Trippe agreed. Or, at least, Halaby thought he agreed.
On a Monday morning, as Halaby arrived in New York for a meeting, he was greeted by reporters. “Would you care to comment on Pan Am’s Concorde order, Mr. Halaby?”
Pan Am order? Halaby had no idea what they were talking about.
The announcement had been made in Paris that morning. Pan Am was buying six Concordes. Why, the press wanted to know, did an American airline have to go overseas for the next generation of airliner?
Less than an hour later, Halaby was standing in Trippe’s anteroom on the forty-sixth floor of the newly occupied Pan Am Building. Trippe’s secretary, Kathleen Clair, told him that he had a phone call. “It’s the White House.”
Kennedy was on the line. He was livid. Why had Trippe, the sonofabitch, double-crossed them? And why hadn’t Halaby made it clear to him what was at stake?
Halaby said he would get to the bottom of it.
Then another call. “It’s the Vice President,” said the secretary.
Lyndon Johnson was just as furious as Kennedy. Halaby told him the same thing he’d told Kennedy.
Finally, out from his sanctum came the Imperial Skygod. Trippe was smiling.
Halaby, who had just received a tongue-lashing from the President of the United States and then another from the Vice President, spoke his mind, “You’ve double-crossed us, Mr. Trippe.”
“I didn’t announce the contract,” Trippe said. “It was given by the French prematurely.”
“As soon as you signed the contract, there was danger of a leak. You never told us you were going through with the signing. You promised to postpone any action.”
The Great Dissembler shook his head. No, that hadn’t been the understanding. Halaby must have misunderstood his original promise. Anyway, didn’t he see? It was the French who had jumped the gun.
Halaby said he wanted to use the telephone. While Trippe watched, fascinated, Halaby snatched up the phone and called the White House. Within seconds he had Kennedy on the line again. Standing there in Trippe’s presence, Halaby repeated what Trippe had just told him.
The President wasn’t buying it. As far as he was concerned, Trippe was up to his old stunts. He told Halaby to pass on a message: “Tell Mr. Trippe we will not forget this.”
Three days later, Miss Clair set the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on Juan Trippe’s desk. He found the text of the President’s speech on page five of the Journal. At the graduation-day ceremonies at the Air Force Academy, Kennedy had announced a “new program, in partnership with private industry, to develop at the earliest possible date the prototype of a commercially successful supersonic transport.”
Trippe liked the part about “in partnership with private industry.” The Primitives were beginning to get the message.
For Trippe it amounted to an interim victory. He had the Concorde order in his pocket, and he had used it to catalyze the American SST project. It was classic Trippe gamesmanship, playing one side against the other, forcing them to do what needed doing.
The only problem had been that nastiness with Kennedy. Tell Mr. Trippe we will not forget this. But that was politics. Politicians were transient. Over the years he had taken heat from Presidents. FDR hated his guts, but that hadn’t stopped him. Truman had blocked him from establishing a single United States international airline. And even Eisenhower, a Republican, had ignored Pan Am’s petitions for domestic routes. Trippe had outlasted all of them. He would outlast this one too.
It wasn’t Kennedy’s message that surprised Juan Trippe; it was the messenger. Halaby had picked up the phone and called the President. Just like that. Right there in Trippe’s office. This fellow Halaby had the ear of the President of the United States anytime he wanted it.
If anything impressed Juan Trippe, it was power. This young man, the self-assured emissary of the President, reeked of raw, high-octane, Washingtonian power. It was just what Pan Am had been lacking.
Already Trippe had forgotten his clash with the President of the United States. He was thinking of how he was going to hire Najeeb Halaby.
It’s a joke, thought Halaby. The word was getting around that Juan Trippe, the chief of Pan Am, had somehow become convinced that Najeeb Halaby was a power broker in Washington. Trippe thought that Halaby was a wielder of enormous clout in the Democratic administration.
