by Larry Berman
ZUMWALT
The Life and Times of Admiral Elmo Russell “Bud” Zumwalt, Jr.
LARRY BERMAN
DEDICATION
For my grandchildren, Isabel and Ian
EPIGRAPH
“Father of the Modern Navy” will remain a unique epitaph to this man.
—VICE ADMIRAL EARL FRANK “REX” RECTANUS IN A LETTER TO MOUZA ZUMWALT, JANUARY 10, 2000
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1 - Conscience of the Navy
Chapter 2 - The Road from Tulare to Annapolis
Chapter 3 - Education of a Naval Officer
Chapter 4 - War Years
Chapter 5 - Crossroads
Chapter 6 - Plato and Socrates
Chapter 7 - Path to Vietnam
Chapter 8 - Brown Water Navy
Chapter 9 - The Watch Begins
Chapter 10 - Zingers
Chapter 11 - Rough Seas
Chapter 12 - The Zumwalt Intelligence Service
Chapter 13 - Ruffles and Flourishes
Chapter 14 - The Watch Never Ends
Chronology of the Career of Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., USN
Author’s Research Note
Index
Picture Section
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Also by Larry Berman
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER 1
CONSCIENCE OF THE NAVY
I have been called controversial. I am glad that this is so because the requirement was to be as Robert Frost phrased it, “And I have miles to go before I sleep.”1
With its copper-clad dome soaring two hundred feet above the ground, the historic chapel at the center of the yard can be seen from every approach to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Built upon a cornerstone laid in June 1904 by the legendary Admiral of the Navy George Dewey, the chapel serves as the navy’s cathedral. A below-ground crypt holds the remains of John Paul Jones, the great naval leader of the American Revolution who gave the navy its earliest traditions of heroism and victory.2
On the cold and overcast morning of January 10, 2000, over two thousand people filled the wooden pews of the chapel to bid farewell to Admiral Elmo Russell Zumwalt, Jr., whose life exemplified the words etched above the massive bronze entrance doors: NON SIBI SED PATRIAE, meaning “Not for self but for country.”
Bud Zumwalt, which is what just about everyone called him throughout his life, is remembered as a trailblazer who reformed the navy and as a champion of the men and women who served in it. He was the iconoclastic admiral who brought a navy drifting toward the shoals back into the channel of the twentieth century and prepared it for the new millennium. Bud Zumwalt forced the navy to think more deeply and objectively about things that should have been self-evident. By doing so, he became a sailor’s admiral, often referred to as Zorro, fighting for the rights of oppressed navy men and women. In 1970 he landed on the cover of Time magazine, which called the charismatic chief of naval operations (CNO) “the Navy’s most popular leader since World War II.”3
The press quickly dubbed it the Mod-Squad Navy led by its “psychedelic admiral.” Sailors began sporting longer hair, beards, and sideburns. The infamous “Z-grams” attempted to meld the traditions of navy service with the needs of a nation in turmoil and a culture in transition. The navy was never the same. Beer dispensers were allowed in enlisted men’s barracks, acid rock blared from service clubs, and women were going to sea. Traditionalists, mostly white, retired admirals, ridiculed the reforms as the Three Bs—beer, beards, and broads, deriding “Zumwaltism” for undoing navy discipline and leading to mutinies at sea.
Bud Zumwalt requested that his funeral be held at the Naval Academy, the place of many memories and milestones in his distinguished career. At Bancroft Hall, his plebe class had been sworn in as midshipmen, taking their oath under Commodore Perry’s flag and Captain Lawrence’s words “Don’t Give Up the Ship.” Graduating cum laude with the wartime class of 1943, the young ensign made his way to the Pacific, soon reporting to the destroyer USS Robinson, where his performance as head of the ship’s Combat Information Center during night torpedo attacks in the historic Battle of Leyte Gulf earned him the Bronze Star for valor in combat. It was the start of a career characterized by service to the nation and commitment to the welfare of those under his command.
