The Dream Machine

by Richard Whittle

  First Gray called the Osprey “a national resource and a national requirement” with “enormous commercial potential” and “enormous potential” for the Marines. Then he said: “I support the president and the secretary of defense’s decision” to cancel it. Then Gray said that “based on the information he was given,” Cheney’s had been “a good decision.” Then he said: “I do not agree with the cost advice that he got, nor do I agree with the advice on military operations.”

  Sam Nunn, the committee chairman, tried to interpret: “You believe Secretary Cheney made the best decision he could make based on faulty information. Am I hearing you correct on that?”

  Gray wouldn’t go that far. “No,” he said, “based on the information he was given by learned people who have their right to believe that they are correct.”

  “But you do not believe they were correct?” Nunn asked.

  “No, I do not,” Gray finally conceded. “But I had my day in court.”

  This was how a service chief could deftly dance the line between insurbordination and his desire to thwart a defense secretary’s decision.

  * * *

  Cheney and his top aides couldn’t complain about the commandant testifying as Gray had, but they didn’t take kindly to it when they caught other Marine officers talking as if the Osprey were going to survive. A week after Gray’s testimony, Brigadier General Harry Blot, the Osprey program manager, spoke at a conference on the civilian potential of the tiltrotor held by Rotor & Wing International magazine in Crystal City. On May 15, the New York Times published an article about the conference under the headline “Copter-Plane Called a Cure for Crowded Airports.” Buried amid praise for the tiltrotor from officials of NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration was this paragraph: “A helicopter has only one-fourth the range and can be heard four times as far away as a tilt-rotor aircraft, said Brig. Gen. Harry Blot of the Marine Corps, who is managing the military’s program to develop a tilt-rotor aircraft. He said he was optimistic about the $28 billion program to build 682 craft, labeled V-22 Ospreys, even though Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has said he will cancel it Oct. 1 to save money.”

  The article appeared on a Monday. A few days later, Blot was confronted by one of Cheney’s aides, Air Force Brigadier General Buster Glosson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs. Glosson scolded Blot for contradicting Cheney in public.

  “What’s your objective by trying to create a confrontation with the secretary of defense in the news media?” Glosson demanded. Blot should show some loyalty to the secretary, Glosson counseled.

  Blot said he knew the meaning of loyalty, “But I cannot lie. I’m not going to lie.” Years later, Blot also remembered Glosson telling him he’d better not comment publicly on the Osprey again. Glosson told me he never said that.

  In any event, when they parted, Blot got on the phone to the deputy chief of staff for aviation, Lieutenant General Charles “Chuck” Pitman, and told him Cheney’s people were trying to muzzle him. That afternoon, as Blot remembered it, he got a call from Cheney’s office telling him the Senate Armed Services Committee staff wanted Blot and PA&E head David Chu to brief them on the Osprey the next Monday at 8 a.m. Blot later heard that someone at Headquarters Marine Corps instigated the invitation. What better way to get the Marine Corps view on the Osprey to the committee than for Blot, a combat pilot and a general, to debate Chu, a bureaucratic numbers cruncher?

  Blot went home that evening and told his wife, “This is it. We’re done. Come the end of Monday, my career is finished, because I’m going to say what I’ve said all along and they’re going to say the opposite.”

  Two decades after the fact, and after dozens of such sessions with congressional aides over the years, Chu couldn’t remember doing such a briefing with Blot. For Blot, the memory was vivid. “We got in there and it was brutal,” he told me. “Instead of the normal seats, they had three hard-backed chairs sitting out there,” one for Blot, one for Chu, one for another Pentagon official responsible for tactical aircraft. The committee staff questioned them for more than an hour. Blot remembered contradicting nearly everything Chu said.

