Defense: The Management Team

(See Cover)

Without debate or dissenting vote, the Senate last week confirmed General J. P. McConnell, 57, as Air Force Chief of Staff and as the newest member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The event was widely unheralded. Yet it marked the end of an era in U.S. military leadership. For McConnell succeeds none other than Curtis LeMay, last of the great combat commanders to serve on the Joint Chiefs.

Omar Bradley, Matt Ridgwayand Max Taylor, Nate Twining and Curt LeMay, Arthur Radford and Arleigh Burke—the very names still conjure up images of flaming cannon, of contrails across enemy skies, of destroyers heading into battle at flank speed. It detracts nothing from their successors to say that the names of "Bus" Wheeler, "Johnny" Johnson, "Dave" McDonald, "J. P." McConnell and "Wally" Greene are hardly household words.

The new Joint Chiefs seem ideally suited to the requirements of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who personally selected each. No Defense Secretary in history has ever asserted Pentagon control like McNamara. For his top military advisers, he wants planners and thinkers, not heroes. He wants team men, not gladiators. The men he has chosen differ widely, of course, in appearance, personality and background. But they have much in common. All are experienced and skilled staff officers, as much or more at home behind a desk as in the field. All may be expected to state their policy views candidly—and then to support, at least in public, any decision made by McNamara and the President. All can cooperate in the overlapping area between military and political policy without breaking a lot of crockery.

The present J.C.S. lineup:

> Chairman Earle Gilmore Wheeler, 57, is a handsome, strapping West Pointer who, with the exception of five months in a World War II combat area, has served his entire Army career at desk jobs far removed from battlefields. A onetime math instructor at the academy, Wheeler still doodles with algebraic equations during J.C.S. sessions. As director of the Joint Chiefs' staff, he was assigned in 1960 to brief Presidential Candidate John Kennedy on military developments; his performance led to his appointment by Kennedy as Army Chief of Staff in 1962. In that job, he won McNamara's favor by his outspoken advocacy of the nuclear test-ban treaty, trekking to Capitol Hill to rebut point by point the doubts expressed by the Air Force's LeMay. A longtime protege of General Maxwell Taylor's, Wheeler succeeded Taylor as J.C.S. Chairman in 1964.