The Dream Machine

by Richard Whittle

  “Marketing is the concept of exploring for needs and developing a response for that,” offered Phil Norwine, a former Navy helicopter pilot who spent thirty-five years marketing for Bell and at one time was Dick Spivey’s boss. “You have to find the needs or develop the needs or develop a response that they [the military] haven’t thought about.” Nor-wine liked to start with the lower ranks in the field and then work his way up through captains, majors, then lieutenant colonels in command of squadrons, asking them what they needed in a new aircraft or modifications to old ones. Then he would use that information. “You want to work at the lower level and find out what the troops really want, then you tell the general,” Norwine explained. Ideally, he added, when you brief a colonel or a general, “you come in with an idea that you know he needs, an idea that would get him a promotion.” Starting at the lower levels also has another advantage, Norwine said: “A guy that might be a major this year in a few years might be a general.”

  Along the way, the marketers brief members of Congress and their aides—especially the staffs of the committees that write the defense budget. The goal is to be able to tell that colonel or general, when the timing is right, that if he’s interested in this new aircraft, there’s support for it in Congress, which has to provide the money. By the time the Pentagon solicits bids for a contract to actually build the thing, the company hopes its concept is already the favorite. The job of the sales engineers and applications engineers was to scheme and plot and travel together to reach that goal.

  The new job was a challenge, though Spivey felt he had the right personality for it. He made friends easily. He was a good talker. Better yet, he was a good listener. He already knew how to give an engineering briefing, and Ted Hoffman taught him a lot about how to boil things down so he could brief a busy military officer or bureaucrat in the least possible time. Never put more than three bullets on a chart. Keep the number of words on your Vu-Graph slides—PowerPoint didn’t exist back then—to a minimum. No sentences, just a few phrases to remind you what you want to say. Use as many pictures as possible; they’ll remember pictures, they won’t remember words. Tell them what they’re looking at in the pictures. Keep It Simple Stupid. And prepare an “elevator briefing,” a pitch you can make between the first and third floors. If you see a guy you want to reach in a Pentagon hallway, know the one most important thing you’re going to tell him before he gets away.

  Spivey knew Bell’s products and could explain them, but he had a lot to learn about The Customer. As a Georgia Tech student, he’d been in Air Force ROTC, but he hadn’t served in the military. The Vietnam War was escalating when he graduated, but Bell got him a draft deferment as an essential defense industry employee. What he knew about the military he’d learned on the job. Now he spent a lot of time reading Aviation Week, Sea Power, Army Times, Proceedings and other military journals to learn what the services were buying, what aircraft and weapons they might want in the future, how military strategy and tactics were changing, what Congress was doing to the defense budget. He got the applications engineers—there was at least one for each arm of the military—to tutor him in how the services were organized, what weapons they had, and how they used them, especially aircraft. He turned his thoughts from gauging the air pressure distribution on airfoils to learning who was who in the intricate bureaucracy of the military “systems commands,” which handled research and development contracts.

  The biggest change in Spivey’s life came in how much he traveled. His wife, Jan, wasn’t thrilled with that. She was left at home with their two young sons. Brett was three when Spivey became a marketer, and Eric was born that same year. As an engineer, Spivey had made one or two trips a year to wind tunnels in California or on Long Island and maybe to a convention or two, but mostly he’d been home at night. Now he was on the road two or three times a month for several days, flying up to Washington, to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, or to the Army aviation command in St. Louis. Applications engineers arranged to get him onto Army and Marine Corps bases to meet people and observe military exercises. They got him out on Navy aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships used by the Marines. Spivey loved that stuff. He was fascinated by the technology, especially out on the ships, and seeing the military use it was a thrill.

  Then there were the big aerospace trade fairs, the Paris Air Show in odd-numbered years and the Farnborough International Airshow near London in even-numbered ones. Those were a must for aircraft manufacturers and their marketers. The shows were a chance to show off products to a lot of top people in a week’s time. Bell and other companies always put their aircraft on display, stationed marketers at indoor booths offering brochures and briefings, and set up temporary two-story “cha-lets” along the flight line with outside decks. They stocked their chalets with fine wines and first-class chefs. This allowed their guests—generals and admirals from nearly every military in the world, U.S. congressmen and senators, Arab kings and other potentates—to dine and drink in comfort while they watched the companies’ aircraft perform eye-popping aerobatic displays.