  Blot went back to his office in a psychological cringe, sure he would pay for the things he had said in the briefing. Cheney would hear about Blot’s defense of the Osprey, he figured, and give him some version of the Welch treatment. Chuck Pitman, however, the three-star general running Marine aviation, had a plan to avoid that: out of sight, out of mind. Within days, Blot got orders to report to the Marine Corps air station at Cherry Point, North Carolina, for six weeks of refresher training in Harrier jump jets. When he returned to Washington that summer, Blot immediately got orders to spend another six weeks at Whiting Field Naval Air Station in Florida to hone his helicopter piloting skills. After that, in December 1989, Blot was ordered to California to serve as assistant commander of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, based near San Diego. The Osprey program got a new manager: Colonel Jim Schaefer, who in 1980, as a major, had piloted the helicopter that caused the disaster at Desert One in Iran. Schaefer had been advocating the tiltrotor ever since.

  * * *

  Dick Spivey had been in the gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives before, but never for such a momentous event. On May 31, 1989, a Wednesday, Spivey sat there transfixed, with Bell lobbyist George Troutman and a couple of other colleagues, as they watched House Speaker Jim Wright—their company’s most important ally in Congress, and one of Troutman’s best friends for three decades—surrender to his enemies. Wright would resign as Speaker the next week, he announced, and by the end of June give up the House seat he had held for thirty-four years. Speaking from the well of the chamber for an hour, Wright was defiant at times, apologetic at others, sometimes nostalgic. He didn’t cry, but he looked as if he wanted to, Spivey thought. Spivey and Troutman wanted to cry themselves. They felt for their friend. They also worried about what would happen to the Osprey with Wright out of the picture. Only weeks ago, even with his own career in its death throes, Wright had told Textron and Bell not to give up on the Osprey, that the Marines and their friends in Congress would keep it going.

  Spivey had been in Washington a lot in the six weeks since he’d gotten word Cheney was going to kill the Osprey. At first, he was flying back and forth to strategize with Troutman and Textron’s lobbyists. Later, Spivey became their go-to briefer, on call twenty-four hours a day to come to Washington and explain the Osprey and the tiltrotor’s civilian potential to members of Congress and their aides. To his briefing’s explanations of how helicopter speeds were limited by retreating blade stall and how tiltrotors could have avoided the disaster at Desert One, Spivey added a slide noting that Article I of the Constitution granted Congress—not the executive branch—the power to “raise and support Armies” and “provide and maintain a Navy.” He wanted to remind the members of Congress he briefed that they had a constitutional right to overrule Cheney.

  In those first weeks after Cheney’s decision, some at Textron and Boeing were still murmuring about abandoning the Osprey. Spivey couldn’t imagine that. If the Osprey died, the tiltrotor dream—his life’s work—might die with it. Besides, Spivey was an optimist. He was sure this was just another bump in the road to get over, another hill the Marines would take. He sure wished he could get in to see Cheney, though. Spivey just knew he could sell Cheney on the dream if he briefed him, but no one from Bell or Boeing could get an appointment with the defense secretary to talk about the Osprey.

  A week after Wright’s resignation speech, Spivey and others in the usual Bell contingent flew to France for the 1989 Paris Air Show. Spivey took along his two sons from his first marriage, Brett, then twenty, and Eric, eighteen. While their father worked at Bell’s chalet, the boys mostly wandered through the static displays of aircraft at historic Le Bourget field and marveled at the daily aerial displays flown by some of the world’s best pilots in the world’s hottest aircraft. They arrived in Paris too late to witness the crash
on the show’s first day of a Soviet MiG-29 fighter jet, whose pilot had parachuted to safety but whose wreckage still lay on a grassy part of the field. One day Spivey’s sons came to the Bell chalet to watch him brief the media on the Osprey and the coming tiltrotor revolution. The boys had heard most of it before, during weekend visits with their dad as they grew up. Spivey loved to tell his sons about his visits to military bases and what the tiltrotor could do for the services. He often brought home models and showed the boys how “cool” the tiltrotor was. As he got older, Eric could see that selling the tiltrotor wasn’t just his dad’s job, it was his passion. His dad was a little bit crazy on the subject, Eric thought. When he saw him meet the press and take their questions at Paris, though, Eric was impressed. The old man really knew his stuff.

