Running the War

After nine months of war, a man could search high & low in Washington for the men who are running the war, and not find them. Everyone is doing the job--and nobody is.

The men to make great decisions on strategy are not in the Army & Navy (where there is still no Unified Command), for there is no one in the Armed Services with power to say what kind of war shall be fought, and how every effort shall be fitted into a grand plan.

The men to make such decisions are not in the new wartime civilian agencies: Donald Nelson's WPB, Leon Henderson's OPA, Paul McNutt's WMC, William Davis' WLB, the Henry Wallace-Milo Perkins BEW. For each of these men has a single segment of the problem to work on, each has shadowy authority stemming only from the President, and as often as not they are in conflict with one another.

Nor are decisions of global politics and global strategy made in the Cabinet. Perhaps it is just as well. Franklin Roosevelt has never shown a disposition to surround himself with strong men in high positions. His Cabinet looked weak even in peacetime. Now, least of all, do most Americans want their war policies to be shaped by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the lady in the funny hat; or by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., who got his job via gentleman farming and publication of the American Agriculturist; or by Postmaster General Frank Walker.

The Cabinet still meets with the President each Friday. But the Cabinet does not make war. Attorney General Francis Biddle, the libertarian lawyer, gets close to the war only when his Justice Department prosecutes spies and saboteurs. Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones, once the moneybags of the war effort, had his wings clipped after the Rubber Scandal. Secretary of State Cordell Hull is still the good, grey man of international diplomacy, but the day of grey diplomacy has faded with Pearl Harbor. Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard is close to the war effort, with his responsibility for feeding the United Nations, but not quite in it.

Of all Cabinet members, only Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox are directly concerned with winning the war. But they do not talk high strategy with their President at Cabinet meetings. Certainly Frank Knox, squeezed between a proud, independent Navy and a President with his own ideas of warfare on the blue water, does not often sway the course of the war.

Yet Colonel William Franklin Knox stands for the war effort in a very particular way. A grand old soldier and dilettante sailor, patriotic American and courageous shouter, competent executive and tyro at strategy, a die-hard Republican who entered the Cabinet for a show of unity in the dark days after the fall of France, Knox is a symbol of the confusion, amateurism, divided authority, the lack of broad planning--and also of the good will --that characterized Washington last week.

Knox's spiritual pedigree goes back to Teddy ("King Theodore I") Roosevelt, and there it stops. As a chunky, redheaded youngster of 24 he went to Cuba with Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. He tore his pants ignominiously on barbed wire in his first battle, got a bullet through his hat and a lifelong case of hero worship. Like Teddy Roosevelt, he believes in strong talk and the Big Stick. Like Teddy Roosevelt, he believes in the strenuous life; at 68, he adheres to a muscular regimen that would kill many a younger man.

Just as Teddy Roosevelt set the pattern of Frank Knox's life, Horatio Alger wrote the pattern of his career. As a boy, Frank got up at 3 a.m. to cover the morning paper route, doubled on an evening paper route after school, earned $2.25 a week. He worked his way through Michigan's little Alma College by waiting tables, spading gardens, painting signs, talking himself into a job as gym instructor. After the Spanish-American War he broke into journalism as a $10-a-week reporter, married his college sweetheart, lived on a family budget that gave him 50-c- a week for spending money, usually managed to save a dime out of his allowance toward a paper of his own.

Once Frank Knox had his own paper--the Lake Superior Journal, which he got with $500 capital, a partner, and judicious borrowing--he went to town. He outslugged and outsmarted the rival newspaper, made enough money to move on to bigger things. He founded a new paper in Manchester, N.H.--then jumped into the big money by becoming general manager of all Hearstpapers at $150,000 a year. He finally wound up as publisher of the respectable and even distinguished Chicago Daily News.

Knox the Politician. As the Republicans' running mate for Alfred Landon in 1936, Frank Knox exhibited all his strength, and all his weaknesses. He knew from the start that his ticket was licked, but never admitted it. He set off on a 22,000-mile campaign tour full of thunder and adrenalin, never stopped castigating the New Deal, never lowered his voice below a victorious shout.

Washington reporters still remember his campaign speech at the Fair Grounds in Hagerstown, Md. The grandstand was packed, the open speaker's platform surrounded by newsmen and telegraphers. But as Knox stood up to speak, lightning flashed, thunder rattled and rain fell in streams. The public-address system went dead; telegraph lines were washed out, everybody around the platform broke for cover. All but Knox: he stuck it out in the deluge as long as he could stand it, soaked to the skin, reading doggedly through his manuscript, grinning, gesturing. Few could hear him--but he won a lot of friends that day.

On other days, when sheer physical energy was less an asset, Knox often lost more votes than he gained. Once he charged that New Deal policies had brought the country to a state where "no life insurance policy is secure; no savings account is safe." Reporters had a field day badgering Republican Herbert Hoover, a director of New York Life Insurance Co., about supporting a man with such a low opinion of insurance.

