Master of the Pentagon

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The day was crisp and sunny, but a cold wind whipped through the marble columns of the white Arlington amphitheater, riffling the rows of flags. At 11 o'clock a can non thudded out the first salvo of the slow, rolling 19-gun salute and a flag-draped caisson moved slowly up from the Arlington gate, bearing the first U.S. Secretary of Defense to a sailor's grave.

From the flower-banked stage a minister intoned the words of the Episcopal burial service: "I am the resurrection and the life . . . Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" An honor guard of Marine riflemen fired three sharp volleys over the plain white wooden marker: "James V. Forrestal, Lieut. U.S.N." and a Marine bugler sounded taps. In the crowd of departing mourners, hat in hand, went the man who had begun to carry on from the point where the doughty, dedicated spirit of James Forrestal had finally given up.

The Change. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast between two men. When big, bald Louis Johnson two months ago stepped into James Forrestal's place, control of the nation's second biggest office passed from a wiry, introverted, unpolitical public servant to a 202 lb., hearty, hail-fellow man of action who had been a politician for most of his adult life. By last week the change of command and the change in methods that went with it had sent uneasy rumors and angry charges up & down the 163 miles of corridors in the Pentagon, where Jim Forrestal had finally managed to get Army, Navy and Air Force together under one roof. Some of the Pentagon uneasiness and anger over integration had long since spread to the 1,650,000 men in the nation's vast military establishment. With the coming of Louis Johnson, old Army man and longtime friend of the Air Force, the unseemly feuding broke more openly into public view. There was no doubt of it; the shield of the republic was beginning to show some alarming cracks (see above).

James Forrestal, perhaps too sensitive to the traditions and loyalties of the three armed services, had tried to win unity by conciliation and persuasion. In this he had largely failed. Louis Johnson had moved in like a combine advancing on a field of summer wheat. He set out "to crack a few heads together," and he did so by bold and brusque decisions. In his fourth week in office he ordered the Navy to scrap its biggest dreamboat, the $188 million supercarrier, United States, and ended naval aviation's dream of striking at the heart of any enemy with the atomic bomb. The strategic bombing role would go to Secretary Stuart Symington's Air Force.

Johnson made his power felt in smaller ways, too. In a kind of gigantic game of musical chairs, he started shifting half of the Pentagon's 25,000 antlike workers into new quarters. He wiped out 57 overlapping and outdated service boards and bureaus. He ordered all armed service celebrations combined into one Armed Forces Day. He ordered the overlapping medical services merged. With an eye to small irritations, he cut down on -the private use of official automobiles. And to end intra-service wrangling in press and radio, he issued a directive "consolidating" the press faculties of the three services, a move which was immediately attacked as an attempt to censor the news that came from the Pentagon.

The Law. Bundling his divided Joint Chiefs of Staff off to Key West, Johnson laid down the law. From now on, there would be unification as the law provided --or else. Those who didn't like it could get out.

Presumably, the purpose of unification was to achieve economy and efficiency in the $15 billion-a-year armed services. But one top Administration economist, watching Louis Johnson's roughshod methods, snorted: "He's made two enemies for every dollar he's saved." In nine weeks he had antagonized: the White House (for his tendency to pop off to the press), the Marines (for privately threatening to disband their air arm), the aviation industry (for canceling other contracts in favor of the B-36), the Navy (for a host of bitterly resented indignities).

Navy Secretary John Sullivan had quit in a rage. Last week, in a pointedly bitter farewell, he said he was leaving "a Navy that no foreign foe has ever defeated." Nobody in the Pentagon missed the stress on the word "foreign."

The Spotlight. In this kind of atmosphere came the explosion on the floor of Congress last week. Louis Johnson's enemies thought they had found two vulnerable places to attack him: he had moved into the Pentagon from a strictly political post as Harry Truman's money raiser; he had resigned his directorship in Consolidated Vultee just three days after he was nominated for the office which must decide the future of Consolidated's controversial B-36.

Inevitably last week, public attention came to rest on the expansive person of Secretary Louis Arthur Johnson, 58, the ex-National Commander of the American Legion, the onetime Assistant Secretary of War, the big operator in and on the fringes of Government, the thriving corporation lawyer who commands fees up to $300,000 a year.

Horses & Bourbon. Like many Virginians, Louis Johnson likes to think of himself as the descendant of a proud old plantation family. On his mother's side, he is. In the ante-bellum days the family estate near Leesville was a showplace of the state, with white mansion house, hundreds of slaves, fine horses and good bourbon. There was even a Confederate colonel in the picture: Grandfather James Louis Arthur, who rode proudly off to join the Army of Robert E. Lee, returned to live out his days selling off acre by acre to keep up the old mansion.

He taught young Louis Arthur Johnson that there was only one profession fitting for a Virginia gentleman. Be a lawyer, he advised the boy, a lawyer and a Democrat. Shortly after his grandfather's death, 16-year-old Louis announced, in a characteristically firm fashion: "I am going to be on the Supreme Court of the United States some day."

