Cyrus Vance (l), Stephen Ailes, Elvis Stahr Jr. (r)

Vance, Ailes, and Stahr bore witness to some of the most pivotal events in American history

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Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

At the Pleasure of the President

Jeffrey Webb headshot

Please welcome guest author Jeffrey Webb. Webb is a teacher and writer from West Virginia. He holds an MFA in creative writing and a BA from West Virginia Wesleyan College, and he has contributed both fiction and nonfiction to a variety of publications, including the Pikeville Review, Red Mud Review, and Teaching Tolerance.


Photo at top: Cyrus Vance (l), Stephen Ailes, Elvis Stahr Jr. (r)

John Kennedy was inaugurated on January 20, 1961. 

Elvis Stahr Jr. was there, seated not far away as the new president famously declared, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Stahr shook hands with Kennedy following the speech, marking his first encounter with the president though it certainly wouldn’t be his last. 

Three Appalachians come aboard

A couple weeks prior, Stahr was serving as president of West Virginia University when he got a call from Bob McNamara offering him the position of secretary of the Army in Kennedy’s administration. A native Kentuckian, Stahr had been at WVU since 1958. After McNamara’s call, Stahr traded an office at WVU’s Stewart Hall for an office at the Pentagon.

 One of Stahr’s first acts as secretary was appointing Stephen Ailes, a native of Romney, WV, as his under secretary. Ailes himself assumed the secretaryship in 1964. Yet another West Virginian, Cyrus Vance, succeeded Stahr as secretary and preceded Ailes. 

Taken December 1961 at the Army-Navy football game. Elvis Stahr is seated far right in the President’s Box.
Taken December 1961 at the Army-Navy football game. Elvis Stahr is seated far right in the President’s Box.

These three Appalachians—Stahr, Vance, and Ailes—bore witness to some of the most pivotal events in American history. At times, they were only bystanders. At other times, they were direct participants in decisions that often weighed life-or-death stakes on a grand scale. 

Oral histories from the JFK Presidential Library and the Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office shine a light on the experiences of these men.

Bay of Pigs fiasco

In an oral history interview, Stahr remembered the evening of the April 21, 1961. While attending a reception at the Mexican Embassy that evening, Stahr was pulled aside by Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. 

“I know you’ve been invited to the National Security Council meeting tomorrow morning,” Johnson told Stahr. “Between now and ten o’clock tomorrow morning you’d better find out everything you can that you would need to know to protect yourself.” 

Stahr recalled Johnson telling him there would “be blood running on the floor in that Cabinet room in the morning” and that Kennedy “is determined to get to the bottom of this thing and find out whose fault it was.”

As Stahr found out the next morning, Johnson was alluding to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Fortunately for Stahr, he could plead ignorance as his office was left out of the invasion’s planning, as were the offices of the other service secretaries. Fortunately for others in the meeting that morning, Kennedy demonstrated a level of leadership and grace rarely seen in politics, then or now, shouldering all ownership of the Bay of Pigs fiasco himself.

Taken October 1961 as Stahr, left, meets with President Kennedy and General James Van Fleet.
Taken October 1961 as Stahr, left, meets with President Kennedy and General James Van Fleet.

“This is the worst catastrophe that has happened to our country in many decades,” Stahr remembered Kennedy saying to the packed room. “It’s an enormous disappointment, but I am taking the complete responsibility. I’ve just called in the press and told them that. I’m telling that to you and to the country and the world, and as far as the Bay of Pigs is concerned it’s a closed chapter. Now what’s the next thing on the agenda?”

On to Fort Bragg

In October 1961, Stahr accompanied Kennedy on a visit to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It was Kennedy’s first visit with soldiers in the field since becoming president. Stahr and Kennedy observed weapons demonstrations, Rangers rappelling off cliffs, members of the 82nd Airborne Division parachuting from planes. Kennedy spoke with troops as they loaded onto their planes. The president, Stahr remembered, “seemed to get just about as much of a hoot out of meeting those soldiers as the kids did themselves.” With the visit coming at the height of the Berlin Crisis, Stahr saw the Fort Bragg visit as a much-needed confidence boost. A “back-stiffener,” he called it.

Stahr served eighteen months as secretary of the Army. In summer 1962, he returned to higher ed, accepting the president position at Indiana University. 

