Defense: Mr. Pacific

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When Felt was jumped over the heads of a score of seniors to four-star rank and went to work as Burke's Vice CNO, Felt had a rare pang of misgiving: Would the leapfrogged officers really work for him? He went to Burke for advice. "If you do what you think is right for the Navy," said Burke, "you will be all right, and they will be on your side. If you don't do that and do it firmly, they will be all over you." Felt took the advice. No one yet has been all over him.

As Vice CNO, Felt's most important decision concerned his own career. In the summer of 1958, when that austere Pacific veteran, Admiral Felix B. Stump, was slated for retirement, Felt was offered his job as CINCPAC. As an alternative, Felt could have stayed on in Washington, probably with a sure shot at the Navy's top job. Rather than stay desk-bound for the rest of his time, he unhesitatingly chose CINCPAC.

"Advise ASAP." Felt's new command waited for him with some misgivings. "He had a reputation for eating admirals for breakfast, lunch and dinner," remembers his ace political adviser, Sterling J. Cottrell. And to no one's surprise, Felt lived up to his reputation. He read every dispatch and cable except the most routine, delved into petty details of his subordinate commands.

In an effort to slash paper work, Felt outfitted his staff with colored pencils—Cottrell's is green, the Army Deputy Chief of Staff got purple—asked for brief, informal answers to his written requests.

("You write in the margin if there is any room left," says one staffer.) Soon everyone got accustomed to Felt's own black-pencil "Feltgrams"—abbreviated scribbles that invariably end "Advise me ASAP [as soon as possible]. What do you think? Why? No? Resp'y, F." But all the time, with his affection for detail, he stored up an unparalleled knowledge of the most frustratingly detailed military theater in the world. Within weeks of taking over, Felt was stowing away in his safes detailed plans for any Far Eastern emergency that might affect his command.

Felt was in Japan for a security meeting in the last week of August 1958, when Communist artillery cut loose at Quemoy.

His Tokyo hotel room immediately became CINCPAC headquarters. Orders went out to get carriers into position, Marine and Air Force squadrons were moved, a Nike installation was set up on Formosa, and reserves were alerted all the way back to California. Thanks to CINCPAC's deployment of his forces, the crisis never got to a point where it could not be handled by the Chinese Nationalist troops, with active advice and assistance from the U.S. There were no U.S. battle casualties.

Conspicuous Deterrent. The defense of Formosa's offshore islands followed the basic outlines of present U.S. strategy in the Pacific. That strategy is currently tailored to limited-war situations, to an enemy that is still conceived to have limited objectives and limited resources. It is a strategy of deterrence.