Here I put in a call for Fred Rentschler, in Hartford. I knew that some weeks earlier, Kraus in Procurement had informally agreed to Pratt and Whitney’s proceeding with the purchase of a lot of tools and materials against a contract then being negotiated, and that Pratt and Whitney had already committed itself in advance in the interest of saving time and money. When I heard Fred’s voice on the phone, I told him about Keyes’s visit and suggested that he might reconsider his advance purchase order; I doubted that Admiral Moffett would sign a contract now for the new engines, since the industry proposed a new agency to do all its buying. I did not pretend to read the admiral’s mind, and was talking unofficially, but thought he should be aware of this possibility. It didn’t take Rentschler long to get the point. Within an hour he had been in touch with Chance Vought, Grover Loening, Bill Boeing, and others who had taken similar risks. And when, next day, Mr. Keyes appeared before the Morrow Board to speak as the sole representative of the industry, Chairman Morrow advised him that there had been a change of plan. So many industry members had asked to address the committee that he could allow Mr. Keyes but a reduced period and that period had now expired. Meanwhile the admiral knew nothing of my action and the industry members who looked to the Bureau for business were not talking. And while we sweated out the hearings, Admiral Moffett moved on another front. None appreciated better than he the influence of public opinion on the whole controversy, and he had found much to worry about in the approval given the Mitchell proposal in the public press. He had, therefore, suggested to George Wheat, now Fred Rentschler’s public relations counsel, that he would like to meet the editorial writers and especially the aviation writers of the metropolitan dailies in New York at an informal dinner where he could talk with them, and he invited me to go along. The dinner, held in a private dining room of the old Waldorf Hotel, started out being a bit stuffy with the natural suspicions engendered in newspaper men by industrialists giving away free food, but Admiral Moffett broke the ice with some delightful personal reminiscences, among them the intimate details of how he outsmarted Billy Mitchell at the Washington Limitation of Arms Conference and won the German rigid airship _Los Angeles_ for the Navy. Then as things loosened up, one of the newswriters put the very question he wanted, by asking why we opposed the idea of unified procurement, supply, and design. To the layman, this looked like a natural way to avoid duplication of effort, to prevent competitive bidding between the Army and Navy for the same products and generally reduce expenses.