This is why defense contractors, like other special interests, pay lobbyists fat fees or salaries to track the budget process and try to influence it in their product’s favor. Most lobbyists do this partly by trying to make sure the right Pentagon officials and military officers, members of Congress, and congressional aides get persuasive briefings about their products. First they have to get their attention, of course, which requires gaining access to them. To get access, almost all lobbyists make campaign contributions and get their clients to make them as well. Many also host fund-raising parties for members or solicit donations from others, then “bundle” them and pass them on so the congressman or senator knows where to direct his or her gratitude. Crooked lobbyists sometimes bribe or try to bribe lawmakers, though that’s probably less common than popularly assumed. Usually, lobbyists cultivate influence in far subtler ways, most often just by trying to become friends with members or key aides, especially top committee aides.
However a lobbyist gets it, access is the key. The typical member’s schedule is packed with committee meetings, floor votes, news conferences, and back-to-back meetings in the office, all sandwiched between evening fund-raisers and weekend trips home to see constituents or campaign for reelection. Getting a member’s ear is the first step in getting a member’s vote, so access becomes influence. That’s why who a lobbyist knows is often far more important than what a lobbyist knows. For that reason, the ranks of Washington lobbyists teem with people who got into the influence game because they already had personal contacts on Capitol Hill. Many lobbyists are former members of Congress, former congressional aides, or veterans of the government’s many legislative liaison offices.
Around the time Jim Atkins decided Bell should take the XV-15 to Paris, he also hired his company a new Washington lobbyist. George G. Troutman, a gregarious native of Albany, Georgia, with smiley eyes and a bulldog grin, was a former World War II bomber pilot who learned his way around Capitol Hill as an Air Force legislative liaison officer. After retiring from the Air Force with twenty-two years in uniform, Troutman lobbied for General Dynamics and then General Electric, whose products include aircraft engines.
“I hired George Troutman, and the reason he came with Bell was the tiltrotor; that’s the only reason,” Atkins remembered.
Troutman, who died of cancer in 2000, was smooth and wily. In a 1979 Business Week article on defense lobbyists, a California congressman called him “very likely the best in the business.” Business Week said the “No. 1 rule” for good lobbyists was “no lying,” but that there was a “corollary, sometimes known as ‘Troutman’s law.’ As one Troutman confidant puts it, ‘Never lie, but don’t necessarily blab the truth.’ ”
“He was a jewel,” Dick Spivey’s former marketing boss, Phil Norwine, said of Troutman. “Very clever. I watched him write letters to himself, one for a congressman [to sign] and one for a general.” At Christmas, Norwine remembered, Troutman would give the guards at the Pentagon parking lot little gift-wrapped bottles of champagne. In pre-9/11 days, security was more lax; the guards always let Troutman park close to the building. He just drove past them at the gate and waved.
Troutman knew everybody on Capitol Hill, it seemed, and was good friends with key members. He and House Majority Leader Jim Wright, a Fort Worth Democrat whose district included Bell Helicopter’s plants, had been friends since Troutman was an Air Force legislative liaison officer. Troutman and Goldwater, a fellow World War II and Air Force veteran, were fishing buddies. It was Troutman who brought the senator to the Bell chalet at the 1981 Paris Air Show. After the air show, Leonard M. “Jack” Horner, a Bell vice president and former Marine pilot who was being groomed to succeed Atkins as president, started going to Washington nearly every week. Troutman took Horner to meet members of Congress and Pentagon officials to sell them on the tiltrotor. “He was fantastic,” Horner said. “He had access to everybody and had a very innovative mind.” Troutman explained that “in Washington, you don’t have to worry about people saying ‘yes,’ you got to worry about people saying ‘no,’ ” Horner said. “So we wanted to make sure we got everything through the system without somebody saying ‘no.’ They didn’t have to say ‘yes.’ He helped me work that.”
By the 1980s, the “military-industrial complex” had evolved into something even more complicated—a triple entente among the armed services, industry, and members of Congress who back defense procurement projects that create jobs in their districts or states. In a 1981 book on defense contracting, Gordon Adams of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank focused on curbing defense spending, called this natural alliance of economic, bureaucratic, and political interests the “Iron Triangle.” As word got back to Bell Helicopter that Lehman was sold on the tiltrotor and the Marines were trying to get a joint program started to buy one for themselves and the other services, Bell focused on getting the congressional leg of the Iron Triangle in place.
Troutman, Horner, Spivey, and others made the rounds on Capitol Hill constantly. They spread the word in the Texas delegation that the tiltrotor was ready for prime time and that a military contract to build one could bring billions of dollars and thousands of jobs to the Lone Star State. They briefed key members of the defense committees on how the tiltrotor could have avoided the disaster at Desert One, and how a contract to build one for the military would mean subcontracts that might create jobs in their states, too. Troutman told Horner it wasn’t going to be enough, though, to win over the defense committees. To create a political base strong enough to get and keep a military tiltrotor program sold, Bell needed allies among members who took little interest in defense issues. When talking to them, Troutman said, they should stress that the tiltrotor was a technology that would revolutionize civil aviation. Aircraft able to take off and land vertically but fly as fast and far as a turboprop airplane would reduce airport congestion and bring air service to remote communities in states like Alaska. When the tiltrotor was proven by the military and adapted to civilian use, the United States would sell tiltrotors to the rest of the world and reap a huge economic harvest. Who wouldn’t be for that? But the military would have to prove the technology first, for commercial aviation would never take the risk. “He was the one who came up with that great idea, the fact that the tilt-rotor was good for America,” Horner said of Troutman. “That was our whole theme: this was a technology that needed an opportunity.”
