John W. Morris
Wall, who'd just made the brigadier general list. John was in school getting a doctorate in law
and not available until late May. He was exactly the right man. I had known John in many
earlier jobs and there was no one else I really wanted to send. So we sent him. He arrived in
June.
We then began to extract North Atlantic Division. That created a certain amount of tension,
too. General Lewis didn't want to give up the job, but the time had come to do it. Even so, we
didn't take him out of the net until September. I had to give Wall time to get his feet on the
ground. I was supposed to retire on 30 June 1980, but because of this project General Meyer,
Chief of Staff, allowed me to stay on until the end of September. So I went there in August
to be satisfied Wall and his people were ready. The book mentioned earlier has quite a bit of
discussion about that whole scenario of the general going to Israel and taking Lewis out of the
net and so forth. My actions were simple and predictable. I followed the original goal of
keeping the Chief's office out of the operations business. We could swallow up 40 or 50
people just running a job, at the expense of policy and programs. It worked.
We sent the best people out there. I found three of the Corps' best colonels-Don O'Shei,
Jack
and Dick Curl-and they were the first three colonels assigned. Jimmy Johnson
was given the choice of each of those for the projects and for running the office. He chose
to run the office, and he put
and Curl in the projects-good decisions that fit
the persons involved.
In executing the job, it took a while for things to settle down. The labor market problem
became significant. Perini used Thais, who proved to be great equipment
but their
upper body strength was low, so they didn't do as good a job on roofing and heavy lifting
things. Perini, I believe, had to have three or four different mess halls because of the different
types of food. The other contractor used the Portuguese and they were infiltrated with some
Communists. They went on strike, which had to be straightened out.
In the end, the Corps built two beautiful airfields. I, of course, had retired in the meantime.
It's a real credit to the Corps and the personnel in the Corps that they were able to get that job
off and running and finished ahead of time and that the budget process worked well. I think
it ended up costing
||content||
.24 billion, instead of
||content||
.2 billion. We had a million overrun. The
fact is the Israelis got all the equipment at the end of the job. I believe they got their 0
million back in other ways. There were changes to the job also. Quality control was tough,
cost accounting was difficult, as was scheduling of the work because of the design issue. All
of those things and many more created a host of problems and difficulties at the project level.
Q ..
You mentioned logistics was a problem.
A
Ben Lewis told me early on in his term that the big bugaboo was going to be procurement. He
was right. Procurement was the crunch item.
Personnel was a problem, too, in a way. The Corps did not have a team in place to send out
to do the job, so we made some ground rules initially. One, we were only going to send about
100 Americans. Everybody in the Corps was busy when this job came along. We didn't have
people sitting around doing nothing. So the idea was we'd send a limited number of key Corps
personnel and hire a construction management firm to supplement this staff. Lester B. Knight
became part of our office. The number of Corps employees was set simply because we wanted
to keep down the number of people we took out of the system and also we thought we could
find 100 key people who were well qualified.
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