After Chairman Vinson agreed that the company had had a clean bill of health since America entered the war, Gibbs laid out his view of how his business participated in the American system of free enterprise. “If you say to me that the profit after taxes cannot keep pace with the gross business,” Gibbs said, “you are automatically limiting the size of business in the United States.”
“Let’s get away from that entirely,” Vinson said, interrupting him. “You have the permission of everybody to do as large a business as you can.”
“All right,” Gibbs agreed. “Then you have to let me run a business that keeps pace in gross earnings with the size of the business.”59
The naval architect trained as a lawyer then rested his case.
The next day, Chairman Vinson once again faced William Francis Gibbs and passed judgment on the wartime conduct of the Navy and Gibbs & Cox.
“I will make this statement for the record,” Vinson began. “I think, Mr. Gibbs, beyond a shadow of doubt, that you have rendered to the country outstanding service in organizing a staff of technical men as skilled and as learned as they are, and you have been of great aid and value and assistance to the ship production program…. I think the Navy would have been bogged down completely had it not been for men of your vision and ability who came in and aided the Navy in its ship building program.
“I want to commend you and I want to compliment the Navy Department on having the vision to employ people of your ability and your firm’s outstanding qualifications do this work,” Vinson concluded.60
He then asked Admiral Cochrane—routed a few days earlier—to take the stand again.
The admiral clarified some additional questions about fee structures and vessel classes for the committee. But before yielding the floor, Cochrane asked if he could make one more statement about the work of Gibbs & Cox.
“One point which perhaps has not been adequately made in the hearings,” Cochrane said, “is that Gibbs & Cox is a unique organization and there is nothing equal to it in any field of marine engineers and naval construction….
“We at the Bureau of Ships,” Cochrane went on, “feel that Gibbs & Cox has done an outstanding job and has been an essential factor in the over-all war effort of the country. Their contribution has been outstanding. We feel that there has been and will be general agreement in this opinion by those who take the time to read the record of these hearings.”
“I agree with your conclusions,” Chairman Vinson said.61
William Francis Gibbs went to Washington as a suspected war profiteer and he left the city a war hero. On his way back to New York, he may have thought that his father, who called engineers impractical, inarticulate, and short on business smarts, had been proved wrong.
The law was not the only way to earn the respect of people who mattered. Thirty years after he quit the law, William Francis Gibbs had won over Carl Vinson, a powerful Washington figure who was among those overseeing the greatest collective effort in the history of humanity, a war against the Axis powers. He was a man who mattered, not a Philadelphia social arbiter or Harvard rich boy. And forty-two years after the New York Times attacked his father for running a fraudulent business, Gibbs showed the country he himself was honest, honorable, and patriotic. Where his father bilked American Alkali out of tens of thousands of dollars, Gibbs demonstrated in a public forum that his firm was squeaky clean.62
A day after the Washington hearings, a headline appeared in the New York Times: “House Unit Clears, Lauds Gibbs & Cox: Absolved of Excess Fee Charge—Firm Called Big Factor in Record Ship Output.”
William Francis returned to his office at 21 West Street and got back to work. “Nothing educates a man like being forced to look up the answer to every possible question that could be asked about his business,” he said about the investigation.63
Less than a month later, 130,000 American soldiers prepared to storm the beaches of Nazi-occupied France. On the morning of June 6, 1944, William Francis Gibbs asked his staff to “pause for a minute and contemplate the importance of this hour, and make a short prayer for the success of the operation and the minimization of its cost.”64
The men and women of Gibbs & Cox had designed the landing craft that carried the American soldiers onto the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.
BOOK II
BUILDING THE DREAM
16. A VERY PLEASING APPEARANCE
As the complete collapse of Germany and Japan neared, William Francis Gibbs was at the pinnacle of an astonishing career that he had created for himself. He was indisputably the nation’s most successful naval architect. The accolades cluttering his walls included honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard and the David W. Taylor Award from the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, named after his mentor.1
When the war did end, William Francis Gibbs could say that he had assembled one of the finest groups of naval designers and engineers, perhaps the finest, in maritime history. The men and women of the firm had worked together for five long years under the strict discipline of wartime service and secrecy, and they had good reason to be proud: Gibbs & Cox’s ships had brought advanced design and innovative construction to the war at sea, and helped the allies win it. They had designed and supervised the construction of more than 70 percent of all naval ships during World War II.
But Gibbs warned his staff about becoming too comfortable. “It is true of any endeavor where groups of people come together for a common purpose,” he said. “Praise is dangerous because of its possible effect of making us over-confident.”2
Like William Francis Gibbs, the United States of America had achieved the seemingly impossible. After years of economic hardship, the nation was emerging from the war stronger than it had ever been in its history. Its soldiers were victorious, its industrial infrastructure robust, and its workers flush with cash. With most of Europe in ruins, America had no real economic competitors. Following Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, the great victor nation was now fully poised to be a true two-ocean power.
Finally, the stars seemed to be aligning for William Francis Gibbs’s childhood dream, and he now felt ready to build a big passenger liner that he could pitch to the United States Lines and the American military. He knew that despite all his accomplishments, willing his so-called Big Ship into reality would be the greatest uphill battle of his life. After four decades of hard work and perseverance, at the peak of his career, Gibbs was both a visionary and a tough negotiator, unafraid of naysayers among rivals in his field and enemies in Washington.
“I am used to hard fights,” he once said. “You never do anything in this world that is different that you do not have nearly every man’s hand against you. It does not make any difference whether it is medicine, or religion, or what it is. You will find that as soon as a man comes up with a new scheme of things, he makes everybody mad because they have to think. Then when they go through that process they join all together against this individual to try to knock him out.”3
Designing the greatest ship in history meant more than a lot of hard work from him and his staff. It had to be driven, as he said, by “an inward urge to crusade.”4 Producing the blueprints of the ship was like composing a score for a great symphony, William Francis said, and a great luxury liner plowing at speed through the ocean was comparable to listening to a great orchestra or church pipe organ; observing its mighty machinery was like looking at the music of Bach under glass.5 Perhaps William Francis had in mind his own favorite classical compositions as he set to work: heroic pieces from the Romantic period—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony (the “Pathétique”), and Wagner’s “Spring Song” from Die Walküre. Or Ravel’s “Bolero,” which, he said, “begins very soft and then rises higher and higher to a tremendous climax…. By God, it’s good!”6