Blue Sky Dream (28 page)

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.”

M
y 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.”

I
t 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 …’ ”

I
t 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.

I
t 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.