SEEKING CONVERSION
“I was in it so deep. I was in it so deep that, well, I just didn’t have the moral compass to say to myself, ‘Sure you’re in it deep, but get out of it now. Cut your losses.’ ”
My father was making one of his confessions, one of his self-lacerations in my presence that each time had the unspoken effect of bringing us closer together. As if handing me pieces to the tantalizing puzzle of himself, he had been saying such things to me for several years by the spring of 1990 when I was thirty-two and my father had been an aerospace engineer for more than three decades. Those years had made me less his child and more his friend, he and I liked to say. As friends we talked of shared interests, something he’d read or something I’d written, some absurdity of modern life we perceived alike and enjoyed having a good laugh about. The less I was his child and the more I became his friend, the tighter my father seemed to grip me in his bear hugs of greeting and the less abashedly he would say to me, “I love you, son.”
“I love you, too, Dad,” I would answer. And then, if my father happened to slip into one of his confessions, one of his ever more harsh appraisals of how dull and suspect had been his working life, I would love him all the more. For I accepted that self-negation as a kind of gift, coming as it did from a father who had once seemed all-powerful to his child, powerfully charismatic or powerfully fearsome depending on the moment, but an enigma self-enclosed, self-sufficient. “It gives me supreme satisfaction that you did not follow my example and become an engineer,” my father now liked to say to me, his friend, and whenever he did, I knew he wanted to share with me some more regrets and doubts, more glimpses of what a life spent in the military contracting bureaucracy had cost his spirit.
What gave this conversation in the spring of 1990 a different color, however, was the fact that the Cold War was won, having been ended by the revolts in the Eastern Bloc. Because of this, life in America’s military contracting bureaucracy seemed to be ripe for change. The nation was abuzz with expectations of a Peace Dividend, a windfall to come from the now indefensible $300 billion defense budget. Perhaps some of that Peace Dividend would pay people like my father to make blue sky technology for the new age, magnetic levitating trains and electric automobiles and a space station or two for monitoring the earth’s ecology. What a difference a Peace Dividend could make, not only in the life of a nation but in the heart of a soured aerospace engineer—assuming, of course, that the aerospace industry could be, in the popular term of the day, “converted” to peaceful pursuits. That is what my father and I were discussing in the spring of 1990, the possibility of conversion.
Days before, I had given my father a taped speech by the leading evangelist of conversion, Seymour Melman, a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University. Melman’s mixture of technicalese and hellfire preaching was different from peace marchers moralizing against “merchants of death.” Melman found his sins in waste and inefficiency and needless drag on the mechanism of the American economy, sins from an engineer’s book, sins that went straight to my father’s qualms. Melman’s accusation against the military sector was that it siphoned off too much capital and brainpower from vitally productive sectors in the economy, a critique he made as early as 1965 in a book called Our Depleted Society, which he followed with The Permanent War Economy (1974), Profits Without Production (1983) and The Demilitarized Society (1988). Never in all those pages had Seymour Melman relented in his damnation of aerospace culture, its bloated bureaucracy and guaranteed profits hidden behind a curtain of black budget secrecy, sins bringing punishment upon all citizens as America’s productivity rate declined and the Japanese whipped us in the commercial marketplace. And now, with the Cold War over, the lone rationale for so pernicious a culture, “national security,” was evaporating.
Seymour Melman’s vision of conversion looked far beyond the new products that must roll off aerospace assembly lines. The very culture within aerospace plants must be converted to the doctrines of the commercial marketplace. The United States government (which had, after all, fostered the military contractors’ mindset) would force this great reformation by requiring Lockheed and its ilk to immediately create conversion committees made up of rank-and-file workers as well as management. Those committees would chart each company’s new, peacefully productive future. Who should be laid off? Who should be retrained? What now should be invented and manufactured by this firm? You couldn’t let stockholders and top management decide those things, Seymour Melman argued, because their interest was short-term profit, and so they would likely sell off assets and fire employees en masse and otherwise stick to making as many arms as possible, leaving America a nation weakened economically and technologically. But if ordinary workers could be given a say in their fate, they would map long-term profitable—and productive—new missions for their companies, transforming the shape and culture of those firms while insuring jobs for themselves in the process. The keys to their own salvation would be placed in their hands.
I found myself very much wanting to believe in this vision of a saved and reformed Lockheed, this idea that the blue sky good life I had known as a child need not end just because the market for blue sky weaponry was disappearing. I wondered if my father could himself believe, and so, after he was done hearing Seymour Melman’s gospel, I decided to tape-record his reaction.
He came to me with a yellow pad full of notes in hand, saying, “Yes, I agree that Melman’s ideas are going to have to be addressed. Will they come to pass without some kind of convulsion in the military-industrial complex? I think not. The first thing Melman’s ideas will have to endure is an incredible, entrenched resistance by those whose careers are at stake. These are powerful men with very powerful interests in the status quo. Now someone like Melman comes along and says, ‘The game’s up, guys. You are obsolete.’ The first thing someone is going to think of when he hears that is, ‘I’m not gonna settle for that, because if I agree with what he’s saying, that makes my whole life irrelevant.’ You are going to have to literally blast these guys, blast these ideas, out of their economic foxholes.
“That’s the ambivalence of it for me,” said my father. “I realize I am one of those people to whom it would be announced, ‘Your adult working life has been spent in a futile pursuit. You’re not needed anymore.’ That would be a bitter pill to swallow. But, to tell you the truth, the idea’s been creeping up on me for a long time. The more I asked myself, ‘What the hell is this doing for the species?’ and the more I saw of dissipated energies and squandered talent, the less enamored I was with the aerospace industry.
