Chapter 19
Internal Politicking, 1960–1962
Clancy Sayen was 41 years old in 1960, a year of decision for him. He had drifted into the ALPA presidency almost inadvertently in 1951, and like many men who have careers thrust upon them, Sayen was dissatisfied. It seemed almost as if he had never made a choice of his own, as if his life were drifting away from him, under the control of others. If he were ever to seek a career of his own choosing, it would have to be soon.
“Clancy had become increasingly unhappy with the job over a number of things,” says Jerry Wood of Eastern Air Lines (EAL). “The constant attacks by dissident members hurt him. The age-60 thing hurt, too, because he was caught in the middle. The junior guys wanted to get the old guys out, but this was done tacitly in the inner workings of ALPA without the press and public ever knowing how deeply split we were.”
Sayen was ALPA’s focal point for every variety of discontent, both internal and external. He felt stifled and impotent, battered from every side by people with special grievances, all of whom seemed to blame him for their problems. Put simply, by the end of Sayen’s third term, he was burned out on ALPA. He had lately received offers to enter private business with friends, and he was eager to accept. With his restless energy, quick mind, and facile executive style, Sayen would be a natural in the business world, as more than one airline executive with whom he had dealt realized. Sayen felt a strong urge for personal growth and development, as his academic career while he was a Braniff copilot had proved. But the lure of academic life had weakened for Sayen. At his age, he was too old to seek further graduate education, and in any case, the fast track in the business world attracted him more. Had it not been for two factors, Sayen would almost certainly not have sought reelection to a fourth term as ALPA’s president in 1960.
The first factor was the Southern Airways (SOU) strike. By mid-1959, the situation on SOU had deteriorated so badly that a strike seemed unavoidable. Sayen felt obligated to the SOU pilots to see them through the crisis, and the timing of developments there forced him to delay making a firm decision to resign. Then, by early 1960, the second factor caught up with Sayen, one that would rouse his competitive instincts and force him into a hotly contested race for the presidency. For the first time in ALPA’s history, a prominent nonpilot, an outsider, was seeking the ALPA presidency. Former Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) Chairman James Landis, a man with powerful connections and a formidable background in the legal profession, was the candidate of a strong anti-Sayen group that emerged in certain EAL locals.
James M. Landis was pure,
up-from-the-depths Boston Irish, a comer who fought his way to the top through
the thickets of politics and law. En route, he became a close political ally of
Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., the former ambassador to
During the late 1940s, Landis
served ALPA well on several occasions, the most famous being the National
Airlines (NAL) strike of 1948. After that, Landis represented individual pilots
in numerous grievance cases. All the while, he was working as a principal
financial and legal adviser to the Kennedy family. When John F. Kennedy won the
presidency over Richard Nixon in 1960, Landis headed a blue-ribbon commission on
government reorganization during the transition. After the inauguration, Landis
filled a permanent slot on a similar presidential commission, one function of
which was to look into the regulatory agencies, particularly CAB. In his
capacity as a Kennedy campaign adviser, Landis began to make contacts with
dissident ALPA members in early 1960. In short order, a diverse coalition of
anti-Sayen elements hatched a plan to run Landis against Sayen at the upcoming
“It was an odd episode in the odd life of Jim Landis,” says Henry
Weiss, who knew the former
When Kennedy was elected president, Landis was selected as an
in-house adviser, although I’m quite convinced he was there only as a sop to old
Joe Kennedy. He never had that much influence on Jack Kennedy, perhaps none at
all. His attempt to unseat Sayen was actually something of an embarrassment to
the administration—here Landis was, out running for the presidency of a union at
the same time he was advising the future president! There were several efforts
made to get him to withdraw, and just before the convention in
Perhaps Landis was unaware that JFK himself was trying to keep him from challenging Sayen, and certainly the dissidents supporting him were unaware of it. Their promotion of the Landis candidacy was motivated more by dislike of Sayen (and their repeated failures in 1952 and 1956 to replace him with another pilot) than by any particular attachment to Landis. Possibly Landis, feeling very much an outsider and an anachronism among the youthful JFK entourage, sought to escape from an intolerable situation, and he saw the ALPA job as an easy one from which he could draw a nice salary by trading on the influence and reputation he still had.
