With the signed contract in hand, Gibbs finally agreed to an interview. The American public, especially the well-to-do traveling set, was eager to hear from the ship’s designer. Gibbs sat down for an interview with George Horne, shipping editor for the New York Times, who was eager to know everything about the new ship.
But Gibbs was extremely cagey. Asked about the published dimensions of the proposed vessel, he said they were “inaccurate.” Asked if the ship would be powered by a nuclear reactor, he stonewalled.
“I’m not going to tell anybody anything,” Gibbs finally said. “We have spilled too many secrets in this country. We have something here, and why tell them what we have found. Why should we save them the ten years of research we have gone through?”
The naval architect freely admitted, the reporter wrote, that he “intends to use every stratagem to heighten the mystery” surrounding the project. The rationale for the secrecy, Gibbs claimed, was two-pronged: “possible national enemies who do not yet dream of the revolutionary advances represented in the design, and friendly maritime rivals in the same un-blissful state of not knowing.”
Gibbs also knew silence would build public interest in his ship. The less he said, the more America wanted to know. He would play the cat-and-mouse game with the press as long as possible.
But what he would tell Horne and all who asked was whom the ship served. The new superliner, he argued, would be “a break for her owners, the people of the United States of America” and “when they see what she can do, the people won’t be sorry.” The men and women of his firm, he would say later, wanted something simple: “They knew they were trying for the greatest ship in the world, and they knew they were doing it as trustees for the people of the United States.”33
Truman’s comptroller general, Lindsay Warren, did not share Gibbs’s views. He had gotten his hands on the contract. After reading it, Warren and his staff got to work on a report to Congress.
In the meantime, William Francis started to assemble a scrapbook of newspaper clippings on the Big Ship. He basked in the public support, but also delighted at how the reporters were kept in the dark about the ship’s specifics.
The same day that the contract was signed, hundreds of workers bent over the drafting tables at 21 West Street heard a firm, patrician voice over the public address system. Engineers dropped their pencils and slide rules. Telephone receivers were put down, and secretaries stopped working except for the one taking down Mr. Gibbs’s remarks.
“We can all take pride and we can all be thankful for the events of April 7, 1949,” he said. “It marks, as I told you, a great event in the maritime history of the United States because on April 7, the United States, a giant among nations, shook off its lethargy in connection with things maritime and determined to take its rightful place in primacy on the seas.”
The negotiations, he said, were “complicated and difficult,” but ultimately “satisfactory.” The ship, he estimated, would be delivered in 1952 and “may be the possessor of the famed Blue Ribbon as the fastest passenger ship afloat.” After reminding his staff that it had been a hundred years since an American ship had captured the Atlantic speed record, he continued, “You have all had a part in the performance and the effort that brought this result and advantage to the people of the United States. Each of you who by heart or hand or enthusiasm have stood beside and behind those of us who were on the firing line has contributed a real and lasting part in the result.
“On behalf of myself and the people of the United States,” he said in closing, “I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”34
But trouble was brewing. As Gibbs, Franklin, and the Maritime Commission were finalizing the superliner contract, President Truman decided to replace the intransigent and increasingly troubled Secretary of Defense Forrestal, who had so admired Gibbs’s work. The sallow-faced Forrestal complied on March 28, 1949. Shattered and dazed, one of the Navy’s greatest champions suffered a complete emotional breakdown. He checked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital just outside of Washington. On May 22, Forrestal jumped out of a sixteenth-floor window to his death.
There was also more turmoil in the military establishment that threatened to impact the Big Ship. Two weeks before the contract was signed for the construction of United States, the Truman administration had canceled a contract for a warship even more ambitious than a transatlantic superliner.
World War II might have proven the military value of the superliner, but a much bigger revolution had taken place in the skies. Long-range fighter planes, based on an aircraft carrier, could devastate unprotected fleets. Even the mightiest battleship, bristling with antiaircraft guns, was vulnerable to a well-coordinated torpedo attack from the air. Just after Pearl Harbor, for example, Japanese bombers sank the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse off Singapore, with a huge loss of life. The future of the Navy, American military brass reasoned, lay in a well-coordinated use of air and sea power, which meant building bigger, faster, and technologically advanced aircraft carriers. In the age of the atomic bomb, a carrier also eliminated the need to plant air bases overseas should America choose to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.
Before his death, Secretary of Defense Forrestal and his allies in the Navy were pushing for the construction of a new generation of super aircraft carriers. His successor, Louis A. Johnson, found himself looking at a contract with Newport News Shipbuilding to build the largest carrier in the world. Costing a staggering $189 million, nearly three times as much as Gibbs’s superliner, the first of this new class of supercarrier, coincidentally named USS United States, would be able to carry a staggeringly lethal number of planes: 54 fighter jets and 12 nuclear-capable bombers.
William Francis Gibbs had never designed an aircraft carrier, and never wanted to. Although he sent his chief engineer, Walter Bachman, to investigate the proposed ship, Gibbs remained totally uninterested in combining air and sea power. “His attitude? A wet blanket,” one colleague said.35 But the aircraft carrier was slotted to take up the biggest slipway at Newport News, a real problem for Gibbs’s timetable. On April 18, 1949, a few weeks before the contract for the passenger liner SS United States was signed, the keel of the supercarrier USS United States was laid on the floor of Slipway #10. Five days later, Secretary Johnson canceled the contract. The project, he said, was just too expensive. Newport News had no choice but to break up the carrier’s keel plates.
The slipway was now clear for Gibbs’s superliner. But the fallout was a huge public relations disaster for the Truman administration. Secretary of the Navy John L. Sullivan declared that what Johnson did to the supercarrier USS United States was outrageous—“drastically and arbitrarily changing and restricting the operations plans of an armed service without consultation of that service.”36 In the “Revolt of the Admirals” that followed, Secretary Sullivan resigned. So did Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Louis Denfield, while many others in the Navy spoke out publicly—a shocking action against a decision backed by the president and his top civilian defense official. Truman only dug in harder.
Johnson’s decision to kill the supercarrier opened the floodgates for further review of big government spending projects, specifically the construction of passenger ships. Leading the charge was Truman’s comptroller general, Lindsay Warren, who had made a name for himself nailing war profiteers during World War II. Now his really big target was United States Lines, which had just received more than $42 million in construction and national defense subsidies to build a superliner. On July 11, 1949, three months after the United States Lines contract was signed, and as preparations for its keel-laying went forward, Lindsay Warren and the General Accounting Office reported to the Senate that the contracts made with the United States Lines was riddled with “various irregular procedures, inaccurate calculations, and unjustifiably liberal interpretations of statutory language.”37 Warren concluded that the proper response of the United States Lines and the Maritime Commission after learning of the $73 million price tag was to build a smaller ship, or to drop the project entirely. “It is apparent,” he said, “that the evidence supporting the Commission’s calculations falls far short of the ‘convincing evidence’ required by the act for an approval for a subsidy in excess of 331/3 percent.”38