In his office in the Chrysler Building, Juan Trippe leaned back and savored the sweet taste of victory. He had just won the biggest gamble of his life.
Chapter Five
The Empire
Idlewild Airport, New York
October 26. 1958
The runway lights sped past in a blur, reflecting on the rain-slickened runway. Captain Sam Miller, Pan Am’s chief pilot, watched the airspeed increase. A hundred knots. A hundred- twenty. . . Miller nudged the yoke back. Clipper America tilted her nose upward and climbed into the overcast night sky.
It was the most-attended departure since the inaugural flight of the China Clipper. The press, television, radio, the public, the well-wishers, and the purely envious had all turned out for the first transatlantic flight of a jetliner by an American airline.
Technically, jet transatlantic operations had been initiated by a BOAC Comet 4 three weeks earlier. But the Comet, as everyone knew, was not a transatlantic airliner but was merely filling in until BOAC received its own 707s in 1960.
Eight hours and forty-one minutes after the departure of Clipper America, including a fuel stop in Gander, the big jet touched down at Orly Airport in Paris.
Not everyone was overjoyed. Despite the hoopla, there were still those—Trippe’s Primitives—who decried the event. Some were Pan American stockholders. The airline, they pointed out, still belonged to the stockholders, not to Mr. Trippe, who had just unilaterally placed orders for $269 million worth of hardware, most of it untested. And he had done this on a previous year’s net earnings of only $10.4 million. They thought it was an act of egregious irresponsibility—a wild gamble on the part of the chairman.
Trippe held his course. His confidence in the new jets—and in his own judgment—was total. The jets, he insisted, “were not a risk either from the money side or the flying side.”
As it turned out, he was right. During the first quarter of the next year, Pan AM’s 707s and DC-8s carried 33,400 passengers with a 90.8 percent seat occupancy—an all-time record. During the next five years, overseas traffic doubled. Pan Am’s operating revenues swelled to over half a billion dollars.
Pan American World Airways would enter the jet age with a decade’s lead on its competitors. And with this victory behind him, the Supreme Skygod was emboldened to gamble again.
With his fleet of jetliners taking to the skies, Juan Trippe’s thoughts turned to more earthly forms of glory. He was thinking about a new headquarters for his burgeoning empire. Somewhere there ought to be a fitting monument to America’s Imperial Airline. And, of course, to Juan Trippe.
But where?
Over the years there had been talk about Pan Am’s leaving New York. Such suggestions always came from some brash new staffer who pointed to the advantages of operating in labor-friendlier and tax-freer regions of the country. Older executives, more interested in maintaining the bond between their heads and shoulders, instinctively headed for cover when the subject came up. They knew that Trippe treated all such cockamamie proposals with a meat cleaver.
New York was Skygod country. Let the others go to the provinces, Trippe reasoned. It was okay for an airline like American, which was run by the folksy Texan, C.R. Smith, to move to Dallas. And it probably made sense for a blue-collar domestic like United to base itself in Chicago. And even though TWA had international routes, the airline was still, in Trippe’s view, a Midwest company perfectly suited to a flatland hamlet like Kansas City.
Pan American World Airways was quite another matter. It was unthinkable that the Imperial Airline’s headquarters would grace the skyline of any metropolis but New York. And that was the end of that.
The problem was, Pan Am had occupied the same offices in the Chrysler Building for nearly thirty years and had outgrown them. The lease was due to expire in the early 1960s, and Trippe didn’t want to renew it. But no other suitable home in New York had been found.
At the end of the fifties, a promoter named Erwin Wolfson was touting a spectacular new business complex for Manhattan. Wolfson’s structure would be the largest corporate office building ever built. In his proposal, the ultramodern building would rise from the foot of Park Avenue, straddling the railroad tracks just to the south of Grand Central Terminal.
