Word: pentagonals
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Pentagon was quick to catch the note in the President's press conference last week which indicated that Ike was less enthusiastic about the need for prompt reorganization of the Defense establishment than he had sounded in his State of the Union message (TIME, Jan. 20). "My own convictions are rather fixed," Ike told the newsmen mildly. (General Eisenhower came back from World War II convinced that U.S. defense needed "central planning-the essence of unity in the armed forces.") But when a reporter asked last week whether he was still in that fight, Ike seemed to back away...
...Democratic Senator Sam Ervin Jr. after listening to a missileman's technical talk, "it sounds like unscrewing the inscrutable." By last week Sam Ervin, Chairman Lyndon Johnson and the rest of their colleagues in the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee hearings had reason to suspect that the Pentagon, like a complex missile, needed unscrewing badly. Having taken testimony on the state of the U.S. defense posture from military and civilian defense officials as well as scientists, the committee last week sat back while the nation's top missilemakers and planemakers opened up with an unprecedented and chillingly unanimous attack...
Cats & Guts. Even angrier was Thomas G. Lanphier Jr., wartime fighter pilot and vice president of Convair (prime contractor on the Atlas ICBM). The Pentagon, said Airman Lanphier, indulges in "dangerous semantics" by indicating that the Atlas will be reliably operational in the near future. Actually, said he, the Russians are two to three years ahead of the U.S. ICBM program because they have tested "hundreds" more parts. Convair could double its efforts on Atlas if the Pentagon so ordered, accelerate its B58 bomber program by three or four months and put 50 times as much work into its anti...
...North American Aviation Inc. (rocket motors), heartily agreed with Tommy Lanphier: "I think it is going to be a long, long time before we have what I consider dependable, reliable [ballistic] missiles . . . They are intricate beyond human belief." Also beyond belief, according to Kindelberger, is the state of the Pentagon. "It reminds me," said he, "of a skein of yarn with which the cat has been playing for years. It is badly snarled and loose ends stick out all over. . . It cannot be untangled by wrapping more yarn on the outside. . . It is a big, vast, intricate thing...
President George Bunker of the Martin Co. (the Titan ICBM) complained that the Pentagon has "so many people who have the power of negative endorsement" but nobody to give "an absolutely clear-cut decision that you know will stand." Titan is still on a "one-shift basis" and has not received a dollar of speedup money. Curtiss-Wright's President Roy Hurley aimed at the Pentagon budgeteers who withhold money for a program that has been approved by the Joint Chiefs and authorized by Congress: "You should shoot them, or drown them or put 'em in jail." Summed...