Dick Cheney played key role in ending Grumman fighter jet program

For Long Islanders of a certain age, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died Monday at 84, will be remembered as the defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush who ended two high-profile Grumman Corp. fighter jet programs — a move that ultimately cost some 25,000 workers their jobs.

At the time, Grumman was the Bethpage-based preeminent builder of aircraft carrier planes for the U.S. Navy. The two jets were the A-6 Intruder, an attack aircraft, and the F-14 Tomcat, a supersonic fighter jet. The latter? Think Tom Cruise in the original "Top Gun."

News reports from the era said that with the Cold War winding down and the fall of the Soviet Union imminent, Cheney, the defense secretary from from 1989 to 1993, sought to aggressively slash military budgets and cut defense spending.

What ensued was a test of political wills among Cheney, the Senate Armed Services Committee, Grumman and the House Armed Services Committee. It was a lobbying battle in which Grumman recruited allies from both sides of the aisle — namely, the former astronaut and U.S. Marine pilot Democratic Sen. John Glenn, and the former Vietnam War naval aviator, Republican Sen. John McCain — to save the programs.

In the end, Cheney won, arguing that taxpayers needed to fund new, more advanced weapons systems.

Grumman had built a host of highly regarded combat aircraft — the Grumman Wildcat and Hellcat fighters, the Avenger torpedo bomber — that helped the U.S. and the allies win World War II. It was the eighth-largest defense manufacturer in America in the early 1990s.

The end of the fighter jet program forced Grumman to merge with Northrop Corp., ending what had been widely viewed as the golden era of military airplane manufacturing on Long Island. Northrop Grumman Corp. is headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, in the Washington D.C. area.

At the time, Cheney said the Tomcat was 1960s technology and was approaching obsolescence.

And, Martin R. Cantor, director of the Long Island Center for Socio-Economic Policy, said Cheney, with eyes on trimming defense spending, argued it was better to purchase one multi-role aircraft — in this case, an F/A or fighter-attack aircraft — than it was to buy separate planes with separate roles.

But Cantor, who from 1988-91 served as Suffolk County commissioner for economic development, said there was more to it.

"Grumman," Cantor said in a phone interview on Tuesday, "wanted to get out of Long Island — and move their operations to Florida — because they thought it was too expensive to manufacture here. ... What the Grumman lobbyist told us was to show how important the F-14 was — and, they gave us the Tom Cruise 'Top Gun' show to do that — but they also told us, 'Don't make this a Long Island issue.' Grumman was saying, 'Save the F-14.' But, in reality Grumman wasn't thinking about saving the F-14 for Long Island, Grumman was thinking about saving Grumman."

In the end, it got neither.

Despite the efforts of a bipartisan Long Island congressional delegation, headed by Sen. Alfonse D'Amato and including Republican representatives Norman Lent and Democrats George Hochbrueckner, Robert Mrazek and Tom Downey, Cheney elected to kill the F-14 Tomcat and A-6 Intruder programs.

The F-14 was replaced by the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, an all-weather, supersonic, twin-engine multirole fighter-ground attack aircraft. 

Grumman was acquired by Northrop to become Northrop Grumman in 1994.

Cheney went on to become vice president under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009.