22 December 2009
 
Right Thinking


(Cologne Cathedral, 1945)
 
Admiral Rex had a made-up family name that came from a tradition of service to the Lutheran Church and to the United States of America. The tradition began long before they swallowed hard and left Germany to cross the wide dark ocean in the middle of the 19th century with the tens of thousands of others.
 
Rex’s great-grandfather came over in 1850, about the same time as my Irish kin, and later, in the unpleasantness between the several states, chose to join the Union Army in order to obtain citizenship.
 
His brother fought at Gettysburg, just down the road from my German ancestors in Shippensburg, who wisely kept as far away from the matter as they could until Bobbie Lee and his boys came to them.
 
The Socotras of central Pennsylvania had something in common with the Admiral’s family, though, besides living in the Keystone state, and that was a fierce commitment to their Lutheran faith.
 
Devout as my people were, the Admiral’s family goes them one better.
 
The family surname- “Rectanus”- is made up from whole cloth, just like mine, though in the case of the Admiral’s family, it came about in recognition of the energy of faith and clear purpose.
 
The Admiral’s direct ancestor was a Catholic from the Diocese of Cologne named Johann Leonard Herresbach. The Cathedral there is one of the great triumphs of the human spirit, and my Great Grandfather made a pilgrimage there in the summer of 1903 to marvel at its beauty*. Construction of the church began in 1248 and took, with interruptions, until 1880 to complete.
 
The graceful Romanesque twin spires made the Cathedral briefly the tallest structure in the world. It had been a six hundred year project which resulted what the people at UNESCO have termed a "powerful testimony to the strength and persistence of Christian belief in medieval and modern Europe."
 
I don’t know what Uncle Dick thought. He made a similar journey to Cologne in the summer of 1944. I would have to dig out the copy of his log-book, but I know he paused only briefly there to drop a load of bombs on the burning city below. Dick was no Lutheran, and it is funny what a few years can to one’s perspective.
 
Johann Herresbach left the Catholic church in 1684 to become a Protestant with the zeal infused by right-thinking Martin Luther, and thoroughly energized, married a woman thirty years his junior.
 
He founded four little Lutheran churches around Heidelberg, and his young wife gave him four sons and a daughter. His parishioners recognized the power of his preaching and his energetic robust faith. They called him “Rectanus,” which in the Latin-influenced High German of the day meant "right thinker.”
 
Impressed by the insight of his flock, Johan He changed his surname to Rectanus, and anyone you meet in the wide world today with that name is directly related to that German line.
 
I don’t now if Rex ever took the family north of the Alps during his tour in the Med. I’m sure he would have appreciated the connection to his family, and the shared story of all the children of the European Diaspora to America.

RADM Vernon L. “Rebel” Lowrance was responsible for bringing Admiral Rex back to Washington from the Mediterranean in 1962, but it is worth a minute to slow down and look at what was happening in the five-sided adult care facility as the new decade unfolded.
 
Lowrence took the helm as Director of Naval Intelligence in the waning days of the Eisenhower Administration. It was in September of 1960, just months after the debacle of the U-2 shoot-down, and just weeks before the election of John Kennedy as the 35th President of the United States.
 

(Junior Officer onboard USS Sea Dog, 1943-44. Official Navy Photo)

Rebel got his nickname as a pigboat skipper of the old school. He won his Navy Cross in USS Sea Dog (SS-401) for his indomitable refusal to terminate war patrols in the face of adversity. He came into immediate contact with the new Defense look that the Kennedy Administration brought to town.
 
The young and charismatic President had worn no hat on the walk to his inauguration, which set us all agog as kids. His hair was great and he looked cool. It was a time of change as dramatic in its way as the election of Barak Obama.
 
Kennedy brought Robert Strange McNamara with him to reel in the military departments and their spiraling requirements with the same techniques he had learned in the Air Corps in WWII and refined in Detroit at the Ford Motor Company.
 

(Former Secretary of Defense and World Bank President Robert Strange McNamara)

McNamara was a prototypical whiz kid. He attained his MBA and with a year with Price-Waterhouse in San Francisco under his belt for real-world experience, strode right back to Harvard in August of 1940 to teach accounting in the Business School. He was the youngest and highest paid Assistant Professor in the history of the school to that point.
 
With war clouds gathering, he taught a program designed to convey analytic “best practice” from industry to young Army Air Forces (AAF) officers to assist in campaign planning. McNamara entered the Air Corps himself as a Captain in early 1943. He did most of his active service in the AAF's Office of Statistical Control, advising General Curtis LeMay on the bombing campaign against the seventy key Japanese cities.
 
