CHAPTER 7
THE END OF THE O’DONNELL ERA
The Election of 1982
J.J. O’Donnell’s last campaign for the
presidency of ALPA ended in defeat, frustration, and a welter of bad feelings.
Multiple allegations of deal-making skullduggery came from all sides—standard
fare for ALPA’s politics, historically. Because he carried the accumulated
baggage of 12 years in office, J.J. O’Donnell knew he faced an uphill fight.
Still, he was a known factor—which counted for something in uncertain times. In
any close election, small factors, any one of which might merit the definition
“decisive,” come into play. But almost certainly, O’Donnell would not have lost
to Hank Duffy in 1982 had it not been for the emergence of the “Delta Machine.”
Delta’s pilots had always been relatively low key in their ALPA activities.
On one occasion, at the 1976 BOD meeting, their general quiescence was such that
they failed to exercise their right even to nominate a candidate for
executive vice-president (EVP). Two pilots from TWA wound up fighting it out
with each other for the EVP post! As for ALPA’s national offices, since the days
of First Vice-President Stewart W. Hopkins (who, we must remember, was not a
real Delta pilot, having come over in the Chicago & Southern merger in
1953), the Delta pilot group had generally not bothered to compete.
“Delta wasn’t a national player in the 1970s, but they had my grudging
admiration at BODs because they had an extremely well-disciplined MEC,” says
Merle C. “Skip” Eglet of Northwest. “They were knowledgeable, conversant with
the issues important to them, and capable in debating their position. They were
far from the mainstream of ALPA in the 1970s, but they did an outstanding job of
getting their position heard—seldom passed, but always heard.”
Until Hank Duffy’s campaign in 1982, only two Delta pilots, Al Bonner and
George Berg, had mounted campaigns for ALPA’s presidency before, both feeble,
and oddly enough, both in competition with each other at the same BOD meeting in
1974. In the early 1970s, Bonner, already ill and no longer flying the line
owing to the heart condition that would eventually kill him, had briefly made
himself a factor at the national level as an O’Donnell supporter. But generally,
until the emergence of Hank Duffy as a visible presence in ALPA’s national
councils owing to the crew complement controversy, most airline pilots regarded
the Delta pilot group as only minimally “in” ALPA, and certainly not “of” it—at
least in the sense of being hard-nosed unionists.
All that was about to change. Beginning in 1980, a dynamic group of Delta
pilots whose leader was MEC Chairman Nick Gentile (pronounced “Gentilly”), began
to remake that image, and they would shortly burst upon ALPA’s national
political scene. This group of Delta pilots, whose political skills (in the ALPA
context) matched in “professionalism” anything available to Democrats and
Republicans nationally, would unseat an incumbent seeking reelection—an
unprecedented event in ALPA’s 51-year history.
Both admirers and detractors alike would call their disciplined operation
the “Delta Machine.” Nick Gentile’s lieutenants, Bill Brown, L.C. “Les” Hale,
and Cameron W. “Cam” Foster, would finetune the Delta Machine into a formidable
political weapon and use it to win a stunning first-ballot victory for Hank
Duffy. Delta had become to ALPA what Napoleon feared China
would one day be to the world. “Let China sleep,” Napoleon said, “for
when it wakes the world will tremble.”
August H. “Augie” Gorse, who won election as Eastern’s MEC chairman in
1980, believes the genesis of the Delta Machine lay in Nick Gentile’s staunch
unionism—an unusual trait for a Delta pilot. According to the “conventional
wisdom,” Delta pilots were historically the kids born with silver spoons in
their mouths, beneficiaries of a benign management they never had to fight. This
view of Delta pilots was particularly prevalent among the Eastern pilot group.
But Augie Gorse knew it wasn’t true of all Delta pilots.
“The first person I heard from after getting elected MEC chairman in 1980
was Nick Gentile,” Gorse recalls. “He said, ‘It’s time for Eastern and Delta to
bury the hatchet.’ Nick was a damn good union man—he acted, talked, and thought
like a union man.”
Among the things Gorse and Gentile agreed upon was that TWA and United,
under their respective MEC chairmen, Harry Hoglander and John Ferg, had become
the proverbial bullies on ALPA’s block. Gorse and Gentile both believed that
O’Donnell deferred far too much to these “elephants,” and they feared that John
Ferg in particular, largely owing to United’s recent “Blue Skies” contract
(which we will discuss later) was setting a precedent in contract negotiations
that would prove ruinous to ALPA in the long run. Gorse and Gentile also agreed
that the major reason for the dominance of the United–TWA alliance was the
rivalry between their own two airlines. Reflecting the pressures inherent in
their competitive route structures, Delta and Eastern often canceled each other
out in ALPA affairs.
“We both agreed that it was time we stopped fighting each other and did
something about the sorry state of ALPA,” Gorse recalls.
From Augie Gorse’s point of view, that meant doing something about J.J.
O’Donnell. Gorse, an engineering graduate of Clemson University who speaks with
an authentic southern accent, retired on a medical disability from Eastern in
1988. He believes that the bad blood between himself and O’Donnell (which many
people saw as a “given” in Eastern’s internal affairs) has been overblown,
largely because they seemed such polar opposites in terms of their sectional
backgrounds.
