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business newsFatal Attraction in the Boardroom: Boeing's "Fixer" Fashions a Scandal
His much-publicized office affair brings an end to his 50-year marriage.
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Stonecipher was the fixer. He had rejoined Boeing after retiring as chief operating officer a few years earlier. Instead, 15 months after he started, he fashioned a scandal of his own, when an investigation uncovered that he had an affair with a female employee. Boeing dismissed Stonecipher using the same code of conduct he had touted.
“It’s not the fact that he was having an affair,” that caused him to be fired, Lewis E. Platt, Boeing’s non-executive chairman, said at the time. “But as we explored the circumstances surrounding the affair, we just thought there were some issues of poor judgment that…impaired his ability to lead going forward.”
It seems Stonecipher, then 68, who had been married for 50 years, found the allure of the head pilot’s seat at Boeing too much to resist. His affair was with Debra Peabody, then 48, a 25-year employee of the company who was vice president of operations for the company’s chief lobbyist in Washington. They had met in January, only two months before the scandal was uncovered, at a company retreat at the Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California. Their affair, company officials said, went on for a few weeks.
A female whistleblower revealed a host of torrid e-mails between the two, which led to Stonecipher’s ouster the following day. He didn’t deny the affair, nor did he protest the decision. Peabody remained with the company.
Stonecipher’s wife, Joan, filed for divorce right away. They were married in 1955. “I’m just as blown away by this as everybody else,” she told the Chicago Tribune in a brief interview.
Stonecipher had planned to step down the next year as he turned 70, his rehabilitation assignment of Boeing’s image expected to be finished then. Stonecipher, the son of a Tennessee coal miner, had been head of McDonnell Douglas Corp., which Boeing bought in 1997. He was the chief operating officer of Boeing until 2001. He left retirement and the golf courses of Florida to convince Washington, as he told Wall Street, that Boeing was not full of a “bunch of crooks.”
Instead of fixing Boeing’s image, he only created more headaches.
Since Stonecipher left, however, Boeing has regained some of its luster. After a year in which its fortunes mirrored those of the global economy, Boeing expects a recovery this year to result in renewed demand for aircraft in 2012. It’s the kind of good news that Boeing had been looking for under Stonecipher’s watch.
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