Working in Washington

When you became Chief of Naval Operations, and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, I guess you had to draw on a new body of experience, because you were no longer in the midst of war. You had to deal now with the politicians and the whole Washington milieu. Reflect on that experience. What did you learn? What surprised you as a military man in Washington?

Several things. Of course, I have testified before the Congress several hundred times. I learned at the outset, first, never answer a question if you don't know the answer. Some people try to give the Congressmen the impression that they have the information and this is it. But they have these tremendous staffs and they immediately will become aware of any misinformation you give them. But they don't concern themselves at all if you say, "I don't know, but I will find out and call you." That satisfies them completely. So I learned that. I got some good advice from Congressman Benson from Georgia, who was Chairman of the Armed Services Committee on that deal.

The second thing is that you will find that the military man as a witness is put in the embarrassing position very often by those who ask questions that obviously are designed to criticize the Executive Branch -- in other words, your boss, the president, who's the Commander in Chief. It's a tactic used over and over again when you're sitting there, and you have to be very wary about that.

The Congress, of course, asks a tremendous amount of questions. Today we have to deal with 107 committees and sub-committees. The number of queries that come into the Pentagon boggle your mind. They have to be answered within a time limit. In the Pentagon, for instance, you'll almost spend more time answering the Congress than you do running your job, because they ask for this information for many, many reasons.

You get involved with political people in the Executive Branch also. People don't realize, when a new president comes in, he has to appoint maybe 6,000 applicants to his administration. Some of them have varying degrees of competence, although they have significant authority. In the Defense Department they've got the Secretary, Under-Secretary, Assistant Secretary, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Principle Deputy Assistant Secretary, I mean it goes on and on. They are tenured at about 2.6 years, and then you've got someone else. When you have a change in administration you get a whole new group to deal with.

Does this mean that the military will always get its way if it waits long enough?

Quite the contrary. What it means is, we have there now a tremendous bureaucracy, and the problem we have in the military is that there are hordes of people that can say no, but you can't find a man that can say yes. There's study after study after study [suggesting] that the whole structure should be significantly reduced. There are too many intervening steps.

But the Congress is responsible for a lot of that. They want us to set up an Acquisition Czar, they want a man that's set up to deal with the drug problem, another man set up to deal with what I mentioned a while ago, low-intensity conflict. You don't need all those things. The present system as set up can handle it alright. But they will zero in and they, the Congress, will issue an order that you reorganize accordingly. Recently we had what was called the Goldwater-Nichols Bill, which alleged to reorganize the Defense Department, and I was very much opposed to that. I don't think it accomplished anything. I testified against it. I told Senator Goldwater and Senator Nunn, [who] thought they were reforming the Defense Department, that what they were trying to do was reform human nature, because the structure of the Defense Department changes radically, and every president handles his people in his staff differently.

The relationship between the people that come into the Executive Branch may have several variations. It may be because they came in because this is a reward for helping in the election. It may be because they are a friend of someone else that helped in the election. In a democracy (and I'm certainly 100 percent in favor of a democracy), there is a tendency to bring competence down to the lowest common denominator because of the injection of politics. But if you're going to have a democracy, you're going to have politics, and so I live with it.

You served two presidents when you had these very high positions as Chief of Naval Operations and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Let's talk about them. What are your observations of Lyndon Johnson now, looking back during that period?

President Johnson was almost entirely focused on his efforts to introduce what was called the Great Society. He was unfortunate to be involved in the Vietnam War during the time when the public and media were getting more and more disenchanted over it, and he, in my view, looked at the war where he didn't want to put out enough effort to win it, but at the same time he wanted to put out enough not to lose it, which is not exactly the way to go about any kind of a combat. My view is that if you make the decision to get involved, you should get it over with as soon as possible. I could go into great length about this particular point.

Anyway, as I told you earlier, I had a call from the people in Austin who are preparing the oral history of President Johnson. They called me and asked me if I would participate and I said yes. The first question was, did I know President Johnson and what did I think of him? I said I knew him quite well and I said I thought he made one mistake. They said, "What is that?" I pointed out that when he entered the White House for the first time, he should have fired everything that moved, including the cat. The point being that the Kennedy people had been very critical of President Johnson. I didn't think that he could expect the loyalty he deserved by the ones that were in the Kennedy administration. As you recall, he did not go to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and he [had already] made the statement, "I will not seek and I will not accept [the nomination for president]." And so, he had a very difficult time. As a matter of fact, he was criticized just as heavily as President Nixon was during the attack on him. We seem to be very skillful in this country of destroying the presidents, they catch all kinds of hell during the end of their terms, almost without exception.

Nixon and Johnson both lost the support of the public. Why was that? That obviously became crucial to our understanding of when we could intervene. And years later Secretary Weinberger heavily emphasized the notion that we have to keep public support if we're going to intervene anywhere. Why did Nixon and Johnson both fail in that regard, do you think?

