Interviewer: Martin Collins
Location: Mr. Atwood's home, Pacific Palisades, CA
Date: June 25, 1990
TAPE 1, SIDE 1
MR. COLLINS: During our previous interviews, you've gone into a number of the technical aspects of North American's work on the Apollo program, both for the S-II and the Command Module systems, and we've discussed some of the circumstances surrounding the fire that happened in 1967. Towards the conclusion of our previous interview, we were looking at the effect of the fire on North American's relationships with Congress, or Congressional response to the fire. What was some of the damage, if you will, that North American needed to repair in terms of its contact with Congress, in that period, if any at all?
MR. ATWOOD: I don't remember too much. We just had a few people that were pretty sympathetic. Sub-Committee Chairman Olin (Tiger) Teague from Texas, who seemed to understand the program difficulties and also Don Fuqua of Florida. Alphonso Bell was the Congressman from this area of California, and tried to be helpful, but there wasn't much he could do. Feelings were very high, of course, as I pointed out in one of my supporting documents.
When one of our scientists attempted to point out that possibly the gas Chromatograph had been jostled by one of the astronauts, Gus Grissom, the whole room seemed to erupt in antagonism, and it was of course an innocent remark, but it sounded like he might be blaming the astronauts for the fire, which of course is an easy interpretation if you let it go. Of course he was not. That could have very well started the fire. In fact, chances are it probably did. But that had nothing to do with malfeasance on the part of the astronauts in any event.
So the whole thing, on balance, was rather bitter, and I don't know how Senator Clinton Anderson, chairman of the committee, reacted. He was moderately courteous and polite. I know the Senator from Massachusetts, I've forgotten his name, was trying to make the company look pretty bad on Senate hearings. He was the guy that was later forced to leave Congress for some depredations. (Brooks)
Anyway, I saw little that could be done. Tiger Teague invited me back for a special meeting one time to commemorate the lunar landing or something, and I was grateful for that. I felt that our relations with him were, if not good, at least honest and fair.
COLLINS: This would have been a private discussion between you and him or some kind of group celebration?
ATWOOD: Well, it was a political event I don't know why he invited me, unless just to make me feel a little better. I was on the dais along with 30 or 40 other people, in some program. I made no organized attempt or any real focussed attempt to try to do anything with Congress. It seemed part and parcel of the whole thing that, as I mentioned to you before, I guess I felt in the same position that Pan American felt after the airplane was destroyed over Lockerbee, Scotland, try to do something to help those people. I felt the responsibility at least to that extent. I hadn't yet figured out what happened. So I felt the best thing to do was, as I did, make no excuses, offer no alibis and do the best we could to get on with it, which we did, of course.
COLLINS: Not knowing precisely what caused the accident at that time, and having the thrust of the argument from NASA being that North American workmanship and quality control--
ATWOOD: --and design too--
COLLINS:--and design was not up to standard in some respect, did you feel there was credence to those kinds of criticisms?
ATWOOD: Nobody can be sure there are no defects, especially in complicated equipment. I had some feeling that there was a very critical attitude down at the Cape, which of course would be understandable. In examining the burned out craft certain evidence of electrical arcing was noted. The electrical power cells in the service module were capable of about 90 amperes at 28 volts so inevitably when the insulation was burned off the wires some arcing must have occured.
NASA also took an uncompleted capsule, I think it was No. 17, requisitioned it from our assembly building, took it to the Cape to compare with the burned out capsule. Of course it was incomplete, untested, uninspected, and it was partially disassembled along with the burned out spacecraft, disassembled by people who were very, very strongly attached to the dead astronauts. Afterwards it was alleged that in the undamaged uncompleted spacecraft there were deficiencies in workmanship, and perhaps and undoubtedly there must have been. Whether they would have been carried on into an operable operational spacecraft, I seriously doubt, whatever they might have been. Improperly skinned wires and a few things like that.
I knew it's pretty futile to take them one by one and try to defend them. So I obviously did not do so. You live with an organization for years. You create quality control. You create standards. And you sincerely hope that these standards are followed. Where they aren't, there's an error. Error in programming, engineering, something. So I could not be sure there were no errors, and in fact, something of that kind must have caused a hot spot that allowed the oxygen to take hold. Whether it was merely a loosened wire, or was caused by handling, the presence of bodies and people in the capsule, or it came from a back shop fabrication area, I don't know. In fact, I seriously doubt that there was anything severe enough to cause the fire, but I don't know, never will know. I have to assume that there was. I did assume that. And my posture was based on lack of knowledge. Something must have happened.