  One of Spivey’s most memorable trips abroad, though, was to Iran when it was ruled by the pro-American dictator Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. At the 1971 Paris Air Show, the Shah’s deputy minister of war for armaments, Lieutenant General Hassan Toufanian, visited Bell’s chalet and chatted up some of Bell’s top executives about buying their helicopters for Iran’s military. In August 1972, Spivey was among a team of forty engineers, marketers, test pilots, and executives who went to Iran to demonstrate the HueyCobra and another Huey-derivative called the 214 Super Huey. Spivey had worked for three years as a top engineer on the 214, which Bell hoped to sell the U.S. Army as it retired its older Hueys. But by the time the 214 was flying in 1971, the Army had decided to hold a competition for a new helicopter to replace the Huey.

  The Bell team worked months to get ready for the trip. Toufanian had promised Bell’s new president, Jim Atkins, that if his helicopters did well in Iran’s hot climate, the Shah would buy a lot of them. For four weeks, the Bell team’s test pilots and top Iranian officials flew the 214 and a Cobra in Iran’s broiling deserts, the thin air of its mountains, and off Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf. One day an Iranian army two-star, Major General Manuchehr Khosrowdad, flew a 214 out in the desert and shot up a series of targets with the gunship. Spivey was there when Khosrowdad came back from his flight and swaggered into a bar in the hotel where the Bell team was staying. “He was so elated he took his gun out of his holster and threw it down the bar—a loaded gun—threw it down the bar and hollered, ‘Bartender, I’m buying drinks for all these sons of bitches,’ ” Spivey recalled. “That fuckin’ gun was rollin’ down the bar. Scared the shit out of me, you know? And he was just like he was a fifth-grader.”

  When the Bell team got back to Texas in September, the Shah had ordered 287 Super Hueys and 202 Cobras—a deal Fort Worth’s increasingly powerful congressman, Jim Wright, would announce in December—and Spivey had gone bald. “I went from a full head of hair to what I’ve got the year that I went to Iran,” Spivey said, gently rubbing the pink skin on top of his head where red hair once grew. “I don’t know how, but it happened in a year. Just, poof!” Not long after he got back to Fort Worth, he bought a cheap red wig, just as a lark, and wore it to the office one day. The hair was dark red and shaped like a pageboy haircut, the Prince Valiant look. Most of his colleagues smirked or even laughed at it. Bart Kelley, though, who was also bald, said, “Dick, if I were young again, I would do the same thing.” Spivey revered Kelley. If the vice president for engineering thought the wig was okay, that made it cool. For years afterward, Spivey wore a red wig all the time. He bought a new one now and then as styles changed and because, like hats, the wigs made his head perspire. They got pretty sticky and stinky after a while. People got used to Spivey’s wigs, but friends wished Dick would just learn to live with being bald.

  On Thanksgiving Day after his return from Iran, while h
e and Jan and their boys were visiting her parents in Houston, Spivey got a call from Phil Norwine wanting to know how soon he could come back to Fort Worth. He was needed for an important new project, Norwine said. In 1968, Bell’s second XV-3 tiltrotor had been destroyed when both wingtip pylons simply blew off during a wind tunnel test at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. The cause proved to be a fatigue crack and some loose rivets in the left wing. Since then, as Spivey knew, a tiny team of engineers under Ken Wernicke had been designing a new experimental tiltrotor. Spivey had helped design its fuselage and rotor before he left engineering. The previous year, tiltrotor guru Bob Lichten had been killed when his car went off the road while he drove home from a Texas Civil Liberties Union meeting in Austin. Troy Gaffey and others on Wernicke’s team had feared Bell might drop its tiltrotor research after Lichten’s death, but NASA’s interest had actually increased in the past year. The agency had opened a tiltrotor project of its own and, in a joint program with the Army, was going to offer a contract to build two tiltrotors to the company that submitted the best design. Boeing Vertol, the helicopter division of Boeing Company, was the competition. Spivey was wanted to help write Bell’s proposal. If Bell won the deal, Norwine added, Spivey would become Bell’s chief tiltrotor marketer.

