Arleigh Burke
U.S. NAVY
AT THE TIME OF HIS DEATH, HALF A CENTURY AFTER THE END OF WORLD War II, Arleigh Albert Burke was best remembered by both naval officers and naval historians as the U.S. Navy’s premier destroyerman.1 His bold and innovative combat style as Commander, Destroyer Squadron 23 (DesRon 23), during the night engagements of Empress Augusta Bay and Cape Saint George in the Solomon Islands won him a Navy Cross and a permanent place in naval legend. Burke’s contributions to twentieth-century American naval history, however, go far beyond his wartime exploits in destroyers. His multifaceted career began on battleships but finished with battles to build and maintain supercarriers, nuclear-powered submarines, the Polaris missile, and the Navy’s role in space. Even during World War II, he spent more time on the staff of Commander, Fast Carrier Task Force 58, as he helped to shape naval aviation, than he did in destroyers. Burke commanded destroyers in the South Pacific from February 1943 through March 1944; during the last 5 months, he commanded DesRon 23. He was chief of staff to Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher in Fast Carrier Task Force 58/38 from March 1944 through June 1945.
During his 38 years of commissioned service, in fact, Burke spent more time ashore than at sea. He had command at sea for a total of only 
years before being selected for rear admiral in December 1949, and then served barely 17 more months in three subsequent seagoing flag command assignments. By contrast, Burke spent a total of 8 years in four shore tours with the Bureau of Ordnance between 1929 and 1945 and 9 years in three different posts in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) after World War II. For the last 6 of these years, he was CNO, an unprecedented and unequaled three terms in the Navy’s top uniformed post.
The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided by the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Temple University in facilitating his research.
It is not surprising that Arleigh Burke’s wartime surface combat exploits have overshadowed his postwar accomplishments of creating and defending navy strategy and programs. Valor in battle signals a strength of will and character that tend to grow larger as the years pass, plus success in combat conveys a sense of conclusive accomplishment. Peacetime achievements ashore are difficult to measure, and their impact is all too easily buried in paperwork, bureaucracy, and secrecy. Yet, physical courage in combat is not always accompanied by the strength of mind and moral courage needed to defend and advance both institutional interests and strategic principles in bureaucratic skirmishes over money, people, or ideas. As impressive as Burke’s combat victories were, it was his long hours ashore in fighting bureaucratic battles where he achieved his most lasting impact on the Navy. His postwar service helped ensure that the nation would continue to exploit the strategic advantages of the oceans and that the Navy could keep its own counsel on budgets, programs, and personnel, if not operations. To a remarkable degree, in fact, the story of Arleigh Burke’s naval career is the story of the U.S. Navy in the mid-twentieth century.2
Burke became a naval officer under rather unusual circumstances and drove himself hard to prove he had not taken on more of a challenge than he could handle. Born on the family farm three miles east of Boulder, Colorado, on 19 October 1901, he was the grandson of a Swedish immigrant, Anders Petter Bjorkegren, who shortened his name to Gus Burke before becoming the first baker in Denver. Arleigh’s father, Oscar, was a farmer who wanted his firstborn son to inherit his property and his dreams. Burke’s mother, Clara Mokler, was of Pennsylvania Dutch stock, and she put a high premium on education. She encouraged her son to follow his own destiny, rather than limit his vision to the 180 acres that Oscar owned or rented and hoped to buy. To his father’s distress, young Arleigh went to State Preparatory High School in Boulder in 1916 and pursued a college course. Encouraged by his teachers, inspired by the history books he read, and stimulated by the outbreak of World War I, he developed an interest in a military career.
The flu epidemic of 1918 closed high school during his junior year. After a brief sojourn on a threshing crew, seventeen-year-old Arleigh decided to compete for an appointment to the Naval Academy. The night before his congressman’s competitive examination, he rode into Boulder because it looked like snow the next day and slept in the stable with his horse. The snow became a blizzard. Many students who were academically far better prepared stayed home, but Arleigh took the test and received the appointment. With school still closed, he studied for the Academy entrance examination with the help of his teachers and some University of Colorado professors. For a few months, he attended a cram school run by a former congressman in Columbia, Missouri. He passed the examination and, barely escaping quarantine when his father contracted smallpox, boarded the train east. Burke entered the Naval Academy class of 1923 on 26 June 1919.
Midshipman Burke, the farm boy who had always hated the smell of cows, felt immediately at home in the Navy. He enjoyed competing “in just such an organization in which the rules were strict, known and observed.”3 Painfully aware of his inadequate schooling and the flukes that had brought him to the Academy, he threw himself into his studies, determined to make the grade. He was not an outstanding student, an uncommon athlete, or an obviously charismatic leader, but he quickly won the respect of his classmates. Energetic and dependable, he used his capacity for hard work and self-discipline to establish a solid record. At graduation, he stood a respectable 70th in a class of 412.
One notable success at Annapolis was the courtship that began on a blind date during his Third Class (sophomore) year. Roberta Gorsuch, born and raised in Kansas, was the daughter of a Washington, D.C., businessman, and Burke felt immediately drawn to her. She was pretty, playful, kind, candid, and easy to talk to. “Bobbie” stood only five feet tall, but in strength of character, intelligence, and determination, she was fully a match for the six-foot midshipman. She quickly came to occupy a great deal of Burke’s free time and attention. Her puckish sense of humor could shake him loose from the black moods that sometimes plagued him, and her inner serenity and strength, rooted in a Christian Science faith that he admired but did not share, steadied and reassured him. Worried that duty at sea would take him from her side for too long, First Classman Burke even requested a commission in the Marine Corps in December 1922, following a rousing address by Major General Commandant John A. Lejeune. Bobbie’s lack of enthusiasm for this abrupt change in plans and Burke’s growing naval ambitions led him to withdraw the request a month later.4 Arleigh and Bobbie were married on graduation day, 7 June 1923, and she was to prove a loyal and energetic partner and ally for more than seven decades.
The Navy that Ensign Burke entered was an institution in transition. In many ways, the U.S. Fleet that trained and exercised off America’s coasts and concentrated in annual fleet problems for defense of the Caribbean, Panama Canal, West Coast, or Hawaii was a huge operational laboratory for the testing of technology and the training of the officer corps that would lead the Navy through World War II and beyond. The battle line reigned supreme in the beginning, but, through the 1920s and 1930s, carrier and patrol aviation, long-range fleet submarines, and the amphibious Fleet Marine Force would be adopted, evaluated, and improved. By the end of the interwar period, of 381 ensigns commissioned in 1923, only 193 remained on active duty; 40 had become naval aviators and 44 had qualified in submarines.5 For Burke himself, however, gunnery, fire control, and explosives held sway, and he became a member of the so-called “Gun Club” of the Bureau of Ordnance.
Even before commissioning, Midshipman Burke had written his bride-to-be of the thrill he felt when the big guns had been fired during his summer midshipman cruise and of how he hoped to “get a full knowledge of ordnance so that we may have a chance to take a PG [postgraduate work].”6 Like 80 percent of his classmates, Ensign Burke went to battleship duty as his first assignment so that he could receive “intensive education in the practice of [his] profession at sea.”7 Spending five years in the USS Arizona, he learned the basic skills of a seagoing officer. This modern-day “school of the ship” provided the 40 ensigns in the Arizona’s 60–line-officer wardroom with practice in deck seamanship, stream engineering, and gunnery and, as division officers, in leading American sailors. Battleship wardrooms at this time were among the largest single congregations of line officers in the Navy, surpassed only by the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, with 65 on duty, and the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where 68 served, 14 as staff and 54 as students.8 During Burke’s tour in the Arizona, he grew impatient in his progress and flirted in 1925 with becoming qualified in lighter-than-air aviation and the following year with becoming a specialist in aerology. Dissuaded by his seniors, he kept working on his qualifications in gunnery, particularly fire control in the plotting room for the battleship’s main armament and, in 1927, applied for postgraduate training in ordnance. Rejected, he transferred to the auxiliary Procyon, applied again, and was accepted in 1929 for PG work in ordnance engineering at the Navy’s Postgraduate School at Annapolis.
After completing a year of classroom and laboratory work and being tutored in college chemistry to meet graduate admission requirements, Burke moved on to the University of Michigan, where he received a master of science in chemical engineering in June 1931. He then spent another year in touring Navy and Army ammunition and explosive production facilities before returning to the fleet as main battery officer on the heavy cruiser Chester. Burke’s postgraduate training qualified him as a full member of the elite and influential corps of line technical specialists who staffed and led the Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd). The bureau’s senior leadership often ran not just the bureau but the Navy itself; two former chiefs of the bureau, William D. Leahy and Harold R. Stark, became CNOs during the interwar years. BuOrd designated Burke a design and production specialist in ordnance explosives and would largely control his service for the next decade. After eleven months in the Chester, Burke became assistant and then officer-in-charge of the Battle Force Camera Party recording fleet target practice and, during 1935–1937, ran BuOrd’s ammunition section in Washington.
