Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

One line: Ben Rich's memoir — Kelly Johnson's longtime deputy and eventual successor at Skunk Works — is what David calls "the Top Gun of historical autobiographies," and it's the direct source for most of the Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich quotes in Acquired's Lockheed Martin episode.

Overview

Ben Rich spent years as Kelly Johnson's number two before taking over Skunk Works on Kelly's retirement, and it was Rich who greenlit the F-117 stealth fighter gamble. The book is a first-person account of his years at Lockheed — an inside view of classified programs from the U-2 to the SR-71 Blackbird to the F-117 Nighthawk, plus Kelly Johnson's engineering philosophy of near-vicious team-size discipline and keeping designers physically next to the production line.

Why it's recommended

David's own words: "This book is like the Top Gun of historical autobiographies. You read it, and you were just fired up. It is amazing what these people did." He singles it out specifically among "a bunch of wonderful books around Lockheed." Many of the episode's signature quotes come straight from it — Kelly's line that "unless he had the hell scared out of him at least once a year in a cockpit, he wouldn't have the proper perspective to design airplanes," Ben Rich's own account of being shown the U-2 prototype on his first day ("the full weight of government secrecy fell on me like a sack of cement"), and his prescient 1992 prediction that piecemeal manufacturing would replace the Skunk Works way.

Source

Lockheed Martin: The Archetype of the Military-Industrial Complex reads long passages directly from the book in multiple places, including the origin of the "Skunk Works" name (from the "skonk works" moonshine still in the Li'l Abner comic strip, respelled after the publisher sued), the line "That primitive skunk works operation set the standards for what followed..." describing the P-80 program, and Ben Rich's 1992 closing prediction about the B-2 bomber's manufacturing approach: "For better or for worse, this piecemeal manufacturing approach, rather than the Skunk Works way, will characterize large aerospace projects from now on."