Yet the overlying problem of oxygen was almost overwhelming me at the time. I said to George Mueller, I remember it very clearly, we were talking about something, I said, "George, that spacecraft would have made a good flight if it hadn't been for that oxygen." He said, "Of course it would." That was the end of that. Now, in the last three years, there have been two people killed in Los Angeles county in operating rooms because of oxygen leaking from their nostril inhalers and causing fires. Two people dead. That's gone on forever. The lack of just ventilation. A fan would have prevented that. But a pocket of oxygen accumulates and a little cauterizing tool or something sets it off. This is well known.
Now, after this accident, I think I can assure you, as long as mankind's on this earth and tries an aerospace capsule, they will not inflate it with sea level pressure oxygen again. Of course it is not done in the space shuttle. They use regular air there. It will not be done again. That's a small comfort to the people that worked on the capsule, the families of people that were lost, but that was an egregious error. It was the cause. Not whoever loosened a wire or whoever jostled the chromatograph, I don't know. This is all clear. Never will they do that again.
COLLINS: Well, separating out the issue of the role of the oxygen in the fire--
ATWOOD: Okay. If you can.
COLLINS: If you can. Viewing the fire as a crisis point for reviewing the North American organization and its management of the program after the fire, and your looking into the organization and responding to what the NASA people had to say, responding to what Jim Webb had to say, and George Mueller, was your sense that the organization was operating at its best possible efficiency for getting this work done in the best possible way?
ATWOOD: Well, I could never say that. It was an organization that was really pressed by technical problems. It really was. The effort to get the weight out of the various elements was very extreme. Dale Myers was totally involved. Of course he read my article on the weight fight on the S-II and he said he had the equivalent on the spacecraft. They were pressed with that. Dale Myers was never directly criticized, and he was managing the Apollo Command Module program of course. They criticized some of the people who worked for him. But no, you know, your ideal is to engineer something, put it in the shop, get it built efficiently and then inspect it carefully and get it out the door and operate.
We had an environment that required us to do all those things at once, with much backtracking to make changes. The changes were almost overwhelming. So this was part of the problem of the organization, and it was far from normal. In fact, as Sam Phillips noted, it was to a considerable degree out of control. Parts had to go back for re-engineering, redesign, again and again, re-release, new material, supply and manufacturing and tooling. Yes, it was a struggle.
However the heart of the organization was people and their attitude, and I felt that the NASA tactic of sending the FBI in to look for crimes and torts and whatever, question everybody in the place, was the worst possible tactic NASA could have taken, from a management point of view. It was almost designed to demoralize and wreck the division. When the people rose above that and went ahead with their work, and the small amount of time that was lost, to me that was the Phoenix coming up out of the rubble, in spite of this sort of abuse. They did it efficiently. You can compare cost in dollars. You can compare anything you want. It was very efficiently done, by comparison. So this is my belief. I did have to move Stormy over, move him out. NASA wouldn't tolerate him. That was the thing where I had the misunderstanding with Jim Webb. This is almost a fragmentary description of it in terms of this book, but--
COLLINS: Just for the record here, Mr. Atwood is referring to Prescription For Disaster by Joseph Trento.1
ATWOOD: Yes. So Ralph Ruud, head of our airplane division, which was really our senior division, went in as deputy to Bill Bergen, who was an experienced aerospace manager, having been president of Martin Company. He knew little about the personnel and resources of the company, but I think it was a matter of finishing the job. The design had pretty much been thrashed out. It was led by Ralph Ruud, with Bergen's supervision, Dale Myers, and Bob Greer, who came with us from the Air Force, a brigadier general, a very fine engineer. He finished the production in spite of the loss of the S-II test article from over-pressure, which was a lack of test discipline. Bob Greer was an excellent man, and he was able to improve the organization for the manufacturing and completion of the S-II stages. Myers certainly did continue with the changes on the Command Module, most of which of course, if it hadn't been for the fire, would hardly have been considered necessary.
COLLINS: I think we've discussed some of these personnel and organizational changes just after the fire.
ATWOOD: Yes.
COLLINS: But the overall impression that one gets from NASA accounts and from some of my discussions with you and others at North American is that there is, if not an acrimony, at least a level of misunderstanding between the North American and NASA people, for at least several years. I wonder whether that's a correct perception of the overall tenor of the relationship during say from--
ATWOOD: It's hard for me to believe that. I used to go to these meetings and I could detect no contest between objectives or even methods. But if the NASA people say so, it must be true. From what I've seen of the records in the NASA histories, this undercurrent runs through quite a lot of it. It was certainly far from our intention or my intention to have any such contest. Now, the personality of Storms might have had something to do with it. On the other hand, Dale Myers has never even--well, I never heard him criticized for personality or lack of diligence or anything else. He was the key man on the Apollo when it was burned up, and yet he wasn't criticized. It was an interesting thing.
