Word: pentagonals
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...economy, reducing the forces on the insistence of Harry Truman, left the U.S. almost totally unprepared for Korea; austere George Marshall, who had to work mightily to pick up Johnson's pieces; able Robert Abercrombie Lovett, who found that even-handed patience was not nearly enough for the Pentagon; and blunt Charles Erwin Wilson, whose experience remains most meaningful of all to Neil McElroy...
...masculine Pentagon world, McElroy is a man's man: he can be a two-fisted bourbon drinker, barely manages to suppress a lifelong passion for shooting craps, has a short-fuse temper and can use four-letter language that does not spell TIDE. As Defense Secretary he must walk the tightrope between sufficient defense and national extravagance; McElroy's own nature is such that he could, without batting an eye, decide to spend $30 million for Procter & Gamble to buy Clorox, yet at home in Cincinnati he long kept close personal tabs on the amount of gasoline...
...Like a Cigar." The personal traits that Neil McElroy brings to the Pentagon have been in him a long while. He is a strong-minded man, and he was a headstrong child, with a habit of holding his breath until he got his own way (his mother finally cured him by throwing a pan of cold water in his face). Raised in Madisonville, now part of Cincinnati itself, Neil was the youngest of three sons of a high-school physics teacher. He was reared on the run: from his earliest memory, all the considerable McElroy family energies were turned toward...
...president, McElroy still wanted the facts. "Just as he remembers names and faces," says a P. & G. executive, "Mac remembers facts, and woe be to anyone in the Pentagon who doesn't remember that Mac can remember every damn thing he ever saw. He can look at a page with hundreds of figures on it and get to the source of any error. He has the same ability to detect a flaw in an argument...
Moreover, Charlie Wilson's idea of improving Pentagon organization was to bring in more civilian officials, some plain incompetent, few with much real military knowledge. While the professional military men, with all their parochial bickering, are far from blameless, it is nonetheless true that the major mistakes of Wilson's day were made by civilians. It was civilian mismanagement of funds last year that forced procurement cutbacks and threatened to wreck the nation's airframe industry. It was a civilian decision that left the Strategic Air Command with a majority of its force grounded for lack...