Wolfson needed a single tenant, a corporation of great size and image, to underwrite the project by leasing a number of floors. Already be had been turned down by several megacorporations, including General Motors and IBM. When Wolfson heard that Pan Am might be looking for a new home, he tried to arrange an appointment with Juan Trippe.
It was well known that of all the species of businessperson that Trippe disliked, real estate promoters ranked near the top. Trippe refused to see Wolfson. Wolfson tried every connection he had.
“Can you get me in to see Trippe?” he asked a vice president.
“Hell,” said the executive, “I’ve been trying for six months to see him myself.”
This went on for some weeks. And then the promoter persuaded a New York banker named Henry Brunie, who was closely acquainted with Trippe, to write a letter detailing the proposed new building. Trippe read the letter. Then he read it again. He called Brunie to ask several questions about the new building. But he flatly refused to talk to a promoter like Wolfson.
Wolfson was a man as persistent as Trippe was obstinate. He asked Brunie to approach Trippe once again and ask him to relent. They could be of service to each other, but it was essential that they meet face to face.
By then Trippe’s interest had been stirred. He finally agreed to meet Wolfson. But the meeting had to be absolutely secret, and it must be after hours, so as to appear purely social. The two men met in the Cloud Club atop the Chrysler Building after its normal closing time. Trippe was in his old conspiratorial role. Before they discussed anything, he gave the promoter a stern warning: if any word of their meeting leaked out, the discussions would end instantly.
There were more meetings. All were conducted with the secrecy of the D-Day invasion. Wolfson files on the Pan Am subject were labeled “Project X.” Pan American was “Prince Albert,” and Trippe himself took the code name “Traveler.”
All the while a grandiose image was forming in Trippe’s imagination. He visualized a magnificent edifice—his building—festooned with the Pan American logo, thrusting upward in the heart of New York City. It would be wonderful! It would be an inescapable daily irritant in the eyes of the Primitives.
As the details were hammered out, it became clear that Trippe, who had shown little previous interest in architecture, was determined to put his stamp on the new building. The basic design pleased him, but he wanted the axis of the building rotated ninety degrees. The rooftop would have to be designed as a landing site for helicopters. And, by the way, he wanted the round Pan Am logo and the name Pan Am displayed in letters thirty feet high on all four sides of the building.
At this the architects and promoters lowered their notepads. They stared at each other. Thirty feet high? Well, now, let’s wait a minute. There was already going to be quite enough flak from New York preservationists about the building’s antitraditional shape. Then to turn a Manhattan skyscraper into a billboard. . . perhaps we should think that one over. . .
That wasn’t all. Trippe announced that he intended to pay a third less rent than the going rate in New York, and, oh, yes, he wanted an equity stake in the building.
What the hell? The promoters put down their pads and took another look at the angelically smiling, soft-spoken airline executive. They were beginning to get the picture. This guy Trippe was trying to set the deal up so that he would eventually own the whole damn package.
The Great Dissembler, the first airline tycoon, had metamorphosed into a hard-bargaining real estate baron. Pan Am’s lease document filled a hundred pages. At a cost of $1 million Trippe captured a 10 percent equity in the project, with an option to increase the holding, a stake that would reap enormous dividends for Pan Am in the future. Pan Am would occupy nine fu
ll floors as well as a huge sales office on the sidewalk level. The lease was to run for thirty years with renewal options for ten-year periods. The total rental amounted to $115.5 million. It was the largest commercial lease ever signed for a Manhattan building.
On the matter of the PAN AM sign and logo, Trippe relented—but only a little. Instead of letters thirty feet high, he would settle for fifteen.
Over the next three years Manhattanites watched the building rise on their island. The chief architectural consultants were the great Walter Gropius of Bauhaus fame and Pietro Belluschi of M.I.T. When the Pan Am Building was dedicated March 1963, Governor Nelson Rockefeller felt inspired to call it “a symbol of the genius and creativity of the free enterprise system.”
Old-line New Yorkers had other names for it: “arrogant, oversize intruder;” “Gropius fiasco;” a “monument to greed and irresponsibility.”
