CHAPTER 17
NATIONAL POLITICS AND MERGERS
The Election of 1986 and Beyond
Picture MacBeth’s “weird sisters” and their bubbling cauldron laced with “eye of newt and toe of frog.” Slimy stuff, but if Shakespeare had really wanted nasty in the pot, he would have dropped in a merger. For making a political “hell-broth boil and bubble,” merging an airline pilot group’s seniority has it all over “adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting!”
Politics, according to an old definition of the term, is how we decide who gets what. As an arena for the resolution of conflict, politics stands just shy of the theater of war. In the famous Clauswitzian dictum, war is the “extension of politics by other means.” That politics often adopts the language and symbolism of war, with rivals waging “campaigns” and planning strategy with military intensity, should come as no surprise.
In reality, successful politics rests upon consensus and compromise—a willingness to take half a loaf. Because the solution will inevitably have losers, the structure of politics must accommodate them. Where peoples and nations are concerned, failure of political consensus leads to war, civil or foreign. In organizations like ALPA, political failure brings factionalism and disunion—the 1963 defection of the American Airlines pilots, for example.
But another dimension to politics bears more directly upon ALPA’s history. Sir Lewis Namier, the eminent historian of 18th century British politics, noted that for all the disputations between Whig and Tory, very little in the way of substantive issues actually divided them. The aristocratic English gentlemen who fought out political campaigns with such venom were linked by kinship, class, and a basic value system. This underlying consensus allowed them to safely dispute political issues. By the 18th century, the so-called “Age of Reason,” neither Whig nor Tory feared that victory by the other would bring prison or property confiscation. Their heated political campaigns simply illustrated yet another ancient political axiom—the closer the relationship, the warmer the contention. Or put plainly, there’s no feud like a family feud, even when it’s only about what 18th century British politicians called place (office and status), not matters of life and death.
The trick to successful politics lies in keeping passions from getting out of hand over nonessentials—not an easy task. Historians can see these old political wars in dispassionate retrospection, but those who actually lived through them had a harder time of it. Once immersed in the tangled underthickets of politics, where personal ambition, private vanity, and naked ego could fester unchecked, warring factions can easily lose sight of the consensus they all know, down deep, they share.
“Some of us still don’t realize that the enemy is out there, not in here,” said Hank Duffy in his opening remarks to the November 1986 BOD meeting at Bal Harbour, Fla. In what was sure to be a hotly contested election for ALPA’s leadership, Duffy was making a point that was as true for 18th century Whigs and Tories as it is for modern airline pilots—that far more unites than divides them. Amidst all the disagreements over specific problems that confronted the profession, from the vexations of crafting new seniority lists for the 12,000 dues-paying ALPA members facing mergers to Frank Lorenzo’s ominous takeover of Eastern, Duffy emphasized the fundamental truth that airline pilots share basic interests.
“Every one of our enemies is out there; not one of them is in this room,” Duffy repeated for dramatic effect, earning a round of applause from BOD delegates.
It was a nice try at defusing the palpable tension in Bal Harbour. During Hank Duffy’s first term, he had labored under an internal political burden that complicated nearly every aspect of ALPA’s mission. His narrow victory over J.J. O’Donnell in 1982 left ALPA with a divided Executive Committee. Tom Ashwood, the TWA pilot and O’Donnell protege who emerged as ALPA’s first vice-president, anchored an anti-Duffy faction that always regarded his victory as a fluke. Either Ashwood or Jack Bavis, ALPA’s executive administrator, could easily have won ALPA’s presidency in 1982, Duffy’s critics believed, had not O’Donnell sabotaged their candidacies by seeking a fourth term. As the 1986 election approached, they saw Duffy as vulnerable.
But Hank Duffy thought otherwise. Thanks to United’s pilots, the delegates had some breathing space for calm reflection. Likewise, the phasing down of the financial burden caused by the Continental strike (which would eventually cost ALPA $70 million) bought Duffy some slack. If the BOD delegates would only step back from the intense struggles of the recent past and consider his leadership on its merits, Duffy believed, he would win another term.
“You will note that these remarks don’t contain the doom and gloom flavor of some of my previous reports,” Duffy told the November 1985 Washington, D.C., meeting of the Executive Board, which effectively began the 1986 ALPA presidential campaign. Relieved that for the first time he was addressing the delegates “without some major crisis brewing,” Duffy could point with pride to ALPA’s successes. He justifiably cited the new $100 million Major Contingency Fund, or war chest, “the accolades given ALPA over the United Strike,” and ALPA’s increasing expertise in “protecting pilots threatened with corporate takeovers” as reasons for re-electing him. Duffy’s opening remarks also contained a strong endorsement of close ties with the AFL-CIO and promised continued support for unemployed pilots, particularly those from Continental.
“First and foremost, we must take care of our casualties, those people who have given everything for ALPA,” Duffy said. “I’m calling on each of you to use all the leverage you have with your managements to place these fellow pilots in jobs on your airlines.”
Tom Ashwood, who followed Duffy to the rostrum for his address as ALPA’s first vice-president, adopted a less sanguine tone, particularly on the Continental strike.
“Let’s not fool ourselves,” Ashwood countered. “We lost this one.”
Perhaps asking pilots who had been through the recent fires to consider their leadership choices calmly was asking too much. Historians might easily recognize an almost Whig-vs.-Tory quality to the upcoming Ashwood–Duffy contest, but more casual observers, enmeshed in all the heated rhetoric, would not.
A peculiar feature of the 1986 election was that for the first time in ALPA’s history, all national officers would be elected to simultaneous four-year terms. Historically, ALPA had favored staggered terms to preserve continuity, but internal changes in governance had lessened the need for that safeguard. Consequently, the opportunity to make a sweeping “mid-course correction,” as Hank Duffy put it during the May 1986 meeting of the Executive Board, was never better. But Duffy expected no such outcome. Despite niggling criticism by rank-and-file pilots (part of the historical baggage all sitting presidents carried), Duffy was confident that the BOD delegates, who generally had a more sophisticated understanding of the difficulties confronting ALPA, would reelect him. Then the unexpected happened—complications arose in the Northwest/Republic airline merger.
