Boyd

by Robert Coram

  Hod used humor and a diplomatic response to avoid saying Israeli pilots used guns because missiles didn’t work. He depended on the United States for fighter aircraft and knew the Air Force was infatuated with missiles. His facetious response drew laughter. But behind the laughter was an unavoidable fact: the day of the gunfighter had not passed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Saving the F-15

  MARY Boyd says her husband changed after he went to the Pentagon, that he became more intense, less gregarious, and always on the defensive. Boyd was constantly angry about what he saw as careerism and corruption, and he brought the anger home.

  When Boyd moved to Washington, he was so anxious to jump into the F-X fray that he would not take time to look for a place to live. Mary, taking care of the five children, did not have time to look either. For more than a month the Boyd family lived in a single room at the Breezeway Motel in Fairfax, Virginia. Then one day Boyd showed up and said to Mary, “I found us a place to live. It’s over in Alexandria.”

  “Oh,” Mary said. She couldn’t generate enthusiasm for anything in Washington. She had not wanted to move from Eglin, where the broad and virtually empty beach was nearby and where Stephen rolled in the surf and found one of the few pleasures of his life. She had not wanted to drive up in the station wagon with five children while Boyd went on ahead in his Corvair. She had not wanted to live in an apartment.

  Boyd drove her and the children to 4930 Beauregard Street, a new apartment project then called Brighton Square. It was only minutes from the Pentagon. He pointed to the door of a ground-level apartment, number T-3, and said, “I think you’ll like this place.” The apartment project was filled with young couples and children. Nearby were forests and open lots where children played without supervision. The apartment had three bedrooms: one for Boyd and Mary, one for Kathy and Mary Ellen, and one for Scott and Jeff. The den was converted into a bedroom for Stephen, who was now twelve. Big sliding glass doors covered one wall of the den-cum-bedroom and Stephen could enter and leave via his own door. For a boy wanting independence but who was forever bound to his wheelchair, this small measure of freedom was important.

  The apartment project had no sidewalks and in the summer Stephen rolled his wheelchair through grass that rarely was mowed. In the winter he sometimes had to push his way through snow. “Why doesn’t Dad get us a better place?” he asked his mother several times.

  Mary smiled down at her son and said, “I’ll talk to him about it.”

  Boyd would brook no argument. “What if we buy a house and are stuck with it?” he said. “What if we can’t sell it when we leave? That happened in Atlanta. Houses always have expenses. But just paying the rent is no hassle. Besides, we are only going to be here a few years.” When Mary continued to ask about owning a house, Boyd settled into a stock response: he nodded and said, “Yeah, we’ll have to do that” and changed the subject.

  The apartment on Beauregard Street became a symbol of how Boyd’s family suffered because of his devotion to his work. In the years following the move, Boyd’s family life devolved into a state of disarray from which it never recovered. Stephen began repairing television sets and stereos and various electronics. His sadness about his handicap had left him withdrawn and fiercely independent. Kathy’s quiet and gentle nature slowly changed into a clinical depression. Jeff, shy and gentle, was hammered in discussions with his father. He found refuge with his collection of spiders and poisonous snakes. John Scott and Boyd had tumultuous arguments that turned into scuffles and, in at least one instance, into a fight. Mary Ellen was more like her father than any of the others; she was his “Snookums,” and she broke his heart when she became ensnared in the drug culture. For years they did not speak. And all the children say today that their anger toward their father is rooted in his insistence on living in the tiny apartment.

  The first time Mary met Sprey was at 10:30 one evening when he and Boyd left the Pentagon early. Boyd got up from the table and began making phone calls while Sprey and Mary were still eating. Mary confided to Sprey that people asked if she had ever thought of getting a job so there would be more money for the family. “They told me if I worked I would have more input into what went on around here,” she said. She shrugged. She knew that was not true. “I can’t take care of five kids and work. I’m not that efficient.” She said a few people at the Pentagon asked Boyd why he lived in an apartment. After all, the mid-60s were a propitious time to invest in the Washington real estate market. A lieutenant colonel could buy a home that would only appreciate in value. But Boyd brushed off every such question with “I don’t like to cut the grass.”

