by Neil Sheehan
April went by and nothing much got done by the Air Staff. Gardner, however, did not let the month pass entirely idle. He wanted a means to overcome future naysayers by continuing to provide the program with the prestigious scientific imprimatur he had achieved through the Tea Pot Committee. At his suggestion, von Neumann volunteered to chair a permanent Atlas (later ICBM) Scientific Advisory Committee. Seven of the original Tea Pot members, including Kistiakowsky and Wiesner, agreed to stay on and nine new members were added. One was Norris Bradbury, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, which would be designing the warhead. Another, apparently chosen for fame rather than his scientific knowledge, was Charles “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh, the hero of the first transatlantic flight to Paris in 1927. Lindbergh had been declared a pariah by President Roosevelt for his isolationist and anti-Semitic agitation on the eve of the Second World War. Talbott, who was prepared to forget all of this in remembrance of Lindbergh’s transatlantic exploit, had resurrected him, awarding him a reserve rank of brigadier general.
In mid-May, General White, with the assent of Twining and Defense Secretary Wilson, who had been brought into the discussion, assigned Project Atlas the Air Force’s highest priority and ordered its acceleration “to the maximum extent that technology would allow.” In White, Gardner and Schriever had won an advocate for the ICBM within the hierarchy. White was an urbane man, thoughtful and open-minded, and his route to the top was an unusual one for the time. He was an intellectual and linguist who had spent four years studying Chinese in Beijing in the 1920s and served in intelligence posts as air attaché in Stalin’s Russia and Mussolini’s Italy during the 1930s, rising to become assistant chief of staff for intelligence in 1944. Hap Arnold had then recognized his all-round talents and given him senior command posts in the Pacific during the last year of the war. Schriever had known him slightly after White had been designated deputy commander of the Thirteenth Air Force in September 1944 for the New Guinea campaign and then promoted to chief of the Seventh Air Force in the Marianas not long before the surrender of Japan. Colonel Ray Soper, who subsequently served as an ally for Schriever in a pivotal position on the Air Staff, remembered White lecturing the assembled deputy chiefs in the Air Force Council. Ballistic missiles were here to stay, he told them, and the Air Staff had better realize this fact and get on with it. Nevertheless, the opposition had not yet exhausted stalling tactics. It was not until June 21, 1954, three months after Twining had said go, that Lieutenant General Thomas Power, who had just completed his six years as LeMay’s vice commander at SAC and taken charge of the Air Research and Development Command at Baltimore in mid-April, received a directive from Air Force headquarters. It ordered him to get things moving by establishing “a field office on the West Coast with a general officer in command having authority and control over all aspects of the program.”
36.
“OKAY, BENNIE, IT’S A DEAL”
Napoleon is said to have remarked that a man makes his own luck. There is also an old Marine Corps maxim that may express the thought more precisely: “Luck occurs when preparation and opportunity coincide.” So it was to be with Bernard Adolph Schriever. Major General James McCormack, Gardner’s choice to lead the building of the ICBM as vice commander of the ARDC, had a heart attack that spring and would have to retire soon. The number of stars an officer wore on his shoulder tabs could matter in an enterprise like this, because he would have to hold his own against civilian contractors who might try to bully or hoodwink him and against other generals who had competing interests. Gardner had the choice of going with Schriever, who was to have served as McCormack’s backup in the field but who had only the single star of a brigadier awarded the year before, or finding another major general qualified to replace McCormack. He hesitated, scanning the records of potential candidates. Vince Ford urged him to give the command to Schriever alone. Schriever and Ford were friends and Ford owed Schriever a professional and moral debt for bringing him back on active duty.