  Spivey liked that idea. He liked it a lot. He thought about the tiltrotor all the time. He thought it was a dream machine. He thought it was Bell’s future. Now it looked like it could be his, too.

  * * *

  Bell won NASA’s tiltrotor design competition, beating out Boeing Vertol, which had built a tilt-wing aircraft once but never a tiltrotor. In 1973, NASA and the Army gave Bell a $26,415,000 contract to build two copies of the sleek little two-seat tiltrotor the company had designed, which except for its rotors looked a lot like an executive jet. NASA designated it the XV-15. Spivey and Bell’s tiltrotor engineers were elated. Now Bell was going to build an aircraft that would prove the tiltrotor wasn’t just a pipe dream, another convertiplane that looked good on paper but was bad in the air. Everyone knew, though, that this was just a small first step toward establishing the tiltrotor as a new way to fly, and thus as a lucrative new product for Bell. If the tiltrotor was going to catch on, Bell needed to sell one of some sort to the military, a customer willing to take risks on new technology, a source of “patient capital.”

  From now on, Spivey’s job was to promote the tiltrotor concept and try to get Bell a production contract with the military. For quite a while, though, he and his marketing colleagues were slowed by the fact that they didn’t have a real tiltrotor to show. It took Bell four years to get the XV-15 flying. Engineers had to wrestle through some tough manufacturing problems and conduct hundreds of hours of wind tunnel and other tests on models and parts before they could build the XV-15. In the meantime, Spivey and others on Bell’s military marketing team tried to get the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps interested in tiltrotors, too.

  Spivey flew to Washington two or three times a month in those years, sometimes with one of Bell’s “applications engineers,” to talk tiltrotor in the Pentagon, often in a trio with Bell’s XV-15 program manager, Tommy H. Thomason, and Rodney Wernicke, who like his twin brother Ken was a tiltrotor engineer. Spivey and his traveling companions went to every military base and Navy ship they could get aboard. They went to Capitol Hill regularly to see congressional aides and members. They attended American Helicopter Society meetings to give tiltrotor briefings. They went to the annual Washington conventions of the major nonprofit groups that back the armed forces—the Association of the United States Army, the Air Force Association, the Navy League, and the Marine Corps Association. They gave hundreds of briefings and answered thousands of questions. The idea they tried to pound home most, though, was simple: a tiltrotor would take off and land like a helicopter but fly twice as fast and at least twice as far. Twice as fast and twice as far. Twice as fast and twice as far.

  Until the XV-15 was in the air, all they could show people were artist conceptions of other tiltrotors Bell’s engineers had conceived, or illustrations of how, in theory, tiltrotors might perform old or new military missions. The idea, consequently, was slow to gain traction in the Pentagon. Shortly after NASA and the Army gave Bell its XV-15 contract, the company offered the Navy two for the bargain price of $15 million as antisubmarine warfare planes. Even at that price, the admirals didn’t bite. The Navy’s pride were its big-deck aircraft carriers, symbols of American power that presidents had used for decades as intimidating diplomatic tools and potent weapons of war. The carrier faction wasn’t much interested in small little aircraft that didn’t need big decks to land and take off.

  The Air Force wasn’t much interested, either. Its priorities were its jet fighters and strategic bombers, though some in the Air Force showed strong interest in the idea of using tiltrotors to rescue pilots downed behind enemy lines or at sea. Marine Corps officers Spivey talked to often were intrigued, but their service had the smallest aviation budget of all. Nor was it clear what they would do with a tiltrotor as small as the XV-15, though Spivey offered the idea of a tiltrotor gunship that size.

