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It was not a job to faze Wall Street's Forrestal. There is a story that he once sent his two sons, aged six and eight, on a tour of Europe by themselves, and when they telephoned him in London that they were having passport trouble in Paris, casually told them to join him as soon as they had straightened it out. He makes a fetish of self-reliance.
One May morning in 1944 he walked with his brisk, wide-apart boxer's step into the big Navy building on Constitution Avenue and sat down in a new office on the second deck. He buzzed for a secretary, dictated letters for an hour, held several conferences, lunched with Ernie King; at 1:25 he left to attend the funeral of Navy Secretary Frank Knox. Since that day, when he unsmilingly took over one of the biggest jobs in Washington, he has occupied the Secretary's office, which his wife endowed with ship's lamps, ship's bells, crossed naval swords and a generally reposeful colonial décor.
The Wall Street Men. Behind his huge desk, gazing skeptically over the top of his pipe and only occasionally flaring into tightlipped, concise profanity, Forrestal wrought some changes. One of them was to transform the Navy into a businesslike partnership between civilians and brass hats, drawing into the firm such men as regular Navyman Admiral Richard S. Edwards, on the one hand, and brilliant H. (for Herman) Struve Hensel, also a graduate of Princeton, ex-Wall Street attorney, on the other. Roosevelt lifted Hensel out of the Navy's Legal Department into an Assistant Secretaryship. There are many and various men around him: Artemus L. Gates, onetime Yale football captain, Navy pilot in World War I, ex-president of the New York Trust Co., a passionate airman and Forrestal's under secretary; political-minded John L. Sullivan (no kin to Boston's late Strong Boy), onetime Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, now Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air.
He goes for advice to Commodore Lewis L. Strauss, partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co., now a naval reservist and a bitter anti-regular; to exuberant Reserve Captain Luis de Florez, onetime consulting engineer to several oil companies, who is responsible for most of the Navy's special training devices; to younger officers like Vice Admiral Louis E. Denfeld, head of the Bureau of Personnel; to "Navy radicals" like Radford and Mitscher; to the best of the surface ship men, like Rear Admiral W. H. P. ("Spike") Blandy, onetime chief, Bureau of Ordnance; to Eugene Duffield, ex-Wall Street Journal writer, now his special assistant.
He set up an office of Fiscal Director and gathered the Navy's financial reins into his hands. More recently he established the Office of Scientific Research and Development, whose job it is to keep scientific research focused on military aims. If rust overtakes the Navy, it will be while Forrestal's back is turned.
Forrestal's back, in fact, may soon be turned. There have been signs that he wants to get out, possibly to return to Wall Street, possibly to go into New York politics. Whether Forrestal, who has served his country long and well, wants a respite or a bigger field of operations is the secret of the close-mouthed Secretary, who still likes to work in anonymity.