In May 1937, Burke began his first tour in (and a lasting love affair with) destroyers, when he became prospective executive officer of the Craven, then building in Quincy, Massachusetts. Battleships had been Burke’s traditional sea-duty preference up to 1934, but dozens of new destroyers were being added to the fleet. These smaller ships offered more opportunities for command and significant new challenges in shiphandling and leadership. Burke spent two years in the Craven and then was appointed to his first command, the Mugford, another new destroyer. Lieutenant Commander Burke was one of only five officers selected early to command one of the new ships instead of a World War I four-stack destroyer. He was assigned to the division of a tough, veteran shiphandler and tactician, Commander F. E. M. (“Red”) Whiting, who demanded audacity at sea as well as technical competence. Burke’s command tour was a triumph. The ship won the Destroyer Gunnery Trophy for 1939–40 as a result of an unprecedented perfect score—thirty-six shots, thirty-six hits—in short-range battle practice and received the “E” in engineering competition and the “C” for communications. Whiting’s last fitness report declared Burke to be “a leader of the highest type” and predicted “he will go far in the Navy.”9 For his part, Burke later told Whiting, “I think that I learned some very important lessons under your guidance, the most important one being that when you have got anything to do, the time to do it is right now. If you’ve got power, use it and use it fast, and the time to make a decision is as soon as the problem presents itself.”10
The Bureau of Ordnance reclaimed Burke in May 1940 and sent him to the Naval Gun Factory in the Washington Navy Yard as an inspector of antiaircraft and broadside gun mounts. To Burke, this might have seemed like purgatory, but the job was critical to ensuring the success of the U.S. Navy that was now mobilizing for war. There were only 220 ordnance specialists in the entire officer corps, and Burke was one of only 46 who were specialists in design and production. More than 80 inspectors were needed ashore to run ordnance production; train officers; and inspect output in guns, torpedoes, and ammunition. Not even the attack on Pearl Harbor could break the gun factory’s hold on Burke. He submitted a request for sea duty every week for more than a year after the United States had entered the war, only to be told each time that he could not be spared. Finally, on 10 January 1943, with a relief at last found and trained, Commander Burke left for the Pacific.
Burke had become a highly proficient naval officer during his nineteen-year career. A good deal smarter than he liked to let on, he had a tremendous capacity for hard work and overcame severe educational handicaps to rise to the technical peak of his profession as an ordnance specialist. His gunnery officer in the Mugford had noted that Burke “may have been endowed with gifts beyond other men, but that is not important, for he developed the numerous ones he had to a superb degree by continuous persistent application with a firm determination to do anything he did very well.”11 If war had not come in 1941, Burke still would have enjoyed a solid reputation in the service as an officer marked by his superiors as one of the Gun Club’s future leaders. But, combat demanded more than the technical mastery of the interwar years. While Burke’s seniors valued his technical abilities, his subordinates recognized his talent for command. Burke’s engineer in the Mugford had evaluated his captain as follows: “One had to have an intimate knowledge of all line duties, engineering, gunnery, seamanship, navigation, shipbuilding, tactics, communications, up keep, repair, logistics. These are the ingredients for command. He had these plus a little extra: enthusiasm for, trust in, and loyalty to his subordinates.”12
Despite his superb prewar performance in the Mugford, Commander Burke was unprepared for surface combat against the Japanese Imperial Navy and had a year’s worth of combat lessons to learn. Assigned initially as Commander, Destroyer Division 43, he spent much of his first months in the South Pacific on his flagship Waller; he read action reports and talked with veterans of night actions in the bitter campaign for Guadalcanal, which had just ended. Ostensibly assigned as screen commander to Rear Admiral A. S. (“Tip”) Merrill’s cruiser task force, Burke’s four destroyers were often dispersed on a variety of assignments in the Solomon Islands. As a unit, they spent long days on escort duty, where Burke relearned antiair and antisubmarine screening operations as modified by wartime experience. His first combat mission, bombarding the airfield at Vila in Kula Gulf with Merrill’s cruisers on 6–7 March 1943, was a success, but Burke was chagrined that his command had not operated more smoothly because he had not worked through detailed combat procedures in advance with his flag captain. He set to work to create a night surface battle doctrine that would remedy such deficiencies.
By early May, building on the lessons of the Guadalcanal campaign and the views of Destroyer Division (DesDiv) 43’s captains, Burke had developed a new approach to the use of destroyers in a cruiser task force. Standard practice was to station destroyers as a submarine screen at night and require them to scramble into battle formation ahead and astern of the cruisers only after the enemy was sighted. Burke proposed that all destroyers should be routinely stationed ahead of the cruisers, in battle formation, from just after sunset until shortly before sunrise, with permission to engage as soon as an enemy was sighted. Burke wanted his ships used as offensive weapons of opportunity, capitalizing on speed and surprise. He believed that if the destroyers were authorized to attack as soon as the enemy was sighted, they could disrupt or disable a small force or distract a superior one with torpedo salvoes to give the cruisers time to withdraw. The crucial problem was whether task force commanders would delegate the initiative in opening fire.13 Admiral Merrill agreed to take the risk, but Burke was transferred before he could test his tactics in combat.
Burke took command of DesDiv 44 in late May and became Commander, Destroyer Squadron 12, in August. Again, he found his ships assigned to a variety of escort duties and was almost never able to operate them as a unit. By late July, his combat doctrine had further evolved. Burke now envisioned night engagements using two parallel columns of destroyers attacking sequentially. Alerted by radar, these columns would carry out successive torpedo attacks on an unsuspecting enemy by maximizing surprise. Burke was unable to implement his ideas in combat, but, in early August, his Naval Academy classmate Frederick Moosbrugger took Burke’s plan and used it in the battle of Vella Gulf where six U.S. destroyers sank three Japanese destroyers without a loss.14
On 19 October, Burke was ordered as Commander, Destroyer Squadron 23, and rejoined Admiral Merrill’s Task Force 39 in time for the invasion of Bougainville in the Solomons. Merrill agreed to allow Burke’s now-proven tactical concepts to govern his night surface actions. The battle of Empress Augusta Bay on 1–2 November saw Merrill’s four cruisers and Burke’s eight new Fletcher-class destroyers confront four Japanese cruisers and six destroyers sent to disrupt the invasion. Burke’s division of four destroyers stationed ahead of the cruisers opened the action by firing twenty-five torpedoes and then turned away while the cruisers opened fire. Burke then found it impossible to regroup and rejoin the cruisers as the battle turned into a melee. At one point, Burke mistook his other destroyer division for the enemy and fired several salvos at them, all of which missed. Despite its mishaps, the Americans sank two enemy ships and damaged four against one U.S. ship damaged and three Americans dead. The lessons of the battle, Burke observed, were the importance of surprise, the necessity of having a clear battle plan, and the importance of allowing destroyers to operate independently. In particular, “it is necessary that [commanders] realize the value of time. It’s the only commodity which you can never regain.”15
DesRon 23 spent November covering the amphibious forces in Empress Augusta Bay or escorting convoys up to the beachhead. During a brief respite, Burke and the skipper of his flagship Charles Ausburne, Commander L. K. (“Brute”) Reynolds, spotted the painting of a little American Indian boy that a torpedoman was putting on his mount. Intrigued, they asked what it meant; after being told, “It was an American symbol,” Burke asked to use it for the squadron. The Ausburne’s crew had already begun calling themselves “beavers” because of their busy operations schedule. Someone suggested the Indian be named “Little Beaver,” after Red Ryder’s sidekick in the popular cowboy comic strip, and the nickname stuck. DesRon 23 forever after was known as the “Little Beavers.” For Burke, the Colorado farm boy who had ridden horses since he was four, the nickname was a perfect match.
On the afternoon of 24 November, after repairs to a troublesome boiler on the destroyer Spence that had restricted ship (and squadron) speed to thirty knots, Burke reported to Admiral William F. Halsey’s South Pacific headquarters that his ships were proceeding at his preferred nonbattle formation speed of thirty-one knots to a late-evening rendezvous southeast of Bougainville. In response to an ULTRA (code word for radio intelligence) report of a “transportation operation to Buka by destroyers” that night, Halsey’s operations officer, Captain Ray Thurber, recalling Burke’s previously impaired formation speed, prepared an operations order: “Thirty-One Knot Burke get athwart the Buka-Rabaul evacuation line about 35 miles west of Buka. If no enemy contacts by 0300 Love [Local Time], 25th, come south to refuel same place. If enemy contacted you know what to do.” Prepared by prior messages and operations for such an action, Burke found the new orders “ideal . . . they gave us all the information we needed, and how we did the job was entirely up to us.”16
The ensuing battle of Cape Saint George, where DesRon 23’s five destroyers engaged five Japanese destroyers, began at 0141 on 25 November, when radar detected surface contacts 22,000 yards to the east. Burke led his three leading ships at the enemy at twenty-five knots, while the other destroyers stood by in support. Burke’s attack came as almost a complete surprise. Two enemy screen destroyers were hit, and one sank immediately. Accelerating to thirty-three knots, Burke now began a stern chase after the three destroyer transports, and the two supporting destroyers finished off the Japanese ship still afloat. At 0215, on a hunch, Burke ordered a radical course change, thereby avoiding a Japanese torpedo spread. In an hour-long running gun battle, a third enemy destroyer was sunk. Unscathed but low on fuel and ammunition and closing Saint George’s Channel leading to the enemy base at Rabaul on New Britain, Burke reversed course at 0400 and headed for home. The Thanksgiving Day victory made Burke and DesRon 23 famous. Congratulations poured in from Admirals Merrill, Halsey, Chester W. Nimitz, and Ernest J. King and General Douglas MacArthur, while the name of “31-Knot Burke” spread throughout America. A subsequent analysis by the Naval War College described Cape Saint George as “an almost perfect action” and one “that may come to be considered a classic.”17
After a year in the combat zone, Burke did not want to return to shore duty in BuOrd. He hoped to stay in DesRon 23 through the spring, but this was not to be. Burke was initially slated for shore duty at Pearl Harbor to train new destroyer skippers for combat and then a new surface command, possibly one of the new squadrons of 2,200-ton destroyers. His life changed forever as a result of a decision by Admiral King, Commander-in-Chief (CominCh), U.S. Fleet, on 11 March 1944. King directed that “aviator flag officers having surface officers under their command have non-aviator line officers as chiefs of staff.”18 Rear Admiral Marc A. Mitscher, Commander, Carrier Division Three and Fast Carrier Task Force 58, was given a list of four surface line captains, including Burke, from which to choose. Mitscher, a pioneer naval aviator and air combat commander, resented the order and refused to deal with it. Captain Truman Hedding, his existing chief of staff, picked Burke because of his combat record and on the advice of Mitscher’s departing operations officer, Commander C. D. (“Don”) Griffin, who had been Burke’s shipmate in 1932–33.