In September 1960, while the
JFK-Nixon campaign was in full swing, Landis declared his candidacy for the ALPA
presidency, announcing what amounted to a “platform” calling for various
improvements in the way ALPA was run. Landis made it clear, however, that he was
challenging Sayen for the ALPA job because Sayen had failed as a leader. Landis
insisted that he had the support of the “majority of the nation’s working
pilots.” He said ALPA had fallen badly behind under Sayen, that it lacked
“leadership, organization, and a program for the future.” He called for
“decentralization and the recruiting of experts” to run ALPA, and he chided
Sayen for failing to provide the “public relations” the pilots needed. This
latter comment was, of course, a thinly veiled hint that ALPA would have a
friend in the White House should JFK win. Pilots from 16 airlines were named as
the “campaign committee” for Landis. Without exception, they were part of the
anti-Sayen faction that had never been able to command a majority in any
convention before. With Landis, they hoped to change that.
When reporters asked Landis
to cite specific examples of Clancy Sayen’s failings, he mentioned the SOU
strike, then three months old. A smile must have crossed Sayen’s face in
Vern Peterson still bridles
at the mention of Jim Landis. The men who had built ALPA were going to take no
chances on losing control of it to an outsider:
Landis had the age-60 thing to work with, and he gave the
impression that he could do something about that in
Jerry Wood first heard of rumblings of the Landis candidacy in the summer of 1960, before the anti-Sayen dissidents announced it openly. Wood began quietly politicking on Sayen’s behalf. He also kept his ear close to the ground, trying to ascertain just how much support the anti-Sayen movement enjoyed among the rank and file. Wood admits opposing Landis’s candidacy with some regret:
Jim Landis was a good friend and a nice guy. Under other circumstances I could have supported him, but I thought we needed someone with Clancy’s qualifications more than we needed a brilliant lawyer. The main attack on Clancy was coming from people who disagreed with our wages and working rules policies. I was chairman of the committee that originated those policies, so I was in a position to judge which man was better suited to carry them out.
Jim Landis’s candidacy was
spearheaded on EAL by Chuck Basham, Bob Silver, and Bill Frye. Also, Joe Stewart
of NAL was very active in getting Landis to take a shot at the presidency.
However, after the campaign got going, the American [AAL] crowd got behind
Landis.
When the convention met in
Capt. Jack Young of EAL clearly stated the case for allowing Landis to address the convention:
There is no question that Mr. Landis is well-qualified for this
job. The fact that he has had the confidence of three former presidents of the
Sayen’s supporters pulled out
all the stops to beat back the Landis candidacy. They argued that the special
character of ALPA required a pilot as president and that its unique position
within the labor movement would be lost if a nonpilot should become president.
One by one, men who had been involved in ALPA from the beginning came to the
front of the hall to express their views with extraordinary clarity and
historical purpose. Most people are not well versed in history, even their own.
But the delegates to the 1960 convention who opposed the Landis candidacy knew
the history of ALPA and how to use it.
Chuck Woods of United Airlines (UAL) argued cleverly that the only reason an outsider was interested in the ALPA presidency was because the pilots themselves had already made a success of it. “I take tremendous pride in ALPA,” Woods declared. “I have seen it develop people within its own ranks who have become experts in every field. Mr. Landis’s qualifications impress me, and I wish I had some of them. I do not, however. I am an airline pilot. I would like to keep this organization for the pilots. I think we can develop among our membership whatever leadership we need.”
Paul Reeder of UAL had been
an ALPA member from the beginning. “The history of pilots’ organizations goes
way back to the 1920s,” Reeder reminisced.
I was in on the birth of ALPA. Dave Behncke ran for office in the
The transcript records that each of these speeches was followed by applause, neatly noted in brackets by the stenographer. Obviously the dissidents supporting Landis did not have the votes to present him to the convention. But at the same time, there was no point in totally alienating them. Before the actual vote was taken, Capt. Ray Hutchison of Pan American magnanimously suggested that EAL’s Chuck Basham, Landis’s most prominent supporter, be allowed to speak his piece fully.
“Mr. Chairman,” Hutchison said, “we have with us here tonight a member in good standing who has been the campaign manager of what I believe will be the cleanest campaign that you in your lifetime will ever see for the presidency of ALPA. Therefore, I request that Chuck Basham be allowed to speak to this body.”
Basham proved adept at enunciating his position, probably performing as well as Landis himself could have done:
Gentlemen, I think there is an issue here stronger than Mr.
Landis. There is a lot of emotion on the floor, and I think we ought to bury it.
It is going to be very difficult to explain that we were scared to make Mr.
Landis eligible for a 51 percent majority. That is all that is being asked, a
democratic approach. You have a leverage of a two-thirds majority, which should
protect us from every Tom, Dick, and Harry from outside. But we selected Mr.