Their relationship was not, however, the reason for Ford’s recommendation. Ford had seen Schriever manage one high-tech study project after another. He knew how pragmatic yet tough and independent-minded Schriever could be and what moral courage he had displayed in taking on the mighty LeMay Ford was convinced that Schriever was precisely the man for the job, that the lack of a second star would prove no handicap. But Schriever and Gardner had not hit it off at all well during Gardner’s initial weeks at the Pentagon in the winter and early spring of 1953. Gardner had at first mistaken Schriever’s controlled manner for lack of imagination and written him off as another careerist. “He felt that Bennie ran too long in one spot,” was how Ford put it with a smile of remembrance. Gardner had also offended Schriever by one of those acts of alcohol-induced boorishness to which Gardner was prone. Bennie and his wife, Dora, had given a welcoming cocktail party for Gardner at their home in the Belle Haven section of Alexandria, Virginia, south of Washington. The guest of honor had arrived pre-stoked for an evening of inebriation with a couple of his double-shot potions of Old Forester and ginger ale already under his belt. After several more, he had picked up a newspaper, sat down, and expressed his scorn for host and hostess and the rest of their Air Force company by burying his face in the paper for most of the party. It had taken Gardner a while to discern the knowledge and character Ford knew so well beneath Schriever’s restrained exterior. And it took time for Bennie to understand that despite Gardner’s abrasiveness and occasionally outrageous behavior, this was a man who cared about the same things he did and who possessed the daring and influence to accomplish them. Nevertheless, the memory of that inauspicious start to what was to become an extraordinary collaboration and abiding friendship seemed to linger with Gardner as he skimmed the records of possible two-star replacements for McCormack. It did not linger for long.
Early one morning in May 1954, the telephone rang in Schriever’s office. His secretary picked it up to find Gardner’s secretary on the line. She said that she was calling for Gardner, who wanted to speak to Schriever. His secretary replied that he was out at a meeting. Gardner’s secretary said he wished to have lunch with Schriever that day at Restaurant 823, a German rathskeller located in a basement at that number on 15th Street in downtown Washington. Would Schriever please call back when he returned to say if this was possible? In the meantime, Vince Ford arrived at Gardner’s office on the fourth floor of the Pentagon. He heard Gardner talking to someone on the phone behind the oak door to the inner office. “What’s up?” Ford asked the secretary, with whom he shared the outer room. “He’s talking to Mr. Talbott and he’s trying to locate General Schriever,” she said. Ford had noticed that Gardner somehow “had a way to look and listen in four different directions at once.” He apparently overheard Ford. The busy light on the telephone line Gardner was using suddenly went out on the console on his secretary’s desk and his door opened. “Hi,” he said to Ford. “Come on in a sec.” He told the secretary to try again to reach Schriever. Ford took a chair at the conference table opposite Gardner. “The job is Schriever’s—if he wants it,” Gardner said, raising his eyebrows, his face softening into a half smile in recognition of Ford’s successful lobbying. Just then the secretary appeared in the doorway. “General Schriever will be at the River Entrance at noon,” she said.
Bennie was waiting for them when they arrived precisely at noon. The River Entrance facing the Potomac was the status entry to the Pentagon. The chiefs of staff and the secretary of defense and other civilian VIPs had their offices on that side of the building. Officials of Gardner’s rank were allowed to park their cars in the small lot there. They climbed into Gardner’s Cadillac convertible, Schriever in the passenger seat in front and Ford in the back, and, as Ford described Gardner’s speed-limits-be-damned driving, “boomed across” the 14th Street Bridge into Washington. Ford observed that the fancy auto “would be a wreck—finished ahead of its time, like one day he would be. He was as hard on his cars as he was on himself.” Swing
ing down I Street, Gardner suddenly turned sharply at a parking lot near the intersection with 15th, bounded over the curb, and stopped just in front of a “Lot Full” sign. The Cadillac straddled the sidewalk at an angle. Schriever smiled and shook his head. Gardner got out and tossed his keys at the outstretched hands of several parking attendants. They were used to him and were grinning. He was a generous tipper.
The “823,” as its habitués called it, was a short way down the block on 15th. “It’s always gemütlichkeit at Restaurant 823,” the ad in the yellow pages of the telephone book promised, and so it was. The rathskeller had an old-fashioned imitation Bavarian atmosphere with a violinist and two pianists on back-to-back grands, draft beer in steins, and the heavy, hearty German food that patrons happily consumed in these years before cholesterol frights. Gardner had discovered the “823” during business trips to Washington in earlier years while he was running Hycon Manufacturing. The moment they walked down the steps to the basement level and entered the restaurant, it was clear that the waitresses and barmen knew and liked him. As he passed through he called to them by their names. His favorite waitress, a woman named Helen, pointed them to a booth and then came over with a smile and asked, “Know any new dirty stories, Mr. G?” “No, but I could use one,” Gardner responded in kind. She leaned forward, cupped her hand, and whispered into his ear, both laughed, and Gardner, no beer drinker, ordered his double Old Forester and ginger ale. “Bennie, what’ll it be?” he asked Schriever. “I’ll have a martini, very dry, Beefeater’s with a twist,” Schriever said. He quickly and uncustomarily added, “Better make it a double.”
