Published in 1976 this is the unprecedented inside story of high policy and politics in the Nixon administration, told by a man destined to become a major American statesman.

Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. was appointed Chief of Naval Operations in 1970, the youngest ever. In four short years he transformed the Navy, setting its course for a generation. His famous Z-grams upset hallowed prejudice by integrating the Navy, upgrading the status of its women, and eliminating the Navy’s demeaning “Mickey Mouse” regulations of dress, behavior, and family life. Simultaneously Admiral Zumwalt reshaped the physical Navy with an imaginative mix of low- and high-cost ships appropriate to the U.S. Navy’s strategic role for the rest of this century.

These dramatic changes were expressions of Admiral Zumwalt’s farsighted and coherent strategy founded on clearly expressed principles: The United States cannot police the world; the United States does have interests around the world; the Soviets and other powers will threaten those interests when they can; the U.S. navy is the best consistent and flexible defense for those interests; to carry out this critical mission the U.S. Navy must therefore be equipped to intelligent but not grandiose purpose, and must have a high morale.

Admiral Zumwalt describes how he managed the Navy in its stormy crisis of integration (he was nearly fired by President Nixon), how he operated in the Pentagon under such different leaders as the canny Melvin Laird and the intellectual James Schlesinger, how he came to prickly terms with Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, how he campaigned to get his programs through the Congress, and how he worked (or couldn’t) with such as Henry Kissinger and Al Haig at the White House. He tells the inside story of the great crises—the 1970 Jordan crisis, the 1972 Pakistan war, the 1972 Christmas bombing of Vietnam, the 1973 Middle East war, and the ongoing SALT negotiation.

As crisis followed crisis Zumwalt found himself increasingly disenchanted with the Nixon administration, and especially the secretive policies and practices of Henry Kissinger. Zumwalt takes the story to the final crisis of Watergate, when he resolved to retire and speak out.

Admiral Zumwalt’s extraordinary and thoroughly documented story vividly illustrated the grotesque effects of paranoid government—just as it reveals the dubious foundation of the then illusory détente with the Kremlin.


Book excerpt:

28 November, 1970

Notes on a conversation with Henry Kissinger

“I gave him run-down on the President’s remarks to me privately in the Sixth Fleet re his priorities. K. does not agree with the President that American people can be turned around. He states strongly that the President misjudges the people. K. feels that U.S. has passed its historic high point like so many earlier civilizations. He believes U.S. is on downhill and cannot be roused by political challenge. He states that his job is to persuade the Russians to give us the best deal we can get, recognizing that the historical forces favor them. He says that he realizes that in the light of history he will be recognized as one of those who negotiated terms favorable to the Soviets, but that the American people have only themselves to blame because they lack stamina to stay the course against the Russians who are ‘Sparta to our Athens.’”