ARMED FORCES: Man Behind the Power

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Within the guarded inner labyrinth of the Pentagon, five men sit at a brightly polished table in soundproofed Room 2C923. Around them the walls are covered with maps: a relief map of Europe, flat blue maps of the Pacific and the Atlantic, brown-and-gold maps of the land masses of Asia and Africa. Spotted strategically across the grey wall-to-wall carpeting are wastebaskets stenciled SECRET.* Four of the five men are doing most of the talking; the fifth is listening, chain-smoking Parliaments, working intricately filigreed doodles on a white notepad with the preoccupation of a man in search of an answer to a complicated problem. “A decision,” the fifth man once explained, “is the action an executive must take when he has information so incomplete that the answer does not suggest itself.”

Before the five men lie bulging portfolios in colored leather: khaki for the Army’s General Maxwell Taylor, blue for the Air Force’s General Nathan Twining, navy blue for the Navy’s Admiral Arleigh Burke, brown for the Marine Corps’ General Randolph Pate, and a nonsymbolic black for the fifth man—the quiet man —four-star Admiral Arthur William Radford, 60, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior military adviser to the President. Before these five military officers also lies an awesome agenda. It can sweep across the types and size of next year’s H-bomb production, this year’s first test flight of an experimental intercontinental ballistic missile, every year’s ceaseless, questing reappraisal of the three-inch-thick strategic war plan that is the blueprint for U.S. survival before an atomic-age equation: one plane plus one bomb equals one city.

Nine times out of ten the Joint Chiefs reach agreement and pass their recommendations upward to civilian authority for the final decisions, a red line slashed across the bottom of each of the white policy papers to signify J.C.S. agreement. When the Chiefs disagree, it is the job of the chairman, Admiral Radford, to press them, gently or not gently, or to report the disagreement to his civilian boss, Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson. “What do you think, Raddy?” Wilson will then invariably ask. Invariably, Radford will produce a written reply, saying, “Here are a few thoughts of my own.” And, more often than not, what Arthur Radford thinks will be accepted as the best-reasoned military opinion of the U.S.

The Powerful Oar. During recent weeks Radford’s quiet opinions have been showing up in so many phases—successful phases—of U.S. policy that Radio Moscow has taken to denouncing him as “one of the most influential men in the apparatus.” With the prestige and style he has accumulated during 3½ years on the J.C.S. and 40 years in the Navy, Radford dips a powerful oar into nearly every basic policy decision confronting the nation. Currently he is urging that the U.S. speed shipments of short-and medium-range missiles (Nikes, Matadors, Snarks) to bolster the defenses of Great Britain. He is helping to work out the details of the agreement whereby the U.S. will send arms to bolster Saudi Arabia while also getting a new five-year lease on Dhahran, the crucial Saudi Arabian air base from which the U.S. Air Force’s nuclear bombers can command the southern reaches of the Communist empire. Everywhere, Radford argues publicly and privately for the alltime-peacetime-high defense and foreign military assistance budget of $43.3 billion (58¢ in every U.S. tax dollar) designed to give muscle to U.S. commitments to 43 friendly nations as an essential element of U.S. security.

“The free world of which we are a part should have three main objectives in the Middle East,” Radford testified on behalf of the Eisenhower Doctrine. “First, the nations of the Middle East must be kept independent of Communist domination; second, the strategic positions and transit rights in this area must be available to the free world; third, the resources, strategic positions and transit rights must be kept from slipping behind the Iron Curtain . . . It follows that the present situation presents a dangerous situation to the U.S., a condition against which we must have an effective defense.” Then Radford quietly turned to the big stick that gives the Eisenhower Doctrine its meaning. “I would say,” he testified evenly, “that the Russians are not going to start World War III now because they know they would be defeated if they did. I would say that we are definitely superior in military power to the Communist bloc.”

Before the Might. This interthreading of military and diplomatic factors and forces, the basic foreign-policy concept of Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, is ceaselessly advocated and practiced at high policy levels by Airman Radford. This Eisenhower concept, carrying downward through all levels of U.S. foreign policy, thus reflects a growing U.S. move to recapture the spirit of the logic of what the Navy’s great theorist, Alfred Thayer Mahan, called “reasonable policy supported by might,” limited by Theodore Roosevelt’s word of caution, “I never take a step in foreign policy unless I am assured that I shall be eventually able to carry out my will by force.”

