Historical notes highlight Pentagon players – Part 3

Harry was fond of boss Zuckert (on right, above and below)

On this page we see more reflections from Harry’s early Pentagon years. Whether he intended anyone to see them (other than the original recipient) we’ll never know. As our family reads these notes, however, we can pair some of his experiences with the Pentagon photos taken during his career. I found these notes dated Jan. 3, 2010 in computer files, though I think he wrote them years earlier.


When I came to the Pentagon, the United States Air Force, as a separate service, was just two years old. The first Secretary, Stuart Symington, was just leaving and the second Secretary, Tom Finletter, was just arriving. One of the Assistant Secretaries was Eugene Zuckert, whom I met early on and took an immediate liking to. The Special Projects Office was run by a couple high-powered Colonels, established to do special jobs for the Secretary.  

The thing to remember is that the Air Force was still trying to organize itself and the Secretary had all kinds of organizational problems in trying to adjust its civilian staff to do the administrative things while the military side was trying to adjust its staff to get out from under the Army and do the military things – and there was a lot of confusion about who was responsible for what. The civilians had no responsibility in operational matters, and the military had some partial responsibility and a lot of interest in administrative matters. Thus there was a lot of tension between the Deputy Chiefs of Staff and the Assistant Secretaries, while the Secretary and the Chief of Staff were mostly cordial. All the discord took place at the second tiers and Gene Zuckert set the original ground rules at that level and got most things smoothed out. Another Assistant Secretary was Roswell Gilpatric, though my mind’s a blank as to when he came in, but I got to know him, too, and he was more of an intellectual than the others and did a lot to enunciate and clarify Air Force thinking in those early days.
   

Anyway, the Colonels and a couple other civilians in the office were mainly occupied in doing things for the brass – the Secretary and Asst Secs and also the Chief – writing speeches, and preparing congressional testimony. Remember, on top of everything else, the war in Korea was just getting underway and the Air Force was scrambling to get into it. Busy as the office was, they turned over the less important stuff to me, the newest member of the staff. By the way, two other people were hired at the same time as I. One, Louise Gronniger, stayed on with me until she retired, a few years before I did.

So, like I said, I got the less important odd jobs thrown at me. One was the newspaper clipping service which became the Current News. Another was the requirement, which some congressman wrote into the law – the National Security Act, I believe – that each Agency must submit an Annual Report. So the Secretary told the Chief to prepare a draft and the Air Staff set up a historical office to write Air Force Histories and then the Chief told the Secretary to prepare a history of the Secretariat to include in the official Air Force History … so, this round robin led to me being assigned to write not only the Annual Reports, which I did for many years, but also a classified history of the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, which I also did for many years. That, in turn, led to me being asked to write an annual account of USAF progress/history each year for various encyclopedias. And that, in turn, led to me being asked to write articles for various magazines, which I did a lot of on my own time at home so I could get paid with a clear conscience. But that’s another story.

By the end of the 1950s, the Current News had grown substantially. We were now getting more newspapers and doing more screening and clipping and putting out more pages in the morning.  I think it was in 1959 or 1960 that we went from 6 to 8 pages. By this time the Air Force Printing Plant was in operation. They had a lithograph printing press. And they had a machine that could take a picture of a Current News page and make a plastic/paper mat which could be put on the press and inked up and reproduced in hundreds of copies. We were making and distributing about 500 copies each morning. And it was no longer exclusively for the Air Force – mostly but not exclusively. We were giving copies to the Secretary of the Army, Sec/Navy, Sec/Def, and Joint Staff. Plus, all kinds of people were coming into the office to pick up any extra copies laying around, if possible.

Harry (right front) with office crew, 1960s

Lots of things were happening in 1960, not only in our office. Eisenhower was finishing up his eight years as President and a new campaign was getting started. Kennedy was entering the national scene, this young Senator from Massachusetts, and Nixon was hoping to graduate from Vice President to President to succeed Ike. Those were exciting times and our office was getting busier. But let’s back up a bit.

