by Larry Berman
Restoring zest, fun, and satisfaction in a navy career meant removing the continual pressure under which people lived. This effort led to examining the root causes of instability and then a search for solutions. To outsiders, some Z-grams may have seemed trivial, but to those inside they were revolutionary.24 Z-04 gave thirty days’ leave between assignments, alleviating some of the hardship in back-to-back deployments. It took one year and three separate Z-grams to do something as simple as allow a sailor to store civilian clothes aboard ship. Z-05 created a pilot program allowing first-class petty officers to keep civilian clothes on ship to be worn on liberty, something only officers and chief petty officers had been able to do in the past. This program was such a success that a few months later, Z-68 extended the privilege “to all petty officers on all ships.”25 Six months later, Z-92 let all nonrated men do the same.26
The enlisted men of Attack Squadron 145 were excited enough by these changes to all sign a letter of thanks to their new CNO: “We are happy the Navy’s leaders are changing standards to correlate with the changing times and the responsibilities of a petty officer. We hope that this latest change will instill additional incentive in our non-rated men to advance and attain the responsibilities of a petty officer. We wish to forward our ‘Well Done’ to you.”27
Another change involved uniforms worn by sailors below the rank of chief petty officer. The uniform being replaced had been introduced in the previous century, the design dictated by weather and the working conditions of the times. After many surveys and focus groups, a change was made, eliminating service dress khaki for officers and chiefs, service dress blue and white jumper uniforms for junior enlisted men, and service whites for chiefs. The traditional bell-bottom trousers and jumper uniforms were replaced by a new uniform. The change ignited a firestorm of controversy. One reassuring note arrived from an early mentor, retired admiral James Holloway. “You are doing so many things for our Navy—things that had to be done under present day operating and other pressures, and which would never have been done without your perception, and the power and prestige of the Chief of Naval Operations in directing and underwriting them.”28 Bud appreciated Holloway having his back on this issue of enlisted navy dress uniforms, stating, “I strongly believe that this change will go a long way to giving added dignity to our individual Navyman, and increase the attractiveness of our service as a place to make a rewarding career.”29
Internal polls taken six months after the first Z-grams showed strong disapproval among 15 percent of the flag officers, captains, and chief petty officers; the discontent attenuated rapidly as one went down to the more junior ranks. Years later, in a letter to a friend, Bud observed, “I think we took the staid old institution for about as much as we could move it at the time. I like to say that I have a wonderful list of friends and a wonderful list of enemies as a result, and I am very proud of both lists.”30
The young men and women in the navy loved these changes, especially the aviators. Admiral Jerry Miller recalled that when Bud first became CNO and started issuing Z-grams, “His popularity with young people was fantastic.” The venerable aviator Admiral John Hyland was scheduled to receive the Tailhooker of the Year award, which goes annually to an individual with a distinguished career in sea-based aviation. In 1965 President Johnson went over the heads of seventy-two more senior rear admirals by promoting Hyland to vice admiral and commander of the Seventh Fleet. Soon thereafter, Johnson promoted Hyland to commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, and he received his fourth star.31 Hyland had been a hero to young aviators.
Bud found Hyland to be likable, but “he just didn’t seem to me to have four-star competence. Neither then, nor when he came out to Vietnam, did he express any interest in what was going on there. He didn’t seem interested in my requests for help on various things. He seemed to me to be a very competent naval aviator, four-stripe captain, who had, on the Peter Principle, exceeded his level of competence. He just didn’t seem to have a grasp.”32
Bud ended up wrangling with Hyland after just one day on the job, which senior aviators saw as the CNO’s attempt to take apart aviation leadership in the navy. In a “Personal and Private” handwritten letter dated July 1, 1970, to “one of the finest bosses I ever had,” the new CNO asked Hyland to retire so that new blood could come into the flag-officer ranks. Hyland had been fighting Zumwalt to the very end on the new daisy chain for early retirements. “A lot of people used to say, in discussing Zumwalt, any guy who had the guts to fire Johnny Hyland had the guts to do anything. No holds barred,” recalled Miller. In a personal handwritten reply, Hyland wrote, “I don’t want to retire. I can hardly imagine not participating any longer in what we do in our great Navy.” Hyland resented being forced out. “When your extraordinary appointment was announced, it was clear that some of the 4-stars would have to go.” Hyland was only fifty-eight years old and beseeched Bud to reconsider, telling him, “I’ve received a remarkable number of expressions of regret over my ‘fate.’ Obviously it is nice to receive such things, but they do testify to my service reputation, and I think it follows that I can still be a valuable member of your team. I very much want to be.”33 On October 15, Bud sent another personal handwritten note, describing the decision as “the most personally painful I have ever had to make.”34 Hyland was ordered to retire as of January 1, 1971.
