If from memory I can elaborate that a little bit, I thought in looking over the structure, as I recall it in this bill, that the National Security Resources Board Chairman is the logical director of joint procurement and of research, now answerable, I believe, to the socalled single Secretary.

In time of emergency, the Chairman of the National Security Resources Board will become a tremendously powerful figure in the United States; but that will be wished upon him without any training, without any staff. He is a man sitting at a desk without even a secretariat of his own awaiting the day of national emergency.

His job will be to integrate the productive capacity, the manpower, the mechanical power, the resources of mines, of forests of forms to the war effort. If joint procurement and research in anticipation of war are not pertinent to that office, then my whole thesis falls flat. The next paragraph is:

Consider that the single Secretary, whom the bill gives authority over one-third of the national budget and control over the whole defense structure, will be a political appointee, the beneficiary of party patronage for campaign services rendered.

That is not a criticism of our political system, but it is a very grave criticism of our national security system.

Mr. HARNESS. Do you have the same thing now?

Captain KARIG. No, sir; because the authority is divided three

Captain KARIG. Well, essentially two ways. It would be three ways under the bill with a separate Air Force.

Mr. HARNESS. You have a Secretary of War and a Secretary of the Navy. Both of them are political appointees, are they not?

Captain KARIG. Yes, sir.

Mr. HARNESS. What difference does it make whether you have one political appointee or two political appointees from your standpoint? Captain KARIG. It divides the chance of error, the chance of confusion, and, let us call it, stupidity.

Mr. HARNESS. Would you not have three Under Secretaries where you now have just two Secretaries really?

Captain KARIG. Three Under Secretaries.

Mr. HARNESS. You would have three political Under Secretaries, one for Air, one for the Navy, and one for the Army. So, you would really enhance the protection against what you are arguing.

Captain KARIG. In anticipation of your question, I should have gone into the statistics of how long an Under Secretary stays in office, which is much less than that of a Secretary. In time of peace, especially, there is small appeal to a man to give up his business and his private life to become an Under Secretary of anything; and even in times of war, they did not last as long as the Secretary.

Mr. HARNESS. Well, now, take the two Secretaries. There is Secretary Patterson, who served as Under Secretary of War all through the war and was elevated to Secretary. The same thing happened to Secretary Forrestal.

Captain KARIG. Yes, sir. Do you think it will go on after the war is over, sir? The present tendency seems to be away from it. Mr. HARNESS. I would not know that, of course.

Mr. MANASCO. What about the "beneficiary of party patronage for campaign services rendered?" Does not the country have some con

trol over the amount of money we spend? I did not know that the Secretary of War or the Secretary of the Navy or the Secretary of National Security could go out and appoint indiscriminately a bunch of ward heelers and put them on to pay them off.

Captain KARIG. I have no intention of intimating anything of that character. What I meant was that a man who was going to be put in charge of the three services as the single Secretary, or those who are individually in charge of the three Departments, is not a man who passes the qualification test for his ability to organize this tremendous edifice, but he is a member of the upper bracket of the successful political party.

Mr. WADSWORTH. Does history prove that?

Captain KARIG. I think so. We will exclude, if you wish, Secretary

Knox.

Mr. WADSWORTH. Secretary Stimson, Secretary Patterson. There are three that do not belong to the upper party.

Captain KARIG. I am not speaking of specific instances, but of a generality over the whole course of history.

Mr. WADSWORTH. I am surprised at your lack of confidence in our Government.

Mr. MANASCo. Another argument was made that the military would get control. It looks like that defeats your argument. If you want experienced men you want to have military men in there.

Captain KARIG. I think you are reading something into this that is not there.

Mr. MANASCO. You do not want to have a civilian head of the Departments of War and Navy?

Captain KARIG. Yes, sir; I certainly do. I want three civilian heads of three different departments, or two, as the case may be. Mr. MANASCO. Whom would you have to appoint them? Captain KARIG. The President, strictly according to the rules. Mr. MANASCO. That is still a political appointment.

Captain KARIG. Yes, sir; and I said when I read the first sentence that that was not a criticism of the system.

