CHAPTER 3
THE TRIALS OF J.J. O’DONNELL
SOS Theory and Practice
If airline pilots as a professional group were doing well during the four golden decades of government regulation, the same cannot be said of ALPA as an organization. While ALPA has always been a “clean” union, free of the antidemocratic corruption and financial malfeasance one associates with the Teamsters, it was nevertheless quite troubled internally throughout much of the period. Some careful observers of ALPA’s history believe that an excess of democracy (if such a thing is possible) lies at the root of the problem. Stewart W. Hopkins, the Delta pilot who played a prominent role in ALPA’s national politics as first vice-president during the 1960s, once summed the situation up nicely: “In ALPA, the only thing that cuts off debate is exhaustion.”
For most of the four golden decades, ALPA’s history at the national level bore witness to a steady subset of disputes among its leaders. Airline pilots have tended toward gentlemanly, almost polite confrontations; but these repetitive quarrels wracked ALPA’s administrative functions and detracted from its effectiveness as a labor union. Some quarrels originated in policy differences, but a great many were purely personal, the product of individual quirks and dislikes, idiosyncratic feuds, and all too often, naked ambition.
Intramural skirmishing has always plagued ALPA’s presidents. Dave Behncke, ALPA’s founder, although an erratic administrator who was quite capable of petty vengefulness against those he regarded as “bad eggs,” nevertheless suffered from these attacks. Although his ouster in 1951 was necessary, who is to say that Behncke’s struggle to hold onto power against his internal rivals did not contribute to his deterioration as a leader?
Clarence N. “Clancy” Sayen, Behncke’s successor, sick of the constant sniping at his leadership, resigned under pressure in 1962, midway through his term. Charles H. “Charley” Ruby, Sayen’s successor, had a terrible time in office, once surviving a 1968 recall effort by dint of a tie vote, which he himself cast in the Executive Committee! So, these internal quarrels clearly meet two of the tests of historical significance—they persisted over time and they led to major changes.
Throughout the four decades of regulation, ALPA’s leaders were aware of this problem and wrestled with it intermittently. Perhaps the best example of this internal effort to rationalize ALPA’s administration and immunize it from “politics” (a term that has a peculiar resonance in ALPA’s history) is the collective history of the various Organizational Structure Study Committees (OSSCs). The first OSSC, founded in 1951 during the Behncke ouster, has had several incarnations over the years and has employed many celebrated outside consultants (probably the most famous being George P. Schultz, then dean of the University of Chicago School of Business and later Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State). That ALPA heavyweights frequently served on the various OSSCs proves the Committee’s importance and the gravity of the problem.
Put simply, that problem was “internal politics” and the effect politics had on ALPA’s administrative functions and other routine services. The culminating crisis of ALPA’s administrative chaos followed the defection of the American Airlines pilots from ALPA in 1963. Then, a bitter power struggle between President Ruby and his opponents on the Executive Committee, notably the regional vice-presidents (which we will discuss later), all but deadlocked ALPA.
While the word “politics” generally elicits a negative response, and “politician” is often a term of contempt, ALPA’s presidency is essentially a “political” job. Nobody can lead ALPA without being a “politician.” The person who lacks political skills, who has no knack for influencing others to adopt policy in their mutual interest, who cannot master the essential art of representing the opinions and sympathies of those who entrust decision-making for them, cannot long survive at the top of ALPA.
John Joseph O’Donnell survived for 12 years at ALPA’s top. As a practitioner of the political arts, he was no slouch. The mere fact of his emergence from the relative obscurity of local executive council chairman to ALPA’s presidency is sufficient proof of his political gifts. In fact, O’Donnell’s internal opponents would often use his skill at politics against him, arguing that possession of these skills was sufficient proof that he was unsuited to hold ALPA’s presidency!
“I see history repeating itself,” former ALPA president O’Donnell said darkly in a 1990 interview. “There was this constant politics between one airline and the other, Delta off on its own, United out in left field, Eastern in some other part of the ball park, nobody really working together, efforts to cut Hank Duffy’s throat. The same thing happened to me.”
John J. O’Donnell (usually referred to as “J.J.” by his contemporaries, but known as “John” to his intimates) has seen more ALPA history from the top than anybody except Dave Behncke. From his election in 1970 to his narrow and bitter defeat at the hands of Hank Duffy in 1982, O’Donnell survived at the top of ALPA’s political world. Politics, by one ancient definition, is how people in any society decide “who gets what.” By almost any definition, ALPA’s particular brand of politics could be as treacherous as a Byzantine court’s. As we shall see, this tendency toward intramural skirmishing permeated ALPA politics down to the local level.1
Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th century British prime minister, once described politics as the art of “climbing the greasy pole.” J.J. O’Donnell would have understood Disraeli’s point, for he had to struggle mightily to remain atop ALPA’s “greasy pole.” He faced bitter opposition and serious efforts to recall him from office, all of which left wounds that still cause pain.
