CHAPTER SEVEN
Calvin Coolidge’s Town Meeting
Billy Mitchell, handsome, dynamic, fast on the draw, and breathing the spirit of the offensive, personified the knight of the air of World War I. An outstanding pilot, a bold horseman, a soldier’s soldier, a courageous crusader, he was the newsman’s dream of dramatic copy. And now he assumed the lead in public opinion with the same _sang froid_ he had displayed flying Number One of the First American Air Force on its first flight over the St. Mihiel Salient. With a fine sense of timing, he did that thing which every American longs to do—he told off his superiors in no uncertain terms, and with such sheer audacity that he almost got away with it. The public supported him from the start; it looked like a sure thing for his independent air force. Save for certain strategic errors, he would have won in a glide.
By seizing upon the crash of the great rigid airship _Shenandoah_ as his take-off signal, Mitchell accepted the risk attendant upon hitting the Navy while it was down. And since lighter-than-air craft had become the personal hobby, and public responsibility, of Rear Adm. William A. Moffett, Mitchell made an implacable enemy of a man who, in the public mind, was no less devoted to the cause of aviation than Mitchell himself. And so, when Bill Mitchell sang out, “Tally Ho!” and started his power dive on Billy Moffett’s tail, he suddenly found himself in a dogfight with an opponent quite as wiley as the famous German Baron von Richthofen. Even this was a calculated risk and might not have brought Mitchell down. It was Mitchell’s attack on the Army that made him vulnerable. For while the Army might view with tolerant amusement Mitchell’s assault on the Navy, it could not countenance insubordination in its own ranks; mutiny is inherently an unpardonable sin. Mitchell may have made a fatal error in not resigning his commission before charging his seniors with “treasonable neglect.” By such action he could have martyred himself in the public eye and at the same time avoided the court-martial that finally convicted him without having to let the independent-air-force issue influence the trial. As it was, certain of his seniors, notably the then Chief of Staff, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who would one day use the Air Force to gain victory in the Pacific, seemed at the time fairly to lick their chops as they assembled to convict General Mitchell.
Over on the Navy side were many naval aviators who had suffered the same frustrations that had aroused Mitchell to a frenzy against the Army. Feeling themselves hamstrung by naval conservatism, they too believed their only hope for advancing their beloved aviation lay in a new deal all around. But steeped as they all were in the ancient tradition of the West Point-Annapolis football feud, their first reaction was to defend their Navy, and the second was to rally around their chief, Admiral Moffett. For General Mitchell to expect aid from them under the circumstances would have been something like a Hatfield trying to induce a McCoy to join up on a squirrel shoot, while the feudin’ and the fightin’ were at a climax. As it was, Admiral Moffett kept his hotheads in line, including a few who openly favored the separate air force.
Meanwhile Mitchell’s quick kick took the Navy high command completely by surprise. And as the political football sailed end over end toward the Navy goal, the only receiver ready was Admiral Moffett. A good open-field runner himself, he was about to take the ball over his shoulder on the dead run and might have sped to a touchdown save that his teammates blocked him out. The Navy strategists decided not to dignify Mitchell with any public recognition; they would just refuse to play.
But in BUAERO, every typewriter began tapping out retaliatory releases for the admiral. In spite of urgings by the latter, the Secretary staunchly refused to comment on the Mitchell attack, even as the press clamored for a reply. It was not until several days had passed that the admiral finally succeeded in drawing a reluctant consent to his own response. Then permission was granted only with the express condition that the admiral should reply on his own account and own responsibility.
Approval came at noon on a Saturday. By then the Bureau had closed for the day and, in addition to the admiral, only two of us remained aboard. One was the admiral’s faithful colored messenger, Brown, the other, myself. We were waiting for the admiral in the anteroom to his office when he steamed through the door under full power. On the desk lay a copy of a statement I had drawn up for him. Seizing this, the admiral scrawled across the bottom a blunt postscript, calling William Mitchell a liar and ascribing his recent charges either to hallucinations or delusions of grandeur.
I cut the mimeograph stencil for him on his secretary’s typewriter. Brown ran off the copies on a machine across the hall. The admiral waited impatiently until they were done, and then, seizing me by the arm, hustled me out of the building and into my car. We drove uptown to the offices of the Associated and United Press, where the admiral himself handed his statement across the counter to astonished reporters.
