FROM THE WINDOW OF AN AIRLINER, IT looks like NASA photos of the moon. Dry. Desolate. Nothing much down there but hundreds of square miles of rock and sand. This particular Godforsaken place is southwest New Mexico, where the U.S. Army tests its missiles and where the first atomic bomb was built and exploded.
The most famous man in southwest New Mexico takes solace from the moonscape serenity of the desert. No one knows better than he how much this desolate terrain really does look like those close-up photos of the moon. He is one of the men who took them.
He is Col. Frank Borman, U.S. Air Force, retired, the man who commanded the first manned moon mission 19 years ago, and who is, arguably, one this century's better-known heroes.
Borman has chosen to live in Las Cruces, N.M., because he is famous for another reason, one that he'd just as soon forget. Las Cruces is to Borman what St. Helena was to Napoleon: a place of exile.
"I made the decision to leave Miami when I left Eastern," says the airline's former chairman, "because I didn't want to hang around where everyone would be asking me to be a Monday morning quarterback about what is going on at Eastern. That's just not what I want to do with my life."
What Borman is doing with his life right now provides an occasional chuckle of satisfaction for his old enemies at Eastern -- a formidable group that includes the 11,000 members of the airline's mechanics union, the International Association of Machinists (IAM). Frank Borman, former space traveler, former Time magazine's Man of the Year, former companion of presidents and popes and kings, former chairman of a $4-billion company with 38,000 employees, is reduced to a somewhat less lofty position: principal car dealer in Las Cruces, N.M. When people in Las Cruces think of the name Borman, they think of Borman Ford, Borman Honda or Borman Isuzu.
Actually, it's a little unfair to call Borman a "car dealer." Although he maintains a small office at the family Ford dealership, he's really just a partner, an investor with his son Fred, who runs the family auto business. Frank himself sells no cars. Still, his adversaries clearly take delight in suggesting that Borman is concluding his star-spangled career in less than glorious fashion.
"SURE, I'VE HAD DAYS WHEN I'VE THOUGHT about the past and gotten really mad," Borman says as he sits in his Las Cruces home, talking about his life in the nonchalant, emotionless tones that have always been his trademark. "Who wouldn't get mad? What happened at Eastern represents a tragic chapter in the history of American business. But you can't let yourself be consumed by it. When you look at my tenure at Eastern as a whole, there's also the fact that we had the most profitable quarter in the history of the company.
"I've already had three successful careers -- military, space and business. Looking back, I've got to be thankful that for more than 40 years I've had a job in which I've been paid to do what I like to do best, which is to fly."
In a sense, Borman was born to fly. He still remembers the summer day 54 years ago when his father, a Gary, Ind., car dealer, took him on a 50-cent airplane ride at a county fair. It wasn't a long ride, but by the time the wheels of that aging Wockel biplane touched down on the dirt runway at the fairgrounds, the 5-year-old boy knew exactly what his life's work was going to be. At 15, he received his pilot's license.
Frank grew up in Tucson, Ariz., where he moved with his parents because he was suffering from chronic mastoid infections, and the family doctor had said the only solution was to take the boy to a dry, warm climate. The family had been prosperous in Indiana, but in the Southwest things were harder. Frank learned the value of a dollar by selling newspapers.
After high school, he went to West Point, where he graduated eighth in a class of 670 in 1950.
After taking time out to marry his high school sweetheart, Susan Bugbee, he shipped out to the Philippines, where he served as an Army Air Corps fighter pilot and flight instructor just before the Korean War. He missed a combat assignment in Korea because he had broken an eardrum during a power dive in a fighter plane.
With his eardrum healed, he became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and like several of his peers at Edwards, went into NASA in the early 1960s. At the age of 37, Col. Borman was selected over several dozen other astronauts to command the 14-day Gemini 7 mission in 1965, which stood for three years as the world record for long-term manned space flight.
It was the start of Borman's fame. Time hailed him as a representative of a "new breed" of astronaut -- diligent, dedicated and businesslike about his approach to his duties. "The wild-blue-yonder, blue-scarf days are gone," Borman said in one of his early press conferences. His bosses at NASA loved that kind of talk.
Three years later, Borman again headed into space, this time as the commander of Apollo 8, which circled the moon in December 1968. Originally, Apollo 8 had been planned for 1969, but word of an impending Russian moon launch caused NASA to speed up its schedule.
The year 1968 had been a bad time for America. It was the year of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the year Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, the year that riots disrupted the Democratic convention in Chicago and college campuses all over the country. Americans were desperate for a hero, and Borman filled the bill perfectly.
