Quarterdeck and Bridge

by Thomas J. Cutler

U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE COLLECTION

MANY IMPORTANT FIGURES IN HISTORY ARE EASILY CLASSIFIED AS either heroes or villains. Few but the iconoclastic historian would have difficulty categorizing the likes of George Washington or Adolph Hitler. Some historical entities, however, fall into a different category altogether. The names of these individuals are guaranteed to provoke a reaction, if rarely a predictable one. The mere mention of the name Douglas MacArthur, for example, will almost always bring forth hymns of praise or venomous fulminations but rarely anything in between.

Whether permanently condemned to this purgatorial characterization or merely waiting for the mellowing effects of time, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., at the time of this writing, is one of these individuals. A history-making admiral merely by being the youngest U.S. Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Zumwalt was not content to steer the familiar courses taken by his predecessors. From the very beginning of his tenure as CNO, he was a champion of change who dared to sail into the political mine fields sown by traditionalists and special interest groups and was ever willing to “rock the boat” in an attempt to correct what he perceived as the serious ills of the U.S. Navy during the early 1970s.

Because he was appointed to the Navy’s highest military office over the heads of many more senior admirals, opposition to his policies might have been inevitable, but a more conservative approach on his part would surely have minimized it. By overturning strategic thinking, liberalizing the Navy’s personnel policies and practices, daring to challenge the omnipotence of the Navy’s long-standing nuclear czar, and using unconventional means to attempt many of these changes, Zumwalt was bound to earn either the profound respect or the fervid execration of those bearing witness to all of this revolutionary turmoil. Like MacArthur and other controversial figures before him, “Bud” Zumwalt is rarely the object of indifference, and he is frequently referred to as either the savior or the ruination of the Navy of the 1970s.

Zumwalt was born in San Francisco, California, on 29 November 1920. Both of his parents were medical doctors, and young Bud (the nickname came from a younger sister’s mispronunciation of brother) was determined to follow in their footsteps. He was a good student who played varsity football, traveled with the debating team, and graduated as class valedictorian. But his mother’s struggle with terminal cancer depleted the family money, which made college and medical school impossibilities for Bud. In addition, despite his fine academic record and obvious intelligence, Bud was “kind of wild,” according to his parents. These factors made the U.S. Naval Academy attractive to the Zumwalts because it offered a free college education in a disciplined environment that might settle him down. At the same time, it appealed to Bud because service in the Navy promised adventure and travel. In 1939, Zumwalt left California for Annapolis to embark on an adventure that would take him to a world war, to command of forces in an unpopular limited war, and, ultimately, to the pinnacle of naval leadership.1

At the Naval Academy, although he graduated in the top 5 percent of his class and finished seventh militarily, Zumwalt was unimpressed with the education he received. He referred to the Academy as a “trade school rather than a college” and noted that “the events in the outside world were bound to pale anything that happened within academic walls. Germany invaded Poland early in my plebe year. France fell as that year was ending. . . . And halfway through my third year, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.”² These momentous world events resulted in the early graduation of the class of 1943, and Zumwalt and his classmates went to sea in June 1942.

Assigned to the Pacific theater, Zumwalt saw action in two of the more dramatic engagements of the war: the disastrous battle of Savo Island in the Solomons and the classic victory over the Japanese in Surigao Strait at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines.³ Between battles, he spent the inevitable hours of wartime tedium in reading. He developed an acute interest in the Soviet Union, which he soon concluded was bent on “world hegemony as soon as possible and as brutally as necessary.”⁴ At war’s end, Lieutenant Zumwalt was assigned as prize crew skipper of a captured Japanese gunboat, which he sailed up the Yangtze and Hwangpoo Rivers to Shanghai. He came into contact there with an enclave of White Russian émigrés who had escaped the tyranny of the Soviet regime and whose tales solidified his feelings about the dangers posed by the autocratic and hegemonic Soviet Union. There, too, he met Mouza Coutelais-du-Roche, whose French father had married her Russian mother in pre-Revolution Russia. A brief courtship ensued and culminated in a marriage that was to last more than a half century.5

When Zumwalt returned to the United States with his new wife, he was intent on leaving the Navy to go to medical school and follow in his parents’ footsteps. But, a fateful and unlikely meeting in 1949 with General of the Army George C. Marshall, then in temporary retirement between his tours as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, changed Zumwalt’s mind. Responding to the young naval officer’s lamentations regarding the poor state of the Navy and the nation’s reluctance to prepare adequately for military contingencies, Marshall responded:

You have just defined the kind of conditions that lead to war. I am convinced that we shall soon be in one again. Young man, don’t ever sell the American people short. They have vast reserves of hidden strength to use when the cause is clear. And when the time comes, your country will need dedicated career men like you.⁶

Zumwalt heeded Marshall’s advice. He abandoned his dreams of becoming a doctor and remained in the Navy for the next quarter century. Equally significant, however, was the great statesman’s advice about the American people, which Zumwalt would remember and which would become a source of antagonism between him and another Secretary of State two decades later.

