Best book on TFX Scandal

[Calvin Ye]

What is the best book on TFX Scandal?

[James DiEugenio]

There was not a TFX Scandal.

And the two best books on this, Robert Art's The TFX Decision and Robert Coulam's Illusions of Choice, both conclude that.

The guy behind the scenes who created all the smoke was Henry Jackson, the senator from Boeing.

[Sean Coleman]

What is the TFX scandal?

[Chuck Schwartz]

Sean, John Simkin started a thread on this on this website.  For your convenience, here is the original post .."

In the last few months of Eisenhower’s administration the Air Force began to argue that it needed a successor to its F-105 tactical fighter. This became known as the TFX/F-111 project. In January, 1961, Robert McNamara, changed the TFX from an Air Force program to a joint Air Force-Navy under-taking. On 1st October, the two services sent the aircraft industry the request for proposals on the TFX and the accompanying work statement, with instructions to submit the bids by 1st December, 1961. Three of the bids were submitted by individual companies: the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, the North American Aviation Corporation and the Boeing Company. The other three bids represented team efforts: Republic Aviation & Chance Vought; General Dynamics Corporation & Grumman Aircraft; and McDonnell Aircraft & Douglas Aircraft. (1)

It soon became clear that Boeing was expected to get the contract. Its main competitor was the General Dynamics/Grumman bid. General Dynamics had been America’s leading military contractors during the early stages of the Cold War. For example, in 1958 it obtained $2,239,000,000 worth of government business. This was a higher figure than those obtained by its competitors, such as Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell and North American. (2) More than 80 percent of the firm’s business came from the government. (3) However, the company lost $27 million in 1960 and $143 million in 1961. According to an article by Richard Austin Smith in Fortune Magazine, General Dynamics was close to bankruptcy. Smith claimed that “unless it gets the contract for the joint Navy-Air Force fighter (TFX)… the company was down the road to receivership”. (4)

General Dynamics had several factors in its favour. The president of the company was Frank Pace, the Secretary of the Army (April, 1950-January, 1953). The Deputy Secretary of Defense in 1962 was Roswell Gilpatric, who before he took up the post, was chief counsel for General Dynamics. The Secretary of the Navy was John Connally, a politician from Texas, the state where General Dynamics had its main plant. When he left the job in 1962 he was replaced by another Texan, Fred Korth. He had been appointed by Kennedy after strong lobbying by Lyndon Johnson. Korth from Fort Worth, Texas, was the former president of the Continental Bank, which had loaned General Dynamics considerable sums of money during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Korth later told the McClellan committee that investigated the granting of the TFX contract to General Dynamics “that because of his peculiar position he had deliberately refrained from taking a directing hand in this decision (within the Navy) until the last possible moment.” (5).

As I. F. Stone pointed out, it was “the last possible moment” which counted. “Three times the Pentagon’s Source Selection Board found that Boeing’s bid was better and cheaper than that of General Dynamics and three times the bids were sent back for fresh submissions by the two bidders and fresh reviews. On the fourth round, the military still held that Boeing was better but found at last that the General Dynamics bid was also acceptable.” (6)

Stone goes on to argue: “The only document the McClellan committee investigators were able to find in the Pentagon in favour of that award, according to their testimony, was a five-page memorandum signed by McNamara, Korth, and Eugene Zuckert, then Secretary of the Air Force.”

Zuckert was a close friend of Tommy Corcoran who helped to get him a post with the legal staff of the fledgling Securities and Exchange Commission in 1937. He was also closely associated with John McCone. Zuckert worked with McCone as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s.

McNamara justified his support for General Dynamics because “Boeing had from the very beginning consistently chosen more technically risky tradeoffs in an effort to achieve operational features which exceeded the required performance characteristics.” (7)

During the McClellan's Permanent Investigations Committee hearings into the contract, Senator Sam Ervin asked Robert McNamara “whether or not there was any connection whatever between your selection of General Dynamics, and the fact that the Vice President of the United States happens to be a resident of the state in which that company has one of its principal, if not its principal office.”

