NO LONGER A KID BUT STILL A WHIZ

Nuclear physicist. Bomb designer.

Missile expert. Presidential consultant. Chief of military research. Air Force Secretary. College president. SALT negotiator.

No U.S. Secretary of Defense has ever come to the job with such sterling credentials or thorough preparation. Still, as Harold Brown points out, most of his predecessors got into trouble "because of things for which no one could be prepared." Then he adds with a slight frown, "There is nothing quite so likely to lead to error as believing that you know all about a situation when in fact it is not the same situation you remember. That's a trap I could easily fall into."

Brown's chief defense against such mistakes is a scientist's reverence for facts. Because he detests canned, military-style briefings, he insists on reading the background studies and documents himself before making a decision. As he zips through them--nearly as fast, it sometimes seems, as a computer scans punch cards--he pencils questions and comments along the margins in his almost microscopic handwriting. Next he peppers the Pentagon's experts with still more questions, until he is satisfied that he has squeezed the subject dry. "No one can snow him," boasts an aide.

At the root of Brown's thinking is his overall philosophy of defense. Says he: "To focus on the question of whether the U.S. might end up militarily No. 2 is to focus on the wrong question. The question should be: What are U.S. military needs? If the U.S. can meet its military needs, it is not in an inferior position. Then the outcome [of competition with the Soviet Union] will be determined not by that balance, but by all the other things--political will, social cohesion, economic capability, technology, agriculture."

Brown's mind was beginning to function along such rigorously analytical lines when he was barely into his teens. The shy and bookish son of a New York City lawyer and grandson of Jewish immigrants from Central Europe, Brown graduated at 15 from the Bronx High

School of Science in 1943. The class yearbook (dedicated in that wartime year to, among others., "the scientist who prepares weapons") twitted Brown for studying "every waking moment in order to raise his average above 99." Actually, it was 99.5%.

In his application to Columbia University, Brown wrote: "I intend to let all my actions be dictated by the answer to this question: 'Will this step help, more than any other action, in winning the war against fascism and in winning the peace that will follow?' "

Brown needed only six years to earn his bachelor's, master's and doctor's degrees in physics, as well as a lasting reputation as a grind and a loner. Comments a Pentagon wag: "I hear his mother had to put him out now and then to sun him." The legend is not far from the truth, but he did find time to become a determined swimmer and tennis player.

By 1952 Brown was helping to win the peace in his own way--as an assistant to Edward Teller, a leader in the development of the H-bomb, at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. In the next few years, Brown not only worked on the H-bomb but also helped design the first Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile, originated the Project Plowshare plan for peaceful uses of atomic energy, and served as the senior U.S. adviser at nuclear test-ban negotiations with the Soviet Union. Recalls an associate: "He was intense, bright, driving and dynamic, but neither patient nor comfortable with people." In 1961, Brown became one of Robert McNamara's "whiz kids." At 33, he was given the Pentagon's third highest civilian job, director of defense research and engineering.

The combination of his youth and self-assurance grated on the graying generals and admirals. A Pentagon official remembers Brown as "looking like a kid. He was a child prodigy with a tremendous mind. He did all his calculations in his head and was always way ahead of everyone in a discussion. He wasn't really arrogant, but he was impatient, got bored and showed it."

Brown was partly responsible for killing the B70 bomber (too vulnerable to Soviet air defenses) and the Skybolt missile (too unreliable). He was also involved in decisions to go ahead with a more advanced land-based Minuteman missile, the C-5A air transport, early research on the B-1 and on'the F-111 fighter-bomber (an $8 billion mistake).

In 1965 Brown became Secretary of the Air Force. During the Viet Nam War, he was a strong advocate of bombing as a means of keeping down the numbers of U.S. ground troops that had to be committed and of forcing the Communists to negotiate a peace. He avoids talking about the war, except to admit that he made mistakes. Says he: "A lesson we learned from Viet Nam is that we should be very cautious about intervening in any place where there's a poor political base for our presence." Brown also learned a more personal lesson. Says a colleague: "Viet Nam showed him there are some problems that have no neat solution, no technical answer, no matter how many times you redo the formula."

Brown became president of the California Institute of Technology in 1969. He trimmed Caltech's nonacademic staff by 10%, persuaded its trustees to admit women students and strengthened its medical-science and biology programs. He also kept a hand in military and diplomatic matters as a member of the U.S. SALT negotiating team and, with Jimmy Carter, of the Trilateral Commission, an international group of private citizens interested in world affairs.