By 1965 it was no secret that Halaby was leaving his post as FAA administrator. Being a career public servant was not his ambition, and he had never intended to stay beyond the first four years. The joke was that by quitting, he was more of an outsider than if he had never visited Washington. His original White House patron, John Kennedy, was gone. Lyndon Johnson’s famous vindictiveness was especially aimed at Kennedy appointees like Halaby who jumped ship. It meant that Halaby’s days of influence in the White House were over.
But Trippe wanted him. And Halaby needed a job. The problem was, the job he wanted was presently filled by the Supreme Skygod himself.
In his next meeting with Trippe, Halaby asked whether, if he were to take a job with Pan American, he could expect to succeed Trippe as CEO of Pan Am.
The Great Dissembler flashed the angelic smile and sidestepped. There was no timetable for his own retirement, he said. Maybe in a year or so. Maybe not. Anyway, he owed it to his faithful lieutenant, Harold Gray, who was currently the company’s president, to give him a shot at the CEO’s job before he retired. But that didn’t mean that Halaby, too, wouldn’t be given his own chance at the top job.
In other words, maybe. Maybe not.
Halaby had already heard insiders say that Trippe would never retire. They would carry him out of his office in a coffin. And Gray, who was only fifty-nine, would be around for a long time.
All this went through Halaby’s mind during the summer of 1965. After a career in bureaucratic Washington, he wanted to try his hand running a real airline. And what more glamorous or prestigious airline was there than Pan Am?
So he signed on. He would serve as a senior vice president with a seat on the board and a place on the executive committee. His salary would amount to $87,000 per year plus an incentive of $50,000 the first year, and options for 25,000 shares of stock at $71 per share.
Halaby had reason to be pleased. It seemed that he, a Californian, the son of an immigrant, and a Democrat, was gaining admission to an elite old Eastern Republican club.
He would soon realize that he hadn’t even gotten in the front door.
It was easy to understand Trippe’s interest in Najeeb Halaby. Halaby possessed impressive—even Skygodly—credentials. He was articulate and suavely handsome. A graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School, he had the unique qualifications of being both an attorney and a test pilot.
Since the age of sixteen, when he learned to fly, he had been smitten with the mystique of flight. While still a young lawyer at the beginning of World War II, he went to work as a test pilot for Lockheed, where he eventually performed high-altitude research with the P-38 Lightning. Commissioned as a naval officer, he flew high-speed dive tests for Navy fighters, pushing them up against the then mysterious sound barrier, where prop-driven airplanes began to act crazy and shed their parts. He tested every new airplane in the Navy’s inventory, including the experimental Bell YP-59A and a captured German Messerschmitt 262.
After the war, Halaby went to work in Washington. He held posts with the State Department, including an assignment in Saudi Arabia. He served under the brilliant but quirky James Forrestal in the newly established Defense Department. He survived into the Eisenhower era, despite his political credentials, and worked for “Engine Charlie” Wilson, Ike’s Secretary of Defense.
In the mid-fifties, Halaby decided he needed to make some money—always a nagging consideration for public servants—and left government to work for Laurance Rockefeller in a variety of assignments. For a while he oversaw Rockefeller’s interest in Eastern Airlines, then run by the irascible Eddie Rickenbacker. He was tapped i
n 1955 to join a task force to investigate the civil airways and airports mess in the United States, an investigation which led eventually to the establishment of the Federal Aviation Agency.
As FAA administrator, Jeeb Halaby was highly visible. He decentralized Quesada’s monolithic agency. He was immediately on the scene at aircraft accidents. He tried out skydiving to determine whether the sport needed regulation. He personally test-flew new production airplanes. He flew the FAA’s Grumman Gulfstream himself to official appointments. Jeeb Halaby, everyone said, was a rising star.
His first day at Pan Am was a disaster. Then it got worse.
Halaby was introduced to the company officers at the traditional Monday lunch in the Sky Club. Trippe presided at the head of the long table, surrounded by his court. The newcomer sat at the opposite end. Most of the executives had already read a leaked newspaper story about Halaby’s hiring.
