 Thank you. I'm really delighted to be here. I was supposed to be here last year and for some personal reasons I couldn't make it, and this was on my book tour bucket list, so I'm glad to be here. And when I was going to be here last year, the book was only in cloth published like this. This may be the version you've seen and the version in there. But now, United States, I'm really happy that Naval Institute Press has picked up and has now printed the book in paperback, so it's very exciting for me. And I'm reaching a whole new group of readers because it's a much different group. I'm starting to get some terrific feedback on that. So I'm going to take you through some aspects of Zumwalt today. I made a little note to myself when I hear that the next eight bell speaker is going to be talking about a court-martial. And certainly there were people who thought Zumwalt might have been court-martialed in the 1973-74 period when a very difficult period with Nixon and Kissinger and little rebellions on the Kitty Hawk and the Constellation. And certainly there was a cry to relieve him from his job. But I'm going to take you through a more personal portrait today of Zumwalt and look forward to your questions as well. And I'm going to begin with some personal things just to clear away the underbrush here. Let me see if technologically I can operate this. It's not working. John? I am pressing the button you told me to press. It's all pictures, but the pictures are worth seeing except the first few because they're of me. But after that, after that it really gets good. Oh, the whole program is frozen? So I'll tell you what, as he's figuring that out, let me just take you over the first page of my notes here. But I'll tell you that I just came from Bath, Maine, where yesterday I had... Oh, it's working. Great. Okay. All right. So the best way to understand my book is to begin at the end of Bud's life. I don't know how many of you, if any of you have been there, but I've been there several times. This is where Zumwalt is buried on the grounds of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis on a beautiful hilltop location right next to one of America's most famous... One of America's most famous astronauts will lie, James Lovell. And Bud is buried there. It's a plot that he chose, and it's just one of the most beautiful and quiet spots in all of Annapolis. And there's only one word was placed on his tombstone when he passed away. Only one word. And that word was reformer. Reformer. We're going to talk about the meaning of that. And then when his wife died, Muzetta, several years later... I'll show you some things and talk about Muzetta a bit. The words, his strength were added. Because Bud Zumwalt was at sea for 14 years of their 53-year marriage, and she endured what hundreds of thousands of Navy spouses and families had to endure of those long separations. And part of his tour, not only as a CNO, but before, was to really focus on ways of lessening the burden and lessening the time, and making it easier for families to deal with the long time that their spouses were at sea. So reformer and his strength are really two of the themes of my book. And my involvement with Zumwalt, I'll talk to you about right now. You know, I was at the Keeling. I was at the Christening. This is a gift from the ship to me. I was very proud of that. And just yesterday, I was speaking with the crew of Zumwalt. It was a big challenge for me because I was asked to instill in the crew a sense of identity for the namesake of the ship that they are going to be sailing on, and it will be commissioned in Baltimore, where I'll be in October, and which will be home ported in San Diego beginning in about November or December. And it's only then that it will be outfitted with its weaponry. So right now, they've just undergone their second set of sea trials very successfully, but there's still a lot of work to be done, but it was really a thrill for me yesterday. I was the captain of the ship, not surprisingly, whose name is Jack Captain James T. Kirk. You couldn't make this up, right? So you've got a Star Trek, a Zumwalt new ship, but it's really state-of-the-art stealth. Only three of them will ever be made. You all know it's a budget buster already, but the fact is there's a great debate about whether or not it will be able to meet its expectations and capabilities. I'm not coinciding with the captain who tells me no sweat, but I'm not smart enough, nor do I have the expertise to answer that particular question. That's me in a much younger day when I first met Admiral Zumwalt right here. This is if you go to Seaspan, and I went just this morning in my hotel room and took a picture of it and put it onto my PowerPoint. I was writing a book. I was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. in the late 1990s, well, 1998 to be exact. I was writing a book, No Peace, No Honor, Nixon Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam. That book focused on how the Nixon administration and then the Ford administration let an ally, someone who we had promised the South Vietnamese government to protect and we would support on April 30th, 1975, which you could argue is one of the darkest days in U.S. history when we let an ally run out of ammunition. This has nothing to do with whether or not we should have been in Vietnam in the first place, which I don't think it was the right war to be in, but once we were in the way we got out, that was the book that I wrote. When Admiral Zumwalt and I first met a few weeks before this, I told him I was writing this book and when he heard that it was about Kissinger's involvement, he wanted to know what it was and I told him. And if you don't know anything about Zumwalt, the one thing that is important to know is that he and Kissinger had a bitter, bitter rivalry. They hated each other. It was an extraordinary intensity. And I have a whole chapter in the book on the spy ring which documents the levels to which Zumwalt and particularly Zumwalt had placed, strategically placed, his loyal Navy lieutenants into Kissinger's national security shop so that he would be aware of all that Kissinger was negotiating and doing with respect to discussions on salt, strategic arms limitations, and other issues for when Zumwalt was a CNO. Zumwalt knew that Kissinger was going to Paris to meet secretly with Le Ducteau, the Vietnamese negotiator, before Kissinger knew what day he was going to go. And this spy ring that Zumwalt had developed is one of the great stories I think of the book and I've received a lot of interesting feedback about it. And Zumwalt and I did this interview for BookTV on the subject of Henry Kissinger and the negotiations to end the war. And this