Inside the chapel were the country’s highest dignitaries, the most prominent being the nation’s commander in chief President William Jefferson Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Two years earlier, in the East Room of the White House, the president had presented his dear friend with the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.4 At the ceremony, Clinton joked that “these days, Elmo ‘Bud’ Zumwalt introduces himself as ‘a former sailor.’ That’s sort of like calling Henry Ford a former car salesman.” When the laughter subsided, the president described Zumwalt as a “great patriot” and “one of the greatest models of integrity and leadership in genuine humanity our nation has ever produced.” The Medal of Freedom citation provided the most appropriate accolade: “In both wartime and peacetime, Elmo Zumwalt has exemplified the ideal of service to our nation. A distinguished veteran of World War II and Korea, he served as Commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Vietnam and rose to become the Navy’s youngest chief of Naval Operations in 1970. As CNO, he worked vigorously to improve our sailors’ quality of life and devoted himself to eliminating discrimination in the Navy. In a life touched by tragedy, he became a great champion of veterans afflicted by ailments related to service in Vietnam. For his dedication, valor, and compassion, we salute Bud Zumwalt.”
Bud Zumwalt and Bill Clinton first met when Governor Clinton consulted Zumwalt on the disposal of Agent Orange barrels in his home state of Arkansas. After Clinton’s election, Bud sought the president’s support for Vietnam-era veterans who had been exposed to Agent Orange, a topic whose importance Clinton grasped immediately. The president designated Robert G. Bell, a member of the National Security Council staff, to liaise directly with Zumwalt on all Agent Orange issues.
The president sought Bud’s advice on normalizing relations with Vietnam, strategic-arms agreements, and cabinet-level appointments. In 1995 Clinton appointed Bud to the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which focused on threats to our nation’s national security involving weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical, and nuclear. Bud and the president worked closely together to pass the Chemical Weapons Convention. Zumwalt then served as an honorary member of the Veterans for Clinton/Gore National Steering Committee in 1996.
The “unique chemistry” between Bud Zumwalt and Bill Clinton took root at the annual Renaissance Weekends in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and one Renaissance gathering forever solidified their friendship.5 Speaking on the topic “If These Were My Last Words,” Bud directed his comments to the nation’s first daughter, Chelsea Clinton. He spoke about the reasons Chelsea could be proud of her parents’ accomplishments with respect to the country’s national security and domestic strength. Bud received a resounding standing ovation from the audience. It was a moving tribute at a time of great personal family crisis for the Clintons. Bill and Hillary never forgot how Bud Zumwalt stood up for them in their time of need.6
An early arrival at the chapel was Bud’s younger brother Jim. Neither man could have asked for a more caring or loving sibling, although Jim’s strong antiwar views and liberal leanings often tested the patience of his more conservatively inclined brother. A July 1968 personal letter of congratulations on the occasion of Bud’s promotion to the rank of vice admi
ral and new assignment as head of the Brown Water Navy in Vietnam expressed Jim’s heartfelt sentiments: “In spite of all the political differences, I have never stopped loving you as a brother, nor have I questioned your integrity or sincerity. If ever a military figure had compassion, you have it.”7 Two years later, on the occasion of Bud’s nomination as the country’s youngest CNO, Jim wrote that “in spite of some political and philosophical differences with you, I have nothing less than the most profound respect for the genius and hard work which has brought you [to] the pinnacle of your career.”8 Bud once asked his brother to stand in for him at a reunion of his World War II shipmates from the Robinson. As the evening drew to a close, one sailor said, “My greatest hero in life is Admiral Zumwalt because he was an enlisted man’s sailor. He always treated us with respect.”9 Jim was especially proud that Bud was beloved by enlisted men, women, and minorities.
