In support of this idea, many of the old-timers worked hard on the admiral right up to the night before the Old Man was scheduled to appear before the Board. Then as we gathered around the long table for his final decisions, with that important subject all that remained to be agreed upon, I put it up to the admiral.
“Sir,” I said, “here is a question that can’t be straddled.”
The admiral twisted nervously in his chair. Strong pressure had been brought to bear on him by the leading old-timers, men whose friendship he regarded highly, and, politician that he was, he would have given almost anything to be able to accommodate them. But underneath this issue lay certain fundamentals on which he had strong convictions.
He had gone to sea in the old days when the Engineer Corps and the line officers had fought so bitterly in the ancient feud between the “black gang” and the “deck force” that the service had been shaken to its foundations. As the only way out of an impossible situation, the Department had finally amalgamated the conflicting forces by absorbing the engineers into the line. The admiral, recognizing the need for specialization, was firmly convinced that it should be had without putting the specialists in a separate corps where corps loyalties might transcend loyalty to the service. Now he had to face that issue alone; there could be no agreement within his Bureau and this time he could not induce them to persuade him to do what he wanted.
“You are all my friends,” he said, lifting his hand in a gesture to include all present, “and I’m sorry not to go along with some of you. The young pilots,” he added, “will think I’ve let them down. But the time will come when they will thank me.” He paused, and then with greater earnestness than I had ever heard in his voice, he concluded, “I’d rather see those kids dead than inflict on them the misery I suffered along with everyone else in the old days of deck force versus black gang.”
Suddenly his face brightened as he said with a smile, “Hell, we won’t secede from the Navy. If we are half as good as we think we are, we’ll take it over!” Years later, when “Duke” Ramsey, Forrest Sherman, and Arthur Radford, some of his “boys,” occupied the seats of the mighty, I recalled this comment.
Next morning, while the admiral testified at the hearings, I sat at my desk in the Engine Section, trying to concentrate on neglected paper work. But up there in that committee room, decisive events were taking place. The admiral was not impressive on the witness stand of a formal hearing; his strength lay in the give and take of the informal conference. He had little patience with the measured logic of a man like Fred Rentschler; though his own conclusions might derive from similar processes, his brain acted like chain lightning. What looked like snap judgment might have been thought through, but he was too impatient to develop the process for others. Now he would be sitting up there before a solemn board, facing a press table of partisan commentators sold on the Mitchell doctrine, and surrounded by all the high dignitaries of the Navy Department, from Secretary Wilbur and Admiral Hughes, the Chief of Naval Operations, down to Bureau chiefs like himself, most of whom feared he might sell out the Navy and go over to the Mitchell side.
For this had been a trying period for the Navy. Following the Armistice, public opinion had favored the idea of peace through disarmament and the Limitation of Arms Conference had all but emasculated the service. Then the spectacular air attacks engineered by General Mitchell had put the Navy further on the defensive. No one in the high command had developed a flair for public relations and now with Billy Mitchell on the offensive, the Navy had its back against the wall. Much of the enmity aroused by Mitchell’s attack now turned inward to BUAERO and even Admiral Moffett. Yet up there before the Morrow Board, if the Old Man would just stick to his testimony as we had written it and not start ad-libbing, he would come out all right. If, however, he deviated it, some hawk like Congressman Carl Vinson, of Georgia, one of the best informed men in Congress, would dive on him at terminal speed.
Then, a little before noon, the admiral himself walked into the Engine Section and slumped down in his chair. All jauntiness was gone; he looked tired.
“They tell me I made a mess of it,” he said simply.