Johnson’s entry into his demesne of the Pentagon was conducted with more bombast than finesse. He evicted generals from their offices, had a great new room created for himself, commandeered General Pershing’s old desk and barked orders across it in a determination to show that he was in charge in a way that Forrestal had never done. Generals were shouted at, but it was the Navy above all that was to be brought to heel. One of the last results of Forrestal’s stewardship had been the laying of the keel of a vast new aircraft carrier, the United States, at Norfolk, Virginia. This was not just a very big ship. It was a symbol of the Navy’s future as an airstrike service. The naval staff had abandoned plans for the construction of thirteen smaller vessels in order to concentrate funds upon this flagship.
In late April Johnson ordered cancellation. The Secretary of the Navy, John Sullivan, whom he had not even bothered to inform beforehand, resigned. Truman was displeased. He supported Johnson on the issue, but thought that his handling was ham-fisted. The President was also beginning to be offended by Johnson’s general boastfulness and incontinent ambition. Although he remained as Secretary of Defense for another sixteen months, he never wholly recovered his position with Truman. Nothing was heard of his candidature in 1952. He did however secure from the Congress a considerable strengthening of the executive powers of the Secretary of Defense, well beyond the puny coordinating role which was all that Forrestal had created for himself. The modern administrative shape of the Pentagon stems substantially from this period of office. His one and a half storm-tossed years, for all the braggadocio, were therefore not without some result.
Still less than with Truman did his relations with the Navy recover. They were not helped by the appointment of Francis P. Matthews, a political ‘pro’ from the not notably nautical state of Nebraska, as Sullivan’s replacement as Secretary of the Navy. Sullivan was a Catholic, and Matthews was a still more prominent one. Truman apparently thought that act of balance was enough without any regard to whether Matthews could tell one end of a battleship from the other. It was a mistake which Roosevelt, for all his skilful playing from the episcopalian heights of Hyde Park of Catholic politicians of Brooklyn and the Bronx, would never have made, at least with the Navy. As a result the admirals, and many below them, were by the autumn not only discontented with the Navy’s role but disenchanted with both tiers of the political leadership in the Pentagon. The consequence of this was the so-called ‘admirals’ revolt’ of October 1949.
The House Armed Services Committee was holding hearings on the B-36 bomber programme, which the Navy regarded as pre-empting its role as well as its funds. Sparked off by a disputatiously bold naval captain called Crommelin, who published a statement claiming that the Navy’s offensive power was being ‘nibbled to death’, the majority of admirals of note rushed either to issue statements of support or to testify before the Committee in a sense deeply hostile to the views of their civilian chiefs. Denfeld, Chief of Naval Operations, did so, Radford, C-in-C Pacific, did so, as did the C-in-C Atlantic and a clutch of other senior serving officers. They were supported, from retirement, by several of the great naval names of World War II, Nimitz, King and Halsey. Radford’s testimony was the most hostile to Johnson, speaking of the lack of confidence in his office felt by senior officers throughout the Navy. But Denfeld’s caused the greater stir. He was the senior serving naval officer. His disloyalty was jugular. It was damaging to the administration, particularly in the month following the news of the Russian A-bomb. Truman, however, was better at dealing with insubordination than at avoiding it. A week or so later he laconically announced that Denfeld had been transferred ‘to another post’. He got the C-in-C Mediterranean, one of the few senior officers who had not been involved in the dispute, perhaps because he was far away, to accept the vacant command. Matthews tried to resign, but Truman allowed him to stagger on for nearly another two years, in spite of a major gaffe in August 1950, when he echoed Bertrand Russell in suggesting that a pre-emptive nuclear strike might be necessary and desirable. A State Department refutation was required and forthcoming. Acheson gladly supplied it. Until he got Marshall back, a month after this, without one kidney but still full of authority, Truman was not lucky in his Pentagon appointments.
The Navy, however, settled down much more quickly and calmly than might have been expected. They were floated off the shoals of inter-service dispute by the splurge of expenditure which followed the outbreak of the Korean War. The Air Force got its B-36S and they got the United States, a lot of other equipment as well, and ultimately the underpinning of their nuclear strike rôle through the development of the Polaris submarine programme. Once the exigencies of Korea had caused budgetary probity to be abandoned, there was room for everyone, admirals, generals and aviators, at the trough of public expenditure.