  Bell president Horner talked to reporters in Paris that year, too, when the Bell-Boeing partnership announced that it had just signed agreements with three big aerospace companies—British Aerospace, Dornier of West Germany, and Aeritalia of Italy—to assess the military and civilian markets for tiltrotors in their countries. If the Defense Department canceled the Osprey, Horner said, Bell would look for tiltrotor support abroad. “We are not going to build an airplane just to put it in the Smithsonian Museum,” Horner asserted. “I’m going to find a way to keep this program going.”

  * * *

  Representative Curt Weldon had already found a way: form a coalition. Cheney’s hit list of programs included the F-14D Tomcat, a swing-wing Navy fighter jet made on Long Island. The New York congressional delegation and members from other states who had Navy bases in their districts were eager to keep the Tomcat going, and like the Osprey’s advocates, they were short of votes. As the House Armed Services Committee prepared to vote on the defense authorization bill that year, the Osprey and Tomcat camps made a deal: you vote for my program and I’ll vote for yours.

  When the Armed Services Committee took up the defense bill that June 22, Weldon and his allies stunned its Democratic chairman, Representative Les Aspin of Wisconsin. Aspin, saying Cheney deserved a vote of confidence for trying to bring defense spending under control, had vowed to block amendments to the Republican defense secretary’s proposed $10 billion in cuts. The chairman appeared confident he could do that even after the committee voted 28–15 for an amendment offered by Weldon and a Tomcat supporter that included $508 million for the Osprey and $230 million to build new Tomcats. Aspin just grinned. He was expecting to nullify that and all other amendments by waiting until the end of the bill-writing session and then calling a vote on the original, unamended bill. If Aspin won that vote, all amendments would fall, a tactic known as “King of the Hill.” When Aspin offered the original bill, though, it failed on a 26–26 tie—the narrowest possible margin. The chairman was mortified.

  “We beat his ass, it’s as simple as that,” Weldon declared nearly two decades later, still savoring the victory.

  Two days after the committee voted, the panel’s senior Republican announced that there would be no effort on the administration’s behalf to strip the Osprey and Tomcat money out of the defense bill when it came to the House floor. “I don’t think it can be reversed,” explained Representative Bill Dickinson of Alabama.

  The Osprey camp had won their first, and most important, battle. They had defied both Cheney and the House Armed Services Committee chairman and saved the Osprey from sudden death. What has been called the dance of legislation, however, is a duet. A bill has to go through the same process in the Senate as the House, and after the chambers have passed their separate versions of a measure, a conference committee of senators and representatives has to resolve the inevitable differences. The Senate version of the bill included $255 million to keep building and testing Osprey prototypes. Unlike the House, however, the Senate included no funding for “long lead items”—parts and tools Bell and Boeing would need to start building production models. That was a big problem for the companies, which had started setting up their production lines using money Congress had voted in 1988, the year before Cheney became defense secretary. That year, Navair had exercised its option to order the first twelve production model Ospreys for $1.2 billion. If the next defense budget included no production money, Spivey told Aviation Week, the Osprey would fall two years behind schedule.

  In fact, the problem was much larger than that. With no production money, the Osprey was just a science project. With no production money, Bell and Boeing couldn’t hope to recover their massive cost overruns under the fixed-price Full Scale Development contract. The companies were pouring more money into that contract every day, and there would be a limit to how long they could do that with no guarantee the Osprey would be produced. Cheney and his aides recognized Bell-Boeing’s dilemma early on and adopted it as their strategy. If they couldn’t kill the Osprey outright, they would try to strangle it to death by preventing it from going into production.

  The House-Senate conference on the defense bill became Cheney’s first victory on the issue. The Senate’s position on the Osprey prevailed. The final bill omitted Osprey production money, and the conference committee’s report said Congress should defer a decision on production until the Defense Department had an independent study done comparing the tiltrotor’s cost and effectiveness to helicopters.