  Mary seemed bewildered by all that was going on around her. She told Christie and Sprey that when she and Boyd met at Iowa State, she thought she was marrying an athlete who would become a coach and they would live in a small town in Iowa and join the country club and buy a little house and lead a quiet uneventful life. It was as if she had stepped onto what she thought was a sedate merry-go-round and found it was instead a cyclonic roller coaster.

  She nodded toward her husband and with a rueful laugh said, “Look what I got.”

  Boyd and his family would live on Beauregard Street for the next twenty-two years.

  Most fighter pilots fly until they are too old to pass the physical or until they are promoted into a nonflying job. Some even refuse promotions that would take them out of the cockpit. Once they lose their flying status, the rest of their life is anticlimactic. They often live near airports and turn their eyes upward and stare longingly at every passing jet.

  It was not that way with Boyd. Few pilots have been as deeply involved with all aspects of fighter aviation as he. Yet in 1968 he lost interest in flying. As a Pentagon staff officer he was not allowed to fly fighters, only the venerable T-33 that fighter pilots looked on with considerable disdain. He did not always fly enough to maintain his flight-currency requirements and twice his boss took him up in a T-33 to regain currency, to enable him to keep his flying pay. But eventually his currency lapsed and Boyd did not regain it. Fellow pilots who knew his background were puzzled. “Why?” they asked. He shrugged and said, “I’ve done that.”

  It was as if he realized that not only had he moved beyond being a fighter pilot, but that he was about to move farther and deeper into other, more complex, and more important areas of his life and that he had to clear his mind of all extraneous matters.

  Almost daily he brought new E-M graphs or new slides or the outline of a new briefing to Sprey. “Hey, Tiger, this is what I put together. What do you think?”

  Sprey took the graphs and slides and briefings and studied them. After a while in his soft calm voice, he might say, “John, this slide is no good. Do you have a better way of showing this?”

  Then the fight would begin. Sprey would explain why the slide was no good and Boyd would shout that it was perfect. Sprey would answer in his irrefutable and thus maddening manner. After Boyd had all he could take, he would slouch off to his office. About 4:00 A.M. Sprey’s phone would ring and when he picked it up he barely had time to say “Hello” before Boyd barked, “What did you mean when you said that slide was no good?”

  Sprey would calmly list the reasons. Boyd would argue and shout and finally end the conversation with a grunt and slam down the phone. He never said to Sprey, “You are right.” But he would change the slide and later boast to Sprey of how strong his briefing was.

  Time after time he came back from a briefing in exultation. One time he burst into Sprey’s office and relived every exchange of his latest cape job. “Goddamn, Tiger, you should have been there. I hosed those sons of bitches. I stacked those goddamn generals up like cord wood.”

  Sprey was amused. “I think you like the body count.”

  Boyd stared at Sprey, thinking, and a wide grin sliced across his face.

  Boyd won battles not only in the open and more or less public arenas, such as briefings, but also in the corridors and offices of the Pentagon, whe
re politics is both byzantine and deadly. Here, one of his greatest weapons was his secret back-channel communication to the Air Force chief of staff. The chief often followed the Franklin Roosevelt theory of management, bypassing sycophantic generals and seeking out from among relatively junior officers a few men who would tell him the truth. The chief knew the culture of the Building and knew that, in many ways, he was the most ignorant man in the Air Force. Dozens of high-ranking officers put their fingers in the wind before they talked to him. Then they told him what they thought he wanted to hear. Boyd, and presumably a very few others, told him what he needed to know. Occasionally a colonel from the chief’s office dropped into Boyd’s office and said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” And the two men sat in a corner of the cafeteria and the colonel said, “The chief wants to know…” And because Boyd gave him straight answers, the chief came to him again and again.

  Boyd used these clandestine meetings to put forth his agenda for the F-X. The chief had enough confidence in Boyd’s integrity that he agreed with Boyd about keeping down the weight of the aircraft. He sent down the order that Boyd asked for: the F-X will have a maximum weight of 40,000 pounds.