McNamara rejected the idea but evidence was to emerge later that Johnson did play an important role in the awarding of the TFX project to General Dynamics. For example, William Proxmire later began investigating the role played by Richard Russell in the granting of the C-5A contract to Lockheed. The C-5A was built in Marietta, Georgia, the state that Russell represented. The Air Force Contract Selection Board originally selected Boeing that was located in the states of Washington and Kansas. However, Proxmire claimed that Russell was able to persuade the board to change its mind and give the C-5A contract to Lockhead.

Proxmire quotes Howard Atherton, the mayor of Marietta, as saying that “Russell was key to landing the contract”. Atherton added that Russell believed that Robert McNamara was going ahead with the C-5A in order to “give the plane to Boeing because Boeing got left out on the TFX fighter.” According to Atherton, Russell got the contract after talking to Lyndon Johnson. Atherton added, “without Russell, we wouldn’t have gotten the contract”. (8)

Several journalists speculated that Johnson and his friends in Texas had played a key role in obtaining the TFX contract for General Dynamics. (9) When "reporters discovered that the Continental National Bank of Fort Worth, was the principal money source for the General Dynamics plant" in October, 1963, Fred Korth was forced to resign as Secretary of the Navy. (10)

Johnson’s role in these events was confirmed when Don B. Reynolds testified in a secret session of the Senate Rules Committee. As Victor Lasky pointed out, Reynolds “spoke of the time Bobby Baker opened a satchel full of paper money which he said was a $100,000 payoff for Johnson for pushing through a $7billion TFX plane contract.” (11)

Burkett Van Kirk, chief counsel for the Republican minority on the Senate Rules Committee later told Seymour Hersh that Senator John Williams of Delaware was being fed information by Robert Kennedy about the involvement of Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Baker in a series of scandals. Williams, the Senate’s leading investigator of corruption, passed this information to the three Republicans (John Sherman Cooper, Hugh Scott and Carl Curtis) on the ten-member Rules Committee. However, outnumbered, they were unable to carry out a full investigation into Johnson and Baker. Van Kirk claimed that Robert Kennedy supplied this information because he wanted “to get rid of Johnson.” (12)

In his autobiography, Forty Years Against the Tide, Carl Curtis gives an insider view of the attempted investigation into the activities of Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Baker, Walter Jenkins and Fred Black. According to Curtis, Johnson managed to persuade the seven Democrats to vote against hearing the testimony of important witnesses. This included Margaret Broome, who served as Bobby Baker’s secretary before the position was taken by Carole Tyler, who later became his mistress. Tyler did testify but refused to answer questions on the ground that she might incriminate herself. Tyler was later to die in an airplane crash on the beach near the Carousel Motel, owned by Bobby Baker.

In his autobiography, Curtis described Baker, Jenkins and Black as “contact men”. He added: “Contact-men existed primarily to obtain for their clients and themselves some share of the vast pool of riches in the possession of swollen centralized political bureaucracies. The more impressive a contact-man’s political connections, the better he and his clients would fare.” (13)

Notes

1. Robert J. Art, The TFX Decision: McNamara and the Military, 1968 (pages 62-63)

2. William Proxmire, speech in the Senate, 24th March, 1969

3. I. F. Stone, The New York Review of Books, 1st January, 1969

4. Richard Austin Smith, Fortune Magazine, February, 1962

5. Robert J. Art, The TFX Decision, 1968 (page 5)

6. I. F. Stone, The New York Review of Books, 1st January, 1969

7. Quoted by Frederic M. Scherer, The Weapons Acquisition Process: Economic Incentives, 1964 (page 37)

8. William Proxmire, Report from Wasteland: America’s Military-Industrial Complex, 1970 (pages 100-102)

9. See “Missiles and Rockets” (11th February, 1963) and Aviation Week & Space Technology (25th February, 1963)

10. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 1993, (page 220)

11. Victor Lasky, It Didn’t Start With Watergate, 1977 (page 144)

12. Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, 1997 (page 407)

13. Carl T. Curtis, Forty Years Against the Tide, 1986 (page 248)

John Simkin

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Posted March 6, 2006

The TFX case is covered by Clark Mollenhoff's book, The Pentagon (1967). I have just ordered a copy as it seems very interesting:

Mollenhoff, Clark R. The Pentagon. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1967. 450 pages.