After he passed through a metal detector, secret service agents ushered Jim into a private vestibule for family members. With Bud gone, Jim and Saralee Crowe were the surviving children raised by two country doctors on the “avenue of the sycamores” in Tulare, California. Saralee was the eldest, followed by Elmo, Jr.; Bruce Craig; and James Gregory. As Saralee embraced Jim, her mind raced through a lifetime of memories that included Crowe family visits to Mare Island, where after dinner at the officers’ club, they listened to Bud make Tarzan calls from a tree house and went to sleep in a sun-heated Quonset hut. Her favorite memory was the time Bud drove across the country to visit the Crowes at Wawona Lodge in Yosemite. Bud arrived at the gate exhausted and out of money, but the Ranger would not allow any servicemen to enter the park free who were not in uniform. Bud got his suitcase from the car and changed right there “in front of God and everybody.”10
First Lady Hillary Clinton soon entered the room, embracing Bud’s wife, Mouza. Looking at the family, Mrs. Clinton said, “Bud and Mouza have been friends of ours for several years. We felt compelled to come down here today to offer our condolences and sympathy to all of you.” Before she could say anything else, the president arrived. When embracing Mouza, family members saw tears in the president’s eyes. “Bud was a good friend. I want to tell you that Hillary and I loved Bud so much. It was a great honor for us,” said Clinton.11
Fifty-four years earlier, twenty-four-year-old Bud Zumwalt, two years removed from the Naval Academy and a prize crew captain, charted and sailed up the Yangtze River to Shanghai, clearing Japanese mines and joining with iconic Admiral Milton E. “Mary” Miles in disarming the surrendering Japanese forces. In Shanghai he met Mouza Coutelais-du-Roché, the daughter of White Russians from Harbin, Manchuria. It was love at first sight. Bud asked Mouza to teach him Russian and in return promised to help her with English. A week later he proposed; two weeks later they were married, with Robinson crew serving as honor guard.
Bud ignored the uniform phalanx of people offering advice that marriage to a foreign-born spouse was a career killer for advancing to higher ranks in the navy, and Mouza ended up making immense contributions to Bud’s career. Bud was at sea for fourteen years of their fifty-four-year marriage. “I can’t imagine what life would have been without her,” wrote Bud.12 Mouza was always HIS STRENGTH.13 Within a short time, alone with a new baby, she adapted to a new culture. During her husband’s three commands, she served as an indispensable “house mother” to waves of young officers and their wives and the wives of enlisted men. Filling the role of both parents during Bud’s long deployments, Mouza moved their four children more than forty times. During the Vietnam War, with two sons and her husband in harm’s way, she was a regular at Clark Air Force Base hospital, counseling and comforting those wounded in combat. “She so loved our Navy, and you knew she loved our Navy. And we so loved her,” said Admiral Mike Mullen. “She was extraordinary in so many ways; extraordinary in how she was to others, and quick to notice those in need. She personified empathy and compassion.”14 When Bud became CNO, Mouza played an important contributing role in retention study groups and programs aimed at improving the quality of life for navy people and their families. “Mouza possessed that rare quality that allowed her to be in the public shadow of a larger-than-life figure,” recalled Ambassador Philip Lader.15
Bud understood that a crow or a star on a man’s sleeve or collar did not make him a leader. He possessed a deep, abiding passion for those entrusted to his care, adhering to the belief that a person who has command of forces in war has a lifetime responsibility for their well-being. Sitting in the chapel was Joe Muharsky, who had just made the seven-hour drive from Cleveland. Joe was one of Big Z’s Swift Boat sailors in Coastal Squadron One, who had fought the Vietcong along tributaries of the Cua Lon River during the time Bud headed the Brown Water Navy that patrolled the rivers and coast of Vietnam.16 Dressed in a black suit pinned with medals awarded by Zumwalt, Joe had come to honor the man who “fought for us when the battle was over and others chose to forget.”17 A few days earlier, Joe had written a heartfelt letter to Mouza. “I never met one sailor who was not proud that he had served under your husband’s command in Vietnam. He gave us something we never had in the Navy until then. It may not have meant much to others but to us it meant the world. There is a simple word for it, it’s called respect.”
The distinguished elder statesman Paul Nitze was sitting in the first row of the chapel. Decades earlier, as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Nitze spotted Zumwalt at the National War College and lost no time offering him a position. Zumwalt moved up to director of arms control and contingency planning for Cuba, and the two men worked side by side during the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis and later in negotiations leading to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. When Nitze was appointed secretary of the navy in 1963, he made Zumwalt his executive assistant and senior aide.