“We were in the same class as new hires in 1956, and to this day, I admire
and respect J.J. O’Donnell,” Gorse insists. “I think that through his first two
terms, he did a damn fine job as ALPA president. The problem I had with him was
just that he stayed in office a mite too long.”
Gorse, well aware that O’Donnell saw him as an archenemy at the time of his
election as Eastern’s MEC chairman in 1980, was capable of joking about it. At
the spring 1982 Executive Board, Gorse bantered publicly about his rocky
relationship with O’Donnell.
“John, set your fears at ease,” Gorse said lightly as he addressed the
chair during a routine session. “I know I sometimes have a tendency to inflame
your fears.”
Actually, this levity between O’Donnell and Gorse came at a time when
everybody thought O’Donnell’s ALPA career was over and might have accounted for
it. In the spring of 1982, nobody expected O’Donnell to run again for a fourth
term that fall. He had seemed to foreclose that possibility at the previous
Executive Board meeting.
In his opening remarks to the assembled MEC chairmen and national officers
at the 38th Regular Executive Board in November 1981, O’Donnell dropped his
bombshell. After recounting the woes besetting ALPA, all of which he described
as having their origin in the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, O’Donnell
launched into a discourse on the effect of these troubles internally. As
everyone at the meeting knew, the Eastern pilots under the leadership of Augie
Gorse were seriously considering a formal campaign advocating O’Donnell’s
immediate recall, largely owing to their dissatisfaction with his handling of
the PATCO strike.
“There are some who are deliberately exploiting these difficult times,”
O’Donnell said, as he struggled to control himself. “I have been a target of
this for some time. I am frank to admit my anger at these tactics. I fully
intend to complete this term of office through 1982. However, I shall not
seek another term as president.” (Emphasis added.)
As we have seen, long-standing animosities had existed between O’Donnell
and his own pilot group. The root of these disputes lay deep in the tangled past
of Eastern’s internal politics at the MEC level. A messy conflict between
O’Donnell and Eastern’s Retirement and Insurance (R&I) Committee Chairman
Charles “Chuck” Dyer over basic investment philosophy, particularly as it
applied to real estate, had further inflamed the situation. By the time of the
PATCO strike these animosities had festered into a formal resolution that the
“A very strong movement was afoot among his own MEC to circulate recall
ballots among the general membership,” says Skip Eglet of Northwest, who was an
EVP at the time. Eglet, an ex-Marine aviator who was at one time an Eastern
pilot (before a furlough in the early 1960s sent him job-hunting to Northwest),
was a perceptive observer of Eastern’s internal dynamics.
“I was violently opposed to recalling John,” Eglet says. “But a lot of
influential players at Eastern were really upset with him over a lot of little
things.”
As Delta’s MEC chairman at the time, Hank Duffy actively involved himself
in stopping Eastern’s effort to recall O’Donnell. Arguing that the
repeated efforts to recall ALPA presidents historically had been
counterproductive, Duffy was instrumental in persuading Augie Gorse to drop the
matter before it came to the floor of the Executive Board meeting “officially.”
O’Donnell’s announcement that he would “not seek” another term as ALPA’s
president was almost certainly related to the recall movement. O’Donnell, a
proud, disciplined, and self-contained man, would not admit that, of course. But
in an oral history interview in January 1991, he came close to it.
“To be very honest with you, I thought I wouldn’t get through the summer of
1981,” O’Donnell conceded, as he expressed his continuing belief that a
“conspiracy” existed between Gentile and Gorse. “I had no problem with people
constantly criticizing, if they came in and grabbed an oar and helped us pull
this thing through the water. Nick Gentile was not involved in that [kind of
criticism], but the people [who were] were considered his fronts. Jack Bavis
pursued Nick on this, and he denied that he was part of that conspiracy.”
Clearly, O’Donnell believed at the time that a conspiracy to force his
resignation was building up in the summer of 1981. He almost certainly chose to
defuse it by announcing his intention to step down from ALPA’s presidency at the
end of his term in December 1982. What this meant, so far as most ALPA officers
were concerned, was that the 1982 BOD would see an open presidential election
with no incumbent.
Almost immediately, speculation about who would fill O’Donnell’s shoes
became the hot topic at the Executive Board. Almost nobody noticed what should
have been an obvious fact about O’Donnell’s announcement—it had left some
semantic wiggle room. Unlike Lyndon B. Johnson, who said “I shall not seek and I
will not accept” another term in his withdrawal announcement
following the 1968 Tet Offensive in
Skip Eglet, whose relationship with O’Donnell went back to the time when
Eglet had flown as a probationary copilot with O’Donnell at Eastern, had gotten
to know O’Donnell very well during his tenure as EVP. Eglet saw nothing
suspicious in O’Donnell phraseology. Like almost everybody present during
O’Donnell’s speech, Eglet shares the perception that O’Donnell’s withdrawal from
the upcoming presidential race in 1982 was sincere. Augie Gorse, who had more
reason than most to be suspicious of O’Donnell, agrees.