is me in Texas Tech and I want to talk to you about this at the Vietnam Archive for a second. If you haven't read the book, it's important for all of you to know that this book was written, I'm a historian, I'm a scholar. I spent a lot of time collecting my materials and my sources were the official Navy records that are housed in the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. Zumwalt left all of his personal papers to the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University. The members of the Zumwalt family who didn't contract with me, didn't ask me to do anything, didn't try to shape this book in any way. When they heard I was writing the book, gave me boxes and boxes of letters that went back 40 years. I had a copy of every single letter that Bud Zumwalt wrote to his father from the Naval Academy during his three years at the Naval Academy, three not four because he was in the war-shortened class that received expedited training. I received probably 50 or 60 of the love letters between he and Muzeta all the time they were away at sea. And then all the letters that Zumwalt wrote to his family up through his time as CNO. Every single member of the family were hoarders in the best sense of the word. They kept everything. And when their biographer came, they gave them to me with no strings attached. No strings attached. And I also conducted over 100 interviews. I conducted those interviews with people who loved Zumwalt. Almost all of those who loved him were his sailors, particularly those who served with him in Vietnam from 68 to 1970, who filled the pews when he was buried at the Naval Academy and who would have died for him and many of them did. And to this day, and it's part of my talk today, I'll tell you why, I view him as their man in Washington, D.C. I also talked to many retired admirals who hated the man for what he did to the Navy with respect to the social change and the change in regulations and the hair codes, the undoing of what they thought disciplined. And I talked to equal number of retired admirals who felt that Zumwalt had done a lot, probably a little too much, but if he hadn't had done it, the Navy wouldn't have survived. And then I just was taking a tour here and I looked over here at this picture right here. And the significance of Admiral Zumwalt is in this picture right here of Admiral Gravely, the first African American admiral, the first one appointed during Zumwalt's time as CNO. When Zumwalt became CNO in 1970, there were only three African American captains, three in rank, only three. That wasn't by accident. That was because the Navy and Zumwalt had learned this during his personnel, his years in tour in Bupers in Washington, D.C. that the Navy had come up with a very creative and genius and clandestine mechanism for making sure that the leadership of the Navy remained white and that you could channel African American, talented African American captains into dead-end opportunities where there would be no opportunity for promotion to Admiral. Women, of course, had no opportunity to go to sea at all, zero except to work on hospital ships, could not become aviators, could not get their wings, and Filipinos were consigned mostly, almost exclusively, to steward ranks. And Zumwalt broke it all, but he didn't break it all until he figured out how to do it and that story is the one in my book. So dozens of interviews, his personal papers, the Agent Orange files, which are so many of them, both in Texas, taken in Washington, D.C., the Paul Nitzah papers in the Library of Congress, because Paul Nitzah was his intellectual mentor and taught him the ins and outs of how to think politically. And I'll show you something about that later. The Naval Institute Oral History is probably hundreds of them, conducted by the great Paul Stillwell, many of you might know Paul, and my research in the National Archives, and with all that information, there's still half of the Zumwalt material unavailable. I was able to triangulate and offer this story. What this story is not, it is not a naval history. I'm not a naval historian. And some other person will write that book. Some other person will write that book about Zumwalt and Project 60, which is included here, but about his legacy as a strategic naval officer. This book is a story of leadership. It's a story of a, it's a portrait of a man. And one of the most honored things that happened to me was, you know, when you need dust jacket plurbs, you don't know what to, you know, you send it out to a lot of people. I had never, you know, I had never met a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen. I sent him the book and he gave me a dust jacket blurb. And he said, if not for Zumwalt, he would have left the Navy. He would have never stayed in the Navy if not for Zumwalt. President Bill Clinton gave me one because of Clinton gave Zumwalt the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, because he never stopped fighting on behalf of the sailors, those sailors and their children and those unborn who would suffer from cancers related to their exposure to Agent Orange and Thurgood Marshall Jr. who believed that his legacy, that he believed that Zumwalt's legacy in changing the social contract in the Navy was significant, significant enough to endorse the book. So the broad contours of Zumwalt's, the broad contours of Zumwalt's life were that he was born, again, I'll just do this quickly because I want to get to the meat of the matter. He was born in San Francisco in November of 1920. He was given the name Elmo Russell Zumwalt Jr. He hated the name Elmo. Who would like it really? And his little sister began calling him Buddy and he went by the moniker Buddy for the first seven or eight years of his life and he changed it to Buddy and he was never called Buddy again. And I can relate to that, you know, because I regret it now, but my name and my book and I published all my books into Larry Berman and my whole life growing up in the Bronx, New York. I was Larry Berman, but I was born Lawrence Berman. And as soon as I was old enough to hear the name Lawrence, I realized I didn't want people to call me Lawrence. And no one ever called me Lawrence again, ever. Much to my mother's deep chagrin. And because she gave me that name, so she thought it was beautiful. And now only today is I've got my Medicare card that I realized, do I regret not publishing under Lawrence? But in my youth, that was the decision that I made. But Buddy never regretted that and he asked everyone to call him Buddy. And that's just a small story there. He grew up in Tulare, California. The son of two country doctors. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1942 in the accelerated class, only three years. Condensed, four years condensed into three so they could go off to war. He received his Bronze Star for bravery in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which is covered in the book. I won't cover that today. The family itself now has four Bronze Star recipients, four. It's a family that has honored the code of duty, honor and sacrifice and service to one's country. And he served on destroyers his entire career. He was seasick on every one of those destroyers. He suffered from seasickness his entire life. His first fitness report. The captain wrote that he wishes he could write more, but he rarely saw Zumaul because he was just over the side all the time. So he was a black shoe and he was a non-aviator. When he became CNO, the aviators got it. I mean, that was one of the great battles between the services because Zumaul really had the courage and he had been aching to stand up to the aviators when he controlled the resources. And that's exactly what happened. In 1968, he went to Vietnam where he changed the whole nature of the war in Vietnam. If he had never become CNO, what he did in the strategic environment in Vietnam between 1968 and 1970 where he changed the war into Delta, reduced casualties and put us on the offensive, he would have been heralded just for that alone. But in 1970, he became CNO. He was deep selected over seven or eight flag officers with higher rank and more experience, almost all of them, including Admiral Moore, who Zumaul would be replacing as CNO and Moore would become Zumaul's boss as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Moore kicked his bucket, the waste packet, waste paper basket across the room when he heard that Nixon had selected Zumaul as CNO. And I'll tell you why he chose him in a minute. But it meant that his Navy career would be over at 54. He became CNO at 50 years at age in 1970. It's very young. A Navy career over Admiral Moore believed that Zumaul should have gone to the Pacific Fleet first, headed that, and then at 54 or 55, he'd come back and become CNO, but he should have had that command experience. Zumaul was the only one in all the interviews that occurred. He was the only one of every other Admiral, how to deal with the Soviet Union, how to help shrink the budget, shrink ships, et cetera. Zumaul was the only one who came in prepared to talk about the personnel problem that the Navy faced. Its re-enlistment rates were at an all-time low behind all other services. African-Americans were not signing up anymore, but no one was signing up. Minorities were not signing up. Women, no one was coming into the Navy. And we were moving to an all-volunteer force that Nixon understood very well that we had to do something to combat this problem in the Navy. And it wasn't being faced in any of the other services like it was in the Navy. But Zumaul came in, that's all he talked about. And Zumaul and Kissinger were blown away by the presentation, and they took them. And that's because for 20 years, Zumaul had been formulating this agenda in his own mind, thinking that if he was ever in power, it would be personnel policies because of how much time he has spent in Washington in watching the personnel system and being horrified by it that he could change the Navy. In 1974 his term ended. He was only 54 years old. What do you do? Well, first he ran for the United States Senate in West Virginia. He didn't have a party for his entire life. So he had to choose a party. Nixon and Kissinger were Republicans, so he chose Democrat. That was the only reason. He was a scoop Jackson Democrat, a hawk on defense, and a progressive social liberal, a progressive on social issues, but a hawk on military policy. In 1976 he endorsed Jimmy Carter for president. In 1976 he gave the speech defending and presenting the Democratic Defense Platform at the National Convention, Democratic National Convention. And in 1980 he formed Democrats for Reagan and he broke with Carter, believing that had Carter won a second term, his own grandchildren might not have seen their 10th birthday. And he became a confidant of Reagan until he was deeply disappointed by something Reagan did, which if I don't forget I'll tell you. And in 1998 he received the presidential, and then of course he wrote his memoir on Watch, but really the Watch never ended for Zimbal because of what happened in Vietnam and the Agent Orange conflict and the fact that he had issued an order to defoliate the jungles, to reduce casualties, to save his troop, to save his sailors. The terrible irony is that he had issued an order where his own brave son, and in namesake, Elmul Zumwal, a swift boat captain who could have avoided service. Imagine, just like the McCain's, in this case you had a father commanding naval forces of Vietnam and a captain with the same exact name commanding a swift boat in the treacherous waterways of Vietnam. And young Elmul could have gotten out of it in any way possible, but that family, there was no way he would back out. Okay? There was no way he wouldn't serve his country and it was a test of Elmul's manhood to prove to his father that he could do it. So every night when they went out in the swift boat, he would rip his name off because if he was ever captured with the name Zumwal, bad news, right? Because everyone knew who Bud Zumwal was in Vietnam. Both sides did. Elmul survived, came home, but he had a ticking time bomb in him. And 10 years later, after marrying, having children, becoming a successful lawyer, he learned that he had two forms of Hodkins, non-Hodkins lymphoma. Eventually he would succumb, but not after a two-year battle in which Bud Zumwalt and Elmul looked for every possible cure. And the deathbed pledged to his son as he held his son just hours before Elmul died. This man who had dedicated his life to honor, duty, and country swore to his son that he would gain accountability and find accountability from those in government who would lie to him when he asked, was this chemical weapon, was this carcinogen, agent orange, this quote, herbicide, dioxin, was it harmful to human beings and he was guaranteed, no it's not. And so, you know, Zumwalt had at this time when he retired, you don't make a lot of money in the Navy, but he became a wealthy man after the Navy. He was on the board of directors of 17 or 18 different companies and corporations. He was dynamic, he was a great speaker and the boards loved him. And he gave it all up and worked for one dollar a year for Congressman Durnisky and he was given subpoena power. And it began subpoenaing documents. And eventually he uncovered or discovered a cover-up of massive proportions in the United States government, not by the Pentagon, not by the DOD