A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  At forty-nine years of age with twenty-six years of service in the Army Air Corps and the U.S. Air Force, Thomas Sarsfield Power was a man whose ambition was as wide as his frame was lean. He had been born at a time when Irish-American families often named a son for an Irish patriot and his middle name was an apt one for a military man. General Patrick Sarsfield, the Earl of Lucan, had been one of Ireland’s most renowned soldiers, holding off the forces of William III at the siege of Limerick in 1691 longer than was thought humanly possible in the last major battle before the enveloping darkness of English colonialism closed over the Irish. Power had come up the hardscrabble way, studying civil engineering in night classes at Cooper Union in New York City until he had enough credits to join the Army Air Corps and qualify for Flying School. He had graduated from Kelly Field in 1929, seven months ahead of LeMay. Flying B-24 Liberators out of Italy, Power had gained a reputation as a hard-tasking, innovative commander, which is why Arnold had given him one of the B-29 wings and a star. He was cold-blooded in judgment and shrewd at his craft. LeMay had taken to him right away after his arrival in Guam and had sent him to lead that first night firebombing raid on Tokyo because he trusted him more than any of his other wing commanders. Power had just received his third star on appointment as commander of ARDC that April. Having served LeMay for the previous six years as his deputy at SAC, Power was intent on adding a fourth star to the row on his shoulder tabs and succeeding LeMay as commander-in-chief of the world’s mightiest aerial striking force. He saw Schriever and this ICBM burden he had been handed as a threat to his dream. It had been naive of Schriever to assume that Power would approve of him and his project, given the contrasting nature of their careers. Power personified the operational Air Force par excellence. LeMay had maneuvered him into command of ARDC precisely because he wanted to keep the research and development organization out of the hands of technological visionary types like Schriever. As an operator, Power naturally tended to view the Air Force world in conventional terms. Not having participated in the work of the Tea Pot Committee and its sequel, he also understood virtually nothing of the nature of the task Schriever faced. Furthermore, had the choice been his, as the former vice chief of SAC and a witness to LeMay’s repeated clashes with Schriever, he certainly would not have chosen this independent-minded colonel, now sporting a single star, for the ICBM job.

  With White and Twining behind the project, Power was too shrewd to oppose it openly, but that did not stop him from letting Schriever know how he felt. The first thing he hit Schriever with was his objection to tossing the prime contractor tradition overboard in favor of this newfangled approach. He was obviously alarmed over the repercussions that were certain to follow when the aircraft industry fought back. Power was being drawn against his will into the middle of a fight in which he did not want to be involved and his ignorance of the technological obstacles inherent in building an ICBM prevented him from understanding why this revolution in contracting and program management was necessary. The B-52 Stratofortress, he told Schriever, was just as complex a weapon as the Atlas ICBM would be, yet Boeing had nurtured it to success. Why didn’t they just let the aircraft industry handle the ICBM? “He inferred,” Schriever wrote in his memo of the encounter, “that we were attempting to tie [a] can to Convair and R&W [Ramo-Wooldridge] would grab off the prize.” Power also objected to the nature of the directive he had received on June 21 from Air Force headquarters. He was carrying out the directive because it was an order, but he didn’t like it, Power said. The whole arrangement was unfair. He was being instructed to create a separate ICBM organization out on the West Coast run by a general officer who was to have complete authority over every detail of the program. Yet the directive also made Power responsible for the ultimate outcome. In short, he was to be held responsible for what he could not control. (His objection here was understandable, given the justly venerated military principle that there can be no responsibility without command.)