The war predicted by Marshall came in Korea. Zumwalt saw action as navigator in the battleship Wisconsin, where he gleaned another life’s lesson that would forever shape his thinking on the importance of military readiness. Years later, he summed up that lesson while sharing his views as one of the participants in the Chester W. Nimitz Memorial Lectures in National Security Affairs:

As one who participated in the Korean War, I believe that history has failed to record an important lesson of our victory there. The basis of the remarkable resilience of U.S. forces in that war . . . was that we were fortunate enough to have vast reserves of munitions, aircraft, tanks, ships, etc. which had been stockpiled for only five years since the end of World War II. . . . Equally important, we had ample numbers of well-trained World War II veterans. . . . That war, in which we came near to defeat, was turned around quickly because of the peculiar circumstances of reserves and equipment and well-trained personnel.⁷

In the years following the Korean War, Zumwalt enjoyed the reputation of “front-runner,” or “comer” in Navy argot. Many in the Navy saw in him a future admiral as he commanded several ships (including the U.S. Navy’s first guided-missile frigate Dewey), attended both the Naval and National War Colleges, and served two tours in Washington, one as an aide to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Personnel and the other in the Bureau of Naval Personnel (BuPers). While at BuPers, he encountered an unofficial but very real policy that he found “most upsetting.” During his orientation briefing, “the officer I was relieving told me that the routine for assigning minority officers was to send them to dead-end billets so that their promotion beyond middle rank would be unlikely.” Zumwalt “did not follow that prescription,” but admitted that beyond that covert response he could not “think of a way that a junior commander could alter a policy that, evil as it was, was clearly winked at or even encouraged by the captains and admirals he worked for.”8 Years later, as CNO, he would think of a way.

In 1962, fate again intervened to alter the course of Zumwalt’s life. While at the National War College working on a thesis titled “The Problem of the Next Succession in the USSR,” his work came to the attention of Paul H. Nitze, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (ISA), who happened to be visiting the War College when Zumwalt was presenting his work to his peers. Nitze was favorably impressed by what he heard about Zumwalt, particularly from the War College’s commandant, and offered Zumwalt a position in ISA. Despite some resistance from his detailer, Zumwalt accepted the position.

Nitze had been a member of the policy planning staff of the State Department during the Truman administration and was acknowledged as the author of the famous National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC 68), which had been an important component of American policy during the early Cold War years. His writings had appeared in such prestigious journals as Foreign Affairs and his counsel was often sought by government leaders. President John F. Kennedy had considered Nitze for the post of Secretary of Defense but eventually appointed him Secretary of the Navy. When he assumed that position, Nitze took Zumwalt with him to serve as his executive assistant and senior aide.⁹

“I have never made a better decision,” Zumwalt later wrote of his alliance with Nitze. The two men became friends, as well as colleagues, and Zumwalt described his years with the statesman as earning “what I think of as a Ph.D. in political-military affairs.”¹⁰ His association with Nitze gave him insight into the inner workings of the Navy Department, taught him many of the secrets of statecraft and policy making, and allowed him to see the detrimental effects that the Vietnam War was having on the material readiness of the Navy. That association also helped him to earn a promotion to rear admiral in July 1965, two years before his class was technically eligible for promotion to flag rank.

In July 1965, Zumwalt returned to sea as Commander, Cruiser Division 7, but the creation of the Navy’s new Division of Systems Analysis brought him a summons from Secretary Nitze and Chief of Naval Operations David L. McDonald to return to Washington to head the new organization. This cut Zumwalt’s sea tour short by nearly two years.

The challenges facing him in his new task were not insignificant, but he learned a great deal about the state of the postwar Navy and was able to have some influence over the directions that the Navy would take in the future. At the time that he took the helm of the new division in 1966, most of the ships making up the U.S. fleet had been built during World War II. Replacement of these aging veterans was an obvious priority. Because the operational costs of the Vietnam War were consuming ever more of the available money, the task was a difficult one. A report titled “Major Fleet Escort Study,” issued by the Division of Systems Analysis, established the basic characteristics of a class of destroyers to replace the aging workhorses of the fleet and emphasized essentials rather than “frills.” The intent was to meet the requirements of a modern escort ship while keeping the costs down so that a sufficient number of vessels could be built. This intention was diluted during the various stages of design and construction so that, by the time the Spruance-class destroyers emerged, they were considerably more sophisticated than the original concept called for in the study. Consequently, they cost more and fewer could be built than originally intended.