Mr. MANASCO. That is the system I thought you were trying to preserve, not having a military caste system.

Captain KARIG. Exactly, sir. I am trying hard to preserve it.
Mr. MANASCO. I do not follow your argument on that.

You say

He will be an innocent when he takes office and he will probably quit it in the preference to dying of overwork before he has completed his apprenticeship.

If you leave him there, indoctrinated into our military caste system, we would be just as well off having a military man. Captain KARIG. Yes, sir.

Mr. MANASCO. I think that is one of the advantages. I think that is one of the advantages of having civilian heads of these military establishments.

Captain KARIG. I agree with you in that.

Mr. MANASCO. But you still have a little politics in it. I do not think you can reward any ward heelers or national committeemen with a bunch of appointments in there. They have got to be confirmed by the Senate.

In the first place, you have got to have money provided for it. I have never heard of the Congress appropriating a tremendous amount

of money to pay off political debts to the War and Navy Departments. I sincerely hope we would not undertake that.

Mr. MANASCo. That is the outfit we should be worried about. You appropriate your money there in blanket fashion. You do not

do it for the Army and Navy Departments.

Captain KARIG. The point I was trying to make, and I am sorry I was vague in it, is that you concentrate control over three departments, with an extension of what are now two departments, in one man appointed according to the system which has served us well.

The CHAIRMAN. Your point was, then, that the over-all political appointee might dominate the others, for instance, the Secretary of the Navy, was that not it?

Captain KARIG. Yes, sir; he dominates the others. He must of necessity dominate the others.

Mr. MANASCO. When we elect the President we run the risk of the President's domination.

Captain KARIG. Yes, sir; but he is elected.

The CHAIRMAN. And we have had a good example of it for the last 14 years.

Mr. HARNESS. Is there anything about the proposed legislation you favor?

Captain KARIG. Yes, sir. Almost every other part of it, which I enumerated in the last chapter. I will skip over the middle and say:

"I strongly believe in an integrated national defense; I personally favor the establishment of a National Security Council," which supplementarily I will say should exercise the functions of the single Secretary, "a Central Intelligence Agency, and a National Security Resources Board having personnel and power to which the Munitions Board and Research and Development Board are subordinates."

Mr. HARNESS. How are we going to integrate or merge the services and accomplish economies if we do not put them under one head?

Captain KARIG. Sir, I can only ask how you are going to do it by putting them under one head. Wherein, in any testimony I have read, is there any delineation of economies to be had or efficiency gained?

Mr. HARNESS. Well, I have listened to a number of witnesses, among them Secretary Patterson, Secretary Forrestal, Admiral King, Admiral Nimitz, General Eisenhower, and others, who have assured us that by this proposal we would save a great deal of the taxpayers' money through procurement alone, if nothing else.

Captain KARIG. Yes, sir; which has nothing to do with my only thesis. It is not performed by the single Secretary. It is performed by the boards, if it is performed at all.

I have not read the testimony. I am only familiar with what I see in the newspapers. However, I do not recall seeing any specific examples given here where you could save dollars, or you could get dollar value for your money. There have been general statements which I have seen in the record.

Mr. HARNESS. Thank you, sir.

Captain KARIG. I was wondering if I had answered Mr. Manasco's last question.

Mr. MANASCO. I will accept it as being answered.

Captain KARIG. Section 103 says he shall have no "military staff," referring to the single Secretary, "but that he may have military aides and assistants without number."

I have a suspicion based on nothing more than a layman's doubt as to the limitations you can place upon the organized Military Establishment, that makes me say it will be a staff in fact. Who will select them? A few civilians will come to the office with a wide enough knowledge of the Army, Navy, and Air Force personnel to make a personal choice. They will take who is recommended by the top professionals.

That I offer as an elaboration of my thesis that the bill does provide for military domination, because a man who is Secretary of the Navy and takes the advice of the professionals is in one group. You have a man who is Under Secretary of War under the present arrangements, but when you have one man who has to take the recommendations from all three services for the selection of his personal aides, then he becomes, I think, dominated by professional military groups. Mr. MANASCO. Does not the President now have military aides, and naval aides?

