by Robert Coram
Boyd rarely had been happier than he was in those euphoric days after the war, when his old friends called to congratulate him. Boyd never mentioned his visits to Washington to see Cheney. The closest he ever came to revealing his involvement was after General Schwarzkopf held his famous press conference and revealed the audacious sweep around the western flank of the Iraqi Army, what he called a “Hail-Mary plan.” Boyd angrily disputed the phrase. “A ‘Hail-Mary plan’ implies desperation,” he told Spinney. “There was nothing desperate about that envelopment. It was planned that way.”
Boyd’s friends also took great delight in pointing out that his long-time criticisms of the B-1 Bomber were confirmed in the Gulf War. The full inventory of Air Force combat aircraft saw duty in the Gulf—except the B-1. The aircraft resurrected by President Reagan could not answer when summoned for war. Once again, Boyd had been right.
Boyd’s ebullience reached its peak when, on Monday, April 22, 1991, the House Armed Services Committee convened in the Rayburn House Office Building to conduct a hearing on the performance of high-technology equipment in Operation Desert Storm, and he was called to testify. Others testifying were former senator Gary Hart, who had been a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Military Reform Caucus; John Lehman, former secretary of the Navy; Don Hicks, the Pentagon’s under secretary of defense for research and engineering; and Pierre Sprey.
Chairman Les Aspin opened the hearing by saying that each of the panel members “shaped the forces, the doctrine, and the debate about our military structure that fought so successfully during Desert Storm.” Boyd wore a bright-orange polyester sport coat and madras pants, an outfit guaranteed to make him stand out among the dark suits in the hearing room. But it was his eloquence that marked the day. He opened calmly with passing references to maneuver warfare and high technology. But then he segued into praising two officers who made a major impact on the services by promoting maneuver warfare: Huba Wass de Czege and Colonel Mike Wyly. Only days earlier Wyly learned the Marine Corps was pushing him into early retirement. Boyd saw the Wyly affair as the Schwerpunkt of his appearance.
That day, when Boyd turned a hearing on high-tech weapons into a hearing on military personnel matters, was one of his finest. He said that despite the success of maneuver warfare in the Gulf War, the Marine Corps still had senior officers with the old attrition-war mind-set. Boyd’s eyes flashed and his chin jutted out in defiance. His eyes roamed the row of congressmen, lingering on each, singling out each one of them. His voice deepened. The Plum was back from retirement and holding center stage on behalf of a comrade, and he was never in better form. Boyd may have been sixty-four, but his personality had never been more magnetic, more commanding. His voice reached every corner of the hearing room, clear and dominating and insistent. He said he was “incensed and outraged” about what the Marine Corps had done to Mike Wyly. He told the congressmen if they did not act it would inhibit young Marine officers from proposing crucial new ideas and the Marine Corps would be ruled by “dinosaurs.” People are more important than budgets or hardware, he said, and while the officer selection process is deemed sacrosanct, there are nevertheless ways for Congress to become involved. He would be happy to tell Congress just what it should do. He said gifted renegades such as Wass de Czege and Wyly must be protected or “it is high diddle diddle right up the middle again and we are going to be in deep yogurt.”
Even though the other three men on the panel had held high public office and were skilled in debate, Boyd dominated the hearing. At the end of the day, nothing changed. But Boyd had defended Mike Wyly before the U.S. Congress, and when he walked out of the Capitol he was beaming.
His happiness soon passed. There was something far more serious with which he had to deal.
He was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.
The symptoms had been present for years, but Boyd had ignored them. He had not had a physical examination since 1975, when he retired from the Air Force. Now he was given five years to live.
He called the Acolytes and told them he had cancer, but he downplayed the prognosis. Only Pierre Sprey knew how tenaciously Boyd researched various treatments. Even though his brother Gerry strongly recommended surgery, Boyd rejected that option. He did not like the numbers: 50 percent of the survivors are incontinent. He told Mary Ellen that the idea of having no control of his bladder was anathema; “I won’t wear a bag,” he insisted. After leaning on the National Institutes of Health to reveal European clinical trial results that they preferred not to release, Boyd eventually elected to have radioactive pellets implanted in his prostate, a regimen then new in America.
