China Clipper / The Secret Pre-War Story of Pan American's Flying Boats
Ronald Jackson / 1980

Introduction / para 4

There was, however, a lot more to the trans-Pacific flights than the floss of comical dances and movies. In the guise of commercial development, the trans-Pacific line was really the first stage of preparation for World War II.

Pan Am

Founded in 1927 by two former U.S. Army Air Corps majors, Pan Am began as a scheduled airmail and passenger service flying between Key West, Florida, and Havana, Cuba. Under the leadership of American entrepreneur Juan Trippe, in the 1930s the airline purchased a fleet of flying boats and focused its route network on Central and South America, gradually adding transatlantic and transpacific destinations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am

Juan Trippe

Juan Terry Trippe (June 27, 1899 – April 3, 1981) was an American commercial aviation pioneer, entrepreneur and the founder of Pan American World Airways, one of the iconic airlines of the 20th century. He was involved in the development and production of the Boeing 314 Clipper, which opened trans-Pacific airline travel, the Boeing Stratoliner which helped to pioneer cabin pressurization, the Boeing 707 and the Boeing 747 which introduced the era of jumbo jets.

He enrolled at Yale University but left when the United States entered World War I to apply for flight training with the United States Navy. After completing training in June 1918, he was designated as a Naval Aviator and was commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy Reserve.[4][5] However, the end of World War I precluded him from flying in combat. Demobilized from active duty, he returned to Yale, graduating in 1921. While there, he was a member of St. Anthony Hall and of the Skull and Bones society. Trippe was treasurer at the first meeting of the National Intercollegiate Flying Association in 1920.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Trippe

The Boeing 314 Clipper was an American long-range flying boat produced by Boeing from 1938 to 1941. One of the largest aircraft of its time, it had the range to cross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. For its wing, Boeing re-used the design from the earlier XB-15 bomber prototype. Twelve Clippers were built, nine of which served with Pan Am

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_314_Clipper

The Aviator / Film / 2004

https://youtu.be/0MXSAwkVU3U

As his OCD worsens, Hughes becomes increasingly paranoid, planting microphones and tapping Gardner's phone lines to keep track of her, until she kicks him out of her house. The FBI searches his home for incriminating evidence of war profiteering, searching his possessions and, to his horror, tracking dirt through his house. Brewster privately offers to drop the charges if Hughes sells TWA to Trippe, but Hughes refuses. Hughes' OCD symptoms become extreme, and he retreats into an isolated "germ-free zone" for three months. Trippe has Brewster summon him for a Senate investigation, certain that Hughes will not show up. Gardner visits him and personally grooms and dresses him in preparation for the hearing. He asks her to marry him, and she just laughs and says that he is "too crazy" for her.

An invigorated Hughes defends himself against Brewster's charges and accuses the Senator of taking bribes from Trippe. Hughes concludes by announcing that he has committed to completing the H-4 aircraft, and that he will leave the country if he cannot get it to fly. Brewster's bill is promptly defeated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aviator_(2004_film)

What was left out of the movie because it has been effectively erased from memory and from history...

The Confessions of A Muckracker / 1979 Jack Anderson with James Boyd

Chapter 3 - Brewster at the Brink

page 48, 49

"For Senator Owen Brewster, opportunity stood at the flood tide in the summer of 1947. He had spent a dozen frustrating year as viewer-with-alarm for the Republican minority; now the levers of power had a last been placed in his hands by the GOP congressional sweep of 1946. He found himself chairman or number-two member of several key committees of the Senate. He was confident he knew how to use that power to advance his career, his principles, his party ad the financial interests that supported them all.

Brewster was in his fifty-ninth year when the long winter of Democratic congressional rule ended; and he had played a role in the coming spring. Over the years his intelligence and industry had won him an influence beyond his rank on the Senate committees of vita interest t big business - the Finance Committee, which levied and forgave taxes,; the Commerce Committee, which bestowed subsidies and monopolies; the Committee on Naval Affairs, from which flowed vast industrial projects. Brewster had put his growing importance to businessmen at the service of his party by raising large campaign contributions for GOP Senate candidates from them - Drew [Pearson] called him a "bag man" - and in recognition of this he was soon to be name chairman of the Republican Campaign Committee.

page 50

As Chairman of the Senate War Investigating Committee - the post that had catapulted Harry Truman into the presidential succession - he was preparing a whole series of probes into putative wartime bungles and scandals that figured to tarnish the Roosevelt-Truman image by the following year's presidential election. To lead off, he directed that public hearings be opened into accusations that President Roosevelt had overruled his military experts twice during the in order to hand out fat war contracts to Howard Hughes, a financial benefactor of his son, Elliot - contracts on with $40 million had been squandered without delivery of anything to the government.

page 52

The hand of meticulous planning was visible in the prehearing manipulation of the press via the daily leaks from the Brewster committee, leaks designed to build public interest in the coming hearings and to prejudice the public before the hearings began.

page 54

At Pearson headquarters we watched Brewster's evisceration of Hughes with a sort of glum admiration. Ordinarily the Hughes-type expose, with its mix of dubious war contracts, tawdry lobbying, First Families in dishabille and tycoons on the run, was Drew's cup of tea, the kind of story he all but owned the copyright on. Normally we would by now have had a pipeline into the committee, would have opened up other sources, and would already be filing exacerbating columns.