While all this was going on under the radar, Bud had been invited to be the principal speaker at the annual Tailhook banquet in Las Vegas. At the last minute, Hyland refused to attend the award ceremony because Bud, not Hyland, was the featured speaker at an aviators’ event. The Tailhook meeting and award ceremony went on without Hyland. “There must have been 25–30 Admirals there to honor Hyland, along with hundreds of sailors, but Bud was now the drawing card,” recalled Admiral Miller. The sailors started chanting, “We want Z, we want Z.” They were soon “standing on their chairs, swirling their napkins around and so forth. They wanted him. He had that much appeal, but you can imagine what the reaction was among the aviation admirals, some of the senior people.”35 When Zumwalt entered the room, he gave “that perfected Tarzan yell. Here he is, the brand-new CNO, and he’s got these Z-grams out, and he tells this great story about Tarzan and he ends up with this tremendous Tarzan yell. And it just brought down the house. It was absolutely fantastic. He couldn’t have established himself better with the young aviators.”36 Meanwhile, the older admirals seethed, plotting their revenge.
One of the most important of the early Z-grams was about the creation of retention study groups. When Bud became CNO, first-term reenlistment rates in the antiwar, antimilitary era were at an all-time low—9.5 percent overall and less than 4 percent on aircraft carriers. The navy was clearly experiencing a hemorrhage of talent. Z-01 convened a junior officer retention study group to focus on the reasons why so many officers and enlisted men were no longer making careers in the navy and to advance solutions. The idea of retention study groups grew from the Vietnam ACTOV Personal Response Program that sought to identify the causes of poor morale and low retention. In a letter to Chon, Bud discussed the “exhilarating and challenging” program for the retention of officers and enlisted personnel and wanted Chon to know how much he had learned from him, evidenced by the creation of the post of assistant chief of naval operations for benefits and services, which was patterned after Chon’s deputy chief of staff for political warfare.37
The idea was for groups to meet in seclusion and brainstorm ideas for improving the quality of navy life and thereby improving retention and morale of naval personnel. “He was as good as anyone I know at nurturing creativity,” recalled Chick Rauch. “I can’t remember him ever saying no to anyone who had an idea.”38
“The excellence of our people has long been our heritage—it is my source of strength. I intend to further enhance this reservoir of strength by assuming as my first task the improvement of many aspects of the naval career,” Bud announced in his first all-navy message. “There is much that will require t
he support of my civilian superiors and Congress. These changes will take time. There are other improvements which we can make within the uniformed Navy. These can come more quickly.” The retention study program would be co-chaired by two junior officers, Lieutenant William Antle and Lieutenant David Halperin. Halperin spent eighteen months in Vietnam, part of the time in Operation Sea Float. As an operations officer, he became close friends with Elmo. Halperin planned, executed, and supervised an extensive area-development program involving both the U.S. and Vietnamese navies. The net effect of these innovative programs was to increase economic activity and improve the general well-being of inhabitants. After four arduous months in one of the VC’s most remote and controlled areas, Halperin was assigned to the Plans Division on Bud’s staff, where he was given the job of designing a time-phased plan shifting responsibility for certain types of in-country air support to the Vietnamese air force. Bud thought Halperin exhibited “the rarest sort of practical judgment and the broadest analytical skills” and found him to have “an exceptionally keen and inquisitive mind” and to be very conscientious. In a letter to the Harvard School of Law, Bud rated Halperin “#1 in 10,000.”39
Zumwalt did not know Lieutenant William Smoot Antle nearly as well. In 1970, Bud asked the chief of naval personnel to select three of the most outstanding young officers from each of the major officer communities to head the retention task forces. Antle reported in August 1970 as the submarine representative and came to the job after a distinguished career in the Naval Academy. He had graduated 28th out of 868 and qualified as an engineer officer on a nuclear-powered submarine. Antle exhibited “the rarest sort of poise and discretion” and was “as articulate and perceptive as any junior officer I have worked with in the past several years,” wrote Zumwalt. Bud believed that if Antle had remained in the navy, “he would rapidly be promoted through the ranks to Admiral.”40
The concept behind retention study groups was to assemble a group of about a dozen officers and enlisted men from each part of the navy. Wives were soon involved, doubling the size and number of recommendations. On July 20, 1970, the first group convened, comprised exclusively of junior officers from the aviation community—some who had already decided to get out, others who were undecided, and some who had committed themselves to naval careers. This group came up with sixty-three specific recommendations, including beer machines in barracks, a twenty-four-hour mess line on carriers, squash courts on all bases, permission to wear flight suits anywhere on base, a goal of six months at home before deployments, giving aviators an opportunity to learn seamanship by assigning them as navigators to cruisers or destroyers, establishing career-counseling programs, and requiring that fitness reports be reviewed and signed by the candidate before being forwarded to higher authority.41 “Your message on retentions was well received by the young officers in the fleet and hopefully it will start the trend line up rather than down,” wrote Lew Glenn. “We definitely need a positive program to help our retention problems.”42
Retention study groups eventually included destroyer and mine-force officers, amphibious and auxiliary officers, POW/MIA dependents, WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service), civil engineers, minority women, ROTC midshipmen, and enlisted persons from the aviation, service-force, amphibious, submarine, destroyer, and mine-force categories. The format for the groups evolved through trial and error. Members met for a week trying to develop a consensus on ways of improving the situation; they were instructed not to make a gripe list. Rather, their focus was to develop discrete, implementable recommendations that addressed specific problems by improving conditions. The CNO did not need to hear long eloquent speeches about what was wrong. Each group was promised time with Bud personally, so that the system could not dilute their recommendations. The chairman of a retention study group was to moderate these one-week seminars and then brief Zumwalt, the secretary of the navy, and flag officers.