In a sense the Korean war was perhaps the antithesis of this spirit, inviting compound failure: before Korea the U.S. vacillated in its Asian policies, and the peace was lost; the U.S. then took the correct step of intervention and subsequently proved unwilling to carry out its will by full force. But after Eisenhower made his decision to end the Korean stalemate, he followed through with a second decision that put the U.S. back onto a logical policy footing. “This was the first time’ in the history of our nation,” says Radford, “that we didn’t break up our military after a war. In fact, we built it stronger. We increased its strength with new weapons, new weapons systems and new tactical procedures.”

Unrelenting Strain. Around the atom, which now comes in almost all shapes and sizes, the U.S. now deploys a versatile force—Army, Navy and Air Force—designed to 1) deter wars, 2) to win wars and 3) to give precise support to U.S. diplomacy at precise points. Such a force-in-being, constantly under re-evaluation and re-equipment, demands such phenomenal expenditures as $15 million for an atomic-submarine power plant (about as much as a World War II light cruiser), $8,000,000 for an intercontinental B-52 jet bomber (as much as 42 World War II 6-175), $3 billion for an intercontinental missile program that will usher the U.S. into the costlier age of space.

Such a force-in-being—or force-soon-to-be—demands the services of a phenomenal one-tenth of the U.S. labor force to man, equip, maintain and feed it. It also demands the unflagging efficiency, enthusiasm and watchfulness of the front-line crews and the steady support of the public during years of strain that know no letup. Whenever Admiral Radford gets away from his three briefcases of Sunday homework to take a drive with his wife Marianna (which is rarely), he must first outline his exact route to a duty officer, so that troopers can be deployed to bring him back in a hurry, if necessary. A crew chief in the Strategic Air Command is subject to the same kind of discipline.

Unexcelled Understanding. That the U.S. has been able to muster up and manage such a huge and sustained military power, and thereby give weight to U.S. diplomacy, is due largely to the happenstance at the right place and the right time of Arthur Radford and his brood of new leaders, battle-tested and thoroughly professional. Their thoughts range freely across the complexities of foreign aid to Iran, say, or the possibilities of interplanetary junketing, just as they keep pace with the fantasies and the donkey work of their jobs. Admiral Radford, a rugged (6 ft. 163 lbs.) man with sharp blue eyes and close-cropped sandy-grey hair, was once a zealous apostle of naval aviation who delighted in baffling battleship admirals and big-bomber generals alike. But Radford has grown in the Joint Chiefs as he has grown into all of his career responsibilities, and he now yields to nobody in his understanding and specific knowledge of the best military-diplomatic interest of the U.S. Items:

¶ He is in tune with the new technology: “We. can’t hope to compete with the Communist manpower, but we can build up an organization that can apply superior power at the right time and place.”

¶ He understands the needs of the economy, warning those who counsel excessive military buildups that “we can spend ourselves into economic collapse.” ¶ He understands the military role in a democratic society: “As difficult as some of our sessions with Congress are, I feel they are vital in preventing excessive and unwise extremism. Here we are subjected to the kind of evaluation only a democracy can give its military. This is the secret of our success, I feel.”

The popular legend is that “Raddy” Radford, professional, is a cold and ruthless man, “Great Stone Face,” “owner of the coldest blue eyes in the Pacific,” etc. In fact, Radford is a warm man whose disciplined emotions, mastery of his job and unfailing consideration for others have earned him a warm regard. In a subtler sense, the regard paid to Arthur Radford further symbolizes a new military appreciation in this new military age for the quiet man in the big picture who sits and thinks and thereby saves lives and deters wars. Once Arthur Radford was one of the hottest pilots in the Navy, leading an aerial stunt team called the High. Hatters, even standing in as stuntman for Clark Gable in the epic Hell Divers. But one of his wingmen of those days now prefers to dwell upon the solid and undramatic way that Radford led his men on the routine patrols. “Raddy had it even then, as a lieutenant commander,” the wingman says. “You could see he thought bigger than his immediate job, no matter what it was.”

“Pink-Cheeked Apollo.” In a sense Chicago-born Arthur Radford was bigger than his immediate job even when, as a Navy-struck youngster at an Annapolis prep school, he used to cut morning classes, rent a boat and head across the Severn to watch such naval-aviation pioneers as Jack Towers and Albert C. Read in their weird helmets and goggles, maneuvering Curtiss pushers through the bright Maryland sky. At the Naval Academy Arthur did well in the famous class of 1916 that produced more than 40 admirals and made such a hit at Academy hops that his class Lucky Bag terms him “a pink-cheeked Apollo.” After graduation and four years in battleships, Raddy got into the Navy’s second postwar aviation class at Pensacola, Fla., won his wings in the fall of 1920, moved steadily upward to command the crack Fighter Squadron I aboard the new carrier Saratoga.

