Sailing True North

by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret. )

  After Mouza, the relationship with Nitze was the most important in Zumwalt’s life, and the connection between them was similarly instant. From the moment Nitze hauled Zumwalt into his office to take the measure of the man whose speech had overshadowed his own, the conversation between the two of them never really stopped. Immediately upon graduation from the War College in 1961, Zumwalt was assigned as a desk officer in Nitze’s shop at the Pentagon; when Nitze was named secretary of the Navy in December 1963, he informed the Navy in no uncertain terms that Captain Zumwalt would be transferring to the Department of the Navy as executive assistant to the secretary.

  As Mahan learned the hard way, few reformers can succeed without powerful patrons and strong political cover. Beyond the incomparable experience, mentorship, and institutional vantage that Nitze offered Zumwalt, the most important effect of their relationship was to immerse Zumwalt in the networks of the civilians who really controlled the Navy. Five years later, when those civilians decided the Navy needed a serious shaking up, they knew just the man for the job—and their continued support would allow Zumwalt to fight his intramural war against the hidebound traditions, odious practices, and institutional inertia of the Navy.

  The years flew by. In 1965, Zumwalt pinned on his first two stars and took command at sea of Cruiser-Destroyer Flotilla Seven in San Diego. Continuing the pattern of previous shipboard commands, Zumwalt energized the flotilla during his year at the helm, then headed back across the country for a first tour in his future office as the director of the systems analysis division in the office of the CNO (OP-96). Two years there further broadened Zumwalt’s perspective on and deepened his experience in naval administration (this time within the uniformed hierarchy). Following that, he headed west again—all the way to Vietnam, where he took a command nobody wanted in exchange for a third star.

  In an ironic echo of Nimitz’s practice of sometimes promoting away his problems, Zumwalt was ordered to Vietnam on the assumption that it would tame if not eliminate an overeager upstart whose energy the current CNO was tired of channeling. (Like most Young Turks, Zumwalt made powerful enemies nearly as quickly as he made powerful friends.) Not for the first time, Zumwalt was taking over a command in which no predecessor had flourished; he relished the challenge.

  The first-ever three-star commander, naval forces Vietnam—a literal backwater position in charge of the so-called brown-water navy which, upon Zumwalt’s arrival, was viewed with equal disdain by North Vietnamese enemies and fellow American forces alike—wasted no time in getting his command pointed up. In his last combat command (and his last prior to taking the CNO’s job), the old Zumwalt energy and personal magnetism were on full display, and new relationships were struck that would remain influential in his subsequent tenure as CNO and beyond. (One such was a lifelong friendship with the South Vietnamese CNO, whose family would later be sponsored for US citizenship by the Zumwalts.)

  The tour was also tinged with tragedy, however: taking the fight to the enemy, which Zumwalt’s brown-water navy did with gusto, had the immediate consequence of getting more sailors injured and killed, and the long-term consequence of exposing many more to the carcinogenic effects of Agent Orange, a defoliant which Admiral Zumwalt ordered sprayed along riverbanks to eliminate cover and thus save his sailors from snipers. One young sailor exposed to the defoliants was Lieutenant Elmo Zumwalt III, who had requested duty in Vietnam and commanded his Swift boat with panache worthy of his famous name. The admiral ordered Agent Orange into the fight convinced that it was not dangerous to humans, and the decision ultimately cost him his son and namesake. Like many in that legendary brown-water navy, Elmo III died of aggressive lymphoma in 1988.

