DEFENSE: The Best Appointment

In the underground command post at Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha last week, a team of 300 Air Force, Navy, Army and Marine Corps officers worked away in rare interservice harmony —putting together a book. The officers were the members of the Defense Department’s new Strategic Target Planning Group, and their book was a bulky, top-secret volume containing data on all important Soviet targets and detailed plans for hitting them in case of all-out nuclear war.

The planning group was rushing to meet a deadline this week set by Defense Secretary Thomas S. Gates, who created the board last August as a solution to a nagging dispute between the Air Force and the Navy over control of the Navy’s Polaris missile-submarine system. The Air Force, claiming the right to hit strategic targets, wanted to put assignment of Polaris targets under control of the Strategic Air Command. The Navy, claiming the need for seagoing expertise, wanted Polaris targeting left up to Navymen. In another day the fight would have boiled out into angry headlines. But Gates set up the interservice strategic target team, headed by SAC Commander General Thomas S. Power, to keep track of all U.S. strategic forces and make sure that every essential target is covered by one force or another at all times.

Filling the Gap. The strategic targeting plan stands as the newest monument to a reserved and dedicated man who, combining outer velvet with inner iron, has proved to be one of the ablest and most valuable officials in the Eisenhower Administration. In the five-sided Penta gon, where most questions have more than five conflicting sides, just about everybody agrees that Tom Gates has been the most successful Defense Secretary since the late James Forrestal (1947-49). Georgia’s crusty Congressman Carl Vinson. chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a frequent Pentagon critic, flatly calls Gates “the best appointment President Eisenhower has made.”

Like Forrestal, Gates came to Government by way of finance. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Gates entered his millionaire father’s investment banking firm, Philadelphia’s Drexel & Co. By the time he went to war in 1942 (he served as a Navy intelligence officer), Gates was a partner and well on the way to piling up a fortune of his own. Putting public service ahead of moneymaking, he went to Washington in 1953 to serve as Under Secretary of the Navy, moved up to Secretary of the Navy early in President Eisenhower’s second term.

Shortly after the first Russian Sputnik soared into orbit in October 1957, Gates picked up the enthusiasm of the Navy’s Polaris missile boosters, fought the civilian battles for a speedup in the Polaris program through the Defense Department and the White House. As a result, the first battle-ready Polaris sub put to sea three years ahead of the original schedule (TIME, Nov. 28). With Russia ahead of the U.S. in land-based ballistic missiles, the U.S. would be facing a formidable weapons gap in the early 1960s had Polaris not been pushed.

Cutting the Knot. A year ago, after serving six months as Deputy Defense Secretary, Gates succeeded Soap Salesman Neil H. McElroy in the top defense post. During his one year, Gates achieved more service unification—notably in research, purchasing and communications—than his last two predecessors achieved in seven years. Gates also cut through a knotty administrative problem that had baffled his predecessors: coordination between the Secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Previously, the Defense Secretary often did not hear of J.C.S. disagreements until “split papers” landed on his desk with conflicts for him to resolve. One of Gates’s first acts as Secretary was to request that he “be promptly informed regarding any issue on which a difference of opinion is developing” within J.C.S. From then on, he made it a practice to meet with the chiefs at least once a week to work out problems as they emerged.

During his years in Washington, Tom Gates often thought of going back to Philadelphia, both to make more money and to spend more time with his family, but his sense of duty kept getting in the way. In early 1959 he submitted his resignation, but President Eisenhower persuaded him to stay on. “It plays hob with my personal plans,” said Gates to an aide, “but I guess it is my duty.” Today, a year and a half later, the President and the Pentagon can be thankful that Gates saw it that way—but then, being Tom Gates, he could hardly have seen it otherwise.