The very word “Camelot” as a definition of the Kennedy “thousand days” needs review. During the 1962-63 period, the U.S. Army had a typical contract study named “Camelot” under way in a “think tank” group that was associated with the American University in Washington. Because of some of the Kennedy-period treatment of the army, or what the army perceived that treatment to be during the JFK-McNamara days, there were many army officials who were quite vocal about their dislike of both men and of their policies. Not surprisingly, then, this study by the members of that army-contract think tank was unfriendly to Kennedy. It used the word “Camelot” in a derogatory sense, and its title was purposely intended to be a bit of a sarcastic rebuke of the President. It certainly was not intended to praise his name and record. Interestingly, this derogatory term has now lost that meaning for most and has become a public symbol of Kennedy and the presumed style and grace of his presidency.
It all began with the romantic election. Kennedy was viewed as a virtual messiah. Such was the power of the Kennedy charisma that the wife of a famous member of the Kennedy entourage was heard to say during the intermission of a play at the old Warner Theater, shortly after the Kennedy inauguration, “Isn’t all this just marvelous? It is just like the break between B.C. and A.D.”3
By the closing days of Dwight Eisenhower’s second term as President, the giant multinational business machine that had engineered his travels from SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe) via the presidency of Columbia University to the presidency of the United States had learned that the ever-popular “Old Man” could be tough. Eisenhower left office on the wave of a substantial federal budget surplus and with a tip of his cap to the dangers of the military-industrial complex. As a result, these master manipulators had held billion-dollar items back from the budget of 1961-62, knowing full well that they could do better with a reliable old friend as President in 1961. They expected that new President to be Richard M. Nixon.
Nixon had always been the special friend of big business. As he likes to tell it, while he was still in the navy during World War II, he responded to a want ad in a Los Angeles newspaper that had been placed there by a moneyed group seeking a young, malleable candidate to run for Congress. With their financial help, he won that election. The remainder of his storied political life was lived under the shadow and tutelage of moneyed power centers.
What Nixon does not say is how he got into a position to take on that role in the first place. In 1941, he worked in the Office of Price Administration beside another up-and-coming young lawyer, Irving S. Shapiro. There they both learned the ways of serving big business and the value of an “anti-Communist” stance. (Shapiro, son of an expatriate Lithuanian, went on to become the Justice Department lawyer in a widely publicized trial against the eleven top leaders of the U.S. Communist Party.4 From there, he moved upward step by step in the DuPont Company, until he reached the position of chairman.) Nixon attacked Alger Hiss and Helen Gahagan Douglas viciously on his way to the House of Representatives, thence to the Senate, and the vice presidency.
Though his years of public life gave Nixon some popularity, they did not win him the presidency against John F. Kennedy in 1960. Thus, the many big-money projects deferred from the Eisenhower era were heaped upon the shoulders of President Kennedy. The greatest of these multi-billion-dollar packages, as described in previous chapters, was to be the war in Vietnam. It had been kept almost dormant during 1960, but it was ready to flare up on call.
Just before the inauguration, when President Eisenhower spoke privately to Kennedy, he informed him that his only concern in Southeast Asia would be the tiny kingdom of Laos. Military activity in Laos was already a public issue. In contrast, Time magazine had carried only six articles about Vietnam during 1960. Although the conflict in Vietnam had been moved along clandestinely since 1945, it was still just simmering when Kennedy came into office.
The CIA’s anti-Castro planning was expedited. Just after the election, the CIA had made its move to increase its secret Cuban project from a small, three hundred-man operation to a three thousand-man, “over-the-beach” assault. By the time of the inauguration of Kennedy, the momentum of that effort was (as CIA Director Allen Dulles and CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell put it, as a threat to JFK) harder to contain than to just let the Cuban exiles loose in an attempt to free their country themselves. Kennedy was getting his baptism of CIA pressure.
There were even bigger budget matters bottled up in anticipation of a Nixon inauguration. For several years, the air force had wanted a new jet fighter aircraft. This dream plane was called the “Everest” fighter, after Gen. Frank Everest, its staunchest supporter. The navy needed one also. However, Eisenhower, determined to go out with a budget surplus, would not allow the awarding of any major contract that could be charged to his term. By the time of Kennedy’s inaugural, there was the promise of a $2-$4 billion air force budget item that could be used for the biggest military aircraft procurement award ever made. The entire aviation industry knew this, and pressures ran high in an attempt to win that prime contract.
Robert S. McNamara had been named to be Kennedy’s secretary of defense. A World War II air force statistician and Harvard Business School professor, he had more recently been the president of Ford Motor Company, where (as part of a group known at Harvard as the “whiz kids”) he had gone directly from his air force duties right after the war. McNamara had become president of the Ford Motor Company on November 9, 1960, the day after Kennedy’s election.
McNamara was not familiar with aircraft or with the complex system of procurement used by the military, but he had a pretty good idea of what the availability of $4 billion meant politically. He announced he would make the award after careful study.5
Before long, the contest for the jet fighter had been narrowed to the Boeing Aircraft Company and a joint proposal presented by General Dynamics and the Grumman Aircraft Company. The aircraft the military desired was called a “Tactical Fighter Experimental,” or TFX. The air force wanted an extremely unconventional aircraft, with wings that could be swept back in flight for higher speed.
