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Proceedings / Naval Review
During the 1960s, it was my good fortune to serve as special counsel to four different Secretaries of the Navy. The job brought with it many satisfactions, but there were frustrations and disappointments as well. The latter were most evident in the controversial development of a new joint Navy-Air Force fighter plane which came to be known as the TFX. Though Secretary Fred Korth was able to wrestle a congressional investigating committee to a standoff on the TFX, he did not survive in his job much longer. In the aftermath of the TFX, other factors came to light, and in the volatile atmosphere of Washington they finally led to his resignation under a cloud. His departure under those circumstances was a very great shame, because it never should have happened. I could not prevent it. I did my best, and I’ve always felt badly about it, but looking back, I see nothing more that I could have done. Even so, I regard it as a failure.
The fact that Korth came through the TFX hearings untouched did not help him in the long run. The committee, following his testimony and after he’d been excused, sent staff members to Fort Worth to go through the files of the bank there—the Continental National Bank of Fort Worth. Korth had been president of that institution before becoming Secretary of the Navy. The investigators went through the files, and they found a couple of letters that Secretary Korth had written to the bank, which were—well, probably indiscreet but not much worse. One letter to the new president of the bank pointed out that Korth was aware that a bankers’ convention was going to take place in Atlantic City. He invited the president of the bank, if he intended to attend that meeting, to be Korth’s guest on the Secretary’s yacht Sequoia on a certain date near the time of the meeting. That would have been all right, but he added, “and if you have any particularly good customers of the bank that you’d like me to include, let me know.” Well, this appeared to the investigators to indicate that Korth was using his position of Secretary of the Navy to further the goals of a bank which presumably he was still inter168 ested in. The facts are really quite otherwise. Korth is a prodigious writer of letters. He dictates them by the dozens and maintains a wide circle of friends. And he is a thoughtful and considerate man who likes to help people. He simply dictates the letters each night and in the morning I think his custom is simply to sign them without reading them. He is very gregarious and very outgoing. When you consider the literally hundreds and hundreds of letters and that he in fact had no interest in the bank, was not going back to the bank, and never did go back, the statement, while ill-advised, was innocent. However, it did cause the investigators to conduct further investigation of all of his correspondence files in the Navy Department.
A few letters found there were embarrassing. One in particular had to do with retired Air Force General Lauris Norstad, who was a very good, old friend from Korth’s Army days. On one occasion after Norstad had retired from his job as NATO Supreme Allied Commander and had the position of chief executive of Owens-Coming Company, he stopped by to see Korth in his office. And that night Fred dictated a letter to Norstad. “Dear Lauris,” it said, “after you left my office this afternoon, I realized that I had heard that Owens-Coming was building a new plant in Waxahachie, Texas.” (This is quoted as well as I can remember.) And he said, “Gus So-and-so is the head of a bank there in Waxahachie, and he was a good correspondent of the Fort Worth bank. I suggest if you haven’t selected someone in the area to take care of your banking needs, that he would be good for you. I’d be happy to drop him a line.” So I think this was one of the most incriminating letters that they found. They were—essentially knowing Korth, knowing his nature, knowing his constant willingness to help people in almost any way, the voluminous correspondence that he carried out— totally innocent. But they were on the Secretary of the Navy’s letterhead, and they were seized upon by members of Congress to indicate that he still had an interest in the bank and that he was doing the bank’s business while he was Secretary of the Navy. There were a couple of other minor pieces of correspondence which were believed to .point in that same direction. So the Washington drumbeats increased in crescendo, and people were calling for his
In this painting of Fred Korth, the artist has the subject holding a letter, dated 1 November 1963, in which Korth informs the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral David McDonald, that he is stepping down as Secretary of the Navy.
dent Kennedy, through his brother Bobby, had asked Fred to step down— that he was an embarrassment to the President and to the Democratic PartySecretary of Defense Robert McNamara had given the same message. It appeared that Korth didn’t have a friend in Washington at that particular time.
As I recall, even his own staff couldn t come up with any way out.
I urged him to hang in there, that, all right, if he actually got fired, that
1985
would be one thing, but that he had °ne nothing wrong and he should stand his ground as long as possible ar>d not quit. He asked, well, what oould happen, everyone was calling for ts blood, the President himself had •ndicated that he should step aside. He asked me what in the world could happen to avoid this. I could think of nothing else to do but tell him the story of the caliph of Baghdad. There Was a plot to assassinate the caliph, but efore the plot could be carried out, e conspirators were apprehended and condemned to death. They were all in e|r cell awaiting their execution and eeling resigned to their fate because in Tact they had plotted against the caliph.
ney were all resigned except one, who sought and was granted an audience with the caliph, because he was aware that the caliph was extremely Proud of his sacred white bull. He told e caliph, “If you spare me, I will each your sacred white bull to fly.” The caliph was intrigued and said, right, he would spare him for one ^nr, and if he taught the sacred white uh to fly, he would pardon him. But 1 not, he’d die a thousand deaths as °nly the caliph could inflict them.
So he went back to his cell to get ls gear, and he told his condemned compatriots what had happened. They said, “You’re very foolish because,
®r all, a year will pass very quickly i you will die a horrible death. By °night we will all be with Allah.”
