Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America (review)

On a foggy morning in mid-December, 1960, two jet airliners collided over Staten Island, New York, sending one fatally crippled plane hurtling toward Brooklyn while the other showered passengers and debris onto shocked onlookers below. The crash killed 134 people and became, for a time, the worst air disaster in American history.

In the opening pages of Collision Course, Georgetown University historian Joseph McCartin recounts this tragedy from the perspective of air traffic controllers who would later remember it as a transformative event in their lives. Convinced that the crash could have been avoided, and appalled by the Federal Aviation Administration’s ability to dodge responsibility, controllers demanded changes that would allow them to cope with the four-fold increase in air traffic that had occurred over the previous decade. These demands eventually gained them allies around the country and put them on their own collision course with President Ronald Reagan.

Most readers will be at least somewhat familiar with the ill-fated 1981 strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (patco). President Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire and permanently replace more than eleven thousand striking patco members has taken on near-mythical proportions in American political lore, usually confirming preexisting opinions of Reagan as either saint or scoundrel. But McCartin breaks out of this familiar cast, recounting a story of institutional failure rather than moral turpitude. The absence of a workable labour law for federal employees, he suggests, ensured an outcome with deleterious consequences for workers and the broader public alike.

The book’s narrative begins by tracing controllers’ evolving strategies for influencing the Federal Aviation Administration (faa). Collective efforts began during the mid 1950s, when controllers formed a professional association to enhance their status and give them respectability and authority within the faa. Ten years later, after the apparent failure of these tactics to induce change in the air traffic control system, many controllers adopted a more adversarial stance toward their employer. The National Association of Government Employees (nage) attracted nationwide support during the mid-1960s by declaring that it would “not play dummy or ‘yes man’” to the faa. (45) But the organization failed to follow through on its adversarial rhetoric. By 1966, controllers in Chicago, New York, and other high-traffic locations lost faith in nage and began to assert leadership on their own.

McCartin does an excellent job fleshing out the individual characters who sensed this widespread dissatisfaction and channelled it into support for the organization that would become patco. Jack Maher, a mild-mannered Korean War veteran from Queens, initiated a series of weekly after-work meetings that popularized the idea of an independent air traffic controllers’ union. One attendee of these meetings was Mike Rock, an outspoken, Bronx-born son of a police officer who would later become known to his colleagues as “Mike Strike.” In early 1968, Rock managed to recruit the nationally renowned trial lawyer F. Lee Bailey to serve as the public face of the new union, launching what McCartin aptly describes as “one of the most unusual collaborations in American labor history.” (65) Offbeat characters were essential to patco’s early development, and McCartin draws on numerous oral history interviews to give his narrative a vibrancy that is rare in academic historical writing.

Broader social and cultural trends helped make patco into one of the most militant public sector unions in the nation by the early 1970s. Despite controllers’ professional aspirations and indifference toward less-skilled work -ers, they “shared in common with other disaffected Americans of those years a distaste for hypocritical, inflexible authority structures,” McCartin explains. Their willingness to challenge authority indicates “a different sort of rebellion” that was brewing alongside more familiar movements of student radicals, civil rights activists, and second wave feminists. (60)

During the second half of the 1970s, however, the public sector union movement diverged from contemporaneous rebellions. Federal civil rights laws provided many of these...