“By the time these ideas began to dominate my thinking, though, I was in it so deep. I was in it so deep that, well, I just didn’t have the moral compass to say to myself, ‘Sure you’re in it deep but get out of it now. Cut your losses.’ ”
Never had my father revealed to me so much of the burden carried within, no longer merely hinting at a career uninspiring or even unworthy of his potential, but voicing the fear that he had traveled too far along a path morally doomed. Of course, never before had there been a Cold War finished, a Peace Dividend coming. What I took from my father’s latest confession was that we two suddenly shared an interest in exploring the potential for conversion, and in it, a kind of redemption.
Electronic mail from a graduate of Arizona State University, class of 1990:
I have a hard time with all the hype about getting the nation’s children interested in math and science. I got caught up in the hype for many years. I was born in ’67 and can even vaguely remember sitting on my father’s lap, watching Apollo launch in ’69. Ever since then, everyone promotes science, and especially AIR science! I have a degree in aerospace engineering. I want to be one of those guys you used to see in the TV ads, on the NASA mission launches, in the videos, and in the marketing the government publishes on why a student should enjoy math and science. I want to design rockets, jets, shuttles. I want to model airflow, run tests in wind-tunnels, build mock-ups. I want to be the one who says “10, 9, 8, 7, 6,…” But I am having a hard time finding a job in the aerospace industry simply because my expectations are too high.
A series of vignettes will tell how my father and I fared in our search for conversion, a quest that ends, some four years later, back in the living room of my parents’ home.
In the first scene it is the spring of 1990, still, and I am in the basement of Columbia University’s industrial engineering department. Seymour Melman bursts through the door of his tiny office late for our appointment, yanking off his cap to reveal a snowy thatch, landing in his chair with a wild grin. Melman is rejoicing at a recent New York Times editorial telling President Bush to get busy cutting the defense budget in half by the year 2000. After that ran, a Times editor invited the professor over to hear his gospel of conversion, which Melman has delivered just this day. “It’s the missing link!” Melman is fairly shouting at me. “The editor owned up that what’s left open is the conversion issue! Conversion is the missing link! What’s the use of talking about budget reduction, and what you’re going to spend it on, if these bunnies in between are scared to death!”
By “these bunnies in between,” Melman means the politicians who want to vote a Peace Dividend, but not if it costs too many jobs in their districts. The solution is his conversion approach, Melman promised the editor as he is now promising me. In fact, Congress could easily surpass the cuts called for by the Times, saving the country well over a trillion defense dollars by the year 2000. And, in a twist on Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics, Melman calculates that reinvesting the savings into infrastructure, education, and R&D would create more than enough wealth and jobs and tax revenue to erase the deficit within a decade.
With the Red Menace kaput, Melman is busy these days evangelizing peace groups and labor unions and Rotary clubs, drawing enthusiastic applause from all. A conference of mayors has given him an ovation and a unanimous resolution calling for conversion. Seymour Melman has even preached to Bryant Gumbel on the Today show. The logic is inescapable. Surely anyone who stands to gain from government spending on butter over guns—teachers, librarians, road workers, police, medical researchers, the homeless—represents a natural constituency for Melman’s plan to phase out the military economy. Congress cannot for long ignore such mounting political pressure and so it is only a matter of time before the bill in Congress that Seymour Melman has helped frame will be passed into law and the great reformation can begin.
That is why Seymour Melman is fairly shouting at me. He is gripped with the fever of a prophet vindicated by unfolding events. “I mean, you can demonstrate that the Soviet military machine has turned into a ladies’ afternoon tea club and that would have no effect on the pressures for keeping the bases, keeping the contractors, and keeping the military labs funded. It’s clear the conversion thing is the missing link between budget reduction and the Peace Dividend!”
A few days later, I am in Washington, D.C., come to see how conversion is proceeding on the Hill. Dick Greenwood, special assistant to the president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, is smoking a cigarette in his office and telling me why, way back in 1978, he helped draft the very first Seymour Melman inspired conversion bill, a bill submitted in roughly the same form every year since and rejected every time. “At that time, everybody was telling us that one third of our membership was involved in military production. Part of our strategy was to try and resist, somehow, marching arm in arm to Capitol Hill with our employers every time a defense contract was threatened. We had to have a program that would permit us to take an enlightened view of foreign and military policy, that could be supported by our people. We weren’t asking for blanket cuts; let the rubble fall where it may. We were asking for a reinvestment strategy to put back into the holes that would be created by those defense cuts.”
And that, Greenwood says, means serious money for retraining and relocating workers who fall through the holes. Democratic Representative Ted Weiss of New York has submitted the Melman bill again this year and it is the only one with serious money for retraining and relocation, which is why Dick Greenwood’s union is backing it strongly.
But what about Seymour Melman’s grand plan? I ask. What about workplace democracy, the conversion committees to be mandated inside of every big firm? Greenwood gives a raspy laugh and tells me he doubts management would pay any attention to those committees. “Their bottom line is, maximize profits.” He takes another drag, his laugh raspier and rueful. “And if they lose a contract, they’ll just strip the company.”
