Wild Blue B-1 Yonder: On the Death of Sam Iacobellis

The latest installment of Sam Roberts’s fractured fairy tale version of history via the New York Times obit section arrives as a paean to Sam Iacobellis, an engineer at Rockwell International, the Southern California aerospace company that during the Reagan era was the largest contractor for both the Pentagon and NASA (it went defunct as a corporate entity in 2001).  In 1982, Iacobellis took over management of the firm’s B-1 strategic bomber program for the Air Force (from a former Air Force pilot named Buzz Hello–another story), after President Reagan bestowed the production contract upon his political heimat following Jimmy Carter ‘s 1977 cancellation of it. The B-1 was one of the great golden goose eggs of the decade.  In 1986, Rockwell earned $516 million on total sales of $5.6 billion, with B-1 accounting for two-thirds of the income.  Its stock doubled in value. Republican defense gospel held that those Soviet nudniks could be brought to their knees just by outspending them, meanwhile just happening to make a lot of ultraconservative Southern Californian industrialists very happy.  And it must have worked!  Because Sam Roberts passes on the hearsay of an old Rockwell chief engineer that the Red generals threw in the towel on the Cold War all because of the B-1. Roberts also quotes an old Rockwell flack about the wonderfulness of the B-1, plus the Great Communicator himself (“What an airplane!”).  If Rockwell were still gaming for Air Force megacontracts, the p.r. offices would be popping champagne corks tonight from Palmdale to Downey and beyond.

Students interested in getting beyond the lingering echoes of Rockwell advertising can start with Nick Kotz’s fine investigative book, “Wild Blue Yonder–Money, Politics, and the B-1 Bomber” (Pantheon, 1988).

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