Stephen Ailes, who had thrown himself into his role as Stahr’s under secretary, was reported by the press as Stahr’s likely replacement. However, Kennedy had other plans, appointing Cyrus Vance, then serving as general counsel of the Department of Defense, to the job. 

Despite being passed over for promotion, Ailes remained on as Vance’s under secretary. Their Mountain State connection, certainly, played a role in establishing their working relationship. 

Ailes and Vance: much in common

Taken September 1962 as Cyrus Vance speaks at the microphone during a White House ceremony presenting the Distinguished Service Medal to the retiring General George Decker. Vance is flanked on his left by Decker and on his right by President Kennedy.
Taken September 1962 as Cyrus Vance speaks at the microphone during a White House ceremony presenting the Distinguished Service Medal to the retiring General George Decker. Vance is flanked on his left by Decker and on his right by President Kennedy.

As Ailes put it: “Cy Vance and I could have been brothers. We were both from West, by God, Virginia.”

Another thing in common: Ailes and Vance both came from political and well-connected families. Ailes was the grandson of West Virginia Governor John Jacob Cornwell. In the late 1800s, John Jacob and his brother, William, bought the Hampshire Review, one of West Virginia’s oldest newspapers and one which exists to this day. Meanwhile, Vance’s great-grandfather had once been mayor of Clarksburg, and his grandfather, John Vance, was a member of West Virginia’s first legislature in Wheeling. Vance’s cousin, another noteworthy West Virginian, was John W. Davis, an esteemed lawyer and a former presidential candidate. 

A couple months into his secretaryship, Vance found himself overseeing deployment of federal Army troops on American soil. 

Racial tensions reach boiling point in Mississippi

In September 1962, James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran, was set to enroll at the University of Mississippi, the first black person to do so. During this time, Vance kept in close contact with Attorney General Robert Kennedy regarding the situation. They weighed the use of federal troops versus National Guard troops to police the situation, the federal troops better trained for riot control but also more likely to increase hostilities between locals and the federal government. 

On Sunday, September 30, tensions reached a boiling point and troops, both federal and National Guard, were moved in to stop the violence. Through the day Sunday and well into the night, Vance remained in communication with key players in Washington and Mississippi, coordinating troop movements and monitoring situation reports. 

Taken June 1963 as Vance greets the president with a handshake at White Sands Missile Range in White Sands, New Mexico.
Taken June 1963 as Vance greets the president with a handshake at White Sands Missile Range in White Sands, New Mexico.

By Monday, October 1, the worst of the violence had halted after the troop presence swelled as high as 22,000.

Only a couple weeks after Ole Miss, Kennedy faced what became the defining moment of his presidency, the Cuban Missile Crisis. The service secretaries did not sit in on the ExComm meetings held during this time, but they were consulted by McNamara almost immediately regarding the situation. 

The Cuban situation: 13 tense days

“As soon as that problem came alive,” Stephen Ailes remembered in regard to Cuba, “we were asked who ought to be mobilized or moved; if there was going to be a ground operation in Cuba, give us the laundry list, timetable, and things like that.” 

Ailes, as under secretary, filled in for Vance during this time as Vance had fallen ill. 

“I was personally concerned as to what the country was going to do,” Ailes said about those thirteen tense days. “President Kennedy was not about to pull a sneak attack on Cuba on a Sunday morning, choosing rather to confront them, and I was extremely enthusiastic about that choice.”

By the next fall, Stephen Ailes was ready to resign as under secretary and return to practicing law. He was set to visit the Panama Canal Zone, the tensions between the United States government and Panamanians running high at the time. Vance convinced Ailes to wait until returning from Panama before submitting his resignation to the president. 

This was November 1963. Ailes never got to submit his resignation to Kennedy, as he was still in Panama on November 22, 1963, the day JFK was shot. 

Johnson takes over the helm

“So then President Johnson asked everybody to stand pat until the first of the year,” Ailes remembered. He withdrew his resignation, delaying it to January. That, too, didn’t go quite as planned. 

McNamara’s deputy secretary of defense resigned in December 1963. McNamara tapped Vance as the replacement. McNamara and Vance, then, decided Ailes should succeed Vance as secretary of the Army. On New Year’s Eve, 1963, as Ailes readied to empty his office, Vance stopped in and asked, “Would you stay on as secretary?”