Trippe loved it. It was the sound of the Primitives gnashing their teeth.
He moved into his new office on the forty-sixth floor. He indulged himself by retiring his old rolltop and acquiring a great mahogany presidential desk. He had a splendid view of the great city beneath him.
Chapter Six
The Man From Camelot
The Primitives were at it again.
Juan Trippe glowered at the newspapers on his desk. It was the spring of 1963, and both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times had come out against the allocation of any more development funds for the SST—America’s supersonic transport. In Washington a speech had been delivered by Senator William Proxmire, congressional budget bloodhound, demanding that SST development funds be shriveled from $280 million to $80 million. To Proxmire and his disciples, the SST was a boondoggle—another fleecing of the taxpayers for the further enrichment of American big business.
Such thinking incensed Trippe. The backward-thinking, nay-saying Primitives! It was just like the 707 project. Hadn’t he been proved correct in his determination to commence all-jet service?
Now it was the supersonic transport.
To Juan Trippe the SST amounted to more than just another pointy-nosed airplane that flew faster than sound. This was the sound barrier. There was magic to the idea. Supersonic flight was the final frontier in the earth’s atmosphere. After that came space travel. Never mind the arguments, the economics, the risks of such an adventure. In Juan Trippe’s mind the SST represented America’s—and Pan American’s—destiny.
He had thrown himself into the fray with all his old passion. He was determined that there would, by God, be an SST, and Pan Am would fly it. Why? Because it was what Juan Trippe wanted.
The trouble was, time was running out. The SST had become a seasonal political issue. Here was Proxmire ranting about the unfairness of it all to the poor innocent taxpayers. The planet people were howling about ghastly airport noise and sonic booms and damage to the stratosphere. The liberals were wringing their hands over the notion of the elite and privileged flying in a billion-dollar airplane at the expense of America’s poor and disenfranchised. At the same time the President, John F. Kennedy, was taking heat from the bean counters in Washington, who wanted to spend America’s money on a host of new social programs as well as some expensive items of Cold War hardware.
Trippe was even getting flak from America’s greatest hero.
Of all people, Charles Lindbergh, Pan Am’s technical consultant, had gone public with his feelings about the SST. “It doesn’t make sense,” the Lone Eagle was telling anyone who would listen. Such an airplane had to be narrow and pencil-shaped to achieve supersonic speeds. You couldn’t make money with the minuscule passenger loads at such a high operating cost.
But Lindbergh’s real concern wasn’t for engineering problems. Now he was worried about the environment. In his later years, Lindbergh had become a technological conscientious objector. He didn’t think the planet needed sonic booms reverberating across its surface. The upper atmosphere didn’t need any more holes punched in it by planeloads of high rollers who wanted to do business on both sides of the ocean the same morning.
People thought the great Lindbergh might be going a bit dotty. He had been heard saying things such as “If I could choose between birds and airplanes, I’d choose birds.” Birds? Lindbergh wasn’t even sure anymore that the airplane had been a very good idea. The world would probably be better off without it.
This was Lindbergh talking? The world’s most famous aviator? Well, it did seem a bit peculiar. . .
Trippe listened to Lindbergh’s admonitions, then he did what he always did when Lindbergh went out on a limb. He ignored him.
Juan Trippe was sixty-three, and there was much left to do. Before he left the stage he intended to equip Pan American for the next century.
It was time to go shopping. Trippe had already learned with the jets and the J-75 engine that to get what he wanted here in the United States, he sometimes had to start overseas.
With his technical entourage—John Borger, successor to Priester, and Scott Flower, his chief pilot in charge of technical matters—he journeyed to London. There they were driven to the British Aircraft Corporation facility, where they gazed at the mockup of the supersonic Concorde. Then in Toulouse, at Sud-Aviation, they saw the actual airframe coming to life on the assembly line. The Concorde was real. The British and French had set aside a millennium of rivalry to pioneer a bold new era in transportation.
