Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Two hundred and fifty planes at thirty million dollars a copy was 750 million dollars. With the usual follow-ons for spare parts it was a billion-dollar contract. “Will that fly in Washington?” Adrian asked.

  Since the end of the Korean War, each year had seen bruising battles between the armed forces over the shrinking Pentagon budget. So far, the Air Force had won most of the fights. General LeMay reflected this momentum in his answer. “We’ll make it fly.”

  Cliff Morris did not have the slightest doubt that Curtis LeMay could deliver on this promise. To him and other veterans of the air war over Germany, LeMay was an almost mythical figure. He had devised the tactics that enabled them to survive and frequently flew in the lead plane to sustain their sagging morale. He had crowned his wartime achievements by creating the Strategic Air Command, whose mission was to warn the Russians against any more Korean-type adventures. Currently equipped with subsonic B-52s built by Boeing, SAC’s strategy of intimidation seemed to be working. As the year 1960 began, communism was quiescent throughout the world except for some sporadic guerrilla fighting in a remote southeast Asian enclave called Vietnam.

  Cliff could see why General LeMay was ecstatic over the Warrior. It could cruise at 2,200 miles an hour at 70,000 feet, giving it an 800-mph advantage over any fighter plane known to exist. It could fly 20,000 miles without refueling, eliminating the fleet of vulnerable flying tankers that the B-52s needed for global warfare. If it was not the ultimate weapon, it was as close as anyone had come to it yet.

  “Now all you’ve got to do is pray your bloody Congress doesn’t go missile crazy,” said a weary English voice on Cliff’s right.

  Everyone looked at Derek Chapman—and at Cliff—with an uneasy mixture of dismay and dislike. Cliff found himself wishing there was some way he could make Derek disappear, instantly. He was turning into a hoodoo, an albatross, a walking, talking intimation of bad luck.

  Unfortunately, Derek was his brother-in-law. Making him disappear was impossible. Short, stocky, and balding, he seemed an affable, tolerable relative when he showed up in California, wondering if he could get a job in Buchanan’s design department. Frank Buchanan was delighted to hire this son of his old British friend. Derek joined the department in the final stages of the superhuman effort on the Warrior and made some valuable contributions to positioning the canards, the small tail-like wings on the nose that enabled the plane to achieve compression lift.

  But Derek’s conversation soon gave everyone the creeps. He brought with him from England a tale of woe that sent chills through Buchanan Aircraft. He talked endlessly, bitterly about the way England’s aircraft industry had been decimated by the emergence of the missile.

  Last year, Russia’s German rocket scientists had beaten America’s German rocket scientists in a secret race and fired a capsule called Sputnik into orbit around the earth. Nikita Khrushchev, Russia’s new strongman, had proclaimed his missiles made American bombers obsolete and the Soviet Union was the number one global power. In the United States, this development had no immediate impact on the aircraft industry, beyond inspiring several companies to set up missile divisions. In England, where budget problems were far more severe, the minister of defense had canceled virtually every advanced aircraft in development, sending a half-dozen companies lurching toward bankruptcy.

  It was unthinkable, Cliff told himself. It could never happen in America. A plane like the Warrior represented all Frank Buchanan and his cohorts had learned from the experimental rocket planes, the Talus flying wing, supersonic fighters like the Scorpion, the agonizing research into flutter to rescue the Starduster. When Buchananites looked at the BX’s sweeping cursives and sharp obliques, they thought of the test pilots who had died in earlier planes, the designers and engineers who had collapsed with heart attacks or heartbreak when their ideas or their endurance failed them. They felt the pride of creating another leading edge in the history of flight.

  The Air Force was equally unenthusiastic about missiles, as Cliff Morris had learned in more than one drunken evening with Billy McCall and his fellow colonels. Hot pilots all, they were horrified by the thought of turning into the silo sitters of the sixties. They had put on their uniforms to fly planes and they refused to believe that a hunk of hurtling metal with a fire in its ass and a computer for a brain could replace them. The Warrior was their answer to the missile.