A piece had appeared in the business press the day before, prior to the official announcement of Halaby’s appointment, stating that Halaby had been hired as a senior vice president by Pan American. The story added that Halaby was Trippe’s “heir apparent.” It didn’t matter whether the item was true or not. It landed like a stink bomb on the forty-sixth floor.
Now the “heir apparent” was meeting his new colleagues. Few handshakes were proffered. Introductions were perfunctory. The glacial expressions sent an unmistakable message: You carpetbagging, publicity-chasing sonofabitch.
Okay, thought Halaby. It was going to take a while for the ice to melt. In the meantime, he would try to learn what his job was.
And that turned out to be his biggest problem. What was his job? The upper echelon of executives closed ranks around the tribal elder, Harold Gray. They seemed to have made the tacit decision to exclude the carpetbagger, Halaby, from the day-to-day operational affairs of the airline.
The same newspaper piece that leaked word of Halaby’s recruitment also reported that he would run the airline’s hotel subsidiary, the Intercontinental Hotel chain. This item sent Trippe’s old classmate and business associate John Gates, who did run the hotel chain, roaring into Trippe’s office threatening to resign.
So Trippe had to do something with the new vice president. But what? None of his executives wanted him on their floor. Well, how about putting him in charge of the Guided Missiles Range Division? That was far enough away from headquarters. And how about the Business Jet Division? And the helicopter operation that Pan Am was sponsoring in metropolitan New York? That surely would keep the newcomer out of everyone’s hair.
The result was that Halaby had no direct role in the airline operation. He bit his tongue and did his job. People would ask him what his new title was. “Vice President, Miscellaneous,” he would say.
Then one day Trippe came up with a new assignment. “Would you mind going down to Washington to see about something?”
Washington? Halaby knew what that meant. Lobbying. Now he was supposed to wield his “influence” with LBJ and the Democrats. So that was the reason he had been hired.
Chapter Seven
New Hires
New hire /’n(y)u ‘hir/ n 1 : bottom stratum of aeronautical hierarchy
2 : lowest form of human life (in a cockpit)
The ship sails into the void of space. On the sound track you hear Strauss’s Blue Danube. Stars glitter in the background like jewels on black velvet.
The interior of the vessel has typical passenger accommodations—safety harnesses and handrails and a zero-gravity lavatory. There are instructions on the door for passengers who have never used a zero-gravity lavatory. Using a toilet in space takes some getting used to.
The stewardess appears, offering cocktails. That, too, takes some getting used to, talking to someone who seems to be inverted, or sideways. In space there isn’t any up or down. The stewardess wears “grip shoes,” which allow her to walk up, down, across—it doesn’t matter—through the weightless cabin.
It is a two-stage journey. In this ship you fly to a huge, rotating station, deep in space. From there you make the final short hop to the moon base in a round lunar landing machine.
For the earth-to-space flight, your ship has wings, which it needs for the takeoff and landing back on the planet. But the ship’s most distinguishing feature, at least if you are seeing it close up for the first time, is the emblem emblazoned on the hull. The distinctive round blue logo makes this vehicle instantly recognizable. You can see that it is a Clipper Ship—a commercial spacegoing vessel of Pan American World Airways. . .
Every new-hire Pan Am pilot went to see the movie. 2001: A Space Odyssey was a fantasy created by writer Arthur C. Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick. In 1968, no one had yet flown to the moon, nor was anyone seriously thinking about commercial lunar flight. But it was assumed, even in science fiction, that if anyone were to fly a scheduled lunar service, it would be, of course, Pan Am.
What the new hires liked so much about 2001 wasn’t the film’s special effects, although they were spectacular for 1968. What impressed them was the depiction of the commercial flight to the moon. It validated their reason for being where they were—flying for Pan American World Airways.
It was the beginning of Rob Martinside’s third week with Pan Am. At eight in the morning his class trooped into the classroom on the second floor of the big Pan Am hangar at San Francisco Airport. They had begun to sort themselves out by background and proclivity. They learned that each fell into one of two groups: Airplane Heads and the Accidentals.