Another study initiated by the division focused on placing surface-to-surface missiles on Navy ships, submarines, and aircraft, which eventually led to development of the Harpoon antiship missile. Zumwalt’s group also participated in the STRAT-X study that led to the Trident submarine with its unique ballistic missile system. Even though he was a surface officer, Zumwalt’s longstanding focus on the Soviet threat made him aware of the need for a strong strategic deterrent, and he crossed intraservice boundaries in his advocacy of both submarines and aircraft carriers.11

Shortly after the Tet offensive in early 1968, Zumwalt was ordered to Vietnam to command the in-country naval forces there. All previous Vietnam naval commanders had been rear admirals, but the assignment was offered with a third star this time. Zumwalt suspected that the promotion was an enticement to ensure that he would take the assignment. He believed that Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas H. Moorer wanted Zumwalt in Vietnam because no admiral had ever gone to a career-enhancing assignment after commanding the naval forces there. Zumwalt later wrote, “This was Moorer’s way of getting rid of me.”¹² Nonetheless, Zumwalt pinned on his three stars—a vice admiral at the age of forty-seven—and went to Vietnam, where, once again, fate would intervene in his favor when his path crossed that of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird.

Zumwalt arrived in Saigon in September 1968 and found that the Navy’s role in Vietnam had stagnated. Earlier coastal surveillance, river patrol, and combined riverine operations had driven the enemy off the major rivers and minimized its littoral operations, but supplies were now coming in from the Cambodian sanctuary and traveling uninhibited along a network of tributary waterways deep into the strategically vital Mekong Delta. To counter this, Zumwalt called together his senior commanders and staff members to work out the details of a new strategic concept that he called SEALORDS (South-East Asia Lake, Ocean, River, and Delta Strategy). The new strategy consolidated the various elements of the Navy’s in-country forces and redeployed them to interdict the flow of enemy supplies, thus placing the naval forces “in harm’s way” and taking the fight to the enemy. This redeployment not only put new pressure on the enemy but had the added effect of injecting new life into the “brown water” forces, whose relegation to mere holding operations had seriously demoralized them. Ironically, as casualties went up, so did morale.13

Perhaps an even more significant contribution by Zumwalt to the war effort, however, came not on the battlefield but from a plan for the extrication of U.S. forces from Vietnam. By the time Zumwalt got to Vietnam, the United States had been actively fighting there for nearly four years, and it was clear that the patience of the American people was wearing thin. Zumwalt had long advocated turning the war over to the South Vietnamese, a process called “Vietnamization” in the argot of the day. He believed that this advocacy was a primary reason why he had been selected to command U.S. naval forces there. Arriving in Saigon in the midst of the 1968 presidential campaign, Zumwalt perceived that he would have three years to turn over the naval war to the Vietnamese if Richard Nixon were elected or one year if his opponent, Hubert Humphrey, won the election.¹⁴ Zumwalt’s plan for Vietnamization, which he called ACTOV (Accelerated Turnover to Vietnam) was well thought out and earned him the respect of General Creighton Abrams, commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam.

ACTOV had a workable timetable that would remove U.S. naval forces from the “front lines” by turning over all American craft and responsibilities to the Vietnamese navy by 30 June 1970. The plan was also reasonable and innovative because it called for a gradual turnover that allowed on-the-job training while maintaining the mission. This was accomplished by first bringing on board one Vietnamese sailor to learn the job of an American counterpart. Once he was sufficiently trained to take over the American sailor’s job, another Vietnamese sailor reported on board and began training to assume another American’s role. This process continued until the entire crew had been replaced from the bottom up. The officer-in-charge was the last to be relieved, at which point the craft itself would be transferred to the Vietnamese navy.¹⁵

While he was commanding naval forces in Vietnam, Zumwalt made a decision that would later bring tragedy to his life. Viet Cong forces had long relied on the heavy foliage along the waterways of the Mekong Delta for camouflage. To counter that advantage, the admiral ordered the employment of chemical defoliants while his son, Lieutenant Elmo Zumwalt III, was serving in Vietnam as part of the brown water navy. Evidence later suggested that those chemicals had been carcinogenic. When the younger Elmo succumbed to cancer, the admiral was faced with the terrible possibility that he might have played a role in the death of his own son.

When the new Secretary of Defense Laird visited Vietnam in February 1969, he was so favorably impressed by his meeting with Zumwalt that, a year later when it was decided that Admiral Moorer should vacate the job of CNO in order to move up to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Laird nominated the young vice admiral for the Navy’s top post. Zumwalt was summoned to Washington for a series of interviews with several Nixon administration officials, during which he was told that he had been chosen as a candidate because Laird and Secretary of the Navy John Chafee wanted a nonaviator as CNO for the first time in nine years and that they wanted someone younger in the office to “bring the Navy into the modern age.”16

As Zumwalt prepared to take the helm, the U.S. Navy was headed for uncertain waters. Because he had been promoted over the heads of thirty-three men more senior to him, the strengths and frailties of human nature were called into play. Some of those he had bypassed would respond as true professionals and accept him as their new leader, but some would allow their personal disappointment to overshadow their dedication to the greater good and become avowed enemies bent upon subverting his success. Although he brought youth and a more dashing image to the office, Zumwalt also brought less experience. Because of his accelerated promotions and unconventional duty assignments, he had left his cruiser division assignment early and had never held a major fleet command. His critics would say this left him unqualified to head the Navy. All of that notwithstanding, on 1 July 1970, in a ceremony at the U.S. Naval Academy, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., was sworn in as the nineteenth Chief of Naval Operations. At age forty-nine, he was the youngest CNO in the history of the U.S. Navy.

