The Galloping Ghost (29 page)

Forrestal, facing congressional hearings on what could be done to bring the branches together, decided to bring along Medal of Honor winners. He tapped Fluckey to represent the Silent Service. Realizing the Navy wouldn't resist all change, the secretary was hopeful a little tweaking could bring consensus. But he hadn't anticipated the impact of James Doolittle. The Army brigadier general had earned the Medal of Honor for leading a squadron of bombers on a successful one-way bombing mission over Tokyo from the aircraft carrier USS
Hornet
in 1942. Of the sixteen B-25 twin-engine bombers, four crash-landed in China and one landed in Vladivostok, Russia, where the crew was imprisoned for more than a year. The others either ran out of fuel or were hit by enemy fire, forcing the pilots to parachute from their crippled bombers. Of the eighty men who participated in the mission, three died during the raid and four were critically injured. Eight others were captured by the Japanese. Of them, three were executed and one starved to death. Doolittle, who landed in China, went on to command Army squadrons in Europe before moving back to the Pacific to direct B-29 strikes against Japan toward the end of the war.

Now, before Congress, Doolittle demanded independence for the Air Force. “It all ended in a big mess,” explained Fluckey. “Jimmy Doolittle made some very bitter remarks about the B-29ers will be turning over in
their graves if they didn't get a separate Air Force—what do you think the B-29ers were fighting the war for? Period. Forrestal's reply to this was to turn and tell the four of us that it was going to be a mud-slinging fest, this unification business, and he was not going to have any bright junior officers mixed up in this type of politics, so we were all excused and would receive orders the next day.”

The next morning seven sets of orders arrived—Fluckey's choice. None appealed to him. Then a new one arrived, canceling the previous seven. Fluckey was to embark on a thirty-day promotional speaking tour for the Navy during the Christmas holidays—without his wife. The commander was beside himself. Just home from the war, just reunited with his family, and now to be separated once again during a holiday period he hadn't enjoyed in years—what a setback. He longed for a return to the
Dogfish,
now impossible since a new skipper had been named. Deep in gloom at the naval operations headquarters in Washington, he had no choice but to follow orders. Then a call came in from Admiral Nimitz's office upstairs. He wanted to see the young officer.

Twice during the war Nimitz had come into contact with the skipper of the
Barb
. The first was when he, General MacArthur, and President Roosevelt visited him at the Royal Hawaiian where the president had insisted on meeting him. The second meeting was near the end of the war, when Fluckey suggested the admiral deploy ten wolf packs to mine the coast of China, from the Yellow Sea to Amoy. Intrigued, the admiral studied the plan and agreed it was feasible. However, since Okinawa had fallen to American forces, there was no need for the mission.

Now, in the admiral's office, the two men—one of the war's greatest submarine commanders and the man who had commanded five thousand ships and two million men at war's end—stood face to face. Fluckey, thirty-two, was a good six inches taller than Nimitz, fifty-nine. Gene's red hair, boyish complexion, and beaming smile were quite a contrast to the stoic, chiseled features of the slightly built white-haired admiral. Nimitz came to the point. He had just been named chief of naval operations and he needed a personal aide for the next two years. Would Commander Fluckey be interested? The offer was a godsend. Such a prestigious assignment would give him the inside track on future promotions in the Navy. But what did he know about being an aide? “I don't know anything about this particular business but I'm sure I can learn,” he opined, adding, “Are there any special orders that you'd like to have, mistakes that your previous aides have made possibly?”

Only one thing, replied the admiral. “I'm going to give you one order, and this is the last order I give you: never offend anyone.”

Nimitz was a pioneer in the undersea fleet dating all the way back to 1907, when he served in the
Plunger
(A-1). He successively commanded the original
Snapper, Narwal,
and
Skipjack
until 1912 and was the first commanding officer of the submarine base at Pearl Harbor. It was through his efforts at age twenty-six that dangerous gasoline engines were replaced by diesels beginning with
Skipjack
. Like Fluckey, who had saved the life of a friend by swimming to his aid when he was a child, Nimitz was honored by the Treasury Department for saving the life of a naval fireman who couldn't swim and was swept away from his ship by a strong tide. Nimitz, commanding officer of the E-1 submarine at the time, dove into the sea and swam to W. J. Walsh's side, keeping him afloat until both were rescued.

