Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Just short of the equator, however, Captain King turned Lexington about and back to the fleet. At midday, they received word that an “enemy” carrier—the USS Langley—had been spotted to the northeast. Captain King decided to launch everything at once, forty-six planes. Suddenly Heinlein, who was working the—voice—radio contact with his flight squadrons’ guard planes, found himself with four squadrons in the air at the same time and under radio silence.

  All had to be back before sunset according to fleet regulations, but the scouting squadron had not located any of the flight squadrons by late in the afternoon. Things got a little tense on the bridge as dusk approached. Most of the pilots had not been checked out for night landings, and they had to be found before nightfall. King stood to lose thirty-one aircraft on his first big operation.

  Three of the squadrons were back when Heinlein finally established radio contact with the fourth. Coincidentally, Buddy Scoles was piloting the guard plane for that squadron. They had somehow fouled up their dead reckoning and were lost. Heinlein recognized the situation immediately: the same thing had happened to him on a training flight near Hawaii. Now Heinlein was on the other end of the radio.

  The signal strength indicated they were at least fifty miles over the horizon. Heinlein rotated the loop antenna trying to find a minimum (zero) for the signal strength. But the signal was zero over too wide an arc—twenty or thirty degrees. He gave them the best homing vector he could guess—but they were separated by a lot of ocean: Scoles described the sea conditions as Beaufort Three—whitecaps on the waves. The sea around Lexington was almost calm, with gentle swells: they were far enough away to have different weather. Not good—and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  As night fell with tropic suddenness, they got the last transmission from the squadron, preparing to ditch. It was night where the Lexington was, but still dusk where the squadron was. That fixed the direction—but it might be too late. Suddenly, the sky lit up with searchlights from every ship in the fleet that carried them—the radio silence had been canceled to save the squadron. The squadron saw the lights and homed in on the fleet. They were coming in with very low fuel reserves, but they all got in safely—“although one did sort of bend his prop around the crash barrier.”26 Buddy Scoles was the last to come in, since he was in a seaplane with pontoon and could land on the water if necessary. His engine coughed and died just as his tailhook caught the wire, and he brought it in dead-stick. He had made it with no margin at all. The commander of the flight squadron reported to King that evening. “Where in the hell have you been?” was all that King said.

  At some point during this exercise, Hoover was detached from the ship so he could umpire the fleet problem, Heinlein acting as his assistant. This detachment was a paper transfer; they stayed aboard Lexington while they processed the paperwork. This put Heinlein on the bridge virtually all the time for three days in a row, since Hoover allowed him to go below to eat and/or nap only at irregular intervals. King never seemed to leave the bridge for any reason. He probably never slept at all during that problem.

  Fleet Problem XII ended close to Panama City. Heinlein raced to bathe, shave, eat, get into civilian clothes, and catch the first boat—but the Captain’s gig splashed first and Captain King was first ashore.

  Early in the evening, Heinlein saw Captain King in the back lounge of Marie Kelly’s Ritz Bar. Four or five hours later he returned and found King still there, at the same table, alone, though his private bottle of Dewar’s White Label was half empty. Captain King looked up, said, “Sit down, Heinlein. What will you have to drink?” Nervous, Heinlein made polite conversation and noted that King invited every officer who looked in to have a drink. Over the course of the evening, he would host nearly every officer ashore that way. After a while, King let him go genially, to stir around a bit and have some fun. They met up again around dawn, when King found Heinlein and Bob Clark waiting for the shuttle back to Lex, and King invited them to ride back with him and the executive in the Captain’s gig. King was alert and apparently sober, even though he must have consumed the better part of a bottle of whiskey.

  A few days later, Heinlein was again detached from the ship and sent to Fort Clayton in the Panama Canal Zone to compete in fleet rifle and pistol matches. He was a little rusty, so he had a coach for the shooting—a small (roughly 120-pound), wiry Sergeant of Marines named Deacon—“all rawhide and a face suitable to a bible-belt deacon and a manner to match.”27 Deacon taught him things about the rifle that weren’t in the book—how to rely on his instincts, his rifle sense. He also taught Heinlein things about handling men that complemented what he was learning from King. No one ever heard Deacon use bad language or raise his voice—“he didn’t need to, as he was widely known to be the toughest non-com around—sudden death, armed or unarmed.”28 And he had the same kind of undefinable presence that King had—just being there, he would steady the men he was coaching. The whole team’s performance rose from mediocre to exceptional. He kept Heinlein firing in the black all that day.