Clark Mollenhoff was a Pulitzer-winning reporter who had been with the Washington bureau of Cowles Publications for seventeen years before writing this book. But a comprehensive study of the Pentagon requires more access than either the General Accounting Office or a slew of Congressional subcommittees has ever been able to muster, and is certainly beyond the means of a mere reporter. Instead Mollenhoff presents 35 short chapters, each of which amounts to a brief but suggestive case study of a different tip of the Pentagon iceberg.

After several short chapters that cover War Department corruption and mismanagement from the Civil War through World War II, he then gets into more current issues with chapter titles that include names such as Howard Hughes, Benny Meyers, Harold Talbott, Robert McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric, and Fred Korth. Other chapters concern various weapon systems procurement scandals, the Pentagon's "black" budget, kickbacks for generals disguised as consulting or travel-expense fees, nonprofits such as Aerospace Corporation that contract with the military and suck in huge amounts for questionable expenditures, and the "profit pyramid," where layers of subcontractors each add on their profit margins and pass the bill up to the next level until it finally reaches the Pentagon and the taxpayer.

[James DiEugenio]

What almost all authors glide over is the fact that GD won the testing round.

The Pentagon reversed its own decision.

McNamara reverted to the original decision since he had contracted out with a company to compile reports on both models.  They stated that Boeing was fudging the numbers and their budget had to be false since the number of individual parts for the AIr Force and Navy models were much higher in number and ratio than GD's. McNamara's entire goal was to have less parts so he could bring down the cost of the plane.  So when McNamara decided to go with GD, Jackson arranged these phony hearings in order to keep Boeing happy.  These dragged on for a period even after Kennedy's death.  Jackson created a lot of BS and Drew Pearson printed some gossipy stuff imagining that somehow this was a huge problem for LBJ. 

Which it was not, it was a huge problem for Jackson.

[James DiEugenio]

I could hardly believe i was the first person to write about this with both books as my factual backdrop.

 

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/was-the-tfx-case-a-scandal

[Anthony Thorne]

Jim - is there a PDF or link online for Jackson's phony hearings? Most congressional testimony is online somewhere but I can't immediately see a link to it. I just want to read up on who else was involved in the hearings.

[James DiEugenio]

As I recall it, he had couple of those southern conservative senators working with him.

They then  forced Fred Korth to resign to make it look like there was something there.  But Korth had little or nothing to do with the F 111.  It was McNamara's project  as an extension of Kennedy's ideas to bring down weapons costs. Jackson stayed in the background since it would look too obvious that he was pimping for Boeing.

[Sean Coleman]

14 hours ago, Chuck Schwartz said:

Sean, John Simkin started a thread on this on this website.  For your convenience, here is the original post .."

In the last few months of Eisenhower’s administration the Air Force began to argue that it needed a successor to its F-105 tactical fighter. This became known as the TFX/F-111 project. In January, 1961, Robert McNamara, changed the TFX from an Air Force program to a joint Air Force-Navy under-taking. On 1st October, the two services sent the aircraft industry the request for proposals on the TFX and the accompanying work statement, with instructions to submit the bids by 1st December, 1961. Three of the bids were submitted by individual companies: the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, the North American Aviation Corporation and the Boeing Company. The other three bids represented team efforts: Republic Aviation & Chance Vought; General Dynamics Corporation & Grumman Aircraft; and McDonnell Aircraft & Douglas Aircraft. (1)

It soon became clear that Boeing was expected to get the contract. Its main competitor was the General Dynamics/Grumman bid. General Dynamics had been America’s leading military contractors during the early stages of the Cold War. For example, in 1958 it obtained $2,239,000,000 worth of government business. This was a higher figure than those obtained by its competitors, such as Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell and North American. (2) More than 80 percent of the firm’s business came from the government. (3) However, the company lost $27 million in 1960 and $143 million in 1961. According to an article by Richard Austin Smith in Fortune Magazine, General Dynamics was close to bankruptcy. Smith claimed that “unless it gets the contract for the joint Navy-Air Force fighter (TFX)… the company was down the road to receivership”. (4)