When Brown returned to the Pentagon this January, he was no longer a kid but still a whiz--and a mellower fellow to boot. He works as intensely as ever and expects others to do the same. Now if his time is being wasted by a subordinate, he ends the conversation--but a little more gracefully. Says a senior assistant: "It seems amazing to me that he is so good with people. That's an extraordinary personality development."

To Brown, dealing with the Pentagon's people is the hardest part of his job "because there are so many of them [about 2.1 million military and 1 million civilian employees] and because the institution they constitute is not easy to change. The toughness of the structure is a strength. It will run even if nobody's hand is on the tiller, though it might go where you don't want it to go. But it's a weakness if you want to change the institution, as I do."

The tightness of his grip on the Pentagon tiller is most evident in his dealings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and its outspoken and sometimes ill-spoken chairman, Air Force General George Brown (no kin). Says Secretary Brown: "I've known the chairman for 16 years; there are generals who were captains when I first met them. That gives me a certain personal rapport." But the brass finds him a hard man to persuade. Says an aide: "He's not just an umpire in the building. He reaches down into the process and shapes policy at all levels."

Brown gets along well with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. The three keep in touch via daily phone chats and weekly lunches in an attempt, as an aide puts it, "to prove that the infighting of the Nixon and Ford era does not have to be the norm." At meetings on U.S. SALT policy, says a State Department negotiator, "Brown is the dominating figure. He knows so incredibly much about nuclear weapons and the strategic balance that everyone defers to him. When the President isn't there, Brown is the de facto chairman."

On Capitol Hill, House Speaker Tip O'Neill rapped Brown's knuckles last month for lobbying too hard against a proposed $4 billion cut in Carter's defense budget request of $120.4 billion for fiscal 1978. But aside from that, Brown has turned out to be an excellent Pentagon advocate on the Hill, neither talking down to Senators and Representatives nor overwhelming them with facts, as McNamara used to do. Among other things, he moved quickly to reassure Congressmen in the face of warnings that the Soviet Union was rapidly achieving military superiority over the U.S. This might be Brown's most remarkable achievement so far. His confidence that America can maintain deterrence and the military balance without crash programs has quieted all but the most hawkish voices in Congress. His performance has won praise from both ends of the political spectrum. Says liberal Democrat Les Aspin of Wisconsin: "Brown seems to be doing all the right things." Says conservative Republican Barry Goldwater of Arizona: "He is doing much, much better than many of us expected."

Both hawks and doves find something to like in Brown's pragmatic defense views. A man who has designed nuclear bombs and seen many of them detonated is in a particularly sound position to view nuclear war, in an aide's words, "as the end of civilization." He is a strong supporter of a further agreement with the Soviet Union on limiting nuclear arms. "Without SALT H," says Brown, "I think the arms competition is going to spiral up a notch. The numbers of warheads will almost certainly increase, and the varieties [of nuclear weapons] probably will. My concern is that if things get more complicated, it will perhaps be easier for military strategists to persuade themselves that somehow they have devised a strategy that would allow them to have a nuclear war without taking unacceptable damage. That would be very dangerous because it would not be true."

Brown's schedule leaves him little time for his wife Colene or their daughters Deborah, 21, a graduate student in fine arts at Indiana University, and Ellen, 19, a sophomore in physics at Princeton. He rises at 6 a.m. in the family's $518-a-month, five-room apartment in Arlington, Va., swims a fast mile in the Pentagon Athletic Club pool, and speed-reads through a pile of documents before the first staff meeting (at 8:30 a.m.) in his large third-floor office overlooking the Potomac. Brown's mind is never on trimmings: there are no personal touches. In-boxes of secret papers, all carefully covered, crowd his massive oak desk. On the wall hangs a portrait of the first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal. Pacing as he talks, Brown has the air of a tense, driving man who never finds enough time to do what he thinks needs to be done. He rarely leaves for home before 8:30 p.m.

Says his wife: "We're not much on the social scene; we don't have the energy. Harold drives himself all day and has time only for work and keeping fit." Then she asks rhetorically, "Why's he doing all this?" And answers, "He has a great sense of duty. He wants to do something for his country." The idealist who set out at 15 to help win the peace is still trying at the age of 49.

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