“A bitterness still lingers,” O’Donnell admitted. While living in Florida retirement, O’Donnell sat for a long interview in January 1991—after Hank Duffy’s term ended. In the interest of fairness, he had refused to go “on the record” with his recollections until Duffy, the man who wrested ALPA from him in 1982, also retired. As we shall see, relations between Duffy and O’Donnell, influenced not only by the 1982 presidential election, but also by the difficult transition of power which followed it, were never close. That is not to say that O’Donnell failed to express sympathy for Duffy. Like former U.S. presidents, ex-presidents of ALPA belong to an exclusive club and, hence, pay each other a certain respect—regardless of their past differences.
“I wasn’t really welcome at ALPA functions during Hank’s presidency,” O’Donnell said. “I invited Charley Ruby to every convention we had. Duffy didn’t do that with me [something Duffy disputes and which probably requires a semantic interpretation of the term “invitation”], but I respected his right to run ALPA’s politics the way he wanted to. He was the president.”
With ALPA’s internal and external wars behind him, O’Donnell became passionate about tennis and physical fitness, pursuing them with the same intensity that characterized his presidency. But time and retirement had mellowed him only slightly.
“It’s a terrible thing to say, the analogy I’m going to use,” said O’Donnell of one old adversary, “but he was like Saddam Hussein, absolutely ruthless. Every airline’s MEC has got about a third who are wild radicals. Another third are dedicated, intelligent guys, but not forceful. The final third wouldn’t open their mouths if their lives depended on it.”
The bitterness that O’Donnell still harbored in 1991 from the myriad battles of his presidency emerged clearly in his rapid-fire Boston syntax. His conversation overflowed with tales of the intricate deals, misunderstandings, plots and counterplots that were the political reality of his 12 years as ALPA’s president. O’Donnell’s capacity to shrewdly sum up both friend and foe was evident in the series of finely drawn portraits (sometimes in acid) he sketched. The defeat that Hank Duffy inflicted in 1982 still rankled, although O’Donnell tried to pass it off with a show of philosophical detachment. Boston Irish are not known for accepting political defeat with equanimity.
“I was the big winner by losing,” O’Donnell declared in 1991.
From O’Donnell’s perspective, most of his troubles as ALPA’s president came about because the “radical third” made life miserable for him. His recollections ring with denunciations of men who are, for the most part, now retired or dead. O’Donnell’s list of “incompetent destructionists” is a long one: Rich Flournoy, the TWA captain who nearly succeeded in recalling Charley Ruby and subsequently became a thorn in O’Donnell’s side; Robert G. “Bob” Rubens, the North Central (later Republic) captain who as a regional vice-president harassed O’Donnell mercilessly, until the 1974 BOD abolished that office; Augie Gorse, the Eastern MEC chairman who bitterly criticized O’Donnell during his presidency; Nick Gentile and Bill Brown, the Delta leaders who were the gray eminencies behind Hank Duffy’s upset victory over O’Donnell in 1982.
But at the top of O’Donnell’s “enemies list” was Bill Arsenault, the stolid United MEC chairman whom he defeated for ALPA’s presidency in 1974. Arsenault plagued O’Donnell until February 1975, when the United MEC (for internal reasons having nothing to do with national politics), recalled Arsenault as MEC chairman. Gerry Pryde replaced Arsenault as United MEC Chairman and developed a close political alliance with O’Donnell. Arsenault never returned to power on United after 1975, but the difficulties he caused O’Donnell during his first five years in office made a lasting impression. O’Donnell visibly stiffened, the ghosts of dozens of old, mean-spirited political battles instantly materializing, when Bill Arsenault’s name was mentioned in 1991.
Arsenault came to United in the 1961 merger with Capital Airlines.2 Despite the minority position of the old Capital pilots once they became part of United, Arsenault rapidly became a factor in ALPA politics at the MEC level. He challenged and ultimately displaced from leadership positions the old United elite, men like Chuck Woods and Bill Davis. Until Arsenault undid himself with the United rank-and-file over contract negotiations in the mid 1970s, he was a fierce O’Donnell critic and a potent adversary.
O’Donnell explains Arsenault’s rise at United as being the result of apathy, and his view finds some support in the observations of Charles J. “Chuck” Pierce, who after a long career of service on United’s MEC, would become ALPA secretary during Duffy’s first term.
“The rise to power of the Capital pilots within the United MEC after the merger was a very touchy subject until the late 1960s,” Pierce says. “Even into the 1970s, a certain amount of resentment was directed at Bill Arsenault, because the ex-Capital pilots wielded power disproportionate to their size. They would work for and support one another in voting situations.”
Gerry Pryde, who replaced Arsenault as United MEC chairman in February 1975, discounts the “ex-Capital” factor as an issue in the internal politics that led to Arsenault’s recall.
“I’m quite sure that resentments directed at the ex-Capital pilots played some part in the recall of John Ferg [whom we will meet later] as MEC chairman during the late 1960s,” Pryde observes. “But by 1975, when Bill Arsenault got recalled, all of us—the old Capital pilots and the old United group—were minorities. New hires who had no recollection of the merger swamped us.”
Arsenault looked, talked, and acted like an old-fashioned labor boss, catering not at all to the sleek, sophisticated image most airline pilots preferred. If there is truth in the old notions that politics makes strange bedfellows, that opposites attract and equals repel, then perhaps that explains why Arsenault and O’Donnell were instantly at loggerheads—they were very much alike! But don’t try to tell J.J. O’Donnell that!
