And when Walter Reuther arrived at “The Aircraft” in East Hartford, he was mustered into the board room and received by all the principal officers of the company. After he had stated his case bluntly, sparing no wallops at the “carriage trade,” we assured him that if he knew where we could get the kind of tools we needed, he was just the man we were looking for. Maybe he had better quit the union and go to work for us. We had combed the countryside for suitable tools but had not been able to find any. As a mechanic, Reuther would know machine tools, and we would like to have his help. Reuther descended into the shop with our supervisors, who walked him for miles over the entire layout. On his return he pronounced the verdict. The stored machines he’d had in mind were no good for our job, after all. He’d had no idea we were doing a watchmaker’s job. What he didn’t know was that watchmakers’ tolerances were far too crude for the exacting demands of aircraft engines. After Reuther had gone back to Washington, one of our old-timers lingered a moment in the board room. “You’ve got to hand it to that cocky little redhead,” he said slowly. “He sure knows publicity.” But aptitude for show business was not wholly monopolized by either labor leaders or politicians; some industrialists got around, too. Notable among these was Mr. Henry J. Kaiser. After the private shipbuilders had developed their new technique of constructing components for assembly in the finished vessel, it was Mr. Kaiser, the dam builder, who caught the public eye as the boss shipbuilder of them all. And his activities were not limited to shipbuilding; he was into everything. After Igor Sikorsky had finally performed the impossible by creating the helicopter, his fame was almost overshadowed by headlines hailing Mr. Kaiser as the great producer of this new contraption. Again, when the German submarine blockade had attained the peak of its effectiveness, it was Mr. Kaiser who crashed the headlines with that hair-raising proposal of his, calling for the construction of 5,000 huge flying boats weighing 500,000 pounds each, with which to leapfrog the German submersibles. A recognized aircraft constructor with the temerity to point out that no such craft had even been projected, let alone designed or tested experimentally, or that the industrial capacity of the nation had already been stretched to the elastic limit, would put himself in the position of lacking imagination. And when, finally, the tide of public opinion forced the President to place an order for such a craft, the contract was awarded to Howard Hughes, and Mr. Kaiser, having promoted the idea, stepped gracefully aside. The President afterward testified to the power of such propaganda when he told Don Douglas he had felt compelled to award the contract to get Henry Kaiser off his neck.