But in BUAERO, every typewriter began tapping out retaliatory releases for the admiral. In spite of urgings by the latter, the Secretary staunchly refused to comment on the Mitchell attack, even as the press clamored for a reply. It was not until several days had passed that the admiral finally succeeded in drawing a reluctant consent to his own response. Then permission was granted only with the express condition that the admiral should reply on his own account and own responsibility.
Approval came at noon on a Saturday. By then the Bureau had closed for the day and, in addition to the admiral, only two of us remained aboard. One was the admiral’s faithful colored messenger, Brown, the other, myself. We were waiting for the admiral in the anteroom to his office when he steamed through the door under full power. On the desk lay a copy of a statement I had drawn up for him. Seizing this, the admiral scrawled across the bottom a blunt postscript, calling William Mitchell a liar and ascribing his recent charges either to hallucinations or delusions of grandeur.
I cut the mimeograph stencil for him on his secretary’s typewriter. Brown ran off the copies on a machine across the hall. The admiral waited impatiently until they were done, and then, seizing me by the arm, hustled me out of the building and into my car. We drove uptown to the offices of the Associated and United Press, where the admiral himself handed his statement across the counter to astonished reporters.
The statement hit the front pages of the New York papers. Its publication released all the ancient grudges and conflicts in aviation dating as far back as World War I. The old “airplane scandal” was dragged out and dusted off by crank inventors, claiming they had been robbed of their patents. The cry of “air trust” echoed through the halls of Congress and counsels of investigating committees, scenting headlines, began trying to get into the act.
Up to that moment some twenty-odd inquiries had been held on what to do about aviation. With surprising agreement they had all supported certain concrete recommendations; without exception they had been promptly consigned to the ninth pigeonhole—the one next the wastebasket. In 1924, during the excitement over the controversy between the proponents of the airplane and the supporters of the battleship, a Congressional committee, under the chairmanship of Congressman Lampert, had found that aviation, instead of being stifled by a “trust” was dying of neglect. The United States lacked both a policy for aviation and the legislation necessary to implement it.
The new controversy revived the ancient cry of “profiteer” against manufacturers, already reduced to hungry remnants of a once highly productive group. These now got together in their aeronautical chamber of commerce and sent a delegation to call on the Secretaries of War and Navy to urge that the two departments join in requesting the President to appoint a presidential advisory commission to look into the whole question. At the invitation of the President himself, they later went to the White House to support this recommendation. The President, who had always shown a Yankee sense of orderliness and a willingness to accept responsibility for the conduct of his administration, had been disturbed by the unseemly brawl. He now made no attempt to deny Mitchell the privilege of stating his case to the public, but since the charges reflected upon his own administration, he accepted the industry’s proposal as a good way to sift them out. He approved the idea of a sort of New England town meeting on aviation.
His first step was to summon his wise and good friend, Dwight Morrow, and his second was to invite him to head up the inquiry. He then selected a group of men whose standing would warrant public support but was careful not to include anyone who had an ax to grind. The Commission included men from civil life who possessed knowledge of aviation, men from Congress who had had experience in the field, and men from the Army and Navy whose judgment would command public respect and confidence as did that of all other members.
Two of the members, Howard Coffin and William F. Durant, were engineers. From the armed forces were drawn Maj. Gen. James G. Harbord and Adm. Frank J. Fletcher, both retired after distinguished public careers. From Congress came three men, Senator Hiram Bingham, of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, himself a military aviator; James S. Parker, of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce; and Congressman Carl Vinson, of the House Committee on Naval Affairs, a Democrat and a man destined to play a statesman’s role in the nation’s security. With Circuit Judge Arthur C. Dennison, Dwight Morrow, the chairman, completed a compact panel well constituted for the task in hand.
The Morrow Board held numerous public sessions and heard over a hundred witnesses present a wide assortment of views and opinions. Against the background of the Mitchell charges, the hearings received public attention and were widely discussed in editorial columns. Comment by the press was strongly favorable to the Mitchell cause and to all outward appearances, the general seemed on the way to victory. Behind the scenes, the Morrow Board studied the many records of previous inquiries, and by sifting them carefully was able to bring its own investigation to a close in about ninety days.
Over in BUAERO, we burned the midnight oil preparing the admiral’s testimony. The spadework consisted in assembling the answers to specific questions propounded by the Morrow Board. Such questions were farmed out to different branches of the Bureau and then assembled for final study. Final editing of these comments fell to Lieutenant Commander Du Bose and myself but the larger issues were debated all over the Bureau. The interested parties were pretty well consolidated in opposition to the independent-air-force proposal, but they were divided almost equally on another organization question: should the admiral favor the formation of a corps of aviators, generally similar to the highly regarded United States Marine Corps?