The statement hit the front pages of the New York papers. Its publication released all the ancient grudges and conflicts in aviation dating as far back as World War I. The old “airplane scandal” was dragged out and dusted off by crank inventors, claiming they had been robbed of their patents. The cry of “air trust” echoed through the halls of Congress and counsels of investigating committees, scenting headlines, began trying to get into the act.
Up to that moment some twenty-odd inquiries had been held on what to do about aviation. With surprising agreement they had all supported certain concrete recommendations; without exception they had been promptly consigned to the ninth pigeonhole—the one next the wastebasket. In 1924, during the excitement over the controversy between the proponents of the airplane and the supporters of the battleship, a Congressional committee, under the chairmanship of Congressman Lampert, had found that aviation, instead of being stifled by a “trust” was dying of neglect. The United States lacked both a policy for aviation and the legislation necessary to implement it.
The new controversy revived the ancient cry of “profiteer” against manufacturers, already reduced to hungry remnants of a once highly productive group. These now got together in their aeronautical chamber of commerce and sent a delegation to call on the Secretaries of War and Navy to urge that the two departments join in requesting the President to appoint a presidential advisory commission to look into the whole question. At the invitation of the President himself, they later went to the White House to support this recommendation. The President, who had always shown a Yankee sense of orderliness and a willingness to accept responsibility for the conduct of his administration, had been disturbed by the unseemly brawl. He now made no attempt to deny Mitchell the privilege of stating his case to the public, but since the charges reflected upon his own administration, he accepted the industry’s proposal as a good way to sift them out. He approved the idea of a sort of New England town meeting on aviation.
His first step was to summon his wise and good friend, Dwight Morrow, and his second was to invite him to head up the inquiry. He then selected a group of men whose standing would warrant public support but was careful not to include anyone who had an ax to grind. The Commission included men from civil life who possessed knowledge of aviation, men from Congress who had had experience in the field, and men from the Army and Navy whose judgment would command public respect and confidence as did that of all other members.
Two of the members, Howard Coffin and William F. Durant, were engineers. From the armed forces were drawn Maj. Gen. James G. Harbord and Adm. Frank J. Fletcher, both retired after distinguished public careers. From Congress came three men, Senator Hiram Bingham, of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, himself a military aviator; James S. Parker, of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce; and Congressman Carl Vinson, of the House Committee on Naval Affairs, a Democrat and a man destined to play a statesman’s role in the nation’s security. With Circuit Judge Arthur C. Dennison, Dwight Morrow, the chairman, completed a compact panel well constituted for the task in hand.
The Morrow Board held numerous public sessions and heard over a hundred witnesses present a wide assortment of views and opinions. Against the background of the Mitchell charges, the hearings received public attention and were widely discussed in editorial columns. Comment by the press was strongly favorable to the Mitchell cause and to all outward appearances, the general seemed on the way to victory. Behind the scenes, the Morrow Board studied the many records of previous inquiries, and by sifting them carefully was able to bring its own investigation to a close in about ninety days.
Over in BUAERO, we burned the midnight oil preparing the admiral’s testimony. The spadework consisted in assembling the answers to specific questions propounded by the Morrow Board. Such questions were farmed out to different branches of the Bureau and then assembled for final study. Final editing of these comments fell to Lieutenant Commander Du Bose and myself but the larger issues were debated all over the Bureau. The interested parties were pretty well consolidated in opposition to the independent-air-force proposal, but they were divided almost equally on another organization question: should the admiral favor the formation of a corps of aviators, generally similar to the highly regarded United States Marine Corps?
In support of this idea, many of the old-timers worked hard on the admiral right up to the night before the Old Man was scheduled to appear before the Board. Then as we gathered around the long table for his final decisions, with that important subject all that remained to be agreed upon, I put it up to the admiral.
“Sir,” I said, “here is a question that can’t be straddled.”
The admiral twisted nervously in his chair. Strong pressure had been brought to bear on him by the leading old-timers, men whose friendship he regarded highly, and, politician that he was, he would have given almost anything to be able to accommodate them. But underneath this issue lay certain fundamentals on which he had strong convictions.
