Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

The Manfield amendments were a huge blow to Project Whorl. Panic set in among the Trustees as they scheduled urgent meetings with top officials from the Nixon administration, including the president himself. Out of those meetings came a brilliant idea. The Gang of Eight has to be briefed on all special access programs, even those that are waived an... See more

West never passed up an opportunity to add flavor to the project. He helped to transform a dispute among engineers into a virtual War of the Roses. He created, as Rasala put it, a seemingly endless series of “brushfires,” and got his staff charged up about putting them out. He was always finding romance and excitement in the seemingly ordinary. He

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There was, however, one cowboy who was dazzled. Ross Perot, the bantam Texan who had founded Electronic Data Systems, then sold it to General Motors for $2.4 billion, happened to watch a PBS documentary, The Entrepreneurs, which had a segment on Jobs and NeXT in November 1986. He instantly identified with Jobs and his gang, so much so that, as he w

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