“Going into the election, I felt I had a pretty comfortable margin,” Duffy recalls. “But I was basing that largely on having the Republic pilots’ votes. Because of merger-related issues, we lost Republic, and that made the election a lot tighter.”
Short of bankruptcy and unemployment, nothing has bedeviled ALPA’s internal politics the way mergers have. Acrimony, bitterness, paranoid suspicions—all these and more have resulted from mergers. Making matters worse, ALPA has always been the scapegoat for pilots dissatisfied with mergers. Since Hank Duffy’s election in 1982, aside from the continuing trouble with Frank Lorenzo, ALPA’s single most contentious internal political issue had been the spate of deregulation-generated mergers.
Honoring a campaign promise to be more “responsive” to rank-and-file members, Duffy spent a lot of time personally answering letters of complaint during his first term. The angriest letters in ALPA’s bulging “President’s File” during these years concerned mergers, some of them long past.
“I will no longer be a member of an association that turns its back when unfair treatment occurs within its ranks,” wrote Jack Fehling, a former Northeast Airlines pilot who came to Delta in the 1972 merger. In a 1987 letter to Duffy, Fehling, his old resentments stirred anew by the 1986 Delta/Western merger, resigned from ALPA over what he saw as the injustice of ALPA’s merger policy. “Why is a pre-1972 Delta pilot with my length of service 800 numbers senior to me?”
“I was very disappointed to receive your letter of resignation,” Duffy patiently responded to Fehling. “In both the Delta/Northeast and Delta/Western mergers, both sides sent merger representatives in to achieve not only the best for their own pilots, but also a fair and equitable settlement. I’m convinced that the system we use under ALPA Merger Policy, whereby an attempt is made to achieve a result through direct negotiations before finally relying on binding arbitration, is a good one. It is fair and provides due process with an ultimate decision by a neutral, and I think that’s the best any union can do. Jack, to blame your union and to resign from it over a single issue is extremely shortsighted. There are simply too many forces at work attempting to tear down the piloting profession for us to fight as individual pilots.”
Duffy was obviously forgetting yet another ancient political truth—”All politics is local!” Fehling was simply expressing a resentment that was understandable among those who had to settle for half a loaf—the inescapable requirement of successful politics. On some airlines, merger fights so blinded pilots to the principles of conciliation and compromise that they actually sought to decertify ALPA. On TWA, for example, trouble involving the 1986 Ozark merger forced MEC Chairman Harry Hoglander to doggedly beat back a decertification effort by a splinter group calling itself the “Airline Pilots Union.” Proving that there was really nothing new under the historical sun, this episode was eerily reminiscent of a similar attempt, led by Waldon “Swede” Golien, a disaffected ALPA pioneer, to form a splinter union called “The TWA Pilots Association” in 1933!1
Airline mergers have produced some wacky feuds over the years. For example, the 1953 merger of Delta and Chicago & Southern Air Lines caused an improbable falling out between Charles H. Dolson and Stewart W. Hopkins, two authentic ALPA pioneers. Before moving on to airline careers, Dolson and Hopkins had served together as U.S. Navy carrier pilots in the late 1920s. Each man had organized his airline for ALPA in 1935—quite remarkable feats considering the hostility toward unions that characterized the South. Dolson (who was older than Hopkins and senior to him in the Navy, went to work for American in 1931, a year before Hopkins signed on with Pacific Seaboard Airlines. But then Dolson got furloughed because of the air mail cancellations of 1934. He caught on with Delta in 1935, but Hopkins meanwhile had “continuous service” as Chicago & Southern acquired Pacific Seaboard in 1934. When Dolson’s “broken service” with American was disallowed, that made Hopkins one number senior on the new Delta list.
Dolson was furious. Now keep in mind, neither man had ever flown copilot for anybody and their piddling seniority difference had no practical effect whatsoever on their professional careers. Dolson, who died in 1992 at the age of 86, would rise from Delta’s chief pilot to chairman of the Delta Air Lines Board of Directors—far and away the most successful executive career any airline pilot has ever had. Hopkins, who at 83 was still alive at the time of this writing, was no slouch either. Not only did he become an admiral in the Naval Reserves, but he also served as ALPA’s first vice-president and was an authentic “king maker” in ALPA politics who almost single-handedly saved Charley Ruby from being recalled in 1966. But that one number rankled Dolson to his dying day, maybe because Hopkins puckishly kidded him about it, giving Dolson a nickname (“Cheerful Charlie”) he could neither live down nor appreciate.
At least the Old Guys like Hopkins and Dolson didn’t sue each other over seniority problems. By the 1980s, pilots unhappy with a merged list were, like so many other litigious Americans, quick to file lawsuits—against ALPA! The 1986 Delta/Western merger (which stirred up Jack Fehling’s old resentments) generated a long, complicated, and expensive lawsuit that did nothing except enrich lawyers.
Ironically, the disaffected Western pilots, consisting mostly of a contingent based in Salt Lake City, would almost certainly have been without jobs had not Delta acquired their airline. Western almost surely would have followed Braniff into oblivion otherwise. But no matter, ALPA (and by inference, the merger committee negotiators from Western itself) would wind up on the receiving end of yet another lawsuit that would require justification of its merger policy before a federal court.
“I’ve got to tell you I think our merger with Delta was fair,” says Chuck Tully, a Western pilot since 1966, dismissing the complainers from his own airline. “I was a B-737 captain before the merger, and I was still a B-737 captain after. If a guy the day after a merger is doing the same thing he was the day before the merger, it’s fair. No Western pilot lost like that, and we were given access to widebody equipment that we would not have had otherwise.
‘I don’t want to sound insensitive to the guys at the bottom of the seniority list [where most of the unhappiness existed, primarily because of age discrepancies], but I think there were a lot of unrealistic expectations out there that no merger committee could have met,” Tully says. “Our committee wasn’t really looking at ‘fair’ so much as they were looking at a comparison to arbitration, the bird in the hand compared to how much more they could gain as to how much they could lose.”
