by Larry Berman
Ties to Vietnam defined so many aspects of Bud Zumwalt’s life, most especially with his firstborn son and namesake. Lieutenant Junior Grade Elmo Russell Zumwalt III served proudly and bravely in Vietnam, commanding Swift Boat PCF-35—maneuvering his lightly armed vessel along jungle-choked streams in the Mekong Delta from June 1969 to July 1970. Elmo survived Vietnam, returning home in 1970, only to learn in 1983 that he had developed herbicide poisoning.
The navy had been taking heavy casualties in Vietnam, which meant that the average young naval person had a high probability of being killed or wounded in a year’s tour. Vietcong snipers preyed on sailors from their hiding spots along the riverbank, perhaps ten to fifteen feet from their targets. When Admiral Zumwalt asked what could be done, experts in the Pentagon advised that Agent Orange defoliation offered the promise of moving those snipers back a thousand yards. He was assured that the herbicide was nontoxic and not dangerous to human or animal life. The jungle terrain was stripped bare. Zumwalt was unaware that the chemical companies producing these herbicides had evidence that the dioxin used in the manufacturing process was carcinogenic to humans. There was the cruel irony that Bud Zumwalt was responsible for ordering the spraying along the rivers and canals that his son and crew patrolled.
Elmo fought his illness for five years, succumbing in 1988 at age forty-two.24 Elmo’s son Russell, Bud’s grandson, was born with severe sensory integration dysfunction attributed to his father’s exposure. Bud and Elmo coauthored a bestselling book, My Father, My Son, followed with a made-for-TV movie starring Karl Malden as Admiral Zumwalt and Keith Carradine as young Elmo.
Bud Zumwalt paid a deep personal price for his decision to use Agent Orange. In a pledge to his dying son, Bud promised accountability from the government and private industry as to who knew what about the poison that had killed his son and so many of his sailors. Bearing responsibility for the loss of a son, Bud dedicated the rest of his life to studying the medical linkages between exposure and illnesses. No service chief ever demonstrated such a continuing and selfless commitment and loyalty to the men and women who served under his command. His son was dead, but by spearheading a citizen education and mobilization effort, he could help others in securing reparations for thousands of Vietnam veterans and their children whose lives had been permanently damaged.
For several years, Bud could not visit the Vietnam Memorial without feeling the pain of losing so many under his command. He found peace only when the government accepted responsibility for taking care of his valiant warriors and their families. Visiting the wall for the first time and pressing his hand firmly against the black granite, Bud could finally “then envision Elmo’s hand reaching out to touch mine.”25
Bud Zumwalt believed that government had a legal and moral responsibility to those who fought for their country. He used his position and reputation to fight for those who lacked the power and resources to do so. Bud founded the Marrow Foundation and served as chairman in order to assist in registering donors as well as raising the funds to help those needing transplants. “Without him, the National Marrow Donor Program could not have survived,” wrote Bob Hartzman. “His determination carried the program through its birth and its most contentious and difficult years. Without him, support for those injured by Agent Orange would not have happened; without him, the studies of medical effects following Chernobyl would have been impossible; and, without him, we could not now be developing ways to protect our people from potential exposure to biological, chemical and radiologic weapons.”26
Bud’s membership on the Special Oversight Board for Investigations of Gulf War Chemical and Biological Incidents enabled a new generation of servicemen and -women to benefit from his leadership, his expertise, and his compassion.27 In the words of President Clinton, “He never stopped fighting for the interests, the rights and the dignity of those soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines and their families.”