people, they had never lied to him, but by the chemical companies, Dowell Monsanto, who had tests that showed, and all this is in the book, tests that showed that all of their studies, not just some of their studies, all of their studies had shown that laboratories, mice and rats and animals that had been exposed to this military-grade weapon, dioxin, cooked at 50 times more than the stuff we use in our yard, that their animals were dying in the labs and that they were giving birth to deformed offspring. And they hid that from the government because they had what was known as company docks. You could always hire and find a doctor who would endorse your story. And so by the time Zumwalt was done fighting for a meeting that pledged, he'd given to his son and it was, in 1998 he was given the award at the Presidential Medal of Freedom for all he had done on behalf of veterans and their families and the unborn, 17 new illnesses, cancers, for veterans who were in Vietnam and served in Vietnam, but not just veterans, their children and their children were covered. It went from zero, sorry, it went from three because President Bush the first was the first president to cover these to 17 and now it's up to 21 and none of it would have happened without Zumwalt. None of it would have happened. So when people think of Zumwalt today they think of that ship in particular. You know, a lot of people forget about these great debates that occurred during the 70s about whether Zumwalt was undoing military discipline and think about the whole portrait and the character of the man himself and what he did and how he did it. And as Bill Clinton said, he never stopped fighting for any of those people and that's why they were at his funeral 2,000 sailors, 2,000 sailors packed into the chapel and they had driven all over and I got so many of their names and went all over the United States to interview them and talk to them and they would have just died for them. They would have done anything for them because he never stopped fighting for them. That's their story. That's what they thought that he never stopped fighting for for them. So I thought it would be fun to do this today. This is one of my favorite photos. It doesn't appear in the book but it's a sailor putting up a clock and it says, it's time for a change. And that's how they viewed him. It's time for a change. Oh, and I want to tell this story. I was flying in yesterday, two days ago to Bath, Maine. And the flight attendant I'm wearing my DGG-1000 hat and the Zumwalt the flight attendant comes over to me and I'm getting, I'm preparing my notes going over and she goes she asked me a question and then I asked her if she served under Zumwalt and she goes, yeah, my husband and I both served under Zumwalt quote he made it possible for all of us her name is Kiki and her husband's name is Brian Oppett. She's a United Airlines flight attendant now. I wrote it on my ticket so first of all to confirm to you it really happened but secondly that I just didn't want to forget it. So he made it possible for all of us and when I told her about the ship she said, oh I know about that ship I'm following it, all that but she didn't know about my book so I sold a copy on the plane which was good and I said, how can you know about my book you know but it was a good deal but Kiki, she was super so I told her I was going to take her picture and show it in the PowerPoint so I did that and so and here's another example, many of you probably you know probably know this man, does anyone know who he is? Alright so this is a good story I just want to pull this bio up right here, here it is so this is at the christening and this man William Bundy came over to me, he teaches here as a part time faculty he's here quite often he's a member of the gravely group I just want to read to you, but he came over to me and he coined me with the gravely coin and he said to me, thank you so much because we don't need another navy book about steel and weapons we need a book about leadership and character and believing in things and he goes if not for him, meaning Zumwalt I wouldn't be here today so I'm just going to read very briefly his bio which I took off the internet the other day which is Dr. Bundy served in the Navy as a career submarine officer, he served as a third African-American naval officer to command a submarine with the distinction of being the first to advance from the enlisted rank to earn a commission and become a submarine skipper he is one of the centennial seven African-American submarine skippers who served during the first hundred years of the submarine service who served Dr. Bundy served in seven submarines including attack, nuclear attack nuclear fleet of missile submarines I'll stop right there but when someone like him comes over to me and tells me he gets it that he wouldn't be where he is today without what Zumwalt did it makes it meaningful to me now it was time for a change you had a C&O on the cover of Time Magazine and you also had him interviewed in Playboy Magazine this is not usual not very forthcoming he was known to his sailors as Big Z which was the first title of my book which my publisher rejected because he didn't think people would know what it was and I guess if Donald Trump can be president Z for president so anything is possible and on that obviously he was famous for his Z-grams which promulgated most of his of the social agenda these new hairstyles obviously liberalized regulations and practices and like a tire motorcycles on bases conditions for leave overnight liberty was all overhauled because Zumwalt learned in Vietnam in 1968 to 70 that his sailors had real needs in 1970 these are a SEAL team in San Diego that Zumwalt's meeting with when he commanded forces in Vietnam his sailors would be out there in these hazardous duties the brownwater sailors this was treacherous work I'm giving the keynote address at the reunion of the game wardens of Vietnam in October in Mobile, Alabama and in Huntsville, Alabama all of these people it was such treacherous work at this time when he became the head of the naval forces he asked his sailors what do you want some of the things they wanted was we want cold beer we want charcoal we could cook our food and Zumwalt started having beer out to his sailors who would not be on base for over two, three, four weeks sometimes and other things some of you might find this to be outrageously silly and a danger to have but Zumwalt thought it was the only way to keep morale up as people were dropping like flies and they were between 1968 and 1969 he was definitely a peoples oriented leader he couldn't do it alone that's Bill Norman who assisted him in so many of the efforts to liberalize naval naval