So I don't know how to take that any further. The work was done efficiently, by comparison. I do think that probably the people at Houston who, as you pointed out in papers you've given me, did not want to have a specification solidified, rather wanted to manage by indirection, by personal visit, by critiques, by arm waving, verbal direction, individual changes and things like that. They wanted it to grow under their, I guess you'd say, supervision, and observation. And it did. But that was hard, really hard for people who were used to their own specifications and their own designing to performance type of thing. It was hard for them to accept, probably, and did create, if there's friction it probably did help create it.
COLLINS: But your perception during this time, before the fire was that things were relatively harmonious as a whole between North American and NASA and the NASA centers?
ATWOOD: I had every reason to think so. Now, I've been told much later, by somebody who knows, one of our people, that Storms, an old time aerodynamicist, was very closely involved with the NACA people and the NASA people at Langley and also at Ames in Sunnyvale, California, where they had wind tunnel facilities and testing. Bob Gilruth was very active in that work too. I was told that Stormy and Bob Gilruth were friends, and that Storms' relationship with Gilruth went from friends to enemies during this period. Now, why, I don't know. But I have good reason to believe that that did happen, although I never was able to get anything myself that indicated it. So that may be the focal point of this trouble. I don't think Storms was too arrogant. He reallyisn't. At heart he's a worker and trier and a reacher for performance, he always did. If you had talked to anybody like Chris Kraft, Bob Gilruth or anyone else in that activitiy, they would probably tell you that the work Storms did on the B-70, in which we achieved a lift-to-drag ratio of 8, at Mach 3, still stands out. Certainly something like the SR-71 doesn't anywhere near match it. Its range is much, much shorter, of course. So anyway, it's a bleeding shame if something like that happened, of course, to a personal relationship.
COLLINS: That raises an interesting question. What was your role in assessing the effectiveness of your key people, like Harrison Storms, assessing their relationships with their important counterparts outside the corporation?
ATWOOD: It's hard to keep up with that on a short term basis, naturally in a complicated organization such as an aerospace company. I guess my method was to rely on 20 years of experience, more than a weekly or monthly assessment of these things. I did confer with Storms. I'd sit in engineering reviews, sit in program reviews, get briefings on all sorts of things, that would seem fragmentary to somebody not an engineer, but to me they made a pattern of problems, progress and potential. So as I say, I'm a product-oriented person. I think I spent most of my, not time but rather attention, on results, engineering work, the progress of tooling and those things, rather than more intangible things which may have been causing some trouble.
COLLINS: What was the nature of your contacts and relationships with Jim Webb and George Mueller after the immediate crisis period, subsequent to the fire? You all continued in your same capacities, towards the end of the sixties. How were your relationships after the initial crisis was pretty much gotten over.
ATWOOD: Well, I had direct relationships with Bob Gilruth, Wernher von Braun, George Mueller, and to a lesser degree with Sam Phillips, and of course with Mr. Webb. I would meet them. I'd go to their offices. They'd come on occasion to visit. I had long talks with George Mueller. In my considered opinion, the most effective people in this program were, in order of their knowledge and contribution, Wernher von Braun, George Mueller, Bob Gilruth, and in another way, James Webb. I base that on only engineering. Wernher von Braun knew what he was doing. And as an electrical engineer, George Mueller knew what he was doing. He did not, I think, really basically appreciate the structural and propulsion ends of it so much. It wasn't his discipline. But he did know what he was doing, and he would talk to me about these things at length, which I appreciated. Mr. Webb, on the other hand, properly delegated authority and maintained political support.
COLLINS: The technical aspects of the program?
ATWOOD: That, and the organizational things. Of course, George was trying awfully hard on the schedule. He had invented a form of a schedule record, I guess you'd call it, which we came to call "Mueller" Graphs which showed how the schedule had been compromised and distorted and delayed and one thing and another, graphically, so that people could see what their problem was a little more basically than might have been the case just waving your arms. He, however, was to me a very reasonable and competent manager.
I think his activities in overall scheduling, which brought together various components for the launches, all from components tests and parts tests and all that, was a very fine effort. It paralleled and followed the type of thing that Ben Schriever's people had done in ballistic missiles. They called it concurrency, which was engineering, development, production all at the same time, because of the perceived missile crisis. Mueller called it "all up testing" which is in considerable measure the same thing, although there are differences.
This is all a difficult concept, Martin, concurrency and all up testing, etc. It's risky. But it saves time. So that's generally the way it seemed to me, on the performing end. Now, of course, it's the customer's business to criticize the contractors. This is standard SOP, standard practice. Even terrorize contractors with threats of cancellation and shifting to another contractor. I'm familiar with that. I've gone through many, many cycles.
Minuteman is a case where we were trying to do something which was almost transcendental, bring the integrated circuits into a state of development where they would operate a Minuteman guidance system in a hole for years at a time. That did accelerate devopment of the integrated circuits, I mean as a big driving force for developing them to the mature condition we have today. But the criticism was very severe at the time, for certain problems. Well, that's only a comparison, and I'm not sensitive to that type of criticism. We handle a lot of money. That's what we're supposed to get paid for.
