The Dream Machine

by Richard Whittle

  Cheney quickly got a chance to test his theory. Bush had sent his first budget to Congress in February, and it was dead on arrival. With the Cold War thawing and the Soviet Union teetering on its foundations, the Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress wanted more cuts in defense spending than Bush proposed to meet the Gramm-Rudman deficit target. Bush sent his budget director to a “summit” with congressional leaders, and days after the Senate confirmed Cheney, a deal was struck. Bush agreed to take an additional $10 billion out of the $305.6 billion defense budget he’d proposed in February. He also pledged to cut Pentagon spending by more than $64 billion over the next five years. Figuring out what to cut was Cheney’s first task.

  * * *

  When the budget deal was announced on April 14, Spivey was in Jacksonville, Florida, where he had been manning the Bell Helicopter display at a Naval Helicopter Association meeting and talking up the tiltrotor for three days. He was getting ready to go home when he got a call in his hotel room from Harry Bendorf, the former Air Force general who ran Boeing Helicopter’s office in Washington. Spivey thought Bendorf sounded shaken. He’d just picked up some bad news from one of his contacts, Bendorf said. Cheney had decided to cut the defense budget by canceling some big programs. The Osprey was going to be one of them.

  Spivey couldn’t believe it. He told Bendorf his sources had to be wrong. Cancel it? Just when we’ve finally gotten it to fly? After spending two billion dollars on it? Cancel the Marine Corps’ top priority in aviation? Kill the next revolution in flight? Somebody must be pulling Bendorf ’s leg. Bendorf assured Spivey it was true, though not yet official. Cheney’s mind was made up, Bendorf was hearing.

  Spivey’s mind was racing when he got off the phone. Was there some way to stop this? What was Cheney thinking? Weren’t the Marines telling him how important the Osprey was to them? Had anyone explained to Cheney how important the tiltrotor was to civilian aviation? Didn’t he understand that the tiltrotor was a national asset? Who in the world had talked Cheney into this?

  The answer was Pentagon bureaucrat David Chu, the tall, slender, cerebral economist who ran the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, PA&E, whose by-the-numbers, dollars-and-cents assessments could torpedo an expensive procurement. Chu had a lot of clout, partly because he had a lot of experience. Civilian leaders in the Pentagon are by and large political appointees who stay a couple of years. Chu had come to PA&E as its director from the Congressional Budget Office in May 1981, kept the job through the Reagan administration, seen his title elevated to Assistant Secretary of Defense for Program Analysis and Evaluation in 1988, and been asked to stay when President Bush took office in 1989. Chu liked it in the Pentagon, where everyone called him “Dr. Chu.”

  The son of a Chinese immigrant and his American-born wife, Chu had graduated magna cum laude from Yale University in 1964 with a degree in economics and mathematics. He began work on a doctorate in economics, but as an undergraduate he had joined the ROTC and owed the Army two years of service. He reported for duty in 1968. As a first lieutenant, he became an instructor in the dry art of getting supplies and equipment from one place to another, then went to Vietnam as a member of a logistics team. When he got out of the Army in 1970, he finished his Ph.D. and gravitated toward government service.

  David S. C. Chu’s middle initials stood for nothing in English. His parents had derived “S.C.” from Chinese characters associated with an aphorism attributed to the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius. “The superior man has nine things which are subjects with him of thoughtful consideration,” Confucius said. “In regard to the use of his eyes, he is anxious to see clearly. In regard to the use of his ears, he is anxious to hear distinctly. In regard to his countenance, he is anxious that it should be benign. In regard to his speech, he is anxious that it should be sincere. In regard to his doing of business, he is anxious that it should be reverently careful. In regard to what he doubts about, he is anxious to question others. When he is angry, he thinks of the difficulties his anger may involve him in. When he sees gain to be got, he thinks of righteousness.” Chu’s parents got “S.C.” by translating the Chinese for “thinking nine times,” and their son lived up to his initials. In Pentagon meetings, where PA&E’s decisions and Chu himself often were strongly attacked, his countenance remained benign, his speech sincere. He was careful with his words. With his short, black hair, a thin face that narrowed to a V, his sonorous bass voice, and his unemotional manner, Chu evoked the Star Trek character Spock, the half-Vulcan, half-human executive officer of the starship Enterprise, who saw every situation through the cold prism of logic. Chu tried to look at issues logically, by thinking nine times, so to speak.

