Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [28]
For all his success in the private sector, Engine Charlie—thus nicknamed to distinguish him from Charles “Electric Charlie” Wilson, the former General Electric chairman who had run President Harry S. Truman’s Office of Defense Mobilization—was not a natural fit as a public servant. Congress took an immediate dislike to him when it emerged during his confirmation hearings that he planned on keeping his GM stock while serving as defense secretary. The government post, he felt, already entailed a significant financial sacrifice in that his salary was diminishing from $566,200 to $22,500. There was no reason to surrender his shareholdings as well. Asked if this might pose a conflict of interest, since GM was one of the Pentagon’s largest contractors, Wilson had haughtily replied that he could not conceive of a situation where he would rule against the company anyway because for years he thought “what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice-versa.”
This famous quote would set the tone for Wilson’s contentious relationship with the press, which delighted in reporting that Engine Charlie suffered from terminal “foot-in-mouth disease,” an affliction stemming from an excess of confidence and wealth. Blunt to the point of profanity, Wilson had no reservations about expressing his views. Congress was a “dung hill”; Democrats were “kennel dogs” that yelped helplessly while waiting to be fed; the National Guard was a “draft-dodging” refuge for cowards that needed to be disbanded; basic research and development was a wasteful scientific boondoggle since it was pointless to “worry about what makes the grass green or why fried potatoes turn brown.” His pronouncements on subjects as far ranging as civil rights and agriculture astounded the press and often drove the mild-mannered Eisenhower crazy. “Damn it, how in the hell did a man as shallow as Charlie Wilson ever get to be head of General Motors?” Ike once exploded.
But the president stuck by his outspoken defense chief because military spending was out of control and Engine Charlie, for all his lack of tact, was a ruthless cost cutter. “In his field, he is a competent man,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary, shortly after appointing Wilson. Engine Charlie reciprocated by firing forty thousand Pentagon civilian employees in his first few weeks on the job, and by 1956 he had slashed $11 billion from bloated defense budgets. Despite the cuts, military spending still ate up more than half the federal budget, threatening Ike’s Great Equation: the delicate balance between a strong economy and a “sufficient” fighting force to best guarantee national security. Engine Charlie’s ongoing brief was to locate more fat that could be trimmed, and his rough chopping guidelines were outlined in the New Look Defense Policy—National Security Council document NSC 162/2—that established where America got the biggest bang for its defense buck. Nuclear and bomber programs were inviolate under the New Look doctrine, which rested almost entirely on the buildup of Secretary of State Dulles’s “massive retaliatory capabilities.” The air force’s Strategic Air Command, as the primary instrument of the nuclear deterrent, was off-limits. Everything else in the military kitty was subject to cutbacks, as General Medaris was about to discover.
• • •
Bruce Medaris and Charlie Wilson, by all measures, should have gotten along famously. Both hailed from Ohio, from similarly hardscrabble small industrial towns. They were both practicing Episcopalians, with equally dim views of big government and bureaucracy. Each spoke his mind freely, to his own self-detriment, and Wilson