  Spivey quickly learned that selling a dream, no matter how much you believed in it, was a lot like being a missionary. You had to make one convert at a time, and you had to have a lot of faith. The more Spivey preached the tiltrotor gospel, the more faith and fervor he put into his mission, the more his own faith in the dream machine grew.

  Virginia Copeland, who became his assistant twenty years later, joined Bell’s marketing department in 1974. The XV-15 wouldn’t fly for another three years, and hanging over Spivey’s desk from a string attached to the ceiling was a model of it someone had hung to rib him. If you turned a floor fan on and aimed it up, you could make the little model sway in the air. Every now and then, Spivey would call out, “Come on, look at this! Someday that thing is going to fly! Someday you’re going to see that in the air!” Spivey’s enthusiasm wasn’t limited to the XV-15. “If it tilted its rotor, he loved it,” Copeland thought. Spivey really believed tiltrotors were going to change the world. “He couldn’t figure out why everybody else couldn’t see this,” she said, and he was determined to make them. “He took the time to figure out who needed to know, and then he went and sought them out and convinced them that his dream was right,” Copeland said, obviously exaggerating his success. Before he went, “He would spend hours making a briefing zing. He’d make it so it’d catch the eye, and put as much pizzazz as he could into it.”

  Those were the days before e-mail or even faxes. If you wanted someone to see something, you had to go show it to them, so Spivey was on the road a lot. All the time, or so it seemed to his wife, Jan. For a few years, she endured Dick’s absences, but they wore on their marriage. More and more, she thought Dick was married to his job, and mainly in love with the tiltrotor. She and Dick were less and less happy when they were together. Spivey began to think about divorce, though he’d been raised to regard it as wrong. Even thinking about it felt like going against God. After a while, though, he had to admit to himself that his passion for Jan had faded away. They separated in February 1978. Their divorce became final in July.

  Spivey’s only passion now was the tiltrotor.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE CUSTOMER

  Each November 10, wherever two or more Marines are together, they buy, bake, or requisition a cake to enact a ritual instituted in 1921 by one of the Marine Corps’ most revered commandants, John A. Lejeune. The rite is performed around the world at gala Marine Corps Birthday Balls, where officers and enlisted Marines wear elegant, dark blue dress uniforms. Marines clad in jungle or desert camouflage also carry it out more simply wherever they find themselves: aboard an amphibious assault ship off the African coast, behind sandbag and concrete walls at a forward operating base in Iraq, in a lonely observation post overlooking Korea’s demilitarized zone. At its most formal, the ritual unfolds this way: The highest-ranking Marine present cuts a piece of the cake using
a Mameluke sword, a ceremonial blade with cross hilt and ivory grip modeled on weapons used by Ottoman warriors. The sword is a remembrance of victories the Marines won in 1804 against the Barbary pirates on the north coast of Africa, commemorated in the famous line in the Marine Corps Hymn “to the shores of Tripoli.” The first piece of cake cut with the sword goes to the guest of honor. The host then cuts a second piece and gives it to the oldest Marine present, often a retiree, whose name, age, and date of enlistment are read out by a narrator. There is no such thing as an “ex-Marine,” they say: “Once a Marine, always a Marine.” The oldest Marine, sometimes infirm and in a wheelchair, passes the cake to the youngest Marine present, usually a private just out of basic training. The youngest Marine’s name, age, and date of enlistment are read out, eliciting howls from the old veterans in the crowd. The passing of the cake symbolizes the “passing of experience and knowledge from the old to the young of our Corps,” explains the narrator in a standard cake-cutting script. Now a third piece is cut and given to the oldest Marine, “further emphasizing the fact that we care for our young Marines before we look to our own needs.” The narrator pauses, then adds, “And so it must be.”

  The annual Marine Corps Birthday Ball in Washington is conducted with all the pomp of a royal wedding, hosted by the commandant and featuring the president of the United States as guest of honor some years. Bugles sound as the commandant and his guest lead a stately processional. The Marine Band plays “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “The Marines’ Hymn” as four Marines ceremoniously roll in the birthday cake. All stand reverently as an adjutant reads General Lejeune’s birthday message of 1921. Then the cake is cut.