Burke transferred to Mitscher’s flagship, the carrier Lexington, on 27 March. Mitscher did little to make his new chief of staff feel welcome in his job. Burke wrote home, “I don’t know my job and there are many things I should know I don’t and I feel lost.” With Hedding’s encouragement, Burke threw himself into “learning the bird man’s lingo.” He flew as much as possible and got “lots of training in handling the Fleet.” He struggled to “get into the habit of dealing with forces instead of ships—and planes instead of guns.” It was not until early May 1944, however, that Burke “really cracked the ice” with the aviator admiral as a result of Burke’s short, concise plans, tailored to the needs of those doing the fighting.19 The admiral even began to permit Burke to introduce some innovative air tactics in the plans for coming operations. Burke still found the job tedious and longed to command destroyers again. He responded enthusiastically to a proposal by Commander, Destroyers, Pacific, to form a two-squadron force that Burke could lead on forays in the North Pacific, but the scheme never solidified. He later noted that, during his fifteen-month tour as Mitscher’s chief of staff, “I have never worked so hard in my life, either before or since, and I don’t believe any other person on that staff did either.”20
As Burke proved himself, Mitscher let him handle nearly all details of Task Force 58’s administration, planning, and operations. By the time the carriers began the Marianas campaign in June, the destroyer captain and aviator admiral cemented a relationship based on mutual respect and an aggressive combat spirit. They would stay together until the end of Mitscher’s life. Burke shared the aviators’ frustrations in June when Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, commanding the U.S. forces in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, failed to appreciate the capabilities of the fast carriers to operate west of the Marianas against the Japanese fleet while guarding against an end run by the enemy on the amphibious forces off Saipan and Tinian. When Halsey took tactical command of the fast carriers during the Leyte operation in October, there were new frustrations. Often bypassing Mitscher, Halsey failed to consult him during major strategic turning points during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In preparation for the Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns, Burke co-authored a comprehensive set of instructions on fast carrier operations, the first of its kind, to guide the task force in the coming months. He survived the winter 1945 operations in support of the invasion of Iwo Jima and against the Japanese homeland and the bitter spring campaign for Okinawa, “the longest sustained carrier operation of World War II.” From 18 March until late May, elements of Task Force 58 were “under almost continuous attack.” “The complete course in suiciders, including the postgraduate course” drove Mitscher and Burke from the flagship Bunker Hill on 11 May, when two kamikaze hits killed 352 men, including 13 of Mitscher’s staff. A kamikaze strike forced them off the Enterprise to the Randolph three days later.21
Mitscher found Burke’s work outstanding and twice recommended that his chief of staff be promoted to rear admiral, at least four years ahead of his contemporaries. Both times, Burke objected because “in fairness to a lot of other people and to the Navy I feel that I do not deserve this promotion now” and because “I can’t think of any way the Navy could get any more out of me if I wore two stars.”22 In November 1944, however, Burke was promoted to one-star rank as a commodore, a rank contingent upon his billet as Mitscher’s chief of staff. By 1945, however, Burke was tired of pushing papers. He continued to feel out of place; the disdain of aviators for most surface officers galled him, although he was now convinced that carriers were the future of the Navy and was “resigned to a happy and early retirement.” Before retiring, however, he wanted one more crack at the enemy in his own cruiser command and a postwar stint as Commandant of Midshipmen at the Naval Academy.23
After the Okinawa operation in June 1945, Burke was assigned to Fleet Admiral King’s CominCh staff in Washington as part of newly formed Section F49 that was attempting to counter the kamikaze problem. When Japan surrendered, Burke was at a desk in Washington. The war had changed him and his prospects significantly. In 1941, Burke had been a promising technical officer, a member of the Navy’s conservative brain trust in BuOrd. By 1945, he was one of the war’s most successful surface combat commanders and also one of the very few “black shoes” (surface officers) accepted by the “brown shoes” of naval aviation. When Mitscher became Deputy CNO for Air in August, he asked Burke to be his deputy, but Burke declined. He argued that Mitscher needed a career aviator in the post, and that, even if he took flight training, he would always be resented as a usurper. He promised that he would be available to serve Mitscher when he went back to sea.
It was with that condition that Burke returned to BuOrd in the fall of 1945 as Director of Research and Development. His responsibilities included overseeing guided missile development and service on the military advisory committee to the head of the atomic bomb project. He remained there until early 1946, when Mitscher, now a full admiral, went to sea in command of the U.S. Navy’s first postwar striking fleet. The new job entailed building a force to deploy to the Mediterranean waters in a crisis, and Mitscher and Burke took a revealing three-week tour of Western Europe that summer. In October 1946, Mitscher became commander-in-chief of the Atlantic Fleet, and Commodore Burke again went with him as chief of staff. There, Burke struggled to maintain readiness in the face of a rapidly shrinking, demobilized navy. Admiral Mitscher died in February 1947. By that time, Burke’s service reputation was such that he was regarded by many, including Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, as a potential chief of naval operations.
Arleigh Burke’s prewar technical and wartime tactical accomplishments did not necessarily equip him to take on the political and technical complexities of the emerging Cold War as a strategic planner. His only formal training in strategy and tactics was a Naval War College correspondence course in 1926–29. For the remainder of his career, however, Burke would be assigned to positions of increasing complexity and responsibility in strategic planning and programming. His engineering skills and operational experience, plus his wide array of connections across the Navy’s technical and warfare communities, provided him with a solid foundation on which to build a comprehensive view of how a modern navy could contribute to national strategy. He encouraged his seniors and subordinates, through long working hours, to do the same, and incorporated their ideas and findings into an expanding strategic concept.
Burke’s first planning assignment was a fifteen-month stint in 1947–48 as a member of the General Board, which advised the Secretary of the Navy on matters of high policy. He worked on a range of projects, from studies of the shore establishment and development of force requirements for the first Joint Chiefs of Staff long-range war plan to a project personally originated by Burke that was titled “The National Security and Navy Contributions Thereto.” This last involved a broad-range survey of active and retired flag officers and selected civilian experts, and resulted in a report, substantially drafted by Burke himself, that laid out a comprehensive and pessimistic assessment of the service’s responsibilities and prospects over the next decade, given a powerful continental power, the Soviet Union, and declining U.S. defense budgets. Following his tour with the General Board, Burke spent an enjoyable five months in command of the light cruiser Huntington on cruise to the Mediterranean and South Atlantic. In December 1948, he returned to Washington for his first tour in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OpNav) as director of the Organizational Research and Policy Division (Op-23).
Burke’s tour in Op-23 was arguably the most controversial of his naval career. It brought him face to face with the difficult and exasperating problems involved in the unification of the armed services and the resulting, often bitter competition over budget dollars, roles, mission prerogatives, and strategic concepts that he would fight throughout the remainder of his service in the Navy. Much of his work involved providing the CNO and the high command of the Navy with assessments of the reorganization schemes that resulted in the National Security Act Amendments of 1949, including a far-ranging analysis that strongly rejected the establishment of a national general staff. In the summer and early fall of 1949, however, Op-23 was assigned to support a high-level task force charged with preparing the Navy’s testimony for the House Armed Services Committee hearings into charges that, possibly, there had been illegal conduct in the procurement of the Air Force’s B-36 bomber, as well as testimony on the wider implications of the Truman administration’s budget-constrained defense policy under unification. Working with Admiral Arthur Radford, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, Op-23 coordinated the Navy’s efforts to defend the Navy’s and naval aviation’s places in national defense and also challenged a developing national military strategy dependent on what the Navy believed was a flawed, inadequate, and immoral Air Force plan for an atomic air offensive against seventy Soviet cities to realize initial military objectives.
During the hearings on the B-36 and on Unification and Strategy (the latter came to be known as “The Revolt of the Admirals”), Burke was tarred in the press with accusations that he was running an antiunification, anti-Air Force “secret publicity bureau,” and Op-23 was subjected to a Navy Inspector General investigation ordered by Secretary of the Navy Francis Matthews. The investigation showed no improper conduct, but, that December, after Burke was unanimously approved “below the zone” by the rear admiral selection board for promotion before officers senior to him, Matthews, with the apparent concurrence of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, requested that Burke’s name be removed from the flag list and the name of a more senior officer substituted. It took the intercession of President Harry S Truman, at the behest of his naval aide and Burke classmate, Rear Admiral Robert Dennison, and the new CNO, Admiral Forrest Sherman, to have Burke’s name reinstated.24
In June 1950, Rear Admiral Burke was serving as the Navy secretary of the Defense Research and Development Board, on what would prove to be his last engineering assignment, when the Korean War broke out. Admiral Sherman dispatched him to Tokyo to be his personal troubleshooter as deputy chief of staff to Commander, Naval Forces, Far East. There, Burke oversaw strategic and operational planning for exploitation of the Inchon invasion and the defeat of North Korea. After the Chinese intervention, he helped to plan the evacuation of U.S. forces under the Communist onslaught. Burke also initiated planning for the maritime rearmament of Japan, an effort that instilled in him an understanding of and increasing commitment to the development of maritime allies for the Cold War competition against the Soviet Union and its allies.
