynamics model of the TFX because that company’s proposal showed a better understanding of the costs involved and offered a minimum divergence from a common design for air force and navy versions of the fighter. Of course, this only added fuel to the fire, because this was the very reason the services did not like the General Dynamics version. They all knew that a carrier-based aircraft had to be designed much differently from a land-based one.

In testimony before Congress, McNamara came back again and served notice on the generals and admirals, saying that the TFX decision process was a sample of a new policy. He said that the day had passed when the services would be allowed to develop their own weapons systems. He added that he picked General Dynamics over Boeing because Boeing had fudged and actually had planned to build different planes for the navy and the air force.

In the heat of battle, the Kennedy forces were pressing their point firmly, but cloaking it in equable terms. In contrast to some of the Pentagon civilian hierarchy of earlier days—for example, Charlie Wilson of General Motors, Tom Gates of Morgan Guaranty Trust, and Neil McElroy of Lever Brothers—the McNamara staff was pure Ivy league: Roswell Gilpatric, Cyrus Vance, Eugene Zuckert, and Paul Nitze. They were neither military specialists nor industry favorites. Because of Kennedy they had been given the power to make these decisions despite the desires of the old military-industry team in high places. It was precisely those men in high places who were upset. It was those men and their associates who began to believe, and proclaim, “Kennedy has got to go!”

Gilpatric, a New York banker who was McNamara’s deputy, was sent out to make an important speech to a bankers’ convention on April 9, 1963. Its title, “The Impact of the Changing Defense Program on the United States Economy,” was actually more pertinent than his audience expected it to be. He spoke about the TFX decision to bankers—and, of course, to the news media—at a time when this was a white-hot subject.

In an early paragraph, he revealed the scope of his subject. The new Kennedy policy was a blockbuster. Gilpatric said—and when he did, windows rattled in defense installations all over the world—“I have not the slightest doubt that our economy could adjust to a decline in defense spending.” He was touching on a sacrosanct subject: Can any nation afford, or exist, with peace?

Having dropped that bomb, he moved along to a rationale for the TFX decision. He noted, “The shifts of defense spending within the budget can create intense problems in individual communities.” If his listeners understood what he meant, they knew he was getting very close to the Goldberg procurement policy. “We do try to make a special effort to give work,” he said, “where it can be done effectively and efficiently, to depressed areas.”

But translate the reference to “depressed areas” to mean “areas that voted for Nixon and therefore are needed in the Democratic column,” and you’re closer to the truth.

Then Gilpatric made a daring comment: “The fundamental fact we all have to bear in mind is that the Department of Defense is neither able nor willing to depart from the requirements of national security in order to bolster the economy, either of the nation as a whole, or of any region or community.”

Despite this statement, that is precisely what the implementation of the Goldberg policy had just indrectly done. As though he believed no one would perceive the real message, Gilpatric added (perhaps for the edification of Boeing and its host of allies in and out of the military), “In the award and management of contracts we have undertaken a wide range of steps to improve the whole process. . . . The handling of the TFX contract illustrated several of the techniques being worked out for use on development contracts where particularly acute problems have arisen in the past.”

Then Gilpatric closed with: “Mr. McNamara and I, after an acceptable TFX proposal was offered, had to make a judgment between these two proposals. . . the air force and navy will get a better buy for the taxpayers’ dollars than would have been forthcoming if the contract had been let earlier. . . .”

Gilpatric made these statements during a time of intense Senate hearings on the TFX. You will note how carefully both he and McNamara avoided any direct mention that they had arbitrarily gone along with the Goldberg formula augmented by the assurances of Kelly Johnson at Lockheed.

Indeed, Kelly Johnson’s role in this selection has not been mentioned elsewhere. I was a friend of Roger Lewis’s, president of General Dynamics, and was told this account of the “Skunk Works” role by Mr. Lewis himself.

As noted earlier, Kennedy’s thousand days were marked by repeated and violent eruptions among power-elite elements within the government and its multinational corporate environment, and this is one that stands out. It is chillingly coincidental that Kennedy’s murder in Dallas one year later occurred not too many miles from the Fort Worth factories where the TFX, and quite incidentally the Bell helicopters for Vietnam, were being built.