Deeds & Promises

Using a side door to dodge the press, Navy Secretary John Sullivan stomped into President Harry Truman's oval study one day last week. For 15 angry minutes he criticized his new boss, Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, and the abrupt cancellation of the Navy's 65,000-ton supercarrier (TIME, May 2). Then he laid down a bitter letter of resignation and headed for the door.

Harry Truman called him back. After all, the President argued, Sullivan was sore at Louis Johnson, not at Harry Truman. The resignation would be accepted, sure, but it would have to be rewritten. Sullivan agreed. In a friendly interchange of notes next day, John Sullivan and Harry Truman parted on the best of terms. But Sullivan pasted together all the angry things he had first written to the President, sent them instead to Louis Johnson.

In a flat rebuttal of Johnson's own statement a fortnight ago, Sullivan accused Johnson of ramming through the carrier decision without a word to the Navy Department. Yet, said Sullivan, the carrier had twice been approved by the President, and specifically authorized by Congress. Furthermore it had been so important to the Navy that other construction funds had twice been reduced to make the carrier possible. As Sullivan saw it, the whole deal was a barefaced double-cross.

Washed Out. When the question of cancellation came up, he wrote, "I started to give my opinion, but before I had talked more than a minute you advised me that you had another appointment and would discuss this matter with me at a later date." He next heard of the matter five days later, Sullivan said, when he was told by a long-distance telephone call that Johnson had washed out the whole carrier project.

Said Sullivan: "Your action ... so far as I know, represents the first attempt ever made in this country to prevent the development of a powerful weapon. The conviction that this will result in a renewed effort to abolish the Marine Corps, and to transfer all naval and Marine aviation elsewhere, adds to my anxiety.

"However, even of greater significance is the unprecedented action on the part of a Secretary of Defense in so drastically and arbitrarily changing and restricting the operational plans of an armed service without consultation with that service. The consequences of such a procedure are far-reaching and can be tragic."

Yes & No. Before the outbursts had subsided, Johnson plunged head first into more trouble. Johnson, who just can't seem to stay away from the press, or be discreet in front of it, let it be known that he had decided on the successor to retiring Army Secretary Kenneth Royall --though it is the President's prerogative to name his own official family. Johnson's choice was 58-year-old Curtis Ernest Calder, the $75,000-a-year board chairman of Manhattan's Electric Bond and Share Co. As soon as Calder could tidy up his affairs, probably within 60 days, he would move into the Pentagon. So said Louis Johnson.

That wasn't the way Calder understood it. As soon as the news hit the wires, Calder cracked back: "I have not accepted the secretaryship of the Army today or accepted it for 60 days from now." In the ensuing confusion, Louis Johnson kept mum while Harry Truman loyally tried to straighten things out by hoping that Calder could still be persuaded. If not, the loud publicity would make it even harder to find another candidate. One trouble was that though the vacant Army and Navy secretaryships were still Cabinet posts in all but name, they were increasingly becoming mere under-secretaryships, under an unpredictable and strong-willed Defense Secretary.

Abject Surrender. By this time Louis Johnson had also thrust his bald skull into another angry beehive. At a friendly little luncheon for a handful of Washington newsmen, he incautiously confirmed some of John Sullivan's worst fears. The newsmen came away with the distinct impression that Johnson was intending to absorb all of Marine Corps aviation into the Air Force or the Navy or both, and that a directive to that effect was already in the works.

Johnson had not told that to the Marines. In fact, he seemed to be losing sight of the Marine airmen's one peculiar function: supporting Marine ground forces in amphibious operations. Marine air is the only flying arm specifically trained for close-in support of ground troops from carrier bases.

Georgia's crafty Carl Vinson hit the roof. As chairman of the House Armed Services Committee he had been getting hotter & hotter at Johnson's methods. After a hurried visit to Johnson's office, he came back to Capitol Hill with Johnson's abject surrender in writing--and to be sure about it, read it into the record on the House floor.

What the House heard was a complete denial by the Defense Secretary of any plan to transfer the Marine or naval aviators to any other service, i.e., the Air Force. He could not do it under law, he admitted, and there had been no thought of any such move anyhow. Said Johnson humbly: "I want you to know that before any step of this kind would be seriously considered, I should ask permission to discuss the matter before the committees of both houses of Congress."

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