  These were the emotions vibrating through Buchanan Aircraft and the Air Force in the weeks after the Warrior rollout. Billy and a half-dozen other pilots began putting the plane through a series of tests that made everyone more and more euphoric. Never had they seen a prototype perform more precisely on or above its specifications. Heat problems were nonexistent, thanks to the exotic metals such as titanium Frank had used for the skin. At supersonic speeds there was not a hint of flutter or buffet.

  Cliff frequently flew with Billy and enjoyed coming home to tell Sarah and the kids that he had been to Chicago or Hawaii and back that day. They got to Chicago in less than an hour, to Hawaii in less than two. Frank gave him a model of the plane for Charlie. Cliff solemnly swore him not to show it to anyone, because it was still top secret. Charlie loved it, of course.

  Sarah watched, unenthused. “Why are you making him a pilot?” she said. “He may not be any good at it.” Charlie did not do well in math or science in school.

  Cliff curtly informed Sarah he was not necessarily making the kid a pilot, he might be making him an airline or aircraft executive. “I hope not,” Sarah said.

  Since their disagreement in South America, they had been observing a Korean-style armed truce. It frequently broke down, with Charlie often the battleground. Cliff’s solution was brutal but effective. He stayed away from home as much as possible, using his new title of sales vice president as his excuse. He spent weeks on the road schmoozing with Air Force contacts in the Pentagon and at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and engine honchos at Pratt & Whitney and General Electric, getting a line on the latest thinking in the field.

  In Washington Cliff began picking up some very bad vibes on the future of the Warrior. Back at Edwards (formerly Muroc) Air Force Base, Billy McCall bitterly confirmed the rumors. “They’re talkin’ about junkin’ it, just like they did the flyin’ wing,” Billy said. “The gutless son of a bitch you’ve got for a boss will probably go right along with it.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” Cliff said, remembering Adrian’s pledge.

  Cliff reported the bad semi-news to Adrian and was encouraged by his reaction. “We’ve got to keep that plane alive,” Adrian said. “It represents our chance to take the world commercial market away from Boeing and Douglas when we go supersonic. I’ll talk to some people at the White House.”

  Adrian had been chairman of the California Business Executives for Eisenhower in both elections. He had some chits to play. A week later, as the big plane roared through a series of high-altitude tests, he telephoned Cliff. “Get all the pertinent data together and reduce it to one page. That’s the most Ike ever reads about anything. Be at LAX tonight. We’re flying to Georgia to settle the Warrior eyeball-to-eyeball.”

  Twenty-four hours later, Cliff sat in a pine-paneled room at the Augusta National Golf Club, listening to Air Force General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tell President Dwight D. Eisenhower why America needed Buchanan Aircraft’s Warrior bomber. Beside Twining sat General Curtis LeMay. Behind them was a row of colonels and lieutenant colonels, including Billy McCall.

  Adrian Van Ness and Frank Buchanan sat beside Cliff, ready to expand the one-page memorandum on the Warrior’s performance envelope, if the president requested it. Dick Stone was also on hand with a briefcase full of financial information. Ike was flanked by his Secretary of Defense, Neil McElroy, and his science adviser, Dr. George Kistiakowski.

  McElroy backed Twining with a strong plea for the Warrior, even if it never dropped a single nuclear bomb. He saw enormous possibilities for it as a reconnaissance plan
e, a military transport—and a commercial carrier. Cliff sensed Frank Buchanan’s tension, as the president listened, deadpan. “I’m allergic to using military funds to develop a commercial plane,” Ike said.

  The astonishment on most faces was unforgettable. For a moment Cliff was sure Frank Buchanan was going to ask Ike where he thought Boeing got the 707 jetliner. All you had to do was glance at their military planes to see the connection. Anyone in the room could have told this man, who was supposed to have access to every piece of pertinent information on any subject under the sun, that leapfrogging from military to commercial models and back again was what the American aircraft business had done since its foundation. But the power of the presidency silenced everyone, even Frank.

  “Mr. President,” said Air Force Chief of Staff General Thomas White, “We need this plane because we think a flexible defense is basic to the nation’s security. A bomber is under the control of a man, not a computer, like a missile. It can be recalled. It can take evasive actions, improvise avenues of attack. It can force the enemy to deploy defenses that absorb a lot of his energy and attention.”

