In the anteroom to the office of the Secretary of the Navy, Fred Rentschler and I waited our turn. A stream of visitors, mostly naval officers of high rank, swept in and out of the sanctum. The men who were furnishing the leadership for this war were contemporaries of mine back in those brave days at the turn of the century when Pax Britannica still reigned and when the chances for professional advancement or even a career looked slim indeed. Now as they moved in and out, many paused to greet us and say a word of congratulation on our industry’s production miracle. Meanwhile, we wondered what the secretary might have in store for us.

Jim Forrestal sat behind his desk, taking a telephone call. As we took chairs in front of him, I glanced around at the flag-draped room and its collection of trophies. Jim had made a bid to refurnish the long room, decorating the walls with blow-up photos and seagoing mementos but even a powerhouse like Jim could not dispel the musty odor of the temporary structure or paint out its shabbiness. By 1945 that collection of shacks had served twenty-five years and seen two world wars, and it bid fair to go on indefinitely. Jim hung up the telephone, flicked a switch to his “intercom-squawker,” barked a sharp order at the answering voice, and then turned to us.

James Forrestal, like Fred Rentschler, was a Princeton man. Curious how you can spot the stamps of Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, and other Ivy League colleges. Schools like this leave as much of an imprint upon their alumni as do West Point and Annapolis. Jim was a close-knit, clean-cut, youngish fellow, dark-complexioned, with the muscles of an intercollegiate boxer bulging around his shoulders and upper arms. A man of few words, he packed almost as much meaning in them as did Fred Rentschler.

“I am going to tell you fellows something, now,” he began, “and if you repeat it, I’ll deny I ever said it.” He paused to pull open the upper left-hand drawer of the desk and remove a packet of gum. After offering us some, he wadded the wrapper of his own piece, flicked it into the wastebasket, and went on.

“You fellows are swamping us with your production,” he said. “Engines, propellers, and airplanes are running out of our ears. The time has come to slow down.”

I couldn’t resist a crack. “So it’s now ‘too much and too soon.’”

Fred Rentschler looked serious.

“Jim,” he began, “that remark of yours gives us the opening we have been waiting for. We have been worried about the same thing for some time, but with the criticism that has been leveled at us, we just didn’t think it was time to bring the matter to you.” He lighted a cigarette.

“Of course you know,” he said, “that the aircraft industry has been blown up like a balloon. Our present output is all out of proportion to our own meager resources. If there should be a sudden cessation of hostilities, as in World War I, and that seems highly probable, and if no more preparation has been made for such an event than now exists, the whole aircraft industry will be wiped out in a matter of days. If any company could survive such a catastrophe, it would be United Aircraft, for we have been ultraconservative and taken every possible precaution against just this contingency, but I promise you even United would go out like a light.” Jim Forrestal sat silent, watching Fred as he went on.

“We have made a quick study of our own situation,” he said, “and concluded that, upon the sudden termination of existing war contracts, which under the law occurs immediately upon the cessation of hostilities, we could not complete the mechanics of paying off our employees in time to prevent liquidating our resources. The pay roll is so big,” he added, “and the job of paying off is so complex, that the outgo would break us before we could finish the task.” He paused.

“To sum up our position,” he concluded, “the disorderly reconversion that seems sure to follow this war will wipe us out even more completely than it did after the Armistice. In our opinion,” he added, “it’s up to you military fellows to do something about it.”

Jim Forrestal nodded. “I go along with you,” he said, “up to the last statement. There is nothing the Army and Navy can do about this. We are public servants and, even under Franklin D. Roosevelt, subject to the people’s will. The only people that can do anything about it,” he added, “are you men. Your industry has got to carry its story to the public.” Again his telephone rang; again Jim handled the call. He turned back to us.

“Your industry,” he went on, dead-pan, “is the choicest collection of cutthroat competitors in the country. Maybe it’s because pioneers still manage it. But if you pioneers expect to survive,” Jim went on, “the industry must unite and do battle for its existence. Frankly, I doubt if anyone can unite the aircraft industry, but someone has got to try it.” He glanced my way.

“If anyone can do it,” he added, putting a finger on my knee, “you can.”

He might as well have landed a fist on my chin. What he meant was that having come out of the Navy, and escaped the early personal rivalries, I was freed of a handicap.

