Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr. US Navy (Retired)
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Oral History of Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr. U.S. Navy (Retired) Interviewed By Paul Stillwell Naval Historical Foundation • Washington, D.C. Copyright © 2009 Foreword to Admiral Crowe’s Oral History By Admiral James L. Holloway III It is with both sadness and pleasure that I write these remarks to introduce this remarkable oral history to those interested in the life and times of Admiral William J. Crowe Jr. The sadness stems from the fact that Admiral Crowe passed away before Paul Stillwell was able to fully capture the recollections of the last decade of his career and his post-Navy life. The pleasure is that I was a friend of Bill’s and as you will read on the following pages, Bill had a remarkable life and this oral history serves as a celebration of that life. With perishable e-mails and other digital media quickly replacing hand-written letters and diaries, oral histories are becoming ever more valuable resources for biographers. Since 1996, with the help of generous donations and dedicated staff and volunteers, the Naval Historical Foundation has captured over 200 recollections of Navy combat veterans and career personnel. These oral histories, along with those sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute and many other Navy-related organizations, are providing insights for contemporary historians who are writing important works to advance our understanding of naval history. Admiral Crowe’s oral history, combined with his excellent memoir, In the Line of Fire, will help future scholars who delve into the complex history of the Cold War Navy. I am particularly grateful to Mr. Frank Gren and Admiral Chuck Larson, without whose perseverance and financial support this important oral history might never have been accomplished; and to Paul Stillwell who once again brought his superb interviewing talents, honed over years of such interviews, to produce this informative dialog with Bill Crowe. 2 Preface In the more than 60 years since the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was created during World War II, only five U.S. Navy officers have held it. The late Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., was one of the five. In 2006 Vice Admiral Robert Dunn, president of the Naval Historical Foundation, learned that Admiral Crowe had not done an oral history on his life and naval career, so he commissioned the one that appears in this volume. Admiral Crowe had previously worked with a coauthor in producing the memoir The Line of Fire: From Washington to the Gulf, the Politics and Battles of the New Military, published in 1993 by Simon & Schuster. After a brief overview of the early parts of Crowe’s life and service, the bulk of the book was devoted to his years as a flag officer. My interviews with Admiral Crowe began in 2006; I very much enjoyed the process. Our goal was to fill in recollections that had not been included in his book. I found the admiral to be invariably gracious and friendly. He was a skilled raconteur who had a wonderful sense of humor. Thus it was a delight to converse with him and draw out his memories. I was struck by the candor with which he described his life, including the fact that he had coped with and shaken off a case of depression during his active service. He was candid as well in telling of others, including, for instance, his assessment of Admiral Arleigh Burke, who served as Chief of Naval Operations from 1955 to 1961. In our conversations, Admiral Crowe talked about his parents and the many other influences that had shaped him. His mother taught him the lifelong pride she felt in being an Oklahoman. His father, who had served in the battleship Pennsylvania during World War I, became a lawyer. He instilled in his son the importance of organizing his thoughts and presenting them orally and in writing; he particularly stressed the value of being a debater. The Navy veteran also fully supported his son’s desire to attend the Naval Academy. Midshipman Crowe entered the academy during World War II and further polished his debating skills while in Annapolis. Among the other members of the class of 1947 were future flag officers Stansfield Turner and James Stockdale and future President Jimmy Carter. The relationship between Crowe and Stockdale was a particularly close one. After graduation and a brief tour in a surface ship, Crowe became a diesel submariner and in time held billets of increasing responsibility. In the 1960s he earned a doctorate in political science from Princeton University. It was a watershed experience, because it put him on a path in which his diplomatic ability and knowledge of politics were used again and again. He had an appreciation for the variety of points of view on a given subject and had the ability to disagree without being disagreeable. As he put it, a mind is like a parachute. It has to be opened to have its best effect. Crowe had hoped to get into the nuclear power program headed by Admiral Hyman Rickover, but the timing was not right. Instead, he served in two further diesel submarine billets and later a tour of duty in the Pentagon. His work on planning the repatriation of the crew of the intelligence ship Pueblo brought him to the attention of the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas Moorer, and later Crowe was part of negotiations on the status of territories in Micronesia. In between, because diesel 3 submarine careers were leading to dead ends, he sought and received an operational billet in Vietnam as the U.S. participation in the war there was winding down. In 1970 Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., became Chief of Naval Operations and encouraged the selection of flag officers whose career patterns were out of the mainstream. Captain Crowe was selected for flag rank in 1973 and moved through a series of jobs that called for his training and ability in the area where politics and the military intersect. When he completed his service as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1989, Admiral Crowe was the last member of his Naval Academy class on active duty. In the process he established a close personal relationship with Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who was the last Defense Minister of the Soviet Union. It was symbolic of the passing of an era, for Crowe’s service as a commissioned officer coincided almost precisely with the duration of the Cold War between the two superpowers. Sadly, even though Admiral Crowe and I did 16 interviews together, we did not cover his years as a flag officer in systematic detail. Even so, he made a number of references to events during his time as an admiral. We had planned further interviews, but the admiral’s health deteriorated substantially in the spring of 2007, and he died in October of that year. Fortunately, he had already written extensively about his experience as an admiral in his published memoir. That book and this oral history thus complement each other. One benefit of the timing was that the interviews began when the admiral’s son, Colonel W. Blake Crowe, was in command of a Marine Corps regiment in Iraq. We also talked of the celebration in connection with Blake’s homecoming. In the interviews Admiral Crowe discussed the Iraq War on two different levels, that of a person with a wide knowledge of geopolitics and that of a concerned parent. Another concurrent activity was that the admiral was then teaching a course to Naval Academy midshipmen. It was a two-way benefit. His students learned from someone with vast experience in their profession, and he kept up to date on the culture of an institution in which he had been a midshipman 60 years earlier. I am grateful to John Maloney, who did the excellent initial transcription of the interview tapes. Admiral Crowe did not submit any editing to the transcripts prior to his passing. I did some editing on his behalf in the interests of accuracy, clarity, and smoothness. I also added footnotes to provide additional background information for the benefit of readers. In a few cases I made corrections to the text on things that the admiral would probably have caught during his reading and in a few cases put corrections in footnotes. In checking the admiral’s recollections against other sources, I found his memory to be remarkably accurate in nearly all cases. Once the editing process was complete, the admiral’s son, by now a brigadier general, reviewed the transcript on behalf of the family. He provided useful inputs and supplied additional information in response to my questions. I much appreciate his help. The one element that Blake particularly emphasized was how greatly the admiral was devoted to his wife and children. With the completion of this project, the Naval Historical Foundation expresses its gratitude to Frank Gren for the financial support that made this oral history possible. Admiral Charles Larson, who served as Commander in Chief Pacific a few years after Admiral Crowe held that billet, facilitated the link between Mr. Gren and the Foundation. Paul Stillwell January 2009 4 ADMIRAL WILLIAM JAMES CROWE, JR. UNITED STATES NAVY (RETIRED) William James Crowe, Jr., was born in LaGrange, Kentucky, on 2 January 1925, the son of William James and Eula (Russell) Crowe. He attended the University of Oklahoma at Norman from September 1942 to June 1943, prior to entering the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, on appointment from the state of Oklahoma in 1943. Graduated on 5 June 1946 with the class of 1947 (accelerated due to World War II), he was commissioned ensign on that date.