Louis Johnson's own father had no plantation. He was a grocery clerk in Roanoke who married Katherine Arthur, the colonel's daughter. A man of good family, little money and less education, Marcellus Johnson taught his son the value of an honest dollar, taught him to think and speak for himself, prodded him on with the fierceness of a man who has missed opportunity himself. After his counsel, no one had to teach Louis Arthur Johnson to get out in front and stay there.

Young Louis always captained the baseball teams. He dived from the highest branch by the swimming hole on Tinker's Creek He led his class in high school. At 15, he took over the local Epworth League and made it into a tri-city organization which embraced two neighboring towns. In the fall of 1908,17-year-old Louis Johnson, handsome, strapping and 6 ft.1 in. tall, descended on the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

Big Man on Campus. Before Louis Johnson's arrival, university politics had been dominated by the upper-crust fraternities. Louis soon changed all that, at least for his day. The Betas, the Dekes, the Sigma Chis would all have been delighted to accept the big, aggressive kid with the curly black hair and determined chin. But Louis became a Delta Chi, organized a merger of lesser fraternities and non-fraternity men and began winning student elections with monotonous regularity.

By the time he graduated, Louis Johnson had been three-time president of the law school, vice president of the oldest university Y.M.C.A. in the nation, secretary-treasurer of the Civic Club. He was also a crack debater, and a good athlete (boxing and wrestling). To the despair of some classmates (and with the help of a photographic memory), he had also made top grades without even seeming to try.

In his senior year, Louis Johnson strolled beside the serpentine walks, a mandolin tucked casually under his arm, hatless and sporting the latest in peg-top trousers, the biggest man on campus.

The Private Book. After graduation, he found no likely place in Virginia to set up a law practice, so he crossed over into West Virginia, settled in Clarksburg, and set out to run things. Elected to the State House of Delegates, he was made majority floor leader in his first term, at 26. Three months later, the U.S. entered World War I, and Johnson went off to fight through the Meuse-Argonne offensive as a captain of infantry. He returned with a hatful of ideas on what was wrong with the Army. On an impulse which was later to become a habit, he sat down and wrote a book-length report on his views. He sent it off to Chief of Staff Peyton C. March.

The Army was so impressed with Johnson's ideas on personnel and purchasing that he was offered a majority on the spot. Johnson wasn't interested. He went back to Clarksburg, married Ruth Maxwell, one of the richest, prettiest girls in town, and took up where he had left off.

His law partner, Philip Steptoe, a shy, scholarly wizard on briefs, was the office legal eagle. Hustling Louis Johnson made friends and drummed up business. Between them, they made an unbeatable combination. The firm of Steptoe & Johnson began branching out--to Charleston and on to Washington.

Exalted Ruler. The junior partner of Steptoe & Johnson, a joiner of joiners, was soon president of the Clarksburg Rotary, Exalted Ruler of the Elks, a rising leader of the American Legion.

Johnson would have liked to run for political office, too, but each time, after casing the situation, he decided that the moment was not quite ripe. The trouble was that the mine workers' union was all-powerful in West Virginia politics, and to the union boys, Louis was just another rich lawyer. "Like a good woman's virtue," one politico explained recently, "Louis' conservatism is taken for granted in West Virginia."

Conservatism in politics never held a man back in the American Legion. And in the Legion, Louis Johnson reached the top in 1932, taking over in the unsettled era after the bonus march on Washington.

Gratitude. Franklin Roosevelt, assuming office as the economy President (a phase that did not last long), ordered a 25% cut in pensions for disabled veterans. When a big Legion rally in Long Beach, Calif, started to threaten a second march on Washington, National Commander Johnson hustled to the scene, talked down the first angry boos which greeted him, and persuaded the Legionnaires not to do it.

Four years later, Franklin Roosevelt remembered helpful Louis Johnson, the loyal Legionnaire, with an appointment as Assistant Secretary of War.

It was a period when a good many Americans resented the Legion's big-stick and big-talk policy. The 75th Congress, faithfully mirroring the mood of the U.S. public, dug itself in behind a bulwark of neutrality legislation and arms embargoes, and hoped that Europe's troubles would disappear if no one noticed them. The Secretary of War, Harry Woodring of Kansas (a "sincere pacifist," Louis Johnson later called him), felt the same way.

Franklin Roosevelt wanted, to the horror of most New Dealers, a bigger Army & Navy.

Armed with Roosevelt's assurance that he would soon be moving into Woodring's job, Assistant Secretary Johnson began acting like the No. 1 man in fact. Isolationist Harry Woodring resisted every move toward U.S. intervention abroad, and Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson fought him at every turn. With the connivance of the President, Johnson tabled important matters that passed through his office until Woodring left town; then he rammed them through "by direction of the Acting Secretary of War." He let it be known openly in the War Department that he was "only in the Assistant Secretary's office temporarily, on the way up."