A stint as Commander, Cruiser Division Five, on the gun line off Korea in spring 1951 was cut short that July when he was assigned to the first United Nations delegation to the truce talks with the Chinese and North Koreans. The prolonged wrangling over agendas and demarcation lines, while Americans died in bitter battles, angered and frustrated Burke. In addition, he was dismayed to find that the secret Allied negotiating positions were repeatedly being anticipated—he believed as a result of espionage—by the Communists. This face-to-face confrontation made a lasting impression. The truce talks convinced him that “the only thing the Communists pay any attention to is power,” and that sustaining the Cold War and waging and winning limited wars on the Eurasian periphery were as important to the success of U.S. military policy as deterring or fighting a general nuclear war with the Soviet Union.25
Burke returned to Washington in December 1951 to serve as director of the Strategic Plans Division of OpNav. This was one of the most important jobs open to a junior flag officer. Although many occupants of that post found themselves overwhelmed by the paperwork, Burke impressed both seniors and subordinates with the energy and initiative that he devoted to preparation of countless papers for consideration by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, and Navy operational commanders worldwide. He directed the development of a rationale for U.S. aircraft carrier force levels for a prolonged Cold War; pushed the creation of options for naval operations to defeat the Soviet Union in the event of war; directed the preparation of a long-range strategic estimate that could be used to guide naval strategic and operational planning, which identified challenges short of all-out war with the Soviet Union as the greatest security problems facing the United States in the future; and personally drafted the Navy’s critique of the Eisenhower administration’s emerging policy of “massive retaliation” for the CNO in December 1953.26
In April 1954, the CNO, Admiral Robert B. Carney, ordered Burke back to sea as Commander, Cruiser Division Six. His two years in the Pentagon had left him both exhausted and disheartened about the direction of national strategy and the deteriorating state of the peacetime Navy. When a friend from his year at the University of Michigan offered Burke a civilian job, he seriously contemplated leaving the service. He was not sure he was suited to high command and doubted that he could do better than Carney at solving the myriad problems confronting the Navy. “I am not sure I would wish to be CNO, even if it were made available to me” he wrote his old division commander, Red Whiting.27 Carney, on the other hand, saw Burke as an outstanding candidate for further promotion. In January 1955, he put him in command of the Atlantic Fleet Destroyer Force and was prepared to send him to Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean the following year.
Burke’s advancement came a good deal sooner than Admiral Carney expected. Secretary of the Navy Charles Thomas had decided not to reappoint Carney and wanted, as his replacement, a vigorous younger officer with a strong technical background and outstanding leadership skills to reenergize what he saw as a demoralized Navy. When flag officers were polled as to what admirals they felt were best qualified to be CNO, Burke’s name turned up on every list. On 10 May 1955, Thomas offered the CNO position to Rear Admiral Arleigh Burke. Burke was startled and somewhat dismayed by the offer. There were ninety-two active-duty flag officers senior to him on the Navy Register, more than eighty of whom were potential candidates for the post, and he thought that his sudden rise might create bad feeling. In addition, he was not sure if he was suited to the job. He warned Thomas that he had a bad habit of speaking his mind, as during the “Admiral’s Revolt” in 1949, which might land him in trouble, and he did not intend to give up this habit. Finally, he felt that he could not accept the post without Carney’s full support. Carney had doubts about the wisdom of such an accelerated promotion but none about Burke’s abilities, and he offered his warm endorsement. On 17 August 1955, Burke became the fifteenth Chief of Naval Operations.
His first few weeks were not propitious. The new CNO found himself at odds with Secretary of the Navy Thomas, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower over the issue of the draft. Burke was convinced that the draft was the only way for the Navy to meet its personnel goals, and he was unwilling to accept the Eisenhower administration’s recent ruling that it would not be reinstated. He requested a White House meeting, where he presented his case. Eisenhower agreed to reverse his decision, but, after the meeting, he expressly warned Burke never again to put his commander-in-chief in such an embarrassing position. Eisenhower treated Burke with cool formality for many months afterward but eventually came to value the soundness of the new CNO’s counsel, as well as the direct manner in which he was inclined to offer it. By the time Burke was reappointed to a second two-year term in 1957, he had become a valued and influential member of the Eisenhower team.
Burke served as CNO through 1 August 1961, an unprecedented and unmatched three terms and nearly six years in office. During that time, his contributions to the service ranged from the adoption of formal mess dress uniforms for both male and female officers and the renovation of buildings at the Naval Academy, a few rooms at a time until complete funding could be achieved, to sponsoring nuclear power for aircraft carriers and surface combatants, changing the submarine building programs to ensure that all future submarines would be nuclear powered, and starting the Polaris Fleet Ballistic Missile program. In particular, he fulfilled Secretary Thomas’s goal of aggressively pursuing the development and procurement of advanced technology systems, including surface-to-air, air-to-air, and air-to-surface missiles, and advanced jet fighters and attack aircraft, including the F-4 Phantom, A-6 Intruder, and A-5 Vigilante, and he brought the Navy into the computer age with the development and initial procurement of the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) for command and control of air and naval forces.
Much of what Burke accomplished as CNO was done within the context of the most intense competition among the armed services for peacetime defense funds in the nation’s history. The Navy consistently came in second behind the Air Force, which received nearly half of all defense dollars during the Eisenhower years. Debates in the Joint Chiefs of Staff (of which Burke was now a member) over strategic plans for the use of U.S. forces in war, particularly general war with the Soviet Union, and over procurement objectives in support of those plans were blunt and prolonged. More was at stake than just forces and funding; the central issue in the debates was nothing less than the American approach to waging war.
The position taken by Burke and the Navy was fundamentally at odds with that of the Air Force and also differed in many ways from that of the Eisenhower administration. Much of the nation’s defense expenditure during the mid-1950s was being devoted to the problem of general nuclear war between East and West. U.S. war plans, which, through the early 1950s, had envisioned a U.S.–USSR war as a protracted multiphase conflict lasting months or years where naval forces could play an important role, had been changed in 1955–56 and now anticipated a rapid two-phase war, with a short, massively destructive thermonuclear first phase and a second phase of “indeterminate duration.” As CNO, Burke worked hard to ensure that the U.S. Navy was at the forefront of development of the capability for fighting a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union, including nuclear-tipped surface-to-air guided missiles and the ASROC, a rocket-powered nuclear depth charge. His highest priority was antisubmarine warfare. Building on the capabilities of the new and expanding SOSUS (sound surveillance system), a fixed passive low-frequency sonar detection system, the Navy planned to establish surface, maritime patrol aviation, and submarine barriers to prosecute Soviet submarines and deny the enemy navy access to the open oceans. In addition, as Burke wrote to British First Sea Lord Louis Mountbatten, “It will be one of the major tasks of carrier striking forces in the early days of a general war to find and destroy” Soviet “submarine hideaways” in “coves and bays away from any other profitable fixed targets” where he expected the Soviet Union to “deploy all of her operational submarines” and their tenders.28
Burke also believed, however, that the developing nuclear stalemate between the superpowers would lead to a situation where “it is my opinion that not even a mad Russian would think of starting a nuclear war unless he has some chance of profit and there is no chance of profit if his own country is largely destroyed in retaliation. The USSR would have nothing to gain and certainly the free nations would have nothing to gain.”29 Burke had “long felt that the ultimate solution of the Communist problem” would “come from internal strains and tensions which will so change the USSR, evolutionary or revolutionary, that it will cease to be an international threat.” A “last desperate gamble by the dictators to retain their power” leading to global war had to be guarded against, but this could be prevented by maintaining a “deterrent force so carefully dispersed yet strategically concentrated that initiation of war will be Russia’s suicide while the free world can survive with some residuum of people and power.”30
The United States and its allies, Burke said, would be well advised to prepare for a broader set of military contingencies: “What is more apt to occur [than a general war with the Soviet Union] are local wars which both the Free World and the USSR will take great pains to prevent expanding into general war. This means precise delivery of weapons suitable under the circumstances existing. It will mean the quick positive delivery of sufficient force but not in excess of that required for a particular situation. It will mean accepting something less than unconditional surrender.”31
Burke believed that the Navy held the key to both of these strategic challenges. A sea-based nuclear force would be much less vulnerable than the land-based bombers and missiles of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and could achieve the same deterrent effect as the larger SAC force because its weapons would be harder to target and destroy. This would permit the Defense Department to shift resources from the general nuclear war mission into preparations for limited and local conflicts. Further, in the unlikely event that the United States was forced into a nuclear war, the relative invulnerability of sea-based missiles would mean that they could be withheld and used selectively, thus freeing the United States from the “use it or lose it” doomsday scenarios that dominated Air Force nuclear war planning. This strategy of “finite deterrence, controlled retaliation” was the fruit of Burke’s years as a strategic planner and provided the context for many of his most important decisions as CNO.32
Long before “finite deterrence” was fully articulated, Burke took the first steps toward creating the tools to make it possible. Only two months after taking office, in October 1955, he moved to implement aggressively a tasking from the National Security Council and directed the Navy to proceed as rapidly as possible to achieve a sea-based intermediate-range ballistic missile. Burke’s directive ran counter to the advice of many of his top subordinates in OpNav, who argued that such a project was too technically complex and too expensive to be justified. Confident that the technical difficulties could be overcome, he appointed Rear Admiral William F. Raborn to head a Special Projects Office that would work jointly with the Army in developing a liquid-fueled missile to be fired from converted merchant ships. The next summer, while the successful development of ballistic missiles was still far from assured, Burke directed the Navy staff to investigate a “minimal target system, the threat of destruction of which would deter the USSR.” Burke would use the resulting study in the Joint Chiefs of Staff to argue against the escalating requirements of the Air Force for thermonuclear weapons to attack the Soviet Union, as well as for the bombers (and later intercontinental ballistic missiles) to deliver them.33
In the fall of 1956, as a result of progress made in developing solid fuel propulsion and lighter nuclear warheads, the Navy split off its Fleet Ballistic Missile Program, now code-named Polaris, from the Army’s program and looked to development of a submarine-based missile force. Breaking with the long-standing practice of treating naval nuclear forces as threats against only “targets of naval interest,” Burke directed in January 1957 that the developing Polaris system be considered a “national” deterrent system. That November, the Polaris development schedule was accelerated so as to produce a deployed submarine armed with 1,200-mile missiles by 1961. Finally, in early 1958, Burke released a long-range concept for “The Navy of the 1970 Era” that called for forty ballistic missile submarines to serve as the Navy’s deterrent to all-out war, while fifteen attack carriers would be used as the service’s “primary cutting tool” to forestall or fight limited conflicts.