Major McNamara used his methodology to make an a priori estimate of how many Japanese civilians would die.


(President Kennedy and General Curtis LeMay (Center))

He said afterward that if we had lost, he and General LeMay might have been tried as War Criminals. In the aftermath of Vietnam, I think he is being too charitable. At a minimum, he was guilty of applying the lessons-learned in one sort of war to another in which people responded in a dramatically different way.
 
Rex knew some of them well. A South Vietnamese pal of his did 16 years in a re-education camp after the war ended for the crime of defending his home and family, and for all else you can say about the rigid right-thinking Northerners, they were nothing if not determined.
 
Closely aligned with the art of operational research, Robert McNamara’s “Systems Analysis,” was the methodology of making art into science. It was supposed to be the interdisciplinary science of analyzing sets of interacting entities and systems and the ensuing interactions within those systems. The methodology was originally developed by the Research and Development Corporation (RAND) to evaluate alternative nuclear weapons outcomes.
 
It was later applied to social policy issues with the same vigor that we have applied to the climate change debate. The fundamental idea was that is was possible to create a science of war, based on rigorous scientific methods, and peer-reviewed in a process that compares projected costs, benefits and risks.
 
In McNamara’s view, it was also "an explicit formal inquiry carried out to help someone, referred to as the decision maker, to identify a better course of action and make a better decision than he might have otherwise made."
 
You can see how well that worked out, when fifty thousand American kids were dead, and a million Vietnamese. But everyone is right in hindsight, and McNamara’s hubris was at its height in Missile Crisis, when everything was new and Change was in the air.
 
I used to walk down the same corridor on the fourth deck of the pre-reconstruction Pentagon that served the leadership of the Navy. The concrete walls of the building were clad in dark oak wainscoting. Models of antique ships lined each side of the wide passageway, and a crisply uniformed enlisted Marine stood guard at a dark wooden desk that protected the Flag Plot.

(CNO Arliegh Burke (l) is relieved by George Anderson. Photo Life Magazine)
 
At the height of the Cuban crisis, the new Secretary with his slicked-back hair would stalk past the Marine with only a glance into CNO Flag Plot on the fourth deck of the Pentagon and demand to speak on radiotelephone with the commanders of individual units conducting the quarantine against Cuba.
 
Chief of Naval Operations George Anderson actually had the man thrown out at one point, which flabbergasted the Secretary. In this case, McNamara was right not to completely trust his Navy.
 
The rules of engagement permitted US Navy combatants to drop practice depth charges on Soviet submarines to force them to the surface and enforce the “quarantine,” an interesting term of art for the blockade ordered by President Kennedy. It avoided the baggage that went along with the more formal term, but which Anderson and his navy leadership took with its forceful traditional meaning.
 
“Damn John Paul Jones!” said McNamara one day in the Flag Plot, thinking the depth charges might be overly provocative. That got the Whiz Kid escorted out of Flag Plot, past the vault door to cramped two-story Intel Plot where the Navy Spooks knew things that could not be told in the larger watch spaces.
 
As much as they knew, they did not know that the Soviet submarine skippers, harried and pursued, had been authorized the use of their nuclear torpedoes if deemed necessary, and the sounds of the explosions in the water from the practice charges came within a hair’s breadth of causing a sleep-deprived Russian to use them.
 
Right-thinking officers talked the Russian out of it, a fact that was not known until 2002, when the Kremlin archives were still open, and the participants still alive.
 
The establishment of the Defense Intelligence Agency in October of 1961 had complicated the process of supporting the decisionmakers even as it had been intended to streamline things. It actually was made it all the more confusing. For all their faults, the two (now three) military departments were efficient at what they were doing when they acted unilaterally. The equipment they acquired was designed only to support the narrow mission areas of sea, land and air, and never intended to permit cross communications or interoperability.
 
World War II in the Pacific, as you will recall, was fought as two separate and independent campaigns, an Army one to the south and Navy one across the mid-Pacific.
 
One of my distinguished friends, one of the last who was actually there, still takes FADM Chester Nimitz’ admonition not to speak ill (publicly) of Doug MacArthur’s staff as still being one of the general orders.
 
Clearly, such a structure of service stove-piped organizations was unaffordable, and Secretary McNamara was just the man to reduce costs and increase productivity.
 