During his preappointment interview with Laird in April, Zumwalt had promised to prepare an agenda for change within the first sixty days of his new office. Appropriately dubbing it “Project Sixty,” Zumwalt produced the document that was to serve as his navigational chart for the rest of his tenure and presented it to the Secretaries of the Navy and Defense on 10 September. Project Sixty was unprecedented in that the document served as a blueprint for what the new CNO hoped to achieve while in office.¹⁷ Admiral Worth Bagley later acknowledged its significance when he confided that “there wasn’t one single policy paper I can remember in three-and-a-half years there in which it wasn’t perfectly clear from the Project Sixty work the direction of decision that should be taken.”18

Many new initiatives were proposed in Project Sixty. They included redefinitions of missions and their priorities, early retirement of obsolescing forces to make way for badly needed modern replacements, new emphasis on research and development, and high priority to “people programs” that would enhance recruiting and retention among naval personnel.

Also included in this unusual document was the young admiral’s philosophy regarding institutional change, which generally embraced revolution rather than evolution. His three decades of experience with the U.S. Navy had taught him that traditional methods of change often led to the slow death of an initiative and that nontraditional ideas were usually swallowed up by a slow process of approval made slower by the reluctance of conservative senior commanders. While executive assistant to Nitze, Zumwalt had played a role in producing a set of dramatic recommendations to enhance personnel retention. He was disappointed to find that, once those recommendations were entrusted to the “system” for implementation, “so few of them were put into effect, and so slowly, that the impact to morale and retention that the whole package would have had was lost.”¹⁹ Zumwalt came to believe that ideas going against the grain of tradition could survive only if they were suddenly brought into the open where they could not be ignored.²⁰ This philosophy soon brought unprecedented changes to the Navy but had the corollary effect of creating vehement factions.

Most controversial of Zumwalt’s methods were his so-called “Z-grams.” The majority of these were designed to counter personnel retention problems in the Navy. Responding to the mandate given him by Laird and Chafee to “bring the Navy into the modern age” and keeping to his philosophy that unconventional changes needed unconventional methods of implementation if they were to succeed, Zumwalt used the Z-gram method as a means of simultaneously communicating his changes directly to all personnel in the Navy.

Even though the Navy was itself a volunteer force, it nonetheless indirectly benefitted from national conscription, and the coming end to the draft placed additional emphasis on the need for the Navy to retain its people. Zumwalt created a number of retention study groups to poll the Navy’s personnel to identify the major obstacles to retention. Acting on the advice of these groups, he began issuing a series of numbered Z-grams to counter these obstacles: 10 were issued in August 1970, 23 in September, and 14 in October, most of them inspired by the findings of the retention study groups. The changes brought about included less stringent grooming regulations, the allowing of civilian clothes on board ship for fleet sailors, the creation of Wives Ombudsmen, a more liberal liberty policy for forces afloat, a shiphandling competition for junior officers, an action telephone line to deal with personnel problems, changes in medals and award policies, major changes to the enlisted uniform, and significant modification to quarterdeck watch-standing procedures. Before Zumwalt was finished, 121 Z-grams had been issued; they covered a myriad of topics and caused a virtual revolution in the Navy’s personnel policies.21

The personnel changes wrought by the Z-grams were generally popular among the younger officers and enlisted personnel but less so among more senior personnel. Some senior officers and petty officers felt that their authority had been undermined by the method and the content of the Z-grams. Others lauded the changes but resented the use of so unconventional a method of bringing them about.

The results, however, were indisputable. Never in the history of the U.S. Navy had such sweeping changes taken place. Gone were many of the so-called “chicken regs” (rules that seemed to have no purpose other than creating rigid discipline for its own sake) that had long been a point of contention among naval personnel. Suddenly, the family and the individual had taken on new significance. During Zumwalt’s first year in office, first-term reenlistments rose from 10 percent to 17 percent. In the spring of 1971, a polling of the fleet showed that 86 percent of enlisted personnel and 80 percent of officers approved of the Z-grams and what they were accomplishing. Even among captains, commanders, chief warrant officers, and chief petty officers—the more senior personnel—the approval rating was 77 percent and among the most junior officers, 93 percent.²² Zumwalt had succeeded in transforming the Navy from its image of a “humorless, tradition-bound, starchy institution.”²³ In fact, he had been so successful that his efforts captured the attention of the national media, put him on the cover of Time magazine, landed him an interview in Playboy, and made him the most famous admiral since Halsey and Nimitz had captured the attention of the American public during World War II.