Ford had a Scotch and watched Schriever’s face. He could see that from the sudden invitation to lunch, Bennie knew something was up, but did not appear to have guessed what it was. He was wrong. Schriever had guessed precisely what was up and was prepared. As soon as his martini arrived, he circled the bell of the glass with his right hand and looked straight at Gardner, who now wasted no time. “Bennie,” he asked abruptly, “how’d you like to run the new missile organization we’re setting up in California?” The eyes behind the thick rimless glasses fixed on Schriever. The wheel had come full circle. Schriever had needed Gardner to launch the ICBM enterprise and Gardner now needed Schriever to carry it to fulfillment. Bennie desperately wanted the opportunity, but was determined to have it on his terms because he was convinced that was the only way he would succeed. And so he deliberately kept Gardner waiting to raise suspense. He slid his long fingers up and down the stem of the martini glass for several seconds while he glanced down in thought. At last he looked up at Gardner.
“I’ll take the job, but only on one condition,” he said.
“Like what?” Gardner responded aggressively.
“I’ll take the job,” Schriever said, speaking slowly so that each word came through distinctly, “provided I can run it—completely run it—without any interference from those nitpicking sons of bitches in the Pentagon.”
Gardner seemed pleased by this Gardner-like response. “Okay, Bennie, it’s a deal. The job is yours,” he said.
Schriever ordered a middle European dish that his German ancestors had appreciated, pig’s knuckles, for lunch.
BOOK V
WINNING A
PRESIDENT
37.
A SCHOOLHOUSE AND A RADICAL NEW APPROACH
He set up shop in a former Roman Catholic boys school in Inglewood, a suburb of Los Angeles out near the city’s international airport. An Air Force lieutenant colonel, the West Coast representative of the Air Research and Development Command, had run across the place while searching for a house that Bennie could rent or buy for his family. Bennie had asked him to look for a house in Santa Monica, farther north, but had specified that it had to be close to a parochial school. While Bennie remained a nominal Lutheran, he had agreed when he married Dora, a devout Roman Catholic, that the children would be raised in her faith. The lieutenant colonel had decided that the logical way to proceed was first to locate a good parochial school, since it was an absolute requirement, and then to find a house. In the course of exploring, he had learned that Saint John’s Catholic School for boys had outgrown its space on East Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood and moved elsewhere. A quick reconnaissance had convinced him that the vacated buildings would make excellent start-up quarters for the new missile organization, to be called, for purposes of anonymity, the Western Development Division (WDD).
The Los Angeles Archdiocese had wanted to sell the buildings rather than rent them, but in the spirit of patriotism agreed to let the Air Force have a lease. The address of the main two-story classroom and administration building was 401 East Manchester, just at the intersection with Locust Street. Space was not at such a premium in the Los Angeles area in the mid-1950s and the school was laid out leisurely. Next to the main building back down the boulevard was a modest chapel, then a singlestory classroom structure, and beyond it a large, fenced-in parking lot. In July, Schriever and the initial members of his missile band, to be known ever afterward as the Schoolhouse Gang, began moving into the buildings.
Again in the hope of preventing Soviet spies from discovering what was to go on in this decidedly unmilitary-appearing, onetime educational complex, Bennie and everyone else wore civilian clothes, or mufti, the military term for civilian garb. The desire for clandestinity was unrequited. A couple of weeks after the Schoolhouse went into operation, a member of Schriever’s crew walked to the bank a short way down Manchester Boulevard to cash his government paycheck. The teller, a tall and quite attractive brunette, smiled at him, compared the signature on his government ID card with that on the check, and then counted out the $20 bills he requested. As he turned to go, she said in a quiet voice, still smiling, “Don’t blow us up over there, will you?”
