Tough Talk

If summary action could squelch the family squabbles of the armed services, Defense Secretary Louis Johnson was off to a booming start. The day after he officially took over from James Forrestal, he called in the press to proclaim his plans for an enforced peace, "right now, in one bite, as far as the law will permit."

Johnson rattled off a whole list of projects designed to get unification of the services in form, if not in fact. In a matter of months, he announced, he hoped to have the top brass of the three services and 12,000 underlings relocated in new, chummy quarters in the Pentagon, a shift once estimated as a two-to three-year job. He ordered the Air Force's General Joseph T. McNarney to shake down the hundreds of duplicating and overlapping service boards and agencies. Four days later Johnson wiped out nine service boards as unnecessary. He made it plain that he would stand for "no vying between the services for headlines."

Johnson also admitted that he had a "pretty fair conviction" of how the competition between the Air Force and Navy's air arm should be decided. Anyone who objected, he said, "would have a chance to argue me out of that conclusion in the next couple of days." After that anyone who still disagreed would get out. Said Johnson: "There will just not be room for them around the Pentagon and I told the three secretaries that."

Four days later Johnson followed up that threat with a major personnel change which looked like the first crackdown. Vice Admiral Arthur W. Radford, wartime task-group commander, was relieved of his post as Vice Chief of Naval Operations and made Commander in Chief of the stripped-down Pacific Fleet (TIME, April 4). Able, popular "Raddy" Radford would get the four stars of a full admiral, but officers of the Navy and the other services got the point: Radford had been the most articulate, determined foe of what the Navy regards as an Air Force threat to the functions and size of the Navy's air arm.

But even Louis Johnson knew that he could get no real unification without some law-changing by Congress. At week's end, as a starter, the President signed a bill creating a $10,000 post, Under Secretary of Defense, for his chief administrative assistant. But armed-services committees in both houses of Congress and their gold-braided pals in the armed forces were still balking at bills which would make the Secretary of Defense the absolute boss of the services as well as their titular head.

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