Remembering—and abhorring—the prevailing attitudes regarding minority officers that he had encountered in the Bureau of Personnel years before and recognizing that the U.S. Navy was still something less than an “equal opportunity employer,” Admiral Zumwalt took aim at the problem with Z-gram No. 66, titled “Equal Opportunity in the Navy.” Z-66, he said, “told the world that when it came to racial affairs Secretary [of the Navy] Chafee and I meant business.”²⁴ It began by acknowledging that the Navy did indeed have problems in this area and went on to establish a number of measures to alleviate the situation. Among the changes mandated was the establishment of a special assistant for minority affairs at every base, on every ship, and in all aircraft squadrons. Each of these special assistants was to have direct access to the commanding officer and would be consulted on all matters involving minority personnel. Z-66 also directed Navy exchanges, commissaries, and barber shops to carry products and provide services frequently requested by minority personnel and decreed that a CNO’s special assistant for minority affairs would be visiting major naval activities to identify problems. This groundbreaking Z-gram concluded with the words, “There is no black Navy, no white Navy—just one Navy—the United States Navy.”25

Taking on the Navy’s archaic but traditional regulations and attempting to rectify racial policies and practices would seem more than enough to incite a revolution and foment a counterrebellion, but Zumwalt tossed more fuel on the fire (or oil on the water, depending on the interpretation) when he issued Z-116. This Z-gram prepared the siege against another old bastion of naval tradition and parochialism by liberalizing naval policy toward women personnel. It opened up many areas previously barred to women by calling for their assignment to “the full spectrum of challenging billets, including those of briefers, aides, detailers, placement/rating control officers, attachés, service college faculty members, executive assistants, special assistants to CNO, military assistance advisory groups/missions, senior enlisted advisors, etc.” Z-116 also provided opportunities for women to become chaplains and civil engineers and to command shore installations, thus creating paths that would ultimately lead to flag rank. In addition, it created a pilot program that placed women on board the hospital ship USS Sanctuary not just as nurses but as part of the ship’s company and laid the groundwork for other policy changes that would come later, with the “ultimate goal” of “assignment of women to ships at sea.”²⁶

Reaction to this radical new policy centered on the Sanctuary program and evoked a wide range of dire predictions that included talk of seagoing orgies and the ultimate demise of the Navy family. In his memoirs, Zumwalt records President Nixon’s reaction: “I guess I can put up with this race thing, but don’t push so hard for women.”²⁷

While Admiral Zumwalt was CNO, the roles of women in the Navy indeed changed. The first female chaplain was commissioned; half a dozen women earned their wings as aviators; and, for the first time in American naval history, a woman pinned on the stars of an admiral. More significantly, a new course had been set, one that would not change after Zumwalt was gone. Since Z-116, progress has not always been smooth, but women have made great headway in the Navy and taken on more and more of the roles that for centuries had been the exclusive domain of men.

Ironically, at the same time that a CNO was finally attempting much needed race reforms, the lid blew off. Three racial incidents occurred on fleet units that eventually captured the attention of the national media and brought Zumwalt’s enemies out in force. Black sailors staged protests that, to alarmists, bordered on mutiny in the carrier Kitty Hawk on 12 October 1972, in the oiler Hassayampa on 16 October, and in the carrier Constellation on 3 November. The first two incidents, although indicative of underlying racial problems in the fleet, were relatively minor in nature and, more significantly, were handled by the effective employment of normal naval disciplinary measures. The Constellation affair, however, was much more dramatic; 144 protestors, both black and white, staged a media-covered confrontation that included clenched-fist salutes and utter defiance of naval authority. Zumwal’s conservative opponents pointed to these outbreaks as proof that the iconoclastic CNO’s personnel reforms had eroded naval discipline and fostered anarchy in the fleet. President Nixon was outraged by the apparent breakdown in discipline and irrationally called for the immediate dishonorable discharge of all offenders, a reaction that was blatantly illegal if not patently hysterical. Several retired admirals convinced their conservative allies in Congress to call for an investigation (a maneuver that was reported in Time magazine’s 27 November issue as “admirals . . . show[ing] their own lack of discipline by campaigning for Zumwalt’s ouster”).28

A combination of Zumwalt’s support among liberals in Congress and the emergence of the Watergate crisis prevented any serious damage to Zumwalt and his policies. He emerged from the congressional hearings relatively unscathed, and the resulting investigative report, although frustratingly obtuse regarding the real issues at hand, received little attention.

It is difficult to assess the significance of Admiral Zumwalt’s personnel policies. He was CNO at a time when all of American society was in turmoil, when such terms as “countercultural revolution” were commonplace, when racial tensions and dissensions over the Vietnam War had skewed perceptions and erected barriers to reasoned debate. In truth, much of what he was attempting to achieve in the Navy was mirrored in the other armed services but with much less flourish and without a personalized target such as he had become. It is quite probable, but impossible to be certain, that such incidents as those on board the Kitty Hawk, Hassayampa, and Constellation would have been more widespread and far worse without the implementation of his racial policies. Indeed, Zumwalt’s unusual measures might well have served as a safety valve rather than an igniter. It is equally difficult to discern what the effects might have been had he not come along at a time when chicken regs and a countercultural society were on a collision course. His opponents see him as the instigator of permissiveness and the destroyer of discipline within the Navy, whereas his advocates see him as the “man of the hour” and the “savior of the Navy.” Both views are certainly arguable, and the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

At the same time that he was struggling to reform naval personnel practices, Zumwalt was also trying to both modernize the fleet and revolutionize the Navy’s strategy. This aspect of his tenure as CNO is often overlooked or, at least, overshadowed by the sensationalism associated with his personnel policies.