Then McNamara sprang a surprise. He took some of the navy’s procurement money and added that to the total and said this would represent “more bang for the buck” because of what he called “commonality.” He believed that even though the air force and navy specifications differed widely, there ought to be enough “common” parts to lower the unit aircraft cost. By this time, the total program had been increased to 1,700 aircraft—235 of which would be for the navy—for a total initial procurement cost of $6.5 billion.
This was the largest single procurement contract ever put together in peacetime. Kennedy and his inner circle had their own ideas of what they were going to do with the disposition of that vast amount of money. They were a bold and politically savvy group. The election of November 1960 had been too close for comfort. They looked ahead to November 1964 and realized that $6.5 billion (or more) would pave a lot of streets on the road to reelection.
So Kennedy added Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, a wise old World War II OSS veteran, to the TFX team. He had not confided in Goldberg before the Bay of Pigs decision, a mistake he was not going to repeat. Goldberg had an idea. It was to use this $6.5 billion potential in every possible way, in selected “politically” marginal counties throughout the United States, to strengthen the Democratic party. Goldberg and McNamara began to work together. McNamara set up a suite of offices, one corridor ring in from his own in the Pentagon, with a staff that had nothing else to do than to plot the course of the TFX source selection program.
I had an office a few doors down the hall from this new suite, and I visited them frequently to join its chief, Ron Linton, and other Pentagon “whiz kids” for lunch. I noticed that the walls of this suite of offices were lined with maps of the United States showing all the states and counties. They were political maps. In short order, at Goldberg’s suggestion, one set of those maps w
as colored to show every county that Kennedy had carried in 1960 and every county that had gone to Nixon.
Then the staff of this office, working with Department of Labor statistics, made detailed studies of each of the major proposals for the TFX. A proposal is an enormous stack of paper. Quite frequently a single proposal for some military item would arrive at the Pentagon in a large delivery truck. This process of “mapping” the proposals included the prime contractors, that is, Boeing or General Dynamics/Grumman, and from them right on down to the smallest subcontractor. These contractors were plotted on county maps. Goldberg’s team marked the site of each facility, taking into account how many people it would employ, how much money would be spent there, how much new construction was involved, and every other political consideration.6
In a short time it was possible to get a visual plot of the impact of the award of a Boeing contract on one set of maps and of the General Dynamics/Grumman contract on another. Through confidential handling of copies of these charts, senators, congressmen, and local politicians throughout the Democratic organization were able to capitalize on the outcome of these proposals. Within no time, word that these charts were being developed in McNamara’s office reached the contractors themselves.
I happened to visit the office one day when word had been received from one of the prime contractors that it planned to open a new facility in a remote county in Utah. That county had been a Republican county in 1960. Needless to say, the process of wooing future Republican votes in this manner was repeated all over the country. Six and a half billion dollars is a lot of money, and it goes a long, long way in a campaign.
While the studies of the political impact of the award of this huge contract were being made, McNamara was forced to draw out the routine source selection process. He had two of the nation’s industrial giants, with their vast array of subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, locked in the biggest battle in corporate history. He managed to string out four full evaluation studies, each one of which nitpicked every item in each proposal, before he sent the whole package to the Source Selection Board, the final, ultimate arbiter, made up of senior officials from both services.
Later, during the 1963 senatorial hearings on the award of this contract, Gen. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the air force, told a Senate Investigations Subcommittee chaired by Sen. John L. McClellan that some 275,000 man-hours of work had been poured into this selection process.
The selection could have been made during Eisenhower’s presidency. It certainly could have been made in 1961. Everything had been ready for a quick decision, in favor of Boeing, right after the Kennedy inauguration. But, with the addition of the navy money and the Goldberg-McNamara political selection concept, the decision was pushed back month after month in every county across the nation while the politicians wrung every ounce they could out of this process—and to hell with the aircraft companies and the services. The Kennedy team had, as always, its eye on the election of 1964.
Finally, on November 23, 1962—more than two years after the election—the decision of the Source Selection Board was made. Most of the senior officials at that meeting came away believing that the decision had been made in favor of Boeing. Eugene Zuchert, the secretary of the air force, confided to a few friends that evening that the decision had been made in favor of Boeing.
Behind the scenes, however, another decision had been made, and it overruled the entire military system. Any major change of the military procurement system, especially as it pertains to a $6.5 billion contract, is bound to have the impact of someone attempting to rewrite the Holy Bible. It cannot be done without an intense, prolonged, and very heated argument.
McNamara knew that he and Kennedy were playing with fire. On the Friday afternoon that he received the choice of the Source Selection Board in favor of Boeing, McNamara already knew the results of the final political survey of the two proposals, that is, the Goldberg comparison. It indicated clearly that the General Dynamics/Grumman proposal would get a greater return for the Democrats at the ballot boxes.