Of the brash, determined Assistant Secretary, who badgered him so mercilessly through those turbulent years, bewildered, bedeviled Harry Woodring recalled last week: "Many men are overambitious. Louis is overambitious. It is sort of like being oversexed."

But what Louis Johnson ably accomplished in those years is history: building up the puny Army air arm, sending Army officers on a survey tour of 20,000 factories to prepare for war production, placing "educational" orders for war supplies, stumping the country preaching preparedness in more than 400 speeches.

The Thunderclap. All this time Harry Woodring hung on to his job, helped by Franklin Roosevelt's chronic reluctance to fire anyone. Not until early 1940 did the blowoff finally come. At the President's instructions, Johnson had begun shipping arms and munitions to beleaguered Britain, by arbitrarily declaring them unfit for U.S. use and thus legally available for export. Woodring refused to permit such goings-on. But Roosevelt insisted, and Woodring resigned in a letter so bitter that it has never been published in full.

Acting Secretary Louis Johnson was ready, willing and panting to ascend the vacant throne. One summer afternoon the telephone from the White House rang.

Mr. Roosevelt was sending up Louis Johnson's formal nomination for the job the next week. Everything was set.

Then came the thunderclap. On the eve of the 1940 Republican Convention, Franklin Roosevelt appointed Republican Henry L. Stimson to head the War Department, Republican Frank Knox to be Secretary of the Navy. The move had obvious political advantages to Roosevelt, but he was also mindful of Hitler's sweep through Europe, and wanted the services of Stimson and Knox. It would be hard to tell who was angrier: the Republicans or Johnson. But he was still nursing another ambition: to be Vice President. Two weeks after the first blow fell he was shunted aside again at the Democratic Convention in favor of Henry Wallace. The end had come.

Louis Johnson, the man who had never before known a major setback, poured out his hurt and humiliation in a note of resignation to his "Dear Mr. President." Then he went back to Clarksburg to brood on man's infidelity to man--and to commit his thoughts to paper in a book which still rests in the Johnson safe-deposit box.

The Waiting. Louis Johnson did not sulk for long. He simply learned another lesson: how to wait. He turned down a scattering of minor job offers from a conscience-smitten Franklin Roosevelt, still holding out for the War Department or nothing. Finally he took a wartime lend-lease mission to India, from which he shortly returned with Delhi belly and another manuscript which "can never be published," he says, "as long as Winston Churchill is still alive."

But mostly once-burned Louis Johnson waited his time, and turned back to the law. With the added luster of Johnson's Government service, Steptoe & Johnson was doing better & better. Its list of clients became a sort of Burke's Peerage of the nation's corporations: Consolidated Vultee, Montgomery Ward, New York Life Insurance. Louis Johnson himself became a director of Consolidated and the $50,000-a-year president of the General Dyestuff Corp., the sales agency for General Aniline & Film, which had been seized as a Nazi asset by the Alien Property Custodian.

He moved into a handsome ten-room mansion in Clarksburg, puttered with a valuable collection of jade in his off-hours and tended two hutches of black & white squirrels. The two Johnson girls grew up and moved away.

He was out of the news, but not out of action. And he was careful to keep in touch with his fellow Legionnaire, Harry Truman. Last fall, when Truman looked around for a man to raise money for his campaign, his eye fell on Louis Johnson.

The Prize. This time there was to be no slip-up when it came to the payoff. Louis Johnson raised the money for the campaign, when the Democratic Party treasury was at its lowest. It was a great political service and Fund Raiser Johnson knew what he wanted. Harry Truman made a few halfhearted attempts to fob him off with offers of the sub-Cabinet Army secretaryship or the Court of St. James's. But Louis Johnson stood fast. The weekend after his inauguration, President Harry Truman let Louis Johnson know that the prize was his at last.

In Johnson's legal mind there seemed to be a slight, nagging doubt about the propriety of a shift from Democratic moneyman to Secretary of Defense. Not long ago he told a few friends of his talk with Harry Truman. "I told the President," Johnson explained, "that I felt I had disqualified myself for any federal appointment." But Forrestal and the President "insisted" and "I had no choice ... I accepted the position, tough as I knew it was going to be."

The Boss. It was-a humble-talking Louis Johnson who moved into Henry Stimson's old office and planted his big feet under a desk once used by Black Jack Pershing. "Golly, we need help," he told his well-wishers. "Please feel free to give me some advice, won't you?"

But Johnson was not a man to wait long, either for help or advice. By last week he had bulldozed his way through stubborn opponents and helpful advisers alike. He had already achieved something approaching mastery of the Pentagon, but it was an uneasy, strife-racked empire that he ruled.

It might yet turn out that his head-on tactics would bring the warring services together where James Forrestal's patient indecision had failed. But an end to service rivalries could never be reached by decree alone. With the Navy in open revolt last week, it was plainer than ever that real unification was also a state of mind: the services had to be convinced, not just told. By that definition, Louis Johnson's job had just begun.

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