DEFENSE: First Team Going In

Lanky Neil McElroy eased through a cluster of photographers in the White House conference room and shook the hand of the darkly handsome man standing by the fireplace. “Take charge, boy,” he said, with a broad grin. “This is what you call the first team going in.” A few minutes later, while President Eisenhower and the Pentagon’s top brass looked on approvingly, Thomas Sovereign Gates Jr., 53, was sworn in as the nation’s seventh Secretary of Defense.

The contrast between Secretary Gates and outgoing Secretary McElroy could hardly be greater. McElroy (who goes back this week, with no regrets, to a new Procter & Gamble job as board chairman at upwards of $285,000) is an attractive, extraverted salesman—impatient with details or lengthy briefings, a man who shrinks from offending a friend or customer, who agonizes over difficult decisions. In his 26 months as Defense Secretary, which began so dramatically only five days after the first Sputnik soared into history, McElroy has had a hit-or-miss record (TIME, June 22). As a salesman, succeeding rough-handed “Engine Charlie” Wilson, he did a brilliant job of persuading Congress to accept his budgets—and then some. Congress, in fact, gave him some $806 million more than he asked for. But he could not choose between proliferating, billion-dollar rival missile systems, crack down on interservice rivalry, or explain away the Administration’s decision to rely on bomber power and accept a missile lag behind Soviet Russia which may not be closed before 1963—if then.*

Tom Gates, in sharp contrast, is a stiff-upper-lip Philadelphia investment banker and World War II Navyman (four stripes in Air Intelligence). He went to Washington as Under Secretary to Navy Secretary Robert Anderson (now Secretary of the Treasury), inevitably inherited the top Navy job in 1957. He ran a taut and tidy ship, was always willing to listen and learn, but ready with a decision when it was called for. When a new naval aide reported to him for duty, Gates told him: “Look, I need ideas. I can light my own cigarettes.” Says a three-star admiral: “If you dumped a messy problem in his lap, he would somehow tidy it up and put it neatly in a package and dispose of it. He was the best Navy Secretary we ever had.”

Gates, who has been Deputy Defense Secretary for six months, moved into his new job last week on the run. An hour after taking over, he reversed McElroy’s longstanding policy discouraging press conferences by the Air Force, Army and Navy Secretaries. Ahead of him lie the same problems that McElroy did not get around to—plus an even more urgent need to grasp the military possibilities in space. Gates has a scant year before the Eisenhower Administration runs out of time, but if he only improves Pentagon morale and makes overdue decisions, he will surely qualify for the first team.

*The 1961 budget will include funds to get the Air Force started on a program to keep part of its nuclear-bomber force on airborne alert at all times until the missile gap is closed.