“There is no question in my mind that when he said he was quitting after
1982 he meant it,” says Gorse. “I certainly didn’t see it as just some kind of
political maneuver.”
But some O’Donnell supporters, like Jack Bavis and Tom Ashwood, more
attuned to the nuances of O’Donnell’s psyche, were less certain. They believed
that O’Donnell’s decision to retire from ALPA was much more tentative and
conditional, and that it was motivated primarily by personal matters that were
specific to that particular time of his life. They understood that if certain
personal conditions in O’Donnell’s life changed, then his political plans might
change, too. But for the moment, both Ashwood and Bavis, who harbored ambitions
of their own, had no alternative but to accept O’Donnell’s announcement as
genuine. It seems, in retrospect, that O’Donnell was afflicted with the same
kind of midlife restlessness that in 1962 caused Clancy Sayen to leave ALPA’s
presidency in mid-term.
“I would say, at that point, I was 60 percent in favor of running again,”
O’Donnell said in 1991 of his thinking at the time of his “withdrawal”
announcement 10 years earlier. But he emphasized and reemphasized that his
decision had nothing to do with ALPA politics. “For solely personal reasons,
solely personal reasons, I was concerned whether I was going to finish
1982.”
O’Donnell’s after-the-fact recollections are at variance with what he was
saying at the time about his reasons for withdrawal, which cited internal
political dissension exclusively as the source of his decision. But O’Donnell
clearly was open to new challenges and a career change. He had alluded to this
just before his withdrawal statement.
“I want to advise you that I have recently had an offer of an attractive
position with a major airline,” O’Donnell told the delegates just before
announcing his unwillingness to run another presidential race. His friends
understood that he wanted to get on with the next phase of his life, which some
observers thought might include government service or even a run for political
office. The only question in their minds was whether he would serve out his full
ALPA term. But O’Donnell put their speculations to rest.
“After much inner searching,” O’Donnell told the delegates of his job
offer, “I have decided that my principal obligation is to ALPA. I cannot turn my
back on my responsibilities to our members’ interests.”
Although O’Donnell did not tell the delegates anything further, the job he
alluded to was as vice-president for government relations at Eastern Airlines.
Frank Borman, Eastern’s CEO, formally offered O’Donnell the job when a routine
retirement left that Washington, D.C., position vacant. Borman
called Augie Gorse to, in effect, “clear” it with the Eastern pilot group. Gorse
gave O’Donnell his approval, possibly seeing it as a convenient way to ease him
out of ALPA’s presidency by “kicking him upstairs.”
Staring directly at Augie Gorse and the other Eastern pilot representatives
as he made the announcement that he would not “seek”
another term, O’Donnell
concluded: “It is my sincere hope that those who are enjoying destructive
sharpshooting at various officers, myself included, would work constructively
toward our common goals in 1982.”
Aside from his personal needs, O’Donnell’s motivation in taking himself out
of the 1982 race owed much to another undeniable political fact—he had totally
lost control of his own MEC. An ALPA president who cannot control his own MEC
stands on shaky ground. Once elected, of course, he can continue in office with
minimal support from his own MEC. Indeed, O’Donnell had done so earlier. But on
the eve of a national campaign, the lack of a stable MEC base upon which to
stand while seeking reelection was a formidable handicap.
Historically, some very strong candidates for national office had fallen
victim to the politics of their own MECs. O’Donnell’s political career in ALPA
had been unique in that he had survived at the top with a divided MEC behind
him; but as the 1982 election approached, it was no longer merely “divided.” A
clear majority of the
In general, a pilot seeking national office without the support of his own
MEC has had virtually no chance of succeeding. Even candidates who possessed
substantial credentials, long ALPA service, and rank-and-file appeal faced
impossible odds. For example, Lee Higman of United, whose service dated from the
days when he was a Boeing 247 copilot, would fail despite a list of credentials
that was almost unrivaled in ALPA’s history. Higman had served on a stunning
array of blue ribbon committees, had written the first administrative policy
manual for ALPA Field Offices, and commanded rank-and-file appeal as a directly
elected regional vice-president. But he got nowhere when he challenged O’Donnell
in 1974. The reason for Higman’s failure was that United’s MEC, committed to
their chairman Bill Arsenault and under his tight control, refused to endorse
Higman’s candidacy. Rank-and-file appeal counts for nothing in an ALPA
presidential election—only MEC members vote.
Assuming that O’Donnell’s decision to retire from ALPA’s presidency at the
end of his third term in December 1982 was genuine (or at a minimum “40
percent” genuine, as he insists), what happened in the interim to change his
mind? At the time of the spring 1982 Executive Board meeting, O’Donnell had
still not reversed his noncandidate status. But strangely, he sounded
like a candidate.
The bankruptcy of Braniff, which happened less than two weeks before the
meeting convened on May 25, 1982, sent a seismic shock through the assembled
Executive Board. Braniff’s fate and the misfortune of its pilot group absolutely
dominated conversation in the hospitality suites, hallways, and the meeting room
itself. At first glance, one might think that Braniff’s failure would be the
final nail in O’Donnell’s political coffin. But ironically, it opened several
political avenues to him. By reminding the delegates that he had predicted
“major bankruptcies” would result from deregulation and reprising portions of
his previous speeches opposing it, O’Donnell was, in effect, saying, “I told you
so” to his internal critics while warning of a grim future.