DIA was a case in point. Rex must have been frustrated with the problems of providing navy people to the new organization from the Detailers office. The Office of Naval Intelligence was forced to contribute three-hundred and fifty people and key mission areas to the new organization that took over the old Army Splinterville at Arlington Hall Station, across the street from Big Pink.
 
The previous service infighting, restricted to the three services, promptly took on another major player. If the recent creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in modern times is any example, it must have been an interesting time for Rex. At BuPers, he was entrusted with the job of issuing orders to the people that Naval Intelligence decided it could shed without real damage.
 
He arrived at BuPers as Intelligence Assignment and Placement Officer from July 1962, and was managing the little Naval Intelligence officer community when RADM Lowrance was relieved by Rufus Taylor in June of 1963. The electricity between the new DNI’s Pentagon office and that of Rex in the Bureau was palpable. Taylor was the first designated intelligence specialist to rise to become Director of Naval Intelligence.
 
Previously, the Navy had a policy of making the DNI a line officer, with the working proposition that is was desirable to show a line officer’s face to the service to enhance the credibility of the intelligence products, and being sensitive to the operational reality of customer needs.
 
It was a complicated world in which the cold struggle was always leaking out in the warmest of ways.
 

(President Eisenhower and President Diem of the Republic of Vietnam)
 
Truth be told, in 1963, there was not just one assassination. President Diem was overthrown and killed in a military coup in Saigon just a few weeks after President Kennedy. Though a CIA officer named Lucien Conein had given limited financial support to those involved in the coup d’etat, the American policy-making community was distracted by the change in the chain of command.
 
Black helicopters aside, there is no evidence that the U.S. expected Diem, and his brother and closest political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu to be killed. To the contrary, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. had offered him physical protection, though it didn’t work out that way.
 
The business of intelligence was getting more complex, and the reality was that only a specialist could understand the bewildering technical changes that were sweeping over the community.
 
I can’t tell you what anyone was thinking at the time- maybe my pal Mac could do that. But I do know that within the bastion of the OpNav Staff, there was the realization of the last of the old warriors that real, actionable operational intelligence was what was necessary to address a growing and worldwide challenge on the world ocean.
 
DIA, for example, was entrusted with one of the greatest secrets of the nation since the ULTRA breakthrough in the 1940s against the German code machines: Corona, the satellite photographic system that could never be shot down, never imprisoned, and never put on trial, was flying over the high value targets of the Soviet Union twice a day.
 
The Navy was in a period of unusual introspection. The first on-orbit capability that the nation had was a primitive but revolutionary ELINT collection satellite called GRAB, and later POPPY, launched shortly after Sputnik caught the attention of the world.
 

(VADM Rufus Lackland Taylor)
 
Admiral Taylor was one of the men who were assumed to be able to answer the challenge. He had fifteen years of operational experience as a line officer himself before transferring to the restricted line, and obviously saw the benefit of bringing line experience into the community- exactly the sort of operational credibility that Rex had earned in the destroyer and cruiser force.
 
1964 was a year of transition for him personally, and for the little Rectanus family in the larger sense. There was a hot war building in the aftermath of the Diem assassination in Saigon.
 
The right-thinking Secretary and the bellicose Texan President were determined to apply the might of America in a scientific method to rush the Communist-inspired insurgency, and they had every confidence that the effort could me managed with metrics and analysis.
 
Of course there are no obvious metrics for the human heart, and that was something we were all going to learn about presently about South East Asia.
 
It wasn’t the beginning of it in 1964. It had been going on for a long time. The first American casualty of the Vietnam War dates to 1957, when Capt. Harry G. Cramer Jr. was killed by explosion near Nha Trang, in what was the Republic of South Vietnam. There were to be so many more.
 
It was Rex’s destiny to try to do something about it, in support of a human force of nature named Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt, very poster boy for a Navy that needed to change.
 
More on that tomorrow.
 
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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More errata: Alert readers kicked me in my already-sensitive shins about neglecting VADM Tom Wilson, the distinguished Director of DIA, who should be inserted in the list between VADMs Studeman and Jacoby. My apologies to Tom.

Also, in “Open Skies,” the codeword KEYHOLE is associated with the U-2 airborne manned reconnaissance program. That is incorrect, and it is the former, rather than the latter side of the two linked code-words that is applicable. For the security officers out there, I forget what it is, or was, and why.

* Editor's note: The complete account of Great Grandfather Socotra's Grand Tour of Lutheran Europe is contained at the website, in his own words.
 


 
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