by Neil Sheehan
This, Vince decided, was a pretty good way to earn a living, and he became fascinated with flying himself. With the two years at UCLA to qualify him, he was accepted by the Army Air Corps and reported to Randolph Field, Texas, in the fall of 1931, just as Schriever was to do in July of the following year. He survived the 50 percent washout rate, received his wings and the gold bars of a second lieutenant in the Air Corps Reserve, and in 1932 reported for a year of active duty, again as Bennie was subsequently to do, at March Field, California. Hap Arnold was already there as base and overall wing commander. Unlike Schriever, however, Ford managed to avoid bombers and to gain a coveted assignment to one of the pursuit, or fighter, squadrons. His was the 34th, commanded by then Captain Ira Eaker and equipped with Boeing P-12 biplane fighters.
On April 14, 1933, while the 34th was practicing formation flying for its part in an air show the March Field units were to stage at the forthcoming annual air races at Santa Monica, turbulence either flung Ford’s plane down on the aircraft below or tossed the plane below up into his. They had been flying at about 10,000 feet, so Ford had plenty of time to unbuckle his seat belt, push away from the tumbling plane, and pull the rip cord on his parachute. Then he passed out. His left leg was shattered by the propeller of the plane below, which had ripped right through the skin of the P-12’s fuselage. He was flown to the Letterman Army Hospital at the Presidio of San Francisco and spent the next two years and two weeks there. The leg also became infected. The infection was ultimately cured, a lengthy process in these years before antibiotics, but bone grafts were then required to get the fragmented leg to calcify and knit back together again. By the time this had occurred, the left ankle, so long in a cast and with the foot turned off at a crazy angle to the outside, had also frozen and calcified, and so in order to walk on it he had to wear a custom-made boot with steel braces at the ankle.
Over the next few years, however, the leg itself, which had healed fairly straight, strengthened and the knee was fine. Friends would later urge him to have the ankle and foot amputated, so that a false foot could be fitted to the stump of the leg and he could lead a normal life. Edward Teller, for example, had lost a foot when he slid under a Budapest tram as a youth, but no stranger would ever know it watching him walk. Ford always refused, preferring to hop about on the dreadful souvenir of his accident. Acquaintances decided that he clung to the deformed foot because he thought it elicited sympathy.
The Second World War saved him from an empty life back in Alhambra. Contemporaries from his Air Corps days were suddenly lieutenant colonels and colonels. He hitched a ride to Washington aboard a plane being flown there from the Douglas Aircraft plant and went to see a Flying School mate who was now a full colonel in charge of all filmmaking for the Army Air Forces. He had Ford assigned as a lieutenant to the 1st Motion Picture Unit at the old Mack Sennett studios in Culver City, California. Ronald Reagan, who had obtained a lieutenant’s commission in the Cavalry Reserve after he discovered that he liked riding horses while a young radio sportscaster in Iowa, had also been assigned to the unit and promoted to captain. Ford offered to take him out to a nearby airfield on weekends to hitch rides on planes for fun, but Reagan declined. He said that the sixteen hands measurement of an average horse’s height was as high as he wanted to go.
For a man who had known the company of serious airmen, making movies in Culver City was not a satisfactory way to spend the war. Ford returned to his catalogue of classmates and one of them arranged an assignment to the Air Transport Command in England and a post as assistant operations officer for a C-47 transport squadron at Bovingdon, just northwest of London. The work was hardly exciting, but it was worthy. The surrender of Japan in August 1945 soon brought banishment to civilian life once more. By 1948, an unhappy Ford was again banging on the gate. A persistent effort led from connection to connection until a Colonel Bernard Schriever hired him. Bennie had heard of Ford’s accident after his own arrival at March Field in 1933, but the two had never met until a mutual acquaintance introduced them fifteen years later. It was the beginning of a relationship that was to last the rest of their long lives.
Although Schriever and Ford became friends and Ford felt indebted to Schriever for a renewed professional life, he had no intention of becoming Schriever’s Sancho Panza. Ford had his own agenda. He was a shrewd man who enjoyed wielding power and influencing events. He was zealous to promote causes in which he believed. But because of the limitations life had imposed on him, he had to do this through other men with rank and status. Lacking both himself, had he sought center stage, his ambition would have been regarded as ludicrous and he would have found himself back in Alhambra. His personality and character fitted him for his behind-the-scenes role. He had a smile that disarmed and great capacity for charm. He rarely showed irritation or anger and was never confrontational. The rub was that the affability might mean he was in sympathy with someone or it might mean that he was just putting them off, for Ford wore it as a mask in all seasons.
His initial move upward from being just another member of Schriever’s staff came in September 1950, when William Burden was appointed the first special assistant to the secretary of the Air Force for research and development. Through Teddy Walkowicz, who was then working for Doolittle, Vince gained an introduction to Burden and the job as his executive assistant. This had put him in position for the meeting with Gardner and the adventures that followed after Gardner appeared in the office doorway on that fateful day in March 1953.
Beginning in December 1954, Gardner and Schriever set Ford to work secretly briefing Henry Jackson, the Democratic senator from Washington State, on the impediments the ICBM program was encountering. Ford met Jackson in restaurants that were not frequented by other politicians or military officers, who might get curious. The objective was to gain Jackson’s assistance in reaching Eisenhower. They would have been hard put to find a senator more willing to help them. Scoop Jackson was not merely anti-Communist, he was ferociously anti-Soviet and, like von Neumann, a believer in “maximum armament.” He was also well placed to assist because he held the chairmanship of the Military Applications Subcommittee of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the joint Senate and House committee that oversaw the Atomic Energy Commission and all nuclear activities, including the manufacture of nuclear weapons. In addition, he was a member of the Subcommittee on the Air Force of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Schriever and Gardner had invited him out to WDD the previous fall and he had been impressed. It was common in the 1950s for the military to surreptitiously appeal to friendly legislators with an end-run play like this when the need arose. There was risk, but Bennie was hardly risk-averse when the goal was worthy of the danger, and he would also have been a moral coward to have let Gardner assume sole responsibility for the plot.
He sent his executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Beryl Boatman, to join Ford at the clandestine rendezvous with Jackson and to regularly pass the senator copies of his latest classified reports. Had the gambit gone awry, Gardner’s authority would not have saved Schriever, particularly given the antipathy toward Gardner within much of the senior ranks of the Air Force. Years later, LeMay accused Bennie of sneaking around behind the chief of staff’s back. Schriever called the accusation “a goddamn lie” and claimed that he had kept Twining informed of everything. This is doubtful. Both Twining and White, the vice chief, were supporters of the missile program. What probably happened is that they learned something of what was occurring through the grapevine—such covert maneuvering is always difficult to keep entirely hidden within the armed services—and tacitly approved by not interfering. Twining later showed his hand by invariably protecting Bennie whenever he did get into trouble. Power also apparently learned what was going on and said nothing. The unobtrusive briefings of Jackson continued for six months. The senator used the ammunition Ford and Boatman provided to hold fifteen closed hearings by his subcommittee. Gardner naturally appeared as a witness and von Neumann, ever prepared to pitch in,
volunteered to testify as well. From March 1955 onward, Johnny carried the additional prestige of being one of the five commissioners on the Atomic Energy Commission, the first foreign-born scientist to be nominated to the post.
All the while, Ford had been boring another tunnel into the White House. Near the end of March 1954, Eisenhower met with a group of eminent scientists who constituted the Presidential Science Advisory Committee, PSAC for short. Its chairman was Lee DuBridge, by then president of Caltech. Eisenhower asked them to undertake a study of the nuclear Pearl Harbor nightmare that was always foremost in his mind. He was convinced, the president said, that modern weapons had increased the danger of such a surprise attack on the nation and wanted them to suggest measures through which science and technology might reduce the peril. A subcommittee subsequently entitled the Technological Capabilities Panel, and commonly known as the Killian Committee, was formed under James Killian, the president of MIT. Gardner gave the panel its first briefing, focusing on the ICBM. And Ford got himself appointed a member of the Killian Committee staff.
He managed this maneuver through a friendship he had struck up with another unsung, toiling-in-the-wings figure like himself, David Beckler, the executive director of PSAC. When the subcommittee officially began its inquiry in August 1954 after Eisenhower had reviewed and approved its agenda—which Gardner and Ford also helped to draft—Beckler needed an experienced staff man to assist the panel and to act as its liaison with the Air Force. With Ford prompting, Gardner offered the services of his executive assistant. The offer was not accepted without second thoughts. While the panel members admired Gardner, they were also wary of his zealotry and thus of Ford as his agent. Beckler’s private investigation through his own sources at the Pentagon elicited the response that, although Ford might work for Gardner, he was by nature loyal, honest in reporting, and invariably discreet. Ford did not disappoint Beckler, and Killian and the other panel members praised his “exceptional” contribution to their report. He received a letter of commendation on behalf of the president as well. But in retrospect there is also no doubt that, character reference notwithstanding, Ford never wavered from what had become his central mission in life. He did his best to put his finger on the Killian Committee’s scale.
The panel’s report, delivered in mid-February 1955 to the president and the National Security Council, did address Eisenhower’s concern with a surprise attack. It urged reducing SAC’s vulnerability by dispersal of its bombers and the creation of a substantial airborne alert. In a separate and ultrasecret recommendation, it also urged the building of the U-2, which, through the lenses of its spy cameras when it began overflights on the Fourth of July 1956, was to ease Eisenhower’s worry by providing the first good look into the closed interior of the Soviet Union. The most striking element in the panel’s mid-February report, however, was its warning of the strategic consequences if the Soviets achieved an ICBM capability before the United States. “The intercontinental ballistic missile can profoundly affect the military posture of either country,” the report said. The panel recommended something without precedent. The NSC had never previously lent its endorsement to a specific weapon system. The panel urged that this now be done, that the council single out the ICBM project “as a nationally supported effort of highest priority.” Gardner, Ford, von Neumann, and Schriever were elated, but then nothing happened. Nobody at the top did anything to rescue them from their plight. They learned to their chagrin that it was not enough to lay a report before the president and the National Security Council. One had to follow up by persuading the council and the president that the matter was sufficiently urgent to warrant an NSC Action Memorandum, signed by the president, and spelling out a specific measure or measures, in order to shake the bureaucracy out of its complacency. Otherwise, the system continued on in its blithely obstructionist fashion. Killian and his associates had failed to do this and Eisenhower, apparently still unaware that the Soviets would beat the United States to the launch if corrective steps were not taken, was content to leave ICBMs to the Air Force and the Department of Defense.
The crafty Ford was undaunted. He set in motion his third clandestine campaign. His new friend David Beckler helped him. With Gardner’s assent, he remained on Beckler’s PSAC staff in the Executive Office Building next to the White House. He had more freedom of action that way. The goal now was to get the subject of the ICBM itself placed on the agenda of the National Security Council so that the president could be fully informed on what needed to be done. The question was how to accomplish this. Arranging for a subject to be placed on the NSC agenda might sound like a trifling formality, but in the world of government bureaucracy, such formalities counted. It was a sine qua non if Schriever, Gardner, and von Neumann were ever to reach Eisenhower.
The NSC was the apex of the elaborate military-style staff system that Eisenhower had constructed to undergird his presidency. The council had originated with the National Security Act of 1947, which had also established the Department of Defense and reorganized the armed forces to provide for an independent U.S. Air Force. Truman had used it, as Paul Nitze’s famous NSC-68 policy paper of 1950 on the Soviet threat attests, but in limited fashion. Eisenhower transformed the council, making it his paramount body to formulate, evaluate, and guide military and foreign policy. The president was its chairman and its principal members were the heads of relevant cabinet departments, such as the secretaries of state, defense, and the Treasury, and those at the top of other concerned government organizations, like the chief of the CIA, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the chairman and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The staff director was the president’s special assistant for national security affairs. Under him was a beehive of sections dealing with the multitude of subjects and issues of interest to the council. The most important element was the NSC Planning Board, because it set the council’s agenda. A representative of each of the NSC’s principal members sat on it. The Planning Board was, in effect, the back door to the council’s deliberations.
One of the board’s unwritten but long established rules was that a subject had to be referred to it by the department concerned, in this instance the Department of Defense. That was impossible in the case of the ICBM because Defense Secretary Wilson was opposed to singling out the missile project for special attention to the possible detriment of other high-priority projects. Beckler suggested that Ford resort to a flanking movement to get around this obstacle—going though the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, the new, more elegant name for the old Policy Planning Staff. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Bowie was chairman of the Planning Council and also sat on the NSC Planning Board as the representative of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Beckler introduced Ford to a civil servant who proved immensely helpful—Carlton Savage, executive secretary of State’s Planning Council. Tall, slim, and courtly, Savage was an old-timer at the State Department, a friend of Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of state during the Second World War. He differed from many in the civil servant tribe, however, in that he had imagination and courage. As soon as he understood the importance of what Ford was about, he gave him his full support. At Ford’s request, he arranged a briefing by Gardner and von Neumann for his own superior, Robert Bowie, and a number of other senior State officials, including Robert Murphy, the deputy undersecretary of state for political affairs; Loy Henderson, the deputy undersecretary for administration; and Chip Bohlen, the Soviet specialist and current ambassador to Moscow, who happened to have been called home to assist with preparations for Eisenhower’s first summit meeting in Geneva in July with Stalin’s successors to the leadership of the Soviet Union. The objective was to make the diplomats realize the psychological and political repercussions on America’s European allies if the Soviets were able to threaten with a weapon like the ICBM and the United States had no equivalent to deter them. The briefing went extremely well and the State Department was won to the cause.
/> Ford was enjoying himself immensely at all of this maneuvering. Years later, he was to write of “the fun and excitement and challenge of roaming the Washington jungle when you’re hot on the trail of a major blow for freedom.” Throughout the period, unbeknownst to Beckler or Savage, Ford kept working the Senate angle, arranging more furtive meetings with Scoop Jackson. He saw to it that the senator always had a supply of fuel for his subcommittee hearings from Schriever’s classified reports delivered by Boatman. To cover his movements, Ford adopted various tricks, including the use of public telephone booths for calls he did not want anyone to be able to trace back to Beckler’s or Gardner’s offices. He jokingly referred to these afterward as “my many carefully staked out field offices around Washington—a telephone booth in the Pentagon, or over at State, or in the nearest bar, or perhaps my favorite field office on the lower deck of the Army-Navy Club—the phone booth right at the bottom of the stairs, not the other one.” (The anonymity of public phones in the 1950s appealed to others besides Ford. They were a favorite communications system of the Mafia.)