During the decade of the 1950s, several organizational things happened. We were still the Special Projects Office and there was always a Colonel at the head of it with a civilian as the second in command. The civilian was Murray Green, also a Reserve Colonel in the Air Force. Now, the Colonel had a military staff, usually three or four officers helping him with all the writing he did for the top brass. The civilian had a half dozen of us helping, also, with writing and other projects for the brass. I was pretty much the number two civilian, running the clipping service and writing the histories, etc., and also helping with the writing chores. Every now and then I was assigned the major responsibility for writing a Secretarial speech. But, mainly, I was administratively running the office. That is, keeping the time and attendance records, making sure all the personnel matters were attended to, etc., taking care of all the performance evaluations, writing up the award and commendation recommendations, and, also handling disciplinary matters, as well. I still had several, three to five, enlisted personnel working for me as well as a few civilians.

Harry appears as the photo-bomber in several old Pentagon shots

When the top two Colonels left and another was assigned, there was some organizational turmoil between the Secretary and the Chief and for a while the Chief of Info was assigned to the Secretary and my office was assigned to Info. (Later they changed their name to Public Affairs, as opposed to Private Affairs or Secret Affairs.) Then for a while Public Affairs was assigned to the Secretary and my office to the Administrative Assistant to the Secretary. There it remained until after I retired. Public Affairs, on the other hand, bounced back and forth between the Secretary and the Chief of Staff until they finally decided that it worked for both, and I guess it’s still reporting to both.

* * *

The next page of reflections in Harry’s files I had already prepared as a blog post (in two parts) in 2015. It refers to his role in a McCarthy-era case while he was working at the Pentagon in the 1950s and living in Greenbelt, MD. That page begins like this: 

If I repeat myself in these looks back, it’s because as things occur to me, I get a different perspective in my reflections. Anyway, in the early ’50s, my office was moved to the Public Relations office for maybe six months or a year and then back to the Secretary’s office, although our work was for both the Secretary and the Chief – it’s just that their staffs kept juggling things around before they finally settled down and we were placed under the Administrative Assistant to the Secretary. At that time, the AA was John McLaughlin, who had been there from the beginning in 1948. In 1953, I came forcefully to the attention of the Secretary. Here’s what happened.
  

In earlier posts, Harry refers to this movie (IMDb photo)

This has nothing to do with my Air Force career. You may recall that this was the era of Senator Joe McCarthy, who accused the State Department and the Defense Department of harboring a bunch of communists. Security considerations took precedence over everything else in DOD. Early in 1953, the Navy Department fired five people as security risks. ...

You can read the rest of that page of reflections in posts on this blog from November 2015: "Harry recounts McCarthy-era case in our Greenbelt, MD, hometown" 

(Stay tuned for the last page of Harry’s historical notes on his early years at the Pentagon.) 

Copyright 2017, Elaine Blackman

Harry recounts ’50s-era Pentagon publishing – Part 2

Harry’s notes below appear to be continued from those in the previous post on this blog. There he recounted how the Early Bird, the Pentagon’s former signature publication, got its name in the 1950s, and the start of the long-time Current News. I found these last edited April 3, 2009. So, who in the world will be interested in this bit of Pentagon history? Possibly the Pentagon historians – and those of us who still marvel at learning more about Harry’s remarkable life.


In the early ’50s, the demand for our daily clips grew beyond our ability to produce it. The problem was reproduction. The Secretary of Defense wanted a copy and the Joint Staff, too (this was before there was a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), so we were buying multiple copies of the newspapers and cutting five copies of articles and pasting up five copies of the Current News. 

In addition, we were making a few more copies on the Photostat machine, but I kept looking around for other ways to reproduce it. Of course, we could get it printed just like newspapers, but that would mean setting up a printing plant, with presses and all, which was impractical if not impossible. I looked at mimeograph machines and that would work if we retyped everything on those mimeograph wax-sheet stencils, but that was also impractical. 

