A Spook History of FedEx - Pt. 2
FedEx gets off the ground with a little help from the Rothschilds, General Dynamics, and the Boston Brahmin.
A Rocky Start
Frustration with the airplane brokerage business and its inefficiencies led Smith to explore other business ventures. Smith began looking into buying a fleet of Dassault Falcons (a smallish fanjet) that were being sold at a low price by PanAm, who was trying to get rid of them. He conferred with Irby V. Tedder, his company’s executive vice president at the time. Tedder was a retired Air Force colonel who served in the 70th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing (now the 70th Intelligence Wing).1 In the 50s and 60s, the 70th Wing was stationed in Little Rock and conducted surveillance missions using B-47s over Soviet Russia, taking aerial photographs and radar recordings of the path the nuclear bombers would take in the event of an attack.2 Some of these flights also launched from Thule AFB in Greenland.
Now that he had his eyes set on PanAm’s Falcon jets, Smith explored different business ideas to use them for. One of these early ideas was to privatize the postal service. "We sent a couple of guys up to Washington," Tedder told Vance Trimble in an interview. “They got permission to go into any phase of the postal service and, you know, check out the possibility of doing it better.” It sounds like the Nixon administration was toying with the idea of privatization as well. In fact, that same year there was a major strike by Postal Service workers, which led to the Postal Reorganization Act. While this new law did grant workers the right to collectively bargain, it also cut all federal funding, making it an independent agency that would have to “pay for itself.”3 This bill was the first of a string of legislation by Republicans that will ultimately bankrupt the agency, if action isn’t taken by future Congresses. As we will see, FedEx ultimately does become a sort of privatized Postal Service, since USPS discontinued airmail in the 1970s, and began outsourcing many of their air routes to FedEx and other companies as well. Not only is FedEx used today by every level of government, businesses large and small, there is also some evidence pointing toward FedEx being used by the intelligence community and some of the more secret aspects of our government.
Another early idea was to be a “flying courier for bond houses.” At the time, it was a lengthy and cumbersome process to move physical bonds between financial institutions. This plan didn’t gain any traction because they couldn’t get any insurance companies to cover it over fears of plane crashes or rogue pilots taking off with planefuls of bonds.4
A third idea along these same lines was to provide the Federal Reserve with a way to transport checks between different regional reserve banks as a way to solve the problem of lengthy delays for clearing the checks. Smith was so sure that this idea would work, he went ahead and purchased two Falcon jets from PanAm, using $3 million of Squibb-Beechnut stock (which Smith received from his father’s inheritance) as collateral. This is also when he decided to name his new business Federal Express. The Federal Reserve ultimately turned him down, however, and Smith was stuck with his two Falcon jets. The idea must not have been too bad, since the Federal Reserve actually adopted Smith’s hub and spoke system for transporting inter-bank checks several years later without him.
After the plan with the Fed fell through, Smith began exploring other ideas and investors. He was now focused on his original idea for a national overnight air shipping network that would become what we know today as FedEx. It was around this time he met Art Bass, a marketing consultant from New York, and Harmon L. “Buck” Remmell, VP of the Wall Street banking investment firm White, Weld & Company. Smith was introduced to Remmell through a banker in Little Rock (possibly Jackson Stephens?).5
A native of Newport, Arkansas, Remmell “talked our language” and understood the Dixie mind-set, which Smith believed would make it easier to deal with Wall Street men. Smith asked him about getting investors to put $15 million to $30 million in Federal Express.6
White, Weld, & Co. (WWC) was a historically Boston Brahmin-controlled investment bank that, at the time of their involvement with FedEx, was led by George Herbert Walker Jr., uncle of President George H.W. Bush. The Boston Brahmins are an elite group of wealthy New England WASP families that are largely descended from early English colonists. WWC was also providing loans to Sam Walton of Walmart to help build his fledgling business around this same time. Smith was already connected to the Bushes through his friendship with George W. at Yale – is this how he got put on WWC’s radar? Why was Arkansas such a focus of all this Boston Brahmin money at the same time in the early 70s?