  Chu had thought at least nine times about the Osprey before Cheney took over the Pentagon. Chu’s opinion hadn’t changed since 1983, when he told the Marines they might be better off buying a mix of Sikorsky Aircraft’s UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters rather than investing the time and money it would take to develop a tiltrotor to replace their CH-46 helicopters. John Lehman and the Marines had brushed Chu’s argument aside. In 1986, when the Osprey needed Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council approval to go into Full Scale Development, Chu tried to stop it again. Lehman and the Marines won that debate, too. “Lehman made a command decision that he was intrigued by this technology, thought it was revolutionary in character,” Chu told me. “The sincere difference of view is, we couldn’t see the revolution. We, the analytic community, couldn’t see what the payoff was to this investment.” Chu didn’t have anything against the tiltrotor, he just thought it too rich for the Marine Corps’ blood. He also didn’t buy the idea that the tiltrotor was going to revolutionize civilian aviation but had to be developed by the military first. Chu believed in the wisdom of the free market. If the tiltrotor was that desirable for civil aviation, why wasn’t the private sector developing it already, he wondered? If the Defense Department needed to pay to develop the Osprey, that was a strong signal that the tiltrotor must not really be all that attractive economically. To Chu, this was simply logic.

  When Cheney arrived at the Pentagon, he asked Chu for a list of programs he might scrap to squeeze $10 billion out of the budget. The Osprey was automatically on Chu’s list, and it was one of nine major procurement programs Cheney decided to kill. The Army’s AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, the Navy’s F-14D Tomcat fighter jet, one of its SSN-688 attack submarines, and the Air Force’s F-15 Eagle fighter were among the others. A lot of members of Congress were going to be unhappy, Cheney knew, but the president had told him to cut the defense budget, and the president was paid to lead. Sometimes having a confrontation with the Congress was the right way to go.

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  U.S. Representative Curt Weldon, whose 7th District of Pennsylvania included a slice of Boeing’s sprawling helicopter plant at Ridley Park, relished confrontation. It got his adrenaline flowing. Unlike David Chu, Weldon believed logic didn’t matter in a political battle. Votes did. To get votes, you had to rally people to your cause. At times, you had to form coalitions. Every chance you got, you had to attract attention to your issue. Confrontation, coalition building, and attracting attention were second nature to Weldon, who had grown up the youngest of nine kids in a textile worker’s family. They lived in company housing, squeezed into a small brick row home like dozens around it, in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania.

  Weldon’s congressional district was a swatch of gritty industrial suburbs just south of Philadelphia. Marcus Hook was one of the grittiest, a tiny borough dominated by a chemical plant and two oil refineries whose tank farms crowded the bank of the Delaware River. The population of Marcus Hook, like the rest of the 7th District, was mostly white, working class, solidly Republican, and patriotic. Each of Weldon’s six brothers went into the military after high school, and his two sisters married military men. A good student, Curt won an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy as a high school senior but failed his eye exam. He went to nearby West Ches
ter State College instead, returned home in 1969 with a degree in humanities, and became a schoolteacher. Like his father and all his brothers, Curt also became a volunteer firefighter. Fires were a constant hazard in an oil refinery town like Marcus Hook, and Weldon was passionate about fighting them. In his spare time, as he and his wife began raising the first of their five children, Weldon earned a degree in fire sciences technology from Delaware County College and began speaking at national firefighter conferences around the country. He also went into politics.

