Background

Admiral Moorer, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you.

How did you decide to go into the military as a career?

I was discussing this last evening with one of the professors. I was extremely interested in electrical engineering and had visions of attending Georgia Tech, since I was from Alabama. Unfortunately at that time, when I was ready to enter college in 1928, we had the Great Depression, and every bank in our little town in Alabama closed. Consequently my father had no money. I'd call your attention to the fact that no one, even in his wildest dreams, expected the federal government to send you to college in those days. It was family problem.

So, it became apparent that if I was going to get an education I had better start looking around. We had one brigadier general in our town from West Point, so I wrote to West Point and asked for their brochure. Then someone suggested that I check with the Naval Academy, which I did, and it was quite apparent in examining these two brochures that, whereas the Army is a manpower service, and tend to deal more with social problems and so on, the Navy is a technical service, because a ship is nothing more than a box full of machines. And I liked the program at the Naval Academy better. So then I had to set about getting an appointment to the Naval Academy.

How did you go about doing that?

Well, we had a senator at that time name Senator "Cotton Tom" Heflin, whose nephew is currently a senator. My dad had been in politics as well as having been a dentist and he knew Senator Heflin, and I had other friends write him. I had previously obtained what we called an alternate appointment, which gave me the opportunity to take the mental and physical exams. So, I was ready to go but I didn't have the principal. So I personally wrote Senator Heflin a letter and told him that I was prepared to go if someone would just give me an appointment. Well, nothing happened, and I got a job with my uncle in a country store in central Alabama, and all of a sudden, I get this telegram from Senator Heflin and I had the appointment. The reporting date was the 10th of June, 1929, and I had about 5 days to get to Annapolis. In those days there were no airplanes so you had to get there by train. It took me two days. I arrived in Annapolis at 9:00 on the night of the 9th, walked in the front gate at 8:00 on the 10th, and put up my hand and took the oath.

You had been a high school valedictorian, so this was an important window of opportunity to realize your academic success.

I finished high school when I was fifteen, and then I worked for two years trying to get to college. It took me two years before I finally arrived at the Naval Academy. But it had no martial overtones, I was just trying my best to get an engineering education. I am still interested in engineering. I tell all the young people in the Navy, if you don't have technical curiosity, you aren't going to be very successful aboard ship. Take an aircraft carrier, for instance. There's not a single discipline that's not actively present. I don't care whether you're talking about thermodynamics or nuclear power or satellite communications or steam engineering, whatever. You can't name anything of a technical nature that you don't find aboard a ship.

What other qualities do you think make for a good soldier, or in your case, a good sailor?

Obviously, you've got to have discipline. You've got to be willing to take orders. You've got to be willing to live in harsh circumstances. As someone has put it, you've got to be able to miss a meal if it's necessary. And you've got to have a wife that will put up with all these things. My wife has been wonderful. We moved twenty-six times, lived all over the world. When I was away, she was responsible for everything -- for buying houses, for paying the children's tuition, taking them to the hospital, etc., etc. Today, so many of the very young people are getting married, and we have also so many girls in the military. Someone over in the Pentagon told me the other day [when] I asked him what are the main problems now, he says: "Child care and pregnancy." But that wasn't present when I was a young officer.

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