General Dynamics had several factors in its favour. The president of the company was Frank Pace, the Secretary of the Army (April, 1950-January, 1953). The Deputy Secretary of Defense in 1962 was Roswell Gilpatric, who before he took up the post, was chief counsel for General Dynamics. The Secretary of the Navy was John Connally, a politician from Texas, the state where General Dynamics had its main plant. When he left the job in 1962 he was replaced by another Texan, Fred Korth. He had been appointed by Kennedy after strong lobbying by Lyndon Johnson. Korth from Fort Worth, Texas, was the former president of the Continental Bank, which had loaned General Dynamics considerable sums of money during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Korth later told the McClellan committee that investigated the granting of the TFX contract to General Dynamics “that because of his peculiar position he had deliberately refrained from taking a directing hand in this decision (within the Navy) until the last possible moment.” (5).

As I. F. Stone pointed out, it was “the last possible moment” which counted. “Three times the Pentagon’s Source Selection Board found that Boeing’s bid was better and cheaper than that of General Dynamics and three times the bids were sent back for fresh submissions by the two bidders and fresh reviews. On the fourth round, the military still held that Boeing was better but found at last that the General Dynamics bid was also acceptable.” (6)

Stone goes on to argue: “The only document the McClellan committee investigators were able to find in the Pentagon in favour of that award, according to their testimony, was a five-page memorandum signed by McNamara, Korth, and Eugene Zuckert, then Secretary of the Air Force.”

Zuckert was a close friend of Tommy Corcoran who helped to get him a post with the legal staff of the fledgling Securities and Exchange Commission in 1937. He was also closely associated with John McCone. Zuckert worked with McCone as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s.

McNamara justified his support for General Dynamics because “Boeing had from the very beginning consistently chosen more technically risky tradeoffs in an effort to achieve operational features which exceeded the required performance characteristics.” (7)

During the McClellan's Permanent Investigations Committee hearings into the contract, Senator Sam Ervin asked Robert McNamara “whether or not there was any connection whatever between your selection of General Dynamics, and the fact that the Vice President of the United States happens to be a resident of the state in which that company has one of its principal, if not its principal office.”

McNamara rejected the idea but evidence was to emerge later that Johnson did play an important role in the awarding of the TFX project to General Dynamics. For example, William Proxmire later began investigating the role played by Richard Russell in the granting of the C-5A contract to Lockheed. The C-5A was built in Marietta, Georgia, the state that Russell represented. The Air Force Contract Selection Board originally selected Boeing that was located in the states of Washington and Kansas. However, Proxmire claimed that Russell was able to persuade the board to change its mind and give the C-5A contract to Lockhead.

Proxmire quotes Howard Atherton, the mayor of Marietta, as saying that “Russell was key to landing the contract”. Atherton added that Russell believed that Robert McNamara was going ahead with the C-5A in order to “give the plane to Boeing because Boeing got left out on the TFX fighter.” According to Atherton, Russell got the contract after talking to Lyndon Johnson. Atherton added, “without Russell, we wouldn’t have gotten the contract”. (8)

Several journalists speculated that Johnson and his friends in Texas had played a key role in obtaining the TFX contract for General Dynamics. (9) When "reporters discovered that the Continental National Bank of Fort Worth, was the principal money source for the General Dynamics plant" in October, 1963, Fred Korth was forced to resign as Secretary of the Navy. (10)

Johnson’s role in these events was confirmed when Don B. Reynolds testified in a secret session of the Senate Rules Committee. As Victor Lasky pointed out, Reynolds “spoke of the time Bobby Baker opened a satchel full of paper money which he said was a $100,000 payoff for Johnson for pushing through a $7billion TFX plane contract.” (11)

Burkett Van Kirk, chief counsel for the Republican minority on the Senate Rules Committee later told Seymour Hersh that Senator John Williams of Delaware was being fed information by Robert Kennedy about the involvement of Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Baker in a series of scandals. Williams, the Senate’s leading investigator of corruption, passed this information to the three Republicans (John Sherman Cooper, Hugh Scott and Carl Curtis) on the ten-member Rules Committee. However, outnumbered, they were unable to carry out a full investigation into Johnson and Baker. Van Kirk claimed that Robert Kennedy supplied this information because he wanted “to get rid of Johnson.” (12)