  Schriever was still his subordinate, of course, but how was Power supposed to adequately supervise him from the East Coast? The field office ought to be located in Baltimore with his headquarters so that he could direct its actions. The argument that scientific and engineering expertise was most easily recruited in California and that many of the industries they would need were also situated there did not sway Power. “Only with inward reluctance does he go along with my moving west,” Schriever wrote. Moreover, out there in California an officer as junior as Schriever would be “a country boy among the wolves,” Power said. The aircraft industry would devour him at its leisure. His eventual discrediting could rebound on Power, and Power, allowing his ego and his ambition to flash, “made a point that he was senior to me and had much more at stake than I.” The necessity Schriever had stated so baldly to Gardner that momentous afternoon at the rathskeller on 15th Street, that to get the missiles built he had to be free to operate “without any interference from those nitpicking sons of bitches in the Pentagon,” had backfired when he had mentioned it to Power. “By his several allusions to my making big decisions on my own … he must feel that I am motivated by a personal desire for power,” Schriever noted. Worst of all, “He obviously does not trust me nor have confidence in me—very important factors when undertaking a job of this magnitude.” Bennie left Power’s office a shaken man. He had been put on probation. If he did not succeed in allaying Power’s worries, no amount of intervention from Gardner would suffice to protect him. Power would find a way to sack him in order to save his own hide.

  Seeing the unity of the Von Neumann Committee at the July 20–21 meeting and the additional support from as ranking a figure in the Pentagon hierarchy as Donald Quarles, Power hid his misgivings. He played along by instructing Schriever to give him the memorandum on the proposed management structure, knowing in advance what it would say. But he also took out some insurance by playing a game known in the military as “cover your arse,” or “CYA” for short. Whenever a matter was up for decision, or some sensitive point had been discussed, he demanded a written proposal from Schriever or a memorandum for the record. He was preparing a defense for the investigation that would be certain to follow if the project failed—men eminent in their fields had urged these actions on him and he had had no logical recourse but to accept their advice.

  Schriever now launched his own “win over Tommy Power” campaign. He became the most attentive subordinate any general could desire. He wrote Power a report every week and shot off a message by Teletype or called on the phone in between whenever the occasion seemed to warrant it, made certain Power was invited to all significant meetings, and traveled to Baltimore frequently to personally update the boss. Judo wasn’t Power’s only sport. He was a keen golfer as well and Bennie turned on the charm here too, arranging the schedule so that their get-togethers were also an opportunity for the general to play with a partner in top form.

  40.

  HOW GREED CORRUPTS

  The men who ran Convair were not interested in being reasonable, nor were they amenable to charm. Schriever stood between them and the pot of gold they were hungry to possess and that was all that mattered. Long months of wrangling with them ensued. They refused to accept Schriever’s offer of a contract limiting them to manufacture of the airframe—the fuel tank and elements of the missile body; to assembling the entire Atlas once the other components (the subsystems) from different firms were ready; and to participation in the testing. They held out doggedly for everything except the engines, which it was agreed would come from Rocketdyne—in short, for the traditional prime contractor role.

  The president of Convair was a retired general named Joseph McNarney. He was typical of those former senior officers who had built large reputations during the Second World War and then cashed in those reputations and the connections they entailed for the large financial rewards awaiting those who could help the military industries take advantage of the demands of the Cold War. McNarney was an old-timer in the Army Air Corps, havi
ng led an observation squadron in France during the First World War, a friend and collaborator of Arnold’s, and one of the best minds in that unique brotherhood. In 1938–39, Arnold had put him to work with Spaatz and Eaker to help plan the expansion of the Air Corps in preparation for the combat that loomed. McNarney’s most important patron, however, had been the forbidding and demanding General George Catlett Marshall, chief of staff of the Army. Marshall had understood that he could not fulfill the enormous task of managing the war on his own and he believed, in any case, in delegating authority. He sought staff officers who were strong, able, and decisive men, who could correctly analyze problems and then implement solutions on their own authority, without constantly referring matters back to him. McNarney, a somewhat aloof, self-confident man, fit Marshall’s requirements nearly perfectly. In December 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor, Marshall had entrusted him with direction of a committee that had recommended the most important reform to ready the Army for its role in defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan—reorganization along strikingly simple, functional lines into Army Ground Forces, Army Air Forces, and the Services of Supply, subsequently renamed Army Service Forces. Marshall had then appointed McNarney his deputy chief of staff, a position he had held until the end of the war, rising to lieutenant general. In 1952, with the aircraft industry surging under the demands of the Korean War and the anti-Soviet buildup in Europe, Convair had needed leadership. Its parent company, General Dynamics, had offered McNarney the presidency and he had accepted.

