The Navy: Four Stripes in the Graveyard

Navy Captain Richard G. Alexander, 45, was one of the most promising young four-stripers in the fleet. Last year the Navy Department rewarded that promise by giving him command of the U.S.S. New Jersey, which will become the world’s only operational battleship when it is recommissioned this April. Last week the Navy Department revealed that Alexander had exercised the most ignominious prerogative open to a blue-water sailor: he formally requested that he be relieved of his command of the New Jersey. The request was promptly granted, and he was given shore duty.

Alexander’s humiliation derived from his bold backing of Lieut. Commander Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter, the hyper-zealous skipper of the radar picket destroyer U.S.S. Vance who was removed from his command off Viet Nam (TIME, Dec. 1). When Amheiter was dismissed without a public hearing, Alexander—who had recommended him for the assignment—at first remained silent in hopes of avoiding an embarrassing scandal. Later, his conviction that Arnheiter’s relief would sap the authority of every commanding officer overrode his concern for protocol; he openly demanded reconsideration of the Arnheiter case by Navy Secretary Paul Ignatius. “To have withdrawn my support from Arnheiter was prudent,” he wrote to the Secretary, “but to turn against him was pusillanimous.”

He demanded a full-scale inquiry and added: “Mr. Secretary, what all of your officers will demand to know is just how in hell this could happen in the U.S. Navy.” Alexander promised Admiral Thomas Moorer, the Chief of Naval Operations, that if his cause failed, he would request reassignment from the coveted New Jersey command. When the bill came due, Alexander paid it like an officer and a gentleman.

Transferred to the First Naval District Headquarters in Boston—”the elephant’s graveyard,” as Navy line officers call it—Alexander will be replaced by Captain Joseph E. Snyder Jr., 43, a veteran of Leyte Gulf and Okinawa’s Buckner Bay. No other heads are likely to roll, but many Navymen must be shaking theirs over the fall of Dick Alexander.