My pilgrimage to the Hill continues with a visit with Representative Weiss, a gentle, thin-faced man with large ears and an endearingly bad haircut. Having spent the previous two days speaking—off the record, always off the record—with various congressional aides close to the action, I am telling Ted Weiss that his conversion bill is this year, like every year before, a dead letter. He listens patiently as I tick off the camps opposed to conversion: the hawks who want the defense budget preserved; the deficit hawks who want defense cuts without a Peace Dividend; the Peace Dividend liberals who want it spent on social programs but not on new lives for affluent aerospace engineers. Even the pro-conversion camp is split, most members rolling their eyes at Seymour Melman’s notion of forcing contractors to include workers in planning new business. Political action committees for weapons makers have spent two million dollars on key congressional seats in the latest election and not coincidentally, as one aide puts it, “There are two kinds of Democrats. Those who are willing to piss off contractors and those who aren’t. And that split is really paralyzing the party.”
Ted Weiss listens without disagreement as he stares out his window. He says, “This came out at the Democratic caucus the other day: Of the top one hundred contractors, sixty are under indictment or under investigation. So I don’t know what the merit is in kowtowing to contractors. They are not our best citizens.”
It is getting toward the end of my spring-of-1990 Washington visit. A bulldogesque, Democratic representative named George J. Hochbrueckner is taking me through a dizzying show-and-tell. His prop is a poster-sized chart kept handy by his desk, a tally of various aircraft meant to illustrate that there are not enough Grumman airplanes in the world, and in particular not nearly enough Grumman F-14D fighter jets.
George J. Hochbrueckner happens to represent the Long Island home of Grumman Corporation’s big complex, happens also to be a former Grumman engineer who won the last election with 50.8 percent of the vote in a district that is largely Republican. After winning, he joined with the rest of the Long Island congressional delegation, conservatives and liberals alike, in the relentless quest to restore a defense budget item, the Grumman F-14D fighter jet, which even the Republican Secretary of Defense, a hawk’s hawk, said America didn’t need. America got eighteen of them, anyway, costing the taxpayers one and a half billion dollars.
“If this was strictly a pork-barrel thing,” the congressman from Grumman is now solemnly assuring me, “there is no way we could win.” For proof I need only examine his chart. “Based on the Navy’s new, revised numbers, [u]sing their own numbers, we’re fifty-six [F-14s] short. So the reason we went after F-14 is we could make a legitimate case the Navy would be short of aircraft.” The Navy, in other words, needed more planes because the Navy said so, and that’s why this was no pork-barrel thing.
Now Hochbrueckner is waving his hand over the entire chart, noting that the Secretary of Defense has proposed axing every plane on it. “And that’s a budget that wipes out Grumman. And then a couple of years from now, if we said, ‘Oh, my god, look how short we are on these airplanes,’ Grumman won’t be there to build them. So last year’s effort was a genuine one, in that we could make the case that national defense required these aircraft.”
What confounds me is that George J. Hochbrueckner has signed his name to every conversion bill in the House. He wants, for example, millions of federal dollars devoted to building a high speed, magnetic-levitation train like the one Japan is developing. “Perfect” for the job, says George J. Hochbrueckner, is Grumman Corporation. My head spins with the Alice in Wonderland conundrum that is George J. Hochbrueckner’s “conversion”: Weapons makers will make the weapons they’ve been making, even when the leading warrior in the land says we don’t need them, even when the same George J. Hochbrueckner wants more tax money poured into nonweapons projects to be carried out by the same weapons makers.
Through the haze of my confusion, I hear, “We had to do this one, the F-14, because this is the bread-and-butter aircraft for Grumman. That’s the one that makes the money. Clearly I was successful at making the case that we’re short of these, and therefore, from a national defense point of view, we should buy them. Now what this does for the company is buy them another two years. The last of these aircraft doesn’t pop out of the pipeline until April of 1993. One of the advantages of winning this was meeting the defense need, but also buying Grumman some time, so programs like Ted Weiss is pushing can be implemented …”
My father’s words keep intruding on my concentration. You are going to have to literally blast these guys out of their economic foxholes … When I tune in again, George J. Hochbrueckner has worked himself into a lather of pride in the service he has rendered.
“At this point Grumman is geared for success. They’re saying, Okay, we’ve got nineteen F-14Ds we’re building now, the eighteen we just put in last year—they’ll be building those things until April of 1993 and maybe longer. There may be more F-14s in the future, there may be a Tomcat 21, which is Grumman’s version of a replacement for the F-14. So I think Grumman’s view is, ‘We’ll be building aircraft for many years to come …’ ”
E-mail from an engineer who describes himself as working “in a little corner of the Space Shuttle program in Houston”: I don’t see a future in my job. Many people in my area have gone back to school, usually for MBAs. Others have either left or been laid off but no one ever leaves to go to another aerospace job. If the picture I’m painting hasn’t told you already, morale seems to always be bottoming out. I’m not a Cold War veteran. I joined the program in 1988 just before the first flight after the Challenger accident. In college I was fed a steady diet of Mars missions, space stations, advanced fighter technology, etc. and I ate it up. I came down here ready to jump into the race. I found bitter disappointment at small-minded bureaucrats who loved to tell me great old war stories about the Apollo program. It feels like “they” told “us” that we were needed and the space program was going somewhere, but “they” were full of shit.
It is March of 1992 and my father, mother, and I have driven to San Jose’s redeveloped downtown to see Silicon Valley’s new shrine to itself, a museum called The Tech. We are able to walk through a microchip clean room, program a robot arm to arrange toy blocks, appreciate a colorful laser pattern, inspect an ultralight, superfast bicycle. Everything is user-friendly and human scaled. The only nods to aerospace are a display about how the screwed-up Hubble Space Telescope might eventually be fixed, and a television screen flashing images of Mars that make the planet’s surface look much like the outskirts of Yuma, Arizona (the pictures were gathered by a Viking satellite fifteen years before). There are no missiles, even though Lockheed Missiles and Space Company is still the area’s largest single employer and hasn’t stopped production of the Trident II. There is none of the spectacularly murderous technology that just a year before had mesmerized the nation watching Desert Storm on CNN, no smart bombs or stealth fighters, parts for which are made locally. The most unsettling item I find is a notice that McDonald’s researchers are at work on a fully robotized fast food kitchen. At The Tech, technology is ingenuity and play, having nothing to do with military budgets.