Even as Jim had talked, orderlies had entered the room and begun shifting chairs, lining them up in an arc around the secretary’s desk. Through the open door I caught glimpses of the uniforms and gray thatches of ranking department heads, standing by for a council meeting. As Fred and I stood up to leave, Jim walked us to the door.

“Why not stay for the council meeting?” he asked me, as we shook hands. “You’ll see a lot of old shipmates.”

“Thanks,” I replied, “I guess we’d better go home and digest what you’ve just told us.”

Back in Hartford, the four members of United’s war council gathered around the long table in the board room where Fred Rentschler had his office. On the walls hung the portraits of men who had helped make the company—men like Chance Vought, George Wheat, George Mead, and Don Brown.

After discussing the problem Jim Forrestal had put up to us, we agreed that this new responsibility would require rearrangement of our own topside organization. An effort to organize the aircraft industry for a public relations effort just didn’t fit in with the detailed administration of any single company. I would have to relinquish my job as chief executive.

And so I came face to face with the decision that I had known to be inevitable the moment Jim Forrestal put the finger on me. I had been in at the inception of Pratt and Whitney and United Aircraft. I had managed three of its four divisions and participated in vital decisions as to the other. I had helped hold it together in the trying days following the Black and Nye investigations, and had been its chief executive through the critical phases of the war expansion. Now that we were over the hump, I would have to give up my cherished title of president in order to try to help the company to survive.

As a matter of fact, we had long discussed the possibilities of a reorganization following the war. We well knew that the reconversion job would try the nervous and physical capacity of a man younger than any of us four seniors, and that our duty to the company demanded that we start bringing juniors along. We four would graduate into the category of elder statesman while my successor took over the reins. The logical man was Jack Horner, of Pratt and Whitney. Ray Walsh and I would fleet up to vice-chairmen and Jack in due course would become president. Meanwhile I would assume responsibility for “general-industry” matters and retain supervision of research. Jack would take over operations, and Fred would continue to exercise authority over the business affairs of the company. Ray Walsh, who had a unique capacity for handling policy, personnel, and legal matters, would continue on his course.

With these decisions reached, we began a discussion of the course to be followed in getting our story before the public. Had there been some independent aviation organization capable of doing the job, we should have looked to them, but under the circumstances, it seemed clear that we must depend upon our trade association, the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce, in Washington. The war production councils, then functioning effectively, would automatically disband upon cessation of hostilities; the Aeronautical Chamber must be rejuvenated.

Discussion of the course to be followed brought out a key suggestion by Raycroft Walsh. Ray had been in the Air Corps in Washington during the Moffett-Mitchell dogfight and had participated in the hearings before the Morrow Board. Having in mind the constructive influence of the Board, he now suggested that we campaign for a new public air policy commission.

Fred Rentschler rather pooh-poohed the suggestion but, when I supported it, finally agreed wholeheartedly. Here was a little indicator of how difficult it might prove to sell the idea to the company presidents; if Fred Rentschler needed selling, how about the others less profound in their mental processes than he? We now decided that I should make a swing around the circuit to appraise the states of mind and try to plant the idea before we committed ourselves irrevocably to changes in our own organization that our directors might not approve. On our board, aside from the principal officers of the company, we had enlisted the help of several distinguished “outside directors.” Joseph P. Ripley, president of the New York investment house of Harriman Ripley, had been active in the original incorporation of United Aircraft and Transport. Harry G. Stoddard, president of Wyman Gordon, had long served on our executive committee. Morgan B. Brainard, president of Aetna Life and Affiliated Companies, was a man of broad wisdom and wide business experience. Francis W. Cole, a prominent Hartford lawyer and later board chairman of the great Traveller’s Insurance Company, brought us mature counsel. Mr. Peter M. Fraser, later president of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company, completed our coterie of able men. And if at times the technicalities of our business confused them somewhat, nonetheless, their unexcelled fundamental business knowledge was a priceless asset to the company. We outlined the plan to them but decided to defer final decision until I could check industry sentiment and determine if the Forrestal suggestion could command its support.

