The death last week of former Lockheed chief executive Lawrence Kitchen recalls one of the most corrupt eras in the tenebrous history of the American defense industry. Fattened by the gluttonous Pentagon budgets of the Reagan years and coddled by a Justice Department loath to disturb a business so adored by California Republicans, Lockheed under Kitchen’s leadership nonetheless stumbled from one imbroglio to another that kept a generation of whistle-blowers and investigators busy on Capitol Hill. The infamous “$600 toilet seat” on Lockheed’s P3-C Orion airplane was an especially sharp burr in Kitchen’s britches, which he somehow made sharper by trying to rationalize the “toilet cover assembly” on the throne that the sub-hunter’s crew required to relieve themselves. (The same plane carried a $16,571 three-cubic-foot refrigerator for lunches and drinks.) Reagan gifted the company with a new multi-billion-dollar contract for the disastrous C-5 cargo plane, ensuring Kitchen’s reputation in the industry as a holy savior. As obituary writers around the country bend over backwards to recast his career in the mold of Benjamin Franklin, it is worth remembering how Air Force financial analyst A. Ernest Fitzgerald described the military aircraft of Kitchen’s tenure for the Joint Economic Committee in October 1984: “a collection of over-priced spare parts flying in close formation.”
“We didn’t buy any $600 toilet seats. We bought a $600 molded plastic cover for the entire toilet system.”–Ronald Reagan, news conference 2/11/86
“You can go into a mobile home and see something not much different.”–Senator William V. Roth, Jr. (Republican, Delaware), 2/5/85