Lieutenant-Commander Radford, a bear on training promising youngsters, got a tragic incentive when his brother Charles, an Army pilot, was killed because a student pilot froze to the controls. “He always felt after his brother’s death that people shouldn’t do things they aren’t trained for.” a close relative recalls. “I’ve heard him say the Germans and Russians weeded out the poorly trained by letting them get killed in combat. He feels the weeding out should be done in rigorous training.” Adds one of Radford’s officers, with a different perspective: ”He impressed pilots that there was a helluva lot more to flying than flying. There was thinking, for example.”

Pilots’ Admiral. In dark December 1941 the Navy picked Captain Radford to centralize and expand the Navy’s flight training program. After a fast survey Radford announced that the Navy could up its training program from 300 pilots a year to 25,000—and proceeded during the next 16 months to push through just such an expansion. Few were surprised when the Navy promoted him to rear admiral and sent him out to command one of the newly forming carrier attack groups in the Pacific —even though Radford had never commanded a ship.

From his flagship Enterprise, Radford led Carrier Division II through the Gilbert Island landings, improvising air and sea tactics to meet each crisis, running his ships and men with warm command and cold logic. In May 1944 he was hustled back to Washington as Assistant Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Air), where he beat loud drums for the cause of naval aviation and produced the Radford Report, a skillful survey of the delivery, combat use, rotation, repair and relocation of aircraft. Brought back to the Pacific in November 1944, when Japanese naval forces were dwindling fast, Radford was appointed commander of Carrier Division 6 with Admiral Marc Mitscher’s vast Task Force 58. There he pasted Japanese shore installations from the South China Sea all the way north to Iwo Jima, Okinawa and Japan. His airmen called him the “pilots’ admiral” because they knew that he could do himself anything he demanded of his air groups—and he knew well the fine line between possible and impossible. Once, while his flagship Yorktown was in the Philippines area, Radford got-orders to send his F4-U Corsairs on a 1,200-mile round-trip attack on Japan. The fighters, he calculated rapidly, would have only five minutes over the target and would not have enough fuel to return if they tangled with the enemy. He signaled his dissent with a famous line: “Negative—no safety factor,” and the task force order was canceled.

“Billion-Dollar Blunder.” After V-J day, Radford’s basic good judgment gave way to blinkered zealotry. He led the Navy fight against 1) unification of the armed forces under a strong Department of Defense, and 2) the Air Force’s strategic-bombing concept, symbolized by the intercontinental B-36, which Radford unhappily termed “a billion-dollar blunder.” Such was Radford’s quiet but sharp-toothed tenacity as he helped lead the famous “Revolt of the Admirals” (1948-49) that the Army’s General Omar Bradley, then chairman of the J.C.S., got away with calling him one of the Navy’s “fancy Dans who won’t hit the line with all they have on every play unless they can call the signals.”

Korea brought new crises, bigger budgets and a truce in the interservice knifing. In December 1952 President-elect Eisenhower and Defense Secretary Designate Charles E. Wilson made their trip to Korea. At Iwo Jima, in Korea, aboard the cruiser Helena (where Ike gathered prospective members of his Cabinet) and at Honolulu, Radford—as the Navy’s Commander in Chief, Pacific—expounded his theories on military diplomacy and on the problems of Asia.

“He made a helluva talk—without notes,” said one participant. “And his biggest contribution was tying all this into one thing, showing that you simply couldn’t expect to push down trouble in one place and not expect it to pop up somewhere else.” The result for Radford was that Ike forgot the old feuds, decided to jump Radford all the way to replace the retiring General Bradley as J.C.S. chairman. “If Radford will work for the country as hard as he worked for the Navy,” Ike told his colleagues, “then he’ll do a fine job.”

The New Look. When Radford took over, he found that J.C.S. procedures were so tangled that only Korean war decisions could find their way out of the J.C.S. to the Defense Secretary, and many an important paper, e.g., a policy for guided missiles, was lost in the backlog. On his first day, Radford got the new team of Chiefs to work in his own office, without staffs, without secretaries, shirtsleeves rolled up; with pencils and paper that they had brought along, they began writing out memoranda on post-Korean force levels and budget needs.

