Defense: Mr. Pacific

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Combat &Command. His first years as a junior officer in a battlewagon and destroyer of the surface Navy did nothing to change Felt. Then, out of sheer boredom, he put in for flight training. From the start, flying became the focus of his life. And with his new enthusiasm he recovered the old drive that his mother had tried so hard to nurture. At Pensacola he met a pretty Alabama girl named Kathryn Cowley, and next day he wrote his mother that he had found the woman he was going to marry. A few weeks later he let Kathryn in on his plans. That little matter attended to. he turned back to aviation with single-minded zeal. Even as a newlywed, says Kathryn, Felt's life was "just fly, fly, fly." And he brooked no complaint. Before the wedding vows, the future admiral had already spelled out the rules: there was never to be any suggestion that he give up flying, never any request that private life interfere with his devotion to naval aviation.

As soon as he got his wings, Don Felt seemed to get more than his share of combat and command posts—experience that built the basis of his skill as CINCPAC.

In the early days of World War II, he had command of the Air Group on the aircraft carrier Saratoga, won a Distinguished Flying Cross for leading the first U.S. carrier strike of the war. A couple of weeks later he got a Navy Cross when his planes sank some Japanese ships in Torpedo Junction off the eastern Solomons. To ward the end of the war, he had com mand of the escort carrier Chenango when the ship earned a Navy Unit Commendation for operations off Okinawa.

In 1943 Felt was promoted to captain.

Next year he became the first naval aviator named to the U.S. Military Mission to Moscow, and there he got a good look at his future enemy. "I think we have the Japanese beaten," he wrote to Kathryn at the time of the Yalta Conference. "I hope we don't let the Russians in. We don't need them." (And in they came, ultimately to turn over Manchuria to the Chinese Communists.) Grand Strategy. Don Felt's peacetime posting to the National War College worked a great change in his outlook.

There, among fellow officers who had been selected for training in the advanced responsibilities of senior commands, he dug with enthusiasm into the study of grand strategy.

After that, Felt's rise to admiral was rapid and steady. At sea he commanded the carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt, later bossed Naval Forces Middle East, and finally spent six months in command of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. In all these jobs he tightened his reputation as a demanding skipper, an arrogant, caustic perfectionist who let his subordinates know exactly what he wanted, and who got just that. Ashore, his big break came when he went to work for Rear Admiral Arleigh Burke, then chief of the Navy's Strategic Plans Division. Burke was already under way toward his present job as Chief of Naval Operations, and he towed Felt with him toward the top.