Zumwalt
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Nitze gave a magnificent talk that afternoon at the War College. As was customary, a group of faculty, along with the commandant, joined Nitze afterward for coffee and discussion. Instead of being asked about his own remarks, Nitze was startled to hear the commandant and professors only wanting to discuss a lecture someone by the name of Captain Zumwalt had given the day before to the entire student body for Alumni Day on the problem of succession in the USSR. “The Commandant and his staff, rather than discuss my subject with me, had words only for the superb individual research project, and the lecture based upon it.”8
Nitze recalled being “irritated about being overshadowed by some student.”9 He began asking questions and taking notes about this Captain Zumwalt, learning from the commandant that Bud was a top student at the War College with a wide range of intellectual interests. The next day, upon returning to Washington, Nitze placed a call to Vice Admiral William Smedberg III, chief of the Bureau of Naval Personnel, asking that Zumwalt be diverted upon graduation from the War College to his staff in Washington as a naval aide. Smedberg objected to this type of interference. Nitze told Smedberg that he was willing to take the issue up with the new secretary of defense, Robert McNamara. Smedberg replied that that would not be necessary.
A few weeks later, Bud’s detailer informed him of the request from Nitze. The detailer thought it was a terrible idea and recommended J-5 (Joint Staff) as the more career-enhancing opportunity for someone on the fast track. Bud was not particularly turned on by the idea of going to the Joint Staff, with its interservice rivalries, but understood that it was the logical move for getting an important ticket punched in the selection process for rear admiral.10 Taking a job with Nitze was risky for someone viewed as a comer, selected a year early for captain. Bud had already said no to Rickover, and the detailer was adamant that going to ISA would derail any chance Bud had for early selection for rear admiral.11 After thinking about it for days, Bud rolled the dice, requesting that his orders be cut to ISA. “More in sorrow than in anger,” the detailer agreed to do it.12
So Nitze brought Bud Zumwalt with him to ISA, assigning him to the Division of European Affairs as desk officer for France, Spain, and Portugal. According to Nitze’s account, Bud “rapidly won the respect of his superiors as well as his opposite numbers in the State Department, operating at the policy level on certain matters.”13 Nitze later often joked that he “hijacked” Bud for his own purposes. Bud worked on negotiating military base rights with Spain and Portugal and on studies involving nuclear policy. Nitze quickly realized that the quality of staff work he was receiving “confirmed his advance reputation” from the War College. Bud was quickly promoted to director of the Arms Control Division, a position that ordinarily would have been given to someone more senior, and his pay grade was increased from a 0-6 slot to a 0-8 slot equivalent to the slot of a rear admiral.14
The new assignment thrust Bud into issues of nuclear proliferation and foreign policy.15 It was apparent to Nitze that some type of arms-control negotiations was going to be undertaken, and he needed someone to ensure that all proposals received the most searching evaluation from the perspective of sound military judgment. Bud developed a series of memoranda analyzing the strategic implications of several versions of nuclear test-ban constraints on weapons development, the prospects for proliferation of nuclear weapons with and without the test ban, and mandatory safeguards under a test ban. “His work was instrumental in helping this government to achieve an intelligent consensus and to avoid militarily unsound clauses in the treaty,” explained Nitze. “He was insistent that the views of the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] be obtained and considered by civilian authority.” As director of Arms Control, Bud also served as Nitze’s immediate staff person on the Committee of Principals, which had been set up by McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk to deal with arms-control issues.16
Immersed in test-ban treaty negotiations, Bud was now in a position of greater visibility and opportunity. As a regular staff participant at meetings of the principals, Bud drafted most of the papers used by Nitze. “I had the intellectual excitement of getting all that done in advance of the meeting and then of sitting in on the meeting and taking notes so that I knew firsthand exactly how to deal with the subsequent revisions and so forth.”17 Bud additionally served as an advisor on Sino-Soviet affairs. Indeed, he had evolved into a specialist, “particularly effective in analyzing the implications for U.S. policy of various actions of the Soviet leadership.”18
One of the early papers written by Zumwalt for Nitze took the position that the national interests of the United States did not require getting involved in Vietnam, that it would be a strategic error to do so in a land war.19 Bud’s own thinking was heavily influenced by Nitze, who believed that U.S. forces should be brought to bear only by air and naval-surface-ship bombardment and by a blockade of North Vietnam. If this did not cause Hanoi to cease its infiltration into South Vietnam, amphibious landings to seize Haiphong and Hanoi would have to follow. This strategy amounted to cutting off all logistical lines to North Vietnam by land and sea. Bud estimated that if this option came to pass, five thousand American casualties would result. U.S. Army forces in South Vietnam would be limited to advisory efforts to equip and train the Vietnamese to fight their own war against indigenous communist forces as the United States contained the threat in the north. He did not think the People’s Republic of China (PRC) would challenge these actions.
