Three federal mediators were brought in to try to resolve the standoff. After one resolution attempt failed, one of the mediators shared his own doubts that the merged company could survive, said Cynthia Cole, a striking engineer who would later become Speea’s president. The mediators were supposed to stay neutral but in a moment of frustration at the hotel where talks were taking place, he confided that he saw the partnership as doomed. The executives who’d come from McDonnell Douglas, he said, were “hunter killer assassins”—and those from Boeing, “Boy Scouts.”
