Experts & Explanations

Peering benevolently over the tops of his reading glasses, Georgia's canny Representative Carl Vinson clapped down his gavel and brought the proceedings to order. His Armed Services Committee had met to consider grave charges: that the Air Forces' controversial B-36 bomber, the nation's prime strategic weapon,,was a product of political finagling and outright crooked practices in high places.

Chairman Vinson had promised that there would be no whitewash--and no fishing expeditions either. "I didn't catch the question," Vinson remarked blandly when one witness began to wander. "I was smoking a cigar."

But Vinson was all attention as the airmen began to unroll their case. Essentially, it rested on one hard military fact. When the B-36 was adopted, the airmen insisted, and when its production was later stepped up at the expense of other aircraft, it was because it was the only U.S. weapon in existence which could reach the only possible U.S. enemy. "It is pointless to talk in riddles," declared Air Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg with a blunt disregard for the diplomatic niceties. "The only military threat to the security of the United States and the peace of the world comes from the Soviet Union."

"Teething Troubles." Some airmen readily admitted that they had not always been so sure that the B-36 could meet that threat. One who did was General George Kenney, who ran the Mac Arthur air arm in the Pacific. In 1946, said Kenney, he had been so discouraged by the "teething troubles" of the B-36 that he had recommended cancellation of all further orders. But as B-36 performance began to improve, Kenney continued, his mind gradually changed. "It astonished me," he explained frankly. "The youngsters liked it. They said it handled good up there. I said good, I'll buy it."

Tough, cigar-chomping Lieut. General Curtis LeMay, who succeeded Kenney as head of the Strategic Air Command, went even further. He did not argue that the B-36 was invulnerable to opposition; Bomber LeMay knew only too well that any aircraft can be knocked down. But, said LeMay, "I don't think the question whether it can be shot down enters in--it's whether you can penetrate to and destroy a target with acceptable losses . . . If called on to fight, I'll order out the B-36 crews and be in the first plane myself."

Questions & Answers. Committee members were visibly impressed by that kind of expert testimony. What, then, was the basis for the charges of political skulduggery?

Air Secretary W. Stuart Symington thought he knew for sure. The charges had been embodied in a rambling anonymous document, prepared by a group of Navy regulars and reservists and furtively delivered to Congressman James Van Zandt, himself a Naval Reserve captain and onetime national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Van Zandt had faithfully parroted the anonymous charges in his speech to the House. Indignantly, Symington denied them one by one: that the B-36 had come into favor only after Financier Floyd Odium had taken over the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corp.; that Symington had been offered a job as head of a gigantic aircraft combine which Odium was planning to set up; that Defense Secretary Louis Johnson had helped the B-36 along in return for Odium's contributions to the Truman campaign. The fact was, said Symington, that every step of the B-36 program had been approved by his professional airmen, that the B-36 had developed into a plane capable of carrying a 10,000-lb. bomb load over a 10,000-mile target run.

Then Symington switched to the attack. Angrily, he challenged Van Zandt to name his sources. Snapped Symington: "It didn't make any difference about attacks against our intelligence, but when they say that the entire Air Force high command is dishonest, I take bitter exception."

Van Zandt made one final effort to get back to the B-36. Just what targets could it bomb from the U.S., he wanted to know. Symington cut him off short. "If I were you, sir, I'd get a map and work it out for myself."

Repeated Rumors. At that heated point, Vinson called a halt. He reminded Van Zandt that his original accusations had been based on what Van Zandt called "information that cannot be disregarded." In his soft Georgia drawl, Vinson said: "I ask Mistoo Van Zandt to give me that positive information. That's the only positive thing he said in his speech."

Van Zandt began leafing through a folder on the table before him. He fished out one vague item reported by Manhattan gossip columnist Danton Walker. "The next letter," admitted Van Zandt, "was anonymous." Was that all? Protested flustered Congressman Van Zandt: "I made no charges against anyone. I simply repeated rumors--and they were ugly rumors . . ."

Vinson ordered a one-week recess to give investigators a chance to run down the author of Van Zandt's anonymous document. Unless Van Zandt could produce something more convincing than that in the meantime, it seemed likely that the Air Forces critics were going to be a lot more embarrassed than the airmen.

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