Landis because he is a man of great stature and dignity, the top administrator
in the
But Basham’s argument swayed nobody. Landis lost on a voice vote, one Basham and his supporters were willing to accept. But from the AAL councils, the demand emerged for a roll call vote. The leader of this movement was Nick O’Connell, the man who would lead the AAL pilots out of ALPA in 1963 when he became master executive council (MEC) chairman. O’Connell’s parliamentary tactics were futile, and they occasioned a lively dispute with Henry Weiss, the convention’s parliamentarian. Whatever goodwill was engendered by the graciousness of Landis’s supporters in defeat was quickly dissipated in O’Connell’s parliamentary nitpicking.
“I feel like I have completed my obligation,” O’Connell said afterward. “It is an honor to be on the losing side.”
After the roll call, a massive desire for internal harmony made Sayen’s election nearly unanimous. The victors were magnanimous toward Landis’s supporters. After the vote, the convention gave a standing vote of appreciation to Judge Landis.
The members rose and applauded Basham as he left the convention floor. The Landis episode was over, and but for the lingering animosity of the AAL group, which had become chronic in ALPA affairs since the late 1950s, a spirit of harmony prevailed. Of the convention’s business, only renominating and electing Sayen to another four-year term remained. He had no announced opposition at this point. Stewart Hopkins of Delta made the principal nominating speech, masterfully summing up Sayen’s strengths and weaknesses:
Gentlemen, what you said was that you wanted an airline pilot. But I think you should realize that in Clancy Sayen, you also have an outstanding administrator. Some of you can remember 1953, when this Association was a bankrupt shambles, torn by factions, about to go under. The last 10 years of progress did not come out of thin air.
In addition to being an administrator, Clancy Sayen is a teacher. I do not know how many of you are aware of it, but your whole complex of loss of license, mutual aid, insurance, and retirement is practically a product of his mind. He not only conceived the program, but he taught the staff and negotiation committees that implemented it.
Clancy has very little
patience. He refuses to create a father image. He refuses to hold anyone by the
hand. He treats you like adults. I know how hard he works, how basically honest
he is, and how brilliant he is.
Sayen was elected by a voice vote. The AAL pilots constituted the core of nays. A subsequent voice vote to make the election unanimous saw the AAL councils remain silent. It was an ominous sign.
Thus, Clancy Sayen was elected to a fourth full term in an office he never really wanted in the first place. What he thought we can only imagine, but the ambiguity in his acceptance speech gives more than a hint of dissatisfaction, both professional and personal. While the climactic debate over the Landis vote was in progress, Sayen had absented himself from the convention. He was, quite frankly, smashed when the delegates called him back to the floor:
Gentlemen, I have been in the bar. If I seem a little incoherent, there are several reasons. One reason, I have been in the bar. . . . The other reason is that we have had some rough years, and I do not think they are going to get easier. If I said so, I would just be trying to kid you and me. One reason is that we fight so hard among ourselves, and our fights with other people are getting harder, the pressures are getting greater, the mistakes getting bigger.
I hope that out of all this
we can learn something. The essence of democracy is controversy. If there’s not
any controversy we’re not doing very much. As long as the controversy takes
place within acceptable bounds and when it is over people will with dignity
accept the result and work together, then we have the very essence of
democracy.
You have heard me make speeches enough. I do not want to make any more.
As even the casual reader can tell from the tone of this impromptu acceptance speech, the heart had gone out of Clancy Sayen. He had had it with ALPA, both professionally and personally. Only his competitive instincts led him to accept a fourth term, and though his supporters couldn’t know it, he had no intention of serving out his full term.
Perhaps only Henry Weiss was fully aware of Sayen’s state of mind at that time:
Clancy was a man who really
had no great taste for politics within his organization, even though he was
literally idolized by a great many people in ALPA. He was competent and devoted
to his duty, but he didn’t have a sense for going out and dealing with the rank
and file; in fact, he disliked it. In the first four or five years of his
presidency, Clancy would not venture out of his office, and he avoided
spontaneous, face-to-face meetings with officers of the government, airlines,
and sometimes his own people. In other words, he essentially started out dealing
with his own people in a very insecure way. That insecurity never did leave him,
but you had to know him quite thoroughly to know that.
In early 1960, Clancy told me he was going to retire as president
of ALPA. I had two serious approaches by the
But he had other notions that he confided to me. He was such a
top-notch, extraordinary individual, and he had worked his rear off for 11
years, and he was not prepared to commit himself at that point to the future. He
and Lane Kirkland had some thought of a common enterprise, possibly sometime in
the future, but first he wanted a break. He wanted to buy a boat, go sailing in
the
But nonetheless, he continued in office in 1960 and 1961, and the culmination of his boredom and the fact that some pretty bad boys were nipping at his heels caused him to resign. They never had a majority, but they made life very unpleasant for Clancy, and after 1960 there were repeated confrontations on the Executive Committee that were really ugly. He was, in effect, almost driven from office.