Harry (with moustache) and Pentagon colleagues, 1950s

Then I found a mimeograph machine that would work. It was a German machine, a Gestetner, that used a rubber stencil. The way it worked was, there was a separate machine that was used to copy anything on to a rubber mimeograph stencil. It could copy newsprint and sketches or drawings okay (pictures, too, but with poor resolution), so we still had to paste up our pages, then copy them on a stencil and then run them off on the mimeograph machine. The only drawback was that it took about five or six minutes to make each stencil, so, for four pages it would take a half hour, including the time to change stencils, etc. We were doing all this at about 6:00 a.m., trying to get copies ready to give the Secretary, et al. at 7:00 a.m., when they got to the office. Each stencil, by the way, was good to run off about 100 copies, which I thought would be more than we would ever need. Little did I know!!

When I demonstrated the wonders of these machines to the blueprint department where they were using the Photostat machines, they were so impressed that they bought several of them and started replacing their Photostat machines, and I got a special price from Gestetner to buy a second stencil-making machine and a second mimeograph machine. With the two machines, we were able to make all the copies we needed and still meet our deadlines. This worked pretty well for several years in the early and mid-50s.

He earned the highest civilian award many times (sample medals below)

We were now printing very legible multiple copies that looked very professional, and getting to be known as the Current News. And, as our capacity to reproduce copies increased, the demand for copies increased as well. We were doing this almost exclusively for the Air Force, though we were giving a few copies to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff. Then the Secretary of the Air Force wanted all the Assistant Secretaries to get it, and the Chief of Staff wanted all the Deputy Chiefs of Staff to get it, and all of them wanted their Execs to get it, and their office staffs, etc, etc. Then suddenly we found ourselves running off a couple hundred copies using both machines and still not able to meet the total demand. An interesting sidelight is that the stencils, which were guaranteed or advertised as good for about 100 copies, started stretching and warping at about the 125th copy. They were, after all, a very thin rubber, and we spoiled a lot of them when we first started using them just in the handling. So we worked with the Gestetner reps in helping them improve their products. 

I had never paid much attention to organizational arrangements, but suddenly I was confronted with an unexpected problem. My office was a separate division under the Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force. Next door to me was another division that handled all the mail coming in to the Secretariat as well as several other things and, in one of the many reorganizations taking place in those early days (remember, the Air Force as a separate Service was only two years old and still trying to organize itself), that division was transferred to the Air Staff, specifically to the Asst Chief of Staff, I think. That organization claimed responsibility for all Air Force printing requirements in the Pentagon, including the Current News. They wanted to appropriate my Gestetner machines and take over all my reproduction needs, and I told them to go to hell. (Ever the diplomat, me.) It escalated right up to the Secretary and the Chief of Staff, who agreed to let me retain my machines and do my own printing, until the Air Staff could come up with an improvement on my operation.

So … the Air Staff took over a block of space next to my office and set up a reproduction facility which eventually became the Air Force Printing Plant. They invested several million dollars in strengthening the floors there to hold hundreds of tons of printing equipment, which rivaled the Navy Printing Plant down in the Basement of the building. And, in time, they did, indeed, come up with a better system, at which time I was happy to turn over the printing business to them. It was, however, agreed to between the Secretary and the Chief of Staff – in writing that I had a copy of in my files – that the first priority in that Plant was the Current News.

In later years, I had a lot of run-ins with Air Staff Reps, and one recurring one was when they wanted to delay the Current News printing in order to print something else with greater urgency, in their view, and I objected. The poor guy who ran the Plant had to do what his boss told him to do, and when he told me so, I had to go over his boss’s head either to the Chief of Staff or the Secretary, and I always won and they hated me for that.

He also saved the wall plaque below, like the one on the wall above

(Stay tuned for Parts 3 and 4 of Harry’s historical notes.)
 
