Restrained Power

(See Cover)

Force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished.

--Alfred Thayer Mahan

Neatly spaced amid the welter of bulldozers, cranes and sweating U.S. marines on Yellow Beach north of Beirut, Lebanon last week stood five green and white umbrellas boldly emblazoned SEVEN-UP. The umbrellas each sheltered a friendly Lebanese vendor with an iced soft-drink box packed with Seven-Up. They were spaced with such orderly precision because the marines' beachmaster decided in his second week ashore that the hordes of Lebanese pop salesmen needed as much organization as the unloading of supplies into that precise point of the crisis-torn Middle East.

Under gnarled old trees in a quiet olive grove on the inland side of Beirut's strategic International Airport, officers of the U.S. Army's 187th Airborne Battle Group were working on a battle plan. They were ready, if called upon, to roll up the Basta, a Moslem area of Beirut held by Nasserite rebels, sealed by deep tank traps, banked with sandbags, defended by carefully sited automatic weapons. But there were immediate problems in the olive grove. Inevitably, the trucks and heavy combat vehicles of the 187th were barging into some of the olive trees causing damage, and there was the question of compensation for the Lebanese olive growers. Mutually satisfactory method of compensation : count the olives on each ruined tree; figure out the estimated life of the tree; pay out the estimated lifetime revenue of the tree, up to 100 years.

To the west of the beach, aboard the mighty 60,000-ton supercarrier Saratoga, pride of the Sixth Fleet, the Navy's job for the day was to pound Douglas AD Skyraider bombers and Chance Vought F8U1 Crusader fighters out of steam catapults into a Mediterranean haze amid jet engine roars, catapult cracks, clouds of hissing white steam. The mission: to show the silver of Navy air power over Lebanon. But Saratoga's jet pilots, like all Navy pilots off Lebanon, got word to steer clear of a certain point just south of the predominantly Moslem port of Tripoli. Reason: a Nasserite rebel sniper holed up there had scored so many hits on Navy planes with .30-and .50-cal. ammunition that Navy pilots were calling him "Annie Oakley." Navy orders: "Don't shoot back." What if Navy planes got shot down? Said a Sixth Fleet air officer: "I guess we would order them to fly higher."

The officer with the job of welding marines, paratroops, Navymen into a spear-point of U.S. diplomacy in one of the U.S.'s weirdest-ever military missions: the Navy's four-star Admiral James Lemuel Holloway Jr., 60. CINCNELM, Commander in Chief, U.S. Naval Forces, Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean; CINCSPECOMME, Commander in Chief, Specified Command, Middle East. Said he: "One might think it would be frustrating to a military man to have such a role--lacking vigorous military action--but I do not think so. The U.S. responded to a request for assistance from the legal government of Lebanon. Our main purpose right now is simply to be here. We are playing from great strength but with great restraint."

Force That Exists. In a sense the restraint aspect of Admiral Holloway's mission got more punditry last week--not to mention frustration, sneers, even mirth--than the greater fact of Admiral Holloway's great strength. But in a week of mixed-up and shifting developments in Washington, Moscow, the Middle East and the U.N., it was Admiral Holloway's show of force--restrained, not brandished--that was the single most important point about the whole Middle East can-of-worms crisis, simply because the force was there.

The key elements of Admiral Holloway's power: 6,100 marines and 3,100 Army airborne troops, installed on a secure beachhead equipped to shoot anything from obsolete Mi rifles to atomic-rocket projectiles; the 76-ship, 35,000-man Sixth Fleet offshore, whose Skyraiders could take an A-bomb from Beirut to Moscow; the Air Force Tactical Air Command's 200-plane composite task force--Douglas B66 and Martin 6-57 light jet bombers. North American F-iooD fighter-bombers and McDonnell F-IOI fighters--at nearby Adana, Turkey, an atomic-and conventional-armed reminder of the mighty, miles-away, 1,500-plus thermonuclear bombers of Strategic Air Command. The key results of Admiral Holloway's power: i) Lebanon and nearby Jordan--buttressed by 2,000 British paratroops--were still untouched by the revolutionary fire in Iraq; 2) U.S. allies from Iceland to the Philippines got proof that the U.S. would deploy and fight if need be to save small friendly powers from subversion; 3) Arab nationalism, whether led by Nasser or not, had been shown that the

U.S. would not hesitate to contain and/or oppose it if it conflicted with the free world's cold-war defenses; 4) world Communism had been shown that the U.S. was not deterred by Russian rocket rattling from deploying into the Middle East, and Middle East military men could not help noticing that the Russians had notably not intervened. To Nasser, in Moscow after the Iraq revolt last fortnight, Khrushchev boasted that he had weapons that could turn the Sixth Fleet into "coffins of molten steel for its sailors," but Khrushchev's Security Chief Ivan Serov nonetheless warned Nasser to fly home overland, because "your plane dare not fly over the sea because they could shoot it down with rockets."

