Hard Landing (31 page)

When a recruiter from Eastern Air Lines turned up in Columbus one winter day in 1956, Bryan eagerly showed up for an interview. As a teenager Bryan had traveled to Florida with his mother and had vowed one day to live there. It was not just the warm weather that he found so attractive. It was also the romance, the beaches, the palms—“like a
deserted island,” as he would explain. He took a mechanic’s job at Eastern in an instant.

Aircraft mechanics is a solitary craft and a profession of precision, two attributes that brought out the best in Charlie Bryan. He rebuilt wings and changed gears on old Lockheed Constellations and ultimately earned a reputation as a top engine-change mechanic, the most demanding job in any maintenance hangar.

Decades earlier, in a fateful turn of events, the International Association of Machinists had received an
engraved invitation to
unionize the hangars at Eastern from Eddie Rickenbacker himself. The IAM was an establishment union with rock-solid American values, and Rickenbacker was petrified that some Communist-affiliated union might otherwise organize his mechanics. (In later years, the union headquarters in Washington would come under the leadership of an avowed socialist.) Charlie Bryan, the loner mechanic, began turning out to hear speeches by one of the IAM’s great leaders, a fiery orator named George Brown. Bryan discovered himself to be a hero-worshiper, and Brown’s stirring addresses caused him to throw himself into the affairs of the union. He soon became a shop steward.

A
seminal event in Bryan’s union career occurred in 1961 in the midst of a crisis, after the wings broke off two Lockheed Electras in quick succession. The problem was ultimately attributed to a vibration-inducing design flaw, which could be remedied by removing the engines and remounting them with altered connections. Eastern, with one of the world’s biggest Electra fleets, launched a crash effort to complete the makeover as quickly as possible, including round-the-clock shifts in the maintenance hangar.

Some of the mechanics, resentful of working a midnight shift, approached Charlie Bryan to complain. Bryan studied the engine overhaul scheme, diagramming the process on a few sheets of graph paper. He analyzed the staffing required to perform the individual tasks involved in each overhaul. He pondered the schedule by which each Electra was intended to enter and leave the hangar. Ultimately he calculated that with a few minor adjustments in the process the midnight shift could be eliminated while actually increasing the speed of the changeover. Eastern’s management, stunned, readily adopted Bryan’s plan. The event suggested to Bryan that a union official—that he, Charlie Bryan—might know as much or more about running an airline as the people paid big salaries to do so.

As for his own work schedule, however, Bryan preferred the solitude of the midnight shift. He quoted from Eastern mystics. He steeped himself in Kahlil Gibran. He became absorbed in the work of faith healer Edgar Cayce. But as aloof, as downright weird, as Bryan struck some of his fellow mechanics, he continued relating brilliantly to groups. He exuded intelligence. His demagoguery was skillful. He studied, and aspired to, the style of John Kennedy. His
telephone number appeared in the Miami phone book under a pseudonym:
Charles Leader.

Once, after hearing the word “
extemporaneous” used in conversation, he rushed home to look it up. While paging toward the word in his dictionary, he noticed a conspicuous entry for the Latin expression
ex aequo et bono
, “according to what is fair and good.” He fell in love with the expression, adopting it as his personal motto and later having it printed on union business cards and stationery.

As time passed Bryan seemed to know more and more about the operations and management of Eastern Air Lines. Discerning an unfailing trading pattern in the stock price of Eastern shares, he began buying and selling on cue, raking in enough profits to buy a ’65 Austin Healy 3000 convertible. Management did little to disabuse him of his self-importance when the payroll department began using Bryan’s ever-precise
overtime records as a check against its own. Later in his career his say-so over corporate affairs—the control he could exercise from his position of union leadership—reminded him of his days running engine tune-ups, a power trip if ever there was one. “It was an
awesome experience being right next to that engine, running it at high power settings, sometimes even takeoff power,” he would tell an interviewer years later. “It was like standing right next to a volcano. You could actually feel the bones in your body vibrating from all that power right there in front of you that you were actually adjusting, and had control over.”