Nothing illustrated Bud’s commitment and compassion more than his friendship with Zoltan Merszei, who was also in the chapel. Bud had asked the retired president, CEO, and chairman of the Dow Chemical Company, which produced Agent Orange, to serve as a founding trustee on the board of the Marrow Foundation, a nonprofit organization formed in 1986 in support of a national registry of bone marrow donors. Zoltan and Bud became close friends. “I can attest to never having met another individual with the admiral’s leadership skills, charisma, and dedication,” said Merszei. “If I could turn back the clock and rewrite my own history, I would make sure that it included military service to this extraordinary country of ours under the exemplary direction of Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr.”28
Jerry Wages was one of several honorary pallbearers. In March 1969, Captain Clarence J. Wages assumed duties as senior advisor and commander of the Rung Sat Special Zone in Vietnam. The majority of his time in-country was spent commanding a river task group. His job was to protect ships coming up the Saigon River to discharge their cargo. The river patrol group commanded by Wages was later awarded the Presidential Unit Citation by President Nixon for extraordinary heroism. Zumwalt considered Wages “one of the finest wartime unit commanders in Vietnam.”29 Tragically, like many of his fellow sailors exposed to Agent Orange, Wages developed leukemia and prostate cancer, earning a 100 percent disability status from the Veterans Administration.30 When Bud told Jerry that President Clinton “had done much more for the Vietnam veterans than either of the past two presidents,” Jerry offered to head a “Vietnam Veterans of Agent Orange Casualty for Clinton” group.31
In 1970, at the age of forty-nine, Bud Zumwalt was appointed chief of naval operations. The choice of Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Navy Secretary John Chafee, Zumwalt was deep-selected over the heads of thirty-three more senior admirals. The youngest CNO in history was expected to create a more egalitarian navy as well as transition it into a smaller and modernized fleet that would be better prepared to cope with the burgeoning Soviet naval threat. Bud Zumwalt took over a navy whose capabilities were deteriorating at precisely the time in history when the world’s rival navy was growing in quantity and quality. “It amuses me a little that I am known mostly as the CNO who allowed sailors to grow beards, wear mod clothes, and drive motorcycles,” wrote Zumwalt. “In truth, I spent almost all of my time pondering upon and seeking to make a contribution to American society with respect to the U.S.-Soviet maritime balance, strategic arms limitation, naval modernization, and a number of other matters that most people would agree have more bearing on the fate of the nation than what a sailor wears to supper.”32
Bud understood that the navy had reached a point in its history where it could no longer drift with the tides and winds of change, totally oblivious to the needs of civilian society and the dignity of its personnel. In a March 1970 letter to the editor of Time titled “Camelot in Blue & Gold,” Dick Rose compared Zumwalt to King Arthur in recognizing that enlisted men were human, too. Rose warned that like Arthur, the navy’s barons—Mustangs and senior officers—would sabotage him.33 Traditionalists charged that good order and discipline were no longer valued in a fighting force. Bud often quoted Winston Churchill’s alleged reply when told that an initiative flouted the traditions of the Royal Navy. “I’ll tell you what the traditions of the Royal Navy are . . . rum, sodomy, and the lash.”34 Bud was not going to saddle the majority of responsible, conscientious, and mature navy people with restrictive regulations designed to restrain the few who would abuse privileges. His goal as a leader was to reform, not destroy the institution. Traditions that aided in the achievement of the navy’s mission and added to its pride, esprit de corps, and morale would be retained. Arbitrary, unduly or unnecessarily irritating regulations and those demeaning to dignity or counterproductive of mission would be eliminated or modified. “I’m sure that when flogging was abolished in the Navy there were those (in uniform and out) who regarded that as a fatally ‘permissive’ move,” Bud wrote to one critic.35
What set Bud Zumwalt apart from senior
officers in the navy as well as from most military leaders was that he was a maverick with the courage of a lion. Bud Zumwalt dedicated his life to the qualities of leadership espoused in Admiral Ernest J. King’s definition of military discipline: “The intelligent obedience of each for the effectiveness of all.”36 To achieve this meant having the most dedicated, perceptive, and imaginative leaders possible, leaders who possessed and utilized the virtues of firmness, fairness, compassion, and a sense of judgment.