Says Admiral Holloway just as flatly: "There is outside aid and there is infiltration from without here, but it would not appear to me that Nasser will mount and launch any kind of formal intervention in Lebanon. Nor do I think the Soviet Union will intervene. I think there will not be a third world war arising out of this situation."

"Lord Plushbottom." Not the least of the elements of the power that exists in the Mideast is Admiral Holloway himself, a "black-shoe sailor," (i.e., no airman), whose square, salt-cured features are often belied by a suave, diplomatic air that sometimes spills over into pomposity. In civvies he sports a Malacca cane. He is something of a connoisseur of wines. He interlards his conversation with phrases out of Dickens or Thackeray, loves to write what he calls "erudite letters" (favorite word: vouchsafe). "If he will ever be known for any command, it will be for his command of the English language," said one officer who served on his staff, and Holloway adds to the impression when he tells his officers, in a neo-British accent, to "go bird-dog this thing," or "go with the speed of a deer and do it," or "let's get our tails over the dashboard on this thing." His Navy nickname is "Gentleman Jim." His press nickname is "Lord Jim." His private Navy nickname is "Lord Plushbottom."

But it is also a fact that Holloway's most loyal admirers are those who have served him longest or worked with him most closely. Reason: Holloway, veteran of 40 able and often illustrious years in the Navy, is first, last and all the time a thoroughgoing Navy pro.

Item: as superintendent of the Naval Academy at Annapolis from 1947-50--he was the youngest in 50 years--he was shocked to discover Academy-based enlisted men living near by in trailer camps. A midshipman's first lesson must be concern for enlisted men's welfare, he told the brass in Washington, and Annapolis of all places must set the example. He came away with the first Wherry housing units the Navy ever got.

Item: as chief of the Navy's Bureau of Personnel from 1953 to 1958--he held the job longer than any other Navy officer in 75 years--he was one of the few flag-rank officers who fought the Navy's real Lord Plushbottoms to push the promotion to flag rank of Hyman Rickover, prickly pioneer of the atomic submarine. One day, to a group of young naval officers, he summed up his philosophy of leadership in a way that defines his value to the nation today. Said he: "You men probably do not think of it in this way, but I do. To be commissioned in the Navy, you had to be appointed by the President with the approval of Congress. This is the procedure and requirement for the seating of a Supreme Court judge or an ambassador. This is why a naval officer must have his chin out at all times."

Monaghan to Hopkins. Admiral Holloway was born in Fort Smith, Ark. in June 1898, the famous year in which the Maine blew up in Havana harbor, Commodore Dewey gave the order in Manila Bay--"You may fire when you are ready, Gridley," and the Navy moved into its new role of world responsibility. In 1904 his father, Dr. James Lemuel Holloway Sr., an osteopath who at 98 is still widely respected in the Southwest, moved his family to Dallas. There Jim went to Oak-cliff High School (now Adamson High), made a name as a varsity football tackle, a member of the debating team (noted victory: in favor of capital punishment), a devotee of the history of Britain's Royal Navy, but also as an almost fanatic would-be cadet at West Point. Outcome: no vacancy at West Point, but a vacancy, and a triumphal breasting of the entrance examinations, to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Jim Holloway entered Annapolis in 1915, graduated in June 1918 in the accelerated World War I class of 1919, but only 14gth out of 199.

Just before the end of World War I. Ensign Holloway reported for duty aboard the destroyer Monaghan, operating out of Brest, France. His first memorable contribution to the war effort: his first show of the Holloway style. "They never told me," he said, "about the lack of space on destroyers. My baggage filled the whole wardroom. I was a very unpopular young officer for that." And through steady performance aboard destroyers, cruisers and battleships and as a staff flag lieutenant in the Navy's lean, between-the-wars years--for eleven years, from 1922 to 1933, he stayed a lieutenant--he built up a steady professionalism that led him to his first command, the destroyer Hopkins. "I made a beauty out of the Hopkins," he said. "I brought her up in appearance and gunnery. A friend of mine, the first lieutenant of the Langley [the Navy's first aircraft carrier], helped me.

This boy gave me an extra 200 gallons of paint every month. I made her look like a yacht."

Iowa to Christmas. Pearl Harbor found Jim Holloway 43 years old, a commander in charge of the gunnery section of the office of Chief of Naval Operations. He put in for sea duty soonest, was cited by the Navy Secretary for "aggressive fighting spirit" while commanding Destroyer Squadron Ten in the North Africa landings. He got the Legion of Merit for a brilliant training job commanding the Atlantic Fleet's Bermuda-based shakedown group for new destroyers and destroyer escorts. In late 1944 he pleaded against Navy Secretary Jim Forrestal's ruling that he must stay in the training command--"where you are hitting your peak"--finally got command of the new 45,000-ton battleship Iowa in Admiral William F. Halsey's Third Fleet.