Bud instructed his staff that they were not to prescreen or drop wild ideas or in any way limit what he heard or what he was exposed to. “Each group was allowed to blow off steam at the beginning, but I then made them see that they only had a short time with Zumwalt and they would blow it if all they did was repeat what he knew—that things were bad,” said Halperin. “They needed to come up with practical remedies.” Halperin put them through a dress rehearsal the night before meeting with the CNO, making sure that the recommendation was framed properly and that each member got a chance to participate.
At the end of the week, the group assembled in the SECNAV conference room, where Bud and senior flag officers and staff were briefed. “For myself, a meeting with the retention study group was likely to be the high point of my week,” wrote Zumwalt.43 Secretary Chafee and senior staff came to as many meetings as possible. Each study group presented between sixty and eighty discrete recommendations. “Green stripes”—approved ideas—were drafted as orders and issued to action officers. The action required took many forms. For some ideas, it was “Do it now,” as in changing the name of the BT rating from boiler tender to boiler technician. For others, it was evaluating and considering alternatives and costs with a plan of action and milestones or perhaps just preparing a background memo for the CNO on the problem and the recommendations. Emmett Tidd followed up on the implementation—those implemented at the Washington level resulted in Z-grams, pilot programs, proposed legislation, or changes in instructions. The others were referred to the appropriate level.
Most Z-grams came from these retention group studies. A Young Turk program, soon called the Mod Squad (Destroyer Squadron 26), was placed under the command of Richard Nicholson, a protégé of Bud who served in a staff position in Vietnam and commanded the Operation Market Time coastal-surveillance task force. This demonstration program attached each officer to a billet one rank below the norm. It demonstrated to the entire navy the benefits of giving young officers more responsibility than they would normally have at their career stage.
Howard Kerr chaired the lieutenant commander retention study group. After receiving the report, Bud wrote his longtime aide and friend, “I concur with your premise that the high quality junior officers today are troubled because of some of those problems which they realize they too will encounter if they decide to remain in the navy. As you know, my position is that we must endeavor to identify and move our best officers to key positions as soon as they are ready in order to maintain the challenge for them.”44
From aboard the USS Constellation on April 12, 1972, Jerry Carr wanted his CNO to know that he had always considered himself a short-timer on first enlistment but that after the Z-grams started coming out, “I decided to reenlist and am intending to do so again when the time comes. Thanks to you, the Navy can finally be a very challenging and rewarding career. I have nothing but the greatest admiration for you and the job you are doing.”45
Just three months into Bud’s first year, Dick Nicholson wrote that “the young people (officer and enlisted) are excited about our new Navy and their future in it. My comment can only be ‘They ain’t seen noth’un yet.’ . . . It has been exciting here in left field watching the stones in Washington being lifted and the worms running for dark corners. For the first time in my 23 years, someone is actually giving more than lip service to our personnel problems. I’m sure happy I was able to stay around to see it.”46 First-term reenlistment rose from below 10 percent during fiscal year 1970 to 32.9 percent during fiscal year 1974. David Halperin learned many lessons under Bud’s mentoring. “By your own example I have come to understand my own limitations,” wrote Halperin in a personal letter to his mentor. “Each time that I have had to acknowledge that the system, the bureaucrats might somehow win in the end, I have intuitively known that you would be able to do whatever I could not do, and that however I might knuckle under compromise—in your finer sense of judgment and principle you would hold the line. John Kennedy was fond of saying, ‘Some men see things as they are and say, why? A few men dream things that never were
and ask, Why not?’ I think that I will always think of you in that way, Admiral: a visionary in an age without heroes.”47
Racial relations and sensitivities within the navy were not at the top of Bud Zumwalt’s list of major issues to be addressed at the start of his watch, but they inevitably surfaced during the transition to an all-volunteer environment. Not until he participated in retention-group meetings did he absorb the effects of institutional racism on individuals. He was visibly shaken by the stories he heard. Afterward, he was ready to fulfill a lifelong ambition “to throw overboard once and for all the Navy’s silent but real and persistent discrimination against minorities.”48
The navy had an ignominious history on race, starting in 1798, when Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Stoddert banned “negroes and mulattos” from service, a ban that lasted until 1812. Substantial numbers served in the navy during the Civil War. In fact, despite bans on enlistment of black sailors, they continued to serve on ships of the fleet, numbering about 1,500 to 2,000 men throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. President Truman’s executive order in 1948 established a policy of “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” The navy essentially ignored the order; enlisted blacks remained in the stewards branch, serving whites. Truman’s Committee on Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services, headed by George Fahy of Georgia, sought to determine why the navy was doing such a poor job with respect to recruitment of black sailors. One vice admiral testified that this was because blacks were “not a seafaring people.”49