The sense of denial pervading The Tech seems to inhabit the national psyche. As I had foreseen, the limp conversion legislation eventually passed by Congress requires no reformation of blue sky corporate culture. Like the magnetic-levitation train and the other big ticket, “peaceful” missions for aerospace once bandied about, the Peace Dividend never materialized. In servitude to pork-barrel militarism, Congress built a fire wall around the defense budget, limiting cuts to a scant 2 percent per year.
The George J. Hochbrueckner version of conversion seems to be winning out after all. Business as usual, that is, and business wherever it can be found. About the time my father, mother, and I are wandering The Tech’s exhibits of fun, leaders of six of the nation’s largest defense contractors are penning a letter urging President Bush to quickly endorse the sale of seventy-five F-15 planes to Saudi Arabia, their argument having less to do with global security, more to do with the economic prospects for families like mine. “It would rapidly inject five billion dollars into the economy, reduce the U.S. trade deficit, and sustain 40,000 aerospace jobs and a corresponding number of jobs in the non-aerospace sector of the economy—all at no cost to the U.S. taxpayer.”
To my blue sky family, I must admit, The Tech is rather boring. No appeals to awe, to the conquering of anyone or anything. The message I take away is that Silicon Valley, like much of America, would rather not dwell on its military self now that a compelling enemy is lacking, would rather pretend that the weapons industry and the people whose livelihoods depend on it are yesterday’s news. After forty minutes poking around The Tech, my father, mother, and I are on the freeway leading away from downtown and back to the suburbs.
E-mail from a Lockheed engineer with fifteen years’ experience: When I graduated college aerospace was beginning to spool up for the go-go 80s. I got sucked in because it was the hot field. I have been trying to get out of aerospace ever since, but have never been able to cross that line, and now am labeled and categorized solely on the basis of my aerospace background (and these are not good labels or categories). The way things are going, I may soon get the opportunity (i.e., the boot) to start a new career at mid-life. My biggest reservation with aerospace is the fact that there are no more big problems to be solved or products to be invented. Most people are bored with space, rockets, airplanes, etc.
It is February of 1993 and a new prophet of conversion has come to my hometown. Despite the glacial rate of its shrinkage, a smaller defense budget has begun to show its effects over the past year as headlines tell of tens of thousands of aerospace workers laid off across the country. Now, everywhere he goes in Silicon Valley, Bill Clinton is cheered for his revival of the Peace Dividend promise, his vow to spend what it takes to train blue sky workers to do something else, and to shift billions from weapons projects to more fashionable goals like a “clean car” and “gigabit” computer network for all.
It is fitting that Bill Clinton, who wants to be a new type of Democrat, finds a role for government in creating new gizmos intended for private utility and enjoyment and profit. There is nothing in his gospel to remind one of Clinton’s claimed hero, John Kennedy, who dedicated government to the task of building and populating the Cold War technocracy, who declared that “We choose to go to the moon in this decade … because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
What will organize and measure the best of our energies and skills from here on out, Clinton preaches instead, are the uncontrollably escalating rigors of global capitalism. You will have eight careers in your lifetime, he is fond of telling the American public, sounding a concept foreign to my father and his generation of organization men, but describing a way of technological life pioneered by the tribe of Woz. The optimism that Bill Clinton exudes says the American can-do spirit now proves itself in how cheerfully we train and retrain for the eight careers the marketplace demands of us. What will come of it all—what industries, what products—are no business of the government, are nothing like a moon rocket. It is each individual, in Bill Clinton’s gospel, who is the ongoing conversion project. At best, we are promised a government arm around our shoulders as we adapt to our kaleidoscopic futures.
During one visit to a Silicon Valley company, the young, modern president is paid tribute by technology used to create the special effects in Terminator II. As Bill Clinton watches, faces on a video screen “morph” from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy to Bill Clinton. Ronald Reagan, who sent more military dollars per capita to Silicon Valley than anywhere else, is left out of the morphing as the audience claps and Bill Clinton offers one of his ingratiating, lip-biting smiles.
E-mail from a twenty-year veteran at one of the largest military aircraft manufacturers: Either you laugh or you cry. People are leaving (voluntarily) at a rate 4× the “historical rate.” This is a company that runs on fear, in terms of personnel management issues. It’s kind of interesting: Working-level people feel (rightly) that they’re doing a good job and they needn’t take a back seat to anyone. The personnel policies, however, almost seem designed with the intent of driving down morale so that people will quit.
It is April of 1994 and once again I am seeking conversion upon the Hill. This day I am in the office of George Brown, Democratic Representative from Southern California. He is a genial fellow with a grandfatherly face and one of the more intriguing résumés in Congress. He studied physics before the atom bomb was invented. He was the first member of Congress to oppose the Vietnam War. He politicked early and hard for projects ranging from renewable energy and ozone layer protection to the space station and the superconducting supercollider. He is today the Chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology at a moment when the Congress and White House are both under Democratic control. He is a man, in short, who has long hungered for the opportunity now at hand, the chance to lead in the greening of a new, federally funded technoscience agenda for America.