All through the Federal Government there was a new ferment, as everybody from Eisenhower on down headed the same way: toward a long-term concept of force-in-being that soon came to be known as the New Look. The key to the New Look was atomic warfare—tactical as well as strategic—whereby U.S. power could be strengthened while manpower levels held steady. The inevitable implication of the New Look was a re-emphasis on air-sea power (Air Force, Navy) and de-emphasis of ground power (Army) that led eventually to the Army’s ill-fated “Revolt of the Colonels” (TIME, June 4, 1956). “Our New Look prepares for the long pull and not just for a year of crisis,” said Radford, soon after the Korean armistice. “The New Look can be supported not just one year, nor two years, but for ten years, or even 20 years, if necessary.”

The New Diplomacy. While the U.S. was generally grasping the logic of the New Look, Admiral Radford was often out in front urging a firm military-diplomatic line against Communism. In 1953 Radford advised Eisenhower to revise Harry Truman’s two-way U.S. blockade of the Formosa Strait. His points: Why guarantee the Chinese Reds against attack from the Chinese Nationalists on Formosa? Eisenhower weighed the risks, took the decision, forced Red China to deploy hundreds of thousands of defense troops along the South China coast. Two years later Radford and Dulles not only endorsed Ike’s public promise—backed by congressional resolution—to defend Formosa by force, but wanted the U.S. to declare its specific intent to defend the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu as well. The President, sensing Britain’s opposition as well as the military value of being indefinite, in effect overruled his two strategic advisers.

In the far more complex crisis of Indo-China, where the great forces of Communism, colonialism and nationalism met, tangled and interacted in violence, Radford again advocated a stronger stand against the Communists than Eisenhower was ready to accept. Radford wanted the U.S. to launch carrier strikes to help the defenders of Dienbienphu; Eisenhower and Dulles believed that such a course would amount to too little and too late, and settled for the partition of IndoChina at the first Geneva Conference. When Radford and Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield argued that strong U.S. support for a little-known anti-Communist leader named Ngo Dinh Diem might save South Viet Nam and check the Reds in Southeast Asia, Ike and Dulles were with them. After a few forlorn weeks the U.S. got all the way behind Diem, and then and there checked the Communist advance. “The diabolical forces of Communism,” Radford warned consistently, “are committed irrevocably . . .”

The Suez crisis was the first real test of the New Look and the whole theory of military diplomacy. When the Russians talked of sending “volunteers” into the Middle East, the Pentagon was ready. Eisenhower, talking softly, sent word to the Kremlin through Ambassador Charles E. Bohlen that the U.S. would oppose with force the movement of any Soviet volunteers. Radford and his Chiefs met daily, and a small task force of J.C.S. staff officers kept 24-hour vigil in the Pentagon’s underground command post. Off the Levant, the U.S. Sixth Fleet was deployed to fight. So, with all leaves cancelled, was General Curtis LeMay’s Strategic Air Command. The result: the Russians forgot about volunteers.

One long-standing Radford recommendation for the Middle East was for the U.S. to join the Baghdad Pact, pledging itself (along with Britain) to defend Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan from Russian attack. Ike and Dulles demurred, for diplomatic reasons, and set out to achieve the same effect with the Eisenhower Doctrine.

State of the Forces. How good are the armed forces? The capabilities:

AIR FORCE. The most resourceful deterrent and retaliatory outfit in the history of war. Strategic Air Command’s intercontinental Boeing B-52s (possible future replacement: Convair B-58s) and medium Boeing B-47s are instantly ready to strike against hundreds of Communist airpower targets within two hours of crossing early-warning line. (1,000 B-47s were flown 8,000 miles apiece in one of General LeMay’s recent, incessant readiness tests.) “Nobody’s going to get lost,” said one SACman. “Our crews have been living with targets for so long they know them like their own home towns.”

Tactical Air Command is developing a whole new concept—Air Task Forces—in which supersonic North American F-100 day fighters, F-84F fighter-bombers, twin-jet Douglas B66 bombers, air tankers and transports can move in consort anywhere in the world to drop tactical atom bombs or conventional. Continental Air Defense Command still appears to be weak against Russia’s growing strategic air power. Other Air Force weaknesses: shortage and slow delivery of the Boeing KC-135 jet tankers needed to refuel B-52s and B-47s at economical altitudes; too many big vulnerable bases at home and overseas.