But in the Army, Navy and Air Force, I have never seen an accident investigation like the Apollo fire investigation. I've never seen skating over the fundamentals and putting the blame where it obviously was only marginally responsible, if at all. Later it was apparent that the Mercury and Gemini capsules had never been tested for flammability even after Gemini short-circuit, and the embarrassment of disclosing this would have been serious.
And there is a difference. The military, the weapon isn't their objective, it's their tool. They encourage contractors and all sorts of resources in this country, universities and everyone else, to help them with their tools. Contractors usually take the job and do the whole thing. But NASA, on the other hand, isambivalent. A spacecraft is not so much the tool as the objective. Later on it may get to be the tool. But that being the case, the focus is somewhat different. The engineering is different. If it worked out to be that when something worked fine, NASA designed it. When something failed, the contractor designed it. It was in that category of who's responsible, who did it, and that type of thing is there.
COLLINS: This line of discussion started off with my trying to get an assessment of the character of your relationships subsequent to the fire, after the crisis had passed.
ATWOOD: Well, I didn't think they changed much. I thought they were reasonably good. To me at least. Of course, they might have kicked other people around a lot more. I know the FBI did. Unnecessary. But I don't think I could say that I was in any way personally constrained or really inhibited in anything I needed to do, which I did. I had a form of crisis on a Sunday. Larry Greene was our Washington rep. He'd been talking to Webb. He knew that Webb was going to insist that we get rid of Storms who was also a friend of his. He came out here on a Saturday night. I went to the office. It was a weekend. Sent Larry back Sunday night with a letter stating that I'd removed Storms; Bill Bergen and Ralph Ruud were coming in, and he took it to Webb the next morning. According to Larry Greene, Webb told him it was a good letter. That's the basis for him in this book saying that he laid down the law to me and the North American executives came back and said, "We'll do what you wish." It's entirely that, which of course is what I did. But I didn't feel that there was any handicap afterwards in my relationship with those people.
COLLINS: I think, unless you want to make some additional remarks about the fire and the working relationship with NASA over this period, I'd like to move on to a slightly different subject.
ATWOOD: Well, I think we've covered it, Martin, at least all my valid thoughts.
COLLINS: I thought it might be useful to look at some of the broad organizational developments at North American during the sixties. One thing that interests me, as a way of getting into this subject, is the role of and evolution of your I guess it's called, contracts and proposals organization, and what role they played at the headquarters level, and how this related to programs in the divisions. And apparently, in flipping through this, a few more pages to slightly later years, we're looking at an organization chart for 1962.
ATWOOD: Isn't that interesting? That is just about the week he died.
COLLINS: Kindelberger.
ATWOOD: Yes. '62, he died the 27th of July.
COLLINS: What is then identified a couple of years later, and I'm not sure if it's the transformation of this organization or an addition to it, where you have a vice president for marketing, as opposed to contracts and proposals. I'd be interested to understand the relationship between those two things, whether that represents a re-naming of that function or an additional function.
ATWOOD: Well, the contract function is quite important. Of course it has to do with negotiating contracts. But that's only the first stage. The administration of the contract after it's been awarded is quite an elaborate type of thing. It involves legal advice. It involves all sorts of compliance with specifications and contract documents. Faithful execution of a contract is an elaborate thing. Now, personally, in this business, I never cared for the term marketing. On the other hand, Johnny Moore, who was coming in about that time, had been head of electronics, and he was thinking more in terms of components and elements and high production things, and there really is a marketing function which is a sales function involved in that. I put him the head of this whole organization when we merged with Rockwell, as you may know.
COLLINS: The head of which organization?
ATWOOD: All aerospace, all. Of course Bob Anderson became head of the automotive. So John Moore wanted to work into the idea of more marketing emphasis, which had some logic for that. It didn't really apply very well to aerospace--namely large airplane contracts, space contracts, rocket engines and things that were very carefully specified in great detail item by item. So that's the best explanation I can give you on that. It really isn't a sales organization so much in an aerospace company.
COLLINS: Just looking here at the organization chart, say for somebody who had responsibility here for military relations, roughly, what sort of falls under there?
ATWOOD: Oh, it's contact with the military. That runs into several categories. One is acceptability of military aircraft we have in the field; trouble shooting the difficulties; the cycle of troubles and what they're looking for that's better; from the combat units to the headquarters and the depot units and all that. There is a definite need for continuity. So there are service people, and of course, there's a spare parts supply situation going on all the time, and there are changes going on, service related changes which arise from marginal performance of some element, like a gun charger or an instrument or a computer or radio, things like that. So we do have a network of military liaison. Alex Burton was in charge of that. He was an ex-military man and well accepted. He wasn't exactly a salesman, but a conduit, both to engineering and to management and to the factory, for that matter.