Alternatively, if the United States was going to get more heavily involved, Bud believed the best way to do so would be with massive air power applied at the source and with a small number of advisory personnel to help bolster a rapidly deteriorating in-country situation. The worst possible course of action would be to introduce forces on the ground. The record shows that Zumwalt and Nitze believed Vietnam was not the place to enforce the U.S. policy of containment because neither man saw South Vietnam as a viable national entity, believing as well that the conditions for nation building did not exist. There were better places for building economies and military capabilities in the region—Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Under the Nitze-Zumwalt concept, U.S. efforts in Vietnam would have been limited to modest support and military advisory personnel. “To commit any ground troops at all meant in the end to commit as many as might be required to ensure the security of those already committed. There was no such thing as being a little bit pregnant,” Nitze wrote of his early 1961 disagreements with McNamara.20 Secretary of Defense McNamara, of course, rejected this line of reasoning because his Pentagon computers all demonstrated that the United States could accomplish its objectives by escalating the ground war. McNamara rejected the Zumwalt-Nitze recommendations; he favored a grand strategy of attacks on limited targets followed by pauses and, if necessary, massive U.S. ground forces in the South.
Robert McNamara and Paul Nitze had what can only be described as a love-hate relationship. When Nitze was in the hospital with an incipient ulcer, he told Bud, “You know, this is McNamara’s ulcer.” Bud thought that “McNamara both admired Paul’s vision and depth and wisdom, and deeply resented it, because he recognized that Paul was so much his superior in that regard. McNamara had twice the memory that Nitze did about names and numbers, but he just wasn’t in the same league with Nitze on concept. In my judgment, McNamara wanted in a deputy someone who would just carry out his bidding. He was perfectly content to have Paul be down there as number three, where he could tap him for his wisdom and yet not be compared with him in Cabinet meetings and in press conferences and that sort of thing.”21
Following the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Nitze joined a small group of the president’s advisors, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, often referred to as ExComm. Nitze was authorized to take notes on the meetings because ISA was the liaison serving the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After each meeting, Nitze would debrief his carefully selected ISA team.
“I was involved in that totally,
” recalled Zumwalt. The night before the crisis, there had been a USS Dewey get-together at the home of the former executive officer. “That was one of those rare occasions when I had far more to drink than I should have had. It was a Saturday night. I was awakened on Sunday morning about 6:00 o’clock, after having had only three hours’ sleep, by a call from Mr. Nitze’s personal secretary telling me that I must be in the Pentagon within an hour. That’s when we began the staffing for the President’s speech.” For the first twelve hours, “I was suffering so much from the hangover, that it was very hard to be brilliant, and I kept saying to myself, ‘How tragic it is that on the one time in a year when I pull this, I get pulled in on the most important work of my life?’ ”22
Nitze had just returned from a meeting of the National Security Council, where it had been confirmed by photos that the Russians were bringing missiles into Cuba. “Paul came back and decided to set up a very small group to work with him. The President authorized people to work with some of their staff but had made it mandatory that there be absolutely no disclosure to any other people, no matter how high their clearances.” Nitze’s team included Henry Rowen, John Vogt, John McNaughton, Daniel Ellsberg, and Bud.
