American Rifle - Alexander Rose [198]
Which is why it seemed the most natural thing in the world for Boutelle to invite the general to his July 4, 1960, barbecue at his farm outside Hagerstown, Maryland. The property was set up for some serious shooting. According to MacDonald, it had a “skeet field, trap field, archery, pistol ranges, you name it. It was beautifully equipped from a shooting angle.”37 Thoughtfully, the host provided three watermelons and a selection of AR-15s. Boutelle placed a watermelon at 50, 100, and 150 yards and asked LeMay to have a go. The general exploded the first and third of them. He walked over to the remains and, in MacDonald’s enigmatic words, “put his hand down in there and picked this stuff up, and I won’t say what he said, but it was quite impressive—he was impressed.” When MacDonald asked whether he wanted to destroy the remaining watermelon, LeMay growled, “Hell no, let’s eat it.”38
From that moment on LeMay wanted AR-15s for the guards at his beloved Strategic Air Command bases. Nothing else would do, especially not M14s, which he’d already tried and disliked. Colt, in the meantime, began a public relations campaign designed to embarrass the M14 publicly and generate interest about its own AR-15.The crew-cut, gun-collecting George Strichman, in his late forties and a board member of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, was the incoming president of Colt and a specialist in company turnarounds and modernization programs. (Some of Colt’s machinery dated back to the Civil War.)39 “We’re up against the NIH factor,” he announced. “Not Invented Here. The [AR-15] rifle’s basic problem was that it hadn’t been invented by Army arsenal personnel.” According to him, Ordnance “got the M14 adopted, then tried to cover their tracks. They resented the AR-15 being thrust upon them.”40 Colt publicists earned their pay. A highly influential article (even Kennedy read it) by the journalist A. J. Glass in the New York Herald Tribune caustically asserted that even some army officers considered the M14 to be “a major blunder . . . the result of an official Army ordnance policy . . . to get rid of short-range, light impact spray-fire weapons.”41 The long-standing idea that the M14 was an inherently poor weapon, it seems, had its genesis in a corporate rival spinning the complex story of its development into an easy-to-understand conspiracy theory about reactionary government officials and military experts crushing innovation wheresoever it could be found.
For the rest of 1960, as Colt and the indefatigable MacDonald pushed tame congressmen to ask questions, LeMay forged ahead with tests for the AR-15. At every turn, Ordnance was frustrated: the AR-15, now that the Colt engineers had tweaked whatever few bugs remained, was a terrific weapon in every way. Finally, in the summer of 1961, LeMay, newly elevated to the powerful position of air force chief of staff, believed he had secured enough proof of the AR-15’s abilities to go ahead and request the purchase of eighty thousand of them. LeMay had miscalculated. He had been depending on the stream of complaints about M14 production delays to give him an advantage, but by the time he submitted his request, most of the problems at Winchester and at Harrington & Richardson had been mitigated.
With one rifle headache apparently dissipated, no one had any desire to invite a new one, and LeMay’s order was turned down by the Pentagon, then by a House subcommittee