TAPE 1, SIDE 2
COLLINS: Would someone like Alex Burton then have close contact with all these field representatives down here?
ATWOOD: Yes, to some extent; more with the military bases, in his case. But of course these were offices. The Dayton office handled all sorts of things because that's where the contracts and engineering people of the Air Force were. Then there's the Omaha office at SAC. I don't think Alex Burton had much of a network, but he was a pretty useful liaison. Of course, in contract pricing, that was a rather massive function, because it was very critical, as you know. We didn't have all fixed-price contracts by any means. Many were adjustable rate and all that. But the negotiation of those things is quite complex and specialized, and calls for many engineering inputs as well as factory, material, labor relations and all this sort of thing. So it's a major element, and it was appropriately in the contracts and pricing group, of course--contracts and programs.
COLLINS: What is the programs element there? To what does that refer?
ATWOOD: Well, it's really a kind of a focal point for--call it sales, if you like. Requests for Proposals come out all the time. Frequently they're telegraphed ahead of time, and they generally go to this group who would analyze them. In many cases, they would decide which division of the company should receive that Request for Proposal, or contract proposal offer. This would require a pretty good knowledge of the divisions. Of course, if it was straight rocket engines, they'd send it to Rocketdyne naturally. But that was the general function of this group.
COLLINS: Okay. So when an RFP came in, what would be then the nature of the contact? I guess this group was the focal point for receiving these things. What then would be their contact with the operating divisions?
ATWOOD: Well, of course, they'd notify them and presumably send it over to them. But it's more complex than that. If an RFP comes in that's a suprise, somebody's been asleep at the switch, you see. The divisions, the engineers and their contact people generally are working on these things well before they come out in final form. The more advanced work you do on a proposal for something new, the better chance you have of winning it, and in fact, that's where a good bit of our discretionary spending goes--for engineering design and analysis work and even experimental work preparing for these things.
COLLINS: Can you give me a little more detail on how these outlying offices were used?
ATWOOD: Yes, I think I can. The Dayton office of course, I used to go there quite often. It was the center for any activity thatimpinged on Wright Field, which of course issued the contracts and had the engineering centers for the Air Force. So when I'd visit there, usually the hotel was arrangd by the Dayton office, the transportation if necessary. There were appointments to be made with people at Wright Field, various labs and divisions, and generally housekeeping, plus continuity, which they developed with various people that visited and had business at Wright Field. They could maintain that continuity through their acquaintanceships and knowledge of the work. We weren't heavily staffed there. It would be somebody from Autonetics, he'd have a secretary and maybe an assistant, maybe somebody to work for him, and Rocketdyne might have someone there, although for a long time they didn't. The aircraft divisions of course used the Dayton office heavily. So it was a combination of liaison, information, housekeeping and visitors' center. And as I say, an information center for what's going on at Wright Field, as best we could.
COLLINS: What would be the importance say of having a contact with the people in the Air Force laboratories there? What was the value of that?
ATWOOD: Well, that's where the requirements originate, and to a person who hasn't participated in these long range engineering evolutions and movements, it might seem you could pop in, get your RFP and go back and figure out a good winning proposal. But the odds of it are very small. Background knowledge and the technical content of the work and its appropriateness in the minds of these laboratory people is all-important. They in turn are following the state-of-the-art and scientific things as well as they can. Whenever something new comes up in industry, they frequently sponsor it. But it isn't long until it's part of the state-of-the-art, and if you don't know about it, why, you're kind of dragging behind. And so I try to give some benefit to people who come in with new technical ideas. But I can't really get patent protection, you see. That's all a thing of the past in government work.
So you take each competition, each cycle of re-equipment, as things on their own. Some people in engineering have been preparing for things for three to five years, and one of the methods by which they prepare is to perform paid studies for the military itself. Before we got the B-70 bomber contract, which was the result of a formal competition, North American, Boeing and General Dynamics, we had done I guess you could call it, accommodation work for them, doing engineering studies, weight, performance estimates, all kinds of configurations and tactics, that sort of thing. Those are really not profitable contracts but sustaining contracts. Boeing had been doing it too, but they dropped that work for a period of years, and then when the competition came up, why, North American won that. That's part of the fabric of these things.
COLLINS: It's perhaps worth noting that you've got offices at Dayton, Colorado Springs which I assume is related to the spacecommand.
ATWOOD: Well, at that time it was more related to the Air Defense Command.
COLLINS: That's right. Okay. Edwards Air Force Base. But it doesn't appear to be related to NASA work to the same degree that you're oriented toward Air Force work.
ATWOOD: Well, of course, let me see. Do you have anything there? 1962.