“He threatened to physically beat me up at least a dozen times,” O’Donnell declared in 1991. He insisted that the only civilized conversations he ever had with Arsenault were in social situations with ladies present. “When we were with our wives, Bill was always very nice, out of character. The next morning, he’s pushing me to the edge again. Arsenault always stood behind me, I could always feel him there, and he was big, husky, like a guy in an old 1930s labor movie.”
Politically, O’Donnell sounds and acts like a guy out of 1950s labor movie. Street-smart, tough, quick-witted as Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront, O’Donnell built his ALPA career on the bones of political opponents who took him lightly, or who thought his grammatical lapses indicated a lack of native shrewdness. To assess O’Donnell during his 12-year stewardship of ALPA, a review of a few critical episodes is necessary.
O’Donnell had won the ALPA presidency in 1970, after a successful but relatively unremarkable 20-year career at Eastern. Although he had served on the Eastern pilots’ Negotiating Committee for 14 years, O’Donnell was best known as a Charley Ruby loyalist who had displayed a high degree of doggedness in carrying out tasks assigned to him. O’Donnell had won a reputation as an expert in retirement and insurance (R&I) matters, and his willingness to help other ALPA groups restructure their R&I programs made him well-known to the pilots who specialized in this arcane area. But O’Donnell’s was certainly no “household” name to pilots flying the line. His reputation was nothing like a W.T. “Slim” Babbitt’s or a Jerry Wood’s, even among his fellow Eastern pilots.
“He was just a ‘boom,’ out of nowhere,” recalls former ALPA President J. Randolph “Randy” Babbitt, from his perspective as having been a junior second officer in 1970. “We heard of this R&I guy who seemed to be doing a good job and that everybody liked up in Boston, a small domicile that always had people active in ALPA work.”
Eastern’s Boston base, from which O’Donnell emerged, had provided more than its share of “inside players” who distinguished themselves behind the scenes in the “nuts and bolts” committees. Pilots like Vic Tully and Roy Anderson, both from the relatively small Boston base, fell into this category. Over the years, a characteristic of ALPA’s history was that small domiciles, where everybody knew everybody else, tended to elect and re-elect the same pilots to local office until their faces became quite familiar within ALPA’s inner circle. In a larger pilot base, relations between individual pilots were more impersonal, largely because of the constant coming and going. O’Donnell benefited from the “focused minority” aspect of his small pilot base in Boston andfrom the fact that his willingness to take on extra tasks had distinguished him as a “bear for work.”
“I was on the BOD when Charley Ruby got elected in 1962, and I was violently opposed to him,” O’Donnell recalled in 1991. “But once he was elected, I did my best to make him look like a hero. I had my problems with Charley, but I tried to be constructive. His enemies, including some guys on my own airline, held that against me; but I figure when you elect a guy president, you ought to get behind him. A lot of people spent all their energy attacking Charley and never gave him a chance to do the job as president.”
As we have seen, the internal politics at ALPA’s top have always been complex, riven by arcane rivalries that often had more to do with personal differences than policy matters. This personal factor was no less true of O’Donnell than it was of Clancy Sayen or Charley Ruby during their presidencies, but in O’Donnell’s case, critical policy issues had a large bearing on the political equation.
One prederegulation issue, skyjacking, deserves special attention, because it led to the 1972 Suspension of Service (SOS), an episode that almost made O’Donnell a one-term president. It also tells us something about him as a political leader and about ALPA as an organization.
Skyjacking was perhaps the most dangerous and prolonged crisis of the O’Donnell era. To deal with it, ALPA necessarily had to step on some powerful toes in government and management, thus permanently affecting both internal and external relationships. O’Donnell’s presidency began with the skyjacking crisis already full-blown. It was, second only to deregulation, the most immediate and personal crisis to confront professional airline pilots since the 1930s.3 In terms of their personal safety, the physical threat of bodily harm, skyjacking menaced every pilot everywhere, a hazard unrivaled in modern times.
Broadly speaking, skyjacking could be subdivided into several categories based on the purpose of the skyjacker. Some skyjackers were simply deranged individuals whose motives were obscure. Others were common criminals. The extortionist using the name “D.B. Cooper,” who parachuted from the rear ramp of a skyjacked Northwest B-727 on Nov. 24, 1971, after collecting a large cash ransom, was one of several such felons. Many U.S. skyjackers sought transportation to destinations denied to them for various reasons, usually political; individuals seeking to get to (or leave) Cuba after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 made up the bulk of this category. But by far the most troublesome skyjackers were political terrorists, who most often sprang from the snake’s nest of trouble that is the modern Middle East.
Terrorism is the last gasp of a political movement that has exhausted all other means of effectiveness. This act of desperation has political roots, hence the solution, in a long-term strategic sense, can only be political. But in the short term, skyjacking, whatever category of causation it falls into, can have tactical solutions.