Normally, before a captain is promoted to flag rank, he needs a major sea command, which for a surface officer meant a destroyer squadron or a cruiser. Nitze’s fitness report recommended that the requirement be waived, and Bud received the second star of rear admiral two years ahead of his Naval Academy class. The promotion sent Bud to San Diego as commander of a cruiser/destroyer flotilla in the First Fleet, but the tour was cut short when Nitze and CNO Admiral David McDonald created the Division of Systems Analysis for the navy and appointed Zumwalt as chief, a position he held for two years preceding his tour in Vietnam.
Under Nitze’s tutelage, Bud Zumwalt expanded his intellectual scope and sharpened his administrative skills. “I earned what I think of as a Ph.D. in political-military affairs,” recalled Zumwalt, who often described his relationship with Nitze as “Plato and Socrates.”18 Nitze owned a 2,200-acre farm on the Potomac near Port Tobacco, Maryland. The Zumwalt family spent weekends at the farm, where they had their own guest house. When Nitze became deputy secretary of defense during the Johnson presidency, Zumwalt became privy to the Vietnam policy thinking of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the president. Whatever Nitze knew, he shared with Zumwalt. Together their doubts grew concerning the viability of military victory in Vietnam. It was not long before Zumwalt’s boss, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer, came to resent his subordinate’s access to this information. Moorer decided to ship Zumwalt out of town; the farthest place he could find was Vietnam. Moorer saw it as win-win: he would break the Nitze-Zumwalt axis, and no one would ever hear of Bud Zumwalt again.
Bud was expected to be in Vietnam by September 1968, two months before the American presidential election. Believing that the war had already been lost politically, therefore making it impossible to prevail militarily, Bud got cracking on shifting responsibility to the South Vietnamese navy and devising innovative strategies for the Brown Water Navy. If Bud Zumwalt had never become CNO, he would be remembered for his planning and conduct in the management of naval forces in an insurgency environment.
Also in the chapel was Qui Nguyen, whose uncle, Vice Admiral Chung Tan Cang, had been the South Vietnamese navy’s fi
nal CNO. When South Vietnam fell, in April 1975, Qui’s family was one of two sponsored by Bud Zumwalt, who pledged to provide “for their needs until they are ready to take their place in society.”19 In July 1975 the eleven-member family took a bus from Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, to Washington, D.C., where they were met by Bud and his son James. “We had our first dinner together that evening with his wife and children,” recalled Qui. The family lived in the Zumwalts’ basement for the next six months. Mouza drove them around for job interviews and introduced them to the rudiments of shopping, keeping a checkbook, enrolling the children in school, and making the transition to a new home. “They have basically always looked out and kept in touch with us for twenty-six years watching us grow as Americans. The Admiral inspired us with his inner strength,” said Qui.20 Qui’s older brother Phu never forgot what the entire Zumwalt family did for them. “The Admiral and his wife helped us to see life in the United States and helped transform our life into good American citizens. Our family wanted to make Admiral Zumwalt proud of our accomplishments, which would not have been possible without their support.”21
Sitting near Qui in the chapel was James Reckner, professor of history and director of the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University. Jim’s navy career spanned twenty years; he started as an enlisted man and later became a commissioned officer. Reckner served two tours on some of the most hazardous rivers in Vietnam. Two decades later, the professor came to see Bud Zumwalt with a request that the retired admiral serve as chairman of the board to preside over the creation of the Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech. The two men had never met. “I went to his office in Arlington, Virginia, knees knocking somewhat, as I’ve never recruited a four-star admiral before,” Reckner said.
Bud Zumwalt embraced the assignment as a labor of love. “With Jim Reckner’s wartime knowledge and his experience with historical research, he was keenly aware of the need to start early the retrieval and assembly of all documents from all sources and all sides if later historians were to be able to write definitive and accurate histories,” said Zumwalt.22 Between 1989 and today, the Vietnam Archive has emerged as a world-class repository of memorabilia and documents relating to the Vietnam era. Admiral Zumwalt chose the archive as the custodian for his personal papers and encouraged all Vietnam veterans to follow his lead.23