![]() ![]() ''We have been moving heaven and earth to help Pan American Airways,'' a State Department official wrote in an official memorandum in 1929. He displayed comparable dexterity in sabotaging the attempts of rivals to win similar favors and exploited State and War Department connections. Trippe quickly proved himself a master of Washington politics, able to extract large subsidies for small performance from a succession of Republican and Democratic postmasters. An early rival for the Caribbean route, Basil Rowe, said ruefully of Trippe's methods, ''While we had been out developing an airline in the West Indies, our competitors had been busy on the much more important job of developing a lobby in Washington.'' In the 1920's and 30's, the infant airlines relied on Federal mail subsidies for the steady income to insure their very survival. THE Air Mail Act of 1925 (the Kelly Act) authorized the Postmaster General to contract with private operators to carry mail by air over designated routes. Trippe solicited funds from his Yale connections much as his contemporaries Henry Luce and Brit Hadden raised the capital to inaugurate Time magazine. Trippe came from a prosperous middle-class family but was in modest financial condition by comparison with such affluent Yale cronies as Cornelius Vanderbilt (Sonny) Whitney. By 1923, Trippe, utterly bored by the securities game, resolved to make his mark in aviation - he had learned to fly as a Marine Corps air cadet during the War. When the young Trippe came down from New Haven in 1921 and began his Wall Street apprenticeship at Lee, Higginson & Company, he was surrounded by Yale men who made comfortable fortunes without undue effort by hawking stocks and bonds. For business schools, Trippe might have served as an excellent case study of managerial misbehavior.Įxcept, of course, that for most of a career that stretched from the early 1920s to the end of the 1960s, Trippe was a glittering success. Chronically late for appointments, he delayed signing essential documents for weeks and months, rewarded employees meagerly, failed to socialize with Pan Am executives and discarded loyal associates like Kleenex once their usefulness ended. According to the authors, Marylin Bender, a former editor and business reporter for The New York Times, and her husband, Selig Altschul, an aviation consultant, Trippe never clearly delegated authority, issued inscrutable instructions and routinely concealed his plans from his board of directors and his important subordinates. Moreover, Trippe defied every sound management precept. He describes him as a man of allyielding suavity, who could be depended upon to pursue his own ruthless way.'' The President said he had talked personally with Trippe. He has what amounts to a worldwide monopoly, and the President is against this. He had made an unsavory record in South American countries. Franklin Roosevelt's Interior Secretary, the waspish Harold Ickes, recorded in his diary this thumbnail character sketch: ''Trippe is an unscrupulous person who cajoles and buys his way. Roger Lewis, considered a possible successor to Trippe in the early 1960's when he ranked just below him in the Pan Am corporate structure, esteemed him as ''the politest and least compassionate man I have ever known.'' Other evaluations were even less flattering. He was close his prospective son-in-law's name happened to be Duke. Typical of the man is the tale of how he was dining with his daughter and her fiance and introduced the young man to an acquaintance as Mr. It was no more than fitting that when the Pan Am building, one of Walter Gropius's less inspired designs, was erected in Manhattan in 1963, its main entrance on Vanderbilt Avenue was right across the street from the Yale Club.Īs a human being, Trippe was cold, distant, unappreciative of associates and forgetful of all names except those of personages powerful enough to advance Pan Am's fortunes. In the wake of World War I, Juan Trippe, then a young stockbroker fresh from Yale, coaxed his rich college friends into financing a decidedly speculative venture. Since 1979, Pan Am has lost nearly $600 million and sold off most of its nonoperating assets to raise cash. The book pursues its human and corporate subjects from the years immediately after World War I practically until today, when, as in the 1920's, Pan Am is an enterprise with serious financial problems, many of them the consequences of decisions taken along Juan Trippe's path to glory. ''THE CHOSEN INSTRUMENT,'' an exceptionally well-done and interesting example of the generally dull genre of business history, is the interwoven story of Juan Trippe and Pan American World Airways, of which he was the progenitor. The Rise and Fall of an American Entrepreneur. ![]()
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