Almost from the beginning of O’Donnell’s tenure as ALPA’s president, the skyjacking issue and the search for a tactical solution to it dominated his attention. Any number of the people O’Donnell brought into ALPA work, men who would later be regarded as his protégés (like Tom Ashwood of TWA), owed their rise to the skyjacking problem and ALPA’s search for a solution to it.
Technical solutions, however imperfect, eventually would be found for the problem. The details of the kind of airport security familiar to passengers all over the world today owe much to the technical contributions of ALPA and International Federation of Air Line Pilots Associations committees and the hundreds of individual pilots from many nations who worked so hard on them. But the fundamental problem in advancing a solution to the skyjacking problem lay in the realm of politics. J.J. O’Donnell’s whole presidency was, to some extent, colored by his response to skyjacking and the extraordinarily direct method many pilots favored to dramatize the seriousness of the skyjacking problem—the Suspension of Service, or SOS, concept.
A series of skyjacking incidents, several of them desperate and dramatic, forced O’Donnell’s hand. Aware that something as radical as grounding an airliner to make a political point would be controversial with airline pilots, O’Donnell prepared for it in unusual ways. One innovative step, which Charles Dent (United) suggested to O’Donnell, was a celebrated B-747 ride ALPA sponsored for nearly 300 United Nations personnel on Nov. 6, 1971.
The short flight from New York to Montreal in the rented Pan Am B-747 (piloted by Stan Doepke of Pan Am) had as its purpose to intensively lobby influential politicians from all over the world to pass ALPA’s “T-Plus” antiskyjacking program. Put simply, T-Plus was a comprehensive set of laws, penalties, and procedures for dealing with skyjacking. Among those being lobbied was future U.S. President George Bush, then U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Placing these world political leaders in a controlled and dramatic situation where they could hear the stories of more than 30 crewmembers who had been skyjacked (including pilots from recently defected American Airlines—with full approval of their ALPA-clone, the Allied Pilots Association)—won unanimous support among rank-and-file pilots.
Everybody who participated in the U.N. flight thought it went well. The roster of ALPA topsiders and MEC heavyweights aboard (including O’Donnell’s nemesis Bill Arsenault of United) was impressive. Tom Ashwood of TWA, who would later come within an eyelash of unseating Hank Duffy from ALPA’s presidency in 1986, acted as master of ceremonies. Ashwood functioned at top form, his cultivated British accent wowing the assembled politicos.
Former Executive Vice-President Merle C. “Skip” Eglet of Northwest, although no fan of Ashwood’s politically, remembers that he made a marvelous first impression: “Ashwood used the Queen’s English extremely well.”
All the international politicians who accepted ALPA’s hospitality on the Montreal excursion went home vowing immediate action by their countries. And nothing happened! Despite rave reviews in the press, heavy television news coverage, and all the back-slapping support, nothing happened! Terrorism slackened not at all, and skyjackings continued. The international community, for all the oral assurances that their U.N. representatives gave during the joyride to Montreal (complete with lavish meals at ALPA’s expense), resisted a coordinated attack on skyjacking.
Even such traditional agencies as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), headquartered in Montreal, offered no help in quelling the skyjacking problem. ICAO, founded in 1944 in a far-sighted attempt to give structure to what was obviously going to be a major post-World War II expansion of international aviation, would repeatedly fail to take effective action against skyjacking. Because ICAO required a two/thirds majority to pass rules, African and Arab nations were able to block the anti-skyjacking efforts of the international community. Despite massive lobbying efforts by IFALPA, with ALPA members spearheading the campaign, African and Arab nations generally continued to see skyjackers as “freedom fighters,” rather than as criminals.
While not as hamstrung as the ICAO, international political leaders were also divided and hesitant about how to handle skyjacking. ALPA, IFALPA, and professional airmen everywhere (including the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries), were united and determined to do something about it. Even the Israeli version of ALPA joined with IFALPA delegates to protest the skyjacking by their own government of an Arab airliner suspected of carrying guerrilla leaders. Israeli ALPA leader Y. Sheked flew to Washington, D.C., to support O’Donnell’s denunciation of Israel—a courageous act. So pilots everywhere were determined to take action jointly to end skyjacking once and for all.
But what should the pilots do? How could they get the serious attention of political leaders? J.J. O’Donnell, who was by nature a cautious and conservative man, listened with increasing alarm as rank-and-file airline pilots demanded drastic action. One idea, emanating from the European pilot groups in IFALPA, began to pick up momentum in the U.S. pilot community in the early 1970s. The idea that gained increasing support was for a symbolic temporary shutdown of all airline service for a short period.
Because the suspension of service, or SOS, tactic bore some resemblance to a traditional strike, it had obvious and immediate legal problems. American labor law, and particularly the Railway Labor Act of 1926 (including the “Pilots’ Amendment” of 1936),4 was designed precisely to prevent such “wildcat” actions as an SOS. Hence, any resort to the SOS tactic would need a careful and innovative legal approach, one that could be fully substantiated in both constitutional and statute law.
ALPA General Counsel Henry Weiss would eventually craft a defensible constitutional rationale for an SOS in 1981. By refusing to fly during a 24-hour shutdown (which was not a strike against their employers), airline pilots would, in effect, be petitioning Congress (and other governments around the world), for relief from skyjacking. The legal validity of this argument, which Henry Weiss devised almost entirely, would later be recognized by the Supreme Court when it upheld flag burning as “symbolic speech” and hence constitutionally protected.