They decided to make the chapel their briefing room. The priests had desanctified the chapel, but had otherwise left the interior intact. When it was put to its first important use, a two-day meeting on July 20–21, 1954, of the enlarged and now permanent ICBM Scientific Advisory Committee (soon to be commonly referred to as the Von Neumann Committee), there had been no time for remodeling. Bennie had not yet even officially taken charge of the fledgling Western Development Division, something he would not do for nearly another two weeks, until August 2, when he issued General Orders No. 1, formally assuming command.
And so on this opening morning of the meeting he stood on the step before the altar rail, where the students had knelt to receive the Communion wafer, and updated his prestigious audience on what had transpired since the formation of the new committee by Gardner and its initial meeting in Washington in April. Johnny von Neumann, Kistiakowsky, Wiesner, Norris Bradbury, and Charles Lindbergh sat on the pews in front of him with the other members new and old. Running down the walls on both sides of the chapel were windows of stained glass with portraits of saints and depictions of religious scenes. These were subsequently covered with plasterboard when the pews were ripped out and replaced by seats. The altar was also removed and a small briefing stage erected in its place. Technically, the plasterboard was nailed over the windows for security reasons, but some of Bennie’s subordinates also found themselves uncomfortable devising a weapon of such terrible proportions amidst the stained-glass reminders that this had once been a holy place.
Obstinately attempting to hang on to the entire project, a Convair team sent up from San Diego to brief the committee now proposed that the firm continue development of its five-rocket-engine, 440,000-pound behemoth missile while it studied the feasibility of a 250,000-pound ICBM. Von Neumann and the other members of the new committee rejected this, as had the original Tea Pot group, and focused where the Tea Pot report had led—on the precise nature of the managerial and technical organization required to put ICBMs on launching pads. By this time it was assumed, as Gardner had schemed to arrange, that the new Ramo-Wooldridge firm would provide the engineering and scientific expertise required. The question now was how they would
relate to Schriever’s Air Force organization.
Donald Quarles, the assistant secretary of defense for research and development, was attending the meeting as an observer to contribute whatever he could. An electrical engineer and physicist, Quarles had run the Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, before entering the Pentagon. The laboratory devised the techniques required to transform nuclear devices produced by Los Alamos, and later by Livermore, the second nuclear weapons laboratory established at Liver-more, California, in 1952, into useful weapons for the Air Force. In the lingo of the service, it weaponized the devices. Quarles suggested that instead of setting up the Ramo-Wooldridge team as a separate staff of advisers, it would be more effective to integrate them with Schriever’s Western Development Division by placing them in a “line position” right under it. General Power, who was also attending, ordered Bennie to study the matter and come up with a recommendation. As WDD was a field office of Power’s Air Research and Development Command, Power was Bennie’s immediate superior in the Air Force chain. Schriever had a report ready by the latter half of August. He proposed that the Air Force act as its own prime contractor through his WDD organization and employ the Ramo-Wooldridge firm as a “deputy” responsible for systems engineering and technical direction of the project. (In practice, although the Air Force was to retain final authority, the men of the two groups were to work side by side and Schriever and Ramo to form a close partnership.)
The radical approach that the Tea Pot Committee had first propounded and Schriever was now advocating would amount to a revolution in the Air Force’s relationship with the aviation industry. The prime contractor system, under which one firm was given responsibility for the entire development, testing, and production of a new aircraft, including any elements it might decide to subcontract out to other companies—engines, for example, were always subcontracted—was time-honored and immensely profitable. And the method had succeeded reasonably well in the evolution of aircraft. It was not that great a bound in technology from the Air Force’s first swept-back-wing, jet-powered bomber, the Boeing B-47 Stratojet, to Boeing’s next and far more formidable swept-back-wing, eight-jet-engine offspring—the B-52 Stratofortress. Guided missiles were quite another matter due to the much more intractable technological challenges. The Tea Pot Committee had seen this in the multitude of modifications, delays, and failures in the histories of the other two strategic missiles it had examined, Snark and Navaho. Schriever planned to give Convair a contract only to manufacture the fuel tank and other sections of the body of the Atlas, what was referred to as the airframe. The contract would also include assembling the entire missile once all the components were ready and participation in the subsequent test firings.