  Heinlein often got back from Panama City to his accommodations at Fort Clayton long after taps. The Navy camp was well separated from the Army regiment stationed there, and the base swimming pool was very inviting. The highly flexible and nuanced view of the rules and regulations he was learning from King and now from Deacon, too, gave him a very pragmatic approach to such things. He knew his team captain didn’t care so long as he racked up a high score on the rifle range, and he wasn’t responsible to anyone else at Fort Clayton. He stripped naked and swam in the warm water, in the moonlight, until he was completely relaxed and ready for bed.29

  Lexington must have transited the Panama Canal without him. Sometime after he rejoined the ship, he had a bout of flu and, about ten days later—in late February or early March, though the specific date was not recorded—he noticed the first signs of a urethral infection: a clear drop in the morning that wasn’t urine and ought not to be there. In the military, one is always alert to the possibility of venereal disease, but in this case it wasn’t: no organisms were found in the fluid or in a prostate smear. It was just an infection—“nonspecific urethritis.” He was treated with protargol and neosilvol and some clear astringent, and the problem went away in a couple of months, by itself.30

  On the morning of March 31, Lexington was standing off Guantánamo Bay, readying for an admiral’s inspection, when they received emergency orders from Washington, D.C.: at 10:10 A.M. an earthquake measuring 5.6 on the Richter scale struck Managua, Nicaragua. Within seconds, 2,400 people were killed outright, and several thousand more were injured. Property damage was estimated at $15 million to $30 million in 1931 dollars, and 35,000 were left homeless over ten square kilometers. Lexington was to head directly to Managua and help with the relief efforts. By that time King had the ship in such a state of readiness that they had the admiral’s inspection out of the way and were under way in less than forty minutes, making no special preparations and leaving their shore parties behind. What the 35,000 homeless needed most was fresh water. All hands were ordered not to bathe until further notice and to be sparing in use of fresh water for any purpose until the evaporative condensers could refill the fresh-water tanks.

  A month later, in May 1931, Captain King made Heinlein ship’s Aide in charge of the Executive Office—a responsible administrative position. Although nominally under the Executive Officer, Hoover, Heinlein was brought into nearly daily contact with Captain King and got an insider’s view of King’s operating style. King, he found, really meant that old chestnut about the ship being a home as well as a combat vessel and lived by it, taking unusual care for the quality of meals and amenities provided his crew—all of them, from flight officers to able seamen.31 And he had the Navy Way deeply ingrained in him, as his inspection policy demonstrated immediately.

  Lexington was too large to be inspected by the Captain once a week. Instead, there were six inspection tours, and when it came time to inspect officers’ coun
try, the Captain would discreetly send his orderly to present his compliments to the President of the Mess and say that he intended to make an informal inspection in about twenty or thirty minutes. This gave them time to get embarrassing items out of sight.

  And there were embarrassing items. The routine disorder might include “improper” magazines or even open bottles of liquor—absolutely forbidden during Prohibition. If any officer had been so indiscreet as to leave a bottle of liquor out, the Captain would not “see” it during his inspection—but the matter would be dealt with officer-to-officer.

  There were more serious matters to conceal, though, than liquor. The JO smoking room, a large separate compartment in Junior Officer country, was used for gambling that included the ship’s Marines and the aviators. Heinlein used to say that his birth date—7/7/7—gave him luck at craps. But poker was his game, and he supplemented his ensign’s salary as a card sharp, teaching aviators with too much money and too little card sense to figure the odds, what poker was all about: “I used a cold-blooded two-pocket system and could count on ca. $100 profit anytime I was willing to lose a night’s sleep to get it.”32 What with the legal expenses of his divorce, he must occasionally have needed that extra $100.

  King’s warning gave the officers time to get all the gambling clutter tidied out of the way. Inspection, too, it seemed, was one of King’s tools to tighten up Lexington. A ship’s readiness is almost entirely made up of small matters concatenated together. Knowing that you are prepared for anything translates from Saturday morning inspection to confidence in the field and in emergency and battle situations. A ship that is not ready at all times is useless to the country, and it was King’s first job to get Lexington ready for anything, anytime.

  Almost the first thing Heinlein discovered as ship’s Aide was that Captain King’s inspections were not the once-over-lightly thing he had imagined. After each inspection, King would send Hoover a detailed memorandum listing the tiniest details of less-than-perfect ship’s housekeeping. Heinlein would break the information down into departments and prepare memoranda from Executive Officer to department heads for Hoover’s signature. This confirmed the conclusion Heinlein had reached about King in the Bremerton Narrows incident: King always looked unhurried and unworried, but he worked very hard, anticipating anything that could go wrong and paying attention to every detail—even the ones he seemed not to notice at the time. That was just exactly what Heinlein wanted for himself. King expected perfect performance from his subordinates—and got it: “I find a boss who consistently requires highest performance much easier to work for than one who blows both hot & cold. As for the third sort, who are satisfied always with poor performance—I quit!”33

  Heinlein learned a great deal about the technique of administration. Both the Executive Officers he worked under tacitly encouraged him to try occasionally to initiate policy. He would prepare paperwork involving a change in policy and then send it up without discussing it first with the Execs. Sometimes it would be signed without discussion (and he would feel smug about it—he was learning the ropes, after all). Sometimes, however, Hoover would send it back with a curt written comment telling him where and how he had erred. The next Executive Officer, V. D. Herbster, would send for him and discuss it more fully in person, explaining things he understood but Heinlein did not.

  Discipline worked both ways with King, as Heinlein shortly came to see. As part of his duties as Ship’s Aide, he prepared the Captain’s daily Mast—effectively the Captain holding court and dispensing justice. In a ship as large as Lexington, Captain’s Mast would be held daily while in port, two or three times a week while at sea. The Mast would be very large after a weekend on R & R—fifty or more cases at a time. In court, King was extremely strict and by-the-book: ten days bread and water, remanded for summary—thirty days’ restriction, deck court, maximum of extra duty, and so on. Each sentence would be “accompanied by oral chewing out, each of which was a literary gem. No profanity, no salty slang, all just loud enough to be heard by everyone present, always grammatical, never repetitious—words that cut like strokes of the cat.”34

  As soon as King stood up and left, indicating he was finished for the day, Heinlein went directly to his office. After ten or fifteen minutes, Captain King would call him to send up the various offenders’ service records. So predictable was this that Heinlein always had the files ready on his desk, with a messenger standing by. Then he waited—arranging for a late lunch if necessary—until King called him to his cabin, looking ten or fifteen years older. He had made some changes to the sentencing: punishments for first offenders changed to warnings, sentences chopped in half and suspended, and so forth. Publicly he threw the book—and that was the word that got on the grapevine; then privately and singly, and therefore not as quickly on the grapevine, if at all, Captain King handed out extremely gentle sentences, ones that rarely marred a man’s official record enough to slow up his promotions. King also used the occasion to review the man’s service record, spotting anomalies that might have contributed to the offense. He took an interest in each man as an individual—ordinary seaman just as much as his officers—and had a remarkable memory.

  King discouraged overuse of the more formal discipline methods, but serious matters did come up occasionally, and for this purpose officers were assigned to defend the men at court. Heinlein was assigned the extra duty of preparing cases, prosecuting, and defending accused men. Heinlein understood immediately that his job was to mount the most vigorous defense he could think of—and he was very good at thinking of defenses. He was much in demand because he never lost a case while King was in the ship, even when King knew the man was guilty and Heinlein knew the man was guilty, since he made a point to extract the unvarnished truth from his “client,” so that he would never be taken by surprise and not be able to defend him properly. The prosecuting officers rarely looked beneath the surface and did not study the rules, particularly those governing evidence. Heinlein did.

  Seamen lead notoriously irregular lives, and maritime law to a certain extent treats seamen as if they are irresponsible adolescents—a vicious and selfperpetuating cycle. It was an eye-opening experience for Heinlein, throwing him into direct contact with personal foibles he must have known about only from reading. It threw into high contrast the degree of self-discipline that he had naturally and which was encouraged of Academy graduates and naval officers.

  That discipline has to come from inside; it can’t be imposed from the outside. In some respects, confinement was worse than useless:

  With respect to … locking a man in jail, [my opinion] arose from having sat in all three positions in court—as a prosecutor, as counsel for the defense and as a member of the court … . I’ve never in my life seen a man rehabilitated by putting him in the stockade or the brig.35

  Heinlein’s personal distaste for confinement—honed by his own days in the Academy’s brig and its durance comparatively less vile—was very great.

  … everything I have seen leads me to believe that confinement, even the mild confinement of the brig, is bad for a man, demoralizing. But, time and again, because of the law, I was forced to sentence a man to brig or prison. I hated it so much that I served as defense counsel whenever I could—and got many a guilty man off, acquitted. Whereupon I would talk to him privately, tell him that if he did not behave himself in the future, I would take him apart with my bare hands … which I could do in those days (and could still take a stab at it; skill at dirty fighting does not drop off with age the way skill at boxing does—unexpectedness counts more than endurance).

  Quite a few of those boys I did rehabilitate, after getting them acquitted. But if they had been sent to building 46 at Mare Island to break rocks, they would have been ruined for life. One offense, even a serious one (short of rape and murder and the like) does not mean that a man is useless; he may simply be young and foolish, with a poor capacity for liquor … . But two years up the river and you might as well have shot him in the f
irst place. Even thirty days in the brig is likely to ruin him for military service; his vulnerable and utterly necessary pride is damaged.36

  Effective punishment would ideally be immediate and then over and done with:

  I am still convinced today that official punishment is rarely of real service in producing a fighting man and that a report for misconduct points to some neglect or professional flaw in the officer in charge of that man … a regulation concerning conduct works best when one does not have to invoke it.37

  The top-down discipline King had imposed was relatively minor—and the exceptions were more significant than the rule. Everything King had done simply framed the circumstances so that the temptations to relax one’s self-discipline, at every level of the ship, were removed or minimized. Once each officer returned to peak performance, then all the other departures from strict regulation were trivial, unimportant—so long as the boys did not think they were getting away with something. That was bad for self-discipline. Discipline does not come from externals and organization—though clarity and appropriateness of organization and externals can help; it comes from within each individual performing his duty as it is given him. Success breeds success.