Finally, Clancy asked me to draft a letter of resignation. I sat on the damn thing, stalling him. He finally sent me a note saying, “Hey, if you don’t write it, I’ll write it myself.”
Sayen announced on Oct. 31, 1961, that he intended to resign from
the ALPA presidency effective with the next Board of Directors convention, which
was soon after rescheduled for
“We had confrontations where the Executive Committee refused to adjourn unless Clancy resigned then and there,” recalls Henry Weiss.
But Sayen wouldn’t resign in favor of John Carroll. He regarded Carroll as a link between the AAL dissidents and the TWA councils, and he feared that if Carroll became president, TWA would slip into the AAL orbit. Sayen was not alone. Although Carroll was widely liked on a personal basis, he still excited a vague distrust among many people. This distrust had more to do with doubts about Carroll’s judgment than anything else. As later events proved, they were probably justified.
During the fight over crew complement in the early 1960s, the Flight Engineers International Association (FEIA) argued that nonpilot engineers were necessary aboard airliners to keep pilots from misbehaving. To support their argument, FEIA officials produced in-flight photos that showed stewardesses at the controls, in the laps of pilots, and generally horsing around. Under Quesada and Halaby, FAA cracked down on this sort of thing. ALPA strongly endorsed the crackdown, agreeing that such behavior was unprofessional and contrary to ALPA’s own code of ethics. A number of pilots against whom this kind of misconduct could be substantiated had their licenses suspended and were fined. Thanks to ALPA, none lost his license permanently. These celebrated incidents brought up by FEIA never endangered an aircraft, but they embarrassed the profession nonetheless.
John Carroll would eventually lose his job with TWA because he allowed an “unauthorized person” (his son) in the cockpit during takeoff. This was long after he failed to supplant Sayen, but it gives some inkling why people felt misgivings about Carroll, even though they couldn’t be specific.
Slim Babbitt, long one of
Sayen’s protectors, was resigned to Sayen’s leaving ALPA, although he didn’t
like it. He believed John Carroll would never do:
I had great respect for Sayen, even though I had some differences with him. But they weren’t big differences, and the things he did wrong didn’t compare to all the good things he had done. He left on his own; we would never have let them drive him out. He left because he had several things brewing in his mind. He didn’t leave in any kind of disgrace. He was a genius, I’ll always say that about Sayen, with figures and pensions and insurance, things like that.
John Carroll was a wonderful guy, but I had done too much ALPA work with him, and I just couldn’t see him being ALPA president. A likable guy, but he didn’t have all his facts. In Executive Committees he’d bring up stuff and, my God, I used to want to go up there and spend no more than a day, and because of John I’d be stuck for three or four. He was the kind of guy you ask what time it is, and he tells you how to build a watch.
The general opinion of TWA pilots about John Carroll is mixed. Out of loyalty, many of them agreed to support him for the ALPA presidency, but the tone of their conversation indicates that, to a man, they weren’t sorry he lost. Dave Richwine speaks for most TWA pilots when he says:
John Carroll represented
himself as the unofficial spokesman for all TWA pilots. John was a big, tall
guy, like Carter Burgess [TWA president], and they hit it off very well on a
personal basis. Once Burgess invited John to a meeting with all TWA
vice-presidents, introduced him, and asked him to make some comments on the
state of the company. John got up and looked around and said, “I can see what’s
wrong with TWA. There’s not enough brains in this room to run a peanut stand.”
Now, I got this story from a
man who was there. Also, John Carroll was the only pilot I know who had to wait
a year after he was eligible for ALPA membership before he was accepted. John
had been so free with his opinions that people weren’t sure they wanted him. You
still find people on TWA who are strong fans of his, because he had a fine mind
and was very articulate. But he was hard to keep in the right channel and that
frightened people. He was also extremely autocratic and pretty well disliked by
the copilots, flight engineers, and stewardesses. As a matter of fact, the
hostesses turned him in on the thing that got him fired. Now, I’ve represented
guys in trouble, some of whom had serious drinking offenses, but I was not
involved in John’s case, and I am very, very glad I wasn’t. Imagine putting an
unauthorized person in the right seat for takeoff! Many people felt very
strongly that John got what he had coming to him. The guy was so intelligent,
but when it got down to the tough ones, his ego overcame his judgment. I was not
the only TWA pilot who was not too happy about John Carroll being president. I
was certainly not enthusiastic about him, even though we were obligated to
support him in 1962. He had some strong points, but his shortcomings were such
that I didn’t think he would have worked out.
