Engineer Memoirs
A:
By that time, I was trying to stay out of it. Because I had been involved earlier with this
thing, all the various parties to this controversy would call me up and tell me what was
happening and ask me what I thought. I tried to give honest answers. But I tried not to
become involved. To an extent, I had a whole other set of problems without this one.
I didn't feel that it was my business to tell the Chief of Engineers how to run this job,
any more than I would have told the Army how to procure M60 tanks or the Air Force
how to procure F16 aircraft or the Navy how to do their thing.
If something that was being done by one of the services ran contrary to our standard
way of doing business or got us into a mess financially or got us into a mess with some
other government, then I did sometimes get into it.
This thing did not seem to be of that type. There were management problems. There
was the problem that I perceived that they had not really come up with the requirement
and the related costs, as we had contemplated in the agreement. The whole idea was
to have some number of lines that represented the requirement, however
many--whether it took 50 or 500, and to put a cost opposite each one of those and a
schedule opposite each one of those, and manage the thing around this structure.
The minute the Israelis said, "We want it painted blue instead of white," just go in and
say, "All right, the damn white paint is sitting out there. The lead time on the paint is
six months. You're going to delay the whole thing six months while we get the other
color paint, and it's going to cost you for the paint. It's your money. However, we
can't agree to it because you can't accept the six-month delay that will bust us past the
implementation of the treaty. So we're not going to agree to it. Since you said back
here that you wanted it white and we agreed on that, white it will be."
That might be a simple-minded view of the way this thing was supposed to work. But
that was the way it was supposed to work. I think everybody understood it at the time.
But unfortunately, I think at the early stages, they didn't get it set up that way
adequately. Then confusion entered in.
Q:
You said you were called frequently by a lot of the participants. Did General Morris try
to involve you?
A:
He talked over with me things he was thinking of doing because, with this ongoing
thing with the Air Force and with the relations with the embassy over there, Jack
wanted to be sure that McGiffert and I would support him, if they got into some
wrangle. He was correctly concerned that the Corps of Engineers had been handed this
thing and that everybody had said, "The Corps will get this job done." He didn't want
something to happen that caused a wrangle over this and that tarnished the image of the
Corps and the Corps' reputation. And he knew that I was watching it.
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