The Navy’s ships had aged significantly during the Vietnam War, and operational requirements consumed greater and greater proportions of a relatively fixed budget. When Zumwalt became CNO, the problem of replacing World War II vintage ships was not yet solved. He had begun work on the problem while head of the Division of Systems Analysis and so knew the direction that he wanted to steer the Navy when he assumed its top uniformed position. Characteristically, Zumwalt took an innovative—heretical, some would say—approach to modernizing the fleet. First, he continued the work he had begun on surface-to-surface missile development to increase the offensive punch of U.S. warships and to match Soviet surface ship capabilities. Second, and far more controversial, he moved to alter the types of ships that would compose the fleet of the 1980s and beyond. Such changes in ship types and weapons systems would alter the course of American naval strategic thinking in a profound way.

The U.S. Navy had placed a heavy emphasis on aircraft carriers and submarines since the end of World War II. This was not hard to understand considering the vital roles each had played in the victory at sea. Zumwalt believed, however, that this postwar emphasis had placed too much importance on power projection, the main function of carriers and submarines, to the detriment of sea control. Zumwalt urged that both of these components of sea power were important, particularly in light of the growth of the Soviet navy that was then under way.

Zumwalt also believed that the reliance on sophisticated and highly specialized elements of naval warfare was contributing to “unionization” among officers and sailors and forcing them to compartmentalize themselves within a particular community if they were to have a successful career. This narrowed their focus and parochialized their operational vision in a way that could prove detrimental to strategic thinking.

To correct this strategic shortcoming and to replenish the fleet with appropriate replacement units in a time of tight budgetary constraints, Zumwalt devised what he called a “high-low mix” of fleet units. Defining the attack carriers and ballistic missile submarines as high-end ships (“high-performance ships and weapons systems that were also high cost”), he called for the addition of less expensive low-end vessels (“moderate-cost, moderate-performance ships and systems that could be turned out in relatively large numbers”) for the sea control mission. The idea was to build a greater number of less expensive ships in lieu of fewer more sophisticated—and therefore more costly—ones. Zumwalt envisioned that “in most cases seven or five or even three ships of moderate capability would contribute far more to the success of this mission than one supership.” To achieve this, he proposed decommissioning many of the older ships to free up funds and allowing the fleet to function for a time with less than the optimal number of units. Zumwalt deemed such a calculated risk necessary for the ultimate achievement of his long-term goals.29

A shift in strategic emphasis as great as Zumwalt proposed was bound to encounter opposition. The aviation admirals were generally opposed, and it was no surprise when the Navy’s nuclear czar, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, mounted the ramparts to thwart this perceived siege on his domain. In retrospect, this opposition seems largely unwarranted because the new concept did not call for an elimination of the high end, but merely advocated a sharing of resources to expand the Navy’s mission capabilities. Indeed, an impartial examination of the record reveals that Zumwalt actively and successfully campaigned for the fourth U.S. nuclear carrier, the USS Carl Vinson and was a strong advocate of the Trident missile and submarine system that eventually replaced the older Polaris and Poseidon systems.³⁰

A less parochial view opposed the high-low mix because it was believed that the low-end ships would lack the flexibility needed to respond in a modern multithreat environment. This argument, although certainly not lacking in validity, failed to take into account the necessity for cost reduction brought about by the political and fiscal effects of the Vietnam War.

In the end, Zumwalt’s high-low concept achieved mixed results. It succeeded in acquiring the patrol frigate, a moderately priced and moderately capable escort ship that emerged as the Oliver Hazard Perry class, later described by Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr., as one of the most successful shipbuilding programs in history.³¹ Zumwalt failed to acquire his cherished “sea control ship,” an envisioned seventeen-thousand-ton, twenty-five knot vessel capable of carrying fourteen helicopters and three VSTOL (vertical and short takeoff and landing) aircraft over vast expanses of the ocean. Although missile-carrying patrol hydrofoil vessels were built and deployed, the concept was eventually abandoned because of their limited sea-keeping abilities. The “surface effect ship,” a five-thousand-ton vessel that could skim above the ocean surface at eighty to one hundred knots, never saw fruition in the original concept but eventually led to the building, on a much smaller scale, of air-cushioned landing craft for the Marine Corps.³²