  Since the F-X had sprung forth at 62,500 pounds and since many generals believed bigger was better, those generals now thought of the F-X as a lightweight fighter, almost a toy. Yet Boyd still was not happy. He wanted the F-X to weigh under 35,000 pounds.

  Sprey never understood the way a real fighter pilot feels about a small aircraft until the day he and Boyd went out to Dulles Airport to fly a pylon racer, a small but very fast aircraft. Many pylon-racer pilots are the size of jockeys. It took Boyd several minutes to shoehorn himself into the cockpit. His shoulders were scrunched together and his knees were up around his neck. He had to bend forward so the canopy could be closed. Sprey thought Boyd must be miserable. But when Boyd looked up there was an expression of absolute glee on his face. “I love it! I love it!” he shouted through the canopy. And Sprey realized that for a true fighter pilot, a fighter aircraft cannot be too small.

  By 1968, people in the Building did not know if Boyd was a genius or a wild man. The most favorable light that can be put on much of his behavior is that it was not that of the typical lieutenant colonel seeking advancement. Boyd’s manner went beyond the coarseness, the close-in spittle-flying conversations, the arm waving and loud voice, the long hair and disheveled appearance, and the nocturnal work habits. If a superior gave Boyd an order and Boyd believed that order had implications deleterious to the F-X, he smiled and said, “Sir, I’ll be happy to follow that order. But I want you to put it in writing.” Generals like to issue verbal orders. That way if the results are not what the general expected, he can always deny he issued the order. While Boyd was within his rights to ask for written orders, his doing so infuriated generals. It clearly indicated he thought the general was wrong.

  Once, he accosted a general in the corridor and began an intense conversation about lowering the weight of the F-X. Boyd was smoking a cigar and waving his arms and jabbing his finger. The general grew bored and turned and began edging away just as Boyd reached out to emphasize a point. The cigar burned a hole in the general’s tie. For a moment those passing by froze as they stared at the tableau of an astonished general looking down at the hole in his tie. The hole smoldered on the edges and grew larger and larger and smoke rose around the general’s face. He slapped out the burning tie, then spun and walked away. Boyd did not know the reason for the general’s abrupt departure until someone said, “Damn, John, you just set the general’s tie on fire.”

  Boyd looked down the hall after the general. “Yeah?” He chortled. “Bet that’s the first time that ever happened to him.”

  Then there was the trance thing. Boyd would be in the middle of an intense conversation when suddenly his eyes would glaze over and he would stop talking and stare at the ceiling or the wall or out the window. It was as if he had been dealt a stunning blow to the head. He did not respond to questions. It might be two or three minutes before he awakened and picked up the conversation.

  “What the hell happened?” someone occasionally asked. “What are you doing?”

  “I just thought of a new E-M iteration” or “Something just occurred to me” or “I just got the answer to something I’ve been working on for several weeks.”

  Finally there was the pipper. For a while no one knew what he was doing. Then one day a secretary could no longer take the suspense and asked, “Colonel, are you all right?”

  Boyd gave her a beatific smile and said, “I got the son of a bitch in my pipper.”

  A day or so later there was a rash of hot platters and cape jobs and Boyd won another battle and his triumphant laughter was heard in the halls.

  Afterward, when Boyd put his feet atop his desk and began moving his pencil around and staring at the eraser, someone would say, “Oh, God. He’s got somebody in his pipper.” They knew hell was about to break loose all over again.

  TAC always has seen speed as a vital part of air-to-air combat and wanted the F-X to have a Mach 3 top speed. Never mind that combat always starts at subsonic cruise speed and almost never reaches supersonic speed. Never mind that the trade-offs necessary for an airplane to reach such speeds would seriously degrade dogfighting performance. As for range, there is no faster way to degrade performance on a fighter than to ask for too much.

  The Air Force feeling about weight was demonstrated during a meeting when the TAC colonel in charge of fighter requirements stood up and said, “I don’t give a damn what the airplane weighs. The specs we gave you are the absolute validated TAC requirements. We have to have these things and I don’t care about the weight. Besides, everyone knows a good big airplane is better than a good little airplane.”

  This was the very antithesis of what E-M revealed to Boyd.