Captain KARIG. Yes, sir.

Mr. MANASCo. This gives him one more.

Captain KARIG. These are not aides, sir. These are assistants and I do not know what is meant by "assistants."

It says there may be detailed to him military assistants, and they will be detailed to him. He does not go out and ask for them. They are given to him.

Mr. MANASCO. If he is an ordinary civilian, he would have to have somebody detailed to him who knows something about the military operation. We do not have many civilians who know much about it. Captain KARIG. Very true, sir.

Mr. MANASCo. You would not want him to have any military aides at all?

Captain KARIG. I think he should have military aides, if you have "him." I do not think we should have "him" at all, you see? I think his functions should be done by the committee under the national security.

Mr. MANASCO. If it is desirable for one, would not that same argument hold as having military aides for the Secretary of War and for the Secretary of the Navy?

Captain KARIG. No, sir; they are aides, they are not assistants. They are limited by number. What does "assistants" mean? The bill does not say.

Mr. MANASCO. I would think you would mean assisting him in formulating policies, administrative policies. If we cannot rely on the honesty and integrity of the man and in our armed forces, I think we had better give up now and let some dictator take charge of the situation.

Captain KARIG. I think that is what you are getting.

Mr. MANASCo. You scare me. If we have got that kind of people in our armed forces today, we are in a devil of a shape.

Captain KARIG. That, sir, is an observation, not a question, I take it.

Mr. MANASCO. That is an observation. I do hope we do not have them. If we do, we ought to turn them over to somebody.

Captain KARIG. I have not met any, sir. You cannot reduce this to an issue of personalities of or human beings whom you can identify.

This bill, I take it, is being written not for this year, next year, but for a long time to come.

My argument is that you are establishing a framework which can possibly be filled by men who are still crawling around in their rompers at this time. You do not know what the effect of politics, or the trend of human thought is going to be in this country. There might very likely be an instance of "it can happen here." If it is strong enough, I think this bill erects within the Constitution, barring any layman's constitutional questions, the framework within the Constitution which can be filled in by a military dictatorship.

Mr. KARSTEN. You really have apprehensions this might result in a military dictatorship, do you?

Captain KARIG. No. Let me not be put on the record as saying that. I will just repeat what I said: That it makes such a thing legally possible in some far-off day.

Mr. KARSTEN. Take our House of Representatives: We have a Speaker, a majority leader, and a minority leader. The Speaker could not be considered as a political dictator, could he? Would you regard him as that?

Captain KARIG. Wherein is the parallel, sir? I have seen him acting very dictatorial many times. I have seen the Speaker turn his back to someone who was asking for the floor.

Mr. KARSTEN. Yes; but you can recall history, that Speakers who do that sort of thing do not last very long. They are removed. The Congress would not tolerate it any more than the Army and Navy would tolerate it.

The CHAIRMAN. Have you anything further, Captain?

Captain KARIG. No, sir; that about covers it.

The CHAIRMAN. All right. We will hear Mr. Cole, then.

STATEMENT OF HON. W. STERLING COLE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW YORK

Mr. COLE. Mr. Chairman, ordinarily, I would much prefer discussing a bill in an offhand, extemporaneous fashion; but to me this bill is of such grave importance and, as I see it, it embodies such serious implications that I would request the indulgence of the committee so that I may be permitted to present my views in the manner in which I have organized them on paper.

No doubt some of the expressions or the ideas will be repetitions of suggestions that have been made by previous witnesses. However, if through the method of repetition the importance of those ideas can be impressed upon the minds of the members of this committee, I feel that it may be time that has not been spent to any disadvantage.

Mr. Chairman, personally grateful as I am for the indulgence of this committee in permitting an expression of my thoughts on H. R. 2319, I confess that it was with considerable amazement that I learned the decision of this committee to discontinue hearings on this most vital matter on July 1.

This decision, coming as it did barely 24 hours after the Secretary of the Navy had issued a general directive releasing naval personnel to voice their views on the proposal, has preemptorily restored the gag on naval officers at the moment the Navy Department removed it.