But all that was in the future. In 1972 Weiss faced an immediate problem of justifying the skyjacking SOS in statute law. From his great breadth of experience in labor law, Weiss adapted the closest parallel cases he could find to serve ALPA’s purpose.
“I remembered that in the 1950s the Longshoremen’s Union refused to load ships with grain for Russia,” Weiss says. “They did so on the proposition that they were protesting not against their employers, but against government policy. That case eventuated in a Supreme Court decision that upheld the action. That gave legal foundation to the ill-arranged skyjacking SOS. I say ill-arranged because ALPA’s officers simply had not prepared the membership for the SOS.”
Regardless of its legal validity, the SOS idea spooked average line pilots, not only because it could get them fired, but because it ran counter to every tenet of their personal code. Airline pilots are not people who defy authority. Their whole ethos revolves around the concept of order, duty, and steadiness of purpose, all carried out within the framework of legitimate authority. To ask people bred in this environment to act like aerial “hippie protesters” was dangerous. Why then, did the SOS concept develop such momentum?
J. J. O’Donnell in 1991 thought he knew.
“You go to a meeting of the largest council in ALPA, which is United Council 12 in Chicago with twelve-hundred members [during the early 1970s], and you had thirty people there,” O’Donnell said hotly. “Twenty-seven of them are likely to be militants who want to carry sidearms in the cockpit!”
So O’Donnell concluded that the SOS concept, which he maintained was a bad idea, growing like the proverbial “Topsy,” resulted from the apathy of ALPA’s general membership and the activism of a militant few. Since the subsequent history of the SOS movement supports O’Donnell’s thesis, why did he agree to it? Barely three weeks after the expensive, ALPA-sponsored “Montreal Joyride,” the U.N. failed to take action on even the most elemental of the “T-Plus” proposals, one that would boycott nations giving asylum to skyjackers. The outrage of the international pilot community was such that the “crazies” won support for an SOS action, according to O’Donnell’s view. But regardless of his personal misgivings, O’Donnell would have to lead the charge for a world-wide shutdown, a “Global Suspension of Service.” On June 6, 1972, a special emergency meeting of the Executive Board approved the SOS, setting a date of June 19 for the action if the U.N. had not responded by then. IFALPA approved a coordinated SOS action on June 8, 1972, two days after ALPA’s decision.
“The stupid idiots called for a shutdown, policy as set by the BOD called for a shutdown, I didn’t call for a shutdown!” O’Donnell insisted in 1991. “Goddam it, they shouldn’t pass hairy-chested resolutions they don’t intend to implement, because if the BOD passes it, I’m going to try my darndest to implement it.”
O’Donnell was still learning his job in 1972, and no doubt uncertain of himself owing to the closeness of his victory in 1970. But it is still an indictment of his leadership at the time, that he would permit an SOS movement to get out of hand, if indeed he thought it wouldn’t work.
“I seriously believed that I could have shut it down…” O’Donnell said in the 1991 interview, his voice trailing off as he recalled the disaster that nearly made him a one-term president. “Certainly we had legitimate grievances, but….”
If in fact O’Donnell did oppose the SOS privately, his public activities gave no hint of it. Perhaps his reminiscences are more strongly molded by hindsight than remembrance, for as we shall see, the animosities that the failed 1972 SOS generated would haunt him for years. Certainly there is not the slightest hint of reluctance in O’Donnell’s public posture of support for the SOS at the time of the crisis, and many contemporaries do not remember events the way he does.
John Gratz of TWA, many times an MEC chairman (and recalled from office by his fellow TWA pilots almost as often), found himself in the thick of the 1972 SOS controversy almost by accident.
“I was elected MEC chairman on April 7, 1972, and it was one of the proudest moments of my life,” Gratz recalls. “I come from a union family. I remember my father once going to jail briefly over a strike, so I was confident that an SOS was the right thing to do. When I came to Washington, it was my first Executive Board meeting. My airline had been hit pretty hard by skyjacking, but I didn’t know anybody at the meeting so I tried to keep my mouth shut. Well O’Donnell made his spiel, and he said we needed an SOS resolution that the president would call with the concurrence of the Board if, in his opinion, it was warranted. Everybody kind of slumped down in their chairs. O’Donnell said, ‘Maybe you didn’t hear me too well,’ and he went through the whole thing again. Well, I rose to the bait and moved that we shut the world down. Everybody cheered, they moved to recess, and they whisked me away and told me to put it in writing, but I had a whole bunch of people helping me.”
To John Gratz and many of his contemporaries at the meeting that authorized the SOS, O’Donnell seemed four-square in favor of it. But regardless of any misgivings he might have privately harbored, we must remember that for purely tactical reasons O’Donnell would have to put up a brave front to give the SOS credibility.
During a nationwide live telecast of “Face the Nation” on the eve of the SOS, O’Donnell did just that. He appeared committed, militant, and willing to defy a court injunction, which the Air Transport Association (ATA), representing 18 airlines, had obtained on June 17, 1972, which seemed, on first reading, to bar ALPA from the action.