The Apollo 8 astronauts' homecoming included a visit to the White House, an address by Borman to a joint session of Congress, and a ticker-tape parade in New York. Based on his performance in Washington and New York, NASA sent Borman, minus his Apollo crewmates, on a goodwill tour of Europe. In short order, the 40-year-old, blond-haired, blue-eyed astronaut charmed heads of state in eight countries. Audiences with Pope Paul VI, Queen Elizabeth II, Charles de Gaulle and Generalissimo Francisco Franco proved he was "almost as good a diplomat as he is an astronaut," The New York Times reported.
The honors kept coming. Borman, James Lovell and William Anders were Time's "Men of the Year" for 1968, an honor not bestowed on the team of astronauts who actually walked on the moon in 1969. And when Borman's retirement from the Air Force in 1970 approached, the media speculated that he might become a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
In the summer of 1970, President Nixon offered Borman a job at the White House. But the job description was vague and Borman opted instead to become vice president for operations at Miami-based Eastern Airlines, which had not had a profitable year since 1959. The idea of staying in aviation appealed to him.
BORMAN MOVED TO SOUTH FLORIDA and took up his new position at Eastern. He proved an able, conscientious executive, and five years later, when Eastern's board was seeking a new president and CEO to bring the airline out of the fiscal wilderness, he was the logical candidate for the job. "Frank Borman is the only man who can save this company," Laurence Rockefeller told his fellow Eastern board members.
It didn't take long for Borman, who assumed the presidency in 1975 and the board chairmanship one year later, to leave his personal mark on the company.
"The Colonel," as his subordinates called him, instituted an authoritarian, no-nonsense style of management. He came to work promptly at 7:30 a.m. and expected all management employees to do the same. He quickly disposed of the company's executive jet. "Why do we need an executive jet when we've got a whole airline?" he asked. He also banned what many executives considered their favorite company perk, the three-martini lunch. Borman forbade drinking on company time, and made it clear he considered lunch hour to be company time.
But a good number of Eastern's executives didn't have much time to grouse about the new, spartan corporate lifestyle. Borman dismissed 81 middle managers and 31 vice presidents, saving the company $9 million annually in salaries.
He also asked all the company's employees to take a voluntary wage freeze in exchange for a program he called the Variable Earnings Plan, which tied salaries to profits. To sell his plan to the thousands of mechanics, flight attendants and flight crews who worked for Eastern, Borman personally toured the 28 states in which the airline had facilities and campaigned for his proposals with his employees.
In those early days, Borman earned a lot of points with Eastern's employees because of his markedly proletarian tastes. While Eastern vice presidents drove Cadillacs and Mercedes, their new leader showed up for work in a used Chevrolet Camaro, powered by an engine he had personally rebuilt. And Borman prided himself in buying his suits off the rack; custom-tailored clothing seemed like a needless frill to him.
Applying that down-to-earth ethic to the company's finances, Borman pulled off a coup that many industry analysts thought was impossible. He turned the red ink to black, bringing Eastern's profits for 1978 to $67.3 million, a company record. Board members began collectively patting themselves on the back for appointing a man with no civilian management experience.
IN THAT HEADY YEAR OF RECORD profits and industry-wide praise for Borman's turnaround job, it hardly seemed foolhardy for Eastern's chairman to place a $1.4-billion order for new, fuel-efficient aircraft. The price of jet fuel had quadrupled in the '70s, and it was reasonable to assume that rising fuel prices would continue for years to come. Added to the debt for planes that Borman's predecessors had purchased, the airline's total debt now came to $2.3 billion.
"If jet fuel had gone to $2 a gallon, Borman would have been hailed as a genius," one industry analyst says. Instead, fuel prices began to drop as OPEC members became greedy for quick profits and flooded the market with oil.
At the same time, Borman was appeasing his labor unions with some of the highest wage contracts in the airline industry. He would later pay for both decisions.
But the event with the greatest impact on Eastern's future occurred during the airline's Camelot year, 1978: airline deregulation. For decades, the federal government had decided what airlines could fly what routes, and had imposed a handful of other strictures that had the practical effect of limiting competition.
Under the new system, just about anyone with the wherewithal to buy or lease a few airplanes and sell tickets could start an airline. In the first five years after deregulation, the number of airlines in the United States jumped from 30 to almost 100.
Unfortunately for Frank Borman, many of the fledgling airlines moved directly into the lucrative East Coast routes that had been Eastern's principal money makers for four decades. The New York-Miami and New York- Washington, D.C., routes were now filled with planes flying the colors of companies that hadn't existed a year earlier. And these new companies, such as People Express and New York Air, had a distinct advantage over Borman, because they were not burdened with Eastern's enormous debt and massive labor costs.