During World War I Nimitz was chief of staff to the commander of Atlantic submarines and eventually rose to command of the heavy cruiser USS
Augusta
and chief of the Bureau of Navigation. On Christmas Eve 1941—seventeen days after the attack on Pearl Harbor—Nimitz secretly flew to Hawaii to take over the Fleet to restore confidence. Fittingly, he was sworn in as commander-in-chief on the deck of the submarine
Grayling
(SS-209) on 31 December. He brought a very personal touch, insisting on greeting incoming ships as often as possible, not only to debrief the commanders, but, as he put it, “to size up the men”—to get a sense of their fighting caliber.

In the latter stages of the war, with the Navy poised to defeat Japan, Truman and Nimitz had a falling out over the president's intention to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. The admiral also disagreed with Truman's idea of instituting a universal military training program of six months. Nimitz thought the latter was a waste of government money, and believed there was no need to drop the two atomic bombs, that it wouldn't save that many American lives at the cost of two Japanese cities. Due to the admiral's intransigence, the president adamantly opposed Nimitz becoming chief of naval operations despite his immense popularity throughout the country. “If it hadn't been for such a blunt man as Admiral King [the outgoing chief of naval operations], he probably wouldn't have been promoted,” explained Fluckey. “But from what I understand, Admiral King told Truman personally, ‘You either make Nimitz chief of naval operations, or you explain to the American public why not.' ”

The president caved in. But he appointed Nimitz to a two-year term—not the customary four.

For Fluckey, the role of personal aide demanded long hours and a blur of activities. The routine was start work at 7:30 in the morning until 7:00 at night, seven days a week. Afterward the admiral and his aide usually
attended social events until 11:00, when they called it quits. Fluckey handled the admiral's appointments, helped with his speeches, accompanied him wherever he went, and was his liaison to the public. It wasn't unusual for three hundred or four hundred telephone calls to come in every day, as well as lots of letters. “The mail was just phenomenal,” said Fluckey. “Any time Admiral Nimitz did something that was out in the newspapers or something, the mail just came in by sackfuls.” The admiral often made three speeches a day, each laid out by Fluckey on cards put in Nimitz's pockets. The admiral had a knack for using humor and narrative stories, especially useful when dealing with the press. Recalled Fluckey, “He taught me to be a pretty good storyteller because, at press conferences, when we were moving into questions and fields that were not quite ready to be publicized, then he would start to tell a story. He'd say, ‘That question reminds me of a story . . .' and he would start to tell the story. This broke the chain of thought.”

Nimitz was careful about those he depended on for advice. “He didn't like yes-men around him, and he used me constantly to bounce ideas off,” recalled Fluckey, an idea-a-minute man himself. “The bounce was usually quite good. If I didn't believe in them, he expected me to speak up and I wouldn't hesitate.”

To Fluckey, Admiral Nimitz was a leader, not a driver. Either style could work, illustrated by the difference between Nimitz and Admiral King, known for his incendiary temper. “It's the difference in whether people will work their hearts out for you,” said his aide of the gentle-spirited Nimitz. “The driver had a job getting this done, whereas the people just want to do the very best they can for somebody they like. Admiral Nimitz usually made people so ashamed of themselves, of their narrow, bigoted, parochial wheeling and dealing viewpoint or outlook,” said his aide. “He would never lose his temper, in spite of what people were trying to foist on him. And then his calm patience would spread like the sea. When conferees were getting angry, he would halt everything by saying, ‘No further decisions will be reduced today. Now talk it out.' The next morning they would reconvene and decisions came out one, two, three as quickly as you can snap your fingers. His leadership was amazing in this regard.”