“The Braniff situation would not have occurred in a regulated environment,”
O’Donnell told the delegates. “One does not need much imagination to realize the
problems of the past were insignificant compared to those we face today. Some of
us do not have to worry, it seems; but five years ago, the Braniff pilots didn’t
have to worry either.”
As O’Donnell cited a long list of crises looming in ALPA’s future, from
“cabotage” to “the deficiencies of airline managements,” he not so subtly
reminded Executive Board members that having friends in high places was the best
insurance against future catastrophe.
“Our objectives cannot be achieved solely through collective bargaining,”
O’Donnell declared.
“Our relations with the Reagan administration are a vital
link—perhaps more influential than any other avenue available to us today. It is
critical that we do not lose these assets.”
Because O’Donnell missed no opportunity to remind the delegates of his
closeness to and influence with the Reagan White House, it all sounded very much
like a campaign speech. His approach, demeanor, and emphasis were not at all
those of a man whose political sun was setting. But strangely, most of the
assembled delegates, taking O’Donnell firmly at his earlier word that he would
not “seek” another term, did not interpret it that way.
With O’Donnell seemingly out the picture, several candidates had begun
testing the waters. The May Executive Board served as a sounding board for
people with presidential ambitions. As they took the pulse of their
contemporaries, none of them paid much attention to O’Donnell. Jack Bavis,
O’Donnell’s executive administrator, and Tom Ashwood, ALPA’s secretary, were
among those considering presidential runs who could logically expect to receive
O’Donnell’s blessing. Ashwood’s comments to the Executive Board indicated that
O’Donnell had not yet reversed his noncandidacy position and that everything was
still wide open. Likewise, Jack Bavis was busily lining up support before
announcing his candidacy. If anybody should have been privy to O’Donnell’s
intention to get back into the race, it would have been Ashwood and Bavis.
Normally, ALPA’s political season would not open until after the May
Executive Board. Both Ashwood and Bavis had tested the waters and liked the
results. Each planned to formally launch his campaign in June. Likewise, John
Gratz of TWA and Tom Beedem of Northwest planned to announce their candidacies.
Hank Duffy, who also intended to enter the race, was so sure that O’Donnell was
out of the picture that he even went so far as to consult with him about
strategy and tactics. In fact, Duffy insists to this day that if he had known
that O’Donnell intended to run again, he probably would not have entered the
race himself.
Sometime in either late May or early June 1982 (the exact date is
uncertain), O’Donnell surprised everybody by announcing that he had changed his
mind and would be a candidate for reelection to ALPA’s presidency once
again—this time for an unprecedented fourth term. In retrospect, Tom Ashwood
admits he should have seen it coming.
“John did not consult me about the withdrawal announcement, and my jaw
dropped when I found out afterward that Henry Weiss had drafted it,” says
Ashwood.
“In 1981, John was vacillating,”
Ashwood says. “He was playing the game of ‘Will he run or won’t he.’ I was
anxious for John to make a decision because I thought I had a chance to win. But
there was no way I would have run against him. On a number of occasions during
1981, John said, ‘I have earned the right to run unopposed.’ He believed the
Association should recognize this by not putting up any candidates against him.
I warned him that this was dangerous and unrealistic.”
In Ashwood’s opinion, the announcement that he would “not seek” another
term never amounted to anything more than a misguided attempt to elicit a “Draft
O’Donnell” movement. But Ashwood admits that it didn’t register on him
immediately. Ashwood says he would have seen through this ploy earlier had he
known that ALPA’s general counsel, Henry Weiss, of whom he was deeply
suspicious, had consulted with O’Donnell and drafted the “withdrawal”
announcement for him. Put simply, had Ashwood known that Weiss was involved, he
would have been more sensitive to the dodges that lawyers so often put into
language.
Jack Bavis, who was closer to O’Donnell than anybody else in ALPA, was even
slower than Ashwood to realize that O’Donnell’s plan was to encourage a “draft”
movement. Any number of ALPA “movers and shakers” believe that Bavis would have
been the most formidable candidate to carry the O’Donnell faction’s banner.
Bavis was a respected administrator who had wide contacts within ALPA, he was a
skilled negotiator, and his personality lacked O’Donnell’s sharp edges. Bavis
was in the midst of planning his own announcement when O’Donnell pulled the rug
out from under him.
“I confess I was deeply hurt by O’Donnell’s turnabout,” Bavis says. “I had
served John loyally for more than a decade, he knew I wanted to run, and he let
me think I would have his support. I guess there’s no other word for it—he
deceived me.”
Skip Eglet was among the first to find out that O’Donnell would be
returning to the political fray. Only days after the May 1982 Executive Board
ended, Eglet was conferring with O’Donnell in the latter’s eighth floor office
at the ALPA building in downtown Washington, D.C. O’Donnell startled Eglet by
suddenly announcing that he had changed his mind about running for reelection.
