Yet William Francis could not stop thinking about how the really big ships, the great liners, were contributing to the war effort. He knew that thanks to their size and speed, the British Queen s and the United States Lines’ America had assumed heroic stature in the North Atlantic. After losing the USS Lafayette, the United States Lines owned only one large troopship—the Gibbs-designed America, requisitioned by the U.S. Navy in 1941 after only a few months of commercial service. The ship was renamed USS West Point and refitted to carry nearly 9,000 troops. But it was the big British superliners Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary that were really important to the war effort, shuttling 16,000 soldiers per voyage to Great Britain in preparation for the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
Hitler, of course, knew that the sinking of one of the Queen s would deliver a major, perhaps even fatal, blow to the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. As D-Day approached, he offered to award the Iron Cross and $250,000 in cash to any U-boat commander who could send one to the bottom. It was a prize that could never be claimed. The Queen s could steam away from any submarine trying to take aim with torpedoes.40
William Francis was soon to confront problems in Washington that threatened to undo everything he had achieved. His time holding dual positions in government and the private sector had produced some powerful enemies. In the spring of 1944, the House Naval Affairs Committee announced it would investigate the naval architecture firm of Gibbs & Cox. The charge was war profiteering.
His superhuman drive and wartime achievements had attracted the attention and publicity he dreaded. Now Gibbs had to defend his reputation to Congress. If condemned as a war profiteer, his firm, his work, and his dream to build a superliner after the war were doomed.
By outside appearances, William Francis and Vera Gibbs had prospered during the war years. In addition to an apartment on the Upper East Side, they also owned a fourteen-room mansion in Old Brookville, Long Island, not far from the Cravath “Still Place” compound in Locust Valley.41 While her husband busied himself with his Navy work, Vera hosted lavish benefits for the Metropolitan Opera, and young son Francis had recently ridden a $2,500 pony in a Madison Square Garden equestrian show.42
William Francis Gibbs actually hated horses the same way he hated publicity. “He always suspects they’re ready to bite him,” a family member, probably son Francis, was once quoted as saying.43
Much of the money funding this lifestyle came from an inheritance from Gibbs’s father-in-law, Paul Cravath, who had died in the summer of 1940. The most powerful corporate attorney in America left his daughter an estate of over $2 million, the equivalent of about $20 million today.44
No matter. It appeared that William Francis Gibbs was living large off the American taxpayer, and Congress was eager to crack open the black box that was Gibbs & Cox Inc.
In May 1944, William Francis Gibbs arrived in a Washington that was no longer a sleepy southern town. The wartime and New Deal bureaucracies had sent the population soaring past half a million residents. The city was gray and bleak. Men in uniform were everywhere, standing guard on the Capitol steps and the Lincoln Memorial. Strict gas rationing had cut down on car traffic. The government urged the thousands of workers at the Washington Navy Yard to carpool. “When you ride ALONE, you ride with Hitler!” exhorted one poster.45
A summons to testify before the House Naval Affairs Committee had recently landed on Gibbs’s desk in the Glass Menagerie. Shocked, he promised to “iron out any irregularities, if there be any, and provide for a course of action that will be generally satisfactory.” He knew that the chairman of the committee, Georgia congressman Carl Vinson, was an interrogator who would have no qualms about destroying the career of anyone put in front of him.
After Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, Vinson had become the leading advocate on Capitol Hill for the modernization of the Navy. Roosevelt, a lover of ships who also needed the support of southern Democrats to stay in the White House, enthusiastically endorsed Vinson’s views. A weak and outdated Navy, Vinson said, was “not a political question, but a national problem—namely, an adequate national defense—a first-class Navy for a first-class nation.”46 The $600 million bill (about $9 billion in 2012) became known as the Vinson Naval Plan and funded the destroyers Gibbs & Cox designed to be the most modern in the world. During the 1930s, two more multimillion-dollar “Vinson Acts” were passed, further increasing money available for naval construction.
Now Vinson was charged with investigating one of the chief beneficiaries of his legislation: Gibbs & Cox Inc.
Even before Pearl Harbor, Congressmen Vinson and other Democratic politicians were under intense pressure to investigate possible abuses by government contractors profiting from the “war business.” The 1934 Navy modernization plan had turned into a $24 billion money machine, and competition among contractors for government favor grew. Shipyards lavished baubles on the wives of important maritime officials and gifts to politicians who christened ships. Time magazine noted that, “after smashing her bottle, each ship sponsor took home a souvenir gift. Some of the trinkets would have lit fire in the eyes of a Follies girl.” Female relatives of Maritime Commission vice chairman Admiral Howard L. Vickery “had been in special demand as bottle smashers. Five had received $6,457.65 in shipyard gifts; Daughter Barbara’s share included two diamond bracelets.”47
Investigating wartime abuse produced great press attention for ambitious politicians like Vinson. Leading the pack of Washington crusaders were two southern allies of President Roosevelt: Senator Harry Truman of Missouri and Comptroller General Lindsay Warren, who until 1940 had served as a congressman from North Carolina. Since America entered the war, Truman’s special committee investigated suspect defense contracts and rooted out a staggering $11 billion in waste.48 As for the comptroller general, the press had dubbed the bull-necked, poker-playing Warren the “Watchdog of the Treasury.”
The press and the public were now eager to learn if the secretive William Francis Gibbs, the so-called “Technological Revolutionist,” was no hero at all, but instead an opportunistic criminal who, after collecting a near monopoly of wartime naval design contracts, was reaping huge profits from inflated fees.
The hearings began on May 8, 1944, in Room 303 of the Cannon House Office Building, a neoclassical marble pile dating from the Theodore Roosevelt administration. The main entrance, with its columns and steps, resembled the portals of the House of Morgan that William Francis Gibbs walked into thirty years earlier, the plans for his dream ship under his arm. This time, he was carrying a stack of notes on his firm’s finances prepared by his brother, Frederic.
The hearings opened with a statement by the committee’s general counsel, Robert E. Kline Jr. “They have set up in New York, at 21 West Street, a huge organization—without doubt one of the largest engineering organizations in the world,” he began ominously, “whose job it is to act, directly or indirectly, as an outside design and procurement agency for the Navy Department.”49
Kline and the Naval Affairs Committee made it clear that the quality of the firm’s work was beyond reproach. But the existing business relationship, they charged, was suspect. Rather than accepting a flat fee for each class of vessel, William Francis and Frederic Gibbs—the firm’s sole stockholders—were charging a fee for each ship launched, leading to, as Kline charged, “a multiplication of fees far beyond any original expectation.”50