  Toward the end of his time as the naval commander in Vietnam, Zumwalt was summoned to Washington. He was ordered to drop everything, leave command of his beloved brown-water navy along the coast of Vietnam, and catch the next flight back to the capital. His orders specified, strangely, that he was to make the journey in civilian clothes. He pondered the possibilities en route. He knew he had been one of the Navy’s rising stars for years—a kind of enfant terrible, with all that connotes. He knew very well that he was something of a lightning rod: hard-charging, iconoclastic, and annoyingly effective, he had arrived in Vietnam a year and a half before, in October 1968, when his boss thought he could promote Zumwalt away by putting him in the career-killing position. Zumwalt had taken the job—and the attendant promotion to vice admiral—with gusto. With typical flair, he had pulled his new three-starred shoulder boards from his pocket the moment his flight reached cruising altitude over the Pacific and pinned them on as the flight crew poured champagne for everyone on the plane. As he made the return journey, he thought to himself, the good news was that the odds of being fired were low; but the bad news was that no matter how hard he tried to peer into the fog of the future, he couldn’t see the shape of what was about to happen.

  He knew that in terms of the possibility of yet another promotion, he had a good chance. He had hit the job in Vietnam full-on and achieved quite a bit. After a quick tour to get a grasp of the situation on the ground and inland waters of South Vietnam, he ordered his sailors off the sidelines and into the fight, built a brilliantly effective command team, and started innovating. Everyone—his own sailors, his fellow US commanders from other military services, and most of all his Vietnamese enemies—felt the results of “Zumwalt’s Wild Ideas,” as the new boss’s brazen schemes became known. Far from disappearing, Zumwalt had jolted a backwater command to sudden life and lethal effectiveness.

  As it turned out, Zumwalt had himself become the “wild idea” of the civilian masters of the Navy. Believing the whole service needed the kind of shake-up Zumwalt had delivered in Vietnam and at every previous command in his career, they had—without his knowledge—“deep-selected” him for a fourth star and the Navy’s top job: chief of naval operations. Over the near-unanimous objections of the current CNO and the rest of the service’s top brass, a group Zumwalt called the “naval aristocracy,” the secretary of the Navy persuaded President Nixon to send for the wild young reformer. Upon landing, he was driven to the secretary of the Navy’s home in Georgetown, still without a uniform or any hint as to what was about to happen. There he learned he would become the new CNO. The Navy was about to undergo a massive reorganization.

  The years 1970 to 1974 saw Admiral Zumwalt’s revolutionary term as chief of naval operations, the position to which he had aspired ever since he finally dropped consideration of a legal or medical career to fully commit himself to the Navy. As he had been at several key points earlier in his career, Zumwalt was “deep-selected” for the position: vaulted over the heads of many seniors and peers. Like the papacy, the CNO’s job tends to be obsessively watched, and the watchers tend to have a strong sense of the likely candidates for elevation when the top job comes open. Zumwalt was not on any of the watch lists, even as a dark horse; when he was ordered without explanation to fly in mufti from Vietnam to Washington, DC, the only lists on which he appeared were those of Secretary of the Navy John Chafee and President Nixon, whom Secretary Chafee had persuaded to appoint Zumwalt. Not a single active-duty admiral supported his promotion to a fourth star. That Zumwalt became Chafee’s candidate for CNO in 1970 was the culmination of the trends that had defined the admiral’s personality and professional history. Also like popes, CNOs come in two basic varieties: institutionalists and reformers. In both roles, leaders of the former type far outnumber those of the latter, and their respective institutions rely on that conservative trend for long-term viability. However, all big bureaucracies tend toward inertia, and must periodically be renewed in their vitality by an energetic reformer.

  In understanding the Navy’s problems in the early 1970s, it is important to consider the underlying racial prejudice that was part of the ethos of the service at the time. For decades, the Navy had used African American and Philippine sailors as its cooking, cleaning, and valet for
ce. It had ingrained in the heads of many officers a sense that those racial groups were a kind of “servant class,” and their possibilities for advancement were very circumscribed. Even as late as the early 1970s when I reported to Annapolis, you could feel a sense of this bias. The huge mess hall at the Naval Academy, where all four thousand members of the Brigade of Midshipmen sit together three times each day for meals, was serviced by stewards who were overwhelmingly minorities, while there were very few midshipmen from minority groups. I was given a photograph around that time of a beautiful Navy destroyer at the pier in 1949, with the crew in ranks in the front. It was beautiful all right—until you looked very closely at the second rank of the photo where all the chief petty officers were arrayed. It had a gap where three chiefs were missing. When I got out a magnifying glass and looked at the picture, I eventually found them—in the very back row, with the most junior sailors. They had clearly been directed to get out of ranks and go stand figuratively at the “back of the bus.” Zumwalt knew that the long-term future of the Navy required changing that mindset and set about doing so aggressively.