Copyright 2017, Elaine Blackman

Things you might not know about drones

Harry in the 1990s

Recently I read about a trending toy for kids and adults – a modular drone. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the inventors know anything about the history of drones, which I learned only after reading the following article. Harry wrote it in 1991 and filed it (untitled) on his computer. He may have submitted it for Defense Media Review, the newsletter he originated post-retirement. Of course, he would have kept up with the evolution of drones in later years. And, he probably predicted drones as toys.


The SCUDs and the PATRIOTs got the lion’s share of media attention during the Gulf War, with the aircraft, the smart bombs and the tanks getting secondary billing. But there is another weapon that played a vital role – one that seems to have been overlooked by the public. The so-called drones – remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs) – served as a critically important intelligence tool in spotting targets for both aerial bombardment and artillery.

The drone is not generally regarded as a high-tech weapon, but that’s exactly what it is. In earlier versions, it would fly over a target area carrying a camera and bring back pictures that had to be developed and studied by expert photo interpreters before commanders could make tactical decisions. By that time, the target situation on the ground may well have changed. Present-day drones, however, are equipped with sophisticated night-vision sensors and television cameras mounted underneath the fuselage to provide an unobstructed view of the ground. They send back information in real time while overflying the target area, thus enabling commanders to make immediate tactical decisions.

Ironically, considering that Iraq tried in vain to draw Israel into the conflict by lobbing 39 SCUD
missiles into Israeli population centers, the drones used by the American forces were purchased from Israel. IAI (Israel Aircraft Industries) is a world leader in the field. The impetus for the development of its drones came from the 1973 war in which Syria’s Soviet-built SAM missiles inflicted unacceptable losses on Israeli aircraft. Israel decided at that time that it would make better sense to use relatively cheap unmanned planes for reconnaissance, rather than the very expensive manned aircraft, to say nothing about the lives of its pilots.

Beginning in 1974, the Israelis invested substantial resources in developing a pilotless aircraft that could make the best use of the rapidly evolving technologies involved in radio, television cameras, computers and communications. By 1982, during the Lebanese operation, Israel’s drones made it possible for its Air Force to eliminate Syria’s SAMs in the Beka Valley in one day with no Israeli losses, a remarkable performance, which the American military studied with considerable interest.     

The U.S. Army in the 1970s tried to develop its own RPV, but after investing some ten years and around a billion dollars, it gave up. The U.S. Navy didn’t really become interested until the mid-1980s, when it lost two of its planes to SAM missiles in Lebanon. After sponsoring an international competition, which IAI won, the Navy bought Israel’s RPV, called the Pioneer system. Modified by IAI for use from battleships instead of land bases or aircraft carriers, these drones were used for the first time by the U.S. in the Gulf War.

At first they were used to monitor Iraqi deployments and fortifications, both in Kuwait and across the border in Iraq. After the fighting started, they were used as artillery spotters for the big guns on the battleships Missouri and Wisconsin, as well as for Army and Marine batteries. Their transmissions showed the gunners exactly where their rounds were hitting, enabling them to adjust their sights for specific targets with devastating accuracy from a few miles to as much as 30 or 35 miles away.

Two people operate the ground facility controlling the RPV system, one to “fly” the vehicle with radio controls, the other to monitor the camera, the night vision equipment, and the communications gear. The payload technician can zoom in on targets without regard to the direction of the drone’s flight, although the two operators must for the most part coordinate their efforts. The effective range is ordinarily no more than about 125 miles, depending on the altitude of the drone, since radio communication between the drone and the ground controllers is by line-of-sight.

Given the spectacular, though largely unsung success of these drones, it seems most likely that the Army and the Navy/Marine Corps gunnery planners will start acquiring more such systems for future use. The Air Force, on the other hand, seems to have little interest in the notion of planes without pilots.

Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman

'I'd rather be flying'

This photo was the only one like it in Harry's files, so I'm guessing he's the pilot -- notice the close-up below -- do you agree? It might have been taken when he was a flight instructor for a flying club while working for the Department of the Air Force.