This check took me westward to Los Angeles, the center of the air-frame section of aircraft production. As our representative in that territory, Russell R. Vought, younger brother of Chance Vought, had long maintained an office in Beverly Hills. Russ had gone west while still a young man, and founded his own business in San Francisco. Then back in 1928, when we had equipped the Langley with the new Corsairs, and especially the single-float amphibians, he had agreed to represent Chance Vought Aircraft on the West Coast on a part-time basis. Now he made his home in Beverly Hills and had a bungalow in Palm Springs. Arrived in Beverly Hills, I called up John G. Lee, the manager of the West Coast War Production Council, and asked him over to the office with a view to getting his appraisal of the problem.

John Lee, through his close association with the presidents of the West Coast companies, was able to give me an authoritative estimate of the sentiment out there. The presidents, he thought, were too much engrossed with their own immediate problems to become interested in the long-term difficulties. They were aware of the threat to survival but not as yet concerned with it. Like many other business chief executives, they were groggy and punch-drunk, and you couldn’t blame them. As a reward for their pains they had found themselves characterized as munitions racketeers, war profiteers, and merchants of death. Now, through production miracles, they had given the lie to their detractors. The profit motive no longer provided an incentive to creative endeavor.

“Take Mr. Douglas, for instance,” John summed up. “He is the key to the West Coast situation. If you could enlist his support, you could also get the help of the others; without it you’d be licked before you started. Time magazine recently quoted him as saying he had the perfect postwar plan: ‘lock the door and throw away the key.’ Of course Mr. Douglas didn’t say that, even though he may have thought it, but the quote is significant.”

Ever since that day in Jim Forrestal’s office, I had been mulling over an idea evolved one evening at Admiralty House, Bermuda, where my wife and I had been the dinner guests of Vice Adm. Sir Charles E. Kennedy-Purvis, RN, K.C.B., Commander in Chief of British Forces in the Western Atlantic. As Comdr. Charles E. Kennedy-Purvis, Executive Officer of the light cruiser Southampton, I had known him well in the old Grand Fleet days. “K-P,” as we called him, had recently been advised of his pending assignment as First Deputy Sea Lord, at the Admiralty, London, where he would be charged with responsibility for recreating the British carrier force after the decline suffered under the Air Ministry. He had asked us down for a visit in order to get my slants on the principles involved.

My idea had first come to me the evening following the German surrender in World War I when several of us wardroom officers had gone ashore to pay a social call on K-P and his wife in their tiny apartment over a cottage in the village of Limekilns. Upon my referring to Beatty’s congratulatory signal to the Grand Fleet, K-P had taken pains to remind me that the message had been addressed to the British Empire.

“Beatty,” he had said, “was not talking to the fleet but reminding the people that it had been the nine-knot tramps, the rusty colliers, the huge transports, the drifters and trawlers, all the ‘Merchant Men’ which had kept the Empire lifeline open. These,” he had added, “are the backbone of our sea power.”

K-P, who like most English officers was much better schooled in public affairs than were we, had gone on to give us a discourse on transportation. From the days of the aborigines’ pursuit of game herds, the progress of civilization was marked by the milestones of the development of transport. In America, the railroads had sparked reconstruction after the Civil War by opening up the resources of the West. Following the World War, the automobile would likely perform the same function. Improved transportation had always increased the number of persons who could subsist on a given area and had always increased the wealth and living standards of lands in which it had been exploited.

When I had inquired what future K-P foresaw for the airplane he had shaken his head.

“The economics of the thing are all against it,” he had replied. “The cost and complication of the airplane are out of all proportion to its limited useful load.”

Subsequently, with the coming of age of air transport, I had begun to visualize an analogy between sea power and air power, a line of thinking that had led naturally to Pax Britannica and Pax Aeronautica. About this same time John W. Donaldson published a paper on the same subject. This would become the keynote of the aircraft manufacturing industry’s struggle for survival, but first we must establish a wholly new definition of air power. Instead of its being synonymous with air force, the term must incorporate such other elements as aircraft production, airline transport, private flying, finance, public support, in fact everything that helps make a nation strong in the air. While advocating the preservation of our industry, we must predicate the need upon the public interest.

When I outlined this idea to John Lee, his eyes lighted up.

“It will take an idea like that to interest Don Douglas,” he said. “Remember,” he advised, “Mr. Douglas responds to the eye rather than to the ear.”