  Indeed, his gravestone bears the one-word epitaph “Reformer.” He came into his job like Pope John XXIII: reading the signs of the times, committed to renewal, and determined to “open the windows” and let some air and light into the institution under his charge. Although he was an accomplished warrior and couched many of his reforms in the context of the growing threat posed by the Soviet fleet, the greatest battles of Zumwalt’s career were fought within the Navy itself. Nimitz, for all his compassion for sailors and skill at forging the Navy into a winning team with a shared sense of purpose, could never countenance the idea of women in uniform and seemed unperturbed by the Navy’s racial policies. A quarter century after Japan’s surrender, it would fall to Zumwalt to use his Nimitz-like organizational abilities coupled with his own high-energy style to clear away bureaucratic overgrowth. He was able to ultimately update racist and sexist personnel policies hardly changed since Nimitz’s day and grossly out of step with the society the Navy recruited from and served.

  Not only did Zumwalt’s reform efforts resemble Vatican II in their scope and ambition, they also caused similar institutional controversy and their legacy remains similarly seminal but unsettled today. Zumwalt’s most famous method was the so-called Z-Gram (or “zinger”): messages sent directly from the CNO’s desk to the entire Navy directing specific changes in policy or operations. Detractors deplored Zumwalt for destroying the good discipline essential to a functioning navy and colorfully impugned him for bringing “beards, beer, and broads” into their comfortable old-boys’ club; Zumwalt fired back and pressed on, wryly writing to one critic, “I’m sure that when flogging was abolished in the Navy there were those (in uniform and out) who regarded that as a fatally ‘permissive’ move.”

  Probably the two most important targets of Zumwalt’s reforms—and predictably the most controversial—were the Navy’s deeply ingrained racism and sexism. Energy alone would not be enough to bring these long-held but shameful traditions in line with the times; the effort required all the political and bureaucratic wiles Zumwalt could muster. Fortunately, as expected, Zumwalt had not only the courage to tackle these problems head-on, but also the wisdom to get the best possible advice and make the most specifically targeted policy changes he could. Two examples from my own career showed the long echoes of Zumwalt’s reforms, the first illustrating the need and the second the result.

  In 1980, a few years after Zumwalt had concluded his time as CNO, I became the boilers officer on USS Forrestal (CV-59), a tired, broken-down carrier home-ported in Mayport, Florida. My assignment was to lead about 150 of the toughest characters on the ship, the engineers who worked in the boiler rooms well beneath the waterline where temperatures often soared well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It was brutal, demanding, and largely unrewarded work in the least glamorous spot in the ship. I found my division of sailors rife with racial tension, malingering, disciplinary violations, and a pirate spirit that “anything goes.” This was hardly what four years at Annapolis had prepared me to tackle on my own. Fortunately, I was blessed with a newly promoted boiler technician chief petty officer, one Clevon Jones. An African American standing six feet five inches tall and with a girth to match, he towered over this young, skinny, short lieutenant. We bonded instantly in our shared desire to improve morale in the division, and quickly settled on a division of labor—the lieutenant would do the paperwork, commend the few sailors who were actually doing a good job, encourage the others constantly, and run interference with the chain of command. The chief would discipline the malcontents by whatever means necessary (you could get away with a lot more primitive methods of discipline in those days), make sure the plant was running smoothly, and work to get our deserving sailors advanced in rank. We agreed that we would simply spend as much time together as we could—an odd-looking couple perhaps, but one that symbolized, “in this Boiler Division the leadership team believes in one team, one fight,” and “we stand together with our shipmates.” We were able to tap into the spirit that Bud Zumwalt had begun a decade earlier and build what was eventually a highly effective force of carrier engineers who performed superbly on several forward deployments.