He had gone to sea in the old days when the Engineer Corps and the line officers had fought so bitterly in the ancient feud between the “black gang” and the “deck force” that the service had been shaken to its foundations. As the only way out of an impossible situation, the Department had finally amalgamated the conflicting forces by absorbing the engineers into the line. The admiral, recognizing the need for specialization, was firmly convinced that it should be had without putting the specialists in a separate corps where corps loyalties might transcend loyalty to the service. Now he had to face that issue alone; there could be no agreement within his Bureau and this time he could not induce them to persuade him to do what he wanted.
“You are all my friends,” he said, lifting his hand in a gesture to include all present, “and I’m sorry not to go along with some of you. The young pilots,” he added, “will think I’ve let them down. But the time will come when they will thank me.” He paused, and then with greater earnestness than I had ever heard in his voice, he concluded, “I’d rather see those kids dead than inflict on them the misery I suffered along with everyone else in the old days of deck force versus black gang.”
Suddenly his face brightened as he said with a smile, “Hell, we won’t secede from the Navy. If we are half as good as we think we are, we’ll take it over!” Years later, when “Duke” Ramsey, Forrest Sherman, and Arthur Radford, some of his “boys,” occupied the seats of the mighty, I recalled this comment.
Next morning, while the admiral testified at the hearings, I sat at my desk in the Engine Section, trying to concentrate on neglected paper work. But up there in that committee room, decisive events were taking place. The admiral was not impressive on the witness stand of a formal hearing; his strength lay in the give and take of the informal conference. He had little patience with the measured logic of a man like Fred Rentschler; though his own conclusions might derive from similar processes, his brain acted like chain lightning. What looked like snap judgment might have been thought through, but he was too impatient to develop the process for others. Now he would be sitting up there before a solemn board, facing a press table of
## partisan commentators sold on the Mitchell doctrine, and surrounded
by all the high dignitaries of the Navy Department, from Secretary Wilbur and Admiral Hughes, the Chief of Naval Operations, down to Bureau chiefs like himself, most of whom feared he might sell out the Navy and go over to the Mitchell side.
For this had been a trying period for the Navy. Following the Armistice, public opinion had favored the idea of peace through disarmament and the Limitation of Arms Conference had all but emasculated the service. Then the spectacular air attacks engineered by General Mitchell had put the Navy further on the defensive. No one in the high command had developed a flair for public relations and now with Billy Mitchell on the offensive, the Navy had its back against the wall. Much of the enmity aroused by Mitchell’s attack now turned inward to BUAERO and even Admiral Moffett. Yet up there before the Morrow Board, if the Old Man would just stick to his testimony as we had written it and not start ad-libbing, he would come out all right. If, however, he deviated it, some hawk like Congressman Carl Vinson, of Georgia, one of the best informed men in Congress, would dive on him at terminal speed.
Then, a little before noon, the admiral himself walked into the Engine Section and slumped down in his chair. All jauntiness was gone; he looked tired.
“They tell me I made a mess of it,” he said simply.
It seemed that when he had taken his stand against the independent air force, Secretary Wilbur and others smiled their relief. The newspaper men looked let down. Then on the subject of the air corps, when Congressman Vinson cross-questioned him, he had, as an afterthought, stated that his Bureau should have control of aviation personnel and operations as well as matériel. Quick as a flash, Vinson shot back, “So you do believe in the air corps after all!”
In the subsequent confusion, the admiral had not made his position clear, but had left the matter in a snarl. Even as he finished his jerky report, the telephone rang. It was Marvin MacIntyre, a newspaper reporter who frequently dropped into the Bureau for a story and who had become one of the admiral’s cronies. Years later, during the Roosevelt Administration, Mac sat in the White House as Secretary to the President, but back in those days he was just a good leg man.
“What happened at the hearing?” he inquired. “It looked to the press as though the Old Man had something on his chest but, with all that rank around him, got hemmed in.”
“Maybe,” I replied, anxious to keep the admiral’s standing.
“But that break with Vinson made him look bad,” Mac wailed.
“I can’t see why,” I replied. “All it meant was that he should have a bigger voice in personnel and operations but with a little topside cooperation, he doesn’t need an air corps for that.” The admiral nodded vigorously. Mac shouted over the phone.
“Sure, sure, I get you. Good-by!”
With that the admiral departed, his head up, his step springy. But we weren’t yet out of the overcast.
