Zumwalt

by Larry Berman

  Perhaps the ultimate benefit of working in BuPers was getting to personally know the detailers, because there was a tradition in BuPers that you took care of your own. When it came time for his next assignment as a lieutenant commander, Bud was able to secure orders to command the Arnold J. Isbell, homeported in San Diego. On Bud’s detachment report, Holloway handwrote, “On our list to come back to the Bureau.”67 Bud had found an early mentor in Holloway, whose later support would be instrumental. Bud thought that Holloway possessed the largest span of control of anybody he had ever worked for, and he learned much from watching him operate. The two men formed an unusually close relationship. When Admiral Holloway died, his son Jim, a former classmate of Bud’s at the academy, wrote to Bud that “Dad always loved you.”68

  The Isbell was in poor shape, as were most of the World War II destroyers that had operated hard during the Korean War. Isbell’s performance level was dismal—she had stood eighth in a squadron of eight for battle efficiency the previous year. She had one of the lowest reenlistment rates in the force, and no reserve officer had requested regular navy in over a year. “I got the ship that had stood the lowest in the squadron, which was a great place to start . . . I’ve said that many times. When you’ve got nowhere to go but up, you just can’t lose,” said Bud of his new assignment.69

  San Diego harbor was covered by fog on the day Isbell’s new captain was set to get under way to accompany an aircraft carrier to sea for operations.70 An engineering problem delayed departure, but eventually the new captain backed out of the slip at the naval station. He conned the ship into the channel and headed out, but the surface search radar quit working. Future rear admiral Robert Hanks was aboard that day. “Using lookouts in the very eyes of the ship, what little information we could get from the air search radar, the fathometer, and radar estimates of our position from the carrier, we fell in astern of her and eventually made our hairy way out to sea. Every man aboard immediately recognized that we were now in the hands of an experienced and thoroughly competent destroyer sailor.”71

  Bud knew that to get Isbell back on her feet, the crew needed a real shot in the arm. A number of actions were necessary, running the spectrum from leadership to management. Bud started with the ship’s voice radio call, Sapworth. A ship at sea is known by its voice radio call, which also carries over to the shore environment, officers’ clubs, enlisted men’s clubs, and in liberty areas. Sailors love to be proud of their ship, but the Sapworth was not an easy name to be proud of. The local joke was that a previous commander had sought a name change from Saphead, and the office of the chief of naval operations had approved a change to Sapworth.

  Sapworth was undignified, and Bud was determined to get it changed. On November 20, 1955, he wrote Rear Admiral Henry Bruton, director of naval communications, “Since recently assuming command of the Isbell this Commanding Officer has been concerned over the anemic connotation of the present voice call.” Other ships in the company had calls like Fireball and Viper. “It is somewhat embarrassing and completely out of keeping with the quality of the sailormen aboard to be identified by the relatively ignominious Sapworth.” Bud wanted the name changed to Hellcat, “so that Isbell may carry on the ‘31-knot Burke’ tradition and proudly identify herself to all and sundry consorts.” Bud believed that “approval of the requested voice call, in my opinion, will lend a great deal of impetus to the surging team spirit . . . it is important to me and my ship.”

  It helped that Admiral Bruton had been Bud’s commanding officer on the battleship Wisconsin during the Korean War. At the bottom of Bud’s memo, Bruton scribbled, “Let’s do this if possible. If not, let’s give him something better than SAPWORTH.”

  The request was approved! The first thing Bud did was to arrange for new patches to be made depicting a black cat with the flames of hell coming up around a devil’s tail. Isbell’s newfound identity was exemplified the day she was returning from a WestPac (Western Pacific) deployment and suffered a breakdown of one her chain-driven lube-oil pumps during a line-abreast formation. Isbell slowed to about fifteen knots in order to make repairs, while the rest of the division headed for the horizon.

