A Long Walk on a Short Pier (Part One)

CCLXV

Even as Juan Trippe faced difficulties on the fifty-eighth floor of the Chrysler Building, other problems began to crop up on Capitol Hill. 

The House of Representatives, 1935

For years Trippe had exercised a free hand in managing his airline. He had written (or had his lawyers write) most of the regulations that applied to international air carriers in the United States. He had worked hand-in-glove with Republican Administrations to promote U.S. interests abroad, so much so that Pan Am had become known as “the other State Department.”  He had read the intentions of the Roosevelt Administration like a gypsy with a deck of tarot cards, helping the U.S. extend its influence across the Pacific even as Japan began encroaching on China and militarizing its Mandates. He had largely blocked Big Jim Farley’s attempt to cripple Pan Am by reorganizing Foreign Air Mail routes.

 

Now he was facing a new set of New Deal rules designed to open the Atlantic Ocean to a second U.S.-flagged carrier, American Export Airlines. AEA was more than a paper airline. It owned three of Igor Sikorsky’s huge S-44 flying boats. Sikorsky had built the prototype for Trippe, who, after years of doing business, went with Glenn Martin’s smaller (and more aesthetic) M-130. Sikorsky didn’t get mad. He got even, selling the prototype (redesignated a VS-44) to the upstart AEA, and building two more when they exercised their option.  They still had no FAM routes, but they were working on it.

Juan Trippe enjoying a pipe

No sooner had Trippe heard about Sikorsky’s embrace of AEA than he had traveled to Washington, and in the truest fashion of a successful free-market capitalist made a convincing argument for monopoly and close government regulation of the airlines. Essentially, he pushed the idea of Pan American as the U.S. national air carrier on Congress. Congress pushed back. They refused to grant Pan Am that status, but they did agree with Trippe that it was more effective and efficient to have only one carrier displaying the American flag overseas. For the time being, that is.

It was a breathing space, little more, for Pan Am. The word in Washington was that competition was preferable to monopoly, and that there would be another international carrier, AEA or someone else, sooner or later. Trippe wanted it later. What Trippe wasn’t being told was that the Roosevelt Administration was quietly backing the expansion of AEA. FDR was tired of having two State Departments. And he was tired of Juan Trippe.

Under normal circumstances Trippe would have just purchased AEA and its big flying boats outright, and added everything to the Pan American System. Circumstances were anything but normal. His usually agreeable Board of Directors refused to let him do anything but maintain Pan Am’s status quo. They were tired of him too.

The “Celestial Observatory” at the top of the Chrysler Building, 1945

Trippe fumed, but he could do little more at the moment. Then came the defections. Board member George Rihl openly argued with Trippe in a meeting, and to Trippe’s almost petulant, “I’m your boss!” Rihl snapped, “The hell you are.” Richard Mellon, David Bruce, and Grover Loening all quit the Board. Mellon had the most recognizable name, but Loening’s departure hurt the worse.

Grover Loening

Grover Loening was a petulant builder of flying boats who had been on the Pan Am Board for nearly a decade. Pan Am didn’t use his aircraft, but various segments of the System did (CNAC among them). Loening was chronically suspicious of Trippe, he preferred landplanes to seaplanes  (oddly enough), and he constantly voted down whatever the Board voted up. After he left Pan Am’s boardroom, Loening went to work in Washington as an aviation consultant --- bringing all of Pan Am’s inside corporate information with him.

 

A Loening Air Yacht of the type used by CNAC, 1930

Loening, who had previously pressed for separate regulation of international and domestic airlines soon became an advocate of a single across-the-board regulatory system. In the alphabet soup of the New Deal, the regulatory agency so designated was called the Civil Aeronautics Authority, or C.A.A.*

A C.A.A. Inspector’s badge, 1938

Loening never rose to any official position of authority in the C.A.A. Rather, he was a henchman for the Authority’s ultimate head, Joseph P. Kennedy.

Joseph P. Kennedy, paterfamilias of the Kennedy clan. He always wanted to be the first Catholic President of the United States, but his unpleasant and domineering personality, combined with his constant scheming and blatant womanizing, made him too many enemies to count.  He had his own daughter Rosemary lobotomized and institutionalized for her willful behavior. He did not tell his wife until later. How many bodies he buried is unknown. A brilliant, unsentimental man, he excelled at business and at government administration, but he fell from grace when he was named Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Once in London, he publicly announced that Britain would not withstand the growing might of Nazi Germany, he associated with British fascists, and he blamed the Jews for the coming war, recommending that they all be deported to Africa. Kennedy never referred to Jews as anything but “kikes” and “sheenies,” and his deportation plan was a part of Nazi orthodoxy (Hitler suggested Madagascar as a Jewish reservation; the Holocaust could be carried out quietly there, away from prying eyes). When Kennedy broke with Roosevelt, openly promoting a policy of appeasement toward Germany and Italy in 1940, FDR recalled him. Kennedy never held another public office, but he machinated his son Jack’s rise to the Presidency in 1961. Fortunately for America John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a kinder and gentler man than his father, very unlike him except for his conquests of beautiful women

Joe Kennedy was a man of undisputed talent and incredible energy who had two, and only two, ambitions in life, the first to end each day wealthier than he had begun it (in which he was consistently successful), and to be the first Roman Catholic President of the United States of America (at which he failed, in large part due to his own deep flaws of character). Kennedy liked to tout his Catholicism, but it was just a part of his self-branding. He left God to his long-suffering wife, Rose. He also liked to talk about the poverty his family had experienced in Ireland and the ravages upon the family of the Potato Famine, but his ancestors had all come from County Wexford, which the Famine left untouched. 

The Kennedy farmstead, Dunganstown, County Wexford, Ireland. Not the little mud cabin of the peasants Joe Kennedy liked to tell people about, the Kennedy property put them solidly in the Catholic yeoman class

Joe Kennedy was a thoroughly amoral man: If he could succeed best by following the rules, he followed them. If reaching a goal meant bending or breaking a rule, he bent it or broke it and never thought twice about it. If ruining a rival meant adding to his coffers he ruined his rival. If killing an adversary was called for, Kennedy had him killed and then slept soundly. 

*Later the Civilian Aeronautics Board (CAB) it was eventually folded into the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)