DEFENSE: The Organization Man

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During their half-hour talk, McElroy accepted the President's offer on the single condition that he be allowed to take a leave of absence from (instead of quitting) Procter & Gamble (since P. & G. was willing to give up its small share of defense contracts, there seemed to be no conflict of interests). Before taking over, McElroy characteristically set out on his tour of military establishments. On the evening of Oct. 4 he was at dinner at the Army's Huntsville, Ala. ballistic missile center when Rocket Scientist Wernher Von Braun was called from the table. Von Braun returned, face flushed, with the news that Sputnik I was in outer space. Even then the Secretary-to-be sensed that the Defense job would never quite be the same again.

Faces on the Wall. In his new office McElroy operates under the gaze of his five predecessors, hanging in oil portraits on the pale blue walls. Set apart is the first Defense Secretary, tight-lipped James Forrestal, whose health was broken by the job. Frame by frame are jowly Louis Johnson, whose ham-handed economy, reducing the forces on the insistence of Harry Truman, left the U.S. almost totally unprepared for Korea; austere George Marshall, who had to work mightily to pick up Johnson's pieces; able Robert Abercrombie Lovett, who found that even-handed patience was not nearly enough for the Pentagon; and blunt Charles Erwin Wilson, whose experience remains most meaningful of all to Neil McElroy.

For right or wrong, better or worse, Charlie Wilson was the man most responsible for the situation McElroy found in the U.S. military establishment. Wilson's five-year tenure covered half the life span of the Defense Department, and his heavy thumb left the biggest print. When Wilson came to Washington the Korean war was about over, and his first big job was to convert to the long-haul New Look. He cut manpower, substituted the firepower of increasingly plentiful nuclear weapons, and it is Charlie Wilson's monument that he maintained an effective force-in-being that kept the peace for five rough years.

But Charlie Wilson's New Look lacked forward vision. He had little if any use for the basic research that makes possible the weapons of the future. Why is the grass green and the sky blue? Why do fried potatoes turn brown? What is the molecular secret of life itself? The answers could not shoot and therefore should not be bought with defense dollars. Why would anyone want to go to the moon? An outer-space satellite could not destroy a target and should therefore have a relatively low priority. In 1957, for example, Wilson's research and development cuts took the Army down from $596 million to $327 million, the Navy from $666 million to $505 million ("That's a lotta money to spend on research, young fella," said Wilson to a Navyman) and the Air Force from $1.2 billion to $622 million. Said a top Army general last week: "Research is the goose which lays the golden egg. Wilson wanted the egg, but he didn't want to feed the goose." As a result the Soviet Union, by devoting its resources to feeding the goose, got the golden egg.