| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Charles Larson Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 3 of 5
Let's go back to your story now. After some service in the Navy, after you graduated from the Academy, you were the first White House Fellow from the Navy.
Yes.
You had a stint in the White House serving as the Naval Attaché to President Nixon. Tell us about that experience.
When I competed for my White House fellowship, I think the Navy didn't really understand what I was doing, and as I was headed for the final competition to determine who would be the fellows for that year, this was back in 1968, the Navy moved my family to Connecticut from South Carolina. And I said, "Wait a minute, why are you moving me? I might get this fellowship and go off again to Washington in two months." And they said, "We've got a lot of confidence in you, Commander, but we're going to move you anyway." So I had a wife who was eight months and two weeks pregnant sitting up in New London, Connecticut now, and I went down to compete for the fellowship, and I got it.
So did they move your family back?
Two months later we moved to Washington, D.C. And I served as a special assistant to the Secretary of the Interior. We had a Fellow with each cabinet officer, and you worked very closely ...
Was this Walter Hickel?
This was Stewart Udall. This was Stewart's last year as a cabinet
officer, and it was the last year of the Johnson administration. So
we were able to go through and meet with all of the people in the
Johnson administration. They then earmarked me to be the transition
officer for Secretary Hickel, and I was going to remain in the office
and kind of bridge the gap into the new administration. And before
that happened -- in fact, I started doing that after the election --
and all of a sudden I got a call one day that asked me to come over
to the Pentagon in uniform. I hadn't worn a uniform in my fellowship,
and they couldn't tell me why they wanted me to come over.
When I got
over there, there were eight young officers standing in the office
getting briefed by this admiral and they said, "You're going over to
the White House and interview for a naval aide to the President. And
so I went over and interviewed and was selected as President Nixon's
first naval aide. And I left Interior and went over to the White
House, and I ended up staying there for two and a half years before I
could go back to submarines.
What sorts of things did you do for President Nixon?
Our office was the liaison for all military matters between the Pentagon and the White House that didn't deal with the National Security Council or the Vietnam War, essentially. So we had all administrative matters. We also had responsibility for all of the military assets that supported the president: Camp David, the presidential yacht, Air Force One, the cars, the helicopters, all of the assets that supported the president and, probably more importantly, all of the nuclear codes and things in the little suitcase.
So you were the bag man?
I was the black bag man. I was responsible for everything inside the little suitcase and also for emergency relocation and evacuation of the president in case of nuclear war, and all of his communications, all of his White House communications.
What was it like to know that you had that little bag? Of course, war could have broken out then; the Cold War was still in full bloom. What was it like as a soldier to have that responsibility?
I certainly felt very seriously the responsibility, and of course, although each of the aides took turns when they were with the president having custody of the briefcase, I was the one designated responsibility for keeping everything inside it updated and making sure that every so often we refreshed the president on everything that was in there. I had already at that time had service on two missile-firing submarines, two Polaris and Poseidon submarines, and on my second submarine I had already spent a great deal of time in the cycle of the procedures that you have to go through when an order comes down from the president to release nuclear weapons. So I was dealing with something, an awesome responsibility, but something that I was familiar with and had spent a fair amount of time thinking about, and understanding the seriousness and the consequences of what we were doing.
Did you literally follow the president around, or was that someone else?
One of the aides was with the president continuously anytime he was outside the White House grounds.
Were you in the same vehicle or you would be in a separate vehicle?
It varied. Sometimes we rode with him, more frequently we rode in the car just behind him.
What is your view of the complexity of Richard Nixon?
I had an enormous amount of respect for Richard Nixon in a couple of areas. First of all, he had the best grasp of foreign policy, geopolitical affairs. He knew the leaders of the world, he could tie it all together. He conceptually could understand that if you take an action here it has a consequence over here. If you do something with Russia it has an impact on China, if you do something with China it may have an impact on India. He could really conceptualize that and hold it all together. So he could take a more strategic approach rather than a crisis-oriented approach. I respected his capacity and what he was able to do in some of the major breakthroughs. Who else but Richard Nixon could have opened China? There are just certain people that could have done that, and because of his background, he was able to do that.
The second thing I respected about him was he was always kind to what I would call the little people. I never saw him humiliate, degrade or in any way treat unkindly the staff people, the little people, the support people. He was always polite to the people that worked in the kitchens, at the hotels, the elevator operators. He was kind to people when the press wasn't looking, and to me the real measure of a character of a person is, what do they do when no one's looking? What type of person are they? And I respected him for that.