policy so let me go to my notes for a second so I don't skip this so Zumwalt was a trailblazer who reformed the navy and he was a champion of the men and women who served in the navy he forced the navy to think more deeply and more critically about things that should have been self evident to them and by doing those he became a sailors admiral fighting for the rights of what he considered the oppressed and his nickname was Zorro given to him by by his sailors I want to read something to you from the book right here I have it marked in 1970 he landed on the cover of Time magazine who called the charismatic chief of naval operations the navy's most popular leader since World War II the press quickly dubbed it the Mod Squad Navy led by its psychedelic admiral sailors began sporting longer here beards and sideburns the infamous z-grams attempted to meld the traditions of the navy service with the needs of a nation in turmoil culture and transition the navy was never the same beer dispenses were allowed in enlisted men's barracks acid rock blared from service clubs and women were going to see traditionalists at that time mostly white retired admirals ridiculed the reforms as the three B's beer beards and broads deriding zoom altism for undoing navy discipline discipline and leading to mutinies at sea but that wasn't the view of James Stockdale former director of the naval war college who during zoom waltz time as cno was rotting away as a prisoner of war in north vietnam one of their the Hanoi Hilton and as was the custom of Stockdale and others and by the way zoom waltz only wore one bracelet the entire time of the war and it was from the day Stockdale was captured to the day he was released with Stockdale's bracelet that he wore on his wrist that's how close they were they became Stockdale as it was his custom when a new aviator was brought in a down pilot was brought in brought to the cell next to him Stockdale tapped on the tapped on the wall at SOS any news from back home so hungry for some information back home and lo and behold the following message came back and my source for this is Admiral Stockdale and it's published in his book as well quote yeah we got a new cno named zoom waltz no more mickey mouse or chicken shit Stockdale loved it so my portrait of zoom waltz is of of an a man who possessed an inspirational faith in the strength of america its people and its navy and his deed his entire life was defined by service leadership and patriotism he helped really to shape history I was drawn to zoom waltz I was drawn to his iconoclasm I couldn't figure out how in the world the navy hadn't filtered him out how did he survive, how did he get to four stars how did he rise to this position how couldn't someone of just somewhere along the line figured out that this man with the courage of a lion was going to shake things up and rattle him and it's because zoom waltz really played his cards learned it under pole pole nitsa he played his cards close to the vest he could have survived in the court of the medici he was one of the great internal bureaucratic fighters he was fearless in taking on admiral rick over and their battles which were detailed in my book that date back to the his original interview with rick over the rick over interview all the way through the term is cno he never back down to rick over ever although he realized that he didn't have the bureaucratic resources that rick over had and unlike rick over zoom waltz was only going to serve four years under nixon for only four years he earned the enmity of his adversaries but the extraordinary loyalty of so many others his famous quote on this you may have heard it was I have a long list of friends and a long list of enemies and I'm equally proud of both of them his hostility towards discrimination was equaled only by his hostility towards the soviet union he believed in loyalty down that was his theory of leadership and that a commander his obligation is a lifetime to his troops or his sailors not just a time of their service and it's you see I was drawn to his humanity the elimination of racial discrimination the reduction of the way of family time women going to see the advancement of all minorities in navy and the first african-american admiral now when zoom waltz became cno his three previous his three predecessors had been aviators and the person who was replacing him was about to become his boss become his boss admiral more who would become chairman of the joint chiefs of staff he faced formidable challenges as cno a soviet navy increasing in size and versatility and quality and confronting the united states on all free world lakes national priorities were changing we were leaving vietnam and he would be responsible for actov actov the accelerated turnover of equipment what navy person likes to give over equipment it's no one it's painful to turn over your equipment to the vietnamese and say goodbye but that's what he was responsible for and national priorities were changing the navy was shrinking nixon ordered the size of the navy to reduce by ships and its budget was significantly cut because national resources were going to go elsewhere after a decade of burgeoning military spending it was a period of military reductionism so the challenge was to fulfill obligations with smaller resources it was an aging fleet and something had to be gone and this is where the battles with rick over started started because zoom wall did not believe that the nuclear fleet was the way to go the atomic fleet because of the cost he endorsed a high low principle but the fact of the matter is the number one crisis that was facing the navy and nixon instructed him to deal with it first was retention rates were low people were leaving the draft was being called off the world was in transition and the navy was transitioning to an all volunteer force how were they going to get anyone to serve in the navy and zoom wall's answer was fun and zest we'll make it fun, we'll make it zest we'll get them to sign up we'll have no one here and the people who are here will be the worst that was zoom wall's view nixon bought it, kissinger bought it and zoom wall implemented those programs based upon his pledge to the president from his interview with the cno so when people think that zoom wall went off and did this half cocked and nixon wouldn't approve it's just not true he told this is why he was hired to do this he made it very clear to nixon in the interview in the book that he would combat institutionalized racism and and sexism sexism and that's exactly what he did and I love this quote I have to go over here to read it because I can barely read it anymore I had no problem supporting women in combat for two reasons