Page 49 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE PROGRAM

cell or cordless phone, you can thank Heilmeier too. It was during his tenure
at Texas Instruments that the stage was set for the development of the digital-
signal processor, the backbone of those electronic wonders.

Heilmeier had such an impressive year as a White House Fellow in the
Department of Defense that at the close of his Fellowship year, he was
appointed assistant director of defense research and engineering, which
made him responsible for all of the Defense Department’s electronics pro-
grams. Then, in the mid-1970s, he was named director of the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, where he
led a team that was striving to stay one step ahead of the Russians and other
threats both real and perceived. On Heilmeier’s watch, DARPA research-
ers worked to perfect a way of tracking submerged Russian nuclear sub-
marines, and he and his team hatched a plan to build an airplane with the
ability to fly undetected by enemy radar.
However, he encountered roadblocks in building his “invisible aircraft.”
“I thought this airplane program was going to go down the tubes because
we were ready to build and we needed help only the Air Force could give,
and we weren’t getting it,” Heilmeier said. “So here is where White House
Fellows connections count. There was a former Fellow who was an Air Force
officer working in General David Jones’s office. General Jones was the Air
Force chief of staff. So I called the Fellow on the phone and said I needed
to see the chief, and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll get you on the schedule,’ and he did.”
Heilmeier kept the appointment, briefed the general on his plan to build the
cutting-edge plane, and received the support that previously had been denied.
By 1977, he had helped produce two aircraft that served as prototypes for the
Air Force’s F-117A Nighthawk and other “stealth” aircraft. During Operation
Desert Storm in the early 1990s, F-117A’s flew over a thousand sorties over
Iraq and hit 1,600 significant targets. The F-117A was the only U.S. or allied
fighter aircraft to score direct hits in downtown Baghdad. In 2003, twelve
Nighthawks returned to Iraq, where they flew more than a hundred combat
sorties. The Air Force retired the historic fleet in April 2008.

THE ULTIMATE IN FELLOWSHIP
William Kilberg (WHF 69–70) is a senior partner with the law firm
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in Washington, D.C., where he special-
izes in labor and employment law. As a White House Fellow he worked as

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