In 1992, Jeff moved to Delray Beach. His earlier efforts at living with Scott and then with Mary Ellen failed. He could get along with neither. So he moved in with his parents and his sister Kathy. He slept on the floor in the living room. He wanted to bring his seven-foot Sri Lanka cobra, his forty tarantulas, the emerald tree boa, the canebrake rattlesnake, the timber rattler, and the tailless whip scorpion known as the vinegarroon, but Boyd said no. As a result, Jeff kept the vinegar-roon and the tarantulas in his car. He always parked in a shady place and came out regularly to feed the scorpion and the tarantulas and to talk with them. He remains angry today that Boyd would not let him bring his collection into the apartment.
During his last years, Boyd’s two great professional delights were the work of Chet Richards and a book being researched by Dr. Grant Hammond at the Air War College.
Richards was the mathematical whiz who came to the Pentagon in 1973, the man whom Christie assigned the job of finding a place for happy hour. Richards had reviewed all of Boyd’s briefings. He later went to work for Lockheed and began studying the fabled Toyota production system, which he found “frighteningly familiar” from his study of maneuver conflict. But the Toyota production system began in the 1950s, about two decades before Boyd began work on “Patterns of Conflict.” The underlying ideas of mutual trust, mission orders, and individual responsibility, and the concepts of “harmony” and “flow” and—most of all—the manipulation of time as a production tool were central ideas in both the Toyota system and the strategy of maneuver conflict.
About that time Tom Peters published Thriving on Chaos, a book that revolutionized management theories in America. Peters talked of creating and exploiting chaos—the essence of maneuver conflict—of shaping the marketplace and of mutual trust. Richards wrote Peters and said the book sounded very much like the theories of Boyd. Peters said he had read James Fallows’s book and knew Boyd’s work. He was embarrassed that he had not given Boyd credit, because his book had been shaped by Boyd’s ideas. He later wrote a newspaper column in which he corrected the oversight.
Richards and Boyd talked for years about applying Boyd’s ideas to business. But by 1993, when Boyd began his physical decline, Richards was beginning to lose interest. Boyd encouraged him to press on, to develop his ideas, and to write and publish papers on the subject. He saw this as an affirmation of the fact that his intellectual legacy encompassed more than war fighting; his ideas were universal, timeless, and could be applied to any form of conflict.
Richards found that lean production had the same impact on American business that maneuver conflict had on the U.S. military. While the idea became a much-talked-about fad in business, very few companies actually put it into practice. Because lean production depends on a certain cultural foundation, businesses, like the military, are reluctant to make the radical changes demanded by a full commitment to the doctrine. McDonnell Douglas, for instance, was like the U.S. Army. With much fanfare it adopted what it called “lean production.” But just as the Army stopped in the desert because it clung to the idea of synchronization, McDonnell Douglas could not shake the adherence to top-down management and centrally controlled production, and the company wound up selling itself to Boeing.
Richards found that a famous observation by Taiichi Ono, the Toyota vice president who created the Toyota system, held tr
ue: companies performing reasonably well will not adopt the Toyota system, although they may showcase isolated elements of lean production. Boyd put it more succinctly: “You can’t change big bureaucracies until they have a disaster.”
With Boyd’s encouragement, Richards wrote various articles applying Boyd’s theories to business. He developed a briefing on the same topic and began delivering it to major corporations. He went to Denmark and lectured at the Copenhagen Business School, where Professor Ole Stromgren teaches courses designed around Boyd’s work. Finally, Richards set up two Web sites (www.Belisarius.com and www.d-n-i.net) to showcase Boyd’s ideas and how they relate to business. (Belisarius, the Byzantine commander, was one of Boyd’s favorite generals and was an early practitioner of maneuver conflict; he always fought outnumbered, never lost a battle, and understood the moral dimension of war.)
By now Boyd must have wished he had listened to the admonitions of the Acolytes to transform his briefings into a written work. It is through a body of writing that a man such as Boyd is remembered. It is when academics pore over a man’s words and then write learned papers that his ideas find permanency. And that may be why Boyd was so enthusiastic about the book being researched by Grant Hammond.
