Defense: Mr. Pacific

(3 of 8)

The logistics that complicate Felt's problems are swollen by merciless statistics. (Korea is 5,500 miles and 45 supply-ship days from San Francisco; Bangkok, main staging point for any operation in Laos, is 9,000 miles and 60 supply-ship days.) To make sense of it all, Don Felt leans heavily on a staff of 240 officers. A carefully chosen political adviser is always at his elbow. But from the carrier ready rooms in the South China Sea to the humming headquarters above Pearl Harbor, there is no doubt about who is "Mr. Pacific." "Mean as Hell." Don Felt starts the day at full throttle ("mean as hell," says an ex-aide), and never slows down. Traffic flows in and out of his office to the tune of his shouts. For a change of pace he sometimes punches at a panel of buzzers (a rash of buzzing means coffee).

He is a bear for facts and figures, probes relentlessly for details of minor operations and files them away in his Univac memory. He works, as one sad assistant puts it, "as though there were no holidays, Saturdays and Sundays, and expects others to do the same." One staff officer, returning from a long flight at midnight, was met at the airport by a messenger who handed him a foot-high stack of homework and told him the admiral wanted it done by morning. Once, in a moment of rare relaxation, Felt, a crack poker player, summed up his basic attitude in a paraphrase from Mister Dooley: "Trust everybody, but always cut the cards." Hunting & Homework. Don Felt learned the beginnings of his furious discipline from his mother. Through most of his boyhood she beat down the familiar pattern of juvenile revolt—his preference for hunting rather than homework, athletics instead of afternoon classes. Under her watchful eye young Don got good, if not spectacular, grades. The pattern continued after the family moved from Kansas to Washington, D.C., and when there was no money for college, Mother Felt had an answer for that too. Don entered a cram school for the Naval Academy, went to Annapolis with the class of 1923.

Away from home, he began to enjoy minor heresies. He got good marks at the Academy from force of habit, but he was too busy trying (unsuccessfully) to make the varsity baseball team, too busy having a good time, to excel. He sneaked forbidden smokes, wore uniforms with well-concealed nonregulation pockets, eventually earned just about as many demerits as anyone in his class. Scholastically, he ranked in the middle brackets—breeding ground of most U.S. generals and admirals.