Nitze’s instructions were clear: “You fellows are all peers; there’s no hierarchy here. We’re going to be under terribly short deadlines, and when I come back from each meeting, I’m going to be giving each of you an assignment, and you’re going to have anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours to get it done.” Each staff member was given something to analyze. In Bud’s case it was how a blockade might work, which at the time was just one of several options being considered. Nitze later wrote that “I adopted the practice of assigning different analytical tasks to each of these advisors. Frequently they had to respond within a few hours or less, timed to give me their written analyses to review, to revise, and to distribute and use at the next ExComm meeting.”23 Bud offered a similar recollection: “I don’t ever recall, during the period of the five or six days that this went on, that we had more than an hour and a half to get back to Paul Nitze.”24
Following days of intense deliberations, during which all possible responses were considered, Kennedy settled on a naval quarantine. With Soviet ships approaching the blockade, McNamara and Nitze met to discuss the type of directive that needed to be written for the Joint Chiefs and the navy as to options available to them. Nitze sent for Bud to write up the orders, but he arrived without paper and pencil. McNamara said he wanted an order sent immediately to the commander in chief, Atlantic Fleet, to stipulate, “and he went through point one, two, three, four. He got up to about point five, and he saw that I didn’t have a paper and pencil,” recalled Bud. “And I will cheerfully admit that what I should have done was have asked for paper and pencil, but I was busy memorizing these points. He picked up a tablet of paper and a pencil, and instead of saying, ‘Here!’ he threw them at me. Well, this infuriated me so much that I left them there—a really dumb thing to do—and he went on and finished his summary, and I left.”25
Bud dashed back to his office and wrote down first words and then sentences, taking about thirty minutes to write the entire message out. “Then I went back in to Paul Nitze and he spent about 15 minutes studying it. And he said, ‘Bud, it’s all there, take it up to McNamara, but I want you to know that he said, ‘If he missed a single point, fire him.’ ”26 Bud later mused, “That was probably as close as I came to losing a career.”27
The wording in Zumwalt’s draft, reflecting McNamara’s instructions, was to give Soviet prime minister Nikita Khrushchev two days to respond. Nitze changed “within two days” to “within a couple of days,” which to the Russians would come across as less definitively a deadline.28 McNamara then approved the rules and procedures for the quarantine. “The proposed action was aimed solely at blocking further shipments of offensive weapons bound for Cuba and to do so with a minimum degree of force. Careful monitoring of every ship involved in the blockade was essential, and insofar as possible, control of the situation at sea was to remain in the hands of fully responsible officials in Washington.”29
President Kennedy wanted to be certain that the Soviets were not backed into a corner. The president wanted to give Khrushchev as much time as possible to think through his response to the boarding of the first ship. To provide maximum flexibility, Kennedy decided that the first ship to be boarded should not be one from the Soviet Union, but from a Third World or Soviet-bloc country. The problem was that the navy wanted the go-ahead to intercept one of the Russian ships. Bud was given the responsibility to relay the president’s decision to the navy. He hand-carried this new directive to Captain Ike Kidd, then in a staff position as executive assistant to CNO George Anderson. The message was sent to Vice Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, then in Op-6 (Plans, Policy, and Operations). Within about fifteen minutes, Sharp sent for Zumwalt: “Look, this isn’t the way to do this. I want you to go back and tell McNamara that we’re closer to a Russian ship, and that we want to go ahead and intercept a Russian ship first.”
I said to him, “Admiral, I can tell you that this has been very carefully thought out, and it’s come from the highest levels.”
Admiral Sharp asked, “What’s your rank?”
I said, “Captain, sir.”
He said, “Do you understand a direct order when you get it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I order you to go back and tell McNamara what I want to do—what Admiral Anderson wants to do.”
