Feasting on the Spoils: The Life and Times of Randy "Duke" Cunningham, History's Most Corrupt Congressman - Hardcover

Seth Hettena is a journalist for the Associated Press. He lives in San Diego, CA with his family.

1

The Duke

Ronald McKeown was in a mood to celebrate. The handsome, square-jawed Navy lieutenant commander had just been picked for his first command, and it was the one he had been dreaming about. The message the thirty-four-year-old had picked up in the end of May in 1972 in the pilots' ready room on the aircraft carrier Midway was the answer to his prayers. He was headed to San Diego to take command of the newly commissioned U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School, better known by its code name, Top Gun. For a fighter pilot like McKeown, it meant training pilots for dogfighting, the thrill of air-to-air jet combat at five hundred miles per hour.

McKeown could have been ordered up by central casting to play the part of a fighter pilot. A former Navy running back, he brimmed with confidence and bristled with intensity and a fierce competitivedrive. His boxing skills and pugnacious attitude earned him the nickname Mugs. McKeown grew up in the west Texas town of Ysleta, where he became a football star. Princeton, Harvard, and Dartmouth had all sent letters of acceptance, but the Naval Academy offered something the Ivy League schools didn't: the chance to play in the Army-Navy game, which, in the days before the advent of the Super Bowl, was the biggest football game in the world. In 1960, McKeown's third year at the academy, Navy was ranked third in the country and played in the Orange Bowl, and McKeown's teammate Joe Bellino won the Heisman Trophy.

During that magical 1960 season, Navy played the University of Washington on the road. The team practiced at a naval air station in Seattle on a field next to a landing area, where three F-8 Cougars landed and rolled to a halt. The pilots got out, locked up their planes, and three women in convertibles drove up. Watching the scene, McKeown thought to himself there was a lot to be said for naval aviation. Football brought out McKeown's ultracompetitive nature, his hatred of losing, which fit the classic fighter-pilot profile. McKeown found that he loved to fly and loved dogfighting more. Even though his father wasn't a hunter and there were no guns in his household growing up, McKeown discovered that he excelled at air-to-air gunnery. He would hit the target 17 percent of the time, when 8 percent was considered excellent.

Dogfighting had become something of a lost art after the Korean War. In Vietnam, Navy pilots fared poorly against the Soviet MiGs flown by the North Vietnamese. The Navy had lost one plane for every two Soviet-made MiGs they shot down over North Vietnam, the worst ratio in the history of American naval aviation. Top Gun began informally in 1969 in a trailer at Miramar with the goal of turning these trends around. The results had been impressive, and Navy pilots soon dominated the skies over Vietnam. The majority of Navy killswere made by pilots who had gone through Top Gun. Success bred success, and the Navy had established Top Gun as a formal command. McKeown was determined to make sure the school didn't disappear when the conflict in Vietnam did.

Before he even got to San Diego, McKeown had heard through the Navy grapevine that one of the instructors under his command was Lt. Randy Cunningham, the first ace of the Vietnam War and the Navy's most celebrated pilot. Tall and physically imposing, Cunningham had a broad face, a flat nose, a Caesar haircut with a pair of long sideburns, and eyes that squinted when he smiled. If any in the Navy didn't know Cunningham and what he had done in Vietnam, they had probably been underwater for months on a nuclear submarine.

On May 10, 1972, flying with Bill Driscoll in a two-man F-4 Phantom, Cunningham had shot down three enemy planes in the biggest air battle of the Vietnam War. On his way back to his carrier, the USS Constellation, Cunningham's plane was shot, but he somehow kept his burning aircraft rolling toward the coast until he and Driscoll were able to reach safe waters and avoid capture by the North Vietnamese. Cunningham's three kills that day brought his total for the war to five, which, under a tradition that dated back to World War I, conferred on him the exalted status of fighter ace and put him in the pantheon of fighter-pilot heroes.

Until he became an ace, the thirty-year-old pilot from Shelbina, Missouri, had a so-so Navy career. He applied for augmentation to leave the reserves and join the ranks of regular, career officers on three separate occasions in 1971 and 1972, the last time ten days after his first MiG kill. He was turned down each time. "Lt. Cunningham was not a fast starter as a junior officer; however, his performance and overall potential to the Navy has continued to steadily improve," read one letter of recommendation. "Since his decision to request augmentation into the regular Navy there has been a very noticeable increasein overall performance as well as enthusiasm for Navy life." In Cunningham's copy of his military records he handwrote in the margin of this letter, "Sound like Navy trash me." But all was forgiven the moment he became the Navy's ace. Realizing that losing Cunningham would be a public relations disaster, the Navy made a rare at-sea appointment to the regular Navy and decided to send him home to capitalize on his publicity.

The Navy plucked Cunningham and Driscoll out of Vietnam and sent them on a five-month publicity tour of the United States in the hopes of building support for an unpopular war. The two aviators visited New York, where they stayed in a suite at the Plaza Hotel, took in a Broadway show, and dined at the "21" Club, one of the city's most famous restaurants. They arrived in Washington, D.C., on May 18 for four weeks of closely scheduled public appearances, press conferences, and meetings with senior military and congressional leaders. The tour took them to Norfolk, Charleston, St. Louis, San Diego, Pensacola, Denver, Boston, and Jacksonville, and by the end of the tour, Cunningham and Driscoll made more than five hundred speeches. Adoring audiences heaped praise on them. "During those five months I received thousands of cards and letters lauding our efforts and accomplishments," Cunningham wrote in his 1984 memoir, Fox Two. "I found but one adverse note. There were no ticker tape parades, no large crowds gathered to honor us as they did the POWs, but I did appreciate the small civilian and military groups full of questions and appreciation." During a visit to his hometown of Shelbina, it seemed to Cunningham that all 2,000 residents turned out to cheer the local hero as he paraded through town in the back of an open convertible.

Cunningham's new status sparked a good deal of jealousy in the ultracompetitive community of fighter pilots. After Cunningham's triple kill, McKeown had sent a message over to the Constellation: "Send Duke home. Give us a chance." Many pilots felt that given the sameopportunities Cunningham had had, they could have accomplished the same thing and also become an ace. The simple truth, however, is that no one else in the Navy did. Air-to-air combat was a lot scarier than many macho pilots wanted to admit. Cunningham was gifted in the cockpit. As a natural hunter he showed almost no fear, and he trained and practiced with the dedication of an Olympic athlete. There may have been better pilots than Cunningham, but few were more aggressive or better prepared.

 

 

While Cunningham was off touring the country in the fall of 1972, three Top Gun instructors who knew him well from Vietnam approached McKeown as he got settled in his office in Hangar Two at Naval Air Station Miramar in San Diego. The pilots told McKeown to make sure he kept an eye on Cunningham, warning him that Cunningham had an oversize ego and tended to exaggerate. Some in the...