This check took me westward to Los Angeles, the center of the air-frame section of aircraft production. As our representative in that territory, Russell R. Vought, younger brother of Chance Vought, had long maintained an office in Beverly Hills. Russ had gone west while still a young man, and founded his own business in San Francisco. Then back in 1928, when we had equipped the _Langley_ with the new Corsairs, and especially the single-float amphibians, he had agreed to represent Chance Vought Aircraft on the West Coast on a part-time basis. Now he made his home in Beverly Hills and had a bungalow in Palm Springs. Arrived in Beverly Hills, I called up John G. Lee, the manager of the West Coast War Production Council, and asked him over to the office with a view to getting his appraisal of the problem. John Lee, through his close association with the presidents of the West Coast companies, was able to give me an authoritative estimate of the sentiment out there. The presidents, he thought, were too much engrossed with their own immediate problems to become interested in the long-term difficulties. They were aware of the threat to survival but not as yet concerned with it. Like many other business chief executives, they were groggy and punch-drunk, and you couldn’t blame them. As a reward for their pains they had found themselves characterized as munitions racketeers, war profiteers, and merchants of death. Now, through production miracles, they had given the lie to their detractors. The profit motive no longer provided an incentive to creative endeavor. “Take Mr. Douglas, for instance,” John summed up. “He is the key to the West Coast situation. If you could enlist his support, you could also get the help of the others; without it you’d be licked before you started. _Time_ magazine recently quoted him as saying he had the perfect postwar plan: ‘lock the door and throw away the key.’ Of course Mr. Douglas didn’t say that, even though he may have thought it, but the quote is significant.” Ever since that day in Jim Forrestal’s office, I had been mulling over an idea evolved one evening at Admiralty House, Bermuda, where my wife and I had been the dinner guests of Vice Adm. Sir Charles E. Kennedy-Purvis, RN, K.C.B., Commander in Chief of British Forces in the Western Atlantic. As Comdr. Charles E. Kennedy-Purvis, Executive Officer of the light cruiser _Southampton_, I had known him well in the old Grand Fleet days. “K-P,” as we called him, had recently been advised of his pending assignment as First Deputy Sea Lord, at the Admiralty, London, where he would be charged with responsibility for recreating the British carrier force after the decline suffered under the Air Ministry. He had asked us down for a visit in order to get my slants on the principles involved.