Skunk Works

“Who says I can’t have two veepees?” he replied, patting me on the shoulder. He said he would name me vice president for advanced projects, just as Northrop proposed to do, and make Rus Daniell his vice president for current projects. “You’re the guy who has the vision and the ideas,” he said. “You’re the guy who can make things happen down the road. I count on your imagination.” Then, for the first time in his dealings with me, he discussed his retirement in three years’ time and told me that I was his personal choice to succeed him. “I’ve got to give the board a choice when I hit sixty-five. It will be between Rus and you. But he’s too old, only two years younger than I am. I will make my wishes known to the board and that won’t exactly hurt your chances. I’ve had my eye on you for a long time. You’ve got the brains and personality to do the job. We’ve got a lot of talented engineers around here, but not too many natural leaders. I like the way you get along, how you deal up-front with everyone, with your good spirit and your energy. So, goddam it, between now and my retirement party, don’t you dare to screw up.”

He also matched Northrop’s offer of a ten-thousand-dollar raise. It was a counteroffer I joyfully accepted.

He began taking me, in my new role as advance planner, along on his trips to the Pentagon. All of us at the Skunk Works knew the two basic rules for getting along with Kelly Johnson: all the airplanes we built were Kelly’s airplanes. Whatever pride we secretly took, we kept to ourselves. And if a blue-suiter wore a star on his shoulder, only Kelly Johnson was authorized to deal with him. The rest of us were free to establish relations with bird colonels and other underlings. Of course, by the time that Kelly retired, many of those colonels I was cultivating would become generals and take command, while Kelly’s connections would be shuffling off to enjoy Boca Raton or Palm Springs on their government pensions.

After all, he had been a familiar figure around official Washington since World War II. He had built the Hudson bomber for the Brits, the P-38 fighter and the P-80 and the F-104—all his recommendations for those projects had been enthusiastically accepted without the slightest argument, the brass showing him the greatest deference and respect. Most of them were former pilots who couldn’t read a blueprint or change a spark plug, much less match wits or dare to contradict the great Kelly Johnson, the genius with the slide rule who created some of America’s greatest flying machines. So Kelly told them what they ought to be doing and they saluted smartly.

Kelly loved to tell how a general named Frank Carroll was so enthusiastic hearing Kelly describe the speed and maneuverability of the new P-80, America’s first jet, which he had been pushing for, that Carroll decided to bypass all the red tape delays and do all the purchase order paperwork himself. “We came back from a quick lunch at two in the afternoon. He had an official letter of intent for me to start work on the P-80 drafted, approved, signed, and sealed in time for me to catch the 3:30 flight back to California,” Kelly said, chuckling delightedly every time he told that story. The same thing happened with the F-104 Starfighter. General Bruce Holloway, who was then head of SAC, was a colonel in procurement back in the 1950s, and listened to Kelly’s pitch about building a supersonic jet. Holloway needed to obtain a list of Air Force requirements to match Kelly’s performance description as the first step toward forwarding a contract for a prototype. “By God, Kelly, I’ll write it myself,” he declared in a blaze of enthusiasm. Kelly helped him draft it, and the two of them carried it up the chain of command to a general named Don Yates, who signed off on it. Total elapsed time: two hours.

Those days were gone forever. Now it was the Air Force calling all the shots, and a towering figure like Kelly Johnson, with his two Collier Trophies and his presidential Medal of Freedom, was respected for his past accomplishments by brash, young aeronautical engineer graduates of the Air Force Academy who had little interest in most of the ideas he tried to generate for new airplanes. Ideas were now a one-way street, initiated by Air Force planners with doctorates in flight sciences. It was rare that the Air Force took a manufacturer’s idea and ran with it, rarer still that manufacturers bothered to present unsolicited proposals to the Pentagon’s planners. And even Kelly was forced to admit that aeronautical brainpower was no longer our monopoly: several of those young procurement officers we dealt with were sharp enough to be hired at the Skunk Works.