ARMED FORCES: Slim Jim (Contd.)

As Lieut. General James Gavin concluded his closed-door testimony before the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee one day last week, Chairman Lyndon Johnson scribbled out a press statement summarizing the testimony and handed it to Gavin. Old Soldier Gavin hurriedly looked it over and okayed it. With that began Round Two of the extraordinary story of Jim Gavin's proffered resignation from the U.S. Army (TIME, Jan. 13).

In the statement. Paratrooper Gavin, the two-fisted boss of the Army's Research and Development section, bluntly revealed his "intuitive" feeling that Army Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor had reneged on an agreement to make him head of the U.S. Continental Army Command (with a fourth star for his shoulder). Furthermore, said Gavin, the Army had tried to transfer him to command of the U.S. Seventh Army in Europe (the same three stars), a step that was aimed at halting his ringing insistence that the Army's role was being whittled down.

"Genial Manager." It was Lyndon Johnson's swift pencil that complicated the Gavin mess, since Gavin's fundamental reason for quitting—his failure to arouse sympathy for the Army's cause—was stuffed in at the end of the press statement. To make the mess messier, Army Secretary Wilber Brucker next day called a press conference to explain how it all started. Before Christmas, when Gavin sent word around that he planned to retire, Brucker called him into his office. "I urged General Gavin to be patient," explained Brucker in the tones of a genial office manager referring to his ambitious messenger boy. He appealed to Gavin to accept the Seventh Army job and a possible promotion a year later. Gavin refused.

The two bargained on, as Secretary Brucker told it, with West Pointer Gavin holding out for the Continental Army Command assignment, an anguished Brucker pleading that Gavin should at least stay on in his present job. At length Gavin promised to "reconsider," for despite his personal ambitions, he still felt strongly for the Army's cause.

Passionate Loser. It dawned on Lyndon Johnson's subcommittee that Johnson's statements plus Brucker's account of bargaining with one of his generals over a duty assignment had indeed done an injustice to the record of a distinguished soldier. Back to Capitol Hill next day went Jim Gavin for another run-through before the committee and another press statement. Said Gavin: "I can do better for the Army outside than in. I have no ax to grind. I am not unhappy with my Secretary. I am not going out to write and raise a rumpus and things."

With that, beribboned (two D.S.M.s, two D.S.C.s, a Silver Star) Slim Jim Gavin marched out of the hearing room, leaving behind, instead of a disturbing picture of an Army where high officials barter for stars, a picture of a passionate partisan who played the game and lost.