“I don’t know anything about the courts,” O’Donnell said in response to a question. “I’m not a lawyer. All I know is there’s no way I’m going to order my people to go to work tomorrow. The airlines are going to be shut down.”
O’Donnell appeared at the time to be willing to defy the courts and risk going to jail. His remarks induced a near state of panic in Bruce Simon, Henry Weiss’s law partner, who was monitoring the telecast in the studio. Simon, assuming that the telecast was being taped and could be altered, told O’Donnell they had to get the broadcast stopped or changed. But it was a live program.
“Bruce was standing right behind the camera,” O’Donnell recalls. “About 22 minutes past the hour, I get this question, and I say, ‘We’re not going to work,’ and Bruce stands up and says, ‘Oh my God!’“
Simon, aware of the grave consequences of announcing in advance that he would defy a court injunction, hustled O’Donnell out the studio’s back door immediately after the telecast and into hiding.
“I said, ‘What the hell’s the matter with you,’“ O’Donnell remembered later. “He says, ‘I’ve got to get you out of here before the sheriff throws handcuffs on you.’ We did not go back to the ALPA office. It was the most emotional experience I’ve had in my life. I didn’t make the policy, but that’s what the members wanted, that’s what the BOD said, and I didn’t have the luxury of choosing which policies to implement.”
John Gratz, the author of the SOS resolution, also went into hiding: “When O’Donnell disappeared, on the advice of friends I did, too. We went out to a motel, and we were all making jokes about the movie The Godfather. We ‘hit the mattresses.’“
Although Gratz laughs about the episode now, in 1972 the possibility of going to jail was not funny. Nor was the subsequent SOS fiasco an occasion for humor. The outcome of the 1972 SOS was at best disappointing, despite some isolated successes. Eastern, which had lost one of its own (First Officer Chuck Hartley, after whom Eastern would name its Miami training center) to a skyjacker’s bullet, shut down completely. Likewise the pilots of Northeast Airlines (who would later merge with Delta), managed a good shutdown. But faced with court injunctions against the SOS, other ALPA groups complied only spottily. United’s Bill Davis, who was an ALPA national officer, walked off a loaded B-747 just before pushback, and a few other brave individuals did likewise.
Eastern’s pilots came away from the 1972 SOS affair aggrieved at the lack of support from other ALPA pilot groups, resolved to vent their anger and frustration somewhere, somehow in the future—a dangerous matter for ALPA’s internal unity. But the Eastern pilots were operating without the threat of punishment, for Frank Borman, Eastern’s CEO, had approved their participation in the SOS and was willing to see his airline shut down. Other pilot groups faced a far different situation.
“I went in to see the president of TWA and said, ‘We’re having this SOS, I’m sure you’ve heard about it, so we’ll be shutting you down Sunday at midnight,’“ John Gratz remembers matter-of-factly. “He started hollering and calling me a mad dog union fool. I told him there was no way to stop it, but my guys were getting scared and trying to wiggle out, and my MEC was raising hell. So I learned that when you say you can lick anybody in the house, you damn well better be able to do it! It was bloody awful.”
With TWA wavering in its support for the SOS, other pilot groups looking for leadership also began weakening. The MEC chairmen of Braniff, Northwest, Pan American, Seaboard World, and Western Air Lines all called Gratz, informing him that if the TWA pilots, who were identified in the public mind most heavily with the action because of Gratz’s authorship of the SOS resolution, did not honor the SOS, neither would they. Gratz, with his own MEC crumbling, tried to tough it out. He bluffed and cajoled, bullied and begged his MEC, appearing outwardly confident of success. It was all to no avail. Gratz’s gamble fell apart during a disastrous telephone conference call among his 18 MEC members just preceding the SOS.
“I told them they were cowardly, yellow-bellied whiners. I said, ‘Man your battle stations,’ and slammed the phone receiver down,” Gratz recalls. “Pretty soon the phone rings, and it’s my best buddy, and he says, ‘John, nobody hung up when you hung up. They ain’t gonna do it.’“
Not only did Gratz’s MEC pull out of the SOS, they recalled him as MEC chairman—and not for the last time! With the collapse of TWA, the other airlines looking to it for leadership also folded.
J.J. O’Donnell was not a slow learner. By the time the aborted 1981 SOS, titled “Operation USA” (the acronym standing for “Unity for Safe Air Travel), rolled around, he was older, wiser, and much cagier. In one sense, O’Donnell would handle Operation USA brilliantly, like a concert violinist handles a Stradivarius. He never intended that Operation USA should ever actually take place. Having learned his lesson about the dangers of the SOS concept in 1972, O’Donnell would use Operation USA as a Machiavellian ploy to extort concessions from the new Reagan Administration. The only problem with O’Donnell’s brilliantly conceived strategy and performance during the 1981 SOS was that its political effect inside ALPA was not what he expected.
Operation USA was thus a simultaneous exercise in external and internal politics.5 O’Donnell frankly admitted in 1991 that Operation USA was a “grab bag” approach to settling issues that had arisen as the result of deregulation, plus some other long-standing grievances ALPA had with the way the FAA enforced certain rules.