  In late spring of 1968, the Air Force was still so influenced by the F-111, so mesmerized by the heavy and expensive variable-geometry wing, that it had not made the fundamental decision as to whether the F-X would be a swing-wing or a fixed-wing design.

  By now Boyd was losing major design battles. The Air Force insisted on a speed greater than Mach 2. The Air Force insisted on a radar with a thirty-six-inch dome—a requirement that dictated a much larger fuselage than Boyd wanted. Despite orders from the chief of staff, the F-X was now at an estimated 42,500 pounds (actually, it was much larger), and the performance, while unprecedented, was far degraded from what it could have been.

  Sprey called the heavy and expensive additions “gold-plating.” He had no patience with those who wanted to add so many heavy items that had nothing to do with shooting down another airplane—everything from nose wheel steering to boarding ladders to tail hook. “If you take off all the nonkill horseshit—everything not necessary to kill another aircraft—you can’t believe how the performance goes up.”

  Boyd and Sprey were desperate. They decided to make one final effort to save the F-X. They would go back to the ideal aircraft. Night after night they labored at the Pentagon, drawing plans for an airplane they called the “Red Bird,” a 33,000-pound stripped-down version of the F-X. Boyd briefed the Air Staff at the Pentagon. On July 18, 1968, Sprey wrote a letter to General James Ferguson, head of the Systems Command. The letter became famous and was passed around the Pentagon, where a few young officers saw it as a masterful dissection of how the Air Force had gone wrong. They admired the brilliance of the man who wrote it and privately wondered if they would have the courage to do such a thing. Others saw the letter as the bitter fulminations of the infamous Boyd / Sprey collaboration. The letter, classified “secret,” said the Air Force had exercised no design discipline on the F-X, no willingness to forego items that did not directly contribute to shooting down MiGs, but only added weight. Sprey detailed items such as the tail hook, nose wheel steering, and maintenance ladder and said the Air Force was so anxious to add gold-plating to the F-X that it was ignoring the ever-rising cost of the airplane. Accompanying the le
tter was a twenty-three-page, single-spaced list of technical recommendations to clean up the F-X.

  Then Boyd and Sprey briefed General Ferguson, the man who would make the final decision on the F-X. The general agreed with everything Boyd and Sprey said. He liked their plans for the Red Bird and said it clearly was superior to the F-X.

  Then the general dropped the other shoe. He said all the three-stars who worked for him wanted the bigger and heavier version of the F-X and that he could not go against their recommendations. He tried to console Boyd and Sprey by saying the F-X would be the best maneuvering fighter in history; why should they get wrapped around the axle trying to make it the perfect airplane?

  Once again, the school of Bigger-Higher-Faster-Farther had won.

  The Air Force was so busy fighting Boyd that it neglected to stay abreast of what the Navy was doing. A few weeks after the Ferguson meeting, the Navy announced that its version of the F-111—the F-111B—had turned out not to be carrier compatible and would not be accepted. The Navy told General Dynamics to cancel its F-111. Then Great Britain cancelled its order for the aircraft. This meant the Air Force was left holding the bag containing the expensive remains of the F-111 program. (The Air Force liked the airplane and continued buying it until the mid-1970s.) But that was not the half of it. Admirals testified to Congress that just because the Navy could not accept the F-111B, it did not mean the Navy could not continue to perform its vital role in national defense. In fact, they announced, the Navy had been secretly working on a plane called the F-14 Tomcat and if Congress would give the Navy the money already allocated for the F-111B, the Navy could go ahead and build the F-14.

  The Navy theory about interservice politics is that once the enemy is down, they should slash his throat, burn his remains, bury the ashes, then sow salt over the land where the ashes are buried. So not surprisingly, the Navy told Congress the F-X had a fundamental flaw, a flaw so serious that development should be stopped: the F-X could not reach the high speeds or high altitudes of the MiG-25 and thus could not shoot down the most serious threat presented by Soviet aircraft. But America should not worry. If the Air Force was unable to design an aircraft capable of meeting the Soviet threat, the Navy was glad to help out. This phantasmagorical aircraft we are developing, this F-14, will do everything and more than the F-X is supposed to do. We will be glad to sell the F-14 to the Air Force.