While appropriations for military aircraft served momentarily to preserve the manufacturing industry and keep the military establishment from further deterioration, funds were forthcoming only on a hand-to-mouth basis. So long as Stalin continued pressure on Europe, Congress would appropriate; the moment he eased up, Congress would revoke. The essential long-term continuing program so necessary to technological progress went by the board. Even Representative Carl Vinson, whose vision had built the Navy of World War II and whose leadership had implemented the aviation programs, seemed unable to formalize a program to put into effect this generally accepted principle. Adding up the results of five years’ effort, the Aircraft Industries Association had to admit failure to reach its goal. To me the reason was abundantly clear. We had failed to enlist the cooperation of the armed forces and airline transport operators under the basic precept of cooperation in public policy and competition in operations. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO The Hand on the Stick Early in 1949 the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee of the Senate, under the chairmanship of Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado, began inquiring into the ills of the airline transport industry. Senator Johnson had sat at my table at the dinner given by the aircraft manufacturers to Congressional leaders in aviation in Washington some five years earlier. A man well informed on the whole subject, he now began directing an inquiry that promised to initiate an important forward step in the formulation of American air policy. Unlike the Finletter Commission and the Congressional Aviation Policy Board, both of which had been held under the overcast produced by the cold front of fear incident to the Berlin crisis, the Johnson inquiry, following close on the brilliant success of the Berlin Airlift, focused attention solely on airline transport. Curiously enough, the underlying significance of the Berlin Airlift was seldom touched upon in the flood of commentary that accompanied the lifting of the blockade. While it was generally recognized as a defeat for the Soviet, and served to ease the tensions and allay the fears of war, the epochal character of the operation went almost unrecognized. Paul Fisher, in the _Bee Hive_, house organ for United Aircraft Corporation, in a brilliant article written on the spot, hailed the victory of air freight. For the first time in world history, commercial air transports—not combat aircraft—had spearheaded United States foreign policy in a victorious action against the swashbuckling Soviet. The very forces which had once reduced Berlin to rubble with bombs had now saved the population from starvation with air cargo.