  “You’ve got Boeing’s B-Fifty-twos for that job,” Eisenhower said.

  “They’re subsonic, Mr. President. Their highest speed is six-twenty miles an hour. This plane can go three times that speed! We’ve got a plane that represents the greatest breakthrough in aerodynamics, in the whole science of flight, in two decades. We can’t dismiss it. We can’t afford to do that. The morale of the Air Force is at stake here!”

  “It’s your job to worry about the morale of the Air Force,” Ike growled, his ground soldier’s animus showing. “Mine is to worry about the economy, the morale of the whole country. It may be a great plane but a missile can do its job as well or better. That’s all there is to it.”

  Cliff found himself thinking about Sarah’s moral outrage at bribing half of South America to sell the Starduster and half of Europe to sell the Scorpion. Didn’t this justify it? There sat the president of the United States, dismissing the greatest plane ever designed by an American. Consigning it to the junkyard. Where did that leave Boy Scout ideas like patriotism, loyalty, integrity? Adrian’s attitude was the only one that made sense. You had to survive in this business by making your own rules.

  Dr. Kistiakowski, Eisenhower’s science advisor, now waded in. He dismissed General White’s argument about the virtues of a plane versus a missile. If anything, the plane was more vulnerable. The CIA had recently reported alarming improvements in Soviet radar and antiaircraft missilery. They now had weapons capable of destroying a plane at 70,000 feet, no matter how fast it was going.

  Cliff turned expectantly to his hero, General LeMay and his cohorts, expecting a furious counterattack. Instead, the generals and the colonels looked dumbfounded. The CIA had not said a word to them about such developments. It was Cliff’s first glimpse of the way the American defense establishment operated, not as a team but as a collection of warring tribes.

  The meeting broke up with the Air Force and Buchanan Aircraft in disarray. “Now maybe you’ll understand why I chopped up the Talus,” Adrian said to Frank Buchanan as they rode back to their hotel in downtown Atlanta. “You see the stupidity, the arrogance, the infighting we have to deal with? The quality of the plane is irrelevant.”

  “I wish I’d taken my mother’s advice and stuck to painting pottery,” Frank said.

  As they sat in the hotel bar gloomily sipping Scotch, Billy McCall joined them with General LeMay. “What’s the next step?” Frank Buchanan asked. “Do we chop it up?”

  “Like hell,” LeMay said. “That goddamn plane is gonna fly or I’m gonna get court-martialed. That fucking infantryman knows as much about air strategy as I do about molecular biology. He’s only gonna be in office another fourteen months. There’s two political parties in this country and the other one is looking for an issue to beat Ike and his boy Tricky Dick next year. This plane could be it. What we want to know is, will you guys cooperate?”

  “What do you want us to do?” Adrian said.

  “Spend some money,” LeMay said. “We’re gonna bring congressmen out to fly in that bomber by the dozen. We want you to make sure they’re well entertained.”

  “Can you protect us if Ike starts canceling other contracts?”

  “We’ll try,” Lemay said. “But we can’t guarantee anything.”

  Adrian looked at Cliff and Dick Stone. Was he remembering his pledge to fight for the plane? It was hard to read his impassive face. Was he thinking of his billion-dollar Starduster dream that would have made them independent of this gut-shredding political game? Probably. “We’re with you,” he said. “Cliff here will be in charge of the reception committee.”

  Cliff sat with Frank Buchanan on the flight back to California. “I’m amazed,” Frank said. “I never thought Adrian had this much guts.”

  “He wants that supersonic airliner,” Cliff said, trying to play peacemaker.

  “So do I,” Frank said ruefully, as if it pained him to agree with Adrian on anything.

  First on LeMay’s invitation list was the Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson, who was running for president. The tall, stooped Texan came to the Mojave factory on a swing through California to try to line up money and support. He had a memo in his hand when he got off his Air Force plane. “Is this bullshit or the God’s honest truth?” he said, handing it to Cliff.

  The memo was a hymn to the power and beauty of the Warrior. It declared the bomber was the issue that could make Johnson president. “The truth, Senator,” Cliff said, raising his right hand. “I wrote it myself.”