  A message came from the USS Frank Knox: “Hellcat. [This is] Viper, sorry about that. We’ll say hello to your families when we get to San Diego.” “Commander Zumwalt was furious,” recalled Hanks, who credited Bud with teaching him seamanship, leadership, and compassion for those under him.72 “Repairs made and he ordered full power, but there was no chance to catch sister ships. Then, over the radio came word that Knox had an engineering casualty and it could not be fixed at sea.” Soon, boiling along at 30-plus knots, Isbell overhauled the crippled Knox. A smiling Zumwalt eased up to the officer of the deck and said, “Lay a course to leave the Knox about a hundred yards to port.” As Isbell came abeam of the Knox, Bud picked up the radio handset: “Viper, this is Hellcat. I’d like to speak to Viper himself. Over.”

  “Hellcat, this is Viper himself. Over.”

  “Viper, this is Hellcat. Beep, Beep. Out.”

  And away Isbell went.

  “Arnold Isbell was a very close-knit wardroom. I really regretted having to give up the command,” recalled Zumwalt.73 In Bud’s opinion, “the combination of hard work to get the training done, melded with the esprit that comes from a kind of a team approach to things, just made us a really highly successful ship. We won, as I recall, every one of the E’s, including the battle efficiency pennant in my second year and stood, of course, number one.”74

  Bud sent a copy of Isbell’s battle efficiency pennant to Admiral Bruton, along with a note of thanks for assigning the Hellcat voice call. With the help of a fine group of officers, he succeeded in raising the reenlistment rate 250 percent in just four months. Moreover, two reserve officers had requested augmentation and retention and had specifically asked to remain aboard. “We are doing everything humanly possible to provide motivation, incentive, and esprit de corps. We are making progress.”75 Another key part of the assignment was the contribution made by Mouza in the big-sister and mentoring role she played for the wives of the officers who were trying to decide whether to make a career out of the navy. Bud always credited Mouza for the fact that Isbell had a much higher retention rate of reserve officers than did any neighboring destroyer.

  Bruton forwarded the letter to Holloway with a note saying, “Here’s a guy that’s really getting results.” The next thing Bud received were new orders to return to BuPers to be a lieutenant detailer. He was relieved of command on July 13, 1957, ending his destroyer tour. During his final weeks on the Isbell, Bud received a personal “Dear Zig” letter from Bruton. “Of course it is no surprise to me that Zig Zumwalt continues his clearly outstanding and exemplary performance in every assignment. I am so certain that such will continue in the future that, without your permission, I have intervened in connection with your next assignment.”

  Without discussing it with Bud, Bruton had gone to Holloway and recommended that Bud replace Commander Tom Weschler as aide to CNO Arleigh Burke. Holloway embraced the idea and sent a memorandum to Burke registering his strongest possible support. Both men felt that it was time Bud had a “front corridor” job. As Burke’s aide, he would become known to every flag officer in the navy and to many officers of all services. “Whether this works out or not, you know my feeling and that of ADM Holloway with respect to you,” wrote Bruton.

  Bruton was not discounting the lieutenant detailer job; rather, he believed being Burke’s aide would be far better for Bud’s career advancement while also keeping him in Washington. Admiral Burke might prefer someone more junior than Bud, and “if ADM Burke decides not to disturb your present orders, it will be for the great benefit of all the lieutenants in the Navy. . . . I hope this meets with your approval, and I think it will. The very few people of your high caliber must pay the penalty of having senior officers interfere (possibly) with your own plans, in the greater interest of the Naval Service.”

  It was a flattering
gesture, but Admiral Burke selected a classmate of Bud’s, Ray Peet, as Weschler’s replacement. Peet had also commanded a destroyer, so he and Bud were at the same stage of their careers. By default, Bud received his preferred assignment, a second tour in the Bureau of Naval Personnel. Returning to Washington, the family moved into the home they had bought during Bud’s first tour with BuPers. The new job involved working only with surface officers, providing Bud his first encounter with the navy’s appalling racist system. One of the first briefings Bud received involved how to detail lieutenants. When it came to the question of detailing the few blacks in the pool, Bud learned that “if you got a black officer, you sent him to recruiting duty, which was then the least popular and the least important in our priority of tours. The dregs were being sent there. . . . You then, at the end of his two-year tour, extend him a year. If he hasn’t left the Navy by then, send him to the worst broken-down auxiliary or tanker you can find. That’s bound to give him a record that will get him passed over, and you’ll be rid of him.”76

  Bud had no idea how high up in the chain of command this type of unwritten directive emanated from, but it was evident that “we were practicing racism of the highest order.” There were Filipino stewards who did not want to be stewards but wanted to be, in one case, a gunner’s mate and, in another case, an electrician’s mate. “To get that approved at a time when the Navy’s policy was racist, I had to be on that telephone 25 times per case to get it done. That’s the kind of thing that convinced me that the system was insensitive and racist and needed shaking up. I knew firsthand from the experiences I had in command.”77

  After Bud had been on his detailer job for a few months, Holloway broadened his portfolio by assigning him to solve the problem of what to do about doctors, who were leaving the navy in droves, getting Bud heavily involved in the Doctor Incentive Pay Bill as special assistant to Richard Jackson, the assistant secretary of the navy for personnel. “Bud was now the officer in charge of active duty military personnel, the billet most intimately related to the Bureau of Naval Personnel. Holloway counted on that officer to keep the assistant secretary placated and satisfied with BuPers, as well as keeping him informed if there were problems.”78

  “His performance was outstanding,” wrote Holloway in recommending Zumwalt. “He handled many special projects for Mr. Pratt and for me, notably the medical officer Incentive Bill. He is extremely well seasoned administratively and operationally. He is an outstanding leader. I am confident Zumwalt is absolute tops for your staff. As I previously remarked, it is in your interest, in the Navy’s, and particularly in mine to have outstanding people in your office, even though I may make some sacrifices over here.”

  In essence, Bud was now an action officer in the Bureau of Naval Personnel. He believed that if naval personnel were to have adequate medical care, increased benefits would be necessary for those choosing a medical career in the navy. He advocated increased pay for doctors in order to compete with the private sector, but the position was not very popular with line officers, who believed that doctors should not receive a higher salary than those who had seen extensive sea duty, especially those with much greater responsibilities during war. Bud’s friends began referring to him as “Doc Zumwalt,” a title that he had once aspired to have in civilian life.

  Another part of his increased responsibilities involved being the action officer for the navy’s equivalent of medicare legislation, making it possible for naval personnel and their families assigned to places where naval medical facilities and doctors were not available to be cared for by doctors within the community at the government’s expense. Bud received his first experience of the congressional process by personally lobbying as many members and staffers as possible. The experience served him well as CNO. “I learned the slow, deliberate and painstaking methods necessary to get programs through in the face of many other lobbies that impact on Congress.”79

  Another lesson Bud learned involved staffing. “To get any one of those projects, whether it was a change in sea-shore ratio or the Doctors Incentive Pay Bill, or the Medicare Bill, or any of the others through, there were at least 50 people in the Bureau of Naval Personnel that had to initial. I learned very early that in each office there was likely to be someone who, just to cover his own ass, would always say, ‘No, bad idea,’ or ask a question that had to be researched.” In each office there was also “someone who was a doer,” and at this early stage in his career, Bud “learned and compiled an actual list of whom to see and whom not to see in each of the bureau offices. And by the time I left there, I could get something staffed in a day that in the first effort might have taken three or four months to get staffed. That came in to be of great use in later years too.”80

  In the preceding six years, Bud had had the opportunity to learn the personnel business from three vantage points: establishment requirements, distribution, and policy management. “These tours served to drive home to me, as I never understood it before, the extent to which bureaucracy on the part of those preoccupied with plans and operations were impacting on the ability of the Navy to solve its personnel problems. And I resolved that if I ever reached a position of authority I would do my best to solve these bureaucratic constraints.”81

  Bud Zumwalt was now seen as a comer. In April 1959, he was one of a select group of commanders chosen to be interviewed by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the posts of commanding officer of a nuclear frigate and executive officer of a nuclear cruiser.82

  It was a Friday when Bud arrived at 10:00 a.m. for the interview at Rickover’s office in the former State, War, and Navy Building. Rickover and his staff occupied perhaps the most austere offices in Washington. There was no carpeting, only torn and worn linoleum, and perhaps most distinctive, all the chairs had front legs shorter than the back legs. Bud was taken to a waiting room, where he sat alone for ninety minutes before being escorted to the first of three interviewers whose job it was to screen candidates before they ever got to Rickover. Passing these initial tests, he was taken to a room and told to sit next to a sign that admonished, AFTER HAVING BEEN INTERVIEWED BY ADMIRAL RICKOVER NO ONE IS TO RETURN TO THIS ROOM EXCEPT TO PICK UP HIS PERSONAL POSSESSIONS AND LEAVE IMMEDIATELY WITHOUT TALKING OF INTERVIEWS.

  The three screening interviews took up most of the day. It was already past five p.m. when Bud learned that his interview with Rickover would soon begin. By seven thirty, someone came into the room to say that Rickover had left at five and that Bud should stand the next day, which was a Saturday. After waiting almost all the next day, Bud was informed that Rickover could not meet until the following week. For almost a month, he heard nothing. It was all part of the Rickover ritual of playing mind games and testing potential commanders in the nuclear fleet. It was also just the beginning of an elaborate process bordering on the insane.

  A month passed, and out of the blue, Bud received a call asking if he could see Rickover that day. Looking over his appointments, Bud said that he was free any time after 10:00 a.m., but he would have to first notify his boss. A few minutes later, the call came that Rickover wanted to see him immediately, at 8:30 a.m. As a final preparation, knowing that Rickover was especially hard on aides, Bud removed his aiguillettes before coming over. Walking down the long corridor, he felt prepared. “I well knew that one must neither rise up and smite him nor be accommodating and obsequious.” Bud was first told by Rickover’s assistant that the admiral had already determined that Zumwalt lacked sufficient engineering experience and, if selected, would be assigned as an assistant engineer on a carrier, a position usually held by lieutenants. Zumwalt considered this akin to the hazing process from plebe year at the academy, although he did agree that he could use the experience.83

  The moment finally arrived to meet Rickover. Bud entered through a swinging door into what looked like an interrogation room in a police station. There was a desk, in front of which were two chairs. Behind one was a “gnome-like figure” who motioned Zumwalt to sit in one of the chairs. Behind th
e chairs was another small desk where a witness sat—a Rickover ritual. Physically, the two men could not have been more different—Bud in his navy uniform, Rickover in his dark, baggy suit, white shirt with oversize collar, and nondescript tie.84

  Rickover reviewed the notes from the three screening interviews, saying nothing at first. “Everyone who interviewed you tells me you are extremely conservative and have no initiative or imagination,” said Rickover to break the silence. “And what do you have to say about that?” Bud was taken aback, saying he needed a few seconds to think, since “it is the first time I have received a charge like that about me.” Rickover shot back, “This is no charge, God damn it. You’re not being accused of anything. You are being interviewed and don’t you dare start trying to conduct the interview yourself. You are one of those wise Goddamn aides. You’ve been working for your boss for so long you think you are wearing his stars. You are so accustomed to seeing people come in and grovel at your boss’s feet and kiss his tail that you think I’m going to do it to you.”

  Rickover told Zumwalt to get out and go sit in the other office until he was ready to be interviewed properly. “And when you come back in here you better be able to maintain the proper respect.”

  Bud was escorted to a barren room referred to as the tank; it held a table and chair and no reading material. He was there to think and reflect on proper behavior. The chair faced a blank wall. There was a small window that faced out into the corridor so that people passing by could look inside to see who was getting the treatment this time. People would peer in, making Bud feel like an animal in the zoo. Thirty minutes had gone by when an assistant opened the door and told Bud he should return to Rickover. But when he arrived, Rickover was on the phone, haranguing the caller about a construction program. Even though Zumwalt already had a Top Secret clearance, Rickover yelled to his aide, “Get him out of here. I don’t want him listening to this.”