At war's end his career and Navy prestige hit a new high when, as Assistant Chief of Naval Personnel, he got the job of executing the decision to demobilize most of the 3,300,000-man Navy fast --"boys home for Christmas." Holloway did the irksome job in chin-out style, standing memorably against all half-threats and pleadings from Capitol Hill and elsewhere to get favored constituents home ahead of their time. One day, when a U.S. Senator brought in a friend to ask a favor, Holloway said in the lawyer's tone that Congressmen understood and admired: "I look to you, Senator, to help me maintain my probity." Holloway added afterward: "No Congressman ever failed to react to such a plea."

Hard Way or Holloway? Having thus helped demobilize the Navy, Holloway next took on the job of rebuilding that was to give the Navy a permanent new stamp. Name of stamp: the Holloway Plan. At Navy Secretary Jim Forrestal's command, he empaneled a group of Navy officers and civilian education experts, e.g., Illinois Institute of Technology's President Henry T. Heald, Williams College's President James P. Baxter III, brought forth a trailblazing plan to use the nation's colleges not only to produce Navy R.O.T.C. officers but to train regular naval and Marine Corps officers for the Navy's future force in being.

The Holloway Plan was approved by Congress in August 1946, was and is criticized as a waste of taxpayers' money because many men use it to get a college education and quit the Navy after serving their minimum three years. But the Holloway Plan flourished despite the criticism on 52 college campuses coast to coast, and a new quip passed into the Navy vernacular. The quip: "Did you get your commission the hard way [i.e., Annapolis] or the Holloway?"

From then on Holloway's Navy name was established--but in training and personnel rather than operational command. From 1947 to 1950 he was a successful superintendent of the Naval Academy, hiking academic standards, instituting a new leadership course for which he wrote half the textbook. The other half, on psychology, was written by a Johns Hopkins group. And after 30 uneventful months as commander of the Atlantic Fleet's Battleship-Cruiser Force, Holloway turned out yet another standout performance, as Chief of the Bureau of Naval Personnel from 1953-58, as the Navy came out of Korea. Once more Holloway impressed his stamp on the Navy in styled phrases, e.g., "We should get the best people we can for these jobs and make them play over their heads," and Holloway's choices usually did just that.

And never had Jim Holloway played so far above his own head. For 3^ years his wife Jean, daughter of Major General Johnson Hagood, U.S.A., was incurably ill with cancer. Holloway would leave his quarters in Washington at 6:20 a.m., play a lonely nine holes of golf with his single adjustable-head golf club at the Army and Navy Country Club, put in a full day's work with not a mention of his wife's illness, then spend the evening at the hospital with her before taking a long walk home, as he put it, "to become healthfully fatigued and then to sleep." In October 1956 Jean Holloway died. Their son, Commander James L. Holloway III, Annapolis '42, is now commanding a jet squadron aboard the attack carrier Essex in the Sixth Fleet off Lebanon.

The Storm Gathers. Around Admiral Holloway at his desk at BuPers, the cold war crowded in from Korea through Indo-China to the Middle East.

Milestone: the Baghdad Pact. The U.S. helped set up a new grouping of Britain, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Iraq designed to seal off the Middle East's northern tier, halfway supported the pact but did not join it, for fear of offending Saudi Arabia and India and of getting associated with British colonial power.

Milestone: Suez. The U.S. took its famous stand for international law by opposing the British-French-Israeli onslaught against Nasser's Egypt, effectively warned the Russians to stay out of the crisis, then failed to work out a way to channel Nasser's Arab expansionism away from Communism into courses acceptable to cold war defense.

Milestone: the Eisenhower Doctrine. The U.S. offered to go to the aid of any Middle Eastern nation--at that nation's request--to help it beat out attack or subversion by Communist or other outside powers. In historic testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Arthur Radford. spelled out the U.S. purpose in Mahan-type precision.

"The free world, of which we are a part, should have three main objectives in the Middle East: 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." The U.S. military could enforce these objectives, he added, because "I would say 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."

It was the lot of Admiral Holloway to vindicate this proposition in its first real test. Last February he got his fourth star, was appointed to command the Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean fleet, and with it the dormant, interservice Specified Command that had been set up to handle any U.S. action in the Middle East. When the test came suddenly and dramatically July 14, with Lebanon's appeal for U.S. help after the overthrow of Iraq's government, Holloway's Specified Command, along with Vice Admiral Charles R. ("Cat") Brown's ever-watchful Sixth Fleet, was set to move to help Lebanon by prepared and rehearsed plan. Holloway, who was in Washington serving temporarily on a selection board, flew back to headquarters in London, ordered the first wave of marines onto Beirut's Khalde Beach, flew on next morning to the marines' newly secured Beirut International Airport. His message on the landing to Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke: "Flawless." His time without sleep: 48 hours.