COLLINS: I was going to say, why don't we look at '63, maybe there's--
ATWOOD: We certainly had a Houston office at one point here.
COLLINS: It doesn't list the offices there.
ATWOOD: No, it doesn't. Well, we had a Houston office all right. We had a Huntsville office. Of course the Washington office took care of Headquarters.
COLLINS: Okay, we're looking at a chart now.
ATWOOD: This is Rocketdyne, isn't it?
COLLINS: No, this is the --
ATWOOD: --oh yes. Yes.
COLLINS: I guess the date on this one is, could be, looks like '66. It looks by this time the contracts and programs function has been redesignated market planning.
ATWOOD: Market planning, yes.
COLLINS: Is that correct?
ATWOOD: Tom Dixon, yes. I think. Yes.
COLLINS: If you can recall, what lay behind sort of redesignating that Contracts and Programs to Market Planning?
ATWOOD: I guess it's all pretty much the same thing. If you're out trying to get contracts, is that marketing? If you're administering contracts, is that administration? It's a little fuzzy. We might say, the acquisition of contracts is a sales function, but it's a lot deeper than that. Some engineering sales activity. It's a part of every organization. Ordinary commercial organizations just call it the sales department. Although you'll find big contracting firms have a program manager for each contract and they'll have their own organization to execute the contracts, and make their money collections, and get theirbonuses and pay their penalties and handle their legal liabilities and all that sort of thing. Big contracts make a difference in a company, make a tremendous difference. Just product sales in large quantities, standardized products, is quite a lot different. Sales and sales promotion and advertising all go together there. Here it's so much more subtle and broadly spread responsibility.
COLLINS: To put the question a little differently, what's the value of developing an extensive staff capability at the corporate level for this kind of activity, versus having it placed in the operating divisions?
ATWOOD: First, about this type of organization in general. A multi-divisional organization with functional staff control is known as a matrix type of organization. George Mueller worked very hard to get NASA into this type of control. The Centers were operations and the headquarters staff was for coordination and consistency. Organization charts are frequently deceptive since a division with a large number of people is usually depicted by a block no larger than a staff function with half a dozen people. I'll give you some examples.
Now, this organization here under Stan Smithson is almost unique. He was one of our original key people. He left Douglas with me and Dutch Kindelberger to really form the organization. He was a highly trusted, effective and capable guy. He was not a design engineer, I mean a new product engineer. He understood drawings and production and all that very well, but he wasn't qualified as an engineer. I depended on him almost without detailed reports for much of this.
One of the most important functions of course is facilities and the distribution of available money for facilities, manufacturing equipment, buildings and this sort of thing. He handled that almost not independently but in conjunction with reports to me, and I could delegate that to him with great confidence. I couldn't very well delegate the engineering and the government relations to him, and these were pretty specialized and important. But you'll notice, I haven't thought of this in years, but facilities and--
COLLINS: Industrial engineering.
ATWOOD: Industrial engineering. That's a pretty good-sized outfit; management systems and organization; next, personnel, E.D. Starkweather, involved labor relations, personnel services, medical, all those things that went with it. Also reporting to Smithson was the West Virginia plant, a feeder plant. Quality and Logistics, he also had that. Now, normally you wouldn't put quality under somebody who's responsible for factory work but in this case, he was only handling the factory work insofar as facilities and machinery were concerned. Material procurement of course was under him, because of his capabilities, his experience and his background.
COLLINS: Okay. What my question in part was getting at, this Dixon didn't work under Smithson.
ATWOOD: No.
COLLINS: He had access to you.
ATWOOD: I guess I know what you're getting at. Why does the headquarters need a staff when divisions have to do the work?
COLLINS: The proposals are essentially technical engineering proposals. What's the value of having that group of people located at headquarters?
ATWOOD: Well, a division with a poorly thought-out bid can compromise the financial stability of the whole company. That's number 1. Not just the division, because they're all under one responsible financial organization. So they're reviewed. Some assessment has to be made. Larger contracts are not signed without pretty detailed analysis and pricing review, a review of facilities, review for legal and review for other things. We try to get it as well reviewed and assessed as you possibly can in reasonable time and effort. That's for contracts.
Now, facilities, the same thing. We have different places we can get manufacturing work done. We can subcontract. We can buy. We can build. Those things are better viewed from the standpoint of a corporate facilities unit than by the facilities engineer in the Atomics division or the Rocketdyne division. They need support and they need money, but they also need review at least if you're going to be one company and not let each one be the steering agent. Then you get to, of course, material procurement. This is a function that's worthwhile, very much worthwhile for the divisions because here again, standardization in some caess, combining of orders saves money. Dividing the material function into the divisions is necessary because of the specialized nature of their products and the engineering that goes with it, but the method of procurement is frequently ordered against a company open purchase order for that kind of material, getting the advantage of quantity discount against the whole thing. So we do need a materials staff to do this, to keep track of supplies, for one thing, and even can balance the warehouse stocks of various divisions, one against the other, if necessary. So those are some of the functions. Then of course quality control is something else. It's primarily to maintain standards and to monitor personnel and supply qualified people as necessary. So they all have their function and they're all a part of the general scheme of things.
