ARMED FORCES: Charlie's Hurricane

(4 of 8)

Launching the Attack. Troubles piled upon troubles. In what appeared to Army eyes as the beginning of Bob Scott's knockout publicity campaign, the magazine Air Force devoted its entire April issue to celebrating SAC's tenth anniversary. Air Enthusiast Arthur Godfrey plugged the magazine on radio and television for a month, generated requests of 160,000 reprints. In its next issue, Air Force virtually wrote off the Army as a combat service; e.g.', "The civil defense mission, particularly, is currently suffering from malnutrition, and this would appear to be a logical place to soak up the manpower being fed into the Army's Reserve program." On Capitol Hill Missouri's Democratic Senator Stuart Symington, onetime (1947-50) Air Force Secretary, began subcommittee hearings aimed at showing that the U.S. needs more, not less, air power. The House of Representatives passed the new military appropriations bill, heavily loaded in favor of the Air Force, almost without quibble. The Army saw its future closing in. It attacked.

One of Metheny's colonels sought out a handful of newsmen known to be sympathetic to the Army, notably the New York Times's able Tony Leviero, himself an Army Reserve officer. The reporters got the classified papers written by the Army planners. The documents blasted at the entire doctrine of atom-armed air power. Said one: "The air-power concept, unless modified, can only lead the U.S. to disaster. It is bigoted and unsound." The Army argued (even as it struggled for more air and atomic power of its own) that the world faces an atomic stalemate on all levels, that future wars will be won with gunpowder by land-massed armies. The Army clutched for the missile. Said a paper: "A general premise is that the use and control of all land-launched missiles is the responsibility of the Army commander at every echelon."

"Brainwashed!" Pulitzer Prizewinner-Leviero knew just what to do with the papers to set off a full-scale controversy. He took them to the Air Force public-relations division, displayed them and asked for "answers." He got his answers. The Air Force was ready with its own documents, slamming back at the Army and downgrading (with arguments along the lines prepared for the Air Force by Harvard Law Professor Walter Barton Leach, an Air Reserve brigadier general and a longtime carrier critic) the Navy's claims that its supercarriers pack a significant strategic-bombing punch. Cried an Air Force spokesman: "The Air Force would be derelict in its duty to the American people if it allowed citizens to be brainwashed by the claims of the other services that they, not the Air Force, are the true path to peace and security."