“By the fall of 1981, John was in so much trouble that it never occurred to
me that his phraseology in withdrawing was meant to leave the door open to a
draft,” Eglet recalls. “In retrospect, I guess I should have been more sensitive
to the nuances. When I asked him why he was changing his mind, he said, ‘There
are some people out there that I simply cannot leave this union in the hands
of.’”
Augie Gorse clearly topped the list of “some people” to whom O’Donnell
could not entrust ALPA. John Gratz of TWA, who had been among the first to
announce that he would be a candidate, did not worry O’Donnell because he did
not think Gratz could win. Hank Duffy of Delta was someone with whom O’Donnell
had always enjoyed good relations and, under different circumstances, might have
secured something approaching his blessings, if not an outright endorsement. But
the budding alliance between Delta’s leadership and Augie Gorse absolutely
enraged O’Donnell, and almost certainly was the key factor in his decision to
reenter the race. In short, O’Donnell feared that Augie Gorse would wind up
running ALPA through his alliance with Delta.
“Things changed substantially at the May Executive Board in 1982,”
O’Donnell said in 1991 of his 1982 decision to reenter the race. “With Augie
Gorse talking to Nick Gentile and Bill Brown, I felt like I had to get back into
it. But not because of Hank Duffy’s candidacy. Frankly, I liked Hank. I just
didn’t like the guys supporting him.”
O’Donnell based his 11th-hour attempt to recover his political fortunes on
his ties to Ronald Reagan. Although the evidence is anecdotal, the consensus of
opinion is that the typical ALPA member supported Ronald Reagan’s candidacy in
1980. As we have seen, O’Donnell began building ties with the Reagan campaign
staff in 1980 and would later capitalize on those contacts during the 1981
“Operation USA” affair. All evidence indicates that O’Donnell believed that he
could rekindle his political spark within ALPA by claiming that his ties with
the Reagan administration would be ALPA’s salvation. When coupled with the truly
disturbing effects of Braniff’s bankruptcy, this influence could be the winning
factor for him in 1982. If he could convince members of the BOD that he could
better serve ALPA as a go-between with the Reagan administration than any other
candidate, then his chances were good.
In O’Donnell’s opening address to the May 1982 Executive Board, he made
certain that the delegates knew of his pro-Reagan leanings, and he wasted no
time in depicting himself as ALPA’s best hope for putting these connections to
use. But this approach held hazards for O’Donnell. He had no sooner launched
upon his campaign to hitch a ride on the Reagan bandwagon, when he fell afoul of
the LPP issue. Augie Gorse made sure that O’Donnell would stub his toe on the
LPPs.
As we have seen, Reagan canceled the Carter administration’s LPP
regulations upon taking office in January 1981. Because the Braniff bankruptcy
had focused attention on the fact that the LPPs specified in the Airline
Deregulation Act of 1978 had never been “revised” as promised by the Reagan
administration, O’Donnell confronted an obvious problem.
“Our objective must be combined legislative and contractual LPPs,”
O’Donnell declared to the Executive Board members. “The Carter administration
did not send its draft LPP regulations until January 18, 1981, three days before
President Reagan was inaugurated. For the past year, we’ve been fighting the
industry to get new regulations. The industry is fighting us tooth and nail.
Last Wednesday I met with [Secretary of Labor] Ray Donovan on the question of
acting immediately on the provisions of Section 43 of the Airline Deregulation
Act.”
Clearly, O’Donnell was doing his utmost to shield the Reagan administration
(and himself) from any blame on the LPP issue. His attempt to link the LPP delay
to the Carter administration made little sense, and his repeated denunciations
of Jimmy Carter, who was in no way responsible for the long delay, struck a note
of blatant political pandering. O’Donnell would later insist that Carter’s LPPs
“as written” were worthless. But unemployed pilots clearly preferred flawed LPPs
to none at all.
“I’m very upset over the long delay that has taken place since the law was
enacted in 1978,” O’Donnell said to the Executive Board. “But I do agree that
additional time was necessary to rewrite the terrible rules that were put forth
by President Carter.”
For O’Donnell to beat on the dead horse of Jimmy Carter and blame him for
the absence of deregulation LPPs more than a year after he had left office
struck many Board members as disingenuous at best and downright shifty at worst.
Focusing additional blame on airline management, which opposed the LPPs from the
beginning, simply restated the obvious and only compounded the problem.
“You can be sure that the airlines are aggressively opposing Donovan’s
efforts,” O’Donnell said. “In the meantime, we must give high priority to
obtaining LPPs in our contracts. We’d like you all to go back to your airlines
and say,‘Hey look, we need the LPPs.”
O’Donnell’s critics were quick to pick up on these weaknesses, particularly
his contention that LPPs should be achieved through collective bargaining rather
than by federal legislation. To make clear that O’Donnell had failed in his
efforts to get the Reagan administration to issue the LPPs, Augie Gorse
introduced a formal resolution that began: “WHEREAS the long-awaited LPPs have
not been forthcoming, and WHEREAS there exist today three separate ALPA pilot
groups on the street…,” and concluded by urging O’Donnell to “continue his
efforts in the legislative arena to secure LPPs, including ‘First Right
of Hire.’”