one, I remember well my grandmother's stories about fighting off the indians along with her husband as they crossed the plains the most vicious and cunning enemy I have ever had to fight was the vietnam women so and zoom wall there's a long record of this it's discussed in my book he found that combating sexism in the navy was much more difficult than combating racism in the navy the navy rolled over on the racism stuff because they realized that the tides of history were changing the navy didn't look like america it was as simple as that and zoom wall's goal was to make it look like america but everyone dug in everyone dug in on women and the explanations are pretty interesting and in the 10th anniversary of now the national organization of women they nominated zoom wall as one of the few men in the world who would advance the rights of women and they recognized them for that pretty extraordinary when you think about that came from within the navy and here's my thing it's a great quote, I want to share it with you here so I don't know if you've seen this photo yet, this is admiral zoom wall kissing the first naval rear admiral admiral arlene dirk is her name and I found this, I'm showing this to you because the story is really cute first I'll read you what zoom wall had to say quote this is zoom wall now speaking although the navy was a racist institution I found it easier to deal with racism than sexism recalled zoom wall it takes longer for a white man to come to believe that a white woman is as equal than it does for him to come to believe that a black man is as equal that's what zoom wall said quote indeed present this picture is really super it's here it is but was especially proud of the day that arlene dirk was selected as the first female admiral when a picture of bud kissing the new rear admiral on the cheek appeared on the front page of all the country's newspapers mrs. john mallet of garden grove california wrote first it's booze and rockin music in the barracks to corrupt the boys now it's a kiss for the lib are you sure you don't represent the french navy no no small wonder we can't win the war with the likes of you in charge may god save america in spite of you but zoom wall's response was classic he wrote back and he often said the following quote but you must understand one does not become cnl without having to kiss a lot of admirals but yeah that's exactly right exactly and that's senator john that's the secretary of navy john warner there who didn't go on and there's a lot on the relationship between warner and zoom wall as well the fact of the matter is the navy has changed has changed for the better zoom wall is often described as the man who saved the navy by bringing it into a new century um there will be 20 other books on zoom wall there will be 20 other books on this change of policy i'm only staking out my position on this my position is that the navy is stronger because of what zoom wall did because of his social social policies and so that's me lecturing the united states naval academy and when i was at the naval academy i mean you could really see you could really see the effects of the policies 43 decades later and this is i just put this in very personal that is my number one my first nephew my mother's sister's son jacob who's graduating this year and heading off from the academy and going off to uh to uh Charleston south carolina to be a nuclear submarineer and when i asked him how come he didn't choose zoom wall as his uh as his ship he said and he told me the story and i looked it up it was true well i assume it was true he told it to me which is that uh uh the first graduating senior from the naval class this year uh who who was on the destroyer list chose to service on the zoom wall so that person is going to zoom wall so zoom wall was gone by the time uh jacob made his decision uh and uh this is how they uh uh what's that our father martin washington yeah that's it that's it one of my favorite pictures so there's one other story i want to tell you about the controversy that surrounded uh uh zoom wall and uh um which is actually i'll tell this first which is so when he was in vietnam his level of compassion for his sailors he personally delivered over a hundred bronze stars uh his aid would fly with him they'd go out to the most remote areas because he wanted to be the he wanted to be the one to uh to deliver to deliver those up to deliver the uh to deliver the uh the medals i've got a couple of delayed responses here that's admiral chan who he worked with in vietnam on the transition of military equipment between uh in vietnam and here it is it's going to come up right now so but you know there's a picture before this just give me a second i apologize well there's one it should be right there it's like the zoom wallet stealth um and uh we'll skip over it and uh oh there it is so this man uh still alive his name his name is admiral uh admiral chan tran van chan uh he's in his 90s now and he was the head of naval forces in vietnam uh in 1968 when zoom wallet was in vietnam and they forged a brotherhood a friendship that would endure uh to the end of bud zoom wallet's life they loved each other after the war as you know many of the south vietnamese uh leading officers were imprisoned uh in uh they weren't sent to reeducation camp they were sent to prison but in chan's case he went to prison for eight or nine years and then he was uh prohibited from leaving the country for another 10 years there was one man over for one decade who kept a fight up to get chan out of the country and that was bud zoom wallet and zoom wallet used every uh chitty had every bit of power he had to get chan out and chan finally got out um and they had a reunion that that picture is taken the moment they saw each other after being separated for 25 years it was very very very moving and there's chan paying his respects to zoom wallet with muza at uh buds at buds at buds at buds grave my interviews with admiral chan i wish i could write a biography of him his life is so extraordinary but the thing about bud zoom wallet that you all need to know also is that zoom wallet was friends with all naval officers uh in the south all of the leading south vietnamese naval officers and in the evacuation of vietnam on april 29th and April 30th of 1975 uh april 29th and april 30th of 1975 uh zoom wallet uh uh let it be known that anyone would be welcome at his home and one day the wind family of 13 showed up at his home knocked on the door and for the next nine months they lived in the basement of his house while the zoom wallet took in that whole family i become friends with half that family very close friends with half that family they credit the zoom wallet with