Flying was Harry’s great love (not counting Jeanette), as we learned in the posts on this blog on May 23 and 29, 2015. In those essays, he wrote about his fascination with the sky since childhood and his knowledge about clouds later on. (By the way, many decades ago, Harry wrote articles about clouds and more for encyclopedias, including Americana, Collier’s, and World Book. But it seems they are nowhere to be found.)

Below, Harry gives us a few more details about his flying days, as a young adult in the DC area and as a youth in Buffalo. I took this story from a casual email he wrote in 2009 to a teenager who was dear to him. At the end, you’ll see his encouraging words to her about writing things down -- aren’t we glad he took his own advice?


I tried playing golf for a while, but I was never very good at it, and I always had the feeling that I would rather by flying. When we first moved down to the Washington area from Buffalo [1949], I used to rent an airplane once in a while just to keep my skills sharp. There were half a dozen or more little airfields around Washington in those days. Sadly, almost all of them are gone now. The land became more valuable for real estate developments.

Anyway, I was working in the Pentagon for the Air Force and the Dept. of Defense, and the Air Force started a flying club, which I joined. Then they needed some instructors who could teach both the flight part of flying and the ground school subjects, like navigation (it’s no use flying if you don’t know how to get from one place to another, and it’s not the same as a road map with street names and route numbers) and meteorology for pilots (you better understand the weather and its effect on your airplane if you want to survive in the air) and other things that you have to know about airplanes if you want to fly them.

So, for some 30 years, I did a lot of flying and made some extra money that way, but mostly I got paid in flying time. For example, depending on which airplane you use, it could cost anywhere from about 15 bucks an hour to fly a two-seater plane, to about 35 bucks an hour for a four-seater, to 60 or 80 bucks an hour for a six-seater – the biggest one we had in the flying club. So if I wanted to take my family on a weekend jaunt that would require ten hours of flying time, that would cost about $350, so that would take care of my teaching time for two evenings and a Sunday in a week.

It was worth it to me because otherwise I couldn’t afford to do much flying. In fact, the only way I could do all the flying I wanted was because I got paid to fly. It’s the greatest hobby – much better than golf. Have you ever been in a light plane? It’s not at all the same as an airliner and certainly not the same as a jet plane.

Discovering Harry's pilot logs brought back memories of our plane rides. Several times he flew me and friends over the sights in Washington, DC, and above our Greenbelt, MD, home so we could wave to the neighbors. (Not allowed anymore, of course.) He took several of his friends on farther excursions. Harry recorded these outings in the red log book, along with our family trip to Buffalo in 1957 ("Family vacation" entry in snapshot below). My brother and I will never forget that flight; I didn't feel so good up in the air, and we stopped overnight in Pittsburgh due to rain. In the green book, Harry recorded his flights from 1942 to '48, while still living in Buffalo. From 1947 to '58, he most often flew a Cessna, the plane we knew was his favorite.

Earlier in Buffalo
When I came home from the war – I had stayed on in Germany for a year and a half after the war ended in May 1945; I was hunting down Nazi war criminals wanted for crimes against humanity – so I came home in December 1946. I had done a little flying in the Army after the war, too, and I wanted more than anything to get a job with the airline, any airline. While I had my applications in at all the airlines, I taught flying at the Buffalo airport, which was just a little airfield at that time – not at all the huge place it is today. My break came through in June 1947 when I was hired to fly for Capital Airlines – a company which went out of business long ago. Two weeks later I was fired – or let go – because I had just passed my 26th birthday, and their policy was not to hire anyone 26 or older. So I continued working at the flying school at Buffalo airport.

I also did other things. Did you ever see the airplanes towing huge advertising banners along the lake shore at Crystal Beach? They do that at all the many beaches everywhere in the country. Well, I did that. I got paid pretty well for that. I also towed gliders into the sky at the gliding capital of the world which, at the time, was Elmira, NY.

