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Prophets Remember. Criticism immediately swirled around the plan. Airmen, including many young naval flyers, wanted to know why so many battleships, or even any battleships, which, by their lights, were obsolete naval weapons.
Extremists of the air and push-button-war persuasion (like Major Alexander de Seversky) believed that all armies and navies had been made obsolete by air power. Chicago's Chancellor Robert Hutchins (see INTERNATIONAL) went Seversky one better: "The conventional reliances of the past—a large army, navy and air force—are obsolete. They find favor only in the nostalgic dreams of obsolescent generals and admirals."
Crackpots had various other ideas. To all of them 67-year-old Admiral King, soon to retire, replied frostily that the postwar plan was only a starter; nothing was definite about the Navy's plan. But until the Navy was satisfied that it had something better, it would hold to the kind of fleet which had fought and won World War II.
The hazard in that quarter-deck doctrine was that reactionary thinking in post-World War II might set in, not only among the battleship admirals (who actually were in retreat) but among the airmen. Men like Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Air, and even younger aviators like Rear Admiral Arthur Radford might become wedded to the carrier, which had spearheaded the war.* Not to be overlooked by prophets is the fact that after World War I the radicals thought the naval weapon of the future was the submarine. In 1913 amiable, conservative Admiral Richard S. Edwards, who now sits at King's right hand, commanded a submarine flotilla.
The Man from Wall Street. Fortunately for the Navy, in all this squally weather and rising winds, it had a skillful pilot—the trim, well-groomed man with the flattened nose and the Wall Street background who for the past year and a half had been its civilian head.
When Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz appeared in the House recently to receive the plaudits of Congress for his job in the Pacific, Forrestal went along. As the Secretary walked down the aisle the members rose and cheered him. Forrestal set his blue-bristled jaw, looked straight ahead and marched on to his seat. It was a characteristic attitude; it was Nimitz's day, not his.
Articulate, blunt Jim Forrestal has learned the ins & outs of Washington, since he arrived there five years ago, a quietly cynical man who had been invited by Franklin Roosevelt to become one of the six presidential assistants "with a passion for anonymity." Like F.D.R., he was born and raised in Dutchess County. And he was a Democrat. Right there the likeness ended. He had worked part of his way through Princeton, where his nose was broken in a boxing bout, worked for the Tobacco Products Corp. and sold bonds for Dillon, Read & Co. He had served in the Navy from 1917 to 1919 as a naval aviator, had returned to Wall Street and risen to become president of Dillon, Read. Franklin Roosevelt was an old and good friend and when he called, Forrestal went to work.
Anonymity suited him. He had always been a quiet, hard-working operator, and he remained one even when Roosevelt gave him new responsibilities as the newly created Under Secretary of the Navy.