(5 of 8)
Five years after the Martin 130, Trippe got his famed Boeing 314 flying boats, and the British were still not ready to fly the Atlantic. But when he got rights to land at Lisbon and Marseille, they wearily told him he might as well come along to Southampton.
All along his road to empire, he competed with the empire-building air routes of the British, Dutch, French, Nazis and Italians, and usually won a place for Pan Am. He negotiated his own treaties with 62 foreign governments. "If Pan American had let the State Department deal with these countries in its behalf," Trippe says, "the U.S. would have had to grant reciprocal landing rights, and today would be crisscrossed with foreign carriers. As it was, by doing its own negotiating, Pan American had to offer nothing but air service."
War Horse. The day after Pearl Harbor, this air service became a prime military asset to the U.S. as a means of quick transport across the oceans. On the routes which Trippe had first plotted with a piece of string on the globe in his office, the armed forces built their huge transport service. Drafted by the Army & Navy as a contract carrier, Pan Am ferried high brass, spies, planes and war materials into Africa, Europe and Asia, and built 53 airports. Its payroll swelled from 4)395 to 88,000 and its Lisbon base for a time was the only Allied radio outpost on the Continent.
There were complaints from the Army & the Navy that Pan Am's expenses and accident rate ran too high and that it sometimes gave its own cargoes priority over theirs. But a report by MATS, the combined Army-Navy transport services, this month summed up: "The importance of P.A.A. bases established before the war to the success of the South Atlantic ferrying and transport route cannot be overestimated."
In the Capital. For its negotiating at home & abroad, Pan Am has a crack diplomatic corps topped, of course, by Trippe, who is his own persuasive, far-seeing secretary of state. He keeps on excellent terms with 73 nations, running all the way from democracies to dictatorships, by a simple rule: he never ties himself to any political party, and he keeps his political opinions to himself.
Under the increasing strictures of state control—and in a closely regulated industry—he has also managed to keep a maximum of freedom because, as one politico commented: Trippe has not wasted his time and strength fighting regulation; he has learned to make it work for him. He did well under a Republican administration, did even better under the New Deal. His political fences are always carefully tended. Pan Am Vice President Pryor, onetime Republican national committeeman from Connecticut, knows his way round G.O.P. circles in Washington. On the Democratic side, Pan Am has Vice President J. Carroll Cone, onetime Army pilot and all-around air expert, who campaigned and raised money for Truman before Philadelphia and helped keep his native Arkansas from going over to Dixiecrat Thurmond.
To this combination, Trippe adds meticulous planning—and an allout attack. Said one bureaucrat: "When you close the door to Pan Am, it comes in the window. And when you close the window, there they are, coming right through the wall." Trippe usually gets what he wants by getting there first.