Editor’s Note: I am watching the skies and the snow. I want to be at the Farm, and fully intend to be there later. On the other hand, I have learned my lessons about travel in Virginia, and considered a tattoo that would read “If it’s snowin’, I ain’t goin.” In the meantime, I would like to introduce you to a major player in Mac’s career, another WWII veteran, and the one who was the proximate cause of Mac’s retirement from the Navy. He didn’t seem to mind- if Bud Zumwalt decides to turn the Navy inside out, there is not a lot that mere mortals can do about it. Mac told me at Willow about the ruthless campaign to banish every flag officer senior to him on the lineal list when Bud became Chief of Naval Operations. If he wanted his trusted cadre of officers from Saigon with him, that was just the way it was going to be and no point bearing grudges. Anyway, meet Rex, who became another great pal in later years.

– Vic

Right Thinking

(Cologne Cathedral, 1945)

This may seem like a bit of a diversion, but you can’t talk about Mac’s Navy career without talking about Vice Admiral Rex Rectanus.

When I reported to BuPers at the Navy Annex in Arlington back in the mid-1980s they warned me that I might get a call from a somewhat imperious older gentleman named Rex, who apparently thought that our office still worked for him. I made a note, marveled at the fact that soon I would know the middle names of six or seven hundred junior officers, and got on which a job that produced a bruise on my left ear.

In time the call came- the Admiral wanted some three-star letterhead stationary, and with due deference, I managed to bilko a sheaf from the harried officers down in Flag Matters. It was an inauspicious start to what became a valued friendship, once I understood what Rex had done for Bud Zumwalt in Vietnam in Operation SEALORDS, the effort to interdict VC logistics shipments in sampans all across the waterways of South Vietnam.

(Rex on the OSD Staff after his hitch as DNI, 1971-74).

This directly relates to the last phase of Mac’s active Naval career. For years I assumed that Mac had been the Director of Naval Intelligence. It was the way things worked. One of the Captains would be selected for Flag Rank, be “frocked” to wear the fat gold braid on their sleeve, serve as something like the Joint Staff (JS, now J2) on the Joint Staff, and finish up as Director of Naval Intelligence.

Sometimes luck, talent and timing meant that DIA or another Combat Support Agency would open up at the right time, and a third star might be available. There were only two authorizations (or three, depending on timing). It really was just a matter of where lightning was going to strike.

I got to know Rex quite well in later years as we followed his last crusade, the one to honor our only MIA Naval Intelligence Officer, CDR Jack Graf. I think there is more to this story- much more- but there are increasingly fewer people to ask about it.

Rex told me over drinks at a soiree he had organized at the historic Willard Hotel downtown how it all came about. “Rectanus,” he said, “Was 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 the family 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 visit 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.

We shared something there- my family patronym is also made up from whole cloth, though in the case of the Admiral’s family, it came about in recognition of the energy of faith and clear purpose. Maybe mine did too. I am only staying for the beer.

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 that resulted what the people at UNESCO termed a “powerful testimony to the strength and persistence of Christian belief in medieval and modern Europe.”

I don’t know what my Uncle Dick thought in 1944. He made a similar journey to Cologne that summer. 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 from his B-17 “Buzzin’ Betsey” on the burning city below. Dick was no Lutheran, and it is funny what a few years difference can do to one’s perspective; from worship to using the spires as the initial point for a bombing run.

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 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. Mac was at First Fleet in San Diego, safely out of town.

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 HBS 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. This was the same stream of advice that Iron Pants went around by approaching Mac in the Estimates section of the CINCPAC HQ on Nimitz Hill.

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 in those days. 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 the cramped two-story Intel Plot where the Navy Spooks knew things that could not be told in the larger watch spaces and right into the broad wood-paneled corridor.

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-led one to the south and Navy-led advance across the mid-Pacific.

Mac still takes FADM Chester Nimitz’ admonition not to speak ill (publicly) of Doug MacArthur’s staff as still being one of the general orders. In fact, that is how we originally met, when he asked a colleague who the hell the whippersnapper was speaking ill of Dougout Doug.

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 behind the stately headquarters at Arlington Hall Station, across the street from my modest digs at 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 could be 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 warfare speciality officer’s face to the service to enhance the credibility of the intelligence products, and being sensitive to the operational reality of customer needs. Ruf Taylor broke that paradigm, which lasted right up until the Radio Wars ended in 2010 with the intelligence folks in defeat and the Cryptologists in the ascendancy.

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. But of course, that was going to mean Mac was the odd man out for being the Director of Naval Intelligence. He gently corrected me on that at Willow one afternoon, and I felt like such a bonehead.

“I wound up at DIA,” he said. “And that actually turned out to be kind of interesting.”
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(Rex and his companion Jinny Martin, both of whom became fast friends. There was never any animosity between Rex and Mac. Both were consummate gentlemen of the old school, and Jinny wound up being one of my best palls until her death last year. )

Copyright 2017 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com