He said, “No, I don’t see it that ay at all. A year is a long time. And Uring the year, I might die a natural ®ath surrounded by my loved ones, or e caliph may die and be replaced by another ruler who might look differ- nt*y upon the situation and pardon me. r’ the damn bull may fly.”
,^° Korth laughed at the story, but he aid, “Well, in this case the bull’s not °0lng to fly.” And he went ahead, and j.e tendered his resignation. Public Af- j(airs Officer Jim Jenkins and I drafted ’ a Very sorrowful event, and I took it Ver to the White House and gave it to ^enny O’Donnell.
Not long after the resignation under Jre’ the bull did fly. The President of United States was assassinated, and *ce President Lyndon Johnson, who ^as very much a friend of Fred Korth, j)ecame President. Had the Secretary Ung in there, he probably would have een all right.
I Horth had a serious hearing loss, and ad several times suggested to him at he avail himself of the expertise of e doctors at Bethesda to have an operation performed while he was still Secretary of the Navy. So on the occasion of his resignation, Jim Jenkins and I urged him to go ahead and check into Bethesda immediately following his resignation and have the operation done. This was a perk accorded him as a former Secretary. In addition to helping his hearing, the operation would put him out of circulation. He would be away from all the jackals that would be after him and his family for sufficient time for the thing to blow over, and he could get on with his life.
So he left the Secretary of the Navy’s office and went immediately to Bethesda. The evening after his operation, I got a phone call from him at home quite late at night, and he asked if I could come out to Bethesda. He sounded very bad. He sounded as though he was still fairly well drugged from the operation, but he said that he wanted me to come out to take a look at a statement that John McNaughton had that he wanted him to sign.
I, of course, advised him not to sign anything, 1 would be right out. I hopped into my Volkswagen and drove from Alexandria to Bethesda, arriving there very late, sometime probably around midnight. There was John McNaughton, who was the general counsel of the Defense Department, with a statement that he said that McNamara wanted to have Fred sign to wind up that whole affair. I read the statement, and it was obviously a confession of guilt, and entirely inappropriate. It did not reflect the facts at all.
I said, “No, you shouldn't sign this. It would be the wrong thing to do. You’d regret it all your life. It’s not right.”
Korth had no reason to sign anything, except for the fact that it was presented that it would be useful for the Democratic Party and the administration if he would sign this. So McNaughton was insistent that he sign it and kept pushing the arguments that Fred as a true Democrat and as a patriot should do this—that this was required of him. Fred, who had gone through the operation that day and was still partly drugged and not feeling well at all, was totally upset at the whole thing and at his wit’s end, indicated that well, just to get rid of it all, he would sign. And at one point I recall literally taking the pen out of his hand.
I suggested that we call Abe Fortas and that if Abe agreed that he should sign it, then I would back out. After all, I was at that point no longer his counsel since he was an cx-Secretary. I had turned over all of the TFX material to
Abe Fortas, who was to be Korth’s counsel when he was no longer the Secretary. Abe had been brought into the picture by Vice President Johnson, who recommended to Fred that he obtain civilian counsel in case Senator John McClellan’s TFX Committee decided to pursue him into post-Secretarial life. So I had spent a lot of time— weeks—turning over all of this information to Fortas, who was then a' member of the law firm of Arnold, Fortas & Porter.
Korth agreed that we should call Fortas, which I did. I managed to get him out of bed with some fast talking with Mrs. Fortas, who didn’t want to call Abe, but she finally did. He agreed that Fred should not sign anything until he got out there and took a look at it. He came out, and he said to McNaughton, “If you say McNamara wants Fred to sign this, I’ll get Bob McNamara on the phone right now. We’ll get this straightened out.” So he called McNamara. Here it was getting,
I guess, close to 1:00 o’clock in the morning or 2:00 o’clock.
“Bob, this is Abe Fortas, and I’m out here at Bethesda.” He said, “Young McNaughton is out here with a statement that he wants Fred to sign.” Abe Fortas had been a professor at Harvard Law School when McNaughton had been a student there in law school. I could only hear one side of the conversation, of course; I couldn’t hear what McNamara said.
But Fortas said, “Oh, you haven’t seen the statement? You say that you left the whole thing to Ros Gilpatric?”
So it turned out that Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric had prepared the statement or had it prepared by someone. According to McNaughton, Gilpatric had sent him out with a statement that Gilpatric had said McNamara wanted Korth to sign. So McNaughton was not misrepresenting anything; he was just apparently misadvised.
Korth decided not to sign, and that was the end of that. I can hardly imagine a more bizarre situation than that evening. It was like something out of a Dostoevski novel.
Captain Kerr had a distinguished career as a submariner and a Navy law specialist. This is an edited excerpt from an oral history interview conducted for the Naval Institute by Paul Stillwell on 1 February 1984. To obtain a newly updated catalog of the Naval Institute’s entire oral history collection, please send $2.00 to Director of Oral History, U. S. Naval Institute. Annapolis, Maryland 21402.
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oceedings / Naval Review 1985