Another thing I did was fly charter trips. In the summer, fishermen would hire our company to fly a plane equipped with pontoons to a lake in Canada just to go fishing. Canada has hundreds, maybe thousands of little lakes teeming with fish and accessible only from the air – that is, no roads so you can’t drive to most of them. In the winter when the lakes were frozen over, we had planes equipped with skis to land on the ice and the fishermen would chop a hole in the ice and sit there and freeze their fannies off and drink beer, while I sat in the plane and listened to the radio or wrote in my journal.

Things to write about
I know all this reminiscing is boring you, but it just illustrates to you that you can write and write and write about all kinds of inconsequential things and never run out of things to write about. And just because you haven’t been around as long as I, does not mean that you don’t have lots of things to write about and stories to tell. What’s your most embarrassing moment? What makes your heart swell with pride? What brings tears to your eyes? Do you cry at sentimental movies? Some people never shed a tear. Some sob out loud. I’m very sentimental and am easily moved to tears in sad movies.


Well, that last sentence is true for me, too -- do you think it's hereditary? Concerning Harry's piloting days, did you or a family member ever fly with him? Please tell us what you remember. (If you're not able to post a comment on the blog, feel free to send me an email and I'll post it for you.) 

If you're especially interested in flying and planes, you might like the book Harry co-wrote in 1994:

 Flights: American Aerospace ... Beginning to Future

Harry recounts McCarthy-era case in our Greenbelt (Maryland) hometown – Part 2

In 1954, Harry was enjoying an active community life with his family and friends in Greenbelt, MD. He had been working at the Pentagon for only a few years when he stepped up to testify on behalf of fellow Greenbelters.

In my previous post, I shared the first part of Harry’s informal account of a McCarthy-era case in Greenbelt, MD. I left off where Harry was sworn in to testify on behalf of men dismissed by the Navy as security risks. Harry was friends and community volunteers with these men. He wrote this account in February 2010 when he was 88; I found it in his files in 2015, a year after he died.

The first half hour was just chatter, so to speak, when the tape ran out, and then the Assistant Secretary said to me, if you’d like to say anything off-the-record, while the tape machine is not working, feel free. So … this may not be exactly verbatim, but this is pretty much what I said to them – and I have told this to very few people before. …

I told them I felt proud and privileged to be working for the Dept. of Defense, but that I was intensely and profoundly ashamed of the Navy for its action in dismissing these five people as security risks. The fact that they were all involved in organizing the residents of Greenbelt into a cooperative housing group to buy the community from the government should have alerted their investigators. The fact that the accusations of communist leanings or similar vague assertions all came from the same sources – people who were opposed to the sale of the community to residents – should have alerted them. The fact that all of the dismissed persons were Jewish should have given them pause and caused them to ask if there was some anti-Semitism involved – actually there was, but I considered it a minor thing, more of a coincidence than a causal factor. (But for the Navy, it had the appearance of anti-Semitism.) And finally, the Navy investigators had taken the accusations by the accusers, and the Navy Dept. had acted on them, without ever actually investigating and interviewing others in the community to confirm or refute the allegations.

They had branded the newspaper that I was the Editor of, as a communist rag without ever interviewing me and my associate editor as a communist fellow traveler, also without ever talking to me. And I was ashamed of the Navy for having caved in to the witch hunt that Sen. McCarthy was conducting, and I said flat out that anyone who considers my associate editor as a communist sympathizer or a security risk ought to have his head examined. Now the Navy is being subjected to public scrutiny because of the case I mentioned before – the guy who went public – and you need to find a way to back down without appearing to back down. The three guys who aren’t fighting it – that’s moot over with and gone – but these two, you ought to just clear them and let them get back to work. It’s my guess that if you reinstate them, they’ll resign gracefully and disappear from public view. After all, why would they want to continue to work for the Navy after this experience?

About then, the tape recorder guy said the tape is up and running again and the Assistant Secretary called the meeting to order again and said to me, we’re back on the record. Then they asked me a few more questions, touching on the things I had just unloaded on them but not in depth. My feeling was that it was all just a formality, that they had already made up their minds and were just going through the motions. Anyway, it took another year before they announced that the two guys had been cleared and reinstated in their jobs.

