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Bright for Fear. Holmes knows all these dangers−and many more that he does not discuss with visitors. But when asked if his job ever frightens him, he has a ready reply: "No, I'm not bright enough."
The truth is, Brainerd Holmes is bright enough to be frightened, and not a bit ashamed of his fears. But he knows he must give those fears short shrift. "We have plenty of skeptics," he says. "They're all over the place, and loud. But the head of the project can't be a skeptic." Looking back across his high-arcing career. Holmes has never had a taste for action-defeating doubts. At Cornell, where he studied electrical engineering, he was president of his fraternity, Chi Psi. "I was made president for two reasons," he explains disarmingly. "I was a pretty able fellow, and the class was pretty depleted by the war." Holmes himself got into the war briefly, serving at Pearl Harbor in 1944 in a radar maintenance pool. "My Navy career was good for me," he laughs, "but not much good for them." Before war's end he married his college sweetheart, Dorothy ("Docky") Bonnet, and when he came home he went to work for the Western Electric Co. in Kearney, N.J.
Everyone he ever worked with remembers him as a restless, dynamic worker, and as a scientist who was not afraid to work with his own hands. He repaired the plumbing and electrical wiring in his own house, designed and built his own TV set, serviced his own car.
The Knack. He was an ideal systems engineer from the start. "The problem in systems engineering," says Dr. Elmer Engstrom, president of RCA and one of Holmes's early bosses, "is to find people with a special knack for marrying men, machines, tactics and everything else into one large system. We could see right away that Holmes had the knack." Says O'Neill, "He made quite a splash with it" and did it on schedule, within costs, and made it work as advertised."
Not long after Holmes went to work for RCA, building Talos, he earned a proud title: "One-Shot Holmes." But making Talos work the first time was simple compared with his next job, on BMEWS. Worried by the nightmare of Russian missiles curving southward across the Arctic Ocean, the Air Force desperately wanted radars that could warn of a missile's approach. No ordinary radars could do the job; it was a Holmes plan that got RCA its most expensive contract ever.
In one of the world's worst climates, in all-day darkness and howling blizzards, and in a place that can be reached by ship, with luck, only three months each summer, Holmes's hot-shot organization built, at Thule, Greenland, two radar reflectors as big as football fields set on edge. The radar beams that they fired over the horizon were strong enough to kill a man who blundered into them.
This vast, unprecedented program required the coordination of 3,000 private subcontractors. Holmes's crew hit every target