He was a very private man, as you may know. One of the things they did with us as his aides, there were three of us, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and then we had an Air Force general who was the assistant to the president who was the head of our office, they forced us on him a lot in the very beginning so he became very comfortable with us and then could deal with us very freely, because President Nixon didn't make friends easily. He was a very private person, private with his family and with his friends, and was not really a backslapper, "hail fellow well met." It's very unusual for a politician not to enjoy being out there in this active social life, but he was very reflective and very serious.
I've drawn a very strong comparison between him and one other person I've worked for, and that's Admiral Rickover. Both of them I felt were totally focused on the job at hand, doing their best and putting all their energy into it without any regard for what it did for them in the way of personal gain.
Rickover was the man who created our nuclear weapons program and profoundly influenced the direction of the Navy.
Well, Rickover actually created our nuclear propulsion program that made the submarine available to put the nuclear weapons on. So it was a dual responsibility. But he was the father of the nuclear submarine and really gave us that capability. I was interviewed by him and selected by him for the nuclear program.
This goes back to what you said at the beginning, teaching leadership through an example and the character of an individual.
That's right.
I've learned both good and bad from everybody I've ever worked for, and I certainly felt it was a wonderful opportunity at that age -- I was about 32 -- to work for first a cabinet officer, Stewart Udall, whom I respected very, very much. Stewart and I were probably as different as night and day when we first came together. He had written a book -- this is very interesting: I'm going to work for him in 1968 so I'm looking at his visionary book which was published that year, 1976: Agenda for Tomorrow. And in the first paragraph of Stewart's book I came across a word and I had to go to the dictionary to look it up. The word was ecology. People would laugh now and say, "My goodness, this admiral doesn't know what ecology is!" but in 1968 most people went to the dictionary to look up that word.
Right. Udall was a leader in pointing out the problem of the environment, which we weren't going to really understand until much later.
That's right, and his book Agenda for Tomorrow pointed out some of the things we needed to do with urbanization and the environment and open space and quality of life and pollution and all those things. He was a man ahead of his time. So we took this young military officer and we took this environmentally sensitive man with a very good sense of domestic issues and put the two of us together, and it broadened my horizon and I think it enriched my mind and my thinking and made me much more tolerant and aware of many, many things.
I'll do a fast forward. You're now the CINCPAC commander, it's the early nineties. Former President Nixon is now eighty years old. You meet with him in Hawaii, I believe you said last night in your lecture, and he lays out, much like you just described Udall, a map for you of the horizon -- in this case, not the environment, but of the strategic factors. Tell us about that.
We sat and talked that day for about two and a half hours. I took
notes and I had them typed up privately and only one copy exists,
because I wanted to keep the privacy of his conversation. He talked
about his conversations with world leaders. He talked about Japan, he
talked about Korea, he talked about Russia, but he really
concentrated on China, because he had just returned from his seventh
and final trip to China. He laid out all the parameters of all the
major leaders who are there today, the strengths and weaknesses of
each one. He talked about the post - Deng Xiaoping leadership
transition, and he made his predications as to how that leadership
would evolve and who would survive and who wouldn't survive and what
the structure would be. That was 1993, seven years ago, and the
structure is almost identical to what we have today, the evolution
went right down the path that he predicted. I think even more
importantly, some of the critical issues that he pointed out are
still relevant today, and that's why I covered many of them last
night in my talk, because he was able to take himself away from the
political frays. If you look at all the things that are happening
today, with the debates in Congress and the president, and
disagreements and all the factions,
what President Nixon said and
some of the recommendations he made kind of transcend all that, rise
above it, and say look, let's take a strategic look far to the
future, where should we be going, these are the key issues and this
is what we need to do. I would take his recommendations today and say
they're still valid.
As a military man who's looked at it from all sides, head of the Naval Academy, commander of CINCPAC, and so on, your experiences with people like Udall, Rickover, and Nixon sensitized you to the importance of ideas that transcend the political fray.
Absolutely. I think it also made me somewhat of an unusual military
man in that I tend to be very liberal on social issues and very
conservative on defense and foreign policy issues. So I don't know
how you would categorize me in the political spectrum. My wife is
very active and sensitive on women's [issues] and social issues, so
I've learned a lot from her. I've taken a bit from everybody that
I've worked with, and that's what frames both my philosophy and my
outlook on life. I feel very comfortable that I don't fit into a
narrow category and that I have a pretty broad view of the world.
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