I think probably there's one reason for Nixon and one reason for Johnson. In President Nixon's case,, he had won the election in '72 with overwhelming support. In our system there are undercurrents of political animosity over events gone by, and I think Mr. Nixon's work as a Congressman against Alger Hiss certainly antagonized many people who were out to get even with him, come what may. That was part of it. And then he left himself wide open when they had what I thought was really nothing but an insignificant event when they caught this individual going into Larry Larry Hillebrand's office in Watergate. I don't think they'd learn very much by getting papers out of Larry Larry Hillebrand's office, but I think that President Nixon should have said, "that's a terrible thing, I was unaware of it, and [I'll] see to it that it doesn't happen again." That would have been the end of it. But he set about, for some reason, to cover up that incident and it escalated up.

Of course, today we have a situation over and over again where you have a Republican president and a congress entirely controlled by the other party. Consequently, it puts the president in a position that he would not have to experience if he had his party in control of the Legislative Branch. As a matter of fact, Mr. Johnson would have had difficulty when he was in the Senate had there been a Republican Party in control of the Senate at the time.

But his problem was, I think, the beginning of the Vietnam War, when he was focused on the Great Society, and he took the view, as I said before, that he didn't want to take the effort to win the war, he would just do enough to prevent losing it. Therefore, he made a strong effort to insulate the public from the War. Obviously, you're not going to get public support if you do that. He did things like give draft deferments, which said that if your family can afford to send you to college, you don't have to fight for your country. That didn't set well; we wound up with defectors to Canada and whatever. He didn't increase taxes and we were spending money like nobody's business. I think the extra expenditure of Vietnam reached about $26 billion a year, but we had no new taxes. And he did not call up Reserves because most of the Reserve officers are in the civilian community, and many of them are very influential, so if they were called in that would just add to the dissatisfaction of the public at large. All of these things that he did trying to keep the people out of it resulted in the people not supporting it. That's why he lost their support.

In this role, you've also had to work with, deal with, argue with, negotiate with, the president's men, and two names come to mind in the period we're talking about. One is Robert McNamara, who was appointed by President Kennedy and then served under President Johnson; and Henry Kissinger, who served under Nixon. Any reflections on these two men that you'd like to share with us? Maybe a comparison of the two?

I cannot compare them. They are about as far apart as you can get.

McNamara came into the Defense Department; he was going to revamp the entire organization, he changed the decision making process, brought it right up to his position -- centralized everything, in other words, and delegated nothing. In our view (when I say "our" I mean the uniform people), he was making a strong effort to set up what I call a management/labor relationship between the civilian and the military people. He was not very receptive to advice. He had his own ideas. As I said to a young girl who was writing a book about McNamara, and she asked me what I thought of him, I said we've been better off with the bubonic plague, because what he did was destroy initiative among the young officers during that period, because they knew there was no point in them taking any action. They had to go to Washington to get permission to do anything, even the most minor things, you see. He wanted to demonstrate that he could control all this. He introduced all kinds of policies and orders that I think were detrimental over all. So I don't mind saying that I'm very low on McNamara.

Turning to Henry Kissinger, quite the contrary, I think Henry Kissinger is a very, very competent individual in the field of foreign policy. He and Nixon made a very good team. Of course, Henry has an ego. Henry, though, will certainly work with you. He has confidence in you. He is a historian unexcelled, I think. He thinks that every event that occurs has already happened before, and he can relate it to something that took place in history, and it turns out it does. There are very similar things when it comes to actions and decisions made at the top level, that's what he's talking about. So, I still see Henry Kissinger very often, and during the time I was Chairman, I saw him two, three, four times a week.

You mentioned earlier that at a national security meeting, Kissinger had a sense of what he wanted to achieve with regard to a particular policy. Go over that again.

That was the way tackled every crisis, whether it be the Israeli-Arab War, whatever. He would always sit down at the beginning and he wanted to set forth what position we expected to have when we finished all the things that we might be able to do, which I though was a good approach, an intelligent approach.

For instance, in the Yom Kippur War of '73, he came up with the point that what we wanted to do was to make certain that the Arabs didn't drive the Israelis into the sea, and make certain that the Israelis didn't humiliate the Arabs. We had occasion to take actions by the United States to prevent either one of these things from taking place. For instance, the Israelis made a major mistake in anticipating that the ammunition expenditure rate would be essentially what it was in 1967. It turned out to be five times greater. They almost ran out of ammunition, and the Syrians were attacking. We were using the C-5 aircraft and the thing got so tight that we were landing the C-5 in Tel Aviv at midnight and they were firing up the ammunition at daylight. On the other side of the coin, the Israelis managed to isolate the Egyptian Army east of the Suez and cut off their water, in very high temperatures -- that's the desert area and so on. The United States brought down heavy influence and made them turn the water back on, because if we had thousands and thousands of Egyptians die of thirst, that would certainly be a major humiliation. We would still be feeling the after-effects. So that's the way he approached crises.

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