He is beginning to realize, the day I visit him, that his chance will never arrive. Five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Pentagon still funds about half of all federally sponsored research and development. Meanwhile, the entire federal R&D budget is dropping just when many corporations are downsizing their labs, causing some experts to predict a glut of underemployed PhDs soon. Thousands of physicists are already scrambling for work now that their superconducting supercollider is a half-finished ruin in the Texas desert, Congress having pulled the plug on that monument to Big Science.
“The nation is never united so much as when it is threatened by something,” George Brown muses, harking back to those misty olden days, the Cold War. “Once that pressure is over, then things tend to ease up and you no longer have a sense of a society devoted to a common goal. Religion doesn’t provide it. Political leadership doesn’t provide it. Writers don’t provide it. Of course when you have this image of how great you are and how valiant your battle against the enemy is—in this case, the Communists—it provides a sort of negative unity. You’re not sure of what you are trying to achieve. You know you don’t want the bad guys to overcome you, and that’s what held us together. Now we don’t even have that.
“No sense of unity. No sense of unity,” says George Brown, summing up his fading hopes for a nation’s ability to dream a common future, and for his government’s ability to coherently plan for and invest in the technoscience to help bring about that future. “If I am hearing you right,” I say, “you are close to despairing that a political coalition can ever be built that will be strong enough to support the kind of government-led science and technological development that we saw during the Cold War.”
“I am becoming somewhat pessimistic about that happening,” George Brown answers.
As he does, neither of us has an inkling that he is soon to lose his leadership of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. That autumn, the Republicans, riding a wave of anger at a federal government that no longer inspires, will sweep into power in both houses of Congress. When looking to the sky for a new science and technology agenda, the Republicans will find it easier to imagine a nuclear attack than a stripped ozone layer, and so they will push for a 25 percent increase in Star Wars funding and try to stall a ban on chloroflouride production. The two Republican members of Congress authoring the bills against the CFC ban will be named, aptly, Doolittle (John) and DeLay (Tom). The leader of the Republican charge into power will be Newt Gingrich. A basher of government welfare and a self-declared true believer in the privatized free market, Newt Gingrich will, nevertheless, also be a stalwart friend to the aerospace industry and higher military budgets, coming as he does from the Atlanta suburb that contains Lockheed’s largest complex.
Months after my visit and shortly after the Republican victory, I will dial George Brown’s number only to hear a taped message from Skip Stiles, his aide on the Committee for Science, Space and Technology. Making reference to the Borg, a race of lockstep, soulless automatons featured on Star Trek, the aide’s voice will flatly inform: “We are Skip. As with all Democrats we have been assimilated according to the post-election plan. Leave a message at the tone. Or hit zero to speak to another unit in central processing. Thank you.”
Late in the summer of 1994, a pleasant, kind-faced woman named Carol Alonso is telling me how it used to go when she would get one of her creative flashes. It would come, sometimes, at home in the evening, as she gazed into the fire. The idea would take shape the next morning as she showered, made breakfast for her husband and two children, pulled her Porsche out of the driveway of her split-level home in the Northern California suburb of Orinda. At the office she’d try the idea on her closest workmates. If they liked it, she’d create some computer models, deliver some briefings, submit her idea to rigorous scrutiny by the best in the business. Every step would grow more and more competitive and Carol Alonso had “seen grown men cry” as they watched their ideas “picked to pieces.” Still, when one of hers made it through, the pain all seemed worthwhile, for Carol Alonso would be handed the prize she and her peers had spent their lives chasing. She would be given America’s next nuclear explosion.
Then would follow the heady days leading up to an underground test, Carol Alonso directing her team toward the “shot” deadline a year away. If this meant Dad and the kids saw less of Mom, the Alonsos, a thoroughly modern family, coped. After all, they had been through this many times before. And, too, they had something to look forward to. Once Mom’s creative flash did become a thermonuclear reaction causing the Nevada desert to rumble with the unleashed force of 150,000 tons of TNT, once Mom’s bomb did go off, the family would celebrate together, unwind, escape. They’d all take a nice vacation.
“We sailed together in the kingdom of Tonga. We hiked in the Himalayas. We sailed in the Caribbean several times. We went to Tahiti and sailed around it in a chartered boat,” says Carol Alonso, eyes alight with the memories. “We had wonderful times together.”
Wonderful times together for Carol Alonso and her fellow nuclear weapons designers are rumored to be nearing an end the day she and I talk at her workplace, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Treaties oblige the United States to cut its warhead stockpile by nearly half within the decade. Gone is the heyday that saw up to four shots a month, more than 1,000 explosions since 1945. President Clinton’s renewed moratorium means there hasn’t been a single underground test for three years and the world is moving toward a comprehensive test ban. Some members of Congress, Republican as well as Democrat, are urging that Lawrence Livermore be shut down and its work be shifted to its sister lab in Los Alamos. Weaponeers tell me the mood of the place is souring as they see slipping away their reason for being. “We’re subcritical now,” one old-timer dourly confides, fearing there are too few left with the know-how to carry on the tradition of nuclear bomb making.
In reading about the crisis of purpose in America’s nuclear laboratories, I see that MIT anthropologist Hugh Gusterson and I independently have come to share a metaphorical perspective. He has studied nuclear weaponeers for years and finds them to be a tribal society whose central ritual was the underground test that Carol Alonso so fondly remembers. For elders, the test built stature and gave them “a feeling of power over their weapons.” For young weapons designers, the test was “a rite of passage” into the tribal inner circle. But now their central ritual is banned and so the nostalgia and fretting I encounter at Lawrence Livermore should be no surprise.
