Zumwalt: The Life and Times of Admiral Elmo Russell "Bud" Zumwalt, Jr.

A couple items of naval lore than I will review Larry Berman's biography of Adm. Elmo "Bud" Zumwalt Junior. My review will come in two parts the book as biography and a discussion of of the career of Adm. Zumwalt.Since probably forever, any major change in the Navy has produced the old timers claim to be members of "The Old Navy" and therefore superior to the new kids. In the United States Navy the original Old Navy were those who came into the fleet before the existence of the Naval Academy. As steam began to replace sails the Old Navy were the who could hand reef and steer. I came into the Navy while Zumwalt was Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and those who came before me called themselves the Old Navy.The term "mark a knuckle" is a term used by the surface Navy to describe an abrupt change of course or speed when conducting a search. This abrupt change can create so much turbulence in the water as to complicate the search. Therefore the conning officer will advise the search team to mark a knuckle when he is about to order such a change.The Old Navy would consider Adm. Zumwalt's tour as CNO as an abrupt change in course between themselves and those who came after and therefore mark a knuckle.Larry Berman's Zumwalt is a compact, readable, well researched biography of a man whose career stretched from small-town California, to active service in World War II and the Korean War, senior leadership in the Vietnam War, the highest position in his profession and an active role in retirement as a conscience driven humanitarian. What keeps it from being a five-star biography is that it appears to be a family friend type biography. Adm.'s Zumwalt's friends and family have a legitimate right to a book that gives them comfort and pride in a person who was a legitimate source of comfort and pride. This said this book lacks detail, context, and an evenhanded critical analysis.Biography is also history. The counterfactual is that a biographer must decide on how much history can be allowed to lengthen a biography. Berman focuses so tightly on his subject and matters important to his subject's family that too many things are either ignored or assumed. To cite a minor example: Berman will refer to a sudden change in the office of Vice President. We're told nothing about who or why or why it mattered except that the unknown persons replacement was Zumwalt's friend Gerald Ford. A much larger topic worthy of more than a few paragraphs would be a critical analysis of Adm. Zumwalt's concern over growing Soviet military strength. Zumwalt's position on the relative strength between the US and the emerging Soviet superpower is a major topic in the last third of the book. Nowhere is it mentioned that there exists substantial post-Cold War analysis to indicate that much of the Russian hardware was barely functional. Even allowing that Zumwalt's fears were completely sound there is no serious discussion of the problem of balancing the needs of the military against the needs of the citizenry and the ability of the citizenry to pay taxes. It is not my purpose to reach any conclusion on these topics but rather to suggest that a biography that does not discuss these topics is not a complete biography.Larry Berman is not a Navy man. So rather than risk technical errors is biography is very skimpy on Navy life. Zumwalt's destroyer commands are covered in a very few sentences and therefore we learn little about his command technique. One of the reasons why I like reading biographies of leaders is to learn about leadership style. In recognizing Berman's inexperience with things naval I was very amused by his description of Zumwalt's life is having been "operating on forced draft". This is a surface Navy expression unlikely to have meaning for aviators or submariners. Adm. Zumwalt commanded steam driven destroyers. The fires that burned at steel melting temperatures required powerful fans to feed them air. These fans are known as forced draft blowers.Adm. Elmo Zumwalt was a sincerely patriotic and loyal American. He served honorably and at a level far above the performance expected of even a superior naval officer. This biography establishes beyond a doubt that he could perform under fire, under pressure and with style. He earned early promotion to captain, to admiral and would become the nation's youngest CNO. This recognition came at a time when early promotion was extremely rare even once in a career.One of the major surprises for me was the significance of Adm. Zumwalt's contribution to the American war effort in Vietnam. Given later events I feel that Zumwalt has earned a reputation as a wartime leader whatever the opinion may be of his service as CNO.I came into the Navy during Adm. Zumwalt's tenure as CNO. There is no doubt in my mind that the Old Navy needed to be driven into making operational racial integration and equal opportunity. The Navy has a long history of deferring to its older and retired admirals whose reputation is resistance to anything that smells of change. This was true at the founding of the Naval Academy, during the conversion to steam power and again in the 1970s. The speed at which the Z-Grams hit the fleet may have crippled the ability of commanding officers to absorb and adjust to the changes. This does not alter the fact that the changes, most of them were necessary. It is easy 40 years later to regard as petty, personnel issues such as longer hair and civilian clothes for the liberty party and miss their impact on the reenlistment rate.What I found most destructive to discipline was the willingness of middle and senior grade officers to openly disparage their senior most admiral. People in uniform are known to complain but the bitterness of the comments expressed by these officers had negative effects down the line. What I continue to find strange is the resistance within the Navy to recognizing Zumwalt as critical to the construction of the new turbine driven ships and many still vital weapons systems.Zumwalt, The Life and Times of Adm. Elmo Russell " Budd " Zumwalt Junior is a good biography. Those who knew and respected this man will find ample reinforcement for this man as deserving of respect. Readers looking for sophisticated critical analysis of this man's roles in any of several important issues in post-World War II America will have to wait.