Gorse’s resolution set off a long floor debate that put O’Donnell
thoroughly on the defensive. With the Braniff bankruptcy on every Executive
Board member’s mind, Joe Baranowski, Braniff’s MEC chairman, pointed out the
obvious: “Our salvation is going to be in the legislative arena [emphasis
added], with the deregulation act LPPs.”
Amidst angry cries for action, Wes Davis of Frontier said, “I don’t mean to
be disparaging toward President O’Donnell, but is that the best we can do, just
keep pushing? This is the most serious situation facing us right now, and it
seems a bit ineffective.”
Obviously discomfited by the furor Augie Gorse’s LPP resolution had stirred
up, O’Donnell sought to defend himself and shift blame from Ronald Reagan. He
praised Nancy Kassebaum, the Republican Senator from Kansas, for her help in
putting “pressure on the Department of Labor.” Then, perhaps realizing that he
had inadvertently called attention to the fact that it was Reagan’s appointees
who were delaying the LPPs, O’Donnell shifted to an attack on the
Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. “We think that the regulations are
going to face trouble in the House of Representatives.”
But this approach also called attention to Reagan’s failure to issue the
LPPs—Congress had already sent up LPPs once. O’Donnell, in obvious
frustration, finally resorted to a blatant appeal to what he saw as
rank-and-file ALPA members’ pro-Reagan views, obviously hoping that by going
“over the heads” of delegates attending the Executive Board, he could score
political points.
“We sure as hell can’t correct the mistakes of the last thirty years by the
U.S. Congress, and that’s what we’re living with right now,” O’Donnell said
angrily. "They like to blame it on President Reagan. I’m talking about the U. S.
House of Representatives.”
O’Donnell’s emergence as a champion of the “Reagan Revolution” struck many
observers as forced. Although O’Donnell insisted that he had always been a
registered Republican, many close associates were surprised when he came “out of
the closet,” so to speak. A long list of ALPA heavyweights, foes like
Northwest’s Tom Beedem and Skip Eglet, as well as friends like TWA’s Tom
Ashwood, thought O’Donnell was a staunch, Boston-Irish Democrat!
“I always accepted the fact that O’Donnell was a Democrat,” Ashwood says.
“It came as a surprise when I discovered he was a fairly strong Republican, but
John managed to conceal it very well until Reagan ran in 1980. He really was
sincerely, terribly, genuinely smitten with Ronald Reagan.”
O’Donnell certainly wasn’t concealing it by 1982. “He waved the Reagan
Republican banner pretty hard during the 1982 campaign,” Skip Eglet recalls. “It
was a surprise, because everybody thought he was a Democrat—maybe a Reagan
Democrat, but still a Democrat.”
Bob Bonitatti, whom O’Donnell had hired as ALPA’s Legislative Affairs
Director in 1975, could have disabused Eglet and Ashwood of their illusions. As
a Republican operative who had served in the Ford Administration and would drop
ALPA immediately to return to the White House as a special assistant to
President Reagan in 1981, Bonitatti knew that O’Donnell was a Republican.
“Why did he keep it a secret?” Bonitatti asks rhetorically. “If you were
the president of a labor union and you had ambitions within organized labor, as
O’Donnell did, would you broadcast your Republican leanings?”
In the final analysis, O’Donnell’s emphasis on his connections with the
Republican administration might have backfired. With Hank Duffy as his opponent,
a man whose established Republican credentials as a county chairman were beyond
question, that issue could be neutralized. But even more damaging, by 1982 a
good many MEC members were having second thoughts about the Reagan
administration. Historically, pilots who are actively involved in ALPA affairs
have been much more attuned to the political realities of organized labor’s
existence than ordinary pilots flying the line. What this meant was that they
often aligned themselves with the Democratic Party out of sheer
self-interest—emotional Republicanism aside. The people who were actually going
to cast votes for or against O’Donnell at the BOD meeting in 1982 were therefore
more likely than rank-and-file pilots to view Reaganism skeptically.1
O’Donnell argued that “the quality of our professional life is increasingly
affected by what goes on in the White House,” and he insisted that “we have been
well-received and listened to at the White House.” But in the final analysis,
this argument was unlikely to sway delegates who were disaffected by the Reagan
mystique. Similarly, delegates who admired Reagan might just as likely conclude
that Hank Duffy’s unforced Republicanism would carry ALPA farther than
O’Donnell’s highly suspect brand. So, how O’Donnell thought he could capitalize
on this issue is difficult to see.
In any case, when news of O’Donnell’s turnaround candidacy became common
knowledge, many BOD delegates would regard it as evidence of bad faith.
O’Donnell’s age further inflamed the “bad faith” factor. He would exceed age 60
before his fourth term ended, should he win reelection. ALPA’s official policy
firmly opposed any flight deck crewmembers over the age of 60. Since
ALPA’s president had historically been accorded the rank and status, in terms of
pay and prestige, that a captain earning the highest pay on the most favored
equipment received, how could O’Donnell justify continuing in office once he
reached age 60? Theoretically, he could continue as a flight engineer to age 65,
but as an ex-pilot, that would violate ALPA policy. ALPA was at that time
engaged in multiple lawsuits as a defendant in cases filed by ex-pilots who
wanted to revert to second officer status at age 60. O’Donnell’s reelection
would set a damaging precedent.