teaching them to be americans for everything from learning how to drive to coins to go to school and the like and none of it uh it's just his compassion was extraordinary in that in that in that regard uh i'm going to skip over some of this because of time uh i've told you the agent orange story so uh the agent orange was was sprayed uh in vietnam it was zoom wallet this is elmo right up there in the uh your the upper right uh and that's jim zoom wallet they're surviving some with their two daughters and his wife musa there's a three bronze star recipients right there three of the three of the four the four is the son of james zoom wallet who's also his name is james zoom wallet now running for congress in florida but was a seal uh a mine a mine deactivator for as a navy seal uh and those are three bronze star recipients his father his son elmo there's this the surviving son jim a marine uh and uh uh uh and uh i'm just going to share this with you there's elmo a few days before he would go into the hospital for the last time and he wrote his father this following this letter and the letter was given to el was given to bud with the instructions don't open it until i'm gone and this is what the letter said how i would have loved to have continued to fight the battles by your side you always made a difference you made my last battle the journey to death more gentle more humane i love you elmo and that led of course to the death bed pledge to find out what had happened with respect to the uh age and orange and then in 1998 president clinton awarded and what elmo zoom wallet described is one of the happiest days of his life most meaningful days of his life the presidential medal of freedom and uh there's hillary clinton behind there he was buried in a naval academy eulogized by admiral mullen uh and bill clinton um as uh well as the secretary of the navy but at zoom waltz insistence the chief petty officer of the navy was instructed to be at zoom waltz request the flag bearer to show his respect uh for the enlisted men in in the navy something that's really significant from zoom waltz uh perspective this is the funeral elmo and bill were very close the relationship between elmo zoom waltz and bill clinton was extraordinarily close zoom waltz was a private advisor to clinton often going in the white house in the evenings um to anyone to talk to clinton about issues of war and peace and there is uh muza at the uh at the grave site this was uh furnished to me by the family muza herself is an extraordinary woman and she was a very supportive picture of them uh uh married over 53 years this is them at their 50th wedding anniversary where he was still running three miles a day she was a great navy wife beloved by navy wives everywhere for uh what she did very active in christenings as most navy wives are she was always his strength and there is the this is the ship on yesterday although i was not at sea uh but and that's the slide that i used yesterday so i'm not that's that's why i i i didn't switch that one out i'll just conclude by i want to i i want to leave time for questions we have about five minutes left and i i got a little too quickly told you uh uh a little too many personal tidbits here and there but uh the one thing i thought about i'll just close is by telling you that uh when adamel michelle howard when adamel michelle howard became the woman in navy history uh i wasn't the only one to realize that it wouldn't happen without buds and wall he brought the navy into the 20th century and as the president said he was the conscience of the navy and i was honored to write this book if you read the book you'll find there's a lot of criticism in some wall too it's all brought up it's all brought in there but i wanted to give you the broad portrait of his life today so i think we have five minutes for questions anyone have any questions yes sir i just want to make a comment questions or comments sure well in 1971 i had 850 men on the little island of the aegis of the ocean building a base comm station there of course we got the traditional messages from adamel zimmel as we completed the comm stay in the runway which i appreciated the first plane air force plane couldn't find the island the second one didn't the third one came in but we were all looking for mail we usually on months between mail zomal sent a message apologizing personally that that plane did not have the mail and promised the next plane would have the mail for us then i realized this guy had a heart mail to him i was amazed it would be a big thing he appreciated it though i have a little section here about how he got some complaints about the uniform he got a lot of complaints about the heavy nature of the uniforms people were wearing and also that they weren't once they got wet they really bogged you down and within about a week or two they were completely re-outfitted and the sailors that was one of the first stories that they told me so did it was another hand? yes sir yeah it's a fascinating story he was really loyal to Reagan so it was the policy of the Reagan administration in the 1980s to do everything possible this is well documented it's documented in my book actually it's part of my next book it was the policy of the Reagan administration during the 1980s because of the budget situation to do everything possible to make sure there was no linkage between not veterans but anyone's exposure to chemicals and dioxin or anything and cancers because of what had happened at Love Canal and elsewhere in the United States because if that connection was or especially in Vietnam because if that connection was made anywhere legally that would then open up the United States government to lawsuits everywhere and from a lot of other groups and it would deplete the budget and this was documented in a series of emails and primarily between David Stockman the OMB director and Ed Meese the president's attorney general and advisor and Zumwalt didn't know any of this until he got the subpoena power and he got the subpoena power and he realized that Reagan, the administration not Reagan, I'm sure Reagan didn't know any of this but the administration certainly had taken the position that Vietnam veterans were not to be associated with any we're not to get benefits because of what it would cost and that deeply disappointed Zumwalt terribly so as a matter of fact it affected them greatly and it affected one of the children too Jim Zumwalt greatly as well because one of his mentors was Oliver North as well and on that so that's that story and so it's quite by the way it's quite ironic isn't it that Bill Clinton who you wouldn't normally think of this is actually a beloved by veterans for what he did for them