What surprises me is where hope has been found to live. The nuclear weaponeers see a way to keep their central ritual, if only in “virtual” form. The labs and their allies are campaigning for a new generation of technology that will allow nuclear explosions to be simulated in the laboratory so that the design—and testing—of nuclear weapons concepts can continue apace. The centerpiece of this program would be a $1.8 billion superlaser to be located at Lawrence Livermore. It would be the largest single military project ever built at the lab, and a magnet for more weapons talent, money, and work. Critics argue that “virtual” testing is an expensive boondoggle that will make a mockery of test ban efforts and promote nuclear proliferation. But the weaponeers I speak with at Lawrence Livermore are hopeful that President Clinton will give the go ahead on the superlaser, hopeful that this will stave off the extinction of their culture. (Their prayers for rejuvenation will be answered two months later as the superlaser receives White House approval.)
On the day I visit, one of the most upbeat Lawrence Livermore denizens is a bearded baby boomer named Kent Johnson, who tells me he was heartened to see that a recent job posting for a nuclear weapons designer drew forty applicants. If the superlaser comes through, he suggests, think of all the fresh blood the tribe might initiate. “I really believe we can recruit people,” he says, “if we have the money.” The fact that the nuclear weapons stockpile is officially said to be 8,000 warheads too full at the moment when he is telling me this does not seem to matter to Kent Johnson, who remains very much interested in the design and testing of nuclear weapons, who expresses no interest in finding other work. Kent Johnson snaps my wandering thoughts back to our conversation by asking, “Your dad. What’s his name?” He is intrigued that I have mentioned my father’s career as a Lockheed Missiles and Space Company engineer. “I’ve worked with a lot of Lockheed folks,” says the nuclear weapon designer. “I might have worked with your father on a project or two.”
“No, I’m sure you haven’t,” I say, though of course I can’t be sure, so ultimately intertwined are the various projects of the extended tribe, so translatable, across the various subcultures within the extended tribe, are certain beliefs and symbols and language and ritual, and the instinctive desire to preserve all this.
The electronic mail is beginning to trickle onto my computer screen in the autumn of 1994. I have sent a message to a few sites on the Web where aerospace people converse. I have asked, “How does it feel to be in aerospace today?” and every time I check in, a few more answers await me. Today there is this from a twenty-nine-year-old aerospace engineer:
My first job was with McDonnell Space Systems Co. on the Space Station program in Houston. After a few years I quit to take a job with a small US Navy contractor in Virginia. Layoffs were always hanging over everyone’s head, especially at McDonnell Douglas, where I survived three significant ones (at least 50 people). The trend there was to first lay off the “dead wood.” Usually these people were capable of doing a good job but had a bad attitude or were just plain lazy. The next to go were those unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They came from every level—upper, middle, and lower management and the engineers, aides and secretaries. You just couldn’t accuse McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co. of discrimination!
The other company I worked for was diametrically the opposite of MDSSC in several ways: 1. Everybody knew everybody. 2. Lame benefits (small companies just don’t have the money). 3. Poor management (incompetent). 4. Quality people were lacking (you get what you pay for). 5. People just weren’t as nice. Well, I recently quit that job and am at the University of Kansas working on an M.S. in aerospace engineering with an emphasis on aircraft design. Honestly, and I know this sounds silly, you need to be an optimist in this industry!!
There is this as well from a senior aerospace specialist at AlliedSignal Engines who asks, like nearly all the others, that I not reveal his identity for fear that being seen to complain might further dim his worsening prospects:
During my 14+ years here—formerly Allied-Signal Engines, formerly Propulsion Engine Division, formerly Garrett Engine Division, formerly Garrett Turbine Engine Division, formerly Airesearch, well, you get the idea—and GE-Evendale, I have watched the aerospace business become a truly depressing place. Sadly, this company and many like it are being run only for a few people in the boardroom and Wall Street. Yes, there is no more Soviet Union, and yes other economic pressures have forced some contraction in employment, but consider that this company is being hit with layoffs every quarter if profits aren’t on target, even though in its 50+ year history there has never been a losing quarter. No matter to the CEO; it isn’t enough that we’re profitable, it’s that we’re not profitable enough. I’ve watched more than half the engineering workforce leave, either voluntarily or not, during the past 4 years and the end is still not in sight.
The saddest thing has been the change I’ve witnessed in the workplace over all these years. In days of old, there was an incredible amount of camaraderie and high spirits. At the end of the day or the week, one socialized with his/her colleagues as they were truly friends as well as coworkers. We were happy to put forth whatever effort was needed to get the job done. All that has changed. It’s turned into a rat race. We have a joke here—it’s no longer a career, it’s just a job. Most of us are looking for other positions, so we’re digging in until they lay us off or something better turns up.
The next day a graduate student at the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research modems this to me:
In 1987, when I began college there were articles and articles about how many aerospace engineers were needed going into the 21st century. Now, still being a student, these articles are nowhere to be found.
The tone of my e-mail matched the voices I was hearing, over the years, whenever I spoke with aerospace people who had been laid off. The tone resided in the narrow place between guarded hope and disgusted resolve. Few openly displayed the vitriol of one Lockheed engineer, dumped three years short of pensioned retirement, who told me that, as his supervisor gave him the news, he was thinking to himself, “I’d like to kick you in the balls.” (And who continued to feel this toward Lockheed management: “I hope they all get boils under their armpits.”)