In February 1990, a federal judge would confirm Tully’s views by dismissing the lawsuit filed by “Rick Herring et al.” (popularly known as “Pilots for a Fair Seniority List”). With some exasperation, the judge ruled that there was an element of the irrational about lawsuits challenging ALPA’s merger policy. Perhaps the judge was only saying, in legalese, what everybody who had ever examined merger disputes already knew—that some animosities would persist until the last pilot involved retired!
Nothing illustrated the inherent contentiousness of mergers better than the Northwest/Republic merger of 1986. Like Western, Republic (originally an amalgam of Southern, North Central, and Hughes Air West) was flirting with bankruptcy when Northwest acquired it. The merger of the two airlines, which operated disparate equipment because their differing route structures and histories, generated a bitter political fight that spilled over into ALPA’s 1986 election.
For all the controversy that ALPA’s Merger Policy has generated over the years, nothing particularly complicated or sinister underlies its principles. It called for negotiations between the two affected pilot groups who ideally would agree on a new integrated seniority list. But what if they couldn’t agree? Then ALPA policy specified binding arbitration by a neutral third party chosen by the principals. ALPA recommended (but did not require) that the negotiators and arbitrators consider certain guidelines in making a settlement. Always high on the list of these factors were the twin totems of airline pilot seniority—date-of-hire and length-of-service.
As is inevitably true of such seemingly simple, straightforward, and principled “guidelines,” the devil was in the details. What, for example, should be done about a conflict between date-of-hire and length-of-service? Which should take priority? During the 1980 merger of Pan American and National, some furloughed Pan Am pilots had dates-of-hire earlier than National pilots who had longer length-of-service. Should date-of-hire for a pilot who had been cleaning swimming pools for the past 10 years take precedence over length-of-service for one who had hustled up another flying job? What was fair?
Further merger complications involved “class and craft” considerations, to use traditional labor terminology. What should be done about a Pan Am pilot with 20 years of unbroken service who, because of that airline’s stagnant promotion list, held the rank of only first officer, while a National pilot with 10 years of unbroken service held a captaincy? Should the first officer and captain lists be integrated separately? And what about gross disparities in equipment flown by two merging airlines? Should Northwest be required to upgrade (at tremendous expense) a grizzled old Republic DC-9 captain to the B-747, even though he was nearing retirement?
Clearly, rigid adherence to merger “guidelines” in all cases was impractical. After all, the purpose of mergers was economic—to ensure the survival of an airline so as to preserve pilots’ jobs. But putting together a merged seniority list was a fiendishly complex, intrinsically contentious process that would have taxed the wisdom of Solomon. What should be done about timetables for complying with upgrade training on new equipment, verification of employment data for accuracy, and dozens of other technical details? And finally, what should ALPA do about an arbitrator who does something really stupid—like cutting the baby in half?
The bitter 1986 merger between Air Wisconsin and Mississippi Valley, two small airlines with fewer than 100 pilots each, stands as a case in point. Because the pilots could not agree on a merged seniority list, the final decision fell to an arbitrator who imposed a settlement that left 15-year Air Wisconsin first officers flying copilot for Mississippi Valley captains with 7 years of service!
Air Wisconsin’s outraged pilots blamed ALPA (not their own negotiators’ hard-nosed insistence upon a “stapler” merger—simply adding the Mississippi Valley pilot seniority list to the bottom of the Air Wisconsin list). Eventually, ALPA had to impose a “trusteeship” over the merged airline after the Air Wisconsin pilots (who outnumbered the Mississippi Valley group by five pilots) voted to pull out of ALPA to overturn the arbitrator’s decision. With ALPA’s good faith on the line, Hank Duffy had no choice but to resist their move and appointed United’s redoubtable Cliff Sanderson as trustee.
All this happened because the breakdown of direct negotiations between the two pilot groups threw the final decision into the hands of an arbitrator who blew it. Such are the hazards of letting outsiders decide things.
“Since 1985, all of ALPA’s internal political crises have been about mergers,” Sanderson declares simply.
Through the years, ALPA has struggled mightily to devise some way to resolve the Merger Policy dilemma. At the very least, ALPA’s policy ought to shift the onus of resentment to the place where it properly belongs—the recalcitrance, unreasonableness, or stupidity, whatever might be the case, of the pilot group negotiators themselves. Many bright and knowledgeable people have fruitlessly sought a “magic bullet” that would provide a painless solution to mergers. By the late 1980s, “final offer arbitration” took its place as the latest in a long line of utopian solutions to merger disputes. Under this scenario, the arbitrator would be obligated to accept either one or the other pilot group’s “final offer.” This would put a premium on reasonableness (assuming that the arbitrator was knowledgeable enough to recognize it), and perhaps bring the two groups into actual agreement. But in any case, ALPA itself would be spared. All this did Hank Duffy no good, however, in the Northwest/Republic merger, which took an inordinate amount of time to resolve. Inevitably (if unfairly), Duffy became the lightning rod for the Republic pilots’ anger.
Part of the problem was that the arbitrator, Thomas Roberts, took so long to make his decision. During the three years (from 1986 to 1989) while Roberts sorted out his options, the merged airline had to operate with cumbersome “fences,” which kept the two pilot groups artificially separate, much to management’s irritation. Then, when Roberts finally made his decision, he departed from tradition by arranging the list by date of hire but using a “career-expectation rubric" with fences that muted its effect.
Under terms of the “Roberts Rights,” senior Republic pilots, no matter what their premerger seniority, would be “fenced off” from bidding up to heavy Northwest equipment (under certain circumstances), until the “career expectations” of some Northwest pilots had been met. Put simply, this meant that until the group of Northwest pilots who had hired on with the “career expectation” of becoming widebody captains had been met, they would have first bidding rights. Since most Republic pilots had hired on with “career expectations” no higher than the left seat of a DC-9, they would have to wait for their turn at heavy equipment—in some cases until 2006!
