INVESTIGATIONS: Experts & Explanations

Peering benevolently over the tops of his reading glasses, Georgia's canny Representative Carl Vinson clapped down his gavel and brought the proceedings to order. His Armed Services Committee had met to consider grave charges: that the Air Forces' controversial B-36 bomber, the nation's prime strategic weapon,,was a product of political finagling and outright crooked practices in high places.

Chairman Vinson had promised that there would be no whitewash—and no fishing expeditions either. "I didn't catch the question," Vinson remarked blandly when one witness began to wander. "I was smoking a cigar."

But Vinson was all attention as the airmen began to unroll their case. Essentially, it rested on one hard military fact. When the B-36 was adopted, the airmen insisted, and when its production was later stepped up at the expense of other aircraft, it was because it was the only U.S. weapon in existence which could reach the only possible U.S. enemy. "It is pointless to talk in riddles," declared Air Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg with a blunt disregard for the diplomatic niceties. "The only military threat to the security of the United States and the peace of the world comes from the Soviet Union."

"Teething Troubles." Some airmen readily admitted that they had not always been so sure that the B-36 could meet that threat. One who did was General George Kenney, who ran the Mac Arthur air arm in the Pacific. In 1946, said Kenney, he had been so discouraged by the "teething troubles" of the B-36 that he had recommended cancellation of all further orders. But as B-36 performance began to improve, Kenney continued, his mind gradually changed. "It astonished me," he explained frankly. "The youngsters liked it. They said it handled good up there. I said good, I'll buy it."

Tough, cigar-chomping Lieut. General Curtis LeMay, who succeeded Kenney as head of the Strategic Air Command, went even further. He did not argue that the B-36 was invulnerable to opposition; Bomber LeMay knew only too well that any aircraft can be knocked down. But, said LeMay, "I don't think the question whether it can be shot down enters in—it's whether you can penetrate to and destroy a target with acceptable losses . . . If called on to fight, I'll order out the B-36 crews and be in the first plane myself."

Questions & Answers. Committee members were visibly impressed by that kind of expert testimony. What, then, was the basis for the charges of political skulduggery?