  Cliff introduced Johnson to Billy McCall and they took a walk around the Warrior, as it crouched on its eight-wheeled landing gear in the desert sunshine. “That’s the damndest plane I’ve ever seen,” Johnson said. “Looks like a bald eagle with its neck stretched.”

  “Wait’ll you fly in it, Senator,” Billy said.

  “You couldn’t get me into that thing for all the gold in Fort Knox,” Johnson said.

  “I hope you have time to watch her go up,” Cliff said.

  Johnson shook his head. “I’m meetin’ eleven oilmen in the Bel Air Hotel in exactly one hour. But this thing—it’s got my support.”

  “We were hoping we could entertain you in other ways, Senator,” Cliff said. “Buchanan’s got some of the best-looking girls in Los Angeles on the payroll.”

  “Don’t worry about me, son. I can get my own pussy anytime, anyplace,” Johnson said.

  The next day, the Los Angeles Times carried a story announcing Senator Johnson’s “all-out backing” of the Warrior. “This is the greatest plane of the century,” he said. “If we can’t afford to build this plane to defend ourselves, we don’t deserve to remain a free people. General Eisenhower is showing his age when he dismisses it as nothing more than a manned missile. I’ve flown in it. I’ve witnessed its miraculous technology in action. I am going to urge the Congress of the United States to fund it, no matter what the president says.”

  Cliff came home in a celebratory mood. He suggested cocktails on the patio before dinner and told Sarah the inside story of Johnson’s endorsement. “We didn’t even have to pay anyone overtime to entertain him,” he said.

  “You’re still doing that?” she said, implying that Tama’s stable should have died with her. “It’s sickening to think a man like him is running for president. He sounds as bad as the Prince. Is his endorsement worth anything? You can’t trust him, can you?”

  “I’m getting awfully tired of your sermons on morality,” Cliff said. “Did it ever occur to you that you’re hopelessly out of your depth?”

  “Did it ever occur to you that I might like a husband with some integrity, some genuine pride in what he’s doing?”

  “I’ve got pride,” Cliff roared. For months he had tried to ignore the anger he had felt about her judgment on the Starduster sales. This new disapproval seemed to justify unleashing it with compound fury. “I’ve got a
ll the pride I need. I’m proud of the plane. I’m proud of the way we’re selling it. You don’t build planes in a fucking convent school and you don’t sell them in a church.”

  “Shhh, the children will hear you,” Sarah said.

  “Let them hear me!” Cliff shouted. “I’m not ashamed of what I’m doing. You’re the one who should be ashamed, trying to undermine me with them, with myself. Trying to destroy my self-confidence. You’re worse than your goddamn brother. He’s sitting around telling everyone we’re going down the tubes the same way you stupid limeys went, chopping up planes because the Russians found out how to shoot off a goddamn rocket.”

  She was trembling. Her eyes were swimming with tears.

  “Maybe Derek—and I—can’t help trying to tell you the truth. It’s a bad habit among us stupid limeys.”

  He saw how impossible it was going to be to talk to her about anything from now on. “I’m sorry about the limey stuff. Let’s forget it.”

  The next day at lunch Adrian congratulated Cliff for the Johnson endorsement. “You can expect a visit from the mick from Massachusetts within the month,” he said.

  Adrian was talking about Senator John F. Kennedy, who had recently announced he was a candidate for the White House. Showing the built-in prejudices of his Boston ancestry, Adrian found it hard to believe any Irish-American could be presidential material. Within two weeks, the Kennedy office called to arrange a visit. A week later, JFK bounded off another Air Force plane and seized Cliff’s hand with an almost lethal grip. “Where is this superbomber?” he asked.

  Cliff introduced the senator to Billy McCall and he promptly recited three of the four records Billy had set in high-altitude flight. Billy grinned. “You must have had a hell of a briefing.”

  In the desert sunshine Kennedy seemed almost unnaturally youthful. Compared to him the drooping Johnson looked like an old man. As they rode down the flight line, Kennedy said: “We’ve got a mutual friend who says hello.”