In order to secure funding from WWC, Remmell advised Smith to hire consultants to do a thorough market research and analysis on his business proposal. Smith had already enlisted Art Bass’s Aerospace Advanced Planning Group (AAPG) for this purpose, but Remmell wanted Smith to use someone with a bit more name recognition. Smith ended up hiring Roger Frock of A.T. Kearny & Co. to perform a simultaneous analysis alongside Art Bass’ AAPG, although neither were aware of the other. This way Smith could sell his idea to banks and investors with the support of two independent research reports. They did indeed come to the same conclusion – the market was eager for a reliable express shipping company. At the time, the industry was dominated by companies like Flying Tigers and Emery Air Freight, but both were “erratic and frequently late.” Despite this, they were still raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually. This was the market gap Fred Smith had been hawking about. In fact, according to both reports, it was even bigger than he estimated, with possible revenue estimates reaching up to $1 billion annually.7 There was also another gap that was identified – the fact that FedEx’s planes would be making most of their trips at night when most commercial airplanes were already grounded for the day, freeing up necessary runway and airspace. Frock’s proposal called for 30 falcon jets and up to $16 million more in additional funding.8 After completing their research, Roger Frock and Art Bass eventually joined FedEx’s executive team.
Smith started buying up all the falcon jets he could find. On top of the two he had already bought from PanAm, he also purchased an additional eight used falcons, one of which belonged to Frank Sinatra.9 He also agreed on an option with PanAm to buy the additional twenty-three falcons he originally wanted. The funding for these planes came from Little Rock’s own Worthen Bank. The only thing left was to get the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), a predecessor to the NTSB, to change a weight regulation that would allow Federal Express to operate modified falcons as air freighters. The company used Jackson Stephen’s Little Rock Airmotive (LRA) to modify the planes, and Smith spent considerable time and effort in Washington trying to get the regulation changed.
Jackson Stephens was, for most of his life, one of the wealthiest men in Arkansas. A graduate of the Naval Academy, Jackson started the Little Rock investment house Stephens Inc. with his brother, Witt Stephens. While the two brothers may have had different politics, personally, their bank played both sides of the political spectrum. The firm bankrolled Bill Clinton’s successful presidential run in 1992 and Jackson Stephens was a campaign chair for H.W. Bush in 1988.10 Most interestingly, the firm was instrumental in bringing the infamous CIA-front bank BCCI to the United States in 1981 with the help of Hillary Clinton’s Rose Law Firm in Little Rock.11 Another company owned by Stephens, Systematics Inc., was also involved with modifying and selling the infamous PROMIS software, used by American and Israeli intelligence to spy on its adversaries. Systematics even had an Israeli subsidiary that employed members of Mossad to carry out this work.12
Smith and his company plunged deeper into debt but in 1972, they got exactly what they needed and the CAB changed their rules in FedEx’s favor. Riding this wave of success, Smith tried to secure another loan, this time from Commercial Credit Corporation (CCC), but to do that, he would need his newly divorced sister Fredette to sign away all her shares as collateral. Fredette had always been willing to help her brother, but she also knew she needed some money to sustain herself, especially in the middle of an expensive and drawn out divorce with her husband Bryan Eagle. Instead of looking elsewhere for collateral, Fred tricked his sister into signing a document while she was in the middle of preparations for a large party at her home in McLean, VA. It wasn’t until she was able to read the fine print two weeks later that she discovered her mistake.13
Smith and CCC had been acquainted since his time in Vietnam, when he and his stepfather purchased Arkansas Aviation and were settling its debt burden with the corporation.14 At the time, CCC was a subsidiary of Control Data Corporation, a major defense contractor and supercomputer company. Control Data built supercomputers for the US nuclear program at both Sandia National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Interestingly, Control Data also sold computers to the Soviet nuclear program in 1972, which resulted in a Congressional investigation. Control Data eventually sold CCC to Sandy Weill (previously of Bear Stearns) who turned it into Citigroup with the help of his young mentee Jamie Dimon.15
From Whitney Webb’s article, The Rise of Jamie Dimon:
In 1968, Control Data Corp. acquired the Commercial Credit Corporation (CCC) to “help its computer customers finance leases of company hardware and stabilize erratic earnings” that then characterized much of the early computer industry. A few years after the acquisition, both CDC and CCC would find themselves intertwined with the “private CIA” network developed mainly by Ted Shackley, the Agency’s infamous “Blond Ghost,” in the late 1970s and which later allied itself with George H.W. Bush. This is highly significant as this particular network was intimately involved with the illicit transfers of both weapons and technology, including during the Iran-Contra scandal, the related PROMIS scandal, and the subsequent “Chinagate” scandal of the mid-1990s…
CCC, for its part, also had odd connections to the networks around Shackley. For instance, one of the key components of this “private CIA” was a company created by Shackley and another CIA operative and long-time associate of Shackley’s named Thomas Clines. That company was known as the Egyptian-American Air Transport and Services Corporation, or EATSCO. It seems that EATSCO functioned as a middleman in arms sales made by the Pentagon to Egypt and, later, other countries.16
Around the same time that CCC issued its loan to FedEx, it was also issuing a loan to Farhad Azima’s Global International Airways. Azima, an Iranian national who was connected to the Shah’s intelligence apparatus (SAVAK) before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, was also involved with Ted Shackley’s “private CIA,” and James Cunningham, a veteran of the CIA’s Air America in Laos. Azima and his airline were later involved in running guns for the CIA during Iran-Contra and the breakup of Yugoslavia.17
In the early days of FedEx, two of Smith’s first employees were his secretary, Charlotte Curtis,18 and pilot George P. Eremea, both of whom he had poached from Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. Instead of sending his pilots to flight school, he started his own and somehow got the VA to pay for it because all of his pilots were former military. Their first charter was for IBM, who needed four airplanes just to move one of their computers.19 FedEx also won a few contracts for six midwest routes from the USPS and even some business from Ford and General Motors.20 After the first year of incorporation, the company operated at a loss of almost a million dollars, and Fred Smith had gotten himself, his family, and his company over $20 million in debt.
This did not stymie Smith’s efforts in the slightest. In order to get his planes modified faster, Smith ended up buying Little Rock Airmotive from Jackson Stephens for more than three times what it was worth.21 Another problem that needed to be solved was the fact that Adams Field in Little Rock lacked much of the necessary infrastructure that FedEx needed, including a second runway and a facility to sort packages. They found their solution a hundred miles east in Fred Smith’s hometown of Memphis. Around this time, Smith hired Michael Basch, Mike Fitzgerald, and many others from UPS. Supplementing the hub and spoke system, FedEx borrowed much of their strategy from the United Parcel Service, including “price schedules, the report forms and even the selling techniques.”22
FedEx’s financial troubles got even worse when White, Weld, & Co. sent a letter demanding Smith contribute $1.5 million more of his own money or they were going to pull out as investors, a blow to the company that it probably wouldn’t survive. At the same time, FedEx representatives in New York were fighting to keep their option on the twenty-three PanAm falcons despite falling behind on their payments for those as well. Smith was left with no choice except to borrow more money. He couldn’t borrow anymore money from Worthen Bank, since he owed them half a million, so he went to Union National Bank in Little Rock and convinced them to loan him $2 million, which covered all of the debts he owed, at least in that moment. The problem was that in order to get the loan from Union National, he decided to forge the content and signatures of a board meeting of the Fred Smith Enterprise Co., with the help of one of his secretaries. This meant that the collateral promised to Union National was fraudulent, and Smith was breaking several federal banking laws in the process. This $2 million dollars didn’t even last very long and Smith needed more money quickly. He pulled the same forgery stunt again, this time with First National Bank in Memphis. Shortly thereafter, Fred Smith decided it was time to formally launch Federal Express as an overnight service. In an attempt to persuade Charles L. Lea, Jr., executive vice president of New Court Securities Corporation, Smith invited him to Memphis to see FedEx in action. Charles Lea and New Court were no run of the mill investors, however.