In order to save the navy, Bud Zumwalt embraced the redrafting and reshaping of its social contract. His aim was to cast the navy in a more humane and more just light. In doing so, he was essentially telling the navy it was grossly behind the country, and certainly the other services, in regard to equality of opportunity. He brought his enormous intellectual powers to this new social contract, and also the courage and the strength to take all the heat from those who didn’t want to see that contract rewritten.37
One of Bud’s closest associates, Admiral Worth Bagley, thought that “he showed—probably more than anybody else—that the navy’s not as great as it thinks it is.”38 Bud’s greatest challenge as the navy’s leader was in combating institutional racism. To no one’s surprise, the ancient sons of Neptune did everything possible to construe integration as a synonym for permissiveness.
Sitting in one of the pews was another honorary pallbearer, Captain William Norman, a black naval officer who taught Bud Zumwalt what it was like to be black in the white navy. In 1956 Norman thought of applying to the Naval Academy, but the recruiter dissuaded him because “blacks were not ready.”39 In 1967 Norman had been teaching political science at Annapolis, where no one would rent him an apartment. Seared in Norman’s memory was the experience of going to an Officers’ Club in Meridian, Mississippi, and being told by the executive officer that he should not come to dinner because other officers and guests would be embarrassed by his presence. Norman was an officer, but whites of inferior rank did not salute him.
Norman detested the treatment so much that he decided to leave the navy. “I knew I could not continue in the navy to serve with the kind of pride and dignity that I was a part of because I still was comparatively ashamed of being a naval officer. I was ashamed every time I walked into a wardroom and looked around me and saw myself as just about the only black face in there except those that were serving food or the Filipinos.”40 When Bud learned that one of the navy’s most promising black officers was resigning his commission, the new CNO requested a meeting. Norman arrived with a one-page list of proposals and ideas for dealing with the navy’s deeply rooted institutional racism, including tackling the racially segregated rating system that kept Filipinos as stewards and manservants for the white admirals, addressed as “Cook,” “Stew,” or “TN” (table navigator). It was a cozy system wherein navy recruiters steered Filipinos to steward and mess jobs despite the fact that twenty-four other positions were available to them. After listening to Norman, Bud pledged that as CNO he would be the agent of social change, but said he needed Norman at his side.
All of the ratings were soon opened to minority enlisted personnel, an action that was met with extraordinary resistance and fierce opposition, even from close friends. Bud refused to waver, because in his heart he knew it was the right thing to do for the future of all career service members and their families. Z-gram 66, one of his famous memos, represented this commitment to eradicate demeaning areas of discrimination. “Ours must be a navy family that recognizes no artificial barriers of race, color or religion. There is no black navy, no white navy—just one navy—the United States Navy.”
Former deputy assistant secretary of defense Dov Zakheim was upset that he was not able to be in the chapel. He was at the JFK School of Government, about to deliver a major address to senior Russian and American officers on major global military trends. Setting aside his lecture notes, Dov first spoke about his friend Bud Zumwalt: “He recognized that no military is stronger than its personnel. And that a military that discriminated against its own was a military doomed to defeat. So he cleaned up the Navy. He eliminated institutionalized racism. He brought women in to serve. He offered promotions to blacks and Jews and other minorities where none had previously been available. And the Navy grew stronger, not weaker. . . . He fashioned the Navy’s relevance in today’s world, a quarter-century after he left service. . . . There was nothing in the Navy of 1970, when Bud became its highest-ranking officer, that pointed to the Navy of today. Nothing. It was a troubled force consisting of demoralized men and aging ships, plagued by bitterness, discrimination and hatred. Zumwalt turned the Navy around. He reversed the trends. All great leaders do.”41