* * *
Troutman was crafty, but the XV-15 remained Bell’s best marketing tool. Even before Paris, Spivey had been urging his bosses to get NASA to let the company keep one of the two XV-15s in Texas so he could invite guest pilots to fly. NASA had been cool to the idea in the past, but after the air show, the agency’s attitude changed. NASA’s aeronautics arm was thrilled with the XV-15’s performance in Paris and the resulting good publicity for its tiltrotor project. For years, the space program had gotten most of NASA’s money and nearly all the publicity, casting a large shadow over those in the agency working on aircraft. The Paris Air Show was a first for NASA, which had never before allowed one of its experimental aircraft to fly at such an event. It had been a gamble, and officials at NASA’s Ames Research Center thought the gamble had paid off handsomely. In October, NASA signed one of the two XV-15s over to Bell for flight tests, air show appearances, and to let guest pilots fly at company expense. NASA’s official history of the XV-15 project explains that “with this arrangement, Bell would be able to demonstrate the capabilities of the tilt rotor aircraft to military and civilian aviation decision makers in an attempt to seek and develop potential markets.”
Bell wasted no time putting its XV-15 to use. On October 30, Barry Goldwater was on his way home to Arizona for surgery to replace his left hip, his second such operation. The senator stopped in Fort Worth first to fly the XV-15. Goldwater’s friend Troutman had made the arrangements, and Spivey and others at Bell were excited when the icon of the right wing arrived. Test pilot Ron Erhart felt sure Goldwate
r would get them a military contract of some kind once he flew the XV-15. Bell president Atkins met the senator and escorted him out to the aircraft. Stenciled on the fuselage under the XV-15’s left cockpit window: sen. barry m. goldwater.
It was Dorman Cannon’s day to fly, so he sat in the right seat. Gold-water’s bad hip made it a struggle for him to get into the cockpit, but the senator was in a good mood; he didn’t grumble. Cannon took them up into a hover, then headed south under gray, cloudy skies, tilting the XV-15’s rotors forward into airplane mode and gaining altitude as they went. Once they were flying like a conventional turboprop airplane, Cannon looked over and said, “Mr. Goldwater, would you like to fly?”
“Yeah,” Goldwater said cheerfully, taking command of the plane with his set of the dual controls. Then he turned to Cannon and asked, dead-pan, “Anybody ever rolled this sonuvabitch?”
Cannon wasn’t sure Goldwater was kidding. “No,” the test pilot replied firmly, “and we’re not going to do it now, either.”
Goldwater looked through his horn-rimmed glasses and gave Cannon a sly grin.
Roy Hopkins, one of Bell’s helicopter test pilots in those days, was sitting by the door to the Bell Flight Research Center offices when Cannon and Goldwater returned. As they came through the door, Goldwater declared to no one in particular, “Man, you guys got something there!” Then he hobbled into a tiny conference room packed with engineers, marketers, and managers. He told them about his flight and what a bright future he could see for the tiltrotor. When he left, Spivey had no doubt: the senator was sold.
By November, Scheuren, Magnus, and the others in the Marine Corps mafia were well on their way to getting the joint VSTOL program created. The services were now openly discussing the idea with each other and the defense companies that might bid on such a project. Magnus told me that as he worked on the studies needed to justify a joint program, “I started drinking the Kool-Aid” on the tiltrotor.
Bell officials—especially Horner, Troutman, and Spivey—were doing everything they could to get others to take a sip. Spivey started inviting every officer and official he thought might matter to Fort Worth to fly the XV-15. Troutman helped get them to come. From November 30 through December 12, Navair commander Seymour, Marine Corps aviation chief White, and six other Air Force, Army, and Marine generals flew the XV-15. Over three days from December 14 to 16, Bell brought in ten Marine Corps officers, including Magnus, Scheuren, and the rest of the Marine Corps mafia helping sell the joint program. Four flew the first day. Three more, including Magnus and Scheuren, flew the next. The third day, Colonels Bob Balch, Darwin Lundberg, and James Creech, the manager of the Navair office created to replace the CH-46, got their turn. Spivey made sure each guest pilot got a plaque signed by the Bell pilot they’d flown with and by Jim Atkins. Each plaque was inscribed: “Know all men by these presents that [name] did on this day fly the XV-15 tilt rotor, the world’s most advanced and efficient high-speed rotorcraft, [date].”
When Balch, Lundberg, and Creech finished their flights, Atkins invited them to his office. “Now I want to hear it from you guys’ mouths,” the Bell president said. “If I make a large commitment to this thing, is it going to make it?”
They all said it would.