Next morning a group of us sat in Jerry Land’s tiny office attending a conference called by the head of the Matériel Division. Bureau business had all but ceased during the inquiry and even now we could not get down to brass tacks. Now a civilian walked right into the conference and brought our discussion to an abrupt halt. It was C. M. Keyes, president of the Curtiss Airplane and Motor Company, and a leader of the aircraft industry. The separate-air-force controversy had agitated them too; many companies favored it, especially those doing business with the Army. Navy contractors either disapproved or kept mum. Clem Keyes, who now stood in our midst, had favored the program.
“It looks like the Morrow Board will not recommend the separate air force,” he said. “But there is one thing they will approve, and there’s nothing you fellows can do about it.” He then went on to say that he would appear for the industry at an early session and that he would support the idea of a government agency to be charged with responsibility for and authority over the design, development, and procurement of all aircraft, whether for the Army, Navy, or civil uses.
The news took my breath, for the thing we feared worst after the separate air force was unified procurement supply and design. Admiral Moffett had taken a strong position against it, but if the industry supported the Army on that, then the Board might accept it as a compromise. The only thing left for us to do was to block such a recommendation. While Keyes went on to support the proposal, I slid out the door and down to the Engine Section.
Here I put in a call for Fred Rentschler, in Hartford. I knew that some weeks earlier, Kraus in Procurement had informally agreed to Pratt and Whitney’s proceeding with the purchase of a lot of tools and materials against a contract then being negotiated, and that Pratt and Whitney had already committed itself in advance in the interest of saving time and money. When I heard Fred’s voice on the phone, I told him about Keyes’s visit and suggested that he might reconsider his advance purchase order; I doubted that Admiral Moffett would sign a contract now for the new engines, since the industry proposed a new agency to do all its buying. I did not pretend to read the admiral’s mind, and was talking unofficially, but thought he should be aware of this possibility.
It didn’t take Rentschler long to get the point. Within an hour he had been in touch with Chance Vought, Grover Loening, Bill Boeing, and others who had taken similar risks. And when, next day, Mr. Keyes appeared before the Morrow Board to speak as the sole representative of the industry, Chairman Morrow advised him that there had been a change of plan. So many industry members had asked to address the committee that he could allow Mr. Keyes but a reduced period and that period had now expired. Meanwhile the admiral knew nothing of my
## action and the industry members who looked to the Bureau for business
were not talking.
And while we sweated out the hearings, Admiral Moffett moved on another front. None appreciated better than he the influence of public opinion on the whole controversy, and he had found much to worry about in the approval given the Mitchell proposal in the public press. He had, therefore, suggested to George Wheat, now Fred Rentschler’s public relations counsel, that he would like to meet the editorial writers and especially the aviation writers of the metropolitan dailies in New York at an informal dinner where he could talk with them, and he invited me to go along.
The dinner, held in a private dining room of the old Waldorf Hotel, started out being a bit stuffy with the natural suspicions engendered in newspaper men by industrialists giving away free food, but Admiral Moffett broke the ice with some delightful personal reminiscences, among them the intimate details of how he outsmarted Billy Mitchell at the Washington Limitation of Arms Conference and won the German rigid airship _Los Angeles_ for the Navy. Then as things loosened up, one of the newswriters put the very question he wanted, by asking why we opposed the idea of unified procurement, supply, and design. To the layman, this looked like a natural way to avoid duplication of effort, to prevent competitive bidding between the Army and Navy for the same products and generally reduce expenses.
The admiral warmed to the subject. He recalled that he had once had that idea and had investigated a few successful business enterprises in the effort to find out how they handled it. He had found his answer at General Motors. If any group could have effected important economies by central purchasing, it would seem to be that corporation. To his surprise, the several divisions of General Motors had been decentralized and given complete autonomy. Matter of fact, that had turned out to be the basic policy that had made the corporation successful. G.M. divisions had been encouraged to compete among themselves. No single all-powerful executive had been given the job of deciding things. Instead, General Motors’ customers made all the decisions. The financial statements of the several divisions were good barometers of the effectiveness of their management. The customer was always right.
