Defense: Mr. Pacific

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As CINCPAC, the compact (5 ft. 6 in., 153 lbs.) Kansan is also U.S. military representative to ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand and U.S. defense pact). He is senior military adviser to SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), the six-year-old federation fathered by John Foster Dulles, which has kept the peace despite the sneering Communist epithet, "Paper Tiger" (its eight members include only two on the Asian mainland: Thailand and Pakistan). He is in charge of all U.S. military aid and assistance groups in Asia. And behind all these organizations and treaties, he is the free world heir to a defensive doctrine as old as the Navy's famed theorist, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914): To maintain order and build prosperous trade in a free world, the U.S. must control the seas and be guardian of the land areas along the shores.

One Umbrella. Before World War II the Pacific was a strategic no man's land, sprinkled with small islands of several sovereignties, controlled by no single power, connected by no satisfactory communications system. U.S. influence ex tended thinly to Hawaii, to Midway and Wake, and beyond that to Guam and the Philippines. The Dutch, English, French and Japanese all jealously guarded their own territories. Knowing their Mahan, the Japanese struck first at the U.S. Fleet in Pearl Harbor before beginning their conquest of Southeast Asia. When Allied forces destroyed Japan's expansionist dreams, they united the Pacific for the first time. Achieved under the umbrella of U.S. power, that unity carried U.S. responsibility to a new frontier along the rimland of Asia.

The emergent power of Communist China gave all its neighbors a common enemy, even if their response has been unequal — some wanted to come to terms with it, some to hold it off, some to avoid thinking about it. With the British, French and Dutch fading fast as Far Eastern powers, help for those who would resist could come only from the U.S. In Korea, the U.S. proved its readiness to defend its new frontier. In the Formosa Strait crisis of 1958, during Red China's bombardment of Quemoy, the Seventh Fleet swung its power behind the beleaguered Chinese Nationalists — and made its presence felt without firing a shot.

Merciless Statistics. Today, from Korea to East Pakistan, Felt's frontier is a continuous troublespot, plagued by unfamiliar riddles, bottomless problems and ancient rivalries. Daily, Felt faces the chance of having to deal with anything from a minor riot to the beginning of World War III. Korea still smolders in an atmosphere of demi-war; Thailand wrangles with Burma over border problems, bickers with Cambodia next door; Pakistan worries about its disconnect ed, unprotected eastern sector. The only unifying factors in the area are the Chinese threat, the presence of U.S. power, and a wish to stay out of trouble.