End of a Strenuous Life

A switch flicked. The microphone in the Secretary of the Navy's office came alive. Along the cavernous halls of the sprawling ten-winged Navy Building, up & down the corridors of the Navy Annex across the Potomac, through all the temporary Navy buildings cluttering the Mall, boomed the taut voice of Under Secretary James V. Forrestal: It is with profound regret that I announce to the naval service the death of the Secretary of the Navy.

Thus last week the 30,000 Washington-based Navy personnel heard of the death of Secretary William Franklin Knox. The nation -- which had been given but one guarded intimation of the Secretary's week-long illness -- learned some minutes later.

So ended the blustery, earnest career of the civilian chief of history's greatest navy. It was a career compounded in equal parts of Horatio Alger and Teddy Roosevelt. The Alger element marked the rise of a paper boy to waiting on tables at Alma College, to $150,000-a-year general manager of 27 Hearst newspapers in 1928, and then to publisher-owner of the huge (412,148 circ.) Chicago Daily News in 1931. The Rooseveltian half of his life began in the Spanish-American War, when young Knox got a bullet hole through his hat and a "Bully!" from Teddy for his service in the Rough Riders.

It progressed through Bull Moose Republicanism and World War I service in the Meuse-Argonne and St. Mihiel offensives. It lived on in his hearty mule-driver's language and his adoption of T.R.'s "strenuous life," even to a half-hour's vigorous daily exercise until a week before his death. Politically it was manifest in his early mistrust of Roosevelt II (he called for "fewer and better Roosevelts", and in 1936 he was the Republicans' violently anti-New Deal vice-presidential nominee). But in June 1940, Knox and fellow Republican Henry L. Stimson entered Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet. He knew the move would be linked with the GOP convention which followed it, instead of the fall of France which preceded it. Said he: "I will be shot at from all sides, damned and denounced [but] I am an American first and a Republican after that."

He was no Navy strategist, and a poor sailor as well. But he conceived his job to be that of a civilian link between the Navy and the nation, not a teacher of admirals. Mostly he bustled about, trying to instill his own brand of peppy patriotism into war workers and servicemen alike. As the Navy's most-traveled Secretary, he visited Pearl Harbor a few days after December 7, and saw Guadalcanal, England and the Mediterranean at war.

Knox's death at 70 was the first in Franklin Roosevelt's war cabinet, though as the New Deal has aged it has become increasingly a gerontocracy.* (Four other cabinet members are in their seventies: Stimson, 76; Hull, 72; Jones and Ickes, 70).

This week as the nation buried Frank Knox in Arlington Cemetery, almost every public figure but Sewell Avery was being mentioned as his successor. Among them: Under Secretary Forrestal, 52, a Democrat, ex-president of Wall Street's Dillon Read & Co., and now Acting Secretary; Admiral William D. Leahy; Democrats Lyndon Johnson and Charles Edison; Republicans Wendell Willkie, Eric Johnston and Lieut. Commander Harold Stassen.

* Government by old men.

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