In the beginning, Hammond saw the book as a biography. But that changed when Boyd issued his only caveat: no personal information is to be included in the book. Boyd did not want to talk about Erie, about his family, or about the personal dimensions of his marriage and his life. Hammond’s book The Mind of War was published in the spring of 2001. It is a study of Boyd’s ideas and is written for an academic audience or for an audience interested in military affairs.
By 1994, Boyd was experiencing such discomfort in his legs and hips that he wondered if the cancer had metastasized to his bones. He spent an hour or so every day rubbing his legs with Ben-Gay.
Mary Ellen gave him a black cat named Pudding Pie and Boyd spent hour after hour sitting in his favorite chair with the cat in his lap. Even though Pudding Pie was grown and had belonged to someone else, the cat was extraordinarily attentive to Boyd. Clearly it was “his.” He remained the indomitable John Boyd. He liked nothing better than calling Sprad out in Las Vegas, Ron Catton up in Spokane, Everett “Razz” Raspberry down in Fort Walton, and the Acolytes in Washington. Catton flew in to see Boyd and stayed several days, spending much of that time listening to the “full brief” of Boyd’s work, about fourteen hours.
One of the few times Mary, Jeff, or Kathy saw Boyd display any emotion was when he saw Legends of the Fall, a movie about the relationship of a father to his three sons. Boyd wept with such grief that his shoulders shook and he cried aloud. Kathy did not understand how he could be so emotional about a family on-screen when he was so oblivious to his own family.
It seemed to Boyd’s friends that he was winning his battle with cancer. But when he drove up to Erie to attend the 1995 reunion of his high school class from Strong Vincent, he was quiet and subdued. Before the reunion he found his way over to Lincoln Avenue and slowly drove up and down the street, looking at the neighborhood where he grew up. His car crept along in front of his old house. Then he went to the end of the street, looked out across the bay toward the Peninsula, then turned around and came back. Time after time he passed back and forth, almost as if he knew he would never see the house again. A vital part of Boyd’s visits to Erie had changed; Frank Pettinato was retired and living in Florida.
That night the class reunion was down at the Yacht Club, only a few yards from where he and Chet Reichert launched their canoe as boys to go over to the Peninsula and work as lifeguards. Boyd wore the madras pants and orange coat, but he did not tell of his exploits in a voice that could be heard across the room. He was quiet, often staring across the darkness of the bay toward the Peninsula. Even when a few of his old friends chided him about never making general, he smiled and shrugged. When Chet Reichert’s wife, Terry, said she heard that he had cancer but had defeated it, he looked away for a long moment. Then he moved closer and whispered, “It has come back.”
Boyd did not know it, but by then he also had colon cancer.
The summer of 1995 was the last time Boyd ever visited Erie. And 1995 was the last time he updated “Patterns of Conflict.” The pain in his legs was such that when he visited Mary Ellen in Washington, Ben-Gay and vitamin C and shark cartilage provided no relief. He was in constant pain. During the visit, Boyd asked Mary Ellen to drive him to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which, in all his years in Washington, he had never seen. There at “The Wall” he found the name of a friend who died early in the war and he wept.
The urologist whom Boyd had been seeing said he could do nothing more, that if Boyd wanted further treatment he should see another doctor. Boyd went to an oncologist in Palm Beach who was famous for prolonging the life of cancer patients. But there was nothing that could be done.
In 1995, as Boyd wrestled with what he now knew was a terminal illness, his firstborn son, Stephen, was diagnosed with melanoma. Mary was devastated. All she could think of were those long-ago days at Eglin when she spent so much time on the beach with her son. Stephen’s cancer was so virulent and so advanced that Boyd thought his son might die first. He wanted Stephen to be comfortable and talked of buying him a big car, a Cadillac perhaps, that could more easily accommodate his wheelchair.