The Accidentals were the larger group. They were there because of a fluke in history: the Red Menace. They were kids of the fifties and sixties who had grown up knowing they would be summoned to join the holy war against communism. In those days you volunteered or you were drafted. Going to college provided, at best, a deferral.
Most had signed up for military flight training as an alternative to a foxhole or a destroyer deck. A pilot was at least an officer, not a faceless grunt. Instead of pushing a mop or carrying a carbine, he was trained to fly the military’s most expensive machinery.
And then an astonishing thing happened. They found that they liked flying airplanes. Even more astonishingly, it turned out that they could actually make a career of it. Waiting out there for them was a plethora of airline flying jobs.
So they became airline pilots. Most did it for no reason other than that it was a hell of a good job. It was something they were already trained to do, and it beat trying to start a career with a five-year-old degree in history or forestry. As an airline pilot in 1965 you could make as much as $40,000 a year, about the same as an admiral or general in the military and more than most of the vice presidents of the airlines. You had a generous retirement plan, medical insurance, free travel, job security. You had half of each month off—time enough to play golf, ski, fish, coach Little League, teach Sunday school, or just stay up late and play.
Sure, they knew about seniority lists, that they would have to start at the bottom. They wouldn’t be making the big bucks for a while. But the way the airlines were growing, it wouldn’t take long. . .
For the other group—the Airplane Heads—the job meant something else. They were there to fly airplanes. That was their life. Benefits, pay, time off—well, that was nice, but what it meant was that you had the time and money to mess with airplanes on your days off.
Typically, the Airplane Heads were kids who grew up building balsa airplane models. They collected comic books—Smilin’ Jack, Steve Canyon, Terry and the Pirates. They soloed when they were sixteen at the crop duster strip on the edge of town. They joined the military to get into flight training. The draft and the Red Menace had nothing to do with it. They went because that’s where the hot airplanes were.
Jim Wood was one of the Airplane Heads. Wood was a tall, woolly-haired young man who laughed in a high-pitched cackle. By the time Wood finished college and entered Air Force pilot training, he had constructed, all from kitless raw materials, 232 model airplanes. He lea
rned to fly before he had a driver’s license. Along with his degree in aeronautical engineering he possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of military airplane trivia. Wood could recite the range, top speed, weight, and engine thrust of every fighter plane in service. More than anything else, Wood had wanted to be a fighter pilot.
When he finished pilot school at the top of his class, he should have gone directly to fighter training. He had every reason to expect an assignment to F-86s or F-100s or maybe an F-106 or F-101 interceptor squadron.
But an odd thing was happening. The U. S. Air Force of the early 1960s was run by a jowly World War II bomber pilot, General Curtis LeMay. LeMay liked to remind unwary America that the Red Menace was still out there, more evil and dangerous than ever. America’s first line of defense was SAC—the Strategic Air Command, LeMay’s armada of bombers poised to strike the Soviets. Because the mission was so important, LeMay demanded that the top graduates of Air Force flight schools be assigned to SAC.
That included Jim Wood. Instead of strapping into single-engine, single-piloted fighters as he had always expected when he graduated from flight training, he would be a multi-engine SAC pilot.
And then when he reported for duty at the remote air base in Idaho called Mountain Home, he learned the rest of the terrible truth: he wouldn’t even be a bomber pilot. Wood was assigned as a copilot in KC-97 tankers. KC-97s were lumbering, four-engine derivatives of the World War II B-29. They weren’t even jets! They were propeller-driven gas trucks whose job was to pump kerosene to LeMay’s bombers on their way to pulverize the Red Menace.
For three and a half years, Wood did this, droning around the globe in a tanker, reeking of kerosene, hating every day of it. When he drove his Aston Martin out the main gate of Mountain Home Air Force Base for the last time, he was on his way to San Francisco and his new career as a pilot with Pan American.
Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am Page 6