Bud first went to see Paul Nitze, who was outraged. Nitze instructed Bud to return to Sharp and tell him to carry out the orders of civilian authority. He used the word “meticulously.”30 Bud tried convincing Nitze to go with him to see McNamara. Nitze replied, “I most certainly will not. You get back to Admiral Sharp and tell him that I have personally directed that he is to carry out McNamara’s orders.”
Bud returned to tell Admiral Sharp that the CNO was going to be in deep trouble if he chose to ignore the new instructions. That evening McNamara encountered CNO Anderson at the navy’s command center for quarantine operations. McNamara confronted the CNO, demanding to know if he intended to follow orders. Anderson told him that there was nothing to discuss. The navy had been running blockades since the days of John Paul Jones. McNamara did not “give a damn” about what John Paul Jones might do; he wanted to know what Admiral George W. Anderson was going to do.31 It was a classic example of military versus civilian authority. This was the first of the series of events that led McNamara to conclude that he was going to get rid of Anderson. “And, frankly, there was, in my judgment, absolutely no excuse for them,” said Bud. “If ever there was a clear-cut case of doing something in the way of using military power to send a signal, this was it. And a good, rational way of building up the levels of perception had been thought out. And why in the world Admiral Sharp, who is a very wise man, wanted to do it this other way—or maybe Admiral Anderson had directed him, probably had—defied me at the time and defies me now.”32
After the president’s speech, Bud walked back to the Pentagon, telling Paul Stillwell, “I went out. There wasn’t a taxi in sight; everything had been scooped up by the ambassadors. And there was no sign of life anywhere. I decided it was a nice night and it’d been a long week, I walked from the executive office—it was then the state department; it’s the executive office of the White House now—to the Pentagon . . . a good long hike but not all that bad. I got about three blocks down and had that eerie sensation that there wasn’t any sign of life. It suddenly dawned on me, I wonder if those missiles are en route.”
Years later, on the occasion of Paul Nitze’s ninetieth birthday, Bud wrote, “I wanted to recall with you the magnificent job you did on behalf of our country during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The almost hour-by-hour debriefings that you were able to give your Cuban Crisis mini-staff, are indelibly engrossed [sic] in my mind. . . . The remarkable way in which you made use of the mini-staff, with assignments from you to each individu
al upon return from each executive committee, with a requirement for short-fuse ‘think pieces’ during the 30 minute, one hour, or several hour interludes in the meetings of the executive committee, made it possible for you to maintain the ‘high ground’ at subsequent meetings. Your recognition that he who had a prepared paper had a major control of the thought process was just one more indication of your insightful knowledge of policy making. With the hindsight of 35 years, I still consider those tumultuous days an example of America at its finest. This episode was just one more indication to me that America has never had your superior as a government servant.”33
In his report recommending Bud for accelerated promotion to rear admiral, Nitze noted that “during the several days of the crisis he produced a series of military-political analyses, on short notice, at all hours of the day and night. These were brilliant pieces of work which added to the process of obtaining rapid government consensus.” When he used these reports in his meeting with President Kennedy, they “had their impact on decisions” and the negotiations. “He was specially commended for the quality of his work during the crisis.”
Bud continued working on contingency plans for Cuba, developing the concept of a State-DOD plan for each of several likely contingencies. Nitze sent Bud to New York to work with Soviet foreign minister Vasily Kuznetsov, UN secretary general U Thant, UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson, and negotiator John McCloy on procedures for the UN to carry out its mission of monitoring the removal of offensive weapons from Cuba. He also became the point man for a special study requested by Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance on U.S. policy options toward Cuba. The report became the primary source document in the generation of policy after the crisis. “My personal observation of Captain Zumwalt’s professional competence and remarkable grasp of complex political-military affairs has been a source of continuing admiration,” Vance wrote to Nitze. “In addition, the habitually heavy workloads, combined with short deadlines, have always found Captain Zumwalt more than equal to the task. Especially noteworthy was the excellent and comprehensive Cuban policy review compiled under his immediate supervision. . . . I have found him to be: a brilliant analyst, an articulate speaker and writer, a prodigious worker, possessed of the soundest judgments, and uniquely effective and calm under pressure”34