Congress decided on joint hearings, chaired by Senator Stennis and including the following members: Senators Stewart Symington, Henry Jackson, Strom Thurmond, John Tower, and John Murphy and House members Charles Bennett, Sam Stratton, and Robert Stafford. From the executive branch, the Navy was designated the lead agency and the CNO appointed me as principal witness. My main responsibility was to draft and present the Navy’s statement. Secretary of the Navy John Chafee, Admiral Moorer, Vice Admiral Rickover and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Wheeler would testify in support. Senator Mondale was the principal witness for the other side, and he was supported by his own staff, Armed Services Committee staff members, several senators and congressmen opposed to carriers, and a number of civilian consultant panelists from local think tanks such as Brookings and the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. I would be allowed by the rules of the committee to testify in rebuttal to their statements.
The hearings ran from 7 to 16 April 1970, and the report, dated 22 April 1970, amounted to 767 pages of testimony. The conclusions were to “strongly recommend that the Congress approve the request of the President for funding long lead time construction items for CVAN-70 in Fiscal Year ’71.” The decision was unanimous from all voting members, with Senator Symington (who had served as the first secretary of the Air Force after the establishment of the service by the Defense Department Reorganization Act of 1947) abstaining. This action was the watershed that firmly established a continuing congressional commitment for nuclear-powered carriers into the future. All of the negative provisions of the Mondale amendment against the future of the Navy’s carrier program had been unanimously defeated.
The Navy considered that the Stennis hearings on the Mondale amendment were of such significance to the Navy and to the nuclear-powered carrier program that CVAN-74 was named the John C. Stennis. The OP-03V testimony in support of nuclear carriers became the basis of the justification for future carrier construction in the Navy’s shipbuilding plan over the subsequent period of the nuclear carrier program, which in 2006 was still in business in OpNav, busy overseeing the fleet introduction of the George H. W. Bush. The OP-03V program has been the major factor in shaping today’s carrier force, which includes ten Nimitz-class ships: the Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. The keel for the George H. W. Bush was laid at Newport News in 2003.
The principal characteristics of the Nimitz class have remained constant for the life of the program: two 120,000-shp nuclear reactors driving four propeller shafts. The length overall is 1,092 feet, the flight deck width is 252 feet, the beam at the waterline is 134 feet, and it displaces approximately ninety-seven thousand tons fully loaded. These ships are capable of a speed of over thirty knots, which equates to more than thirty-four miles per hour. A normal complement of aircraft would be eighty-five combat planes, and a ship’s crew with an embarked air wing consists of more than five thousand people. The current cost of the George H. W. Bush is about $4.5 billion.
Eight years later I again encountered Fritz Mondale. We found ourselves side by side in Arlington Cemetery, walking behind the caisson bearing the coffin of Gen. Chappie James, USAF, from the chapel to the grave. Mondale was President Jimmy Carter’s vice president and I had just retired as CNO. We reminisced about the carrier hearings in 1970, and then Mondale said, “I still have your picture on the wall of my office.” I reacted with surprise. “My picture?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “the picture of the aircraft carrier inscribed, ‘Senator Mondale, if you vote for the carrier in the authorization bill, we might name this one after you.’” I had forgotten all about that, but it was a friendly token of the courteous ways that at the time were the manner of the Senate no matter how rough the politics were.
THE CARRIER PAMPHLET
One of the projects undertaken in OP-03V was the preparation of a handbook-sized publication titled All the Questions You Had About Aircraft Carriers but Were Afraid to Ask. I had drafted the text in consultation with Dave Leighton of Admiral Rickover’s staff and then arranged with the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company to publish the pamphlet in a very attractive but professionally businesslike format. I don’t remember how many were printed, but there were a sufficient number to distribute one to every officer in OpNav, the Ship Systems Command, Air Systems Command, and the office of each member of Congress. Other copies went to advocacy organizations such as the Association of Naval Aviation and the Tailhook Association. The idea was to have a readable message in a handy-sized pamphlet, with two objectives: to inform those who needed to know and to make sure all of those responsible for promoting the program were consistent in their statements. This fact book of the Carrier Program Office was instrumental in marshaling support within the DoD and the Congress for the authorization and funding of the Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1977 and the Carl Vinson in 1979. The booklet remained in circulation for more than ten years with at least one reprinting. President Carter vetoed the 1979 DoD budget because it contained a Nimitz-class carrier, which would have been CVN-71. The pamphlet was dusted off and recirculated in Congress, along with another CNO document I had written called “The Case for the Nuclear Carrier.” The following year, Congress included CVN-71 again in its FY 80 budget and President Carter again vetoed the defense authorization bill. This time Congress overrode Carter’s veto, and the proposed CVN-71 became the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
THE CV CONCEPT
The secretary of defense controls the significant force levels of all the services: the number of divisions in the Army and Marine Corps, the number of carriers in the Navy, and the number of tactical fighter wings in the Air Force. Although OSD had been stuck on the number fifteen as the force level for attack carriers since the post — Korean War era, in 1967 the Navy was also operating nine antisubmarine warfare carriers (CVS). The CVSs were Essex-class ships that had done a full career of more than twenty years as attack carriers but, because of age and material condition (wear), had been transferred to ASW duties and redesignated CVS. As the new large-deck Forrestal-class carriers entered the fleet, Essex-class CVAs had to be dropped from the CVA category so as not to exceed the limit of fifteen CVAs The Essex-class attack carrier that was being replaced would undergo a short overhaul to correct the most debilitating deferred maintenance and to equip the carrier to operate the lower-performance propeller-driven ASW aircraft, the Grumman S-2 Tracker. Then, like dominoes, a CVS also had to be dropped from the ASW force to stay within the nine-ship CVS force level. Those deleted CVSs joined the amphibious force, in many cases as helicopter landing assault ships. If their material condition was too poor, the retired CVSs were sent to the scrap yards. This was an interesting example of the long-livedness and the great utility of carrier-type vessels. By 1968 most of the Essex-class ships constructed during World War II were twenty-five years old or more. Originally, the service life of an Essex-class ship was considered to be twenty years, but the exigencies of the Cold War had caused that figure to be extended to twenty-five through various applications of the Service Life Extension Programs (SLEP) and other remarkable feats of shipyard skill. The greatest problems were the engineering plants, which had been run hard and had even become unreliable in some cases. Further, in some of the CVSs, their hull plating had become so dangerously thin from years of continuous operation at sea, first as CV/CVAs and then as CVSs, that there was a real question of the vessels’ seaworthiness under heavy sea conditions.