This extended “fence” was only one of several bitter disputes between the “Red Tail” (original Northwest) and “Green Book” (former Republic) pilots. A variety of arcane details, such as “dispute resolution” over the B-757/767 type rating, resulted in yet another welter of lawsuits filed by everybody on all sides with multiple targets—ALPA, the opposition pilot group, the former managements, and arbitrator Roberts himself! Each group had grievances over specific aspects of Roberts’ award. An old adage holds that when everybody is unhappy with a merger, it must be fair!
One other aspect of the Northwest/Republic merger deserves comment. In their leadership choices, each pilot group selected men better known for pugnacity than persuasiveness. The Northwest pilot group chose ALPA’s original “Dog of War,” Bob Kehs, whose nickname of “Dr. Strike” was a recognition of his skill at confrontation. Perhaps to counter Kehs, the Republic pilot group selected his mirror image, Earl J. (“E.J.”) Lawlus for a prominent role. Neither would win any shrinking violet contests.
The carrier’s economic burden of retraining crews, one traditional reason for an arbitrator imposing “fences,” played little role in Roberts’ original arbitration. In mitigation, Republic pilots who were most affected by these “fences” actually got paid the same as if they were flying the heavy aircraft from which they were “fenced off,” thanks to their ALPA contract. It was actually a fairly generous reward for sparing the company (in some cases) the expense of upgrade training for pilots nearing retirement.
But many Republic pilots, feeling psychologically aggrieved, blamed ALPA for “betraying the guidelines” contained in the Merger Policy. Actually the Northwest/Republic merger did no such thing. The Republic pilots could see only that the “fence agreement” violated the date-of-hire priority. But ALPA’s Merger Policy had always subordinated straight date-of hire/length-of-service to the overriding necessity of “preserving jobs” and other considerations as well. By 1988, to break this fixation on date-of-hire, ALPA’s revised Merger Policy would explicitly state that “the application [of these criteria] should not preclude the consideration or use of any integration method which could balance the equities [emphasis added].”
The Northwest/Republic merger undoubtedly made the former Republic pilots feel like “second-class citizens,” but it did not violate ALPA’s policy, and in the way of such things, the actual injury done them wound up being magnified in the retelling. Smarting over arbitrator Thomas Roberts’s handling of the merger, Republic’s pilots abandoned Hank Duffy, for whom they had cast all 1,684 of their votes by “unit rule” in 1982. Four years later, they would cast 1,726 unit-rule votes for Tom Ashwood.
With the TWA/Ozark merger generating similar stresses, Hank Duffy suddenly found himself facing a growing and quite unexpected coalition of pilot groups who blamed him for the perceived shortcomings of ALPA’s Merger Policy.
“I think maybe the pilots unfairly expect ALPA to fix things that are really not fixable,” admits Lawlus. “I’ve flown with former Eastern and Braniff pilots, and while they’re all thankful to have a job, that underlying resentment directed at ALPA doesn’t seem to go away, and that’s also true of mergers. There are former Northeast pilots who are still pissed off at Delta’s pilots after all these years.”
But Lawlus, a former Marine pilot who began flying with Bonanza in 1956 (and consequently takes a back seat to no one in “merger experience”), despite his philosophical commitment and long service to ALPA, feels bitter about the way his “Green Book” Republic pilots were treated in the merger with Northwest’s “Red Tails.” He blames Northwest’s management for a pattern of discrimination, which the original Northwest pilots encouraged, against former Republic pilots. Lawlus also believes Duffy ignored it to gain the political support of the Northwest pilot group in 1986.
“I would have preferred to see things in a different way, and I hate to be so critical of Duffy and ALPA,” Lawlus says, “but they made us feel like we had a damned tattoo on our foreheads.”
“Going into the 1986 election, I thought Hank would win in a landslide,” says Northwest’s Skip Eglet, who was an ALPA executive vice-president at the time. “Then, a tremendous coalition of airlines who had the same merger philosophy, who publicly and vigorously defended date-of-hire as the only way to merge seniority lists, carried the policy debate over into the convention and voted as a block against him, and that was some big airlines—United, TWA, USAir.”
When combined with Tom Ashwood’s undeniable brilliance as a campaigner, the festering animosities brought on by the avalanche of mergers suddenly made the election of 1986 a toss-up. Ashwood had made identification with the larger trade union movement a centerpiece of his campaign, even before pilot opinion began to shift on the issue in the 1980s. Constantly urging pilots to solve their problems in the “good old union way,” Ashwood was a master at anecdotally praising unionism in principle, calling on pilots to not only play a role in the AFL–CIO, but to lead it as well.
“Now we hear talk about ‘Let’s join the labor movement,’” Ashwood chided Duffy at the November 1985 Executive Board. “We should be leading it!”
While Duffy’s aristocratic bearing and former role as a Republican Party county chairman made him an unlikely labor leader, no one could doubt his commitment by 1986. Spurred not only by Ashwood’s criticisms, but also by the antilabor bias of the Reagan Administration, Duffy began to emerge as a conspicuous spokesman for the AFL–CIO—something ALPA’s leaders had been wary of, historically.
“The strong antiunion stand of this [Republican] Administration is unchanged, and we cannot expect any help,” Duffy told the May 1986 Executive Board. “If we want to survive, we have to toughen up as a union. We tend to look too much to other people. During Continental, we looked to the Australians to shut down the South Pacific [a slam at Ashwood, who believed Aussie trade unions would refuse to fuel Lorenzo’s planes]. The catalyst for our transition from an elitist association to a labor union has been communications. In 1982, I told everybody who would listen that we needed communications across company lines. If that program had been in place during Continental, I think the results would have been far different.”