So, my associate editor, who was very grateful to me, told me that during that two-year period, he had had several jobs, selling shoes, selling cars, and finally, working for the Park and Planning Commission as an urban planner – and he thought when he was cleared and reinstated he would get all his back pay – two years’ worth. Not true. What he got was all his back pay minus what he had earned in other jobs during that time. It amounted to only a few thousand dollars, most of which went to the lawyer. Both guys, by the way, resigned two weeks after they were reinstated.

After I testified, Secretary Talbott called me in and asked how it went and I told him what I just told you – all I had said at the hearing. He told me that the whole subject of those security dismissals had come up at the weekly meeting of the Service Secretaries with the Secretary of Defense, several times, and he had personally told the Secretary of the Navy about me, that I worked for him and that he fully supported me.

Many, many years later, when Fritz Kramer was a Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army, he told me that a Navy investigator had come to see him when he was still in Army Intelligence to ask about me and that he had let the guy know in no uncertain terms that the idea that I might be sympathetic to communism was ludicrous. And he asked me what that was all about, so I told him the whole story, too. Well, most of it. The whole story is much too complicated. I have tried to condense it here which necessarily leaves out a lot of pertinent information. It’s ironic, by the way, that Secretary Talbott had to resign under a cloud, so to speak. As I understand it, he had used his office as Secretary of the Air Force for some personal business. Still, I remember him with gratitude for his support when I needed it.

 You can read more on this case and about Greenbelt history in “Greenbelt, Maryland, A Living Legacy of the New Deal” by Cathy D. Knepper. The book includes several quotes from Harry.

Harry in 1951 above, 1953 below (with me)

  Copyright 2015, Elaine Blackman


The (mostly) fabulous '50s

In 1949, the Zubkoff family of three left Buffalo and moved to an apartment near the "Center" in young Greenbelt. In 1953, the family of four moved close by to a row house at 17-H Ridge Rd., where we lived till 1963, when I was 11. I have an early memory of one night watching Harry and a few others working on the newspaper at the dining room table. Maybe they were discussing the outcome of the McCarthy case that had upset the whole community for the past year or more.

 

Despite the turbulence of the McCarthy case, and I'm guessing many more crises to come, Harry often claimed he "had the best job in the world" for 36 years at the Pentagon. Here are a few 1950s-era photos of Harry at work: getting an award; gathering with associates at an event (by the time I worked for the government, alcohol was not allowed on the premises); and posing with a group of young adults, possibly interns or the flying club he taught.

Harry recounts McCarthy-era case in our Greenbelt (Maryland) hometown

In 1952, Harry and his family had settled into the young city of Greenbelt, MD. The next year, he found himself immersed in a political drama involving both his community and his workplace.

Do you know anyone who was accused as a communist sympathizer during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s? “McCarthyism” hit close to home when I discovered the following informal story that Harry wrote for someone (unknown) in February 2010, when he was 88. It was part of a larger historical piece about his Pentagon office, from 1950 to1987. I'm sure Harry's extended family will be awed by yet another experience of his life.

In 1953, I came forcefully to the attention of the Secretary [of the Air Force]. Here’s what happened. This has nothing to do with my Air Force [civilian] career. You may recall that this was the era of Senator Joe McCarthy, who accused the State Dept. and the Defense Dept. of harboring a bunch of communists. Security considerations took precedence over everything else in DOD. Early in 1953, the Navy Dept. fired five people as security risks.

Now, at the time, I was working part-time as editor of a weekly newspaper in Greenbelt, MD, where I was living. I did that from 1950 to 1961, and Greenbelt was a predominantly democratic community of politically aware and activist democrats. It also had a hard core minority of conservatives, mainly centered in the local American Legion Post.

Eleanor Roosevelt, a supporter of Greenbelt, 
visited the new Center School in 1938. I was 
excited to find this original photo in Harry's files.