More often they sounded like forty-three-year-old Chuck Goslin when he matter-of-factly stated, “I was downsized.” Chuck Goslin, like his two brothers, his father, and his father’s father, worked for the Grumman Corporation on Long Island. Grumman was the only job his father ever had, a job that started in 1945 and ended in 1992, and so he had known the company in a different time, when “it used to be you knew everybody and there was a lot of teamwork and you were proud of Grumman.” When his father had worked on the F-14 fighter jet and the lunar landing module that Neil Armstrong stepped from so famously, “It was a hometown pride sort of thing. You had a sense the region did this. That’s a good feeling. But the last five years have been disheartening because it all had become so competitive. We were bidding on things we knew we were never going to get. Why bid? Just to keep us busy.”
A manufacturing engineer, Chuck Goslin worked with 25,000 others at the Bethpage complex at the height of the Reagan buildup. But his company lost a key space station project to Boeing in the mid-1980s, began shifting electronics and manufacturing work to plants in Florida and Louisiana, and finally submitted to a takeover by Northrop Corporation. By 1994, Grumman had laid off four fifths of its Long Island people. Chuck Goslin was handed his pink slip one morning by a manager who told him, “I have good news and bad news. The bad news is I can’t keep you. The good news is you’re the last person I’m laying off this year.”
He was given fifteen minutes to clear out. “They were worried about sabotage, which kinda made sense. And there was a cut-off. If you’d been there twenty years, you got two weeks’ notice and a nice severance package. Otherwise, fifteen minutes’ notice, pack up your stuff, sign these papers and nice knowin’ ya. That’s what happened to me. I walked out the door, went home, called the missus up at her work and said, ‘Well, I didn’t make it another week.’ It was a beautiful day, I remember. I drove by my dad’s house. ‘Hey, that’s it,’ I told him. ‘I’m lookin’ now. I’m in the search mode.’ ”
Chuck Goslin’s search led him to evangelists of conversion. For years the local conversion activists had been pushing to diversify the Long Island economy away from Pentagon dependence. They had been crying their warnings even as George J. Hochbrueckner was assuring me that “Grumman’s view is, ‘We’ll be building aircraft for many years to come’ ” because “at this point Grumman is geared for success.” But now there would never be another Grumman aircraft built on Long Island, and George J. Hochbrueckner was making defensive criticisms of Grumman management in the newspaper, and Chuck Goslin had found work at the local conversion office as a career adviser to others no longer employed by Grumman. “Most of them are bitter,” he said. “Angry because they haven’t been able to rationalize what’s happening. They get no help from Grumman whatsoever.”
What Chuck Goslin could not rationalize is why conversion was such an impossible dream for a company like Grumman. Why did the region’s largest supplier of high-skill jobs have to be gobbled up and emptied out? Why didn’t Grumman, for example, ever get a chance to build trains or buses? “Airplanes,” said Chuck Goslin. “Cut off the wings, cut off the tail, whuddaya got?”
Instead, near as Chuck Goslin could tell, here is what happened. “Grumman liked to call itself The Family Corporation. But the decisions weren’t made in a family sort of way. It was done with numbers. The top forty or fifty people kept getting stock options as the company lost money and people lost jobs. Now, just today, Grumman Northrop announces its fourth quarter earnings are a record high. And two weeks before, they cut 3,500 workers. Boom!”
It is September of 1994 and my father, having handed me another beer from the refrigerator, is winning his fifth straight game of pool. “What can I do? You’re invincible on your own table,” I say as the eight ball banks in and my father gives one of those satisfied shtocks I remember from childhood. He is smiling. “I’ve got something you’ll be interested in,” he says, popping into the VCR a videotape with the familiar Lockheed star logo on its label. “The latest propaganda.”
This tape, my father says, was handed out earlier in the summer by Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. Every employee was instructed to watch it at home to learn why half the workforce had been laid off in the past four years, and what those who remain might expect in the future. For fifteen minutes the CEO and a handful of other senior managers flash interchangeably onto the screen, their heads and eyes barely moving as they speak of “prioritizing,” of “investing smartly” in “core competencies,” and of the “need to be prepared personally for change.” Woven through their declarations is an anonymous, friendly female voice who lays out the grim facts.
“The last three years or so have been among the most trying the LMSC employees have ever experienced.… Thousands of our colleagues have lost their jobs. There are still many employees here now who are not confident they’ll be here a year from now.…” She revisits history to provide context. “It’s 1991 and the Soviet economy has crumbled. The Cold War, perhaps more a war of economics rather than military might, has ended with the United States the apparent winner. But we as a nation have paid quite a high price for that victory. The losses to the defense industry over the last several years are staggering. Total sales for the defense industry were down 14 billion dollars in 1993. That’s a 10 percent drop in one year alone, the biggest drop ever in the industry.… From 1989 through 1992 the aerospace industry eliminated 291,000 jobs, and then in 1993 another 131,000 jobs. This left the aerospace workforce total at 909,000, the first time in more than fifteen years the aerospace work-force had dipped below one million. What’s in store for 1994?”
What is in store, the viewer is told, is more of the same. And all of this, the various talking heads of management go on to say, has taken them quite by surprise. After the Cold War ended, the downturn in “defense procurement caught most of the defense contractors unaware,” says one. “I think in particular Lockheed was,” points out another. Indeed, as late as 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the leading minds of Lockheed Missiles and Space Company issued a plan called “Vision 2000,” which projected a 50 percent growth in the sales of Lockheed missiles, satellites, and such by the end of the decade. “Hardly less than twelve months later,” another manager admits, “that really appeared optimistic.”