  Curt Weldon got elected mayor of Marcus Hook in 1977, in part by promising to take on the Pagans Motorcycle Club, a biker gang that had been terrorizing the borough. Marcus Hook was the gang’s national headquarters—Weldon had grown up with their president—and the bikers acted as if they owned the town. Weldon didn’t look tough. He slicked down his longish brown hair and wore muttonchop sideburns that crept below his ears like moss on an oak root. The dark frames of his glasses looked heavy enough to break his nose. Weldon sizzled with energy, though, and he didn’t mind a fight. As mayor, he had the town police put the Pagans under twenty-four-hour surveillance. That cramped the gang’s style. State and federal investigations of drug deals and murders by members of the Pagans followed and the club left Marcus Hook. Weldon boosted his popularity by obtaining a $90,000 federal grant to install night lights at the town’s ball fields, literally creating a bright spot for a community depressed by industrial decline and layoffs. He was reelected mayor two times, served a term on the Delaware County Council, then won his seat in Congress.

  When Weldon heard Cheney was going to cancel the Osprey, possibly costing hundreds and maybe thousands of his constituents their jobs, there was no doubt in his mind what he was going to do. On April 18, 1989, three days after newspaper reports confirmed Cheney’s plan, Weldon sent the defense secretary a letter declaring his “adamant opposition to the rumored elimination of the V-22 Osprey.” Weldon vowed to “vehemently oppose” such a move.

  But how? As a junior member of the minority party in a House whose 260 Democrats could steamroll its 175 Republicans any time, Weldon had no power. He knew how to build a coalition, though. Weldon had proved he could do that his first year in Congress, when he organized the Congressional Fire Services Caucus, an idea that came to him as he looked for a way to gain some influence. There were volunteer firefighters in every congressional district in the nation. By leading a caucus focused on issues dear to those firefighters’ hearts as well as his own, Weldon would have a way to connect with every member of the House and Senate, and even influence some. Through Mason Lankford, a volunteer firefighter from Texas he met at a conference, Weldon even got House Speaker Jim Wright, Fort Worth’s congressman and the most powerful member of the House, to join his caucus. A Democratic House Speaker had no reason to pay any mind to a freshman Republican like Weldon, but with Lankford’s introduction, Wright not only joined Weldon’s fire caucus but helped kick it off at a news conference. The first time they talked, Weldon pointed out to the Speaker that his district, like Wright’s, was home to one of the plants that was building the Osprey. Great program, they agreed.

  * * *

  By the time Cheney decided to cancel the Osprey two years later, Jim Wright was no longer so powerful. Representative Newt Gingrich, a right-wing Republican firebrand from Georgia as audacious as he was ambitious, had been pursuing ethics charges against the Democratic Speaker of the House for months. On April 17, 1989, a couple of days after Cheney decided to take David Chu’s advice on the Osprey, the House Ethics Committee’s three Democrats and three Republicans unanimously concluded there was “reason to believe” Wright had committed sixty-nine violations of House rules in his personal finances. The Speaker—Bell Helicopter’s congressman and one of the tiltrotor’s most important supporters in Congress—was now going to be too busy trying to save himself to save the Osprey. Others would have to try to do that.

  On April 19, Republican senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Democrat John Glenn of Ohio fired a first shot across Cheney’s bow. Glenn, best known as a former astronaut, was a former Marine pilot who had flown the XV-15 tiltrotor demonstrator in 1986. He and Stevens took the unusual step of offering a freestanding resolution in the Senate urging the Bush administration to fully fund the V-22. In a nearly empty chamber, the resolution was adopted by voice vote.

  Six days later, Cheney came before the 52-member House Armed Services Committee for the first time to defend the new budget and his decision to kill nine major procurement programs. In those days, Cheney didn’t suffer from the aloof, grim, even sinister public image he acquired after he got rich in the 1990s running Texas-based oil services giant Halli-burton Company and in 2001 became vice president. Cheney had been a popular, if highly partisan, member of the House, rarely sunny but courteous, accessible, and often wry. At the House hearing that April 25, the Democratic chairman, Les Aspin of Wisconsin, greeted Cheney warmly. Other members praised him as they got their customary five minutes to ask questions. A surprising number also peppered Cheney with complaints about his decision to cancel the Osprey. Weldon was one of a half dozen members who took Cheney to task for the decision.

