In 1969 the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation took a break from making planes to drop bombs on Vietnamese villages and turned their attention to making films about dropping acid. The results of both their efforts were awful. And of course they were richly rewarded at the taxpayer’s expenses.
From Night Flight:
Lockheed ended up borrowing $(removed) million from a consortium of banks in 1969, even they would still end up declaring multimillion dollar losses for the company for ’69 and 1970. It wasn’t enough money, however, and so the failing aerospace giant once again turned to our federal government, who then granted them a $(removed) million dollar loan guarantee, which Nixon’s administration actually proposed and Congress narrowly ended up passing in August 1971, passing that sizable debt on to the U.S. taxpayer by showing that Lockheed — just like the banks — was simply too big to fail.
Lockheed would survive and grow in the 1970s, of course, ultimately buying another defense contractor, Martin Marietta, and becoming the mega-huge Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest defense contractor, which was later described by Jonathan Vankin in The Big Book of Scandal as “a company that sold billions of dollars in weapons every year, while covertly functioning as one of the world’s largest organized crime syndicates.”