“John’s age was not a small issue during the election campaign,” Skip Eglet
believes.
The campaign that followed was a curious one. Formal debates at various
pilot domiciles featured the three candidates—O’Donnell, John Gratz, and Hank
Duffy. Although both Gratz and Duffy had attended the anti-O’Donnell “unity”
meeting in
Football games and wars, it is said, are won in the trenches. That’s pretty
much where the “Delta Machine” won Hank Duffy’s election. The Delta pilots, who
had historically been very disciplined at BOD meetings, raised the art of ALPA
campaigning to new heights. They brought a large contingent of nondelegate
volunteers to the convention, and they used this manpower to “hold hands” with
practically every delegate who might support Duffy. Wavering delegates, whether
they represented only a few votes from an “ant” council, or several thousand
votes from an “elephant” council, received special attention. Delta’s
hospitality suite, which featured elaborate Cajun cuisine personally prepared by
New Orleans LEC Chairman Jack Saux, undoubtedly helped. In a close election,
little things count. Some political pundits say that Tom Dewey lost the 1948
election to Harry Truman because of his mustache, which reminded too many people
of “the little man on the wedding cake”!
But more importantly, the technical efficiency of the Delta Machine built
momentum for Duffy. The Delta pilots’ “war room” was a technological marvel. It
bristled with computers, delegate count boards, phone banks, and the like. From
this “war room” (which some astonished observers described as “like a Combat
Information Center on an aircraft carrier”), the “Delta Machine” tracked every
delegate’s vote on an almost hourly basis once the BOD meeting began in Bal
Harbour, Fla. If a previously committed Duffy voter showed signs of wavering,
the Delta Machine knew it almost instantaneously and dispatched a well-briefed
volunteer to shepherd the apostate home. The Delta Machine was to ALPA’s
politics what steroids were to bodybuilding!
But the Delta Machine was by no means a strictly Delta operation. Chuck
Huttinger of TACA would prove to be a crucial player, because he used his
influence with the Group V airlines to siphon away from “ant” councils nearly
250 critical votes that O’Donnell believed were safely in his column.
“John O’Donnell was the most able politician I ever came across in ALPA,”
says Tom Ashwood of TWA. “I mean the guy could have been Tip O’Neill [the
legendary
Something like this happened among the “ants” at the 1982 BOD. The
disciplined Delta Machine assiduously courted the Group V airlines. Many of them
were supposed to be safe for O’Donnell, but the chink that Tom Ashwood saw in
O’Donnell’s political armor became glaringly apparent among them. The Delta
Machine was quick to remind these “ant” voters that O’Donnell had “kowtowed” to
United, the mightiest of “elephants” at the 1980 BOD meeting in
Los Angeles. The United group had staged a three-day walkout at the instigation of John Ferg, primarily
over the crew complement issue. For “ant” airline pilots, putting a third
crewmember in their cockpits was almost a guarantee of bankruptcy and
unemployment. O’Donnell, seriously worried that the United group would go the
way of American Airlines in 1963 and bolt ALPA, had been quite lenient with the
United pilot group—humiliatingly so, many “ant” delegates believed.2
But in reality, once the heavy politicking began at the BOD meeting,
O’Donnell’s lack of attention to his friends was not what proved fatal. Rather,
it was something quite strange, particularly for a man who in 1970 had pioneered
sophisticated campaign techniques. O’Donnell’s three previous winning campaigns
had featured buttons, posters, and brochures. In 1982 he had nothing! In
effect, he had no O’Donnell campaign!
Jack Bavis, O’Donnell’s campaign manager, still hurt and disappointed at
O’Donnell’s supplanting of his own candidacy, seemed to lack heart, according to
several witnesses. O’Donnell himself, who should have been out in the hallways
and hospitality suites doing what he did best, pressing the flesh and personally
stroking undecided delegates, instead sat in his suite atop the Sheraton Hotel,
seemingly disinterested. When his presence was necessary to seal a bargain or
make a deal, O’Donnell was unavailable. And not because John O’Donnell didn’t
know how to make deals.
“When it came to sensing what people needed and wanted to cut a deal, John
was the best,” Tom Ashwood asserts.
Certainly the Delta Machine did not shrink from “cutting a deal.” Realizing
that victory or defeat hung in the balance, the Duffy forces used their ultimate
weapon—promise of the coveted job of executive administrator—to sew up victory.
With their sophisticated intelligence network telling them that their vote count
was still below what was needed for a first-ballot victory, Duffy offered the
job to John Erickson of Western Airlines, a mid-sized pilot group with 1,223
votes. The night before voting began, when the “elephants danced” in the
hallways and hospitality suites of the Sheraton Hotel, Duffy’s campaign manager
struck the deal.
