The Republican minority was spearheaded by Graves’s colleague Paul Mitchell, a two-term congressman from Michigan who sharpened his knives and summoned all his righteous indignation for a showdown with Dan Carey, the outgoing president of the Allied Pilots Association, the American Airlines pilots’ union:

Captain Carey, you made more than a few headlines by releasing portions of an apparently secret recording made in November.... Who made that recording, sir?

Did the APA board of directors authorize that or know in advance you were making the recording? Did you tell Boeing officials that you were making that recording prior to the meeting or subsequent to that?... Are you aware that—I’m sure you are—in April you issued a press release fully confident in the 737 MAX’s capabilities?

What’s the value [of releasing a secret recording] to the system or the families?... Explain to me what warranted that, sir!

Carey had, in fact, recorded a meeting seven months earlier with Boeing executive Mike Sinnett—the now-infamous gathering at which Sinnett had falsely assured pilots that a failure of the MCAS was a near zero probability event, and that in any case an MCAS breakdown would never happen in the United States, because most airlines had paid extra to activate their “AOA Disagree” lights on the cockpits. Boeing had a history of deflecting blame on to dead pilots, even back in the pre-Stonecipher era, when a malfunctioning rudder on an earlier generation of 737s caused a string of crashes and near-misses in the 1990s, while Boeing and its surrogates promulgated a range of alternative theories about pilots inexplicably (or intentionally) jamming the controls.

Carey could feel the MCAS story veering into similar territory, so he recorded the meeting in case another once-in-a-lifetime MCAS fail occurred—as it indeed did. Had you wandered into the congressional hearing without knowing an extra 157 people were now dead as a result, you’d have assumed Dan Carey, a pilot and labor leader whose small effort to check the power of a corporate behemoth had been rewarded with a lost reelection campaign two weeks earlier, was in fact the most unscrupulous character in the whole sordid affair. (His interrogator, Mitchell, for the record, is a probable centimillionaire who made his fortune selling a chain of predatory for-profit junior colleges to a private-equity firm and his political reputation challenging Rick Snyder, Michigan’s water-poisoning, austerity-besotted governor from the right.)

I was sitting in the room as this happened, my first time in the Rayburn building since the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and I am almost embarrassed to report how painful it was to listen to Mitchell and company shamelessly gaslight everyone, just as Congress’s hard-right true believers had done when they fingered ACORN as the perpetrator of the 2008 meltdown, or Iraq as a key culprit in 9/11 before that. Men like these had told far bigger lies for far bigger and scarier clients to far more destructive ends. And far more successfully: Regardless of what happens in the criminal case, there have been more than 60 lawsuits filed against Boeing over the MAX. No one who knows anything about anything believes Boeing is anywhere close to being out of the woods, and some who know a lot think the road ahead could lead to bankruptcy court.

But it’s also true that no one who knew anything about anything thought it was a good idea to slash research and development spending, lay off half the engineers, or subcontract whole chunks of a plane without designing it first. It hardly mattered. “It was two camps of managers, the Boeing Boy Scouts and the ‘hunter killer assassins,’” remembered Cynthia Cole, a former Boeing engineer who led the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) during the 787 saga. “How do you merge those two management philosophies? The hunter killer assassins will destroy the Boy Scouts. That’s what happens.”

That’s what happened on an exponentially more ruinous scale in mortgage lending and pharmaceutical sales and at General Electric, which over the past decade has spent more than $50 billion buying back its own stock even as its staggering insurance business losses threaten to bankrupt the company. (And none of this has diminished GE’s zeal for deindustrialization, which has disemboweled places like Fort Wayne and Erie and Schenectady and put tens of thousands of people out of work, both permanently and on furlough.) It’s what happens to every well-intentioned half-measure to mitigate the catastrophic effects of climate change.

None of these things had to be ideological wars, said Cole, a lifelong conservative who now chairs the King County Republican Party in Washington state and first joined the union—membership in SPEEA had been voluntary when she joined—because not a few months into her first engineering job she had watched a space shuttle land in a control room full of engineers who had built the shuttle. The shuttle bounced, there was a massive collective intake of air, and one of her colleagues let it slip that the landing gear wasn’t strong enough to withstand certain weather conditions, and that if she wanted to keep her job she’d keep her mouth shut about it; she was laid off a few months later. “I thought to myself, oh my gosh! This happens in the movies.”

She had no idea then how sick she would get of watching the same movie.

But a month later, back in the same room on a biblically hot day, a son of Kenyan farmers restored a bit of moral clarity to proceedings: “As an investment professional, allow me to inform Congress as to how Boeing has viewed this whole crisis.” Noting that the stock had surged from $140 four years earlier to $446 right before the crash that had killed his wife, and his son, four-year-old daughter, nine-month-old daughter, and mother-in-law, Paul Njoroge laid out the sequence of 737 MAX orders, ten-figure stock buybacks, and dividend hikes that had dealt out this horrible fate to his family.

“One hundred and eighty-nine lives were lost, and executives at Boeing cared more about its stock price than preventing such a tragedy from occurring again.”

“Could that be the reason Boeing did not feel obliged to ground the MAX even after the second crash of the Boeing 737 MAX?” he asked. “Back to my very essential question, why wasn’t the MAX 8 grounded in November after the first crash in the Java Sea? One hundred and eighty-nine lives were lost, and executives at Boeing cared more about its stock price than preventing such a tragedy from occurring again,” and so had begun “a pattern of behavior blaming innocent pilots.”

“I am empty,” he told the committee. “My life has no meaning.” He had met his wife studying finance at the University of Nairobi. The family had been spread across Bermuda, where Paul worked as an investment manager at Butterfield Bank, and Ontario, where his wife and children were settling down. Paul was expected to join them later. The distance had been hell, and he had never even had a girlfriend before her; his family was literally everything, he explained, and every single one of them was gone. “I have nightmares about how they must have clung to their mother, crying, seeing the fright in their eyes as they sat there helplessly. It is difficult for me to think of anything but the horror they must have felt.”

After his testimony, a dead-eyed Njoroge stood in the hallway for nearly three hours, granting interviews to the dozens of journalists who needed exclusive footage to anchor their packages. He told me he wasn’t surprised that Boeing’s stock hadn’t suffered more since the company had killed his family. He would never buy it himself, of course, but even now it would be hard to justify leaving it out of a client’s portfolio.



* This article has been updated to clarify Sorscher’s worries about Boeing’s future and the domestic-violence accusation against Patrick Shanahan.