When I saw Jerry Wood walk into that hotel with Charley Ruby at his side, I knew what was happening. They would buy anybody that Jerry brought in there who was a viable opponent to John.
When the 1962 Board of Directors meeting convened, the delegates confronted probably the most intense presidential politicking in ALPA’s history. Although a narrow consensus had emerged in opposition to Carroll, there was no obvious alternative candidate. Many delegates favored Kay McMurray, a former UAL captain who had resigned to go into the insurance business and later signed on full-time with ALPA. He had served Clancy Sayen in the same capacity in which Sayen had served Behncke, executive vice-president. McMurray had done an excellent job, was widely respected, and knew ALPA intimately. But he had two things working against him. First, McMurray, unlike Sayen, didn’t have the crisis of Behncke’s ouster to explain his decision to leave the cockpit permanently. Second, McMurray bore many of the same handicaps as Jim Landis, and an attempt to make him president would alienate the sizable group that had supported Landis, since it would smack of discrimination. (Technically, because McMurray was an “inactive” ALPA member, he would need the same constitutional two-thirds majority that Landis would have required to be eligible to serve.)
Another major candidate for the presidency in 1962 was UAL’s Chuck Beatley. Although a reluctant candidate, Beatley was willing to stand in until ALPA’s power brokers could find someone else. Operating under the old axiom that you can’t beat somebody with nobody, the opposition to John Carroll needed Beatley to serve as a foil until they united on a choice.
Ironically, Charles Ruby of NAL thought he, too, was supposed to be merely a stalking horse for somebody else:
They said I was supposed to split the vote. John Carroll had been politicking for a year. I had known John Carroll only through meeting him at various conventions. A bunch of people had approached me about stopping Carroll, but I didn’t think too much about it. When they asked me to allow my name to be placed in nomination, my next question was, “Can I draw few enough votes to be safe?” Actually, I found out before I finally committed that the people on Eastern, Pan Am, and National who were pushing me didn’t have a preferred candidate other than me. But I still thought I wouldn’t be elected. I didn’t figure that Sayen would come down to the convention and talk to them. Sayen said, “It can go wild if John Carroll gets in.” I wasn’t even a delegate, and my name didn’t even surface until about two days before the vote. LeRoux of PAA [Pan American World Airways], Babbitt and Wood of EAL, and Bobby Rohan of my own airline did the politicking. Sayen didn’t specifically advocate my candidacy, he just let people know what he thought about Carroll.
I still figured that there were so few of these guys who had ever
heard me or seen me, and fewer still who knew me, that I wouldn’t get it. I went
around to all the MEC caucuses, and people started greeting me and I started to
get more concerned—about winning. I was as close to being retired as a man could
get, flying the DC-8 just four and one-half trips a month. So winning the ALPA
presidency was a sad day from my standpoint. Frankly, I wanted Chuck Beatley.
He was a good guy, he had a lot of experience, and he made sense.
The vote was close, but Charley Ruby, then 53 years old and a pilot for NAL since the day it was created in 1934, was ALPA’s new president. His victory was the product of a combination of forces that will be dealt with in a later chapter. But for now suffice it to say that Charley Ruby was like a comfortable old shoe. In troubled times, people need reassurance and a steady hand. Ruby laid no claim to brilliance, nor did he outline dramatic changes or new departures for ALPA. He was a status quo candidate, and his victory was, in effect, a vindication of Clarence Sayen. All Ruby promised was that he would do the best he could. Everybody who knew Ruby respected his granite-like integrity. For the moment, that would be good enough for ALPA.
What of Clarence Nicholas Sayen, released at last from the yoke
that bound him to a job he never wanted? At 43, Sayen was ready for a new
career. He would take a long vacation first and then go into the trucking
business on the West Coast with his old friend H. B. Anders of UAL. In a few
months, he would tire of the business and begin flirting with politics. In 1964,
Sayen headed “Pilots for Johnson” against Barry Goldwater, but once again he
turned down offers from the Democratic administration to come to the political
arena of
In early 1965, Sayen did what many smart insiders figured he
would do all along—he joined airline management. EAL employed Sayen as
vice-president in charge of West Coast operations to open that territory under
new CAB route awards. But Sayen never worked a day for EAL. After accepting the
job from EAL President Floyd Hall (the former TWA pilot and ALPA member) in
The brilliant career of Clancy Sayen, just 46 years old and with a seemingly limitless future, was over.