The international banking dynasty of Baron Rothschild of Paris was behind New Court. Lea’s firm, an offshoot of Amsterdam Overseas Corporation, had been formed in 1967 principally to handle the Rothschild family’s American investments. With the baron’s approval, Lea was looking to risk part of the $100 million he managed in a promising venture.23
Lea was initially skeptical and declined to invest in the fledgling operation but later changed his mind when Colonel Henry Crown, head of General Dynamics got involved. Colonel Crown was keen on FedEx’s business model and was willing to use General Dynamics to loan the company a little over $30 million. Colonel Crown also helped convince Prudential insurance to chip in $5 million of their own money.
Despite the new investments and attention, FedEx still struggled to pay its bills. The company fell behind on payments for rent, fuel, and couriers. The situation reached a boiling point when an unpaid courier held a station manager at gunpoint, demanding payment. “If I don’t get my money right now, I’m going to blow this sucker’s head off, and shit in the hole!”24 Safe to say, he got paid quickly. Another group of investors convened, this time including Allstate Insurance, the First National Bank of Chicago (led by A. Robert Abboud), and Chase Manhattan. This deal almost fell apart because of the October 1973 oil crisis but was salvaged by Abboud. This rollercoaster of fortune turned out to be too much for Colonel Crown and General Dynamics and they decided to pull out completely in the first quarter of 1974.25 Under pressure from investors (primarily Charles Lea), Smith was replaced as CEO by General Howell “Howling” Estes Jr., the Air Force’s youngest four-star general, although Smith retained his position of president of the company. This hire was more for show than anything. Even Charles Lea referred to Estes as a “store-front dummy” for the purpose of courting more investors.26 The company kept growing, although never quite becoming profitable, yet some felt they were getting close. Art Bass ended up flying to France to make a direct appeal to Baron Rothschild, who conceded $9 million more after some convincing.
Union National Bank eventually learned of the fraudulent documents and began working with the FBI and U.S. District Attorney W.H. “Sonny” Dillahunty to indict Fred Smith for bank fraud. A Grand Jury was convened and several witnesses were called to testify. The same day he was indicted, Fred Smith hit and killed a pedestrian with his car in Memphis. Instead of stopping and getting out to help the man, Smith sped off, fleeing the scene. A police officer that observed the incident was eventually able to pull him over. The victim, George Clifton Sturghill, a fifty-four-year-old black handyman, died in the emergency room.27 The story was mostly covered up in the media, with only a paragraph tacked onto the end of an article about Smith’s fraud indictment, several days after the fact. Sturghill’s own family wasn’t even made aware of the fact that he was killed by a car, let alone who was behind the wheel, until well after his death. Smith brushed the incident off in the next meeting at work and blamed his “ignorance” of the accident on a loud and “rowdy negro bar” he had passed. Smith went to federal trial but was acquitted, and his car accident case in Memphis was dismissed less than a month later.
Smith returned to Washington in 1976 to lobby Congress some more, this time advocating for mass deregulation of the airline industry. This time, he wasn’t alone. According to a report from SRI International, “After failing to sway Congress in 1976, FedEx organized other freight carriers and commuter airlines; together they presented a strong case to Congress and the Administration, revealing the costs of regulation and benefits of deregulation.”28 Following a signature by President Jimmy Carter, the Air Cargo Deregulation Act of 1978 and the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 were the largest, most sweeping pieces of legislation affecting airlines since the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938.
