The Perils of Pushing

When it comes to hustling for European defense contracts, no one outhustles California's Lockheed Aircraft Corp. Its salesmen entertain grandly offer luxurious junkets to the U.S., bombard defense officials and parliamentarians with facts and figures to show that their products are indisputably the best. Lockheed likes to operate through people who have an "in." In Britain it hired Prince Philip's longtime buddy Michael Parker. In Bonn, its chief lobbyist is former U.S. Army Major General Richard Steinbach, who until June 1962 was chief of the U.S. military advisory group in Germany.

But Lockheed's hard sell has boomeranged in West Germany, where oh-so-korrekt businessmen and politicians are apt to bridle at such high-powered and flashy salesmanship from outsiders. In recent weeks, Lockheed has not only lost a multimillion dollar contract it hoped to get, but has so infuriated German Defense Minister Kai-Uwe von Hassel that he shelved an order that Lockheed had already won. Said Von Hassel: "Those Lockheed guys will not get into my office any more."

Having delivered more than 200 P104 Starfighters to the Luftwaffe, Lockheed saw its program coming to an end in Germany, and was anxious to sell the Germans something else--its C-130 Hercules transport, one model of which the company had specially revamped to fit certain German requirements. All that Lockheed had to do was persuade Bonn to drop a planned Franco-German project to build the Transall turboprop transport. But the Germans could not drop Transall--for Transport Alliance--without affronting the French, who have already ordered 50 planes. Germany's renascent airframe industry, also, needs the work that the Transall would provide. And there was a further international consideration; by buying Rolls-Royce engines for its Transall, the Germans hope to lessen Britain's foreign-exchange problems in maintaining British troops on the Rhine.

Though the German Defense Ministry had already decided to order 110 Transalls, Lockheed nevertheless set up a special sales command post in Bonn and prevailed on a majority of the members of the Bundestag defense committee to vote against granting Transall funds and to call for a flying competition between the Transall and the Hercules. Von Hassel exploded. He denounced Lockheed for "deliberately operating with false figures and data," prodded the Bundestag committee into reversing itself and approving the funds for the Transall and, for good measure, pointedly postponed a $70 million order for 33 Lockheed F-104 trainers. Still boiling, Von Hassel also demanded that Lockheed Chairman Courtlandt Gross visit Bonn to make a personal apology for Lockheed's actions. Gross did not show up in Bonn, but he did cable to suggest a meeting with Von Hassel when the German minister visits the U.S. later this month. The conversation should be interesting.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.