The death of Jack Bierwirth, who held all the top executive positions at the old Grumman Corporation on Long Island in the decades before it collapsed into the arms of another military contractor as the Cold War ended, is a reminder of that industry’s perpetual contradictions. Everyone in the aerospace business saw the writing on the wall as the space program wound down from its Apollo peak and “defense” companies faced the necessity of consolidation. One obvious solution: get out of the federal government’s pocketbook. But the big aerospace-weapons firms have always comprised a basically socialist industry, utterly dependent on the U.S. Treasury. Long coddled by the guaranteed profits from cost-plus contracts for fighter planes and space vehicles, Grumman faltered badly every time Bierwirth tried to sell something in the capitalist marketplace (most notoriously with New York City’s Flxible buses). So he resorted to intimidating Congress and essentially blackmailing the Pentagon over the delivery of products deemed essential to American power. If he had been running a real business, he would have been booted out in a New York minute.
Leroy Grumman, the company’s fabled founder, was a Cornell-educated engineer, the son of a carriage shop owner, whose love of airplanes dovetailed with the voracious munitions maw of World War II, turning an abandoned garage in Baldwin NY into one of the era’s Gargantua Behemoths. A very strong case can be made from the historical record that the Cold War was contrived partly to keep those giant armament makers going as regional economic dynamos after 1945. There is no doubt whatsoever that they–and their modern incarnations–depended on products that have no other customer besides the government. Jack Bierwirth was a Yale-educated lawyer, the son of a powerful New York banker, whose instincts were for strong-arm tactics. He would have done well to listen to what Leroy Grumman’s widow, Rose, once told me about what went wrong at her husband’s company: “It got too big.”