Knox as Secretary. In accepting the Secretary's job in 1940, Knox showed what one friend has called his "boisterous integrity." Some Republicans wanted to read him out of the party for going over to the New Deal in a campaign year; some of his oldest Chicago friends stopped speaking to him. But Frank Knox, whose top-notch Daily News foreign staff had kept him well posted on the world crisis, said only: "I am an old soldier that's fought in two wars, and if my Commander in Chief gave me a rifle and told me to start out again as a buck private, I'd do it. I am an American first, and a Republican after that."

As a soldier with Teddy Roosevelt, Frank Knox had charged up San Juan Hill with the best of them. Now, as Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of the Navy, he found that the ride with Roosevelt II was rougher.

Like most editors and publishers who came up the hard way, Frank Knox stands in awe of technical knowledge, of scientific book learning. A few sessions with Navy technicians, spouting the mathematical secrets of gunnery, the lore of navigation, such erudite shipbuilding terms as sheer and camber, took the wind out of Knox's sails. A red-faced boner before a Congressional committee, when he said that the distance between Gibraltar and Dakar was 800 mi. (actual distance: about 2,000 mi.), brought down the sails themselves. Ever since, Knox has been out-sheered and out-cambered by the admirals.

He confided to friends recently: "Any layman would be a damn fool to get himself mixed up in the professional business of trying to fight a naval war. That's a job for the trained naval officer who has spent his life in the service learning about navigation, logistics and fire power. My job is to find out what the top admirals want to put across, talk it over with them and then do my damnedest to see that the job gets done as economically and efficiently as possible."

Happy Warrior. On his job, as he defines it, Knox works hard and happily. Filled with council meetings, Cabinet meetings and sessions with his bureau chiefs, Knox's days click off rapidly; he has time for few civilian callers, for few press conferences. The administrative details of his office run smoothly, without quarrel--and without the worrisome burden of global planning.

The strenuous life has not been affected by his duties. He lives on the Navy's yacht Sequoia, sleeps like a kitten in the breeze of the Potomac. Every morning he hops out of bed at 6:30, hops ashore at old Fort Washington for a half-hour constitutional. He climbs briskly up the steep, winding road from the river, trudges smartly around the tree-lined parade ground, returns to the yacht for setting-up exercises, a shower, a massage, a breakfast that would be enough exercise in itself.

At night, after he has cleaned up his desk, he reverts to his old job as publisher of the Daily News, which still pays him $60,000 to make up the difference between his $15,000-a-year Cabinet job and the $75,000 salary he used to draw in Chicago. Almost every night he talks long-distance to chubby, nervous John O'Keefe, who was his private secretary and now holds the reins as vice president of the Daily News. He hears reports, gives orders, rebukes erring staff members. Before he goes to bed at 10:30, he reads the previous day's Red Streak edition, line by line, to make sure his instructions have been carried out.

The Sins of Omission. Since Pearl Harbor, which showed an appalling state of mind and lack of coordination with the Army (though Frank Knox himself had warned that an attack might come there), Knox has helped the President in shuffling his admirals but he has not made over his Navy Department in any way that would demonstrate that it has an aggressive grasp of the Haushofer type of war that the U.S. now has to fight. As one of his colleagues in Washington puts it, "Frank Knox is a man of action and his heart is in the right place but I don't think his head helps his heart very much."

A global-minded Secretary of the Navy, with a clear mandate to run his department with a firm hand, would still have plenty of reforms to accomplish.

> Navy-Army cooperation, which some military men think has been created by a unified command in such areas as the Panama Canal (under an Army man) and Hawaii (under a Navy man), is still in many places more form than fact. Navy or Army men, although sometimes asking or lending aid to the other services, seldom plan campaigns as if the two services were working on one job.

> The Navy air arm although no longer an outcast is still a stepchild to the Navy's battleship admirals. Rear Admiral John H. Towers, a dyed-in-the-wool aviator who has been flying since 1911, did get promoted to Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Air. But plans to make him a Vice Admiral, and to promote deserving airmen on his coattails, have been lost in the shuffle. "Jack" Towers has been excluded from powwows of the General Board, and has applied for active sea duty.

> The Navy Department organization still is based on seven autonomous bureaus which get their own appropriations, go their own way, draw up their own schedules of materials and manpower needs. And for operations purposes the Navy is divided into 15 independent districts, each jealous of its own prerogatives, a division of authority with borderlines in which often nobody really considers himself in charge.

> A large amount of Navy thinking in the past--by Secretary Knox as well as the admirals--has been built on the Jutland-Trafalgar tradition of great fleet battles, meeting enemy line to line in a great slugging match. But sea battles are now fought by aircraft while the fleets lie over the horizon (cf. Coral Sea and Midway) and the fleet's main job is to keep the sea lanes open.

At Midway and in the Coral Sea, the U.S. Navy has done some magnificent fighting in World War II. In Washington the Secretary of the Navy has also turned in a magnificent performance within his native limitations. He has courage--he did not try to cover up the bungling which was responsible for Pearl Harbor--and he has energy, which he gives to his job without stint. As the U.S. is now organized for war he may be doing as well as any Secretary could. Some day he may even give his Navy Department a reorganization--and continue to be the same kind of Navy Secretary that he is.

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