Citing regional meetings with spouses, “family awareness,” increased use of VCRs, computer nets, and the introduction of “Viewpoint Cards” in every issue of Air Line Pilot, Duffy took credit for the success of the United strike and the new militancy and self-confidence that were rippling through ALPA. He noted that, under his leadership, ALPA had placed pilot representatives on several AFL–CIO councils, had become affiliated with the Maritime Trades Department of the AFL–CIO and the International Transport Federation, had joined the “union label” movement, and was advertising the “Don’t Buy” list among rank-and-file pilots.
“”These things have nothing to do with the airline industry,” Duffy proclaimed, “but a lot to do with the trade union movement. We have come a long way from the days when at every BOD meeting we had a resolution on the floor that said, ‘Get out of the AFL–CIO.’”
Ashwood, who constantly cited the British trade union tradition in his anecdotal speeches to ALPA groups, believes he forced Duffy into a more militant, prounion rhetorical mode as the 1986 campaign evolved.
“I believe I was the first national officer to ever use the word ‘union’ on the record,” Ashwood says. “O’Donnell, who actually switched us from a professional association to a union, used to suck on his teeth when I would do that, because union wasn’t a popular word until the Continental strike.”
With nothing to differentiate Duffy and Ashwood on most substantive issues, the election of 1986 would ultimately turn on matters of personality and the struggle for “place,” as 18th century Whigs and Tories understood it. But Ashwood did urge one rather remarkable change internally—a change that might have backfired on him. Insiders knew that Ashwood was unhappy with Henry Weiss, and Ashwood let it be known that if he won election, ALPA’s historical connection with the law firm of Cohen, Weiss, and Simon, would end.
“Cohen, Weiss, and Surrender, I like to call it,” snorts Ashwood.
Ashwood had become disillusioned with Weiss while serving as first vice-president. He would later come to believe that ALPA was “outlawyered” during the Icahn takeover of TWA, but his core complaint against Weiss was that he had become too involved in ALPA’s internal politics. Ashwood was deeply suspicious of Weiss’s role as parliamentarian, particularly some technical decisions in 1982, which Ashwood maintains kept the pilots of recently bankrupt Braniff, who would have supported O’Donnell, from voting. In 1986, as Ashwood sees it, Weiss was instrumental in letting the Frontier pilots vote, even though they were in essentially the same condition as the Braniff pilots had been in 1982.
“Frontier had gone belly up, and there was not a chance that they were ever going to come back,” Ashwood maintains. “But Weiss ruled they were still alive as far as ALPA was concerned, while the Continental pilots, who were getting back to work, 1,600 votes that were for me, Weiss ruled could not vote, even though they were represented at the BOD. Pure politics—I would have won, and Weiss would have been out of a job.”
To many ALPA insiders, Ashwood’s criticisms of Henry Weiss were jarring. Weiss’s service to ALPA dated back to the Behncke era, and his reputation for ALPA’s history. As ALPA’s “chief legal counsel,” Henry Weiss has been at the heart of ALPA’s courtroom battles for nearly half a century.
“There was never any legal establishment as ‘general counsel,’” says Henry Weiss. “It’s just a name that sticks to us.”
Legally established or not, Weiss was the rock upon which ALPA’s legal edifice was built. Largely owing to Clarence “Clancy” Sayen, ALPA’s second president, Henry Weiss and his law firm became inextricably linked to ALPA, serving both as “outside” counsel and, through a curious set of historical circumstances, as godfather of ALPA’s current Legal Department.
In the mid-1950s, Clancy Sayen, dissatisfied with the way ALPA’s in-house Legal Department was handling routine casework (grievances and the like), gave Weiss an angry ultimatum. It was a surprising development, because Sayen and Weiss were close friends. The raging firestorm of the 1953 Behncke ouster, which they had fought as allies, had built a bond between them that was like the bonds men retain from experiencing war together. They even shared each others’ homes, rather than stay in hotels when they found themselves in Chicago or New York. Suddenly, here was Clancy Sayen storming into Henry Weiss’s office with blood in his eyes.
“Sayen came to New York and said to me in plain terms, ‘If you don’t handle our grievance cases, you’re not going to do any of ALPA’s work!’” Weiss recalls. “Previously, with few exceptions, I had handled only those grievance cases that had special note of some kind. The Legal Department had messed up a lot of things, and he wanted to disassemble it completely. He said, ‘You’ll become vice-president of Legal.’ I remember it was wintertime, and I was sick with a cold. I said, ‘Clancy, let me alone! I don’t work as an employee for institutions. Take your anger out some other way.’”
After Sayen cooled off, Weiss agreed to supervise the building of a new legal staff for ALPA. With Sayen’s backing, Weiss cleaned house, interviewed and hired new lawyers, and reorganized ALPA’s administrative procedures in so far as they applied to routine legal matters.
“The long and the short of it,” Weiss remembers, “is that I got a mandate to reestablish a reoriented Legal Department.”
Sayen gave Weiss a year to complete the job. Building upon Harold Bennett and Maurice Schy (“Both very good men,” says Weiss), the newly restructured ALPA Legal Department emerged from the chaos of the early 1950s with a new sense of direction.
“I tried to give these lawyers a sense of their client,” Weiss says with intensity. “Lawyers were being sent all around the country with no sense of connection with United Airlines or the United pilots, or National Airlines and their pilots.”
To develop this sense of identification with pilots flying the line, Weiss insisted that ALPA’s lawyers be assigned to serve specific airlines and physically dispersed around the country.
“I saw that if we would out-base the lawyers at the various domiciles, where they might handle two or three airlines, because business was not so intense as to require one lawyer for one airline at that time, they would have a sense of the guys they represent and to whom they are responsible.”
Henry Weiss emphasizes this last point with a flinty glance, one that has been honed over nearly six decades of intense courtroom battles.
Although Weiss admits to being Clancy Sayen’s soul mate in every way (words like “brilliant” recur in his conversational remembrances of Sayen), ALPA founder Dave Behncke, not Sayen, first brought Weiss on board. The United States is a litigious land, so any confrontational organization (like a union), must necessarily find itself enmeshed in legal snares. Just such a snare brought Dave Behncke to Henry Weiss’s door in 1946.
