Douglas Waller latest book in bookstores September 7, 2004.

A Question of Loyalty:
An Interview with Douglas Waller on His Latest Book

1. Why did you decide to write this book?
2. Tell us something about Billy Mitchell. What was the general like?
3. Some have called Billy Mitchell the father of the Air Force. Why is that?
4. What made Billy Mitchell so controversial?
5. You tell Mitchell's biography through his court-martial. Why was he put on trial?
6. Mitchell's trial was one of the most spectacular the Army has ever conducted. Wasn't it a major event not only for Washington, but also for the entire country?
7. Didn’t Mitchell’s court-martial raise some very serious issues about how far a senior American officer can go in criticizing his superiors, and his president?
8. We’ve had a lot of high-profile court-martials. How do they compare with Mitchell’s court-martial in 1925?
9. Was Mitchell found guilty or innocent?
10. Billy Mitchell had an uncanny knack for predicting the future, didn’t he. What kind of predictions did he make?
11. Isn’t Mitchell’s place in history still debated to this day?
12. How did you go about researching this book? What did you find new?

Q. Why did you decide to write this book?

A. Billy Mitchell was a fascinating person. For the journalists of his day, Mitchell was good copy. I would have loved to cover him as a reporter. Digging into his life and writing about him as a biographer today was fun. Mitchell wasn’t just a famous airman, he was a political general. Mitchell in many ways set the template for the “American Caesars” we saw in the Army later—the controversial generals like Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. In fact, MacArthur sat on Mitchell’s court-martial and Patton was a good friend of Mitchell. America in his day was just getting into the mass media—with big circulation papers, national magazines like TIME, and the radio. Mitchell understood how to use the mass media to further his causes. He knew how to cultivate and spin the press, how to create an image for the voters.

Q. Tell us something about Billy Mitchell. What was the general like?

A. He was a complex character: independent-minded, aggressive, brash and often contemptuous of his superiors. He was fearless as a pilot, charismatic as a combat commander, brilliant and innovative as a strategist. He came from one of the richest families in the Midwest. His grandfather, when he died, was worth over $300 million in today’s dollars, and his father had been a U.S. Senator. He joined the Army when he was eighteen and immediately became the service’s youngest officer. In World War I he led the largest armada of airplanes ever assembled to attack the Germans and returned to the U.S. as a young general with a chest full of medals. He was a short compact man, who spoke with a twangy voice, who liked to sport the latest fashions in civilian clothes, who didn’t smoke and didn’t eat red meat. In the 1950s Gary Cooper played him in a movie and the Mitchell family thought the actor was totally miscast for the role. They thought it should have been Jimmy Cagney.

Q. Some have called Billy Mitchell the father of the Air Force. Why is that?

A. Mitchell was the first to use mass air attacks in combat during World War I. He saw airpower as a potent and decisive weapon in future battles. His ideas had a profound effect on World War II, which he didn’t live to see. To this day, Air Force officers are still immersed in his theories during their training. He’s revered by cadets at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, where his bust sits in the cadet court of honor and his picture hangs in the school’s dining hall. There were other officers in those early years who were the builders in the Air Force. But it was Mitchell who planted the seeds for what is now America’s global airpower.

Q. What made Billy Mitchell so controversial?

A. By the time of his court-martial, Mitchell had made enemies of practically every senior officer in the Army and Navy. And the President of the United State was mad at him. He wanted a separate Air Force, which the Army and Navy adamantly opposed. The Army wanted to keep its Air Service and the Admirals in the Navy weren’t about to hand over their planes to a new Air Force. Mitchell also called for a Department of Defense over all the services, which the generals and admirals of his day thought was a ridiculous idea. Of course, that’s what we have today. But Mitchell was about as subtle as a brass band, and he had no diplomatic skills. When the Army and Navy and the White House ignored him, he went over their heads directly to Congress and the American people to plead his case. He wrote hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles calling for a separate Air Force and a Department of Defense. As you can imagine that didn’t make him too popular with the powers that be in Washington. It certainly would get a general today fired if he did, and, in fact, it got Mitchell fired from his job in the Army Air Service.

Q. You tell Mitchell’s biography through his court-martial. Why was he put on trial?

A. In 1925, a giant rigid airship the Navy operated, which was called the USS Shenandoah, ran into a thunderstorm over Ohio and crashed. Fourteen men died in the accident. It was a national disaster. Rigid airships back then were considered the wave of the future, in terms of air transportation. The officers who flew these airships were glamorized like astronauts today. So this was like the 1920s version of a space shuttle accident. It traumatized the country and was front-page news after it happened. Shortly after the crash, Billy Mitchell--who had been fired from his Washington job, had been sent off to a backwater post in Texas, and who was becoming increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of aviation development—blasted the Navy and the War Department for their handling of the giant dirigible and aviation in general. He accused them, and by inference the President of the United States, who was then Calvin Coolidge, of treason and criminal negligence in their oversight of national defense. As you can imagine, Coolidge wasn’t happy when he picked up his newspaper and read Mitchell’s lengthy statement attacking his administration. So Coolidge had him put on trial in Washington for insubordination.

Q. Mitchell’s trial was one of the most spectacular the Army has ever conducted. Wasn’t it a major event not only for Washington, but also for the entire country?

A. It was a spectacular political trial in Washington. Think of the O.J. Simpson trial; that’s how the media of the Roaring Twenties covered it. The top papers like the Washington Post and New York Times covered it gavel to gavel. There were even movie cameras in the courtroom. The trial became a marathon, lasting over seven weeks. Hundreds of spectators lined up outside the courtroom every day for the few precious seats inside. All of Washington’s high society and political elite came to the court-martial. The Mitchell trial came just after the Scopes monkey trial, but in many ways the Mitchell trial became more of a national obsession—because instead of a mousy school teacher accused of teaching evolution, here was a dashing young air general with a glamorous, wealthy wife accused of standing up to his superiors.

Q. Didn’t Mitchell’s court-martial raise some very serious issues about how far a senior American officer can go in criticizing his superiors, and his president?

A. It certainly did. Mitchell’s long statement blasting the War Department and the Navy and the President was incendiary. You can get away with saying most anything against a President if you’re a civilian. But for a man in uniform, it raised serious constitutional questions. In this country we have civilian control of the military, so no President could put up with a general speaking like this. Mitchell may have been right in a lot of the things he said. And MacArthur thought that senior American officers should be free to speak their minds on questions of national security. But there’s a line a senior officer can cross in speaking his mind. And as far as the other Army generals saw it, this became a question of loyalty—which is the title of my book. Mitchell’s commanders thought he had betrayed them and the president. Mitchell believed he owed his loyalty to a higher cause—which was making the nation secure with airpower.

Q. We’ve had a lot of high-profile court-martials. How do they compare with Mitchell’s court-martial in 1925?

A. In 1925, military law was still somewhat primitive, a relic of the old British Articles of War. There had been reform in military law five years earlier, but even so, the prosecutors and judges in Mitchell’s court-martial had considerable leeway to wing it. In 1951, Congress enacted the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which put in place more legal procedures that you see in civilian courts. But commanding officers still exert a lot influence over who gets court-martialed, and they still pick a soldier’s jury. Mitchell’s trial was the most complex the Army had ever conducted up to that point. It was fair by the standards of 1925, but certainly not by today’s standards. All the generals who sat on Mitchell’s court-martial as jurors knew him well and most came to the trial pretty much pre-disposed on how they were going to vote.

Q. Was Mitchell found guilty or innocent?

A. I don’t want to give away the ending. You’ll have to read the book.

Q. Billy Mitchell had an uncanny knack for predicting the future, didn’t he. What kind of predictions did he make?

A. Mitchell predicted a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor eighteen years before it happened. He predicted that high-speed airliners would take people across the Atlantic Ocean in as little as six hours. He predicted that the air force would one day be able to strike the enemy with cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles. He even once wrote that a single aircraft could strike at the heart of New York and cripple the city and its financial market—a forecast that was eerily similar to 9/11. And he made these predictions in the 1920s.

Q. Isn’t Mitchell’s place in history still debated to this day?

A. It is. Military officers still argue over his ideas and whether he helped the progress of airpower or hurt it by being so vocal. In his day, his admirers compared him to Socrates, Alexander and Robert E. Lee. His detractors accused him of being everything from a Bolshevik to the catalyst for the inter-service rivalry we see to this day. Air Force Academy cadets from the Class of 2001 selected Mitchell as the man they most wanted to emulate. But other officers, particularly many in the Navy, still dismiss him as shameless grandstander and self-promoter.

Q. How did you go about researching this book? What did you find new?

A. At least nine biographies had been written on Mitchell before I began my work. But there were parts of his life still a mystery. Questions about the man and his court-martial remained unanswered. My hunt for new material on Mitchell took me all over the country in order to unearth family letters, diaries and government documents never seen before by previous historians or biographers. The discoveries were tucked in archives, packed away in old family chests, even, in one instance, locked in a safe deposit box. I uncovered extensive diaries, confidential government documents and more than 150 family letters, all of which had never been seen before by previous biographers and historians. I also drew on thousands and thousands of pages of trial transcript, court documents, lawyers’ notes, and other private letters in my research.