Growing out of the high-low mix and Zumwalt’s strategic vision were several other tactical, technological, and organizational innovations that improved fleet readiness and mission preparedness. During his watch as CNO, the mission capability of aircraft carriers was expanded, Marine Corps air squadrons were incorporated into carrier air wings, helicopters were effectively placed on many surface ships, the CAPTOR mine (a deep-moored sensing device that detects an enemy submarine and fires a Mk 46 torpedo) was developed and deployed, attack submarines were employed as task group escorts, secure communications capability among fleet units was dramatically improved, antiship missile defense capabilities were greatly enhanced, and research and development budgets (particularly in antisubmarine warfare) were markedly increased.33

One of Admiral Zumwalt’s most significant achievements was in the development of surface-to-surface missile (SSM) capability. When he first was appointed CNO, the U.S. Navy was significantly “outgunned” by the Soviets’ vastly developed SSM capability, both short and long range. Development in this area not only would match an already existing Soviet threat but would reduce the dependence on carrier-based aircraft. In the years immediately following World War II, the Navy had embarked on SSM development when it began work on the Regulus missile, but it had abandoned the program when planners decided that the effectiveness of carrier aircraft had obviated the need for SSMs. Zumwalt called this “the single worst decision about weapons [the Navy] made during my years of service.”³⁴ Building on the work that he had started while heading the Division of Systems Analysis, Zumwalt initiated a number of programs leading to the development of the sixty-mile Harpoon and one thousand-mile Tomahawk cruise missiles. These missiles eventually became major components in the armament of most of the surface units in the U.S. Navy. Proof of their importance was reflected in a 1988 letter to retired Admiral Zumwalt from Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that began:

Dear Bud,

I just returned from a trip to the Persian Gulf where I had the opportunity to visit the Commander Joint Task Force Middle East, as well as some of the ships that took part in the at-sea engagement against Iranian naval forces on 18 April. . . . As I reflected on the events of the eighteenth, I couldn’t help but recall the battle you waged in gaining acceptance for the HARPOON missile. Every HARPOON fired that day performed exactly as advertised. Without it we would not have been nearly as successful as we were. I just wanted you to know, Bud, that the system you personally championed had such a profound effect on our engagement with the Iranians, and will no doubt serve us equally well for a long period into the future. The Navy and the Nation are most grateful for your success with the HARPOON.³⁵

The reference to serving well in the future was upheld during the war with Iraq just years later, when cruise missiles were employed in significant quantities against the forces of Saddam Hussein.

As Zumwalt’s tour as CNO entered its last year, he found himself more and more at odds with the power foci of the administration. Nixon himself was less than pleased with his CNO and was pressuring the Secretary of Defense either to control Zumwalt or to dismiss him. Although Zumwalt had emerged from the Constellation-inspired Congressional hearings relatively unscathed, Nixon had been outraged by the affair and apparently held his CNO at least partially responsible. More significant was the enmity that had developed between Zumwalt and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, one of Nixon’s closest advisers. Zumwalt later revealed that Kissinger had privately told him that “the West was a civilization which had passed its historic high point and was on the wane, and that it was facing in the Soviet empire the rising empire of the next century, and his [Kissinger’s] job was to preside over the smooth transition into inferiority.”36 This was very different from the philosophy imparted by George Marshall so many years before, and the rift between Kissinger and Zumwalt grew until it was impossible to breach.

Years later, during a lecture at the Institute of International Studies in Berkeley, California, retired Admiral Zumwalt told his audience, “I have a wonderful list of friends and a wonderful list of enemies, and am very proud of both lists.”³⁷ Included in the latter list was Admiral Rickover, head of the Navy’s nuclear power program for decades. Zumwalt believed that Rickover held too much power and influence over the Navy and that his views were much too parochial. The two admirals locked horns on several occasions, most significantly during the 1974 congressional appropriation hearings. Zumwalt had believed, in 1970, that he and Rickover reached an agreement under which Zumwalt would support the accelerated purchase of submarines for three years while new surface vessels were being designed and tested and that Rickover would not oppose the development of such vessels—the patrol frigates, hydrofoils, small carriers, and other vessels of the low end of Zumwalt’s high-low mix. When it came time for funding the small carrier, a key part of Zumwalt’s plan, in the 1974 budget, Rickover mustered support in Congress against the program that ultimately killed it.

Zumwalt’s continued support for low-end ships earned him not only an enemy in Rickover himself but also enemies among leaders in the military-industrial complex who depended on Rickover’s programs to keep them supplied with multimillion-dollar shipbuilding and weapons procurement contracts.

Zumwalt’s enemies eventually were numerous and powerful enough that, had he not been nearing the end of his tour as CNO, it is quite likely that he would have been fired. Secretary of Defense James M. Schlesinger later told Zumwalt that, three days before the CNO change of command, he had been ordered to fire Zumwalt.³⁸ Schlesinger ignored the order and, on 29 June 1974, the tumultuous tenure of the Navy’s nineteenth Chief of Naval Operations came to a close in a ceremony at the U.S. Naval Academy. At the end of the ceremony, at Admiral Zumwalt’s request, the Navy band played “The Impossible Dream.” Retirement did not bring an end to the dreams of Zumwalt. He continued to address various groups on topics of defense and foreign affairs and, at one time, sought a seat in the U.S. Senate from Virginia.