On Christmas Eve in 1968, in mankind’s first voyage around the moon, Frank Borman and his crewmates raised a wave of goose bumps the world over while reading aloud from Genesis. “Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you,” Borman had said, closing a television broadcast observed by
I billion people, “all of you on the good earth.” Despite a number of harrowing moments unseen by the civilian world, the Apollo 8 mission, commanded by Borman, had been a triumph, no one’s more than Borman’s. Less than a month later he and his wife were seated conspicuously close to Richard Nixon during his inauguration ceremonies. Borman addressed a joint session of Congress and appeared before the College of Cardinals in Rome, speaking from the identical spot where Galileo in 1616 had been found guilty of heresy.

Despite his celebrity as a space explorer, Borman by 1969 was ready to abandon NASA. He was spending more than 200 days a year away from home, and his wife, Susan, was feeling all the stress and anxiety that Borman took pride in sloughing. During the Apollo mission, with its untested entry and exit from the gravitational field of another celestial body, Susan Borman displayed a bittersweet image to the nation as she nervously ran her pearls between her lips. No one, including her husband, realized at the time that she was also
dousing her fears with alcohol.

Leaving NASA, Borman was the most sought-after executive material in America. Nixon aide H. R. Haldeman tried to recruit him for a high-level White House appointment. Ross Perot, the wealthy Texas computer magnate and crusader in behalf of Vietnam POWs, nearly landed Borman as the head of a new political organization to conduct “town hall” broadcasts. Many corporations called, but Borman refused to hire on as a trick pony. He wanted a real job, doing real work—a chance to prove himself in the world outside the military and the space program. In this respect none of the other invitations Borman received matched the appeal of the offer from Eastern Air Lines.

It was a job the title of which bespoke genuine responsibilities: vice president of operations. The position paid only $60,000 a year, a fraction of what a retiring astronaut might pull down elsewhere, but working at Eastern meant working with airplanes, and Borman still loved airplanes as much as ever. Even after a trip to the moon, Frank Borman was still building model airplanes. He began working full-time at Eastern in July 1970. “I figured right then and there, if I
didn’t blow it, I’d be president,” he later commented.

But Borman stumbled within weeks of entering Eastern’s nondescript, poured-concrete headquarters on the perimeter of Miami International Airport. The pilots who flew for Eastern were different from the pilots who flew for the U.S. military. Borman discovered that they actually wanted to make money. Before he knew what hit him, the pilots’ union rolled him in a critical series of negotiations, saddling Eastern with one of the most punitive labor contracts in the airline industry. The top management was furious. In his official performance review Frank Borman received a “
below average” rating.

But Borman, soon much wiser, recovered. He worked compulsively,
spending day after day on the road despite his intention to remedy the absences of his NASA years. Unwittingly he was worsening his wife’s drinking and emotional problems, which finally resulted in her lengthy convalescence in a treatment center. (Her valiant recovery was poignantly detailed in Borman’s memoirs, published under the title
Countdown.)

There was treachery along Borman’s path to the top, which hard work alone would not overcome. By the time Borman arrived, the power struggle among the many vice presidents in Hall’s organization had split the top leadership of the company into
two warring camps. One group, led by Hall himself, consisted of the corporate leadership in New York, the platoon of bright young analysts he had brought aboard. The other faction was based at Eastern’s operating headquarters in Miami, where Sam Higginbottom, Eastern’s president, ran a fiefdom of his own. Though he had seen plenty of internal politics in the military,
Borman was shocked at the extent of the divisiveness gripping Eastern: the rival camps not only had their own staffs and headquarters but even separate public relations executives, each of whom leaked negative gossip about the other faction to the press. The finger-pointing worsened as Eastern was inundated with Lockheed L-1011 widebodies that had been ordered in earlier years. The new jets afflicted Eastern with excess capacity. Other airlines had similar problems—too many 747s and DC-10s. The L-1011s, however, were shipped with troublesome engines, worsening Eastern’s image for poor service.

In his first several years Borman—hired and championed by Hall, but reporting to Higginbottom—walked a tightrope between the two factions. The situation was resolved when the Eastern board finally intervened on the side of Hall, the chairman. Higginbottom, the president, was forced out. Borman, however, would never forget one of Higginbottom’s admonitions to him. “Frank,” Higginbottom told him, “this company is almost
impossible to manage.”

