Are the Defense Reorganization Years of Turbulence 1947-50 Telling US Anything About the JFK Hit?

[David Josephs]

David, generally, i think that the Defense Authorization Act of 47 was SUPPOSED to unify the quarelling branches under the Sec Def but it failed to do so, and in this light the description of Johnson is interesting. Was he perceived as over reaching because the other branches still were resisting centralization as they were Forestal, who came from Navy and ran the problem of trying to nominally seem balanced re the main rival the New extremely ascendant Air Force?

Was Acheson's apparent triumph over Johnson accomplished with some degree of cooperation from the independent services, resisting cental control?

Later in the 1967-published book Hilsman is quite frank about CIA secretive influence in the State Department. It is pretty clear that he blames CIA for the weak role of the Department at least as represented by Rusk.

Of course the rivalry between the services were nearly as strong as they were in 1947, when MacNamera assumed the Sec. Def. position. He formed the DIA because he could not get good Soviet estimates from the different services, as each sevices' estimate was very different, and based on its self interest vis a vis the other services.

You see Nathaniel I get the opposite from my reading....

To put the matter simply, Eberstadt felt that the record
of interservice coordination during the war was
commendable, and that the wartime experience did not
demonstrate the need for full unification. He also worried
about the establishment of any "General Staff"
arrangement, or the creation of a powerful Chief of Staff in
peacetime, as potential threats to the tradition of civilian
control of the military.


https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-t...201947.pdf

and I found this that deals more with the effects on the CIA.

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While "the
basic framework for a sound intelligence organization
now exists," the report declared, "[t]hat
framework must be fleshed out by proper personnel
and sound administrative measures." 3

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3
[/SIZE][size=12]The unclassified Eberstadt Report's findings and conclusions were largely based on the more extended classified report[/SIZE]
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drafted by John Bross, an OSS veteran and later a senior CIA official. Ludwell Lee Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith
as Director of Central Intelligence: October 1950February 1953 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1992), 124. This report (hereinafter cited as "Classified Eberstadt Report") formed the chapter, "The Central Intelligence
Agency: National and Service Intelligence," in the classified Volume II of the commission's national security organization
report. Its pages are numbered 2560, and the best CIA copy is in Executive Registry Job 86B00269R, box 14, folder 132.
For the "framework" quote, see pages 4041.
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