Moreover, he had an additional major problem to resolve on his own. He had to be sure that the choice he was going to make would indeed fly. McNamara basically did not know one aircraft from another. He had a man on his staff, Alfred W. Blackburn, who was an experienced test pilot; Blackburn had been hired in 1959 by the Defense Department’s Bureau of Research and Engineering specifically for the TFX project. Blackburn, however, favored the Boeing proposal, so McNamara could not discuss his personal problem with him.
To play this card, McNamara called an old friend and asked for the name of a man who could vouch for the design of the General Dynamics model. This friend suggested Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson, head of the famous “Skunk Works,” a shop where many of the finest aircraft built by Lockheed had been designed. Johnson had designed the CIA’s U-2 spy plane, among others. McNamara had the General Dynamics specifications delivered to Johnson and asked him to verify their suitability. Johnson studied the aircraft designs carefully.
The fate of the $6.5 billion TFX project had been placed in the hands of a man who had devoted a lifetime to building superior aircraft, and to building them in direct competition with both Boeing and General Dynamics. Even at this stage of the game, fate played its part.
Years before, Roger Lewis, chairman of the board and president of General Dynamics, had worked at Lockheed. He and Kelly Johnson had been good friends, and still were in 1962. Lewis was an old aircraft professional who had been around the business since its golden years in the 1930s. Kelly looked over the General Dynamics design very carefully—no doubt thinking how much this meant to his old associate.
Johnson called McNamara and told him that the plan from General Dynamics was acceptable, and he assured McNamara that the aircraft would fly. Later, Roger Lewis was to say in a rather low key manner, “The company expects to produce an exceptional aircraft and that its qualifications to do so are unparalleled.”
With the Goldberg review in hand, and supported by the call from Kelly Johnson confirming the airworthiness of the design, McNamara scheduled a meeting for November 24, 1962, to announce the decision. He ignored the vote of the Source Selection Board and all its senior military members and announced his choice of the General Dynamics design. With that he authorized the start of the engineering-design work, wind-tunnel testing, construction of a model of the plane, and all the other actions essential to the development of a total weapons system.
On April 8, 1963, during a period of intense controversy, McNamara authorized the issuance of a contract from the air force procurement offices at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which in turn authorized General Dynamics and Grumman to turn out twenty-two test models of the TFX.
Gen. Curtis LeMay later testified that no one from the original air force-navy evaluation teams on up to the final air force-navy board that recommended the Boeing design—and this included himself—had ever recommended the General Dynamics model. The members of the Source Selection Board, which had voted for Boeing, were stunned by the development. Al Blackburn, who had worked on the project since 1959, resigned. This is to say nothing about the shocked feelings at Boeing and its long list of subcontractors.
The decision sent tremors throughout the entire aeronautical industry and the business world. If Boeing, traditionally the number-one defense contractor, could be set aside, anyone could be excluded from any contract, for what seemed to be arbitrary political reasons. LeMay added, “I was surprised that the decision was made without consultation. I don’t consider this the normal procedure. I thought we had such a clear-cut and unanimous opinion all up and down the line that I was completely surprised at the decision.”7
In the face of the heated opposition, McNamara held his ground. He said he had chosen the General Dynamics model of the TFX because that company’s proposal showed a better understanding of the costs involved and offered a minimum divergence from a common design for air force and navy versions of the fighter. Of cour
se, this only added fuel to the fire, because this was the very reason the services did not like the General Dynamics version. They all knew that a carrier-based aircraft had to be designed much differently from a land-based one.
In testimony before Congress, McNamara came back again and served notice on the generals and admirals, saying that the TFX decision process was a sample of a new policy. He said that the day had passed when the services would be allowed to develop their own weapons systems. He added that he picked General Dynamics over Boeing because Boeing had fudged and actually had planned to build different planes for the navy and the air force.
In the heat of battle, the Kennedy forces were pressing their point firmly, but cloaking it in equable terms. In contrast to some of the Pentagon civilian hierarchy of earlier days—for example, Charlie Wilson of General Motors, Tom Gates of Morgan Guaranty Trust, and Neil McElroy of Lever Brothers—the McNamara staff was pure Ivy league: Roswell Gilpatric, Cyrus Vance, Eugene Zuckert, and Paul Nitze. They were neither military specialists nor industry favorites. Because of Kennedy they had been given the power to make these decisions despite the desires of the old military-industry team in high places. It was precisely those men in high places who were upset. It was those men and their associates who began to believe, and proclaim, “Kennedy has got to go!”
Gilpatric, a New York banker who was McNamara’s deputy, was sent out to make an important speech to a bankers’ convention on April 9, 1963. Its title, “The Impact of the Changing Defense Program on the United States Economy,” was actually more pertinent than his audience expected it to be. He spoke about the TFX decision to bankers—and, of course, to the news media—at a time when this was a white-hot subject.
In an early paragraph, he revealed the scope of his subject. The new Kennedy policy was a blockbuster. Gilpatric said—and when he did, windows rattled in defense installations all over the world—“I have not the slightest doubt that our economy could adjust to a decline in defense spending.” He was touching on a sacrosanct subject: Can any nation afford, or exist, with peace?
JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK Page 23