NAVY. “The Navy,” says Admiral Radford, “is a precision instrument of diplomacy. Foreigners apprehend the punitive possibilities of a ship which can pinpoint a target without sounding the signal for another world war.” From the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean to the Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific, the versatile Navy can land Marines to pacify a mob, put down missiles within a 500-mile range, send A3D twin-jet bombers at 600-plus m.p.h. to a radius of 1,500 miles. Most pressing day-by-day Navy job: watching for deployment of Russian guided-missile and conventional submarines against U.S. coastal cities and overconcentrated U.S. Navy bases like Norfolk-Newport News.

The Navy is pressing its hunter-killer submarine measures, e.g., extremely long-range detection, atomic depth charges. It will build its 15th atomic submarine; it wants to build 15 atomic aircraft carriers (at $310 million each), and Nautilus, symbol of Admiral Arleigh Burke’s atomic revolution (TIME, May 21), has already and without refueling sailed 20,000 leagues beneath the sea.

ARMY. Still basically a road-bound and land-chained World War II-Korea concern, outnumbered 175 divisions to 18 by Russia’s manpower (let alone Red China’s). As of now, the Army’s most useful deterrent service is to hold the line in Germany and Korea in such strength that the Communists must concentrate to break through, thus provide targets for U.S. atom power (so plentiful is the atom that one Red battalion is now a suitable atomic target).

But the Army, says Admiral Radford, “never had a brighter future.” Building on the morale of its elite and tradition conscious troops (“Airborne, airborne all the way” shouts the 82nd Airborne trooper), the Army is developing: 1) atomic support commands with Corporal and Honest John atomic-missile batteries packing the firepower punch of all the U.S. artillery of World War II; 2) lightweight “pentomic” divisions comprising five mobile combat groups well suited to fight a dispersed and radioactive war. Because the U.S. is short on military transport, it would have taken 30 days to airlift one Army division to Suez.

No Time for Bickering. Radford, who considers these the most powerful forces in the history of the world, well knows the problems of keeping them that way. Problem No. 1 is that a high percentage of the services’ skilled technicians are leaving for higher wages in industry. Radford and the service Chiefs are convinced that the answer is to make service life fairly competitive with civilian life, e.g., higher pay for higher skills and higher merits, and they argue forcefully that the higher costs (perhaps an additional $700 million a year) will be more than met by higher re-enlistment and higher performance.

Problem No. 2 is that the U.S. is now beginning to move into “the grey area.” in which the unknowns of ballistic missiles must be phased gradually into the knowns of planes and men, with the prospect of heavy damage to such key sections of the military economy as the fighter aircraft airframe industry (see BUSINESS).

Problem No. 3 is that the three services, moving into this uneasy grey area, are also moving on to new bickering about the future of missions and budgets and careers. When the Navy starts serious groundwork and lobbywork on its projected 15 atomic carriers, the interservice roof may fall in. “There are going to be some investigations on missiles,” one Air Force general sadly predicted, “that’ll make the B-36 hearings seem like a powder-puff game.”

“To Avoid Insult.” Around and about these capabilities and problems there is gathering an acute awareness of the importance of the military-diplomatic role. “So we’re the big stick,” said one SAC officer. “So maybe old Dulles thinks of us when he sits down at the mahogany.” And when Admiral Radford one day paraphrased Teddy Roosevelt, “Never extend a military projection beyond its capability of winning,” one of his officers echoed afterwards: “Substitute ‘diplomatic’ for ‘military’ and you have a currently valid statement. In fact, you have a policy.”

As he moves on toward August, when his second and (by law) final term on the J.C.S. is due to expire, Radford sometimes plunks forward into the future of American life and American defense, now inextricably intertwined. Says he: “We haven’t seen anything yet.” Then Radford turns back to the meaning of what George Washington, the first Commander in Chief, had said as he confronted the turbulence of the Old World and got the American Experiment on the way. “There is a rank due to the United States among nations,” said Washington, “which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be ready to repel it.” Then Arthur Radford, the quiet admiral, adds the postscript that is his life: “The more our country sweats in peace, the less it will bleed in war.”

*After each J.C.S. meeting, an officer and a non-com from a special Pentagon nine-man destruction unit empty the secret wastebaskets into a paper bag. They also tear off the scratch papers on the J.C.S. pads, removing the top three or four sheets which, while they probably have no writing on them, do have impressions from the sharp pencils. All this material is catalogued, put in safes for ten days. Then it is taken to one of the basement incinerators in the Pentagon and burned. The ashes are pulverized into dust-thin particles. Then a destruction statement is signed by the noncom who did the work and the officer who supervised it. Everyone who handles the contents of the secret wastebaskets is screened for top-secret clearance.