  The Osprey camp was disappointed, but as long as the final decision rested with Congress, the Marines and their allies could be optimistic. The companies could keep preparing for production using the money Congress had provided pre-Cheney while Weldon and his coalition tried to get Osprey production money into the next year’s defense bill. That was their plan as Congress adjourned for the year that November.

  A week later, Cheney showed them he wasn’t going to step aside and leave the Osprey’s fate up to Congress. He had Navair cancel the contract Bell and Boeing had signed in March to build the first dozen production models. The Pentagon also took back $200 million of the production funds Congress had approved in 1988.

  Weldon and other lawmakers were outraged. Cheney was trying to use executive power to preempt Congress in deciding the Osprey’s future. The new defense secretary clearly wanted a fight. Weldon and his allies were going to give him one.

  * * *

  On September 13, 1989, Preston M. “Pete” Geren, Jr., a thirty-seven-year-old Fort Worth lawyer whose political experience consisted of three years as a Senate aide and an unsuccessful run for Congress, won former Speaker Jim Wright’s seat in the U.S. House. Geren was a Democrat, and at the request of the Republican Party, Weldon had campaigned for his opponent. When Geren got to Washington that fall, though, he and Weldon fast became allies, and then fast friends. The Osprey brought them together.

  Bell Helicopter was one of the biggest employers in Geren’s district, and he went to Congress pledged to fight for the Osprey. As Geren quickly learned, Weldon was way ahead of him. Weldon already had organized an Osprey team which was meeting at least every other week to plot strategy, usually in Weldon’s office. The regulars included interested House members or aides, lobbyists for Textron, Bell, and Boeing, and a lobbyist for the United Auto Workers, the union that represented workers at Boeing’s and Bell’s plants. A Marine Corps legislative liaison officer also would be there, though others were admonished to keep quiet about that.

  Soon the Corps’ maneuvering to thwart Cheney on the Osprey would be a secret as poorly kept as Charlie Wilson’s crusade to arm the Afghan rebels “covertly,” but the Marines didn’t want to advertise how they were doing it. There was nothing unusual about liaison officers providing information to Congress. Plotting strategy with Cheney’s foes wasn’t illegal, either, but it was a political sin. For that reason, when Marine Colonel Parker Miller became a legislative liaison officer in the summer of 1990, he didn’t share the details of what he was doing to help get the Osprey funded with the commandant or other generals, though he and other liaison officers reported to them regularly.

  There were a lot of details Miller could have shared. In t
he fall of 1989, Weldon had drafted a “V-22 Action Plan” that included every tactic imaginable. Weldon and the company lobbyists would brief congressional delegations to make sure they knew how much the tiltrotor meant to their states in jobs and economic development. A Textron lobbyist would keep a list, updated weekly, of how individual members were likely to vote if Osprey funding came up. Bell and Boeing would invite as many lawmakers and their aides as possible to visit their factories in Texas and Pennsylvania to see how the Osprey was being built and watch prototypes fly. They would host Osprey luncheons in Washington for those who couldn’t make such trips. The lobbyists and Marine liaison officers would draft questions for members of Congress to ask in hearings when the Osprey came up. Bell, Boeing, and engine maker Allison would send “political action packets” to their subcontractors, located in nearly every state. The packets would include pro-Osprey editorials that the subcontractors or their employees could submit to local newspapers, pro-Osprey form letters they could send to members of Congress and state legislators, phone numbers they could use to call lawmakers and urge them to vote for the Osprey. The liaison officers would send similar packets to Marine Corps Reserve associations. They also would arm Weldon with alternative proposals for funding the Osprey, analyses of just how much money the program needed for various purposes, and details on the Corps’ aviation goals—ammunition for hearings and defense bill votes. Weldon assigned himself to get as many House and Senate committees as he could to hold hearings on the Osprey and the civilian potential of the tiltrotor. His group also would organize a “Tilt-Rotor Technology Coalition” of big-name business and union leaders, politicians, former top government officials, and prominent academics who would speak out in favor of the Osprey and promote the tiltrotor for civilian aviation.