Now after Ford had broken the ice, Bill Knudsen began bringing in other automotive plants to help us. The great Buick and Chevrolet companies of General Motors joined up, followed soon by Nash. After Curtice of Buick and Coyle of Chevrolet and Mason of Nash had worked out general principles with our top management, the jobs were taken over by the keen shopmen who had made all those organizations great. In some cases our new allies took on responsibilities for Hamilton-Standard Propellers and, in the case of Nash, they even went into production on helicopters when, later on, we faced that new demand. Chance Vought teamed up with Goodyear Rubber and others, on the licensing of product and every division of United spread out all over the country to bring in competent suppliers, large and small. Meanwhile, after Bill Knudsen had set up the aircraft program and George Mead had turned it back to the armed forces for administration, we ran into stormy weather on the matter of deliveries. The schedules set up by the Army and Navy were fantastic. Among other things, the two services had long neglected to buy engines and propellers for training planes and now, of course, immediate delivery of these was called for. Our plants had been tooled for foreign account on the 1,000-hp 1830’s, and the trainers called for 400-hp Wasp Jrs. for which we had no jigs or fixtures in quantity. Save for our flexible-production scheme, this problem would have thrown us for a loss, and even then we had to hustle to retool. Before we had learned the rudiments of the expanded program, the politicians had begun scrambling for cover. Even some of our military friends began casting about for excuses to blame the manufacturers for their own shortcomings. Newspaper columnists and radio commentators who had previously castigated us as war mongers now began screaming “too little and too late.” One of the most acid of these, Fulton Lewis, Jr., made a special trip to Hartford to give his public an on-the-spot disclosure of the shortcomings at United Aircraft. His Hartford outlet then was WTHT, _The Hartford Times_, whose publisher, Francis S. Murphy, was familiar with our problems “Over East,” as we say up here. Frank suggested that Fulton Lewis call on me, and I, all unsuspecting, gave him a personally conducted tour of the shops and then, back in my office, told him some of our problems. Fulton Lewis, surprised by what he saw, asked me if I would go on the radio with him that night. Afterward, he sold the National Association of Manufacturers on his idea of sending a group of commentators of press and radio on a nation-wide tour of factories to learn the truth about “too little and too late.”