Thus, Operation USA was a purely tactical ploy on which O’Donnell spent money lavishly. He hired consultants, expanded communications within ALPA, and generally succeeded in getting everyone “in the loop” by holding “pep rally” type meetings at various crew bases around the country. All this was necessary to convince the incoming Reagan administration that ALPA was serious, that the nation’s airlines really were going to shut down. O’Donnell’s problem was that to convince the Reagan people of ALPA’s seriousness, he first had to convince rank-and-file ALPA members. That required subterfuge, and it would lead to political problems.
“We got the nation’s attention in 1972, that we had worldwide concerns about skyjacking,” O’Donnell says. “But with the 1981 SOS, let’s be honest, it was about self-interest. We were trying to solve a lot of different problems. We spent millions of dollars whipping up the troops, getting them emotionally ready to walk out of their airplanes.”
In O’Donnell’s judgment, which he based not only on the failed 1972 SOS, but also on the recent history of ALPA’s strikes, if he had unleashed Operation USA it would have been, in his words “an absolute catastrophe.” So, O’Donnell’s game plan was to call off Operation USA when he thought he had extracted the maximum he could from it. He had no idea it would generate so much political heat inside ALPA.
In November 1980, shortly after the election of Ronald Reagan, the BOD once again authorized the Executive Board to call an SOS if the incoming Republican administration did not respond to ALPA’s concerns.
The timing was deliberate. O’Donnell, who had contacts with high-ranking members of Reagan’s campaign staff, knew that his best chance of influencing new Secretary of Transportation Drew Lewis was during the first weeks of his term in office.
Despite repeated campaigning against the Carter administration’s policies as they affected aviation, ALPA had been unable to secure any relief. The object of this pressure on the Carter administration (as it would later be on the Reagan administration) was to secure a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to adjudicate the most divisive of the several issues—crew complement.
Even a highly publicized day-long picketing of the White House in October 1980, just before the election (when it was most damaging to the Democrats), had not secured the PEB. But O’Donnell was almost certain (to the extent that any deal involving “politics” can be) that the incoming Republicans would accommodate ALPA.
“Because I was an Irish Catholic from Boston,” O’Donnell says, “everybody thought I was a Democrat. I have a lot of liberal views, but I was a registered Republican for many years. I was a strong supporter of Ronald Reagan, and I think 75 percent of airline pilots were, too. I thought it was in ALPA’s best interests not to endorse him, but I had good ‘ins’ with the Reagan people, particularly the White House staff, on both a working and a social basis.”
During the campaign, O’Donnell worked quietly for Reagan, one of the few labor union presidents to do so. The Reagan people were glad to have O’Donnell’s support. The quid pro quo for this work, O’Donnell was given to understand, would be speedy action on ALPA’s request for a PEB to decide, once and for all, the crew complement issue. So O’Donnell knew, long before the BOD meeting in November 1980 that he would not have to implement an SOS. O’Donnell had cleverly insured ALPA against the “catastrophe” he was sure an SOS would cause.
On Feb. 11, 1980, ALPA’s Executive Board canceled the SOS at O’Donnell’s urging. Two weeks later, living up to the bargain his subordinates had made with O’Donnell, Ronald Reagan announced the appointment of a PEB.
When the PEB met in early May 1981, ALPA got its day in court. But put simply, it was a foregone conclusion that the PEB that Reagan appointed would hand ALPA its head on a platter. Aside from window dressing, that’s exactly what happened, with consequences for O’Donnell’s political standing within ALPA that were to prove quite damaging. On every substantive issue, particularly the third-crewman concept, the PEB ruled against ALPA’s position. The only positive aspect of the Reagan Board was that it finally ended the long internal wrangle over crew complement. Henceforward, the third crew member, with whatever safety edge that extra set of eyes provided, would fade away as technology improved productivity in the cockpit. The long battle was lost, but at least it would no longer trouble ALPA internally.
For J.J. O’Donnell, political problems, compounded by the devastating impact of airline deregulation, were multiplying. O’Donnell could point to the “window dressing” successes of Operation USA: a voice in aircraft certification, new channels of communication with the FAA, the quashing of that agency’s attempt to use the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) as an enforcement tool, a function for which it had never been intended. But as the presidential election year of 1982 dawned, these benefits seemed trivial, and disaffection with O’Donnell spread. Part of this disaffection was simply that he had been in office long enough for a backlog of separate grievances to build up against him. The Northwest pilots, for example, felt that O’Donnell had not been sufficiently supportive of their 105-day strike in 1978, although when pressed for details, they generally admit that most of their complaints were more psychological than material.
Gerry Pryde of United puts it another way: “I was a close student of that strike, and what went wrong there had everything to do with the pilots of Northwest and little to do with J.J. O’Donnell. Kay MacMurray [the federal mediator assigned to the Northwest strike and, incidentally, former United pilot who had quit flying to become Sayen’s executive administrator during the mid-1950s] confirmed my judgment.”
Thus grievances emanating from separate airlines, and for varied reasons, nagged at O’Donnell. Many ALPA members traced their discontent to his handling of the SOS—some pilots disliked O’Donnell because they opposed the SOS concept, others denounced him for not carrying it through to completion.
