Word: kotchian
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...August 20, 1972, A.C. Kotchian, president of the Lockheed Corporation checked into a suite on the tenth floor of the Hotel Okura in Tokyo and set in train the events which were to lead to the biggest scandal in the post-war history of Japan; his own dismissal along with that of Daniel Haughton, chairman of the board of Lockheed; and the most profound reconsideration in the United States of corporate morality, power and influence since the Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920's. But the Lockheed affair, as it unfolded on a worldwide stage, is more than...
...Kotchian's Mission...
...When Mr. Kotchian arrived in Japan on that August day in 1972, his mission was nothing less than to save the Lockheed Corporation from impending bankruptcy. The company was then, and is now, the largest defense contractor in the United States. (Corporate sales in 1975 amounted to an estimated $3.5 billion.) But in the late 1960's, Lockheed's management had made a major decision to diversify its business and compete with Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas in the manufacture and sale of commercial airliners. Lockheed had thus developed the L-1011 Tristan wide-bodied jumbo jet, but the program...
What precisely did Mr. Kotchian do when he set up his command post in the Okura Hotel? In a remarkable five-part interview in the Asahai Evening News, he outlined the Lockheed sales campaign in detail. The crux of the problem for Lockheed was to persuade All Nippon Airlines to postpone a decision to buy the McDonnell-Douglas DC 10 and then arrange for All Nippon to buy the Lockheed Tristar, instead. In order to accomplish this objective, Kotchian undertook to penetrate the very top level of Japanese political decision making. He enlisted the aid of Lockheed's secret agent...
According to Kotchian's sworn testimony before the Multinational Subcommittee, Lockheed also dispatched $2 million through other channels to Japanese government officials in order to ensure that the "right" decisions were made. In effect, Lockheed, in pursuing its commercial interests, had become a nefarious political actor in Japan. It had secretly retained Kodoma as its sales agent, a leader of that political faction in Japan which the United States government had regarded, since the close of World War II, as inimical to our national interests. And, in making pay-offs to various politicians in the Japanese government, the company contributed...