Borman had an ally in 65-year-old Laurance Rockefeller, who remained one of Eastern’s principal shareholders. Rockefeller saw in Colonel Borman many of the same qualities that he had revered as a boy in Captain Rickenbacker. “Frank is
like the Captain in modern dress,” Rockefeller once remarked. “The virtues are the same—guts, drive, energy, leadership.” Rickenbacker, however, had been capable
of letting down his guard every now and then and relaxing. Borman, in Rockefeller’s view, was “unremitting.”

Acting at the board’s request, the company named one of its directors, a former
Reader’s Digest
president, to a senior vice president’s post in the marketing department. None of the company’s officers—not even Hall—was informed of the true role of the man from
Reader’s Digest:
to act as an investigator,
nothing less than a spy, for Laurance Rockefeller. Rockefeller’s mole discreetly interviewed the senior officers about the company’s problems, and when the fingers swung around to Floyd Hall, Borman was among those doing the pointing. He inveighed against his mentor’s Harvard-inspired management techniques, he reported that Hall was protecting deadwood in the executive ranks, and he informed Rockefeller’s man that the factionalism between New York and Miami was still crippling the company, even long after the ouster of Sam Higginbottom as president.

Eastern had been losing money for years; the bankers were threatening to
pull the plug. “Frank Borman is
the only man in the United States who can save this company,” Rockefeller now declared to his fellow board members. In May 1975 Borman was informed that he was being appointed president of Eastern Air Lines. “Thank you,” he answered. “
I’ll do my best.”

Borman had one foot in the door, but Hall still had two years remaining as chairman and chief executive. The two men began quarreling. Hall attacked Borman’s orders to outfit passenger service agents in bright red jackets (as Delta had done) so they could be easily identified by deplaning passengers. Hall, suffering from health and marital problems, was moving further into left field, in Borman’s view. So Borman decided to confront the man who had brought him to Eastern in the first place.

He told Hall to step down. Hall protested that he had two more years to go. In that case, said Borman, the board would have to decide between the the two of them.

Thus was Floyd Hall—like MacIntyre and Rickenbacker before him—forced from the executive suite. Two years ahead of schedule, Borman, 47 years old, became the chief executive officer of Eastern just before Christmas in 1975.

He would sink or swim not on the buoyancy of his triumphs in
space but on his capabilities as a corporate executive. Eastern’s fortunes would rise or fall with him as well, and with them in turn the livelihoods of 33,000 employees. There was, Borman declared, no place for living in the past. “There has always been
a certain romanticism associated with the airline business,” he warned his senior executives in a memo after becoming chairman. “We must avoid its perpetuation at Eastern at all costs.”

Still at his fighter pilot weight of 168 pounds, the new chairman of Eastern assumed command from a headquarters office known as Building 16. It might as well have been Stalag 17. Located on the perimeter of the airfield at Miami International Airport, it was a nine-story structure of poured concrete and skinny windows with all the aesthetic appeal of a shoe box standing upright. In an effort to dress up the ninth-floor executive offices, arched doorways and other Moorish touches had been added, along with a sweeping cantilevered stairwell. The walls were done in a plastic wallpaper of orange stripes. Into Borman’s office went air force fighter-plane paintings and photographs of his two sons, both in uniform; they too had attended West Point. On his desk sat
a paperweight that read, “Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.”

The atmosphere swung between the barracks and the locker room. People who trifled with insignificant business matters were
dismissed as “dipshits.” Once, getting briefed on the grounding of yet another L-1011, Borman barked, “
Have you fixed it yet, or are you going to make a diner out of it?” During a meeting of officers he once asked a female vice president to fetch him
a cup of coffee. (She refused.)

Whatever his macho mind-set, there was
not a trace of ostentation about the Colonel. He drove Chevrolets—at one point an early-model Camaro convertible that he had rebuilt with his own hands. His musical tastes ran to Merle Haggard. He ordered every officer in the company (himself included) to pitch in as baggage handlers during the busiest periods, explaining, “
Everyone whose mission is not critical to the peak period goes out to help.” He scrapped the “Wings of Man” slogan as a pretension. Long before the idea ever occurred to Lee Iacocca’s people at Chrysler, Borman reluctantly agreed to
take to the airwaves as Eastern’s advertising spokesman in a
memorable series of television advertisements. “Don’t make me sell Tang,” he protested.