Until 1978, the U.S. government, through the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), regulated many areas of commercial aviation such as fares, routes, and schedules. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, however, removed many of these controls, thus changing the face of civil aviation in the United States. After deregulation, unfettered free competition ushered in a new era in passenger air travel. The CAB had three main functions: to award routes to airlines, to limit the entry of air carriers into new markets, and to regulate fares for passengers.…There was stiff opposition to the bill—from the major airlines who feared free competition, from labor unions who feared nonunion employees, and from safety advocates who feared that safety would be sacrificed….In general, freed from the rules of the CAB, regional and major airlines inaugurated new routes in droves….Unfortunately for the airline industry, fuel costs, economic recession, and wanton over-expansion in the wake of deregulation began to have serious negative consequences.29
The deregulation didn’t even end there. Over the next two decades, the Federal government would go on to deregulate the trucking industry, energy and utilities, telecommunications, rail, maritime shipping, the financial sector, you name it! It all started here.Smith returned to Washington in 1976 to lobby Congress some more, this time advocating for mass deregulation of the airline industry. In 1977, Smith once again got what he needed and the CAB rules changed to allow FedEx to use whatever planes they wanted. FedEx upgraded from their Falcon-only fleet to include the much larger DC-9 and eventually Boeing 727s.
With Flying Colors
In December 1977, Fred divorced his wife and married his secretary Diane. The business had now become very successful and paid off all their deficient loans. FedEx successfully went public on April 12, 1978.30 By 1983, FedEx was a billion dollar company. Despite inheriting much of his wealth, Fred Smith, like his father, was never really accepted into the old money circles of Memphis’ elite. This newfound wealth had Smith butting up against the local moneyed establishment, and he did not mince words when speaking to the media.
The “landed gentry” came in for most of his assaults. He was singling out the city’s business elite, for the most part executives from old-line pre-Civil War aristocracy, whom he accused of clinging to “the plantation mentality.” In a number of speeches he hammered this group as “insular, extremely conservative, and exclusionary. . . . They claim to be broad-minded, but they are not.” Smith criticized Memphis for having a “police problem.” Roger Frock recalled: “I think he thought the police were picking on the black employees we had, because they were stopping them when they were driving home from the hub. Saying what business did minorities have being out at that time of night. I know he was riled up about that for a while.”31
In order to decrease his own tax burden, Smith successfully lobbied Washington, with the help of Congressman Henry Ford, to change the capital gains tax from 49 to 26 percent. Despite advocating for more conservative tax policies that would benefit himself financially, Smith’s local politics became more nuanced. He opted to support W. Otis Higgs for Memphis mayor, who would’ve been the city’s first black mayor, had he won. This greatly upset the incumbent mayor Wyeth Chandler, who had helped FedEx get set up in Memphis in the first place. Chandler accused Smith of being a “zealot on civil rights.”32 Smith’s politics never quite reached the level of being “progressive,” let alone coherent. “We’ve [Federal Express] supported various candidates. I would say I’m much more independent than anything else. I believe more in betting on the man.”33 Smith continued “attacking the influx of ‘parochial, very doctrinaire’ rural whites; the blacks who mistakenly saw ‘each and every issue as a civil rights battle’; and the patricians, the ‘landed gentry,’” which didn’t earn him many friends, but at that point he didn’t need them. Business was booming and he was on top of the world.
While Smith was no stranger to politics, having spent so much of his time lobbying in Washington for airline deregulation or lowering his tax burden, but Smith formally entered the political realm in 1979 when he became national finance chairman for TN Sen. Howard Baker’s Presidential campaign. He held this job for only four months before he decided that he either wasn’t very good at it or that it wasn’t worth his time.
In January 1981, construction was completed on the new “superhub” at Memphis International. This new facility allowed FedEx to sort up to 750,000 packages a night all under one roof. FedEx also spent $300,000 to install weather sensors at Memphis airport, a technology that had only previously been used at military ammunition depots.
Any time news leaked that Smith was considering moving the Memphis hub elsewhere, all hell would break loose. At one point, Smith considered building a company town at an abandoned military airfield in Illinois. The explosive reaction to this news in Memphis inspired Smith to threaten a move any time city officials weren’t acting quickly enough to approve the things he or FedEx needed.