Nimitz had a cordial working relationship with Congress but didn't trust lawmakers to deliver on promises. In an appearance before an appropriations panel, for instance, the lawmakers fawned over him while going over the Navy's budget, assuring him of support while asking, “Are you sure you have enough, Admiral?” Nimitz replied the budget was sufficient. Later Fluckey expressed surprise at the generosity shown by the lawmakers. Yes, replied the admiral, but they should be ignored. “The party line this year
is to cut, and cut they will, and it's very sickening when people—there they are reasonable while they're listening to you, but the minute you're away, they'll go ahead back and adopt the party line. So now we'll go back and plan for the cuts.” Three weeks later the cuts were announced and Nimitz was ready with a plan to deal with them.

The admiral and his aide became quite fond of each other. “He grew on me so rapidly that really he became closer to me than my own father, and I could see his effect on everybody else in much the same way,” said Fluckey. Indeed, the admiral drew loving throngs just about everywhere he went. “I used to carry handfuls of autographed cards in my pockets,” explained his aide. “Women would kneel in front of him, grab his pants leg, kiss the cuffs of his pants. They'd kiss the sleeves of his uniform, just stop him, absolutely stop him dead in the street and he couldn't move.”

One such occasion was at a governors' conference in Kansas City, where Nimitz gave the keynote address. Afterward he and Fluckey were coming down the stairs of the capitol before thousands of visitors who had come to get a glimpse of the admiral. “The crowds broke through the police lines and started running up the steps to get a hold of him,” recalled Fluckey. “I had another group of policemen I kept on the side that came charging in to form a circle around him. They broke through them, and I grabbed Admiral Nimitz by the hand and dragged him back up the steps, because I really thought he would just be trampled to death. I'm talking about thousands of people, if you can imagine it. I just kept pulling him up the steps as fast as we could, with a few people clawing at him, and right back into the capitol, and finally pushed him into a men's restroom. Here were all these ladies outside and they broke right past me and went right into the restroom.” The admiral had to stand on a toilet seat in an enclosed stall to keep from being seen. Later he and Fluckey slipped out unnoticed through a basement entrance to the capitol.

In Washington Nimitz's popularity made it virtually impossible for him and his wife to go out together in public. Seeing a movie was impossible; patrons would interrupt constantly or stare at the couple. According to Fluckey, the Nimitzes resorted to dressing up in old gardening clothes with slouch hats and leaving their home at the Naval Observatory through a backyard garden gate in the evening, crossing Wisconsin Avenue unnoticed on the way to a movie theater.

The seven-day pace as Nimitz's aide was tough not only on Gene but on his family. At a dinner for the Fluckeys at the Nimitz home, Mrs. Nimitz asked Marjorie how “shore duty” was going now that her husband was home from
the war. “Well,” she replied, “if you can call this ‘shore duty,' I see less of my husband than I saw of him during the war practically and certainly less than at any time he's been on sea duty before.” Mrs. Nimitz wasn't surprised. She'd been trying to pare down the admiral's hours without success. The price of being a Navy wife.

Since she liked Marjorie immensely, Mrs. Nimitz later scolded the admiral for the “lousy life” he was imposing on the wives. He decided she was right. There would be no more working hours on Sunday. He also began dismissing his staff at 4:00 pm on Saturdays.

The Fluckeys and the Nimitzes found common ground in a most unusual way four months into Gene's new assignment. It was late March 1946 and the admiral and Army Gen. Dwight Eisenhower were invited to speak at the University of Richmond, where they were to receive honorary degrees. Nimitz and his wife had invited Marjorie to come along to make a foursome. She felt ill that morning and declined. After the ceremony, historian Douglas Scott Freeman hosted a noontime reception at his antebellum mansion. Mint juleps were served amid much laughter as the two military leaders shared humorous vignettes from the war. When the early afternoon reception broke up, Nimitz suggested that he and his wife repay the courtesy call that Marjorie and Gene had made to their home in the observatory. The admiral suggested his aide take along a fresh mint julep for Marjorie.

What could he say? “Wunderbar!” remarked Fluckey. “Marjorie certainly will be feeling better by now.”