COLLINS: When you were mentioning the proposals, I guess I'm still a little unclear on what input corporate level staff could make that people in the divisions couldn't make to produce aquality proposal.
ATWOOD: Well, number one is price. The experience factors and the comparison factors that go into pricing, and the visible assurance of a double check on price estimates may or may not seem critical to you, but it's really inconceivable to me that you would sign something that a lad brought up from one of the divisions and said, "We think this is what it will cost." If this were a different form of company, and he had a cost experience on these things, and he knew every time it came off of the end of a production line what it would cost, that would be different. But we are estimating in nearly all cases something new that hasn't been done before, and at the very least, I, together with my staff, have to at least have some concept of the risk we're taking or the degree of risk, to be justifiable, to be anything more than a loose-coupled aggregation of associated companies.
COLLINS: Given that the contracts and programs and later the marketing function provided a kind of liaison information function for the corporation, how did the knowledge that they gained about Air Force interests and requirements and present practices tie in to formulating a proposal?
ATWOOD: Well, you see, a proposal is, in nearly every case, basically engineering work. The design elements have to be well defined. In many cases drawings have to be submitted. Certainly technical analyses are a fundamental requirement. And these are diced down to various sizes as you get down to the detailed engineering work, and there just isn't any way to write a textbook on that or a working manual. The effectiveness of the engineers themselves, their representatives, and their interchange with their government counterparts is delicate but it's important. I've been rather appalled in recent years by some of the so-called crimes of lobbyists or liaison people or consultants who have at least allegedly been paying people to get information, improper information, from the military, and I don't know whether I've engaged in anything might be improper in the past or not. I don't know. I don't think so. I do know that we have never paid anyone in government for any information. But I do have this conviction, Martin, that without an awful lot of informal information, the rate of progress in military engineering and effectiveness is going to drop down pretty badly. I just don't see how they can maintain a really dynamic advancing technology and expect contractors to produce it without a tremendous amount of interchange and even potential planning information. If this is forbidden in the future, I think it bodes pretty badly for our military posture. Maybe we can afford it, these days. We probably can. But it's taking a lot for granted.
COLLINS: I guess maybe another way of looking at this, when you're writing a proposal, you're writing it for a particular audience.
ATWOOD: Yes. You are.
COLLINS: You know who the--
ATWOOD: You hope you are. You try to.
COLLINS: Who in the corporation knew that audience the best. Was it the people in the marketing or contract function or the people in the divisions?
ATWOOD: Well, if the people in the divisions didn't know it best, they weren't really doing their job. And so the engineers in the divisions must have a better idea of their audience, their requirements and their objective than anybody on the staff level, including the chief officer, who can only be generally aware of these needs, requirements and demands. Although I have been, and being an engineer, I have on some occasions probably called the shots properly myself. But it's not likely to be commonplace. So to answer your question, the division engineers must be the front line on that. On the other hand, there may be something parallel in another division they don't know about, which is possible, or even complementary, you see. That's where a corporate staff has to pull its weight, one way.
COLLINS: Leave that for a moment. There might be another question or two there that I'd ask you later.
ATWOOD: Sure.
COLLINS: I'd just like to do a couple of wrap-up things here. Did you get a sense during your tenure at North American of who you felt were the key people in the organization, people that you really relied on to accomplish the mission of the organization?
ATWOOD: Well, they come in categories, of course. I mentioned Stan Smithson, a reliable and hardworking man, great knowledge of machinery, buildings, facilities, personnel, tooling, all that. When he decided to retire at the age of 62, it was really a blow to me. He was not disaffected in any way, but he had a feeling he wasn't going to live very long, for some reason, apparently in his family history, and he decided as soon as he could get the maximum pension, which wouldn't increase materially at age 65, he retired at age 62. When he retired we were the best of friends, but I felt it was a very severe setback at a critical time. It was in 1968.
COLLINS: Let me just ask, would that have affected the relationship with NASA during this period?
ATWOOD: It's hard to tell. He was very effective at getting things done in the factories. But of course, when engineering difficulties or impossibilities came up, as they did in some of the S-II work, the catch-up is very difficult. But he would have helped a lot in that. Yes, he would. He was somebody I could really rely on.