By 1959, Burke clearly was looking to Polaris as a potential replacement for most of SAC’s bomber and missile force but at a much reduced cost for the nation as a whole. A study of alternative targeting, which had the potential to move the nation’s war plans away from a largely preemptive massive first strike effort aimed at Soviet military and civilian targets across the board toward an exclusively retaliatory target list of highest-priority targets only, was under way in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If the “alternative undertaking” was adopted as the nation’s primary strategy in war, finite deterrence might become a reality. The first Polaris submarine, the USS George Washington with its sixteen ballistic missiles, was on track to its first deployment in the fall of 1960, thereby setting the stage for development of a controlled retaliation strategy.
The cost to the Navy of implementing Burke’s alternative to national nuclear strategy, however, was high. The Navy’s annual budget hovered at $11—$13 billion through 1961, far short of the $16–$17 billion that Burke calculated would be needed to produce a modernized U.S. fleet by the 1970s. This meant that many promising programs, including the Triton and Regulus II cruise missiles and the P6M Seamaster long-range jet seaplane, had to be canceled. The necessity of such trade-offs troubled Burke. A 1957 study projected that Navy force levels would fall to 693 ships by 1971, far short of the 927 required for wartime missions, if funds were committed to developing Polaris, making all future-construction submarines nuclear powered, and introducing nuclear power into all future aircraft carriers and some surface combatants.34 Nevertheless, the CNO was determined to press forward with the effort to broaden national military strategy.
Arleigh Burke understood that “we have to work hard to maintain the Navy as a viable instrument of power—power which is needed by the United States, which is understood, and which can grow and change.” He told a fellow admiral, “We have to maintain in ourselves, and imbue our juniors with an ardor to keep our Navy in front. We must pass along a willingness to think hard—to seek new answers—to chance mistakes—and to ‘mix it up’ freely in the forums and activities around us to promote knowledge. From that knowledge we can inspire our country to have faith in us—not because the organization of the military forces is the only place to put our national faith, but because we have discharged our responsibilities in such a manner that we have justified confidence in the effective manner in which we operate.”35
Burke’s persistence in challenging prevailing assumptions about the nature of the threats facing the United States and how best to confront them was based on a philosophy of leadership rooted in Navy traditions and experience. Naval officers achieved the pinnacle of their careers in command at sea, a role which necessarily required a high degree of individual initiative and responsibility. Because of this, the service had evolved a system of decision making more consciously decentralized than might have been workable in the other services. Many of Burke’s initiatives as CNO were intended to encourage preservation of this leadership tradition.
Upon becoming CNO in 1955, he had established “Flag Officers’ Dope,” a monthly classified newsletter to all flag officers in the Navy, to acquaint them with important events and proposals, as well as the rationale behind his decisions and actions. In 1956, he instituted a multimedia “Spirit of the Navy” presentation to provide naval personnel with an understanding of the foundations of the service and its role in the nation’s history. Appreciating the new power of television to reach the general public and improve the Navy’s image, he encouraged service support of such classic television series as Navy Log, Silent Service, and Men of Annapolis. In 1958, he created the Naval Leadership Program, which emphasized the importance of individual responsibility and individual contributions in meeting the many challenges that faced the Navy. In addition, he took steps to encourage increased postgraduate education for all naval officers in the social sciences, as well as in the natural and technical sciences. At the Naval Academy, Burke established a postgraduate scholarship, later bearing his name, that allowed a few highly motivated, excellent midshipmen—following graduation and after one year at sea—to obtain their doctorates at civilian graduate schools.
In 1958, Burke wrote:
We believe in command, not staff.”
We believe we have “real” things to do. The Navy believes in putting a man in a position with a job to do, and let him do it—give him hell if he does not perform—but be a man in his own name. We decentralize and capitalize on the capabilities of our individual people rather than centralize and make automatons of them. This builds that essential pride of service and sense of accomplishment. If it results in a certain amount of cockiness, I am for it. But this is the direction in which we should move.36
Nevertheless, he pointed out, “there has to be a good deal of conformity in any organization or it will go off in all directions.” The challenge was to create a sense of common purpose, without stifling individual drive and initiative. This was not easy in the postwar Navy; rivalry between the different branches of the service was sometimes intense, especially in competition for high command. It was quite natural, Burke noted, for an outstanding naval aviator to “believe that there is no other group in the whole world that does as much for the defense of the United States,” and for submariners committed to nuclear power and the Polaris program to “become a little too enthusiastic sometimes and believe that only they are really needed in a Navy.” Such pride, he observed, was “fine as long as the aim to make the specialty better is based on the larger desire to make the whole Navy stronger. All these elements are essential and they are needed. If any one element of the Navy were to be eliminated the whole Navy would suffer and the enemy could concentrate on the one element which we did not have and win their war, regardless of what the other people could do.”37
He knew that those who had to pick the service’s future leadership “cannot afford the luxury of bias for or against any group of people.” He hoped that “there would come a time” when “it will be possible to have [most Navy commands] commanded by any line officer—aviator, submariner or ordinary surface officer.” He “personally believe[d] also that by the time a man makes Flag Officer he should lose his designation, no matter what it is, submarines, aviation, or anything else, and become a Flag Officer in the broadest sense of the term—one who can command forces.”38
As CNO, Burke had only limited power to move the Navy in the directions he wanted. By the time he took office, the OpNav bureaucracy was large and unwieldy. In 1923, when Burke had received his commission, the Office of the CNO was staffed by 65 line officers plus a handful of staff officers and a few civilians. In 1955, there were more than 630 officer billets in OpNav. The same growth was evident at all levels. The Bureau of Ordnance in Washington had only 26 officers when Burke came to the Explosives Section in 1935; by the 1950s, every bureau employed hundreds of uniformed and civilian personnel. Burke was very much aware that he could not merely command things to happen in Washington. He had to exercise leadership, not just authority. The keys to such leadership were loyalty, communication, and delegation of responsibility.
Burke was part of a generation of naval officers who had been taught that loyalty was the most important of the “essential qualities of a naval officer,” and “loyalty up and loyalty down” epitomized how naval officers should conduct themselves with both subordinates and seniors.39 As CNO, he felt “thwarted by the absence of simple, undistorted communications downward, as well as up.” He was “never fully as knowledgeable of any one subject as I feel I should be” and regretted that “I never seem to have time to get the full story from the action officers.” In order to get things done in the Pentagon, Burke felt that “it is not wise for me to give a direct order. If I do, then I must do my damnedest to make sure that it is carried out.” Instead, “what I try to do is to call the action officers up to my office. This causes some complications right away because I bypass people. The action officer is supposed to tell his people what has happened and tell them what I think should be done. If the action officer is alert and enthusiastic and also believes that it should be done, it will get done, because he will follow through and he will do the checking [emphasis in original].” This was “the main reason why,” that, as CNO, Burke believed he could “influence things but I must get things done by persuasion and sometimes things do not get done which I think should be done.”40
In spite of such constraints and frustrations, Burke was a remarkably effective leader, capable of inspiring and persuading his bureaucracy. A master of the memo, he was able to tweak, cajole, and encourage his subordinates with pointed commentary and teasing good humor. In an era before computers and satellite communications, he kept his fleet commanders informed of what they needed to know by message, “Flag Officers’ Dope,” or a lengthy letter, as appropriate. His top leadership in OpNav (as would future historians) benefited from his memoranda for the record of more than 150 meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Armed Forces Policy Council, and National Security Council that he circulated for information or for action. His occasional rages were legendary but infrequent. For the most part, he motivated his staff by his own example of hard work and devotion to the service and his willingness to share generously the credit for any successes that came his way.
Burke’s approach to leadership and his strategic vision of the importance of naval power in waging the Cold War came together in his efforts to build strong and lasting relationships with the navies of countries allied with the United States. This strategy began to take shape in 1950–51; while serving as the deputy chief of staff to Commander, Naval Forces, Far East, in Japan, he was instrumental in helping to lay the groundwork for the establishment of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. His commitment continued to grow throughout his tour as director of OpNav’s Strategic Plans Division in 1952–54, as he worked to provide friendly naval forces with loans or transfers of ships and equipment under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program. As CNO, he looked to supporting the West German, Japanese, Nationalist Chinese, and many South American navies through ship and equipment assistance. In 1959–60, Burke established the annual UNITAS cruise and at-sea antisubmarine warfare exercises with South American navies. He also built strong personal relationships with, among others, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, the British First Sea Lord and later Chief of the Defence Staff; Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge, chief of the naval forces of the Federal Republic of Germany; Vice Admiral Zenshiro Hoshina of Japan; and Admiral Henri Nomy of the French navy. Believing there was a professional bond and code of conduct among naval officers that transcended nationality, Burke established the Naval Command College at the Naval War College in 1956. The Naval Command College, designed to bring together outstanding and rising senior officers from allied and friendly nations to study naval power, work out problems, and develop bonds of trust and understanding, is among Burke’s most long-lasting accomplishments. It continues to thrive at Newport and to expand navy-to-navy contacts well beyond the end of the Cold War.
Arleigh Burke was the last CNO to command the fleets. As “executive agent” under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Burke directed the Commanders-in-Chief of the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets (CinCLant and CinCPac) and Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Naval Forces, Northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean (CinCNELM) where to move their forces in times of peace, crisis, and war. Also, as CNO, he had direct control over the sensitive submarine reconnaissance operations that gathered intelligence on the Soviet Union and its navy.41
During the Suez Crisis in October-November 1956, when England, France, and Israel attacked Egypt in response to Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, beset by rebellion in Hungary and turmoil in Poland, threatened to send “volunteers” to aid Egypt and rain nuclear rockets on Egypt’s attackers. U.S. policy looked to end the conflict and defuse the potential NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) crisis. When Burke ordered the Sixth Fleet into the Eastern Mediterranean, Fleet Commander Vice Admiral C. R. (“Cat”) Brown inquired of the CNO, “Whose side am I on?” Burke shot back, “Take no guff from anyone.”42 Burke concluded from the crisis that “as usual, only naval forces could take the military action that was required when the situation broke” and that his direct operational control of the fleets maximized their ability to respond quickly.43 The following year, Burke twice moved the Sixth Fleet into the Eastern Mediterranean to deal with crises in Jordan and Turkey. A Washington columnist observed of these operations, “Our armed forces divide the chores. Whenever trouble brews, the navy gets the first assignment—and the Air Force gets the first appropriation.” A delighted CNO passed the newspaper clipping on to the military assistant to the Secretary of Defense with two comments: “We didn’t plant it,” and “It’s true.”44
During 1958, two crises occurring in rapid succession on opposite sides of the globe again demonstrated the value of naval forces that were ready to respond. In May 1958, President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon notified the United States that he might need U.S. help to defend against a possible Syrian invasion. Determined not to be caught unprepared, as were the British by the Suez crisis, Burke dispatched the Sixth Fleet to the Eastern Mediterranean and added two U.S. Marine battalion landing teams to the one already in the area. A coup in Iraq in mid-July led Chamoun to request immediate U.S. support. President Eisenhower’s order to land the U.S. Marines allowed Burke only thirteen hours for implementation, rather than the twenty-four hours that he had said he needed. Nevertheless, the fleet put the first Marines ashore the next morning and sent in reinforcements over the next few days. The lesson of Lebanon, Burke believed, was that the command system worked:
Since the CNO was in command of the Fleets, I was responsible to the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] and to the President for the readiness and movement of the Fleets. I followed President Eisenhower’s and the JCS directives but it was up to me to have the Fleets positioned and ready for action whenever and wherever they were needed.
So I moved the Sixth Fleet and made other necessary preparations including reinforcing it for any emergency—or at least for some of them. Naturally everybody was informed, but I did not have to wait until the end of weeks of debate before getting ready. It was a very flexible command system in which action could be taken very fast. It was a decentralized system.45
The second crisis, in Taiwan Straits, closely followed the operation in Lebanon. In late August 1958, the People’s Republic of China launched a heavy artillery attack against the Nationalist Chinese–held islands of Quemoy and Matsu, less than twelve miles off the coast of mainland China. Burke believed that the Nationalists could defend the islands against a protracted siege if they had American aid and argued strongly that the United States was obligated to help. Despite criticism in Washington that the islands had little strategic importance and their defense might lead to nuclear war, Burke argued that to refuse to defend them against the Communists was intolerable: “If we retreat under fire and retreat under pressure, where does that leave us in the eyes of the rest of the world—and our own eyes?”46 Burke believed that the United States had to be ready to use tactical nuclear weapons if Chinese forces attempted to invade Quemoy, but he did not expect the crisis to go that far. Shifting forces from the Mediterranean and the United States, the CNO moved to reinforce the Seventh Fleet with three attack aircraft carriers, two cruisers, additional destroyers, and more nuclear-strike aircraft. From August until the end of the year American warships surveilled the mainland and escorted Nationalist convoys resupplying the islands. The shelling continued into early October, but no invasion was attempted, and the crisis quietly faded.
Even as Burke was directing these critical operations in the Mediterranean and Western Pacific, events were transpiring in Washington to bring an end to the CNO’s operational control of the nation’s naval forces. Proposals for increased unification, or even merger, of the armed services and creation of an American general staff had been presented by various individuals and organizations throughout the 1950s. In April 1958, President Eisenhower had sent a special message to Congress that called for reorganization of the Defense Department to consolidate the power of the Secretary of Defense and reduce the authority of the civilian and military heads of the individual services. In particular, direct control of operating forces would be transferred from the service chiefs to the President and the Secretary of Defense. The Joint Staff was to be enlarged, and the chairman’s power over it enhanced. The role of the Joint Chiefs was to be redefined, so that they would function as a unit, with their primary responsibility being to act as joint advisers to the Secretary of Defense, rather than as heads of their own services.
Burke acknowledged the need for reform measures to clarify the responsibilities of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense and increase coordination in combined operations. Nevertheless, he had serious reservations about Eisenhower’s plan. Burke was reluctant to see operational command of the U.S. Navy removed from the control of the Chief of Naval Operations. Only naval officers, he believed, were familiar enough with the unique requirements of operations at sea to direct them with the dispatch that was needed in far-flung crisis situations. He was deeply worried about the prospect of a unified military service, in which command of naval forces might fall to an Army or Air Force officer who knew nothing about seafaring. Too many mistakes would be made, which would threaten the success of complex and critical operations. In addition, Burke liked the existing structure of the JCS, which he saw as a forum where diverse views were argued. A microcosm of democracy where balance was maintained, it prevented “singlemindedness, one concept domination, one interest, one strategy, one military posture, one weapon.”47 He worried that expansion of the Joint Staff could eventually lead to creation of a national general staff powerful enough to quash debate over strategy and tactics and allow a move toward complete merger of the armed services. Unable to convince Eisenhower to alter the plan, Burke offered as much support as he could in hearings before Congress, but he also explained his reservations freely enough to provoke a storm of criticism from those who thought he owed the President an unqualified endorsement. Convinced that he would not be reappointed when his term expired, Burke took a certain grim pleasure in riding out the storm. He had no political ambitions and would not mind being fired for defending the Navy, he explained to a friend, and that “gives me a freedom of action which is quite a powerful asset.”48
The Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 became law on 6 August, and its provisions were gradually implemented into 1959. Despite its passage, Burke was able to claim a minor victory in what the act did not do: it did not provide for the de jure or de facto establishment of a national general staff, nor did it lay the groundwork for eventual merger of the armed services. One important battle was lost, but one that Burke had been resigned to losing. The CNO was removed from direct operational control of the fleets, although his office did retain control over planning operations and thereby continued to set operational parameters.
The loss of control over fleet operations created more of a problem for his successors than it did for Burke. After his first difficult year, Burke enjoyed an unusually close relationship with Eisenhower. He was an effective member of the administration’s foreign policy team and worked harmoniously with military commanders, as well as the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As the voice for the Navy in foreign policy problems resulting from civil wars and domestic unrest in Indonesia (1957–58), Cuba (1957–60), and the Congo (1960), he exercised considerable influence on foreign policy decisions. During military preparations for dealing with a potential Soviet and East German closure of Western access to Berlin in 1959, Burke proposed the possibility of naval countermeasures against Soviet maritime choke points in the Norwegian Sea, Baltic Sea, and Mediterranean Sea/Black Sea as a means of applying pressure on the Soviets from areas where the United States had military leverage. This proposal set in motion a plan for maritime contingencies that remained in effect through the unification of Germany in 1990.49
By 1958, even as Burke was raising questions about the Defense Reorganization Act, Eisenhower began sending notes addressed to “Arleigh.” In February 1959, the President presented Burke with a bottle of scotch as congratulations for the launch of a Vanguard satellite. Burke’s public affairs officer, Commander C. R. (“Buck”) Wilhide, drafted a humorous reply, in which an increasingly inebriated Burke expressed his thanks for the gift. The final paragraph ended: “Mush quitnow an fine anodder bodel odish delic iuocius boos.” When Wilhide next checked, he was horrified to find that Burke had signed the letter in a mock drunken scrawl and sent it to the White House. The President, rather than being offended, delightedly thanked Burke for “a much needed chuckle.” Arleigh Burke was the last CNO to have such a personal relationship with a serving President of the United States.50 In 1959, when Burke let it be known that he did not wish to be reappointed for a third term because he feared he might be getting into “a rut” after four years, which “doesn’t help the Navy any,” Eisenhower refused to part with him. He told Burke flat out that it was his duty to accept reappointment. He was an indispensable part of the team.51
Despite the President’s respect for Burke, the Eisenhower administration continued to whittle away at the flexibility of U.S. military strategy, in direct opposition to the CNO’s long-standing positions that diversity of weapon systems and flexibility in strategic planning were critical to national security. The strongest blow was delivered in the summer and fall of 1960 when Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates decided to consolidate nuclear war planning in a Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (JSTPS) located at Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. Gates, as well as the President, regarded the move as a compromise. The Air Force wanted operational control over all strategic nuclear delivery systems, including Polaris, in a combined strategic command dominated by the Air Force. Gates’s decision was designed to address Air Force concerns by eliminating wasteful and dangerous duplication in war planning while stopping short of removing the Polaris from Navy control. Burke found the compromise unacceptable and said so to the President. The proposed JSTPS would put SAC in a position to dominate national war planning. Requirements for nuclear weapons would be based on SAC’s first-strike targeting concepts, excessive criteria for damage to be attained in a war, and conservative operational factors. A firm floor would be established below which strategic forces requirements could not fall. When Eisenhower backed Gates in August, Burke quickly sent some of the Navy’s best officers to Omaha to join the staff and try to guard against SAC’s targeting excesses. Even with these efforts, however, the National Strategic Target List and Single Integrated Operational Plan, produced in the fall of 1960, basically doomed the Navy’s “finite deterrence” concept and second-strike targeting “alternative undertaking” from ever controlling national nuclear strategy and policy. Burke feared that this would severely limit the nation’s future strategic flexibility as ballistic missiles came of age and limited wars proliferated around the Eurasian periphery.