  McNarney’s point man on Atlas, Thomas Lanphier, Jr., had made his mark by participating in the shooting down of a Mitsubishi bomber carrying the commander-in-chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, one Sunday morning in April 1943. The U.S. Navy had broken the Japanese code and, learning Yamamoto’s precise schedule for an inspection tour of Japanese defenses in the Solomons, arranged an aerial ambush by Army Air Forces P-38 Lightning fighters flying out of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. Lanphier was a captain and leader of the killer team designated to destroy Yamamoto’s bomber, while the other Lightnings in the group fended off its escort of Zero fighters. As it turned out, there were two Japanese bombers in the flight. One Mitsubishi was ferrying Yamamoto and some of his aides, while the second bomber held other members of his staff. And two P-38s, one piloted by Lanphier and a second by a lieutenant named Rex Barber, did the shooting that brought both bombers down. Which P-38 pilot got which bomber was impossible to tell, but Lanphier claimed to be the man who had sent the legendary Japanese naval warrior, the inspirer of the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor on another Sunday morning two years earlier, plummeting to his end.

  Like Teller’s contention that he was the sole parent of the hydrogen bomb, Lanphier’s claim somehow stuck. An operator in the wily, human sense of the term, he turned his exploit into a ticket to a living after the war. Ingratiating himself with W. Stuart Symington, who was to become the first secretary of the Air Force with the creation of an independent air arm in 1947, Lanphier served as his aide. By the 1950s, he had shifted to Convair. When Atlas became a potential moneymaker in 1954, McNarney appointed Lanphier vice president for the project. One reason Lanphier was given the job was that he had maintained his political connections in Washington. Symington was now a Democratic senator from Missouri and a figure to be reckoned with on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

  McNarney and Lanphier had gotten their way in the past by intimidation and they saw no reason why they should not get their way again. They regarded the insignificant brigadier general who opposed them exactly as Power had predicted, as a “country boy” they could run over. They started a campaign against Ramo and Wooldridge in the trade press, accusing them of stealing technicians for their new firm from Hughes Aircraft in order to corner the ICBM business. (Ramo and Wooldridge had, in fact, taken some of the best of their staff at Hughes with them when they left and stopped enticing away more at Schriever’s request after the matter became an issue.) “Aircraft Industries Assn. is considering a strong protest to the Pentagon,” an article in the November 8, 1954, issue of the magazine Aviation Week warned. “Big battle on upper Pentagon levels looms between the established missile contractors and the Johnny-come-latelies in the field.” McNarney and Lanphier, apparently thinking that Bennie would heed one of the idols of his youth, set Ira Eaker on him. Eaker, who was drawing, by the measure of the day, a lavish salary of $50,000 a year from the Hughes Tool Company as its liaison to Hughes Aircraft, warned Schriever not to put his faith in Ramo and Wooldridge. They were upstarts who were not well regarded by the major aviation industries, he said. He invited Schriever to an Aircraft Industries Association convention in Phoenix, allegedly to clarify questions members of the association had. Bennie saw the invitation as a ploy to pressure him and declined.