Another man, Raymond Rice, I first met when I was a junior engineer at Wright Field in 1928. He was a graduate of Berkeley, engineer, and we had some work in common at Wright Field as juniors. Later on he went with Martin Company while I went with Douglas. When I left to go with North American, our first base of operations was back in Baltimore. I moved back there for a year and a half, and I renewed my acquaintance with Rice, who worked with Martin in Baltimore. He was a California man. I prevailed on him to come back to California, and join with Dutch Kindelberger and Smithson and myself, which he did.
I was chief engineer, but very shortly Mr. Kindelberger decided to make me his deputy, and of course it was time to gradually release my engineering responsibility, and Raymond Rice became chief engineer and vice president, and a very valuable man. He ran the engineering department through many, many airplane designs and changes, and was highly regarded by everybody involved. He died not more than three or four months ago, in Santa Barbara in retirement. He was not a very communicative man, although I was friendly with him personally and his wife and family. We were quite friendly.
He came to me one day in about 1962, '63, somewhere in there, and said, "Lee, I want to retire." He was only 57 or 58. I said, "Ray, I can't believe it." And he said, "Yeah, I've decided I want to retire." We talked maybe twenty minutes and I said, "Well, Ray, I can't believe that. I can't believe that's serious. Of course you know what you want to do, but please take 30 days and think about it and come back and talk to me about it then." Well, he got up and paddled out, and went on his way and I didn't hear any more about it. I thought he would forget it. But he came to me exactly 30 days later and said, "Lee, I've been thinking it over. I want to retire."
Of course then I realized that that was it, so I said, "Well, Ray, you know what you want to do and of course you can. I'm very sorry to hear about it but I wish you the best." He got up and left, and so, that was before Dutch Kindelberger died. He wasn't in very good health or very active, but I told him about it. He was kind of taken aback. It must have been '60 or '61. And so I waited about two or three days and appointed Ralph Ruud head of the Los Angeles airplane division, and he'd kind of been assistant to Rice, and announced it, he'd asked for his retirement and we'd give him a party or something.
Ray came back in my office, "Lee, I've changed my mind." It's the God's truth. I said, "Ray, it's too late to change your mind." So he said, "Well, okay, no hard feelings," and off he went. I wish today, God damn it, that I'd said, "Look, I've got another job for you," and some way kept him. But you know how things are. You can't take too much of that, that type of treatment, so I just said, "So long." And I really regretted it. I don't know whether he regretted it or not. He retired up in Santa Barbara on a modest pension. I don't think he ever had alot of money but he seemed happy.
Carl Hansen took Rice's place. He was assistant chief engineer, he became chief engineer. He was not a very highly qualified technical man, but at least an engineer and a good hard worker. He was a key man. And darned if that son of a gun didn't come in and retire! He said, "Well, you know, Ellen and I have never spent our money on night clubs and restaurants and we've just decided to retire and enjoy life." He was young, under 60 or about 60. And that was another one. No hard feelings. We're the best of friends. He's still alive. Comes to all our retiree parties and everything.
COLLINS: You consider him one of the key people in the organization?
ATWOOD: Well, he was certainly one of the strong elements, the glue that made the thing work. Storms then became chief engineer, after Hansen and Rice. I'm trying to remember. Yes, oh yes, Hansen retired well after Rice did. So Stormy was really our topflight in everybody's mind. He was as I say kind of a carefree type, a blowsy type in appearance, and he was quick to laugh and all that but I thought of him as a very, very productive and original engineer, which he was. Then there were others. Of course dozens in engineering.
I started the space work in what became the missile division. Bill Bollay was our first director, very fine technical man. But he was working under Larry Waite, and Larry was a good engineer but a very conservative man. I think Bollay finally got disaffected because he left, after seven or eight years. That was a loss too. But Bill was not destined to live very long. He started a successful little research study group and sold it out to someone, made a considerable amount of money, at least for those days. He died later up in Santa Barbara from Alzheimers.
Then Bill Snelling was another man. He was a very key element in our scripture. He was a graduate of Caltech, but rather than practice engineering as a design engineer, he was an industrial engineer, and he went into the manufacturing end. He did a lot I guess to enhance our planning and tooling and various things that went into manufacturing and production. But he never evolved into the head of a major element of the company, for some reason. He's retired. He's in excellent health still, down in Palm Springs.
The engineering cadre was too numerous to start to enumerate. Many many fine engineers, literally tens of thousands worked for the company, and many still do. They were my pride and joy, really. Of course the factory people too, very diligent people, very talented people in sheet metal, machining, material processing, all the things that go with metal forming and finishing. They were just excellent. We built it up from nothing, you see, starting in 1934, '35, '36, and I was really sorry to see some of those people go. I really was.
COLLINS: Okay. Why don't we stop there?
ATWOOD: Very good.
COLLINS: Thank you.
1 Joseph J. Trento,Prescription For Disaster, (New York: Crown, 1987).
Rev. 08/13/96