The Name Droppers. It was on the day after the landings, however, that Holloway's diplomatic finesse and mili tary firmness best paid off for the U.S. The situation: a long column of battle-dressed marines with M48 Patton tanks and lumbering LVTs was ready to move on from Beirut airport into the city; an unexpected force of 23 tanks of the Lebanese army was drawn up in position to block the marines and deny access to Beirut. On hand was Lebanese Army Chief General Fuad Shehab, who took a dim view of Lebanese President Camille Chamoun's request for U.S. help.

Into this difficult situation hurried Admiral Holloway, along with U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Robert McClintock. Holloway tried to warm up Shehab by dropping the name of a mutual friend. Said he: "Lord Mountbatten asked me to send his best wishes to you." When Shehab suggested that the marines move into Beirut only in small groups so as not to offend what Shehab called Lebanese sentiment, Holloway, ready to compromise, did not demur. But Holloway, his eye on the main objective, i.e., the securing of Beirut, then made it plain to Shehab that the marines had to get rolling right away, or as he put it in his nonstylish French, "tootey sweetey." Said Admiral Holloway afterward: "We were really sitting on a powder keg, but fortunately there were no incidents. We just got in a car--Ambassador McClintock and I--and led the column straight through."

Desperate Hours. Since the landings, Admiral Holloway's diplomatic-military talents have been kept minute-to-minute busy, put to many a test. He gets up aboard his electronics-crammed command ship Taconic about 6 a.m., keeps on the move until past midnight, has found spare time only to write four letters to London to his second wife--last January he married Josephine Kenney, the widow of a naval officer who had served with him in BuPers--and to drop down from admiral's country to see an occasional shipboard movie. Title of one movie: The Desperate Hours. He presides over a flood of operational, intelligence and logistics reports that range from one end of his command at the Navy base at Port Lyautey, Morocco, to the other end in the Persian Gulf, where the Navy maintains a little-heralded and could-be-boosted force of one seaplane tender and two destroyers. He keeps up a drumfire of "sitreps"--situation reports--to Admiral Burke, a flow of erudite radio dispatches to Righthand Man Cat Brown, usually kicked off in crisis' heat with a "Dear Cat," signed "with warm regards."-

Frequently, too, Admiral Holloway takes off from his helicopter landing platform on Taconic to inspect his onshore and offshore commands, to consult with his field commanders--the Sixth Fleet's Amphibious Force Commander Rear Admiral Howard ("Red") Yeager, the Marines' Brigadier General Sidney Wade, the Army Airborne's Brigadier David W. Gray. Holloway must also make the rounds of U.S. and Lebanese officials--the State Department's visiting Trouble-shooter Robert Murphy, U.S. Ambassador McClintock, Lebanon's President Chamoun, Army Chief Shehab--to keep in close touch and in close tune with the intricate local negotiations. Holloway also has to keep in tune with what passes in Lebanon for public opinion. "The people of Beirut," he says, "are largely in favor of our being here, and they are becoming more cordial daily. Surely some of them are not, and they could make trouble, but the threat of trouble is receding."

But a Marine lieutenant colonel staked out at a command post put it another way: "There's something here, and you feel it, and it makes you feel damned uncomfortable."

Basis of Order. There was indeed much to be damned uncomfortable about as Holloway and his men, and behind them the nation, moved into the third week of the nlp-and-tuck Middle East crisis, and it was still too soon to guess whether Holloway was headed for success or failure. "The irony of it," as a Pentagon officer put it, "is that he can fail greatly but only succeed quietly." But already Admiral Holloway and his men, by their show of great power and great restraint, have laid out some fundamental guidelines for their countrymen and their allies on Lebanon's shifting sands.

"The organized force of a community," wrote the Navy's Mahan, "is and must remain the basis of social order so long as evil exists to be repressed." The admiral and his men might even rerun it into a new definition of the t)ld Navy quip that had loomed so large in the long and notable service of Admiral James Lemuel Holloway. That new definition, which was also a new challenge: Do you fight the cold war the -hard way, i.e., by letting things slide into a shooting war, or the Holloway, i.e., by deploying adequate power to stop it?

-Last week Cat Brown got two other kinds of dispatches. In his letter to President Eisenhower about why-not-get-together-at-a-parley-at-the-summit, Khrushchev called Cat Brown a lunatic. Brown considered this a compliment. Three days later, Brown learned that at year's end he will get a fourth star and command of NATO's Southern Europe command based in Naples.

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