“I’d feel a hell of a lot more comfortable if you all didn’t have exactly the same suit on,” Atkins told the three Marines.
Atkins knew the other services weren’t sold on the tiltrotor the way the Marines and Lehman were. By now, it appeared certain a joint VSTOL aircraft program would be created, but it was uncertain how long it might actually last. The Army had started the XV-15 with NASA a decade earlier, looking for a faster way to evacuate battlefield casualties, but had almost dropped out just a couple of years ago. Spivey and others at Bell were hearing that the top brass weren’t sure the tiltrotor’s speed would make all that much difference to the Army. Some Army generals were more interested in trying to build a new combination attack/scout helicopter with stealth technology to evade enemy radar. Navy admirals, meanwhile, were less enthusiastic than Lehman about investing a lot of money to buy a complex new aircraft largely for the Marine Corps while trying to build a 600-ship Navy, new fighter planes, and a lot of other things.
Two weeks after Atkins and the Marine colonels talked, DeLauer got Deputy Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci to sign an order directing the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force to chip in $1.5 million each to create a joint VSTOL program for themselves and the Marines, a step called “Milestone Zero.” But that was just a start. The next steps would be to get the services to really commit to the program and Congress to fund it.
For the time being, the potential new aircraft would be called the JVX, for “Joint Services, Vertical Lift and Experimental.” Reports in the trade press said that if it went forward, the project would be huge— $20 billion or more in all, though the real estimate was $41 billion. The Marines were to buy 552 of the new aircraft to replace their CH-46s and CH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters. The Navy would buy 50 for various missions. The Air Force wanted 200 for special operations and combat search and rescue. The Army was expected to buy 288 for electronic surveillance, to carry troops, and for medical evacuation. The JVX would be a bonanza for whatever company won a design competition to be held in 1983, after a new program office had done all the necessary studies and paperwork. The Army would be in charge, but the program manager would be Marine Colonel Jimmie Creech, who had run the Navair office searching for a CH-46 replacement and flown the XV-15 in December.
In January, the new program office organized a meeting at Quantico Marine Base of the four armed services to decide the minimum requirements the JVX would have to meet—speed, range, altitude, payload, etc. Each service sent a small group of experts. Magnus led the Marine Corps delegation. (Another participant grinned when he recalled how Magnus introduced himself as “Bob Magnus, Commandant Marine Corps.” After all, he was representing the commandant.) The panel deliberated for a week and wrote a Joint Services Operational Requirement. Officially, the JVX might be a tiltrotor, a tilt-wing, a compound helicopter Sikorsky was working on called the Advancing Blade Concept, or some other VSTOL craft—all were theoretical candidates. The requirements committee, though, decided the JVX would need to cruise at 250 knots—close to 290 miles per hour—and fly as high as 30,000 feet to do what the Marines and the Army wanted. Only the tiltrotor had shown it could do that.
The JVX program office also assembled a 54-member team of experts to assess the various VSTOL technologies against the Joint Services Operational Requirements. Magnus was on that panel, too. The technology committee, which studied the options from February through April, decided only the tiltrotor could meet the requirements.
Spivey and others at Bell were excited by the way things were unfolding but still unsure they would win the deal. Nobody but Bell had ever built a tiltrotor, but in theory, another company could. Boeing Vertol had competed against Bell for the NASA/Army project that produced the XV-15. Spivey didn’t know it at the time, but even before the JVX program was announced, the Boeing executive who’d been in charge of trying to sell the Marines the Plastic Phrog had written a memo to the company’s president urging him to create a tiltrotor program of their own as soon as possible. Spivey also heard from Magnus that Sikorsky might design a tiltrotor of its own and bid it. By now, Magnus was on the phone fairly frequently with Spivey. “We were properly but pretty closely knit,” Magnus said. But even Magnus wasn’t sure Bell had the manufacturing ability to build a tiltrotor as big and capable as the Marines wanted.
As the JVX program got under way, Magnus and the rest of the Marine Corps mafia went into high gear to get it through the budget process—approved by the Navy Department, into the Pentagon’s future defense spending plans, okayed by top civilian officials, and funded by Congress. Magnus was in the office by about five-thirty each morning and left after dark each evening. The admirals were resisting, throwing hurdles in the way of a program that was going to spend
a big chunk of their future budgets on the Marine Corps. They used a standard tactic: requesting studies. Magnus worked on almost all of them. He also worked on studies Lehman and Kelley ordered up aimed at reassuring Marine aviation chief White and Commandant Barrow, who were antsy about the course Lehman had set for them.
With House Majority Leader Wright, Senator Tower, and the rest of the Texas delegation looking out for Bell Helicopter’s interests, however, and with Bell lobbying others in Congress, momentum for the JVX was quickly growing. Magnus also was working on Congress to make sure the JVX got funded. Normally, the Marine Corps legislative liaison office would handle that kind of thing, but in January, Magnus started going to Capitol Hill on his own to brief House and Senate armed services committee aides on why the Marines wanted the JVX program and the tiltrotor. He was doing what Kelley wanted, but he was poaching on legislative liaison’s turf, so sometimes he went to the Hill in civilian clothes to avoid notice.
The Dream Machine Page 13