In order that we might concentrate on this job, the Voughts now suggested that my wife and I join them at their cottage on the desert. Here at Palm Springs, the task was to do a sort of Mahan analysis of air power in history, and boil it all down to the simplest terms. After a lot of head-scratching, pencil-pushing, and earnest discussion, I finally got it in form.

Feeling now the need for the best possible counsel on this important matter, I wangled an invitation from Rear Adm. John H. Towers, then on duty at Pearl Harbor, and hopped out to Honolulu in a Pan American Boeing Clipper that left San Francisco before supper and arrived at Pearl before breakfast next morning.

Curiously enough, Jack had as his guest a young English lieutenant commander of the Royal Naval Flying Service, who had been sent out by my friend K-P to observe American carrier operations. After two decades, he was doing the Godfrey de Chevalier act in reverse.

During my two-day visit at Pearl Harbor, Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief, entertained at a luncheon for his top commanders who had been called in by air for briefing on the next operation, and he invited me to join the party. As I sat down, the single civilian in a galaxy of top brass, I estimated that the average number of gilt stars among thirty-odd officers must be about two and a half per man. These fellows, all either contemporaries at Annapolis or men with whom I had been shipmates prior to leaving the Navy, had fought through two world wars and participated in world events none had even remotely foreseen.

After a review of my program with Jack Towers and Forrest Sherman, the latter now Nimitz’s planning chief, I caught the Clipper back to San Francisco. We had a full load, top brass returning to Washington and young bluejackets returning home on top priority because of illness in their families or other personal difficulties. Arrived back at Beverly Hills in time for lunch, I called Don Douglas on the telephone, and made a date with him for the morrow.

As our company car pulled up at the entrance to Don’s plant in Santa Monica, the California sun shown on the camouflaged village, which so completely concealed the sprawling plant that it was hard to find the gate. Don sat behind the desk in the shadow of his lightproof and soundproofed ground-floor office, and stood up to greet me as I came in. After a few words to state my business, I handed him his copy of the air-power statement and as Don sat down to read it, I opened my copy with a view to pacing his reading. Don Douglas read carefully, noting every word.

“I’ll go for this,” he said simply, speaking in the soft voice that made it difficult to hear him at times. Then after a moment he added, “What do you want me to do?”

I explained the need for a meeting of our Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce at which the board of governors should adopt the program. We must reorganize the Chamber and give it a set of officers who could direct the program; I suggested that he become chairman of the board of governors. He countered with the statement that this job should be mine, but agreed to accept the vice-chairmanship of the board. I suggested that we borrow John G. Lee from the West Coast Aircraft War Production Council to head up the reorganization of the chamber and, after some consideration, he agreed. We would bring in Clyde Vandenburgh, of the East Coast Council, and Frank Russell, of the National Council, to assist. A meeting of the National Council was scheduled to take place in Los Angeles late in April, 1944, which would be attended by all the company presidents. We would call a simultaneous meeting of the Chamber and put the air-power program before the Board for consideration at that time.

On April 26, 1944, the board of governors of the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce met in Los Angeles. In presenting the program, still in its tentative typewritten form, I pointed out that this was a preliminary statement and subject to revision by the members. After all, the Constitution of the United States had been no one-man job but the painstaking effort of many men of different minds; we needed the thoughts of everyone on what would prove an important action by the board. A number of constructive suggestions were offered and voted, after which the revision was adopted unanimously. The preamble to the resolution ran as follows:

And the essence of these principles was summarized toward the end of the pamphlet in this paragraph.

We had naturally expected that when this document was released to the aviation press it would create something of a stir, but in this we were disappointed. After this warning that the idea would need to be sold, even to aviation writers, we began to appreciate the fact that we had a job on our hands. Through Deac Lyman, an old New York Times reporter, we were invited to lunch with Arthur Sulzberger and his editors in the executive dining room of the Times Building, where we briefed our situation. The Times, always alert to aviation matters, subsequently covered aviation news and handled aviation editorials against the background of the policy. The magazine Aviation, whose editor, Leslie Neville, was author of numerous books on aviation, caught the new spirit and developed the theme. Soon all the members of the Aviation Writers’ Association took a hand in developing the broad background of air power as a trinity of commerce, industry, and security.

Subsequent events proved that we had acted none too early. Within a matter of weeks, we were haled before a Congressional investigating committee, the War Contracts Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs.