Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2004, page 27

In Memoriam

 

Admiral Thomas Hinman Moorer (1912-2004)

 

By Andrew I. Killgore

Admiral Thomas Moorer at a Sept. 21, 1999 luncheon at the Army-Navy Club, where he received the first annual Liberty Award (staff photo R. Curtiss).

FORMER CHAIRMAN of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer died Feb. 5 at the National Naval Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He was 91 years of age.

A soft-spoken southerner from Alabama, Moorer was 15 when he finished high school as the valedictorian of his class. Two years later he entered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. A naval aviator, he was a lieutenant at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, and was one of the first pilots to get his plane in the air. A few months later his plane was shot down over the South Pacific.

With difficulty he managed to land safely with his crew. Picked up by a freighter, the ship was almost immediately attacked and sunk. Escaping in a lifeboat, Moorer and his men made it to an uninhabited island. There he carved an enormous S.O.S. in the sand. He was awarded the Silver Star for his conduct.

Admiral Moorer rose through the ranks with several fleet commands. He was commander in chief of the Pacific fleet at the time of the Tonkin Gulf clash between U.S. and North Vietnamese sea forces. In 1967, President Johnson appointed him chief of naval operations, the top command in the navy. Later Moorer became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Among the issues, conflicts and resolutions he faced as chairman was arms-limitation talks with the Soviets, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 and the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

In 1998, a CNN report on “Operation Tailwind,” which charged that U.S. forces used a lethal nerve gas on American defectors in Laos during the (Vietnam) War, quoted Admiral Moorer as confirming the story. CNN and Time magazine later retracted the story. After a defamation suit by Admiral Moorer—a fierce defender of the military—CNN issued apologies and negotiated an undisclosed settlement with the retired admiral. “It was an insult to the young men that do this very dangerous work to try to set up accusations they were trying to kill Americans,” Moorer told The Washington Post.

Admiral Moorer became a hero to the survivors of the USS Liberty, the American intelligence ship attacked by Israel off Sinai on June 8, 1967, killing 34 sailors and injuring 171. Israel claimed a “tragic accident” had occurred. Admiral Moorer insisted, together with the overwhelming majority of Americans, that the attack was deliberate.

Intensely loyal to the Navy, at every chance the admiral lent his weight to efforts to get at the truth. In 1999 this writer was present at the Army-Navy club in Washington, DC when Admiral Moorer and several officers who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor reiterated their conviction that Israel had tried to sink the Liberty and kill all of those aboard.

Recently an Independent Commission of Inquiry, to which Admiral Moorer lent his name, held a ceremony at the Congress to charge Israel with deliberately attacking the Liberty. Former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Akins joined Moorer in accusing Israel. The commission met on Capital Hill to highlight the failure of Congress to conduct an investigation of the attempt to sink the Liberty.

Forceful to the end, Admiral Moore’s final statement on Jan. 9, 2004 (see March 2004 Washington Report, p. 9) attacked the American double standard where Israel is concerned. The final part of his statement focused on the “treatment of the USS Liberty and its survivors.”

Andrew I. Killgore is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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