Dave Woodbury first met Bud Zumwalt in 1972 when Jerry Wages brought him into the CNO’s office to introduce him as Jerry’s relief as naval aide to the CNO. Sitting in the chapel pew, Dave remembered that he had last been to the Naval Academy for Bud’s controversial change-of-command ceremony some twenty-six years earlier. An honorary pallbearer, Dave had seen his boss for the final time a few months earlier at a meeting to discuss medical issues related to veterans’ exposure to Agent Orange. At the time, he thought Bud looked unusually tired, but Bud tried putting him at ease by saying that he and Mouza were driving the next morning from their home in Arlington, Virginia, to Cary, North Carolina, in order to spend time with their younger daughter, Mouzetta, and her husband, Ron. He would have plenty of time to relax during the family visit.42
When they arrived in North Carolina on September 22, Bud felt ill and was taken to a local hospital, where the initial diagnosis was a collapsed lung. Three days later, Bud was transferred to Duke University Hospital, where tests revealed mesothelioma—an incurable cancer of the lung lining related to asbestos exposure. Bud returned to Duke on October 13 for a radical procedure known as extrapleural pneumonectomy—removal of the lung, the lining around the lung sac, and the upper half of the diaphragm. It was a “Hail Mary,” especially because such surgery is not normally performed on patients over fifty-five years of age. Bud’s physical condition was so good that the attending physicians felt he could undergo the very dangerous operation.43
In the days prior to the surgery, hundreds of letters and cards arrived. Scott Davis of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center opened a meeting of the International Consortium for Research on the Health Effects of Radiation in Russia with the announcement that Zumwalt was ill. Every member of the Russian delegation signed a message wishing “our warm feelings which are coming from our souls and hearts . . . we know you as a person who can foresee the dangers facing humanity and find ways to overcome it.”44
Rosemary Bryant Mariner, one of the first eight women selected for naval flight training and a retired naval aviator, wrote, “Your leadership as CNO, not just in opening pilot training for women but in forcing the Navy to deal with the reality of an all-volunteer force, made a profound difference in my life and for the national security of our great republic. I am proud to have served under you in the U.S. Navy and as an American citizen.”45
Joe Ponder sent a gift of “dancing flowers” to the hospital along with a note that “you’ve brightened my day many times by caring, giving and simple listening.”46 Over thirty years earlier, on November 27, 1968, Zumwalt had been at Joe’s bedside in the U.S. Army’s Twenty-ninth Medical Evacuation Hospital in Binh Thuy, in the heart of the Mekong. A gunner’s mate serving aboard Patrol Craft Fast 31, Joe had been on special missions from Ha Tien near the Cambodian border all the way down to the southernmost tip of the Ca Mau peninsula. On November 24, 1968, his Swift Boat was on a search-and-destroy mission that was part of Zumwalt’s Operation SEALORDS, an acronym for Southeast Asia Lake Ocean River Delta Strategy. Joe’s boat was soon engaged in armed conflict with enemy forces along the Bo De River. In a fierce and blistering gun battle with VC forces, Joe was seriously wounded in the right leg. As he regularly did, Bud Zumwalt showed up to personally present the Purple Heart, but what Joe remembered most is that the top dog pulle
d up a chair to speak for thirty minutes. When it was time to leave, Zumwalt maneuvered his way around Joe’s tubes to give his sailor a hug, whispering “God Bless you, son. I wish you the very best.” Joe thought it was all a dream and almost pinched himself to prove the admiral’s visit wasn’t. “I will NEVER get over the fact that a Vice Admiral, the Commander of all U.S. Naval Forces in Vietnam, Elmo R. Zumwalt took the time out of his very busy and important schedule to visit such a low ranking person!”47
Returning to headquarters, Bud penned a personal letter to Rebecca Ponder: “I visited your husband yesterday at the hospital in Binh Thuy. The opportunity for me to talk with such a fine, brave young American was one I will long remember.” Bud reassured her that Joe was recovering and looking forward to getting back to his unit. “Your husband told me you were expecting a child. You and your baby should certainly be proud of your husband.”48
Retired admiral Harry Train wanted his friend to know “you are my all-time hero . . . what you have done for this nation, what you have done for our navy and what you have done for its people is beyond description.”49 Retired admiral Arthur Price, one of Bud’s component wartime commanders in Vietnam, wrote, “Remember it was ‘you’ who did so much to improve conditions for the little guy and his dependents in the Navy.”50