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By Root 2033 0

and merchandising rights to Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company for the knockdown price of $75,000 and a 4.5 percent royalty on future sales.32 It was an audacious move, especially for Colt, which was then it-self perilously close to bankruptcy. The outbreak of peace in 1945 and the armistice following the Korean War were as bad for gun companies as the South’s surrender in 1865. By 1954 Colt’s annual profit was a miserable $246,670, and the work force had more than halved, to just 750.33The following year, exactly a century after Sam Colt had incorporated his business, the struggling arms-maker was taken over by Leopold Silberstein’s Penn-Texas Corporation, later called Fairbanks Whitney after the financier was ousted when his own empire collapsed a few years later.34 In a brave bid for solvency, the Colt board dispensed with its usual caution and threw the dice one last time.

For the ArmaLite fire sale, Boutelle appears to have been advised by Bobby MacDonald, a principal of Cooper MacDonald of Baltimore. Cooper MacDonald specialized in brokering sales of small arms, such as Colt pistols, Remington rifles, shotguns, and industrial-sized quantities of ammunition to a select and discerning international clientele, mostly in Southeast Asia, where such weaponry was always welcomed.

Colt gave MacDonald $5,000 to send him off on a sales tour of the Far East. Together with Stoner (who joined Colt as a consultant), MacDonald visited the Philippines, Malaya, Indonesia, Thailand, and Burma. MacDonald had high hopes for his order book: he believed the “short stature,” as he put it, of Asians would make the lightweight, low-recoil AR-15 a popular choice for their armies.

The arms merchant was half-right. While the AR-15s were wildly popular, not a single order came in. It turned out that these countries had signed military-assistance agreements with the United States, and the treaties stipulated that any models they purchased had to be in service with an American military or law enforcement entity. Because the Amazon of income generated by these deals—$9 billion between 1960 and 1964, $5 billion of which was in liquid cash—flowed back to the United States, these agreements aided the balance-of-payments deficit, propped up favored military contractors, and helped pay for the Pentagon’s ever-rising international commitments. Indeed, by 1965 weapons exports were offsetting nearly half the cost of stationing U.S. forces around the world (excluding Southeast Asia).

What was good for General Motors, General Dynamics, and McDonnell Douglas was not, however, good for little ArmaLite, for even countries without such agreements were loath to buy weapons for which it might be difficult to obtain parts and ammunition. To their consternation, MacDonald and Stoner realized that without some kind of deal with a government agency, the AR-15 would never see a sale, no matter how much the Asians liked it.

On their return MacDonald made calls to the FBI, the navy, the Marines, and even the Secret Service (which actually bought two AR-15s and stashed them in the president’s limousine, but removed them when someone pointed out that their spray-fire would kill too many bystanders). He reserved his greatest efforts, however, for the air force. Rumor had it that the service was seeking to replace its airbase security police’s aged M1s and M2 carbines.35

The vice chief of staff of the air force at the time was General Curtis LeMay, sometimes known as “Bombs Away” LeMay and the unfortunate inspiration for George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson character in Dr. Strange love. LeMay had been the leading advocate of mass bombing offensives in the Second World War and afterward had turned the Strategic Air Command into the mirror of his views on Massive Retaliation. Blunt when he spoke, brooding when he didn’t, bombastic all the time, but acknowledged even by his (many) enemies as the greatest sky captain of all time, LeMay was determined never to allow the air force to take its orders from the army. His insistence on air force independence and