When Boyd talked of dying, it was always with much bravado. When he died he wanted a Viking funeral, his body tied atop an old wooden boat and the boat towed into the middle of Lake Erie and set afire. He worried constantly about his books and his records and the early versions of his briefings and what would happen to them when he died. At times he sat and looked at his books and wept.
By late 1996 Boyd was spending most of his time in bed. He did not want to go to the hospital. He fell frequently and Jeff occasionally took him to a hospital in Palm Beach for radiation treatments. As they drove north on I-95, Boyd stared at people in nearby cars and said, “Look at all these people. They are well. They are healthy. And I’m dying.”
The skin of Boyd’s chest broke out in frightening lesions. Radiation caused uncontrollable diarrhea. He wore a catheter. Darkly, Jeff took some delight in all this. The man who had dominated his life, the man who always had to be in control, now had no control.
Once Kathy came into Boyd’s room and found him sitting in his chair, surrounded by his books and papers. Tears coursed down the folds of his face.
“What is it, Dad?” she asked.
“I won’t get to see my friends anymore,” he said. Uttering his thoughts made him weep aloud. His lips trembled as he said, “I won’t get to see Tom and Pierre and Ray and Chuck. I won’t get to see Mike and Jim. Not ever again.”
Kathy fought back her anger. Why didn’t her father say he would miss his family?
Almost as if he sensed what she was thinking, Boyd looked up and said, “I love you.”
“I know,” Kathy said. But she was even more angry. It was the first time her father had ever said that he loved her. And he waited until he knew he was dying. Why had he not told her years ago?
Now when the Acolytes called, Boyd was often too weak to come to the phone. He grew weaker and weaker and then, in late February 1997, entered the hospital. His family knew the end was near.
Jeff sat by his father’s bed during those last days. By now Boyd was so heavily sedated that only rarely was he conscious. Jeff was there the night his father suddenly began talking of Tom Christie and reliving the days when they had stolen a million dollars’ worth of computer time. Boyd drifted back into sleep. A few minutes later he called out “Pierre” and laughed and said, “Tiger, we hosed those bastards good.” Again he drifted off. Then he called out “Chuck” and laughed about calling Spinney in one night at midnight. “Because I’m a goddamn colonel and I say so,” he murmured. He called out for Leopold and Burton and Wyly. And Jeff realized his father was replaying his life, remembering one last time the comrades with whom he had fought the good fight. Jeff l
istened and waited for the name of someone in the family. But his brother Gerry was the only name Boyd mentioned. Gerry was not there; he refused to visit because he was angry that Boyd had rejected his advice about having surgery.
Mary called Tom Christie and told him the end was near. Christie sent out e-mails to Boyd’s friends. Sprey called Spinney and said, “We have to do something about John’s books and papers.”
“I know. I think they should go to one of the service schools.”
“The Marines?”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
Early the next morning Spinney sent an e-mail to Marine Corps Colonel G. I. Wilson, who forwarded it to Commandant Charles Krulak. Before noon, Krulak answered, “Let’s do it.”
By the next day, the top generals in the Marine Corps were planning not only how to handle a special collection of all Boyd’s papers, but also a John Boyd exhibit at the Marine Corps Research Center at Quantico.
The Acolytes called daily to check on Boyd. He could not talk. Mary told Spinney not to visit, so Spinney sat down and wrote Boyd a long letter. It was difficult because, unlike Christie or Leopold or Burton, he had a warm and loving childhood. He and his father were close, and he found it hard to articulate his feelings for Boyd without being disrespectful of his own father. But he wrote the letter.
Then Jim Burton called at a time when Boyd was strong enough to talk. Burton said, “You are the father I never had. You made my life richer than it ever could have been without you.” Burton is not a demonstrative man. But that night he said, “John, I love you.” And he and Boyd wept as they said good-bye to each other.
Boyd wanted his friends to remember him as the man who burned down hangars in Japan, the bigger-than-life Forty-Second Boyd, the Mad Major, the Ghetto Colonel who presided over happy hour in the Old Guard Room, “Genghis John” who hosed a dozen generals and whose cape jobs and hot platters and tube steaks were the stuff of legend. He did not want them to see a withered old man with a catheter running into a container under his bed.