After Warren asked for a congressional committee to investigate the Maritime Commission, the Committee on Expenditures, chaired by Congressman William Dawson of Illinois, set to work that fall. They hauled in each of the four maritime commissioners for intense questioning. The answers were not good ones. Commissioner Grenville Mellon, the man who signed the superliner construction contract, admitted that he understood “only vaguely the procedures involved in the staff’s calculations, [and] he claimed to have detected in them mathematic errors which he failed to correct because they ‘were all recited, they were in the record.’”39
Congressman Dawson could barely contain his rage. “You are not given a blank check,” he said, “to say ‘I believe this is convincing, and upon this I am going to do as I please with the Government money.’”40
The commissioner who completely broke ranks was Raymond McKeough, who now rehashed all the objections he had made before finally voting to approve the contract. McKeough told the committee that the commission’s goal of a fixed $28 million contribution from the United States Lines resulted in a “reckless abandonment of an orderly, systematic approach to the required determinations.”41
Truman, meanwhile, thought about abolishing the Maritime Commission as an independent body and putting it under the direct control of one of his cabinet secretaries. He asked his attorney general to look into the House’s report and make a legal recommendation.
After reading Warren’s report, Frederic Gibbs fired off a rebuttal to Commissioner Mellon. Frederic asserted that the large national defense allowance in the language of the contract was not some kind of ruse, but the result of demands placed on the designers by the Navy, which made it “inevitable that national defense features were interwoven into practically every part of the ship.” He also insisted that more stringent American naval and commercial regulations regarding safety, especially fireproofing, did not benefit the owners. “The owner does not make a penny more because the vessel is fireproofed,” Frederic wrote.42
In short, the contract price was legitimate in that it allowed United States Lines to build a superior dual-purpose ship that was otherwise not possible.
In spite of the controversy, on February 8, 1950, a giant shipyard crane gently dropped a fifty-five-ton steel plate onto the same huge dry dock floor where the keel of the carrier USS United States had lain ten months before. It was the first keel plate for “Hull Number 488,” the official yard name for new United States Lines flagship.
The massive plate was lowered into a canyon of wooden scaffolding that lined the entire dry dock. One of the men there was shipwright Tom Paris, whose job was to help set the huge piece of steel precisely in place. “When the first piece of keel came in, it was nothing but a flat plate,” he recalled. “I set the plate down on the dock floor, I put the centerline on the frameline, and then tied it down to the dock floor.”43
There was no keel-laying ceremony to speak of. A group of shipyard executives, naval officers, and reporters, all dressed in winter coats, huddled together on a crude wooden platform overlooking the dry dock floor. William Francis stood at the center of the group, his black lapels turned up against the wind and hands clasped together.
With the keel down, William Francis Gibbs’s ship began to rise.
But once construction started, newspaper reporters and photographers were barred from the construction site. The way the ship was built was a military secret. Gibbs ordered that all images and plans be kept under lock and key, and the three thousand people who worked at the site were not to say anything to anybody. If a worker was caught discussing construction details in public, he faced immediate dismissal, a prospect that sealed lips in a company town like Newport News, Virginia.
A few months later, President Truman decided that the best way to resolve the issues raised by the new superliner was to abolish the Maritime Commission. Its powers would be assumed by the newly created Federal Maritime Board and the Maritime Administration, which would be under the control of the Department of Commerce. The Maritime Board would supervise rates, while the Maritime Administration would carefully handle the granting of construction and operating subsidies. The president then tapped Vice Admiral Edward L. Cochrane, the former chief of the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ships and the man who had defended Gibbs against war profiteering charges. He accepted the position of head of the Maritime Administration.
Gibbs now assumed that his ship, now well under construction, was safe from the fate that had befallen the supercarrier USS United States. He was wrong.
18. A MIGHTY SWEET BABY RISES
All during the spring and summer of 1950, work on the ship proceeded steadily. William Francis made frequent trips to the shipyard to keep an eye on developments, making sure that everything was being built just as he had envisioned it. Shipyard workers knew they could never slack off, because Gibbs had a habit of sneaking up on them. The sight of the darkly dressed man in the floppy hat put the fear of God in everyone from foreman to welder. “Everybody knew Gibbs was there,” shipwright Tom Paris said. “They knew not to speak to him, but they knew when he came by, he was making sure that everything was put just as he put it.”1
As he wandered around the site, blueprints under his arm, Gibbs must have reveled in the complete control he finally had over the project. After forty years of dreaming, the Big Ship was becoming a physical reality.
Once the keel was laid, workers attached huge steel ribs, which spread out from the keel as if they grew from an enormous backbone. The ribs were then slowly sheathed by 152,000 high-tensile steel plates that were welded together, not riveted. Welding—a faster and superior method of construction that created a flat, hydrodynamic hull surface—was used sometimes on big liners before the war, but never on this scale. Gibbs & Cox had perfected a way to weld the mass-produced Liberty ships together, with most components made off-site by subcontractors. To build United States, Gibbs had to coordinate production and delivery with eight hundred suppliers in sixty-eight different locales.2
Special attention was given to the stern, which if not built correctly would vibrate badly from the force of the propellers. To make sure that the stern was rigid and strong, workers tied the structure together with an interlocking network of bulkheads, brackets, and girders.3