Fighter's Fighter

In 1956, when a newly retired U.S. Navy commander was convicted by a civil court of manslaughter for shooting an intruder, the Navy struck his name from the retirement rolls, cut off his wife and children from their only source of income. The case might have ended there had not Washington's powerful Army, Navy, Air Force Journal (circ. 28,166) gone into action. So hotly did the weekly Journal argue the injustice of the Navy's action that Georgia's Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, started an investigation of conflicting service policies by which hard-earned military retirement pay can be denied without appeal.

Last week, when the imprisoned officer was paroled in time for Christmas, the Navy sank its marlinespike even deeper by dunning him for $3,777. Explanation: Under "unknown circumstances," i.e., snarled by red tape, the Navy had continued to send the commander his retirement pay after it was officially cut off. The Journal again front-paged the story, raised a ruckus that may well prompt congressional action to give servicemen ironclad retirement benefits.

Stay of Execution. Few weeks pass in which the Journal (slogan: "Spokesman of the Services since 1863") does not flail away at brasshatted bungling. Best-informed and most influential military publication in the U.S., it is studied closely from Capitol Hill to the White House (where 34-year Subscriber Eisenhower's copy* comes every Friday through the mail), from far-flung foreign bases to Washington's wire-service bureaus, which cull frequent stories from the Journal and label them "authoritative." Because the Journal has high-echelon readership (56% of its subscribers rank above Army captain) and high standards of accuracy, the Pentagon snaps smartly to attention when it barks. Examples:

P: In 1956, when the Army quietly lopped twelve days from the school year of soldiers' children in Europe (thereby risking their accreditation by U.S. schools), the Journal's headlines swiftly restored the Army's $500,000 budget cut.

P: Sniffing out Charlie Wilson's plan to abolish the Army's Veterinary Corps in 1956, the Journal stayed the execution by pointing out that Congress alone has the legal authority for such action.

Management Audience. But the Journal's eight-man staff also stands diligent guard over top-level military policies, carries voluminous texts of significant military documents. Boasts Publisher Robert Ames: "We reach the top management audience of the military." The Journal's weak spot is its tendency to be a house organ for the military. This it does with out shame or doubt, meticulously listing in country-weekly style all military transfers (sometimes thousands an issue), runs a chatty society section devoted to service doings, plus a vital statistics column in which, as one staffer says, "an Army brasshat has to be mentioned to make the birth official."

The Journal's own birth, less than two months after the Battle of Gettysburg, was hastened by the irresponsible fashion in which the daily press covered the Civil War. Under Editor William Conant Church, onetime chief war correspondent for the New York Times, who had served as a captain in the Union Army, the Army and Navy Journal in its first issue lodged a baleful eagle atop Page One, promised that the paper would be devoted without bias to "sound military ideas and to the elevation of the public service." The weekly, which expanded its name to the Army, Navy, Air Force Journal after the Air Force became a separate arm, was willed to Washington's famed Gridiron Club of newsmen in 1949 by Colonel John O'Laughlin, its longtime publisher (and onetime Assistant Secretary of State under President Theodore Roosevelt). The club turns its profits over to a fund for indigent newsmen.

The Journal today faces the almost insupportable task of judging among the warring services to and for which it speaks. For nearly a century it has kept a cool head while raising its circulation. Editor LeRoy Whitman, 55, onetime aviation reporter and assistant city editor of the Washington Post, says: "It has never been a question of steering the middle course. The question is: 'What's best for the national defense?'

* Since his retirement from the Army in 1953, the President has had to pay the $8.50 civilian subscription rate rather than the $6.50 military price.

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