The black book was a weapon. In Ezra's hands, the trusts, holding companies, and industrial partnerships became a hit list. He secluded himself in the library for days, cross-referencing family holdings with his own data about the corporations that would supply the nucleus of the military-industrial complex of America.
He shunned the giants. US Steel, General Electric, the Dow Jones giants—too large, too clumsy, their boards filled with old-fashioned men who would not embrace the revolution he would attempt to thrust through their doors. He was a vulture, and he was prowling for wounded, under-valued game with guts.
His final list included a portfolio of the unknown and the injured, companies that were one bad quarter away from bankruptcy but held within them a kernel of genius that only one from the future would recognize.
Seversky Aircraft Corporation: A tiny firm in managed by some bright but eccentric Russian émigré. It was losing buckets of money, but its founder was obsessed with high-speed, all-metal monoplanes. Ezra could see that with a changed management team and a massive investment of capital, this firm's genetic inheritance could be cajoled into evolving into what would later become Republic Aviation, the builders of the legendary P-47 Thunderbolt.
Van Norman Machine Tool Company: A small firm in Springfield, Massachusetts, that barely existed in the trough in industrial orders. But they controlled the superior patents to precision-milling machines, the very devices necessary to make in quantity the complex gear and engine pieces for thousands of aircraft and tanks.
DuPont's Special Projects Division: This wasn't a business to acquire; it was a division to pillage. He knew that somewhere in the chemical giant, a research group was playing with synthetic polymers to create an artificial silk. He wasn't in the stockinged-interest business; he was in the business of the fabric they would call "nylon," which would be perfect for parachutes, and in the other work with polymers that could create synthetic rubber.
Various Patents: He drew up a list of small privately-held patents in advanced radio vacuum tubes and in magnetron technology—the fundamental constituents of radar and proximity fuzes.
Ezra knew he couldn't burst into boardrooms and announce he wanted to build a war machine decades before anyone in America thought to do so. He needed to create a credible cover story, a Trojan horse to conceal his real goal. He would bundle his acquisitions under the popular, liberal lens of industrial modernism.
He began to grant thoughtfully prepared interviews with business correspondents, speaking of a "new era in American industry." He spoke of "the future of mass transportation" in referring to his interest in airplane companies. He spoke of his buying up of machine tool firms in terms of "revolutionizing manufacturing efficiency." When business reporters inquired after chemicals, he spoke of "new materials for the modem home." It was a masterful campaign of misdirection that made him appear to be some kind of futuristic capitalist, a man of the future, when in fact he was quietly acquiring the constituents of a weapons arsenal.
His decisions, however, brought consternation to the stodgy and clubbable American business community. He did not cajole; he controlled. With the huge financial leverage of the Rockefeller name behind him, he initiated hostile mergers, proxy wars, and bought dominant stakes in the open market, paying in many cases well above the deflated market value in order to buy outright control.
This put him in open and straightforward confrontation with Junior. The family was finally in open hostilities.
"You're like some corporate raider, Ezra!" Junior thundered at a strained family dinner, his voice echoing through the grand dining room. "A buccaneer! I was called today by the chairman of Seversky Aircraft. A good fellow who happens to be the friend of Charles Lindbergh. You threw him out of his company! People at the bank, our fifty-year-old partners, warn me you are acting with a recklessness that stains our name!"
Ezra smoothed his lips with a napkin in his typical placid style. "The so-called good man you work for was running his company into the ground, Junior. I've replaced him with men with experience in production lines, not just aerodynamics principles. Our company name? It was built under my father-in-law, with the understanding that innovation more often than not required a firm hand to handle it. Or did he build Standard Oil in committee?"
The punch hit its mark. Senior, seated in the head of the table, said nothing, his silence a shield for Ezra's maneuverings. The family was officially split in two ways. There was Junior's clique—the public image of Rockefeller largesse, supported by the old system of lawyers and financiers—and there was Ezra's clique, a shadow administration of faithful brokers and newly purchased industrialists, unofficially legitimized by the patriarch's irrefutable authority.
It was amidst Seversky Aircraft's embittered takeover when Ezra found his first true lieutenant. Weeding out the old risk-averse board, he came across the dossier of the chief engineer, a person named David Sterling. Sterling was a brilliant aeronautical engineer from MIT, but his dossier was dotted with reprimands for "insubordination" and "unauthorized and fiscally imprudent design recommendations."
Ezra was intrigued, so he sent for Sterling's dismissed blueprints to be brought to him. He unfurled one across a great table. It was a conceptual drawing of a four-engine heavy bomber, larger and more imposing than anything that was being under construction in America. It was a crude conceptual sketch of the future B-17 Flying Fortress. The panel had dismissed the blueprints as a wild money pit.
Ezra summoned Sterling to his office in the company HQ. Sterling, a hard-looking individual in his mid-thirties with intense eyes and black marks on his fingers, walked in expecting to be dismissed. He stood stiff in front of the desk of the newcomer.
Ezra did not receive him with open arms. He simply slid one of Sterling'spown pogonogicked blueprints across the gleaming mahogany.
"You see this design, Mr. Sterling," Ezra stated with icy and precise voice. "It's genius. The wing-loading calculations, the stress analysis... it's a decade ahead of schedule."
Sterling blinked in surprise. "The board said—"
"They were idiots," Ezra cut him off. "But this design," he touched the paper, "is also too safe."
Before the stunned engineer could utter a word, Ezra seized a pencil. With swift, precise strokes, he began to sketch alterations directly onto the blueprint. He called for a streamlined, pressurized cabin to fly at high elevation. He called for spots for many defensive machine-gun turrets with overlapping areas of coverage of fire. He sketched in a more powerful installation for the engine nacelles to cope with a more powerful Wright Cyclone engine he knew was in the process of coming into production.
Sterling stared at him, agape. This man, this financier of Wall Street, this corporate raider, was not only panning his design; he was improving it with a concept that was approaching the occult. He spoke of combat considerations at high altitudes and extreme-range flights that no one in the US Army Air Corps was even thinking about yet.
"Who... who are you?" Sterling stammered, his professional demeanor shattered.
Ezra let go of the pencil and looked up to meet the gaze of the engineer. "I am your new boss. And I am giving you a new directive, Mr. Sterling. The Board requested that you design aircraft that would generate profits. I want you to design the aircraft that will win the coming war."
He stood up and walked to the window, looking out across the airfield. "I want a bomber to fly two thousand miles, to carry a five-ton load, to evade enemy fighters at thirty thousand feet, and to bring it home. I want a long-range fighter escort to fly with it all the way to its objectives and home again."
He turned back to the shocked engineer. "Your budget," he explained, his voice like cold and unforgiving steel, "is whatever you determine that it has to be. Now, get to work."
He had shot his first bullet in the industrial war. He had his factory. Now, he had his general as well.