Eastern's profits began to slide almost as soon as deregulation began; 1979 was the last profitable year for the airline until 1985.
Suddenly, Borman found himself facing pressure from every quarter. The banks, which owned a $2.3-billion chunk of Eastern, demanded pay cuts all the way from the executive suite to the maintenance hangar. This put management on a collision course with the unions, and Charles Bryan, the tough-talking president of Eastern's IAM chapter, dubbed Borman's Variable Earnings Plan the "Veritable Extortion Plan" and campaigned against it.
The intensity of the struggle brought out the autocrat in Borman, who, as the unions were quick to point out, had learned his leadership skills in the military, where the colonel gives the orders and the soldiers obey without debate.
In 1983, when Borman asked all employees to take a 20 percent pay cut, he didn't bother to campaign for it like he had in his honeymoon days at Eastern. Instead, workers were shown a videotape of a stern-looking Borman threatening to declare bankruptcy if the pay cuts were not accepted. "In my opinion, you will be voting on your jobs," he told his 38,000 employees in that characteristic, emotionless Borman style.
BORMAN WAS NOT ONLY caught in a squeeze between the banks and his employees. He also faced increasing pressure from a third, more formidable opponent: the new breed of post-deregulation airlines.
The toughest of these competitors was Frank Lorenzo, a Harvard-educated Texan who had built a massive airline holding company called Texas Air Corp. He did it largely by busting the unions at Continental Airlines in 1983 and he did it with a new strategy. He took the airline into bankruptcy and convinced the judge to set aside union contracts. Starting up again a few days later, Lorenzo slashed 8,000 jobs and rehired the rest at half their previous salaries. Then, looking for new fields to conquer, he set his sights on Eastern.
The new, non-union Continental was in a position to do some real damage to Eastern. Continental pilots earned roughly half what Eastern pilots were paid; baggage handlers earned less than half -- $18,000 a year for the average Continental baggage handler vs. $43,000 a year for his Eastern counterpart.
Eastern was clearly on the ropes, and most of the industry knew it.
"It beats the hell out of me why Borman hasn't been fired," one Wall Street analyst was quoted as saying. "Maybe firing an astronaut would be like firing Santa Claus."
It was in this atmosphere that IAM president Charles Bryan came up with a plan that would radically change things at Eastern. He agreed that his workers would take a 20 percent pay cut if employees were given Eastern stock in lieu of the money they forfeited, and if the employees were given four of 15 seats on the board of directors.
Initially, Borman balked. "I won't have the monkeys running the zoo," he said, using terminology that was not representative of his best skills as a diplomat.
But since there were virtually no alternatives, the plan began looking better and better. On Dec. 12, 1983, Eastern announced a new labor pact based on Bryan's proposal. And for a time, it worked better than anyone could have dreamed.
Once again, Eastern's profits set a company record. The pay cuts were saving $295 million a year, and equally important, union members, who now stood to gain financially from a profitable Eastern, went out of their way to perform their jobs more efficiently. The huge CF-6 engines (which powered Eastern's A-300 Air Buses) were now being serviced in an average of 168 hours, instead of the 485 hours it had taken the same mechanics to do the same job before the power-sharing plan went into effect. Borman was rapidly becoming as big a hero in business circles as he had been at NASA. The Harvard Business Review published a report hailing the Eastern profit- and power-sharing plan as an example of how U.S. business could outperform the Japanese in quality and productivity.
But already, the seeds of Borman's final crash were being sown. Charles Bryan, who had become an Eastern director as part of the new management plan, was having a great time exercising his power, which included access to the company's financial documents. Bryan and the union began publishing their own financial analysis reports about Eastern. At one point Bryan published a report that accused Borman of keeping a double set of books because of the way the airline accounted for tickets that Eastern sold for other airlines.
"When my report came out, we were all in Las Vegas for a convention," Bryan says. "I was playing the slot machines in the hotel when Borman came up and started yelling, 'What the hell are you trying to do to me?"'
The two retired to a coffee shop to discuss Bryan's report. "I didn't have my glasses with me," Bryan recalls, "so Borman said, 'We can both use mine.' He would read something and yell at me and then he would take off his glasses and hand them to me and I'd put them on, read something else and yell back at him. It made an interesting little scene."
When December 1984 rolled around, Eastern's creditors, who still held a $2.3-billion axe over Borman's head, insisted the wage cuts should continue. Borman felt he didn't have a choice and announced a unilateral decision to continue the wage reduction program. No stock was given in exchange for the cuts.