My father offers a laughing translation. “He means: We didn’t know what the hell we were talking about! Still don’t know what we’re talking about!”
Now the woman’s voice is saying that things really turned sour two years ago. About the time Bill Clinton was elected, more projects were pulled, including the “cancellation of more than half of our classified business.”
A manager’s talking head appears. “There’s been almost a vengeance against defense spending now.”
“Democrats!” my father interprets with snicker. “Damn them all.”
“Clearly,” says the female voice of Lockheed, “something had to be done and it had to be done fast.” What was done is that a number of “task forces” made up of “the best and brightest employees” were told to find ways of saving the company $46 million a year, ways that included the trimming of benefits and, unavoidably, the further firing of fellow employees. This, says the female voice of Lockheed, was “excruciatingly difficult and, at times, agonizing.” Sadly she foresees more “trying” months ahead “as we continue to grapple with the volatile defense and commercial environment.”
What the talking heads of management are wanting to say to everyone watching this tape is that they do have a new plan for Lockheed. The company will maintain its present size by trying to sell satellites and other products to commercial buyers, cutting the current 99 percent dependence on government to 70 or 80 percent. The company might also consider a merger with some competitor, says a talking head of management. As he does, he probably knows that Lockheed will in two months merge with Martin-Marietta, which will create the world’s largest aerospace firm while causing the elimination of 19,000 jobs in twelve states and boosting the price of Lockheed stock. But he does not let on to these specifics. He says only that the way of things is that “the strong will survive and the weak will be consolidated into the strong.”
“And finally,” says the female voice of Lockheed, “we asked [the company’s leaders]: If you could make one statement to the people of LMSC, what would that be?”
“Good-bye,” says my father.
“This is such a rapidly changing world,” comes the answer from a talking head of management. “Ah, we’ve had huge technological gains in the past but, ah, they are going to continue into the future at an accelerated pace and, ah, individuals owe it to themselves, they’ve got to continue education, continue improving their skills that are transferable not only among the company but ah, ah, you know, throughout the work environment …”
“Not a hint,” says my father when the tape has ended, “not one syllable of how the company is going to help even the chosen and gifted employees enhance their skills. If you make yourself attractive to the company, we might keep you. And the way we’re going to maintain our present size is to be successful in a line of business we’ve never been successful in before, and run by the same team of senior managers who have confessed that they were completely taken by surprise that, with the end of the Cold War, the defense budget went down!
“So this all makes a hell of a lot of sense to the poor befuddled employee. In the privacy of his own home, where he can’t challenge the speaker, he listens to this monologue that tells him he’s up a stump.”
My father’s cynicism is infectious and I am chortling along with him, two friends perceiving together one more absurdity of modern life. What a laughable dream now seems the notion of aerospace plants shifted to peaceful pursuits as Seymour Melman had once prophesied it, an orderly process insuring “productive” jobs for the maximum number of blue sky workers. Melman the industrial engineer had looked upon the aerospace industry as a flawed machine awaiting modification by perfectly rational criteria. He had failed to see in aerospace a national enterprise assembled and fueled by myth, a myth that would have to be replaced by an equally powerful myth before any true reformation could occur.
The myth was as Harry Truman’s Air Policy Commission had capsulized it just after the Second World War: that the next war forever looms and when it arrives we shall prevail in the skies. The myth was that “self-preservation comes ahead of the economy” and so aerospace must not be confused with more mundane endeavors such as the creation of electric cars or magnetic-levitating trains or other machines that might help America perform more efficiently.
The myth that dawned with the Cold War has proven itself more durable than the Cold War, so that rising U.S. defense spending is now officially said to be calibrated for the fighting of two Desert Storms at once in separate corners of the globe, B-2 bombers are purchased by a Congress for a Pentagon that does not ask for them, and the same Congress calls for a 30 percent drop in spending for civilian research and development by the year 2002. This long after the end of the Cold War, we can see how it will be. Even as the “consolidated” aerospace giants are staffed by a dwindling number of blue sky workers with fewer years, less benefits, lowered expectations, the blue sky culture will remain unreformed, stoic in its belief that self-preservation comes ahead of the economy. Conversion is an act of imagination and springs from a pressing desire to lose the old habits, to invent a new self. Desire was lacking within the boardrooms of aerospace companies; imagination was not to be found in the nation’s leaders who might have framed new myths to sustain a frightened tribe.
The word “conversion” has long ago disappeared from pages of newspapers and magazines, and my father and I don’t much mention it anymore either. The price of Lockheed stock, like defense stocks in general, has remained strong throughout. The architects of defense mergers have emerged rich (talking heads on my father’s videotape will be among the Lockheed and Martin-Marietta executives to reward themselves with $92 million, $31 million of it to come directly from taxpayers). Nowadays, rather than “conversion,” the words used to describe the transformation of the aerospace industry are the words used to describe employee purgings in other industries: Mergers. Buyouts. Rightsizing. Re-engineering.
“The people I talked to after this tape had been distributed were horrified,” says my father. “They were very depressed. These were early to midcareer people in their thirties and forties with families and mortgages and skills and energy. And they had an interest in staying with the business, because they were in it so deep.”
My father, who is still laughing bleakly and shaking his head as the tape finishes rewinding, will be spared the horrified depression of his friends, however, for he is one who finally did achieve conversion (of a personal kind, at least). Two years before, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company had invited my father to take early retirement. He had accepted. Get out of it now, my father told himself. Cut your losses.