In 1983, the first book about FedEx was published. Absolutely Positively Overnight!, was written by University of Memphis economics professor and Stanford Research Institute alumnus Robert A. Sigafoos. Sigafoos was given full access to FedEx’s archive of documents, as well as interviews with executives, but the finished product infuriated Smith, so much so that, according to Sigafoos, “after my book came out, there was a time or two when I went home late at night that I’d look up and down the alley. Because he was pretty sore at me.”34 Sigafoos chalked some of Smith’s frustrations up to his political aspirations at the time, and figured that this book at least appeared to be airing Smith’s dirty laundry. Sigafoos actually had a favorable view of Smith and said he was deserving of accolades for his success.
Despite FedEx’s rapid growth and success, Smith was terrified of potential challenges that threatened the company. Smith wanted to maintain the esprit de corps among employees and executives that existed in the early days. Smith did this by focusing on promoting from within and almost guaranteeing that there would never be layoffs. What Smith was really trying to avoid was a union. Even in the early days of FedEx, employees attempted to unionize several times, each time unsuccessfully. The first of these attempts was supported by the United Pilots Association. The second attempt was in 1974 with the help of the Teamsters, who had represented UPS employees since the 1930s. The constant threat of unionization forced FedEx to share some of its wealth with its employees and has created a corporate environment with a “no furlough policy.” After a spate of conflict and unrest in the 1980s, employees were given the ability to communicate concerns to upper management through a grievance policy. Other ways that Smith tried to keep his employees happy included, “dinner for two” vouchers and “Bravo Zulu” stickers, a Navy flag tradition that Smith carried over for employees that went above and beyond. By 1984, FedEx was bringing in $1.72 billion a year, far surpassing its competitors UPS and others, who weren’t even close to breaking a billion.
Smith’s penchant for exploring new ideas in business extended to the structure of the organization itself. At one point, Smith brought in Charles Kepner, a former RAND Corp. employee, to conduct some “strategic planning.” After meeting with several consultants, Smith explored decentralizing the company, which ultimately didn’t work. Smith rented 6,000 ft of office space and created his own RANDian think tank, the Advanced Projects and Research Group (APRG), nicknamed the “turkey farm.” The office had a mainline connection into the FedEx computer system. APRG explored the use of unconventional vehicles like the newly released supersonic Concorde as well as using dirigibles for heavy freight. Neither of these ideas panned out, but APRG did end up doing work that was useful to more than just the FedEx boardroom. APRG tested a “magic window” prototype developed by California’s Flight Dynamics Corp. by installing them on a few of their 727s. This “magic window” was essentially a heads-up display (HUD) that allowed pilots to see through foggy conditions and land the plane safely. Their research eventually included adding infrared technology to the concept and was even (allegedly) sold to the US government for military applications. Another technology tested by APRG was Autoland, which could land a plane (usually in less than favorable conditions) with only the supervision of a pilot. Other ideas that were considered but ultimately didn’t pan out included a Ultra High Frequency television station for business news and information, as well as building booster rockets for Space Transportation Company to launch global communication satellites.
