From Plowshares To Swords - Sharecropper's Son To A Manager In The "Military Industrial Complex"

Lee E. Rhyant credits his mother, wife of a sharecropper, for his success

The man who oversees the manufacture of one of the most sophisticated aircraft ever devised doesn’t hesitate when asked who’s responsible for his success. It was, he says with a slight smile, the work-worn wife of a South Georgia sharecropper.

Lee E. Rhyant, the 58-year-old executive vice president and general manager for Lockheed Martin’s Marietta facility, rides herd over the 6,800-employee operation that produces — among other things — the F-22 Raptor, a $140 million, super-stealthy jet in the cross hairs of federal budget cuts.

The F-22 program employs 25,000 people in more than 40 states, including about 2,400 at the Marietta facility. Defense Secretary Robert Gates last month declared the 20-year-old jet doomed, even though some Congress members vow to save it.

Rhyant arrived in the middle of the F-22 program, which has meant increased investment at the Marietta facility, but also generated its share of criticism. Critics contend the jet fighter is too expensive and was intended for the Cold War. The fighter has not been used in Iraq or Afghanistan, relatively low-tech combat theaters that some military strategists say will be typical of 21st-century conflicts.

Rhyant, who has an easy laugh and is quick with a tale of his life, is as evasive as his company’s endangered aircraft when asked about the F-22’s future.

“One thing I’ve learned in 38 years in business is not to speculate on [federal] budgets,” he said.

That a reporter is sitting in his spacious office at a premier defense contractor asking the question is an unlikely culmination of an unlikely career path. And no one is quicker to admit that than Rhyant.

“A friend once told me that a person had a better chance of winning the lottery than ending up in my position from where I came from,” Rhyant laughed. He worked for Rolls-Royce Aerospace and General Motors before his current gig, which includes strategic development, corporate special assignments and government relations.

Rhyant landed at the Marietta facility, which had a 2008 payroll of $528 million, about a decade ago. Today, he spends nearly as much time giving speeches at business conferences, youth leadership forums and schools and colleges as he does at the plant.

He was named Cobb County’s 2008 Citizen of the Year and this month will receive an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the 3,400-student Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Fla.

“It’s easy for a person in that position to get carried away with their title, but he’s just not that way,” said Rhyant’s pastor, the Rev. Harris T. Travis of Zion Baptist Church in Marietta. “He always seems to make time for others.”

Travis said Rhyant, who has fought two bouts of prostate cancer, agreed to head an ambitious fund-raising campaign for the church even though he was already serving on a dozen boards, including the Atlanta Area Boy Scouts Council, the Georgia Club, the Atlanta Urban League and United Way of Cobb County.

U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson counts himself a Rhyant fan. “He’s a very humble man,” Isakson said. “He could walk into a room and fit into whatever strata he walked into, whether it’s a room full of CEOs or a soup kitchen.”