Trippe needed no more convincing. The United States could not afford to lose its leadership in aviation. America needed an SST of its own. And standing there on the factory floor, gazing at the needle-nosed Concorde, Juan Trippe thought of a way he might make it happen.
The SST had already lived and died—on paper—several times.
In 1959, during the Eisenhower administration, Federal Aviation Administrator Pete Quesada had proposed that $2 million be allocated to the development of an SST. The technology, it was assumed, would evolve from the experimental B-70 supersonic bomber being built by the military aircraft manufacturer North American. At Lockheed’s famous “Skunk works,” where futuristic airplanes like the P-38 and the U-2 and the F-104 had been created, preliminary sketches were already rendered for a supersonic airliner. But Quesada’s proposal drowned in the muddy waters of the Defense Department and the Eisenhower cabinet.
Then came young blood. The Kennedy administration replaced Quesada with a former test pilot named Najeeb Halaby. In addition to heading the Federal Aviation Agency, Halaby would be aviation adviser to Kennedy.
Kennedy viewed aerospace competition in terms of national prestige. The massive cost of landing a man on the moon made sense to a leader like Kennedy, because it would be an American planting the flag. The home team would win. There was glory to be gained, and for Kennedy that was reason enough.
The British and French were collaborating on the Concorde, a supersonic airplane that embodied the prestige and aspirations and egos of a rising European community—and particularly the hopes of a Frenchman named Charles de Gaulle. To further heat up the competition, the Soviet Union was constructing its own SST, the TU-144, a Concorde look-alike.
Kennedy’s problem was largely bureaucratic: how to bring all the warring parties together in a joint commercial effort of this size. Government agencies, by their nature, didn’t care whether an airplane used only by commercial airlines ever got built. Nothing of the immensity of the SST program had ever been undertaken by a consortium of private industry and public agencies.
Who would pay for it? The manufacturers—Lockheed, Douglas, North American, Boeing—were not able to absorb the huge research and development cost. Nor were the airlines.
That left the government. But Kennedy’s own administration was divided over the SST. Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, was opposed to any purely commercial supersonic development. Advances in aviation, he thought, ought to be spin-offs from a military program. A large segment of Congress, led by Senator Proxmire, derided the entire project as a bottomless hole for ta
xpayers’ money.
In the spring of 1963, Kennedy appointed the FAA administrator, Jeeb Halaby, as the point man in the SST effort. Halaby made his rounds, trying to line up promises. One of the promises he wanted was from Juan Trippe.
Kennedy had never trusted Juan Trippe. He already knew about Trippe’s interest in the Concorde. A move by Pan Am to order a foreign supersonic transport would be taken by the rest of the world as an indication that the American aviation industry acted without any direction or policy guidance from its own government. It would give the appearance that the President could not make a decision to build an American SST, and Pan Am, therefore, had to go overseas.
There was also a history of bad blood between the Kennedys and Juan Trippe. In the thirties the patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, headed the powerful Maritime Commission. Kennedy had tried to bring all American overseas commerce—not only the shipping lines but international air carriers—under the regulatory control of his commission. Pan American happened to be the only American overseas airline, and Kennedy was opposed to any such monopoly in international commerce. Trippe had fought back, using all Pan Am’s political clout in Washington to effect passage of the 1938 Civil Aeronautics Act, which snatched control of the airlines away from Kennedy’s commission and gave it to a separate agency.
Joe Kennedy was an important figure in the Democratic Party and had been a heavy contributor to the campaigns of Franklin Roosevelt. He was now Juan Trippe’s implacable enemy. And, by extension, so was the President of the United States.
Old Joe was still around. The Kennedys, everyone said, had long memories.
On JFK’s orders, Halaby called Trippe, reminding him that the President was on the verge of making a deciion about the SST. Would he please defer any announcement about Pan Am’s intentions?
Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am Page 5