  He was convinced that McNarney and Lanphier’s motive was simple greed. Their argument that Convair could handle the missile by itself contradicted the opinion of some of the best scientific brains in the country on the Von Neumann Committee. They were not stupid enough, he believed, to think that they possessed superior technical judgment. What mattered to them was profit. In the last analysis, they did not give a damn whether the ICBM got off the ground or not, as long as they harvested the taxpayers’ treasure in the meantime. One proof of this was the absurd proposal they had kept pushing to go ahead with production of their impractical five-engine, 440,000-pound ICBM design. “They don’t want to understand,” Schriever wrote in notes for a briefing he gave at the Air Matériel Command in Dayton on October 28, 1954, underlining his frustration at his fruitless attempts to reason with McNarney and Lanphier. “Efforts to discredit AF approach selfishly motivated—don’t stand close scrutiny,” he added. He drafted a letter of protest for Power to send McNarney. Power signed it despite his misgivings. Under the circumstances, he had no choice but to back his subordinate for now. Schriever and Gardner also persuaded Twining to telephone McNarney to tell him that he, the chief of staff, stood behind everything McNarney was hearing from Schriever and to urge him to accept the terms.

  Still, McNarney and Lanphier held out. They tried more intimidation by also setting Symington on Schriever, but the ploy again failed. The senator flew out to California for briefings by Bennie and his team at the Schoolhouse in Inglewood and then by McNarney and Lanphier and their Atlas team at Convair headquarters in San Diego. After his return to Washington, Symington indicated he was going to start making trouble over the way the ICBM program was being handled. Schriever and Gardner took the initiative and confronted him together in order, as Bennie put it in his diary, to “lay cards on table with Symington.” Charles Lindbergh also intervened, persuading Talbott to call the senator. The counterattack seems to have been effective. Symington apparently decided he did not want to get involved. He did nothing.

  At the end of November, McNarney and Lanphier convened a meeting in San Diego to present what they apparently regarded as a compromise. Gardner flew out from Washington to attend, joined by Lindbergh on behalf of the Von Neumann Committee. Schriever arrived with an attitude growing ever more suspicious. He had had lunch the day before with Jimmy Doolittle. Friends like Teddy Walkowicz had been warning him that Convair had by no means slackened its lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill and wherever in the Pentagon McNarney and Lanphier thought they might get a sympathetic hearing. Doolittle described their attitude and that of other major aircraft makers with grim succinctness: “AIA [Aircraft Industries Association] wants to see us fail,” Schriever recorded in his diary. At San Diego, Charlie Bossart handled the main briefing, McNarney or Lanphier occasionally interrupting with additional information they thought might help to sell their offer.

  Bossart said Convair had abandoned the assumption of a 3,000-pound warhead that had been the basis for its earlier monster missile design. His team was now laying out a far lighter model based on a 1,500-pound hydrogen bomb. He also briefed on what Convair was doing to design the nose cone that would house the
bomb and its ideas for the guidance and control system. The company wanted to hang on to both of these subsystems. Lanphier said the firm was prepared to hire 250 consultants and to put 1,600 engineers to work on Atlas in 1956. The meeting settled nothing. McNarney and Lanphier continued to refuse to accede to Schriever’s demand that they confine themselves to manufacturing the airframe and assembling the missile.

  By mid-December, Schriever was so exasperated that he drew a cartoon in his diary entry of December 14. It showed a bloated figure labeled “Industry,” which exuded “Politics” and “Pressure,” and had an arm reaching out toward a bulging sack of money to satisfy the “Ravenous appetite accustomed to.” Underneath were the words “Motive Big Profit.” Bennie had then written “(Pat),” an apparent abbreviation for “Patriotism,” followed by the words “Small Thought.” What Schriever had run up against was the moral corruption that had become endemic to the U.S. military industry as a result of the Cold War and its demand, year, upon year, upon year for new weaponry. The behavior of McNarney and Lanphier epitomized the vice. The offer he was making to them might not be nearly what they wanted, but it would provide Convair with a reasonable profit. This was particularly true at a time when the overall military budget was diminishing because of the end of the Korean War and the determination of President Eisenhower to hold down military spending. Schriever also alluded to this in his cartoon by sketching a shrunken sack of money for the fiscal year to come. A decent return, however, was not enough to satisfy McNarney and Lanphier. They wanted the whole kit and caboodle.