In an interview some years later, former Secretary of the Navy and then Senator John Warner described Zumwalt as having the courage to “raise his head above the ground” even at the risk of getting “it shot off.”39 There can be no doubt that Elmo Zumwalt did not hesitate to go “in harm’s way” in order to implement what he perceived as badly needed changes. When faced with congressional hearings on the Constellation affair—a time when his job was clearly at stake—Zumwalt “considered the tumult not as a warning to take a defensive posture, but as an opportunity to nail equal treatment for minorities and women so firmly into the Navy that anyone would have trouble removing it.”⁴⁰ Zumwalt was clearly an innovative thinker and a risk taker. His methods were unquestionably radical and provocative, but they also achieved what had not been done before. Zumwalt’s contention that traditional methods were prone to failure when revolutionary changes were needed makes sense, as viewed historically. The evaluation proffered in a 1993 study conducted by the Center for Naval Analyses that “the Zumwalt strategic revolution would have achieved greater success had Admiral Zumwalt not believed it necessary to carry out the personnel revolution simultaneously” is intriguing and probably true.⁴¹ Yet, Zumwalt did believe that his personnel revolution was necessary, even to the detriment of his strategic initiatives. Looking back, he later wrote:

I was certain to turn over to my successor a navy in which all kinds of important business was unfinished: strategic analysis, ship construction, weapons development, relations with other parts of the government, and so forth, ad infinitum. But if it was within my power, I was determined to turn over to him a navy that had learned to treat its men and women, enlisted and commissioned, in a manner that recognized that, regardless of the peculiar demands military life made upon them, they were citizens of a free country in the last quarter of the twentieth century.⁴²

In hindsight, it appears that Zumwalt’s vision had been properly aimed. The strategic situation that he and the U.S. Navy faced in the early 1970s has changed tremendously, but the most important element of the Navy remains its people.

NOTES

1. Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., On Watch: A Memoir (New York, 1976), 23–24; Elmo Zumwalt, Jr., and Lieutenant Elmo Zumwalt III, with John Pekkanen, My Father, My Son (New York, 1986), 7–10.

2. Zumwalt, On Watch, 24.

3. Norman Friedman, “Elmo Russell Zumwalt, Jr.,” in Robert William Love, Jr., ed., The Chiefs of Naval Operations (Annapolis, Md., 1980), 365.

4. Zumwalt, On Watch, 25; Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., interview by author, August 1995.

5. Zumwalt, On Watch, 3–22.

6. Quoted in Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., A Global Military-Political Perspective: Past and Future (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), 5.

7. Ibid., 6.

8. Zumwalt, On Watch, 198.

9. Andy Kerr, A Journey amongst the Good and the Great (Annapolis, Md., 1987), 163–63.

10. Zumwalt, On Watch, 29.

11. Friedman, “Elmo Zumwalt, Jr.,” 366–67.

12. Zumwalt and Zumwalt, My Father, My Son, 41.

13. Thomas J. Cutler, Brown Water, Black Berets: Coastal and Riverine Warfare in Vietnam (Annapolis, Md., 1988), 285–88.

14. Zumwalt, Global Military-Political Perspective, 9.

15. Cutler, Brown Water, Black Berets, 344–45.

16. Zumwalt, On Watch, 43–46.

17. Jeffrey I. Sands, On His Watch: Admiral Zumwalt’s Efforts to Institutionalize Strategic Change (Alexandria, Va., 1993), 19.

18. Worth Bagley, Reminiscences by Staff Officers of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr. (Annapolis, Md.), U.S. Naval Institute Oral History Collection, 241.

19. Zumwalt, On Watch, 170.

20. Zumwalt, interview by author.

21. The Z-grams and their subjects are listed in Zumwalt, On Watch, 530–32.

22. Ibid., 248.

23. Ibid., 178.

24. Ibid., 204.

25. Ibid., 204.

26. Ibid., 262–65.

27. Ibid., 265.

28. Stephen Howarth, To the Shining Sea (New York, 1991), 526.

29. Zumwalt, On Watch, 71–74.

30. George Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890–1990 (Stanford, Calif., 1994), 410.

31. John F. Lehman, Jr., Command of the Seas (New York, 1988), 392.

32. Sands, On His Watch, 108–09.

33. Ibid., 93–109.

34. Zumwalt, On Watch, 81.

35. William J. Crowe, Jr., to Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., 10 May 1988, letter in Zumwalt’s possession.

36. Zumwalt, Global Military-Political Perspective, 27.

37. Ibid., 25.

38. Zumwalt, On Watch, 511.

39. Quoted in Sands, On His Watch, 21.

40. Zumwalt, On Watch, 248.

41. Quoted in Sands, On His Watch, 9.

42. Zumwalt, On Watch, 247–48.

FURTHER READING

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