In his autobiography, Forty Years Against the Tide, Carl Curtis gives an insider view of the attempted investigation into the activities of Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Baker, Walter Jenkins and Fred Black. According to Curtis, Johnson managed to persuade the seven Democrats to vote against hearing the testimony of important witnesses. This included Margaret Broome, who served as Bobby Baker’s secretary before the position was taken by Carole Tyler, who later became his mistress. Tyler did testify but refused to answer questions on the ground that she might incriminate herself. Tyler was later to die in an airplane crash on the beach near the Carousel Motel, owned by Bobby Baker.

In his autobiography, Curtis described Baker, Jenkins and Black as “contact men”. He added: “Contact-men existed primarily to obtain for their clients and themselves some share of the vast pool of riches in the possession of swollen centralized political bureaucracies. The more impressive a contact-man’s political connections, the better he and his clients would fare.” (13)

Notes

1. Robert J. Art, The TFX Decision: McNamara and the Military, 1968 (pages 62-63)

2. William Proxmire, speech in the Senate, 24th March, 1969

3. I. F. Stone, The New York Review of Books, 1st January, 1969

4. Richard Austin Smith, Fortune Magazine, February, 1962

5. Robert J. Art, The TFX Decision, 1968 (page 5)

6. I. F. Stone, The New York Review of Books, 1st January, 1969

7. Quoted by Frederic M. Scherer, The Weapons Acquisition Process: Economic Incentives, 1964 (page 37)

8. William Proxmire, Report from Wasteland: America’s Military-Industrial Complex, 1970 (pages 100-102)

9. See “Missiles and Rockets” (11th February, 1963) and Aviation Week & Space Technology (25th February, 1963)

10. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 1993, (page 220)

11. Victor Lasky, It Didn’t Start With Watergate, 1977 (page 144)

12. Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, 1997 (page 407)

13. Carl T. Curtis, Forty Years Against the Tide, 1986 (page 248)

 

John Simkin

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Posted March 6, 2006

The TFX case is covered by Clark Mollenhoff's book, The Pentagon (1967). I have just ordered a copy as it seems very interesting:

Mollenhoff, Clark R. The Pentagon. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1967. 450 pages.

Clark Mollenhoff was a Pulitzer-winning reporter who had been with the Washington bureau of Cowles Publications for seventeen years before writing this book. But a comprehensive study of the Pentagon requires more access than either the General Accounting Office or a slew of Congressional subcommittees has ever been able to muster, and is certainly beyond the means of a mere reporter. Instead Mollenhoff presents 35 short chapters, each of which amounts to a brief but suggestive case study of a different tip of the Pentagon iceberg.

After several short chapters that cover War Department corruption and mismanagement from the Civil War through World War II, he then gets into more current issues with chapter titles that include names such as Howard Hughes, Benny Meyers, Harold Talbott, Robert McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric, and Fred Korth. Other chapters concern various weapon systems procurement scandals, the Pentagon's "black" budget, kickbacks for generals disguised as consulting or travel-expense fees, nonprofits such as Aerospace Corporation that contract with the military and suck in huge amounts for questionable expenditures, and the "profit pyramid," where layers of subcontractors each add on their profit margins and pass the bill up to the next level until it finally reaches the Pentagon and the taxpayer.

Thanks for that Chuck

With that cast of crooks I’d wager all the envelopes in Manila that there’s a scandal in there somewhere. 

[James DiEugenio]

Please read my article.

[Michael Clark]

On 7/29/2021 at 2:43 PM, James DiEugenio said:

There was not a TFX Scandal.

Whenever there is big money riding on a contract like the TFX project there is scandal and corruption. Congressfolk will not be looking at the merits of the proposals. They will be looking at the benefit to their state or district. Dallas won the argument.

Edited August 2, 2021 by Michael Clark

[James DiEugenio]

I disagree.  McNamara won the argument, but he was then neutralized by Jackson and the Pentagon.