It so happened that Pan American was to Drew the archetypal corporate ogre. Since the 1920's he had been berating Pan Am as a greedy octopus fed by taxpayers' subsidies and protected by exclusive government franchises. It represented to Drew one of the most pernicious of political evils - the corporation that grows rich through government intervention while all the time influencing the political process to encourage yet more intervention.

At that very moment, in fact, Pan Am was making its boldest bid to have the United States set it up as an official worldwide monopoly. Its plan was known as "the chosen instrument" concept, under which Uncle Sam was to sponsor and subsidize one airline which was to carry all American traffic overseas; no new competitors would be allowed and all existing American carriers with overseas operations would be forced either to merge them with "the chosen instrument" or to shut down...

Was it not curious, we thought, that legislation to enact this plan into law had been introduced by Senator Brewster, who had lined up ten members of his Commerce Committee in it support and was on the verge of pushing it through? And was it not equally suspicious that Howard Hughes was the major obstacle to that legislation?

page 57, 58

At this point in his disintegrating fortunes, Howard Hughes phoned Drew from one of his West coast redoubts....

Then he got to the nub of the nub: three months before, Brewster had attempted to lobby him in behalf of Pan Am, he said, and having failed, they were both out to destroy him. Pan Am had put great pressure on him to merge Trans World with Pan Am and co-sponser the chosen instrument plan. Brewster himself had told him at the Mayflower Hotel that the probed would be dropped if he joined forces with Pan Am. Hughes had asked for thirty days to think about it over, and while he dickered with Pan Am the investigation had lain dormant; when he finally rejected the offer, it was revived with a vengeance.

https://youtu.be/RHPEmBlBjuY

page 59

I stated my basic theory of senatorial behavior: senators were great bullies but poor fighters; they are occupational cowards, or rather, victims of excessive caution. They could be fearsome infighters when the public wasn't watching or when their victim was a pushover. but they would run from a donnybrook of uncertain outcome, for they were in the popularity business. I offered to cite chapter and verse, but Hughes pressed me on to my conclusions, which were, in substance, that since he could never effectively defend his lobbying tactics or get far on his contract performance, and since any attempt to do so would only put him right where Brewster wanted him, his salvation lay in turning the hearing into a free-for-all that would scare off the senators.

https://youtu.be/Q9syydKlgIs

page 62

In print and on the airwaves. Drew hammered away at one theme: don't be deceived by the splashy headlines; behind them was a "desperate struggle between two great airlines for the most lucrative travel routes in the world"; in that struggle, Owen Brewster was "Pan American's chief congressional spokesman."

Brewster denied any "connection" to Pan Am, a predictable denial which phase two of our prepackaged attack was aimed at. Here again, the information provided by Hughes was invaluable. The "chosen instrument" bill Brewster introduced had been drafted by Pan Am's lawyers...

Drew had a cooperative friend on the Brewster committee, Senator Claude Pepper, the liberal Florida Democrat. Our column was almost the lone pro-Pepper voice in Florida's conservative press, and Drew, always an unabashed caller-in of debts, day by day nudged Pepper toward leading a Democratic attack on the way Brewster had stacked the probe against Hughes. Gradually Pepper warmed to the task. On the day one of our columns appeared describing the secret residences and apartments maintained by Pan American for the quiet entertaining of government dignitaries, Pepper interrupted the hearings to cite these items and to demand a committee probe of Pan Am. And one afternoon Pepper went to Brewster's private office to complain of improper anti-Hughes leaks by the committee. He found Brewster closeted with Sam Pryor and Pan Am's publicity agent, Julius Klein. Pepper told Drew, and that item went right into the next column.

https://youtu.be/Q9syydKlgIs?t=93

https://youtu.be/0LjLlUe-zts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Owen_Brewster

The "chosen instrument" bill

https://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/40851

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Pearson_(journalist)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Anderson_(columnist)

Open new tab https://qagg.news and click below link:

https://qagg.news/?q=%23%2311242

For anons who love a deep dark rabbit hole...

Dig on Jack Anderson's co author, James Boyd...

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep..."

Hint... when someone like James Boyd has no wiki page... that's a red flag.

https://qagg.news/?q=%23%23TO243