Weiss is convinced that the airline operators intended to destroy ALPA after World War II. The post-war surplus of pilots qualified to fly military transports was the operators’ ace in the hole. Using these pilots as leverage, the airline operators expected to get rid of ALPA once and for all. The effort began on Ted Baker’s National Airlines, and it would eventually culminate in the celebrated strike of 1948. But all Henry Weiss knew when he met Dave Behncke for the first time was that ALPA wasn’t going to be an easy outfit to work for.2
“Dave was a very demanding person, and you had to do precisely as he wanted, or else you were fired; and he fired ruthlessly, in a very arbitrary fashion,” Weiss recalls.
Indeed, Henry Weiss and his law partner, Sam Cohen, became ALPA’s lawyers only because the eminent labor lawyer, Henry Kaiser, had quit ALPA because he found Behncke impossible.
“I soon encountered that problem myself,” Weiss recalls.
Behncke expected a lawyer simply to be a mouthpiece who would parrot long, rambling statements that Behncke himself had previously written. At his first legal proceeding representing ALPA, Behncke handed Weiss such a statement. Finding it both inappropriate and demeaning, Weiss began editing Behncke’s prose severely.
“Stick to the script!” Behncke hissed.
Weiss flatly refused. Having just lost one prominent labor lawyer with these tactics, Behncke retreated and allowed Weiss to do his job.
“I don’t know how we made our peace,” Weiss recalls of his refusal to knuckle under to Behncke. “But somehow we came to an understanding.”
Behncke and ALPA desperately needed a topflight labor lawyer to pursue legal action against National’s Ted Baker, who was making a shambles of ALPA’s dearly bought collective bargaining contract, refusing to honor parts of it and threatening to fire any pilot who acted as a union officer. Desperate, Behncke’s turned to his old friend Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City, who recommended Henry Weiss. Weiss had never heard of ALPA when Behncke lumbered into his New York City offices in 1946.
By folklore and custom, the best way to deal with litigation is to have a legal pit bull to turn loose on opponents. Henry Weiss already fit that description, and it was a good thing. Ted Baker’s lawyer in the first round of legal sparring that followed Weiss’s hiring was none other than Roy Cohn, who would later achieve notoriety as Senator Joe McCarthy’s hatchet man.
“That was before his Red-baiting days,” Weiss recalls with more than a hint of disdain.
By taking the measure of Roy Cohn and Ted Baker, Henry Weiss made an impression on Behncke, thus beginning a relationship between his law firm and ALPA that has endured into the 1990s. What began as a temporary legal assignment, a one-time job for a union Weiss never expected to hear from again, would lead him into a parallel life—half spent with the law, the other half with ALPA.
Like the grillot tale-tellers of West Africa, who bear within their own memories the rich oral traditions of their people, Weiss has accumulated a vast store of knowledge about ALPA’s history—much of which does not appear anywhere in the written record. There was practically nothing about ALPA he didn’t know, hadn’t seen, and most remarkably for a man of 80 (at the time of an oral history interview in 1990) couldn’t remember.
Henry Weiss was born on March 31, 1910, the second son of a successful, hard-driving Baltimore clothing manufacturer who cannot be credited for making him a labor lawyer—quite the contrary. His father hated unions and warred with them continuously. In 1925, when Henry was only 15, he entered Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Graduating from college at the tender age of 19, Weiss went on to Columbia Law School, emerging with his degree in 1932—at the bottom of the Great Depression. Ironically, he did not initially practice labor law, the field in which he became so prominent.
Although Weiss retired from the active management of his law firm in 1985, he continued as ALPA’s parliamentarian, much to Tom Ashwood’s dismay. Weiss reflected upon these distant events during an interview in August 1990. He was still keeping an office on the 25th floor of the unpretentious building at 330 West 42nd street (next door to the New York Port Authority bus terminal), an area gone seedy with panhandlers and trashy businesses.
It wasn’t always this way. Once, in another time, through these very doors walked Behncke, Sayen, Ruby, and all the other great names in ALPA’s past. Now that “Behncke’s Tomb,” the old headquarters building at 55th and Cicero in Chicago, has fallen to the wrecking ball and Midway’s expansion, perhaps these offices are the closest we can get to a “historic” ALPA site.
The surroundings are a perfect reflection of Henry Weiss—straightforward and no-nonsense. The office accoutrements of a practice devoted to labor law are usually somewhat spartan, and Henry’s digs are, to put it mildly, no exception—clients of Cohen, Weiss, and Simon needn’t worry about being charged for the overhead of this utilitarian layout. No deep pile carpets, no fancy art work, no hushed atmosphere, no elegantly coiffured secretaries—just plain, working-class New York simple. Henry’s office, which commands a sweeping view of the Hudson River and Manhattan’s Lower West Side, is hard-edged and spare. Instead of drapes to hush the din rising from the adjacent theater district along Broadway, the windows have plastic venetian blinds. The only thing in the office that bespeaks luxury is a single Japanese wood block print by Hiroshige—a souvenir of Weiss’s World War II service as a U.S. Navy officer. The normal buzz of the great city below occasionally rises with the wail of a siren, making it necessary to turn off the tape recorder until the emergency vehicle has passed.
Henry Weiss sat for two days, patiently answering questions, choosing his words carefully, weighing their impact. He scrupulously avoided any mention at all of Tom Ashwood personally, but he denied charges of interfering in ALPA’s politics.
“I have from time to time been called into discussions that were certainly about policy,” Weiss said carefully. “I would not under any circumstances attempt to influence or shape a judgment or policy without feeling that this really resonates with what the members want done. Of course, I will enter discussions as to the merits of some particular issue. But it’s up to them to decide, to make their choice.”
Weiss would say no more about the unpleasantness of the 1986 election. His conversation ranged from the merely anecdotal (fascinating stories about ALPA’s dominant personalities and their foibles) to the kind of sere, linear analysis of events one would expect of a law school professor (which Henry Weiss has been). He was far more interested in the future of the airline piloting profession than in settling old scores.