The Western pilot group was under severe stress. Western was everybody’s
next candidate to follow Braniff into bankruptcy. Under John Erickson’s
leadership, the Western pilot group had, in 1981, engineered a careful series of
concessions that not only saved the airline, but incredibly enough, avoided
furloughs, too. Erickson’s extraordinary handling of this crisis allowed Western
to live on until 1986, when a merger with Delta saved it. Had Erickson not
provided the necessary leadership, Western clearly would not have been a viable
airline and hence not a merger candidate.
So Duffy had good reasons for wanting Erickson as his executive
administrator, not the least of which was that he was an early Duffy booster who
had committed months earlier. But the problem was Erickson’s fellow Western
pilots. O’Donnell’s pitch, that Western was in deep trouble and that only he had
the political connections in Washington, D.C., to save the airline, had
considerable appeal for them. But ultimately, the prospect of seeing one of
their own at the elbow of power in Washington struck the Western pilots as better job insurance than O’Donnell’s claims of
political influence with Ronald Reagan.
O’Donnell played the Reagan card on the first day of the convention. Not
only would Drew Lewis personally address the BOD, but Ronald Reagan himself made
a short videotape address. Reagan’s video speech tacked an obvious endorsement
of O’Donnell onto some standard political boilerplate: “I have been working
closely with your president, J.J. O’Donnell, and I want you to know that his
input and your support have been a real help in forwarding our recovery
program.”
Drew Lewis’s endorsement of O’Donnell was more personal but no less vague
on specifics than Reagan’s. “J.J., I am extremely indebted to you because
without your support we would not have been able to come through that problem
[the PATCO strike],” the Secretary of Transportation told the BOD delegates. “I
think with the concerns you have, and I sensed them last night as I walked
around the reception, we have to keep the right perspective.”
On election day, the pattern that had characterized the various debates at
pilot domiciles around the country repeated itself. Hank Duffy took the high
road, pledging improved communications and better control of ALPA’s finances,
and promising unity across company lines. O’Donnell’s brief speech was curiously
muted, tired, almost subdued. Only John Gratz, a stocky, well-built bear of a
man, seemed to enjoy himself on the rostrum. During the various debates, Gratz
had taken considerable pleasure in blasting O’Donnell.
“I am convinced that there will be a new president of ALPA,” Gratz told the
BOD members. “That is the mood of this convention. We in ALPA are caught in the
middle of a time when we were never so ill-prepared, when the indecisive
handling of basic issues by those at the top has created overwhelming feelings
of disunity, disappointment, and even depression.”
Gratz’s remarks were directed at United’s “Blue Skies” contract and the
rash of concessionary contract demands that were ravaging ALPA. He played on the
general resentment many pilots felt over O’Donnell’s kid-glove handling of the
United pilot group during the 1980 BOD in
Los Angeles. Whatever negative baggage
O’Donnell owned, Gratz made sure it didn’t get lost.
In his seconding speech for O’Donnell, Bob Gould of Pan Am urged the
delegates to ignore the baggage.
“All right, along the way J.J. has taken some hits,” Gould admitted. “He
has even been sacked a few times. But by God, he has always gotten up. This is
the time to stay with an old pro.”
At last it was over. All the speeches had been made, all the deals cut. The
“elephants had danced,” and the moment of decision was at hand. Skip Eglet, who
held the rostrum during the actual election, notified the delegates of the rules
and acted as chairman of the convention.
O’Donnell’s supporters knew they couldn’t win on the first ballot, but they
had good reason to suppose that Duffy would fall short of the 13,644 votes
necessary to elect. John Gratz harbored some vain hopes that a deadlocked
convention might turn to him as a compromise. Duffy’s managers were certain that
if their man did not win on the first ballot, O’Donnell’s legendary deal-making
skills would find room to maneuver and that would spell doom on the second
ballot.
The vote went exactly as the Delta Machine had planned. Among the
elephants, Northwest, Delta, and most of Eastern fell to Duffy; O’Donnell got
United and Pan Am; Gratz got TWA and a bigger chunk of Eastern than O’Donnell.
Among the mid-sized airlines, Duffy got Continental,
Piedmont, Republic, and Western; O’Donnell took only half of USAir.
But among the Group IV and V airlines, the Ozarks and the Frontiers, O’Donnell
swept the board. So, the “ants” went mostly to O’Donnell, except for the 250
votes from the likes of Air North,
Aspen, Reeve Aleutian, and Ross, which Chuck Huttinger of
TACA siphoned away to Duffy.
Duffy needed 13,624 to win. He got 13,753—a slender 129 votes more than
necessary.
And so, with breathtaking suddenness, the roster was called, the votes were
cast and counted. There were calls for Duffy to come forward, but he was away
from the floor. He appeared within a few minutes and made gracious, healing
remarks. O’Donnell, concealing his bitter disappointment well, resumed the
rostrum and went on with his duties.
“O.K., gentlemen,” O’Donnell said with business-like detachment, “we’ve had
a good fight. Now in our own best interests, our own selfish best interests,
let’s get behind the new president and support him. It’s a lonely, hard road,
and he needs your support. He has mine, without question.”
1 See “Pilots, Republicans, and Labor,” Ch. 12.
2 See “Blue Skies and MEC Wars,” Ch. 15.