The SOS idea has had a troubling history. Three times, in 1972, 1981, and as we shall see, during the Eastern strike of 1989, the SOS concept fractured ALPA’s internal unity. While preparation for the aborted 1981 SOS, Operation USA, was much better than for the skyjacking SOS of 1972, rank-and-file ALPA members (had O’Donnell permitted it to go forward) probably would not have adhered to it any better. When Eastern’s pilots, desperately at war with Frank Lorenzo during the 1989 strike, appealed to Hank Duffy for a nationwide SOS, he would make the same judgment as O’Donnell—that the basic SOS concept was unworkable.
In a sense, the SOS is ALPA’s nuclear weapon. Before any ALPA president dares launch it, he must be certain that the issue necessitating its use is of such paramount importance that the vast majority of airline pilots on every airline will unhesitatingly risk not only the loss of their careers, but also jail! Given the unfriendly structure of the federal court system since 1980, American labor law has been transformed. An SOS (even a local one) would almost certainly bring an injunctive crackdown. A nationwide SOS would almost certainly entail prison time for ALPA’s leaders. The antilabor proclivities of judges whom Ronald Reagan and George Bush appointed, and who by 1991 constituted over 80 percent of the federal bench, would almost certainly land ALPA leaders down to the local level in jail.
The abortive 1981 SOS would have serious political consequences for O’Donnell. His opponents believed he was vulnerable because of it, and they were determined that the 1982 BOD meeting would not see a repeat of the 1978 meeting. In 1978, O’Donnell’s opponents failed to unite on a candidate, and he won a surprisingly easy reelection. Only Bob Shipner, one of the chronically disaffected Eastern pilots, challenged O’Donnell. Shipner had no following outside his own airline and negotiated a withdrawal (in return for a chance to address the delegates) on the eve of balloting in 1978.
O’Donnell by 1991 still fumed at the Shipner episode of 1978, because Shipner, in return for being allowed access to the rostrum before withdrawing from the race (which was, technically, a violation of the rules), agreed to say nothing derogatory about O’Donnell. Angelo “Angie” Marcione of TWA, chairman of the Nominating Committee, at first refused Shipner’s request as improper. But O’Donnell encouraged Marcione, who was a strong supporter, to bend the rules in the interest of saving money and time.
“Running a Board of Directors meeting was expensive as hell,” O’Donnell recalled. “I didn’t want to appear anxious to have Shipner withdraw. But he starts this terrible cutting up of me, about no leadership. Then he withdrew. My friends were just totally bulgy-eyed. There was no applause for him—total silence. Shipner only had a few crazies. I had 95 percent of the votes.”
Many ALPA insiders had expected the 1978 election to be a repeat of the extremely close 1974 election, which O’Donnell, still smarting from the failed 1972 SOS crisis, had won by an eyelash. Skip Eglet of Northwest, a close student of ALPA’s political dynamics who has held a variety of important ALPA offices, including executive vice-president, cites O’Donnell’s skillful pre-BOD maneuvers in explaining this lack of opposition in 1978.
“There’s a certain anomaly in the 1978 election, because nobody was terribly pleased with O’Donnell,” Eglet says. “In 1978 we had a 105-day strike on Northwest, and I was disappointed in the support we got from O’Donnell. So I made a pilgrimage to Seattle to visit Gerry Pryde of United to try to convince him to run against O’Donnell.”
Pryde, the former United MEC chairman who had replaced Bill Arsenault after his recall, was an authentic “mover and shaker” in ALPA politics. If anybody had the clout, in terms of respect and name recognition, to unseat O’Donnell in 1978, it would have been Pryde. But Pryde’s candidacy had a problem.
“I felt O’Donnell had done a good job,” Pryde says frankly. “I had worked with him very closely as MEC chairman, and I thought that while he started out making a lot of mistakes, he grew into the job and became a well-respected leader within labor. He didn’t make the same mistakes twice.”
So Gerry Pryde would not challenge O’Donnell. He told Eglet and others who were urging him to run for ALPA’s presidency that he was unwilling to live in Washington, D.C., which was, in effect true, but still something of a subterfuge. Imagine the anti-O’Donnell faction’s embarrassment when they discovered, barely a month later, that Pryde had, in effect, joined O’Donnell’s slate and was running, unopposed, for first vice-president.
“I don’t know whether a deal was previously made or if O’Donnell found out that people were out actively recruiting people to run against him and decided to head them off,” Eglet muses. “I picked the right guy [the widely respected Pryde], I just didn’t offer him the right job.”
Pryde denies that he was in any way consciously a part of an O’Donnell slate in 1978. But in effect he was. The true mark of a clever and effective politician is when he rules through others, with his unseen hand motivating others to take actions without their being aware of it. By every standard of measurement available, O’Donnell fit that definition.
For J.J. O’Donnell, the 1978 BOD meeting was the high-water mark of his political control of ALPA. But the tumultuous events of the post-1978 period would offer the anti-O’Donnell forces new opportunities. Next time, they vowed, it would be a different story. They would be organized and ready in 1982.