Weiss worried most about two things—the effects of the internationalization of the airline industry and deregulation. Henry Weiss is not a man to mince words. “Capital doesn’t have any patriotic strain in it,” Weiss declared. “Capital flows where the capital gets paid most for its use. Because transportation has become so fluid and efficient, we know that it is seeking globalization, really a searching out from one market to another for the cheapest labor.”
Weiss doubted that the U.S. government will be of much help to airline pilots seeking to protect their jobs from cheap foreign competition.
“The State Department has been willing to give away these intrusions [by foreign airlines] into American domestic markets without getting anything in return,” said Weiss. “This represents a major threat to the pilots of this country. Unless airline pilots have some kind of national agenda, for example one that includes internationalization high on the list, they’re going to find themselves very hard-pressed as a profession. Unless they speak with a single voice on major issues, unless they damn well act as a unified group, they’re going to wake up someday and find their jobs are disappearing.”
After nearly half a century of valuing Henry Weiss’s advice on an enormous range of subjects, Ashwood probably made a mistake in attacking him. Nor was Weiss’s decision to keep Braniff’s pilots from voting in 1982—Ashwood’s core complaint against him—clearly improper.
Duffy’s victory over O’Donnell was so narrow that every vote was crucial, but we must remember that the Braniff situation was unique in ALPA’s history at that point. Braniff’s pilots represented an airline, which, at the time, had ceased flying and seemed dead. In 1986, Frontier was not yet technically in bankruptcy. Weiss’s decision to allow the Frontier pilots to cast their 407 votes was admittedly arguable, but Duffy would eventually win by a margin of 570 votes. Similarly, Continental’s ALPA loyalists were clearly in the minority on their airline and had already lost a decertification vote. In any case, even if Weiss had ruled that they were eligible to vote, the Continental pilots might have gone for Duffy, anyway—they had voted for him over O’Donnell in 1982.
So the situation was murky, the political equivalent of the “fog of war.” Still, Ashwood had definitely touched a nerve by bringing the role of Cohen, Weiss, and Simon into political play. Whether it was the cultural inclination to criticize lawyers or substantive legal issues of the past, the law firm had been around so long and had engaged in so many critical actions that it had built up a backlog of pilots who could find reason to be disappointed with it in some way or other.
“I think the role of Cohen, Weiss and Simon was a fair question,” says United’s Chuck Pierce, ALPA’s secretary and Ashwood’s ally. “I think they were in over their heads in some areas, but maybe that’s inherent with having a general firm in whose basket you put all your eggs.”
But in fact, the role of Henry Weiss in the election of 1986 was always peripheral. The merger issue was dominant in so far as policy considerations played a part. After that, the choice of leaders came down primarily to a struggle for “place” among men who shared a consensus—far more than they would admit in the heat of the campaign. The BOD delegates would ultimately have to make their choice based upon personality, style, and hunch—not policy.
Randy Babbitt, ALPA’s executive administrator since replacing Western’s John Erickson in January 1985, came aboard after the Duffy–Ashwood split was already full-blown and had a ringside seat at the 1986 election. Babbitt, whose talents as a conciliator would later play a pivotal role in winning ALPA’s presidency in 1990, brings considerable insight to the questions of personality and style in ALPA’s politics.
“I thought I could mend some fences, so I devoted a lot of energy to that,” Babbitt says of the Duffy–Ashwood rift. “But after a year of trying, I conceded it was unredeemable, there was just too much scar tissue. I never knew whether there was already so much damage done there was no repairing it. I will probably go to my grave wondering.”
As the campaign of 1986 moved into high gear, Babbitt realized that the Northwest/Republic merger might throw the election to Ashwood, but even here the candidates’ personalities and styles figured prominently. Babbitt saw Duffy as an effective campaigner in small groups, but less convincing with large groups. Ashwood was just the opposite.
“Hank could sit down with three or four board members, and they’d walk out absolutely convinced,” Babbitt mused. “As for the larger groups, his style, which was very cerebral, hampered getting his message out. Ashwood, conversely, was very polished, but I found the clarity of his vision doubtful, and I didn’t think Tom had the savvy to do the decision-making that was going to be in front of us. While Tom was convincing audiences, I was always more comfortable with Hank making the tough decisions, particularly in 1986. That was just an unbelievable nightmare with Northwest and Republic fighting, all those mergers—USAir, Piedmont, PSA—testing pilot groups’ wills, and what gets squeezed is ALPA as an institution.”
As the election campaign heated up, Duffy got a break when Roger Hall, United’s MEC chairman, unexpectedly entered the race, thus diluting the anti-Duffy vote. Hall’s sudden entry angered Ashwood’s friend, Chuck Pierce.
“I can’t remember seeing Hank Duffy so elated,” says Pierce. “The fact that Roger Hall was running made Duffy’s job significantly easier, because the Delta people came down to Miami saying, ‘Look, the opposition can’t even make up their mind who they want, the train is about to leave the station, Hank is the next president, and you’d best be on board.’”
Hall had told Pierce in March 1986 that he had no interest in running for ALPA’s presidency. Then a combination of things intrinsic to United’s politics changed his mind. Hall, who had been elected MEC chairman by a single vote, led an unstable coalition whose heart really belonged to Rick Dubinsky, whom many considered United’s leader of the future. Still, Hall’s many strong admirers at United thought that he had done a superb job during the strike and that this prestige would carry over into a large vote by uncommitted BOD members. In addition, more than a few United activists, for all their dislike of Hank Duffy, were lukewarm about Ashwood. As these pressures mounted, Hall belatedly entered the campaign.
“A lot of people were pushing me to run against Duffy,” says Hall, admitting that it was a question of disillusionment with the choices that motivated them. “United had become a very cohesive pilot group, and I happened to be the leader.”
“Roger’s decision to run divided the opposition,” says Pierce. “The two campaigns, Ashwood’s and Hall’s, went on until just before the election process, when Hall conceded to step down and run for first vice-president. But by that time, the damage had been done. If the United pilots had gotten behind Ashwood right from the beginning, in my opinion he would have beaten Duffy.”