When the final fiscal report for 1985 was tabulated, it was evident to everyone that the good times were over. Eastern ended the year with a paltry $6.3 million profit -- a one-tenth of one percent return on gross revenues of $4 billion.
The banks were furious and told Borman that Eastern had to start making a 2 percent profit -- or there wouldn't be an Eastern. In desperation, the airline's management began shopping around for a buyer. And then the thought occurred: Why not Frank Lorenzo?
The way the board figured it was this: The specter of Lorenzo as Eastern's new owner would provide Borman with the quintessential ultimatum for the unions -- take the pay cuts or have the company sold to a proven union buster. And indeed, both the pilots' union and the flight attendants' union went along with the pay cuts, hoping that this would save them from the dreaded Lorenzo.
But when Charles Bryan and the IAM were given that choice at a fateful board meeting on Feb. 23, 1986, Bryan made it clear that, given a choice between continuing to work for Frank Borman and taking a chance on being fired by Frank Lorenzo, the machinists would opt for Lorenzo.
The Eastern board's ruse had failed. On Feb. 24, it was announced that Eastern Airlines had been sold to Texas Air.
Lorenzo's first action at Eastern was to eliminate 1,500 jobs and promise to cut many more. The new Eastern boss succinctly stated his labor policy: "I don't talk to representatives of unions."
One might wonder whether the machinists would think that Bryan had blown it. Apparently not. Last summer, the IAM elected Charles Bryan to an unprecedented third term as president.
SHORTLY AFTER LORENZO TOOK OVER, BORMAN indicated that he would stick around to run Eastern for Texas Air. But in June, he called together 200 of his friends and fellow executive employees for a dinner at Miami's Grand Bay Hotel and announced his plans to leave Eastern and move to Las Cruces, N.M., where he and his wife Susan had just bought a home, and where his 33-year-old son Fred had purchased a car dealership a couple of months before.
No representatives of labor were invited to the dinner.
IF BORMAN IS BITTER THESE DAYS, HE IS ALSO reticent. Sitting at his home in Las Cruces, he declined to elaborate on his feelings about Bryan and the IAM except to say, "I hope they're happy. He is leading the union members, like lemmings, right into the sea."
Bryan talks of Borman in equally somber tones: "The great tragedy is that Frank Borman was never able to use his international status as an American hero to make this company work."
Borman keeps a relatively low profile these days, even in Las Cruces.
"When we first heard he was coming here," recalls Lee Gemoets, business editor of the Las Cruces Sun News, "we all assumed we would soon be seeing a lot of him at various VIP-type functions around town. But that just hasn't happened. I'm sure he gets invited to parties and charity events in Las Cruces, but he's never there."
The irony in Borman's life is that, for a man who doesn't have a job, he is extremely busy.
Part of the reason, no doubt, is that keeping busy provides a way of forgetting the past. Borman is clearly not thrilled with his new station in life. While he doesn't refuse to talk to the media, he does an excellent job of being hard to reach. It took two months just to get him on the phone to set up an interview for this article. When a photographer flew from Florida to New Mexico to take pictures, he was given 30 minutes.
"Take it or leave it," Borman said. "I'm busy."
Surprisingly, he has found plenty to do. One week he's off to Wright- Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for the 40th anniversary of the Air Force; another week he's a guest at the opening of Joe Robbie Stadium; still another week he shows up with Frank Lorenzo at an exclusive lodge in Wyoming. Last summer he helped to investigate the plane crash that killed the president of Mozambique.
Borman seems to have found a way to spend as much time on airplanes as he ever did. One of his new duties at Borman Motors is to pilot the company airplane. And he occasionally takes his World War II vintage DeHavilland up to do aerobatic stunts above the desert. It's the best way to forget his worries, he says.
One thing Borman doesn't have to be concerned about is money. In June 1986, according to records filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he accepted a severance settlement from Eastern of $900,000. He also gets a $150,000-a-year consultant's fee from Texas Air through 1991.
Borman is somewhat evasive about his next career move.
"I'm interested in several causes, and I am going to do my best working for George Bush," he says. He is a member of Bush's political action committee, and as the presidential campaign intensifies, he will probably get out and stump for the vice president. Some of Borman's friends speculate that if Bush were elected, Borman would be appointed to a federal job.
So far, however, his only appointment has been to the University of New Mexico board of regents. But those who have known him for years think it's unlikely he will spend the rest of his life contemplating the desert sunsets.
Borman himself is characteristically guarded about where his life is going.
"I'm 59 years old," he says. "I've still got a lot to contribute. But if you ask what I'm going to do with the rest of my life, I've got to say that's a question that has yet to be answered."
ROWLAND STITELER is a writer for the Orlando Sentinel's Florida magazine.