Man in the Middle

In the reaches of the world's oceans, the man who commands a ship is, by necessity as well as by tradition, the unquestioned lord of his vessel. Some top admirals of the U.S. Navy carry this quality to shorebound duties in the Pentagon. But nowadays they are questioned by an equally authoritarian operator, Defense Secretary Robert Mc-Namara. And right in the middle of these collision-bound forces sits a string bean of a Texan who holds down one of the most impossible jobs in Washington: Navy Secretary Fred Korth.

Korth, 53, is slightly stooped, combs his white hair severely back, wears thick, black-rimmed glasses. When he gets all gussied up in a jet flight suit, he looks like a cartoonist's rendition of a Sad Sack Spaceman. But on the basis of his performance so far, Korth is far from being ridiculous. He is neither the admirals' cabin boy nor one of Mc-Namara's whiz kids.

"Gut-Shot Panther." When McNamara picked Korth to replace John Connally, who quit late in 1961 to run successfully for Governor of Texas, Korth already knew his way around the services. A Fort Worth banker, he was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Trans port Command during World War II, had served as Assistant Secretary of the Army in 1952-53. Foreseeing that McNamara would soon start shaking up the Navy, Korth jumped the gun on the Pentagon's civilian boss, appointed a study committee to reorganize the Navy's business side. Although some admirals, as Korth describes it, "screamed like a gut-shot panther," that reorganization went into effect last week. It coordinated four traditionally autonomous bureaus: Ships, Naval Weapons, Yards and Docks, Supplies and Accounts.

Korth also is trying to broaden and upgrade education at the Naval Academy, wants Annapolis to have a civilian dean, require all its instructors to hold master's degrees. Korth sides with McNamara on the Defense Secretary's decision to award the TFX fighter aircraft contract to General Dynamics, even though Navy experts preferred a Boeing design. He helped seal the dismissal of Chief of Naval Operations George Anderson by not recommending Anderson's reappointment.

On the other hand, when McNamara proposed a military pay hike, Korth wrote a blistering letter to protest that the increase was inadequate. He has cemented friendships for the Navy on Capitol Hill with his frank answers, booming voice and earthy humor. Georgia's Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, likes Korth so much that he took him along home recently to meet all the Vinson relatives in Milledgeville, Ga.

Resisting the Stampede. Korth's big test will come as the Navy tries to answer McNamara's insistent questions about why it needs more carriers (TIME, March 29), why a carrier needs such a huge protective force, why the Navy wants its carriers to be nuclear-powered. Declares one top naval officer: "Before World War II, the Navy really was the senior service. If we didn't want to answer a question then, we didn't do it. That's the spirit we need in the Navy today. If they cut back on our shipbuilding program, I don't care who is here. We will fight."

Unmoved, Korth refuses to be stampeded into taking up the admirals' fight.

He insists that McNamara has the right to ask such questions and deserves statistical, factual answers, not seven-seas rhetoric. In his role as a sort of service middleman, Korth says: "I love the Navy, but I have loyalties upwards too."

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