In the late 70s and early 80s, Smith found himself on a couple enigmatic international trips. The first of these was with his old friend and lawyer, Lucius Burch, who took Smith along with him to Rhodesia, which was on the verge of collapse at the time. According to Burch,
“I had this money from selling my lodge in Ireland. It was like finding it in the road. I hadn’t done a day’s work to get it. So I was looking for a place to put that money at great risk, and if it hit I’d really have something big out of it. It looked like Rhodesia was such a place. War was going on, and it began to look like Bishop Abel Muzorewa was going to come out as head guy in the government. And I knew about Muzorewa. He was born in 1925 into the Manyika tribe, eldest of nine siblings, and aspired early to the clergy. Muzorewa was sponsored by the Methodist church and came to the United States. I knew about him from Nashville because he attended Scarritt College there, and got a master’s degree. So Fred and I went over to Rhodesia. And Fred liked to go out with the government patrols at night. Just for the fun of it. It wasn’t attractive to me; it was bad enough as it was. The guerrillas would come around shooting at the houses, putting mines in the goddamn roads, and everything. But Fred enjoyed that. He’d go out with the soldiers on what they called “sticks”’—four- or five-man patrols. He stayed in Rhodesia as long as he could. But he had a baby on the way, and he had to go home. I remained over there a month or more. The sort of life he led in Vietnam, I think, was something that was congenial to his nature.35
Burch continued on, now talking about another enigmatic trip Smith would take in the early 80s, with some context from Vance Trimble,
“Fred did the same thing later over in Israel, when they had the fighting in Lebanon. The last big one they had. He went over there to go around with the Israeli guys, flying some, I think, watching the operations.” Indeed, Smith surfaced in west Beirut in the middle of fierce hostilities on his thirty-eighth birthday, August 11, 1982. This adventure had a prosaic origin years earlier. The FedEx chairman was given an award at a dinner in Memphis by the international Jewish fraternity B’nai B’rith in the spring of 1979. Smith told the dinner chairman, Ira Lipman, head of a Memphis security firm, that he wanted to visit Israel. Lipman offered to take him. “He didn’t get around to it then,” said Lipman in an interview for this book, “what with having all those children. But we finally settled on 1982. We left Memphis on August 9, just after Israel invaded Beirut—the war was going on. We didn’t tell our wives we were going into the battle zone until later.” Smith and Lipman were flown by the Israeli army to west Beirut and spent several hours in a bunker during an artillery and bomb barrage.36
Sigafoos, in his book, refers to the Israel foray as a “business trip.” “His close advisors at Federal Express were convinced Smith went there to get the smell of battle so he could inspire his staff for the upcoming air battle with UPS.”37 Around this time, Smith was also apparently toying with the idea of becoming Secretary of Defense.
In a 1982 feature article on his life, the [Memphis] newspaper [the Commercial Appeal] observed: Smith talks about the “natural camaraderie” that developed among members of frontline outfits [in Vietnam]. “It is a small, enclosed fraternity. There were only four hundred thousand who saw any real conflict. The rest of the country did their own thing. There is a real bond there.” He keeps in contact with a number of his war buddies. Some are in a variety of occupations; others have risen quite high in the military service. From time to time there have been whispers about the company and its security-cleared executives cooperating with the nation’s intelligence community. The company’s research into the potential “magic window” system of electronic vision, for example, has obvious benefit to the military. Federal Express does a huge volume of time-sensitive shipping for the Defense Department. . . . As for Smith, he smiles a Cheshire grin when asked about the Central Intelligence Agency making use of Federal Express, saying, “Even if it were true, I couldn’t talk about it.”38
While Smith obviously never became the head of war for the United States, he did get very close. Incredibly, he was George W. Bush’s first choice for Secretary of Defense over Donald Rumsfeld, but Smith declined the job. When Rumsfeld resigned in 2007, Bush offered him the position again but he refused, with the reason given that he needed to spend more time with his terminally ill daughter.
Ravenstein, Combat Wings pp. 109–110
Overnight Success p. 107
Absolutely, Positively Overnight! p. 40
Overnight Success p. 117
Absolutely Positively Overnight p. 42
Overnight Success p. 126
Overnight Success p. 124
Overnight Success p. 133
Absolutely Positively Overnight p. 50
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2023/03/investigative-series/the-rise-of-jamie-dimon/
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2023/03/investigative-series/the-rise-of-jamie-dimon/
https://apnews.com/article/4a4b6e9dfc0949e698ee0ada284414ed
Overnight Success p. 134
Overnight Success p. 139
Overnight Success p. 131
Overnight Success p. 142
Absolutely, Positively Overnight!
Overnight Success p. 153
Overnight Success p. 166
Overnight Success p. 169
Overnight Success p. 177
Overnight Success p. 184
https://web.archive.org/web/20040723145251/http://www.sri.com/policy/csted/reports/economics/fedex/appendixb.pdf
Overnight Success p. 223
Overnight Success p. 226
Overnight Success p. 232
Overnight Success p. 237
Overnight Success p. 269
Overnight Success p. 284-285
Overnight Success p. 284-285
Absolutely Positively Overnight! p. 122
Overnight Success p. 288