In the fall of 1960, Burke told President Eisenhower that he wanted to retire at the end of his third term as CNO. In early January 1961, before the Kennedy administration came to power, planning commenced for a CNO change of command that summer. Although John F. Kennedy asked Burke if he would consider serving another term, Burke was convinced that this “job was nothing I wanted to continue.”52 He respected the new President, as well as his brilliant, if inexperienced, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his Secretary of the Navy John Connally, but Burke found himself uncomfortable with many of the policy assumptions of the new administration and its style of management. He was irked by the systems analysis approach to developing defense policy and strategy and by the arrogant attitudes of junior officials in the Defense Department, who seemed to feel, he thought, that civilian control of the military meant that any civilian was the superior of any military officer. Kennedy did away with many of the systems that Eisenhower had established for assigning responsibilities and communicating decisions because he found them too confining, but he never clearly specified what would take their place. Burke often found himself at a loss to understand just what the President wanted from him.
Two episodes in the spring of 1961 topped off Burke’s sense of frustration. The first was the administration’s conduct of the planning, execution, and subsequent investigation of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba by CIA-backed and trained Cuban exiles. Burke and the other Joint Chiefs had serious doubts about the military feasibility of the CIA plan but were never given the opportunity to fully assess it, nor were they asked to approve it. Under pressure from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the landing site was switched from a friendly and isolated village on Cuba’s south coast to the Bay of Pigs. The Joint Chiefs did not like the switch, but, even though they reviewed the plan a number of times and commented on specific aspects, they did not object to the President. The Joint Chiefs felt that they had no choice but to do their best to make the plan work because that was what the President appeared to want. Kennedy, on the other hand, seems to have interpreted their silence as approval. The landing took place on 16–17 April 1961. After a last-minute decision to withhold supporting American air strikes in order to improve deniability, Burke, who had not been told of the decision until too late, now knew that the invasion was headed for disaster. To the CNO, it seemed intolerable that the United States was willing to send a fighting force into danger with totally inadequate support or logistical planning. Helpless to avert the debacle, all he could do was pray for the lives of the men doomed by American bungling.53
In part, Burke’s anger over the Bay of Pigs reflected his firm belief that Communist governments could be overthrown by popular uprising if the spark could be successfully lighted. The invasion by Cuban exiles might have worked if the United States had been willing to stand behind them. In the spring of 1961, Burke pushed for such a national commitment to the defense of Laos against Communist pressure from the Pathet Lao. Training the Laotian people to defend themselves would be the first step, but, he argued, the United States must be prepared to intervene with its own forces, including tactical nuclear weapons, if necessary. The military difficulties involved in mounting an American war effort in a distant, landlocked country were enormous, but if the United States were committed to defeating Communism, it must be prepared to take the necessary risks. War is not a game to be dabbled in, Burke warned; it is a deadly serious business. Willingness to use all necessary military force might make the use of any military force unnecessary. Lack of commitment, on the other hand, would only encourage Communist expansion and make ultimate confrontation, or even ultimate defeat, inevitable. Burke’s argument for intervention in Laos was not popular with either the Kennedy administration or the Congress, particularly in the wake of the embarrassing failure in Cuba. As it turned out, no American action was required. A cease-fire put an end to the immediate crisis, but tensions remained unresolved in the long term.
On 22 April, as the Laotian crisis was coming to a head, President Kennedy appointed the Cuban Study Group under General Maxwell Taylor to review the Bay of Pigs operation and make recommendations about how similar mistakes could be avoided in the future. Burke served on this committee as the JCS representative and used the opportunity to press for clarification of the U.S. commitment to intervene in local conflicts. The committee’s report, sent to the President in June, called for restructuring lines of communication within the administration to ensure that the JCS assumed responsibility for planning both military and paramilitary operations. It also recommended establishment of an interagency group to plan and execute the kind of local Cold War operations deemed necessary to counter Communist expansion. Kennedy accepted and implemented many of the committee’s recommendations, perhaps Burke’s last major contribution to the shaping of American national policy.
Relieved as CNO by Admiral George W. Anderson, Burke retired from the U.S. Navy on 1 August 1961. He was tired, “completely frustrated,” and “felt there was nothing I could accomplish.”54 He was concerned that the Kennedy administration would not wage the Cold War as aggressively or as competently as he thought necessary. Moreover, he was convinced that the Navy was facing a long-term crisis in its force levels and that, if ship construction were not increased over the 1961 level of 22 ships a year, the active fleet of 817 ships would decline to 440 within two decades. Nevertheless, after a few months of decompression, he plunged into his new civilian life with the same energy and dedication that he had brought to his naval career. He became a long-term member of several major corporate boards, including Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, Chrysler Corporation, Thiokol Corporation, and Texaco. In 1962, Burke helped to organize the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies. He served as its chairman, counselor, and executive committee member for fifteen years and helped to build it into a major Washington policy analysis institution. Although he had never been a Boy Scout and had no children of his own, Burke also served as president and member of the executive committee of the National Capital Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America from 1962 to 1974, one more expression of his strong personal commitment to building patriotism and citizenship.
Although he continued avidly to follow the fortunes of the Navy and was glad to do whatever he could for the service whenever his help was requested, Burke never interfered in current naval policy or practice and never criticized any of his CNO successors. Great honors continued to come to him for his postretirement service, including the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Gerald Ford in January 1977. In November 1982, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman bestowed on Burke his most signal tribute by naming for him not just one ship but the entire class of the new DDG-51 guided-missile destroyers. Despite increasing infirmity, he and Roberta Burke attended the USS Arleigh Burke’s keel laying in 1986, her launching in 1989, and sea trials and commissioning in 1991. Burke was the only living American ever to see the ship named for him go to sea.
Arleigh Burke “slipped his chain” at Bethesda Naval Hospital from complications of pneumonia at 0530 on New Year’s Day, 1996. His funeral at the Naval Academy chapel on 4 January brought more than two thousand people, including the past and present high commands of the U.S. Navy and the President of the United States to say goodbye. President William Clinton declared, “The Navy all Americans are proud of, the Navy that stood up to fascism and stared down communism and advances our values and freedom today—that Navy is Arleigh Burke’s Navy.”55
During his last years, Burke summed up his long life as follows: “Life has been good to me. I didn’t die young. I wasn’t killed in the war. I did most everything I wanted to do, and some things I didn’t want to do. I had a job I liked and a woman I loved. Couldn’t ask for more than that.”56 Burke was many things during his lifetime—chemical engineer, ordnance design and production specialist, wartime combat commander, staff officer, service chief, architect of national policy, and corporate officer. On his tombstone, however, he requested only one word to sum up his accomplishments: “Sailor.”
Three books have been written about Arleigh Burke. The first two, Ken Jones, Destroyer Squadron Twenty Three (Philadelphia, 1959), and Ken Jones, with Hubert Kelley, Admiral Arleigh (31 Knot) Burke: The Story of a Fighting Sailor (Philadelphia, 1962) are long out of print. Jones, who died before completing the second book, did a great deal of interviewing for both books and also carried on correspondence with Burke’s family and Navy colleagues. Unfortunately, the source data in both books cannot be reconstructed, and there are a number of factual errors in each. The most recent study, E. B. Potter, Admiral Arleigh Burke, A Biography (New York, 1989) was designed as a popular biography; it is thus heavy on World War II and very light (and often inaccurate) on Burke’s postwar career. This author’s essays, “Officer Development in the Interwar Navy: Arleigh Burke—The Making of a Naval Professional, 1919–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 44 (November 1975); 503–26; “Arleigh Albert Burke,” in Robert W. Love, Jr., ed., The Chiefs of Naval Operations (Annapolis, Md., 1980); and “Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, United States Navy,” in Stephen Howarth, ed., Men of War: Great Naval Leaders of World War II (London, 1992), are a concise set of assessments of Burke’s life and career based on interviews; access to Admiral Burke’s papers, which was as complete as possible at the time of writing; and broad research in declassified official and unofficial papers in Navy, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Department files at the Navy’s Operational Archives and the National Archives, and presidential papers at the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy Libraries. The postwar history of the U.S. Navy is in desperate need of solid work. Michael Isenberg’s nine-hundred-page opus, Shield of the Republic: The United States Navy in an Era of Cold War and Violent Peace, 1945–1962 (New York, 1993) is colorful but filled with errors and omissions. The two best surveys are Robert W. Love, Jr., History of the U.S. Navy, vol. 2, 1942–1991 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1992), and George Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890–1990 (Stanford, Calif., 1994), but both are based essentially on secondary sources. Solid studies based on primary sources for Burke’s period are Jeffrey Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945–1950 (Washington, D.C., 1994); Gary Weir, Forged in War, the Naval-Industrial Complex and American Submarine Construction, 1940–1961 (Washington, D.C., 1993); Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Nuclear Navy, 1945–1962 (Chicago, 1974); Thomas C. Hone, Power and Change: The Administrative History of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, 1946–1986 (Washington, D.C., 1989); and this author’s two essays, “The Origins of Overkill, Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” International Security 7 (Spring 1983), 3–71, and “Process: The Realities of Formulating Modern Naval Strategy,” in James Goldrick and John B. Hattendorf, eds., Mahan is Not Enough, the Proceedings of a Conference on the Works of Sir Julian Corbett and Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond (Newport, R.I., 1993), 141–75.
1. See the obituaries of Admiral Burke in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Washington Times, 2 January 1996; the special edition of Surface Warfare Magazine 16 (September-October 1991), commemorating the commissioning of the USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51); and E. B. Potter, Admiral Arleigh Burke, A Biography (New York, 1989), which devotes eleven chapters to Burke’s World War II service and three chapters to his six years as Chief of Naval Operations.