Perhaps, but in the opinion of many others, Duffy’s incumbency and the good relationship he enjoyed with the Group Five airlines, when coupled with the undeniable tactical skills of the fabled “Delta Machine,” doomed Ashwood’s candidacy. By 1986, Group Five had more than 5,000 votes—taken together, these “ants” made up a big airline. These smaller airlines depended upon ALPA and its administrative and financial support far more than the larger airlines. Because of this working environment, the personal relationships they had developed with their contacts in ALPA had a definite political impact. Randy Babbitt, who had helped negotiate so many contracts for these “ant” airlines, would eventually owe his election in 1990 to the simple fact that pilots working for the Group Five airlines liked him.
The same was true of Duffy in 1986. When the balloting was all done, Duffy’s strongest support clearly came from Group Five. Among the large airlines, Duffy took only Delta, Northwest, Pan Am, Piedmont, and less than half of Eastern. Ashwood took TWA, United, the lion’s share of typically splintered Eastern, nearly all of USAir, and Republic by “unit rule.” The “ants” (the Alaskas, Suburbans, Simmonses) generally favored Duffy.
In a curious reversal to the pattern that saw most pilots affected by mergers vote for Ashwood, the pilots of Frontier voted for Duffy out of anger at Roger Hall (despite his withdrawal) and United. Because Hall and Ashwood effectively made up a “ticket,” the beleaguered Frontier pilots, reacting to the failure of their proposed merger with United, punished Ashwood—thus earning Henry Weiss the Ashwood faction’s ire, as we have seen.
Politics often comes down to the old notion that “My enemy’s friend is my enemy.” Dick Ferris, angry at the 1985 strike’s outcome, had sought to sabotage it by offering a merger to Frontier conditioned upon that airline’s pilots’ willingness to accept a B-scale, which of course they would, because the alternative was bankruptcy and unemployment. United’s pilots had just taken a strike over this issue, so they could not allow Ferris to subvert their victory through the backdoor via this merger.
If Frontier’s pilot were to don United’s uniforms, they would do so under the same contract that United’s pilots had bled for in 1985.
So the United/Frontier merger fell through, not that it was ever much more than a maneuver on Ferris’s part. Abundant evidence shows he never had any intention of merging with Frontier, that he merely wanted to pick off some of Frontier’s assets while embarrassing United’s ALPA loyalists.
Duffy’s total vote came to 14,714, as compared to Ashwood’s 13,604. In a somewhat surprising development, indicative of the ambivalence of many BOD delegates about “politics,” Roger Hall (the other half of the Ashwood “ticket”) won handily over Northwest’s Skip Eglet, 18,086 to 10,331.
Eglet fell victim to an internal political dynamic worked out in the corridors and hospitality suites, during those long hours the night before ALPA’s elections when “the elephants dance,” as the saying goes. The big airlines, groping toward unity and a show of harmony, moved toward Hall as an outsider who would carry none of the acrimony that had characterized the Duffy–Ashwood years. In addition, thanks to Hall’s leadership during the strike, he had taken on the aura of a folk hero, and many delegates saw a vote for him as a symbolic gesture of solidarity with the United pilots and their stand against Ferris.
The remainder of the national officer races settled out for a variety of reasons. Probably indicative of a desire to keep political power “balanced,” the delegates reversed course again after electing Ashwood’s putative ally Roger Hall, by electing Eastern’s Larry Schulte secretary, to replace the incumbent, United’s Chuck Pierce, a staunch Ashwood supporter—although by a much closer margin of 15,116 to 13,304. Finally, genial Jack Magee of Ozark/TWA, by 1986 virtually a permanent fixture as ALPA’s treasurer, turned back yet another in a long series of challenges, outpolling USAir’s Bob Spates 15,502 to 12,918.
When the election was all over, Duffy observed the rituals of politics, declaring: “To those who voted against me, let me pledge that we are going to draw a curtain on all the division at the end of this election. It is emotionally draining, and it pits us against each other. I am going to come out and visit with each of you and discuss our differences; and when we come out of that meeting, we will all be marching in the same direction.”
True to his very British roots, Tom Ashwood accepted defeat with grace and equanimity. He returned to flying the line as a TWA B-727 captain and eventually reentered the maelstrom of TWA’s internal politics. He locked horns with Carl Icahn, got drafted as MEC chairman, and then recalled—a common fate on that airline. Hank Duffy would eventually name Fred Arenas, a loyal “committee puke” and self-described “foot soldier,” to take over temporarily as TWA’s MEC chairman during one of that airline’s constant emergencies. Arenas lasted one day!
“We were surprised at United and TWA combining because they had been in virtual open warfare over the TWA pilots crossing the flight attendants’ picket line, United being in support of almost anybody on strike,” said Hank Duffy in retrospect in 1989. “They had open hostility on the picket lines, so I thought there was no possibility of them throwing their forces together. Fortunately my campaign manager [Bill Brown of Delta] was more pessimistic about that, and he turned out to be right. I was doubly surprised that Roger Hall agreed to take second position on that slate, because I thought, if anything, it would be the other way around. They had a real chance to carve me up. They missed, but it was closer than we thought it was going to be.”
“A lot of it was painful, but I don’t regret it,” Ashwood says. “People have asked me after 1986 how I would have changed my campaign. I wouldn’t, that’s why I can live with the loss, because I did everything I possibly could do within my own set of standards. And I lost. That’s O.K., that happens in politics.”
Sir Lewis Namier couldn’t have said it better of any Whig or Tory. Now was the time to lick wounds and come together for Duffy’s second term. Frank Lorenzo, poised at Eastern like Hitler on the Polish border of the Soviet Union in July 1941, was about to launch his own version of Operation Barbarossa.
1 See “The Rise and Fall of the TWA Pilots Association,” Flying the Line, Ch. 9.
2 See
“The National Airlines Strike of 1948,” Flying the Line, Ch. 13.