Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman Read Free Book Online Page B

non-profit contract is a loss.” 35 But such was Kaiser’s enthusiasm that he leaped at the chance to realize his dream of revolutionizing the aviation industry, just as he had almost everything else. 36
    Kaiser and his wife, Bess, met his new partner for dinner at the Shoreham Hotel in DC. The thin, taciturn Hughes walked in wearing sneakers and no necktie. He had a slinky blonde on his arm with long hair pulled down over one eye like Veronica Lake.
    “I think Mother Kaiser almost died,” Kaiser’s longtime secretary Edna Knuth remembered. “But that didn’t bother Mr. Kaiser. He was talking business with Hughes and it was a big night for him. He didn’t care about the blonde.” 37
    Then reality began to intrude. Because aluminum and magnesium were in critical supply in 1942, the government had deemed that all new airplane prototypes be made from plywood. Hughes’s first problem was finding enough wood for his massive project, and for the massive building in which to house it. In the end he settled on birch laminates, but the press preferred to think it was spruce so it could brand his plane the “Spruce Goose” (a name Hughes hated). But as Kaiser followed the plane’s progress by phone calls and telegrams, he became more and more alarmed. 38
    Kaiser was obsessed with meeting deadlines. Hughes, on the other hand, was a perfectionist who considered deadlines imposed by others an intrusion into his own private vision. He was also prone to be inaccessible at critical times—a foretaste of the mysterious recluse of later years. Kaiser would show up at the plant in Culver City and learn that Hughes was missing. Then he would pace and fume while Hughes’s aides hunted for their boss. 39
    By summer he was not only running out of patience but running out of time. He had to account to the War Production Board for the Spruce Goose delays, but Hughes was giving him almost no information. On August 27, 1943, the project’s general manager called Donald Nelson out of his office. “We have a terribly chaotic situation out here,” he warned. “It’s going to blow right up in your face.” 40
    Kaiser and Nelson were never mutual fans. Many felt Nelson had set the megaplane project up to fail: As journalist Eliot Janeway put it, he had told “Kaiser that, so to speak, he can have a ham sandwich if he can bake the bread, borrow the butter, and somehow steal the ham.” 41 But for once they had a common foe, Hughes’s unaccountable delays, and a common objective: to find out what the hell was going on.
    In September the Navy’s top aeronautics expert, George Spangenberg, was sent out to California with the head of the Civilian Aviation Board, Dr. Ed Warner, who had been Jimmy Doolittle’s teacher at MIT. On the flight out, Spangenberg and Warner did hours of calculations ofthe plane’s planned weight, fuel, and payload range—which became more sobering the longer they checked the figures.
    Spangenberg had to admit he was “tremendously impressed” with the setup at Culver City. Hughes had figured out how to build everything from wood, including his factory—with the cap strips for the Spruce Goose’s wing beams requiring no fewer than sixty-four laminations. 42 But he was furious that Hughes’s engineers hadn’t told their boss the aeronautical truth: while the plane’s lift went up as the square of its linear dimensions, its weight went up as a
cube
of those dimensions. The “square-cube” law had doomed the project from the start, plywood or no plywood. The Spruce Goose might get off the ground but it would never fly—let alone across the Atlantic.
    Spangenberg and Warner returned to Washington to write out their sixty-page grim report, and on February 11, 1944, Nelson canceled the Kaiser-Hughes contract. 43 After the war Kaiser put the blame squarely on his old nemesis Jesse Jones. Jones had said, he told a Senate committee investigating the Spruce Goose’s cost overruns in 1947, that “there was no