Only four days after he took office, President Richard Nixon joined one of the biggest and angriest dogfights in airline history. He abruptly canceled a December decision by Lyndon Johnson that had supposedly settled for good a four-year contest for the first new transpacific air routes to be parceled out in 20 years. Johnson's awards, to six of 18 competing airlines, had left Washington seething with charges of high-altitude politicking and string pulling by "rainmakers," the cocktail-circuit term for former L.B.J. aides who had found lucrative jobs with some of the lines....
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