with respect to compensation but it's Reagan who gets all the credit in many ways as a veteran's president it's really interesting yes sir someone had a question okay go ahead I was in the field bunkering business and we used to bunker destroyers in Boston Harbour and I went aboard one in the Zumwalt era and the crew would lay out and sit on the back the back the captain and I went along and he stepped between the legs and then we got to put the hose aboard nobody knew quite where to put it they didn't open the valves so we had to determine where the valves were and that ship was no more competent or able to go into combat I think they were mentioning Zumwalt rather negatively yeah yeah fair enough so the comment was of course that you know there were some of the attitudes I filtered down to the way sailors acted on a ship affected overall performance I can't argue about that that's a fact the question is how prevalent was it where certainly the tours of duty for the constellation in the Ticonderoga where the real things occurred in San Diego in 1973 in 1972 but their performance at sea was magnificent and they endured long times away and alike so thank you later on the admiral in charge of the First Naval District boarded the vessel he got as far as the gangway and he stood there and looked forward and looked down and he told the captain that they are all condemned to the ship or aboard for 30 days he'll come back if there isn't any benefit there's going to be some thought marshals it was a tough era yeah it was a tough era I think it was time for one more I spent six years in the Navy and the last two years was right here at Newport and I was on I guess the most advanced day of study ship that the Navy had at the time which was just carrying the SQS-26 I heard prior to that several years prior to that I had attended a elite school the Deep South I met Arnold 20 and I was very much inspired something that he said it was kind of well represented by Thomas Kool's series Course of Empire and that's the way I viewed history and I was fascinated by the process and I always wanted to know the underlying mechanisms when I came to Newport I had an ample opportunity to do so and I've documented it I've written a autobiography that's several hundred pages and a large chunk of it has to do with my observations here I tried to get involved with the ZOOMALT 35 I've met a number of people there had social interactions some of them are anecdotal I'd love to share this with you because otherwise I would hate to see it just kind of disappear along with the rest of the household effects when I die Why don't we talk afterwards I'll give you my email A separate issue that I raised my hand on was in your book you describe how on the Bronze Star I was very intrigued by that because he was kind of like in a panic mode as it was approaching late golf and he thought for certain that it would crash but and he received the Bronze Star and afterwards I guess without fanfare the CEO I believe you said got a Silver Star and I thought about that and I realized that was a night attack and they were being followed by radar and the strategy obviously must have been and I suspect a lot of thought in some preparation to do that because it was a soft mud that saved them and I suspect what he was doing was hurrying as rapidly as he could until the blip of the ship merged with the blip of the island and then the Japanese would not know which way he was going to turn or whether he crashed and I suspect that was a real event that was taking place waiting for the merger of the blip of the Japanese radar So you've read the book I have a lot of details about how he I didn't see that so the only thing I could do I used the radar man's first-hand account primarily that's very detailed there's a radar man's I forget his name account that I used for that very extensively and then Zumwalt in his autobiography certainly wrote quite a bit about it and I should have mentioned to everyone by the way there is one voice in my book that no one has ever used and no one will use it again So Zumwalt from the earliest time that he began his service in the Navy he went to Annapolis and he really didn't go to Annapolis to become for a Navy career he was going to become a doctor like his parents but it was George Marshall who changed his mind George, George C. Marshall Secretary of State who was transitioning state to defense and Marshall told him that the country needed people like him to service to others as a doctor or service to his country he chose service to a country and never looked back but he started something a few years later that he continued all the way until the end of his CNO years which is he spoke into a tape recorder every night every night and just put those tapes away he didn't know he was going to become CNO he didn't know he was going to become head of naval operations in Vietnam he just spoke into this tape recorder every night impressions of everybody and then when he wrote his book Arn Watch in 1975 he paid someone a lot of money to type up all those transcripts all of them and they were given to Zumwalt to write the book he owned them obviously this is before this is a different era and so then Zumwalt finished Arn Watch and this voluminous set of tapes and transcripts and put somewhere where I don't want to tell you where because I'm on being taped anyway but they were put somewhere and given to somebody and this box one day just mysteriously was given to me and so I actually had Zumwalt's voice on these tapes unedited on the transcripts unedited unfiltered Zumwalt coming back and if he was pissed off at someone and said why but the stuff on Nixon and Kissinger and Admiral Moore and others during this period is so detailed so descriptive and so great and so in the book when Zumwalt speaks and I cite it as Zumwalt transcripts and and I return those transcripts to their rightful owner it's a family person obviously and that was really where I got into it with Zumwalt because I could really feel it the stuff on the race riots and everything else Zumwalt spoke to me, he was long dead when I began writing this book but every night he could speak to me through those transcripts and I recognized there were just his voice and all of us have come home at night and if we imagine speaking into a tape recorder a lot has depended upon mood, alcoholic intake, everything but I filtered my way through it and it was I did the best I could with it so I forgot to mention that so that's in the book as well so with that I think I'm getting the signal so I want to thank I want to thank you all for joining us today, it's a great crowd and I'll stick around for a few minutes if anyone has any questions, thank you