  Cheney had known he would face resistance in Congress to the defense cuts he was proposing. “My former colleagues have been great,” he said in an opening statement. “I have heard from a lot of them in the last couple of weeks, all of them interested in making certain that I don’t close their base, or cut their weapons system, or cancel a program that they believe is absolutely essential to national defense.” Cheney also knew the Marines and their allies were especially unhappy about the Osprey. He had heard a lot about that particular decision, Cheney said, “and I now know for certain that nobody ever leaves the Marine Corps.” He stood his ground, if defensively. “I want to assure everybody that I have no designs upon the Marine Corps whatsoever,” Cheney volunteered, answering an accusation no one had made. The tiltrotor was “an interesting concept” and “probably a good aircraft,” but it was being built for a “very narrow mission”—amphibious assault—and helicopters were a good and cheaper way to do that. If the Army were still interested in the Osprey, Cheney volunteered, that might make it affordable, but the Army wasn’t. “I would like to be able to preserve it,” he said, but with orders to cut $10 billion in defense spending, “I don’t know how we shoehorn it in.”

  When Cheney left, he and his aides were a little surprised by how many Osprey questions he’d gotten, but they didn’t think they were in for a big battle on the issue. They were wrong.

  * * *

  Three days after Cheney testified, the Bell-Boeing Joint Program Office sent a letter to the Naval Air Systems Command declaring that “with great reluctance” the companies would stop work on the Osprey in one week. The letter didn’t say so, but if the Defense Department wasn’t going to produce the Osprey, as Cheney had decided, the companies didn’t want to pour more money into developing it. Their cost overruns were mounting and profits on future production model Ospreys were their only hope of getting their money back. If there weren’t going to be any production models, there would be no profits.

  A week later, the companies withdrew the threat. A Washington law firm had studied the FSD contract for them and concluded it was airtight. If Bell and Boeing walked away from it, the government could make them pay back the money they’d already been paid for FSD. Besides, the Osprey’s friends in Congress were telling them to hang on. Cheney or no Cheney, the Marines wanted the Osprey badly, and the Marines were good at getting their way in Congress. No service was better at that.

  The Marines already had a strategy. They would do for the Osprey’s friends in Congress what Charlie Wilson and the CIA had done for the Afghan rebels: arm them covertly, in this case with the weapons and ammunition of Washington policy battles—information and intelligence. It was a strategy all the armed services used from time to time, but over their history, the Marines had been forced to turn to it more often than the other ser
vices—at times to preserve their very existence. That was one reason they were so good at it. Another was the Marine Corps’ popularity in Congress, most of whose members admired the elite service and not a few of whose members had served in it. “Once a Marine, always a Marine,” the saying went, and in 1989, there were two dozen or so Marine Corps vets in Congress. Every month or so, Marine Corps liaison officers would organize a breakfast on the Hill where the commandant or another top general would meet with members of Congress and aides who had been Marines to talk about the Corps’ needs. After Cheney’s decision, the Osprey was often a major topic of those closed-door talks.

  Marine Corps leaders would have to be careful, though. The secretary of defense sets policy for the Pentagon, and military leaders can’t officially oppose him. Once the secretary declares a policy, top generals and admirals are expected to salute and support it, no matter how much it irks them. Cheney signaled his first week in office that he was going to demand that kind of loyalty. At his first news conference, he sent a shock wave through the Pentagon by openly rebuking the Air Force chief of staff, General Larry D. Welch, for trying to work out a deal with members of Congress on plans for basing nuclear missiles. Welch was “freelancing,” Cheney said at his news conference, and what the general had done was “inappropriate.” Cheney was going to see Welch in his office to personally express his displeasure with him, he announced. For a four-star general in charge of an entire armed service, it was an extraordinary humiliation.

  Marine Corps leaders didn’t want to risk the Welch treatment, but there were ways to avoid it. The Senate has to confirm top military officers in their assignments, and at confirmation hearings, generals and admirals are always required to promise under oath that, when asked, they will give Congress their personal views on military issues, even if they differ with their civilian bosses. This was why, when he was asked about the Osprey on May 4, 1989, in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Alfred M. Gray, Jr., the commandant, responded in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Roman god Janus, the double-headed guardian who faced two ways at once.