I went to school with a few Zumwalts; this is a fun read!

I regret that I have to give this book only four stars rather than the five it otherwise deserves, because it places textual material that should have been on-the-page footnotes into reader-hostile endnotes - 49 pages of them. It is a well done bio of a rather neglected personality. The preliminary chapters on Zumwalt's early life, family background, and early naval career contained much that I did not know.I think the author falls a bit short in coverage of the opposition to Zumwalt and his policies. For a full appreciation of the resistance and the post-Zumwalt reaction/rollback, maybe you had to be there. I was. Memory: Master Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, when asked what his boss (ADM Isaac Kidd) thought about beards - "He hates `em with a passion." Memory: sister of CAPT Robin Quigley (Director of the Waves) discoursing at a dinner party about how her whole family despised Zumwalt and had rejoiced at his defeat for the Senate. Memory: a captain, chief of staff at a naval base, addressing a group of maybe 50 master and senior chiefs a couple months before Zumwalt's exit; he declared that he disliked beards and hoped to see them banned when Zumwalt left. Then, intermingled among various other criticisms of Zumwalt's policies, three times: "Now, I support Admiral Zumwalt." Memory, about a year after Zumwalt's departure: one of my petty officers came in half an hour late and explained - he had left home in civvies, intending to change to dungarees on the ship. He had stopped by the dispensary to refill a family prescription. New policy. Uniform of the day only. He had had to return home and start over.I find it surprising and a bit puzzling that the author seems to have made no use of the weekly Navy Times and its coverage of such matters, and that he makes no mention of Hanson Baldwin's early 1974 hatchet job (in the Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest) on Zumwalt and his policies. He also seems unaware of RAFT - the Racial Awareness Facilitator Training program ordered by Zumwalt in late 1973 - and of how Zumwalt finally integrated the Steward rating: by eliminating it, by merging it with the largely-white Commissaryman (cook) rating.Subsequent chapters covering within-government bickering (Rickover, Kissinger, Nixon, and others) were of less interest (to me), although I recognize that others will surely find them fascinating.A still-unsolved mystery is whatever took place between Zumwalt and ADM Moorer in the months just before Zumwalt took over. Moorer legalized beards just before the change. Did Zumwalt ask him to do so? Did Zumwalt foresee the furor that beards, in particular, would arouse; did he perhaps want to preserve a bit of deniability? In Z-gram 57 he refers to "my predecessor's guidance" concerning facial hair.The author concludes with a lengthy "Research Note" detailing his difficulties in obtaining materials from the Naval History and Heritage Command. This does not surprise me. I sense that the Navy would prefer to erase Zumwalt's reform efforts from its institutional memory while still honoring the man himself, making Zumwalt just another name in a list of flawless CNOs. The author made use of a few of the U.S. Naval Institute's oral histories. A full perusal of these would be likely to produce many instances and examples of recalcitrance and obstructionism. But these histories cannot be accessed on the internet, or searched. They can only be ordered in transcript at $75 - and that's $75 each. ($45 in DVD.) There are well over 200 of them. Thereby full access is priced out of the range of the merely curious. Only once in a while does the curtain lift.I found it significant that even in the new century the lingering opposition was still potent enough to (almost) force the renaming of the Zumwalt-class destroyers.

It was on a visit to Bath, the Maine Maritime Museum, that I first heard of this remarkable man and officer. Hardly surprising as I am British! This has been a stunning read. Brilliantly researched you can sense the elation of his early rapid advancement, the steep learning curve to arrive at a place where you can have an impact only to be met with the machinations of powerful people chasing their own prejudices. I found so much and will read more!