Taken April 1964 as Stephen Ailes, in overcoat and hat, visits the Army’s VII Corps stationed in Germany. To Ailes’ left is Lieutenant General Louis W. Truman, a relative of President Truman.
Taken April 1964 as Stephen Ailes, in overcoat and hat, visits the Army’s VII Corps stationed in Germany. To Ailes’ left is Lieutenant General Louis W. Truman, a relative of President Truman. 

President Johnson announced Ailes’ promotion in early January 1964, the New York Times describing Ailes at the time as a “warm, jovial man” with “a disposition to join young soldiers in the field, share their rations and hike along with them in training.” On the same day as Johnson’s announcement, riots broke out in the Panama Canal Zone due to escalating conflict between the American Zonians and Panamanians. The next morning, Ailes met with the president. 

Johnson said to Ailes, “Goddamn it, when I appointed you, you didn’t tell me that all hell would break loose.” 

Ailes proved invaluable in easing tensions between the United States and Panama. 

Revamping Army basic training

Another area where Ailes proved invaluable was in revamping the Army’s basic training program. 

As early as 1962, during his tenure as under secretary, Ailes had been tasked with reviewing the Army’s basic training. His last act as under secretary was submitting this report with his recommended solutions. As secretary, he oversaw the implementation of these recommendations, resulting in the formation of the Army’s drill sergeant program. In recognition of Ailes’ role in the creation of the Army’s drill sergeant program, the Stephen Ailes Award is given annually to an outstanding drill sergeant of the Army.

Throughout Ailes’ time in the Pentagon, the likelihood of war in Vietnam loomed larger and larger. In a June 1964 speech at West Point, Ailes confirmed for the first time publicly the Army had 10,000 troops in Vietnam, making up two-thirds of the supposed 15,000 total American servicemen located there at the time. In August that year, Ailes oversaw an increase of Green Berets in Vietnam from 600 to 1,000. He also oversaw a lengthening of tours for special forces troops in Vietnam from six months to a year. In October, Ailes announced the Army had amassed 900 casualties of killed and wounded in Vietnam within the past year, a significant jump from tallies of years previous though only a small indicator of the bloodshed to come.

Vietnam involvement in hindsight

“What is the real lesson of Vietnam?” Ailes wondered two decades later. “I think it is a damn hard question. The answer…is not that military force never can be used, or that we don’t have any responsibilities around the world to protect people under attack. The answer to it is…we just have to be very careful about when we jump in, to be sure that there is somebody there who really is trying to build a nation of the kind that we are prepared to support….I think…there wasn’t any such thing in Vietnam, and that we should have been able to see that, probably, and that we sacrificed a lot of money and people in a hopeless endeavor….Once you get down that road, you don’t know where to go.”

Taken in 1965 as Ailes visits with cadets from the University of Kentucky Army ROTC.
Taken in 1965 as Ailes visits with cadets from the University of Kentucky Army ROTC.

Late career moves for Ailes, Stahr, and Vance

Ailes ultimately resigned as secretary in June 1965, returning to the law firm Steptoe & Johnson. He would not, however, divorce himself entirely from government service, serving on the Intelligence Oversight Board under President Gerald Ford.

Elvis Stahr also would remain on the national stage, leaving Indiana University in 1968 and stepping in as president of the National Audubon Society, a role in which Stahr led efforts for the eventual banning of DDT. Vance would perhaps prove the most prominent of the three men, most notably serving as secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter.

When they died in 1998 and 2002, Stahr and Vance, respectively, were honored with burials in Arlington National Cemetery. Stephen Ailes died in Maryland in 2001. He would not be buried in Arlington. Instead, he was buried in Romney’s Indian Mound Cemetery alongside his wife and several members of the Cornwell-Ailes family. 

To home he had returned.  

Sources:

Elvis Stahr Oral History

Cyrus Vance Oral History

Stephen Ailes Oral History

More articles on Appalachians serving at Federal Government level:

President Andrew Jackson’s rise from the Waxhaws(Opens in a new browser tab)

Every time I attempted to start, my new horse would commence to kick(Opens in a new browser tab)

Dr. Richard Banks vaccinated his Cherokee neighbors against smallpox(Opens in a new browser tab)

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