After dinner, I laid out the plans for Lehman’s visit. In the event that Lehman might have demurred at the thought of flying in an A-6 off a carrier — and I thought there was a good chance that he would not want to do so, based upon my previous experience with the civilians from the Pentagon — I didn’t want Lehman to be embarrassed. However, John Lehman was of a different stripe. He was positively enthusiastic about flying from the carrier and asked if he could go on a strike. I pointed out that we were losing people daily to the heavy ground fire over North Vietnam, and because of his assignment in Kissinger’s inner circle, it would certainly be embarrassing if he were captured and had his fingernails slowly pulled out with pliers. He reluctantly agreed that it would be wiser not to put him in a position where he could possibly fall into the hands of the enemy, but he certainly wanted to go along as a crewman just as far as was prudent.
The following day, Lehman was sent by helicopter over to the carrier Saratoga, which was the flagship of Commander, Task Group 77.3, at that time the senior aviation flag officer in tactical command of the Seventh Fleet air operations. He was a colorful individual, a rear admiral, known to his friends as the “Big Coolie.” With his six foot four inch, husky frame and square jaw, he somewhat resembled the character Big Stoop in the comic strip Terry and the Pirates. On a previous tour of duty serving in the Pentagon, the Big Coolie, who was an especially dedicated advocate for carrier aviation, had taken to visiting the offices of the staff of the secretary of defense on the third floor of the Pentagon, where he would attempt to educate these civilian analysts on the benefits of carriers. He was physically more persuasive than verbally, and the secretary of defense eventually had to call the SecNav and instruct him to forbid the Big Coolie from visiting the third floor offices of the SecDef. The reason given was that he was intimidating the civilians.
The Big Coolie was an aviator’s aviator. When he commanded an F-8 fighter squadron as a thirty-six-year-old commander, he was the top pilot in the unit in air-to-air combat. He had also commanded an air wing in which he flew all of the different types of planes in the wing. He had then been in command of a carrier before taking over a carrier division. He was clearly the sort of person who would give the impression that the aviation leadership of the operating Navy was tough, experienced, and professional. It had also quickly become apparent to me that John Lehman was an exceptional young man with an enormous amount of common sense to go along with his sharp intellect, and that he could certainly differentiate between the truth and elaboration. I thought that he would find in the Big Coolie an interesting and well-qualified spokesman for Seventh Fleet air operations.
Calling the Big Coolie on the radio telephone, I explained to him exactly what I wanted him to do in furthering Lehman’s education in matters of Seventh Fleet operations, especially the carrier operations, which at that time amounted to about 90 percent of the Navy’s involvement in the war. Lehman was to be checked out as a bombardier/ navigator in the right-hand seat of a Grumman A-6 Intruder and launched on an operational mission. The Intruder would accompany the strike flight up to the coastline, then fly along the coast and pick them up again as they came out. He would fly the entire mission with the exception of the portion that was overland. It was essential we avoid exposing him to the possibility of going down and being captured.
The Big Coolie called me the next afternoon to say that Lehman had done well on his A-6 flight. He had been an enthusiastic crewman and had learned to operate the Intruder’s complicated radar after only fifteen minutes on the controls. As a consequence, he had gained an excellent appreciation of the electronic and weapons capabilities of the A-6. The education of John Lehman in naval matters had begun. At that time, few of us would have guessed that he would end up being one of the most active and productive secretaries of the navy in its long history of distinguished public servants.
Lehman did visit other units of the Seventh Fleet, including surface combatants conducting shore bombardment. He liked the fact that I was riding a 6-inch gun cruiser and could watch direct gunfire missions against hostile targets ashore, observing the fall of shot and an occasional secondary explosion when an ammunition dump was blown up. John Lehman later wrote to me saying that his report to Secretary Kissinger had been a positive one, and that he had found little to criticize in the Navy’s operations. He felt that Kissinger had been persuaded of not only the essential nature of the Seventh Fleet forces in the conduct of the war but also of the fact that they were making a unique and major contribution.
As a footnote, when I returned to the Pentagon after the Seventh Fleet assignment, I got in touch with Lehman, who had joined Fred Ikle on the staff of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The two of us continued to share our mutual interest in naval aviation and the role and the capability of carriers in future war plans and military strategies. When I became chief of naval operations in 1974, I hired John Lehman for the CNO’s personal staff as a consultant, mainly to advise in matters concerning SALT but also in a host of other operational and political subjects involving the Navy and, especially, carriers and Naval Aviation. When John Lehman became secretary of the navy in the Reagan administration and I had retired from the Navy, he continued to keep in touch and share his views with me on naval matters.
In later years, a retired naval aviator who had flown off the Saratoga in 1972 told me that he had been on the strike with Lehman and implied that John had insisted to his pilot that they not linger at the shoreline but go on with the other A-6s to the target. My vehement response was, “Don’t tell me another word!”
17
Vietnam
In spite of the furious barrage of salvoes from her 8-inch main battery, the USS Newport News (CA-148), flying the flag of commander, Seventh Fleet, appeared to be trapped in the approaches to Haiphong Harbor. It was almost midnight on 27 August 1972, and three North Vietnamese torpedo boats had used the cover of darkness and the karst islands of the Dao Cat Ba archipelago to ambush the heavy cruiser. The Russian-built P-6 fast attack craft were moving at top speed to close off the only escape route.