Greenbelt was a government town, built by the WPA [Work Projects Administration in the New Deal Agency] under FDR mainly for government employees, and managed and administered by government employees. Working on the community newspaper was a volunteer thing. All of the businesses in Greenbelt were cooperatives and, in the eyes of the conservatives, cooperatives and communists were closely related, although the most successful in the country in those days were the big farm cooperatives, organized and run by conservative republicans. The huge agribusinesses of today grew out of those farm cooperatives.

In 1953, the government decided to get out of the housing business. There were three towns in the country built by the government; one in [Greenhills] Ohio, one in Greenbelt just outside of Washington, DC, and the third in [Greendale] Wisconsin. The government offered to sell these towns to the residents if they could organize themselves and put up the money – otherwise, they would be sold to developers. The other two towns were sold to developers.

But in Greenbelt, we were successful in organizing a cooperative housing company and putting up the money, but there was stiff conservative opposition and some of those hardline conservatives accused the organizers of being communists. We were all renters, you see, and many of them did not have the money to put up to buy their homes, and they wanted the town sold to a developer so they could continue paying cheap rent.

Harry with Jeanette and his associate editor friend, 1953

Well, any rumor that someone’s a communist was dangerous in those days. The Navy fired five men as security risks, all of whom lived in Greenbelt and all of whom were among the organizers of the housing cooperative that was planning to buy the town. One of them was my associate editor on the newspaper and all of them were friends of mine. Three of them decided not to fight it. They just left town and moved to other parts of the country and started new lives. Two stayed and fought. One of them went public and became famous, in a way. They made a movie about his case called “Three Brave Men.”

The reporter from The Washington Post who covered the story won the Pulitzer Prize and went to work for The New York Times. The three brave men were: the guy who was fired, his lawyer, and the Assistant Secretary of the Navy who made the final decision to reinstate him, and defy Senator McCarthy. The actor who played the part of the main character was an Academy Award winner. He won the Oscar for “Marty”.

My associate editor fought it, too, but he didn’t go public. The problem for me was two-fold. First, I was associated with him and there was a lot of talk at that time about “guilt by association,” and second, the newspaper itself was accused of being a communist paper and I was the editor. All of which placed me under suspicion. And I had a Top Secret clearance from the Air Force, etc.

The Navy had scheduled a hearing for my associate editor and I offered to testify as Editor of the paper on his behalf along with the Minister of the Community Church and the local Chief of Police. But, before I did, I told my boss, the AA to Secretary of the Air Force, that I was going to do that and if it would embarrass the Air Force I offered to resign. He said let’s talk to the Secretary who, at that time, was Harold Talbott, which we did. Talbott said to me that if there is anything in your background that could lead anyone to believe that you’re a communist or are sympathetic to communism, tell me now, because we will put a special investigation on you and it’s bound to come out. I said I’ve already been investigated and cleared and my life is an open book. But, I said, I plan on being harshly critical of the Navy, and since I work for you, it might hurt you or the Air Force. And he said, if you’re clean I’ll back you all the way, and f--- the Navy.

Well, it took almost a year before a hearing was scheduled and I was called to testify. A guy named Adam Yarmolinsky wrote up a report on several of those security cases, including this one. At the hearing was the Navy’s Assistant Secretary, the Navy Vice Admiral who was the Navy JAG officer, and the Navy’s General Counsel, and a couple other Navy folks whose jobs I didn’t catch, and one person who operated the tape recorder. It was a formal hearing in a formal setting and I was sworn in.

They asked me a few questions about my background, my education, and my service in the army during the war. Then they asked me about my associate editor and about the newspaper, what my job as editor entailed, etc. The first half hour was just chatter, so to speak, when the tape ran out, and then the Assistant Secretary said to me, if you’d like to say anything off-the-record, while the tape machine is not working, feel free. So … this may not be exactly verbatim, but this is pretty much what I said to them – and I have told this to very few people before. …

To be continued next week ...