2. This essay is based primarily on the author’s three essays on Burke’s life and career: “Officer Development in the Interwar Navy: Arleigh Burke—The Making of a Naval Professional, 1919–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 44 (November 1975): 503–26; “Arleigh Albert Burke,” in Robert W. Love, Jr., ed., The Chiefs of Naval Operations (Annapolis, Md., 1980), 262–319, 417–29; “Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, United States Navy,” in Stephen Howarth, ed., Men of War: Great Naval Leaders of World War II (London, 1992), 506–27; and on the author’s ongoing research in Admiral Burke’s papers for a full life-and-times biography. Unless otherwise noted, information in the current essay is drawn from the previous essays.
3. Burke to author, January 1973.
4. Burke to Roberta Gorsuch, 17 December 1922, 19 January 1923, 22 January 1923, Arleigh Burke Papers (hereafter cited as Burke Papers), Operational Archives, Naval Historical Center (NHA). Burke’s Naval Academy Official Record in the Naval Academy Archives indicates that he withdrew his request for a Marine commission on 5 February 1923.
5. These figures are derived from data on the Class of 1923 in Department of the Navy, Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, July 1, 1940 (Washington, D.C., 1940), 80–87.
6. Burke to Roberta Gorsuch, at sea, July 1922; 22 January 1923; and 6 February 1923, Burke Papers.
7. U.S. Department of the Navy, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy, for the Fiscal Year 1923 (Washington, D.C., 1923), 596.
8. These statistics are from Bureau of Navigation, Navy Department, Navy Directory, Officers of the United States Navy and Marine Corps, July 1, 1923 (Washington, D.C., 1923).
9. Fitness Report, October 1, 1939–May 9, 1940, by Captain F. E. M. Whiting, Burke Papers.
10. Burke to Whiting, 6 December 1946, Personal File (PF), Burke Papers.
11. Rear Admiral Robert Speck, USN (Ret.), to author, 15 August 1971.
12. Rear Admiral H. H. Mcllhenny, USN (Ret.), to author, 17 August 1971.
13. Commander, Destroyer Division 43, to Commander, Task Force 19, Subject: Employment of Destroyers, Secret, Serial 37, 7 May 1943, PF, Burke Papers.
14. Commander, Destroyer Division 44, to Destroyers of Task Force 31, 22 July 1943, and Battle Plan, 1 August 1943; Commander Rodger Simpson to Burke, 28 August 1943; and Burke to Roberta Burke, 8 August 1943, all in PF, Burke Papers.
15. Burke, narrative, Film 411–1, 31 July 1945, PF, Burke Papers, 13.
16. CinCPac RI Secret Message 240348 November 1943 in U.S. Navy Commander-in-Chief Pacific Intelligence Bulletins (No. 534–No. 655), 1 September-31 December 1943, SRMN-013, Part III, NHA; Burke, Battle of Cape St. George, narrative, Film 411–2, recorded 1 August 1945, Burke Papers, 2.
17. President, Naval War College, to Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet, Serial 4181, 13 January 1944, PF, Burke Papers.
18. Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet, to Commander, Carrier Division Three, Naval Message 111700, March 1944, PF, Burke Papers.
19. Burke to Roberta Burke, 4, 11, and 15 April 1944; and transcript of Burke interview by Stan Smith, 12 July 1965, all in PF, Burke Papers.
20. Burke, Carrier Forces Pacific, Battle of the Philippine Sea, narrative, Film 417, recorded 20 August 1945, PF, Burke Papers, 1–13.
21. Quotations, in order given, are in Commander Task Force 58, Action Report, 14 March to 28 May 1945, Serial 00222, 18 June 1945, NHA; Theodore Taylor, The Magnificent Mitscher (New York, 1954), 279; Burke to Roberta Burke, 19 May 1945, PF, Burke Papers.
22. Burke to Roberta Burke, 18 August 1944; and Burke to Rear Admiral J. L. Kaufmann, 12 August 1944, both in PF, Burke Papers.
23. Burke to Roberta Burke, 9 February 1945, PF, Burke Papers.
24. On the “Admiral’s Revolt” and Burke’s part in it, see Jeffrey Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945–1950 (Washington, D.C., 1994), 165–218.
25. Burke to Captain C. D. Griffin, 8 October 1951, PF, Burke Papers.
26. This paragraph is based on a review of the recently declassified Strategic Plans Division files, NHA.
27. Burke to F. E. M. Whiting (draft), 30 July 1954, and Burke to Whiting, 31 July 1954, PF, Burke Papers.
28. Burke to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Louis Mountbatten, 4 February 1958, Mountbatten Folder, CNO Personal Files (CNOPF), Burke Papers. On Cold War naval strategy, see this author’s “American Naval Strategy in the Era of the Third World War: An Inquiry into the Structure and Process of General War at Sea, 1945–1990,” in N. A. M. Rodger, ed., Naval Power in the Twentieth Century (Annapolis, Md., 1996), 242–54; “The History of World War III, 1945–1990: A Conceptual Framework,” in Robert David Johnson, ed., On Cultural Ground, Essays in International History (Chicago, 1994), 197–234; and “Process: The Realities of Formulating Modern Naval Strategy,” in James Goldrick and John B. Hattendorf, eds., Mahan Is Not Enough, the Proceedings of a Conference on the Works of Sir Julian Corbett and Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond (Newport, R.I., 1993), 141–75.
29. Burke to Mountbatten.
30. Burke to Captain Geoffrey Bennett, RN, 5 March 1957, CNOPF, Burke Papers.
31. Burke to Mountbatten.
32. For a detailed assessment of Burke’s role in the making of nuclear strategy, see this author’s “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” International Security 7 (Spring 1983): 3–71.
33. Vice Admiral R. E. Libby to Op-oo, memorandum: “Proposals Relative to Atomic Operation Concept,” Serial BM00043–57, 1 May 1957, File A16–10, Atomic Warfare Operations, Box 8, Chief of Naval Operations Op-oo Files, NHA.
34. Rear Admiral R. E. Rose to Chief of Naval Operations, memorandum: “Inadequacy of $1.5 Billion Shipbuilding Funds Level,” Serial 0041P03, 13 September 1957, A1(1) unlabeled folder; and Rose to Chief of Naval Operations, memorandum: “Impact of Polaris Program on Shipbuilding and Conversion Program,” Serial 034903B1, 13 December 1957, A-1(1) Shipbuilding and Conversion Programs folder, both in Box 1, Op-oo Files, NHA.
35. Burke to Rear Admiral Walter Schindler, 14 May 1958, CNOPF, Burke Papers.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Henry B. Wilson et al., Naval Leadership with Some Hints to Junior Officers and Others (Annapolis, Md., 1924), 29–35.
40. Burke to Rear Admiral Robert Goldthwaite, 13 October 1960, CNOPF, Burke Papers.
41. Burke to Admiral Arthur Radford, memorandum: “Submarine Patrols,” Op-oo/rw, 7 November 1956; and Chief of Naval Operations to Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, memorandum: “Submarine Reconnaissance Patrols,” Op-332C3/msm, Serial 000104P33, 7 November 1956, both in Ship and Aircraft Movements, folder A4–3, Box 3, Op-oo Files, NHA.
42. CNO to ComSixthFleet, Naval Message 020615, November 1956, cited in Jill M. Hill, “Suez Crisis 1956, Center for Naval Analysis Study CRC 262” (Arlington, Va., 1974), 66–67.
43. Burke to Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge, FGN, 14 November 1956, CNOPF, Burke Papers.
44. Chief of Naval Operations to Military Assistant to Secretary of Defense, memorandum: “Potomac Fever” by Fletcher Knebel, Op-oo Memo 281–57, 26 April 1957, Originators File, CNO Papers, Burke Papers.
45. Arleigh Burke, “The Lebanon Crisis,” in Arnold R. Shapach, ed., Proceedings, U.S. Naval Academy: Naval History Symposium (Annapolis, Md., 1973), 73.
46. Arleigh Burke, “The Important Things Are Intangible,” interview by Robert J. Donovan, ONI Review, November 1958, 517–20, NHA. On Taiwan Straits, see also Joseph F. Bouchard, Command in Crisis, Four Case Studies (New York, 1991), 57–86.
47. Letter, Burke to Schindler.
48. Burke to Captain George H. Miller, 10 July 1958, copy courtesy of the late Rear Admiral Miller.
49. Burke’s Berlin proposals are discussed in Joel J. Sokolsky, Seapower in the Nuclear Age, the United States Navy and NATO, 1949–1980 (Annapolis, Md., 1991), 67; their continuing impact is seen in Deep Sea planning under the quadripartite Live Oak contingency planning effort described by Dr. Gregory Pedlow, SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe) historian, in a series of unpublished papers for the Berlin Crisis Project of the Nuclear History Program in 1991–93. Burke’s role in shaping Eisenhower foreign policy has been most recently discussed in Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy, the Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (New York, 1995), 90–91, 120–27, 148–52, 170; Richard E. Welch, Jr., Response to Revolution, the United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1961 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 49; and Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting Castro, the United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York, 1994), 83,137, 156–59.
50. Burke to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 18 February 1959, Burke folder, name series, Box 3, Ann Whitman File, Eisenhower Papers as President, 1953–1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library; Eisenhower to Burke, 25 February 1959, Eisenhower folder, CNOPF, Burke Papers.
51. The quoted words appear in Burke to Admiral Felix Stump, 27 November 1957, CNOPF, Burke Papers.
52. Arleigh Burke, oral history interview by Joseph E. O’Connor, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
53. On the Bay of Pigs and Burke’s part in it, see Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure, Kennedy, Eisenhower and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs (New York, 1987), 122–69; and Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, Perilous Options, Special Operations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York, 1993), 19–50.
54. Burke, oral history interview.
55. “Remarks by the President at the Funeral Service for Admiral Arleigh Burke,” 4 January 1996, copy in author’s possession.
56. Quoted in “Funeral Program in Memory of Admiral Arleigh Burke,” copy in author’s possession.
