Skunk Works

“Why you?” Fred Lawrence smiled, repeating my question. “Because you’ve got the temperament and background we’ve been looking for. You’re Kelly’s troubleshooter on the technical side, which is recommendation enough. We need you to make sure we get the right propulsion system to fit performance capability. That’s eighty percent of the battle—am I right? How many prototypes go down the toilet because the engine is underpowered or totally wrong for what the designers want to achieve? You won’t let that happen. You have a solid reputation for being a straight shooter and customers like you. Ben, with you on board we think we can do big things in the fighter market.”

He explained that they wanted to go after the cheaper, lighter airplanes for the NATO and Asian markets, and had plans in the works to prototype an advanced Air Force interceptor. “We want a piece of that fighter market,” he said, “and you can help us grab it. You know that won’t happen at the Skunk Works as long as Kelly is in charge. The Air Defense Command crosses the street when they see him coming. He’s just too big a pain in the ass to work with. You know I’m telling it right. Ben, break out and come with us. Be your own man. I’m telling you, you won’t regret it. We’ll do big things together.”

I didn’t trust Lawrence, but the job he was offering represented the kind of personal challenge that I lived for. Over coffee, he told me that whatever salary Kelly was currently paying me, Northrop was willing to better it by ten grand annually. I promised them a decision in a week.

My wife, Faye, was no help. She said, “Ben, only you can decide what to do. It is up to you.” The truth was that I was tempted to grab the job, but dreaded having to confront Kelly with my decision.

In the past six years he had taken me under his wing, putting me up for various professional awards for my work on the Blackbird’s revolutionary moving-spike inlets, encouraging me to write technical papers for aeronautical journals to increase my name recognition within the industry. The curse of operating inside a top secret world is that very few in the aerospace industry knew you even existed. I also had talked Kelly into letting me attend a thirteen-week management training course at Harvard’s Business School in the summer of 1969. It was an advanced management institute for about one hundred and fifty carefully selected, upwardly mobile executives—and Kelly wrote me a glowing recommendation that helped me get in, and authorized Lockheed to pay the tuition freight, which was considerable. He backed me even though he insisted that it would be a complete waste of my time. “I’ll teach you all you need to know about running a company in one afternoon, and we’ll both go home early to boot. You don’t need Harvard to teach you that it’s more important to listen than to talk. You can get straight A’s from all your Harvard profs, but you’ll never make the grade unless you are decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision. The final thing you’ll need to know is don’t half-heartedly wound problems—kill them dead. That’s all there is to it. Now you can run this goddam place. Now, go on home and pour yourself a drink.”

But I had persisted, and when I returned from Cambridge, wearing a new crimson tie, Kelly asked me for my appraisal of the Harvard Business School. To accommodate him, I wrote out an equation: ⅔ of HBS = BS. He roared with laughter, had my equation framed, and gave it back to me for Christmas.

Kelly let me test my Harvard training by putting me in charge of an elite Skunk Works team of engineers and designers that he loaned to Lockheed’s main plant for six months, just down the street from our Burbank headquarters, in the fall of 1969, to help them build five prototypes for a new carrier-based Navy submarine-hunting airplane. He could spare us because our own business was unusually slack. Between the new Blackbird and the older U-2, the Air Force had all the spy planes it could use. And that was our house specialty. Northrop’s Fred Lawrence was correct: the blue-suiters who controlled fighter procurements didn’t think of us as fighter builders any more. Our last fighter was the Mach 2 F-104 Starfighter, built during the Korean War to match the fastest Russian MiGs. But for more than a decade we had been seldom included in the bids sent out from the Pentagon announcing a competition for a new fighter. Lockheed as a corporation had a booming business in cargo aircraft and missiles for the Navy. But the Skunk Works had to lay off about eleven hundred workers. And the open secret, which several of us inside the Skunk Works realized but never openly discussed out of loyalty to the boss, was that the blue-suiters in charge of fighters had blackballed Kelly Johnson and excluded him and us from fighter competition because they found him too contentious and bullying to work with any longer.