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Johnson made his power felt in smaller ways, too. In a kind of gigantic game of musical chairs, he started shifting half of the Pentagon's 25,000 antlike workers into new quarters. He wiped out 57 overlapping and outdated service boards and bureaus. He ordered all armed service celebrations combined into one Armed Forces Day. He ordered the overlapping medical services merged. With an eye to small irritations, he cut down on -the private use of official automobiles. And to end intra-service wrangling in press and radio, he issued a directive "consolidating" the press faculties of the three services, a move which was immediately attacked as an attempt to censor the news that came from the Pentagon.
The Law. Bundling his divided Joint Chiefs of Staff off to Key West, Johnson laid down the law. From now on, there would be unification as the law provided —or else. Those who didn't like it could get out.
Presumably, the purpose of unification was to achieve economy and efficiency in the $15 billion-a-year armed services. But one top Administration economist, watching Louis Johnson's roughshod methods, snorted: "He's made two enemies for every dollar he's saved." In nine weeks he had antagonized: the White House (for his tendency to pop off to the press), the Marines (for privately threatening to disband their air arm), the aviation industry (for canceling other contracts in favor of the B-36), the Navy (for a host of bitterly resented indignities).
Navy Secretary John Sullivan had quit in a rage. Last week, in a pointedly bitter farewell, he said he was leaving "a Navy that no foreign foe has ever defeated." Nobody in the Pentagon missed the stress on the word "foreign."
The Spotlight. In this kind of atmosphere came the explosion on the floor of Congress last week. Louis Johnson's enemies thought they had found two vulnerable places to attack him: he had moved into the Pentagon from a strictly political post as Harry Truman's money raiser; he had resigned his directorship in Consolidated Vultee just three days after he was nominated for the office which must decide the future of Consolidated's controversial B-36.
Inevitably last week, public attention came to rest on the expansive person of Secretary Louis Arthur Johnson, 58, the ex-National Commander of the American Legion, the onetime Assistant Secretary of War, the big operator in and on the fringes of Government, the thriving corporation lawyer who commands fees up to $300,000 a year.
Horses & Bourbon. Like many Virginians, Louis Johnson likes to think of himself as the descendant of a proud old plantation family. On his mother's side, he is. In the ante-bellum days the family estate near Leesville was a showplace of the state, with white mansion house, hundreds of slaves, fine horses and good bourbon. There was even a Confederate colonel in the picture: Grandfather James Louis Arthur, who rode proudly off to join the Army of Robert E. Lee, returned to live out his days selling off acre by acre to keep up the old mansion.