Now, the admiral continued, with each G.M. division held responsible for its own performance, common sense dictated that its officers must have full authority over the tools and materials required to discharge that responsibility. Control of purchasing was one of the first requirements. Automotive line production called for split-second scheduling of material receipts, and this could not be surrendered to some independent agency without danger of breakdown. Besides, while central purchasing might appear to reduce cost through volume purchases, competition between the divisions might do at least as well without endangering deliveries. That was all theory, but obviously a company like G.M., in which central purchasing might appear particularly attractive theoretically, must have come to their decision to decentralize after experience.
Next day, on the train back to Washington, I felt depressed by the almost universal acceptance of the Mitchell plan. Even though the Morrow Board were to turn it down, public opinion would ultimately force its acceptance. The admiral, however, was most cheerful. He thought that if he now had just one man in the Bureau, he could turn the whole thing to his advantage. The man he had in mind was Capt. Henry C. Mustin, a pioneer naval aviator who had died in the service. Henry Mustin, he said, was one of the few men in aviation who combined vision and imagination with practical judgment. It was the latter quality that Mitchell lacked; Mustin had had them all. Before he died he had drawn up a detailed plan for the organization of naval aviation. He had sketched the big carriers with their squadrons flying overhead, their spare planes on deck and the personnel listed down to the last ordinary seaman. That sketch now lay in his safe in BUAERO. When we got back there, I was to get hold of Du Bose, his Financial Division head, and help work out estimates of the cost of creating such a force. We should spread this over a five-year period—make a five-year procurement program for naval aviation.
“And,” he summed it up, “don’t figure too close. Use your imagination.”
When, finally, the long-awaited report of the Morrow Board was published, it came as a distinct letdown to many. The advocates of the independent air force let out loud wails of “whitewash,” and the press reflected its disappointment. However, in BUAERO there was satisfaction. The Board rejected the idea of the separate air force at that time. It did, however, recommend an Air Corps status for the Army Air Services, something quite compatible with the Army organization’s several branches such as Infantry, Field Artillery, Cavalry, Engineers, Coast Artillery, and so on. The report made separate recommendations for reorganization of the Army and Navy, which would later be enacted into law in the Air Corps Act of 1926. It referred to the need for waiving the requirement for competitive bidding in cases where the public interest required it, a provision that was later so garbled in the Air Corps Act that it became quite impossible to procure aircraft at all without violating the law.
The Board especially turned thumbs down on the British plan of an air ministry charged with responsibility for both military and civil aviation. It took a strong position for the principle that historic American tradition called for armed forces for defense only, and it insisted they should be kept subordinate to the civil government. However, it urged the orderly expansion of air transport, preferably under private management and, to promote the orderly development of civil aviation, it recommended the establishment of a bureau of air commerce in the Department of Commerce, then under Secretary Herbert Hoover. It further recommended the appointment of an additional assistant secretary of commerce for air, to supervise the new bureau.
The Board recommended a policy of continuity of orders for the aircraft industry and proposed a standard rate of replacement of operating aircraft in order to retain a healthy industry. This, it pointed out, must become the nucleus of rapid wartime expansion and should be administered as a continuing source of technological leadership.
If the report proved lacking in sensationalism, it was none the less constructive. If now it could be implemented it might become the Magna Charta of American aviation. President Coolidge transmitted the report to Congress with his own approval and thus started it on its way to being translated into the Air Commerce Act and the Air Corps Act of 1926. These acts, in effect, placed the responsibility for promoting aviation directly upon the shoulders of the government. They made it the duty of those in authority to promote the orderly development of the air forces, our air commerce, and our aircraft industry; and thus, for the first time, enunciated a clear statement of United States air policy.
As for General Mitchell, whose charges had led to the formulation of this policy, he was tried by Army general court-martial and convicted of violation of the ninety-sixth Article of War. He was sentenced to be suspended from rank, command, and duty, with forfeiture of all pay and allowances for five years. President Coolidge modified the forfeiture of pay and accepted the general’s resignation, to take effect February 1, 1926. Just ten years later, Billy Mitchell died. But one day the United States Congress did create a separate air force, and by then, General Mitchell’s name had been firmly established in his countrymen’s minds as a man who had been martyred for his vision.
During the last decade of General Mitchell’s life, Admiral Moffett served continuously as Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, and there founded the technology of naval aviation. It has been said of the contributions of the two men that “Bill Mitchell’s fumble set up the play from which Billy Moffett went on to score.” Just at the peak of his career, the admiral gave his own life to his country in the crash of the rigid airship _Akron_.