  Flash forward another decade, and in the early 1990s I became the captain of USS Barry (DDG-52), a brand-new Arleigh Burke–class destroyer based out of Norfolk, Virginia. I was in the middle of my command tour when Barry was selected to be one of the first combatant warships to have a mixed-gender crew. About 15 percent of my 350-man crew were transferred and replaced by women at the stroke of a pen. This raised a fair amount of consternation not only in the minds of the crew, but among the wives of this previously all-male crew who were skeptical about sending women to sea with their husbands. I spent six months going from work center to work center (about ten sailors per group) explaining why this had happened (the fleet needs more sailors, these are top-notch, highly trained shipmates) and how we were going to integrate women into the ship (they are here to work as your shipmates, not be part of your potential dating pool). It was hard leadership at the retail level, but it worked. Within a month or two, everyone looked around and realized we were a better, more talent-laden ship than we were before the transfers. Again, you could drop a plumb line from that transition back to the reforms of Elmo Zumwalt.

  Always what the Navy calls a “deck plate leader,” someone who is highly visible and close to his subordinates, Zumwalt as CNO continued to listen widely and well to sailors and officers throughout the service in the belief that they knew best what changes needed to be made. Several he hired directly, such as Lieutenant Commander William Norman, who was about to resign his commission because he could no longer reconcile “being black with being Navy.” Norman was a principal author of the Z-Gram Z-66, issued on December 17, 1970 (about six months into Zumwalt’s term), which concluded: “There is no black navy, no white navy—just one navy—the United States Navy.” Zumwalt promulgated Z-66 with a personal endorsement in which he stated that “Ours must be a navy family that recognizes no artificial barriers of race, color, or religion.”

  Later, Zumwalt mused that “although the Navy was a racist institution, I found it easier to deal with racism than with sexism.” Indeed, it took more than eighteen months and fifty more Z-Grams for Zumwalt to serve Navy-wide notice on “Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women in the Navy” (the title of Z-116). Twenty-five years after the end of World War II, women not only were still barred from combat positions but still bore the World War II–era classification of Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) when Zumwalt took over the CNO’s office. Z-116 and subsequent efforts tried to change that, but the bureaucracy was already fighting back hard. In two more years as CNO, Zumwalt issued only five more Z-Grams.

  Where Mahan’s legacy was contained in his thought and Nimitz’s shone most clearly in the team he built, Zumwalt’s impact—like that of all reformers
—shows most clearly in his long-term innovations which continue to be shaped by his successors. As transformative as his reforms were, he ritually revoked them (in line with long-standing tradition) upon his relief as CNO, and his successor quietly but firmly refused to institutionalize the vast majority of them. Though things are much improved, today’s Navy heavily restricts beards and beer, and still has a way to go toward full equity for women and minorities. Nevertheless, Zumwalt showed what might be possible, and many evolutions the Navy has made in his wake—however reluctantly or tentatively—are echoes of his enormous energy.

  Essential though it was, Zumwalt’s tenure was not unblemished by scandal. As with most reformers, it was in his nature to push harder and farther than the bureaucracy was prepared to go—and sometimes he pushed too far. In 121 Z-Grams addressing a wide range of controversial issues some examples of overreach and correction were inevitable.

  Zumwalt served out his full term as CNO and retired from the Navy in 1974, at the still-youthful age of fifty-three. Like his predecessor Chester Nimitz, Zumwalt busied himself in retirement with all manner of public projects. He wrote a book, ran and lost a US Senate race in Virginia against the incumbent Harry F. Byrd Jr., and remained a passionate and tireless advocate for the sailors who had served under him in Vietnam and the processes of reconciliation that followed the conflict both within the United States and between the United States and Vietnam.