An Inoffensive Rearmament (4 page)

Following this period of McCarthyism, the Army began to recognize the need to introduce modern business methods into its leadership and management practices, and Kowalski, who had an ego and “fought like hell to get a job worthy of himself,” was subsequently assigned to help found the Command Management School located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Kowalski created, organized, and became
the first commandant of the school, and he chose to model its pedagogy after the Harvard Business School Case Study method of learning. According to his son, this was “radical military thinking at the time.” Another radical policy Kowalski implemented was preventing the “natural proclivity” of staff at the school to say “no” to requests. He told the staff that they could approve things without his concurrence, but if they wanted to disapprove something, they had to come to him. This policy “promoted action and progress.”

The school regularly had guest speakers who were businessmen and elected officials, which Barry thinks created connections for his father and may have helped lead him to Congress. The idea of guest speakers seems to have come from a visit Kowalski made to Columbia University. When he returned home, Kowalski was infatuated with a speaker he had heard, Charles Percy, then president of Bell and Howell (and later a U.S. senator). Being commandant of the school gave him access not only to business leaders, but also to those in the highest levels of the Pentagon and political leaders in the executive branch and Congress. It was this latter group that Kowalski would join following his military career.

During his time in the Army, he had stayed in touch with his hometown friends, many of whom had entered local politics. Several of them had urged him to run for office when he returned from Japan. Kowalski eventually retired from the Army in 1958 to run for Congress from Connecticut, and he was elected to the Eighty-Sixth Congress that year. He had been strongly supported by a local political boss who needed a Polish candidate to run because of the heavy Polish constituency in the state. In 1960, he was re-elected to the Eighty-Seventh Congress, but had lost a bid in 1962 for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Connecticut when his political sponsor would not endorse him. He ran as an independent and lost, turning his sponsor into an enemy. He subsequently wrote an unpublished memoir about this experience titled “Worms in Charter Oak,” a strong indictment of the influence of political bosses and the danger of vested interests in a democracy.

In January 1963, Kowalski was nominated by President John F. Kennedy to be a member of the Subversive Activities Control Board, or SACB, a body established in 1950 to examine communist influence in various organizations. Ironically, the hearings before the Internal Security Subcommittee were postponed several times owing to a “rumor that somewhere in the power structure there might be a suspicion that he was a peacemonger.”
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Eventually, Kowalski was confirmed in October of that year, and he served until September 1966.

According to his son, Kowalski

did not want the appointment. But Dad needed a year of service at a presidential appointment level on top of his time in Congress for four years to achieve a substantial retirement. His battle to run as an independent for the Senate had left him out of favor. Consequently, his enemies in the administration offered that appointment for two reasons: (1) Dad did not want the job (it offended his liberal political views), and (2) it would be difficult for Dad, a liberal, to get confirmation votes in the Senate. And they only promised a nomination, not a job. Give him job he doesn't want and likely cannot get. And so Dad had to “campaign” to get it. To be confirmed, he spent time getting the votes of southern conservatives. Once on the board, however, Dad found a sympathetic soul, Governor Francis Cherry of Arkansas (who preceded the infamous Orval E. Faubus). They teamed up to defeat everything that was a threat to civil liberties. Cherry had been also nominated for the board in a begrudged fulfillment of a political obligation to him. The anticommunists regretted the day those two partnered up. The two of them could together prevent repressive board action and did. Under Kowalski/ Cherry, the SACB became an irrelevance; although Dad and Cherry had only a couple of years to work together [Cherry died in 1965], they accomplished it. Maybe Lyndon B. Johnson shrewdly made those appointments to undermine the anticommunist movement? More likely, Dad always felt that he got the last laugh out of the matter.

President Johnson did not renominate him, and Kowalski reportedly made no effort to seek renomination. “It's not,” he said later, “much of a job at all.”
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It was during the time he served on the board that he worked on this manuscript.

Kowalski's continuing an interest in Japan during this time was demonstrated by a letter he wrote in late June 1960 to President Eisenhower, whose visit to Japan had recently been canceled owing to riots over the Japanese government's handling of the ratification of the revised bilateral security treaty.
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In his capacity as congressman-at-large representing Connecticut, Kowalski wrote to the president to propose dispatching General MacArthur to Japan again on a mission to improve relations with Japan:

The friendship of the Japanese people is of tremendous importance to the United States in the fight against Communism. Recent developments indicate clearly that the generally pro-American feelings which prevailed in Japan during the post-war years have deteriorated to an alarming degree.

During my four and a half years of military service in Japan, I found that the Japanese people had a warm regard for America. The American they admired above all others was General Douglas MacArthur, in whom they had complete trust.

In view of the increase of anti-American feeling in Japan and mindful of the esteem in which General MacArthur is held by all segments of the Japanese people, I respectfully suggest that you consider sending him to Japan on a friendship mission. Such an assignment could be made under terms and provisions deemed appropriate by you.

I am convinced that General MacArthur, by talking to the rival political groups and by meeting again with the Japanese people, could do much to restore the friendly feelings of the people of Japan toward our country.

We cannot afford the loss of Japan. I am sure that General MacArthur could help prevent such a tragedy for the free world.
¹⁷

Another thing Kowalski worked on before and after his retirement was his inventions. It may have been his engineering background, or his open-mindedness, that allowed him to come up with practical and prescient solutions to problems. Frank conducted experiments at his home on Regent Drive in Alexandria, Virginia, on the way to Mount Vernon, the residence of George Washington. Because of the availability of military housing, Frank and Helene did not purchase a house until he became a member of Congress. “[Because they were] children of the depression, they bought a $40[,000 house] in 1958 with cash. In fact, my parents paid cash for everything: automobiles, furniture, appliances, etc. It rubbed off on us kids,” son Barry recalled.

Frank's hardy, Polish immigrant mother-in-law, Sophie Bober, died in May 1974. At the funeral, his daughter urged him to see his doctor because “he looked wan and his cheeks sunken.” He had been having heart trouble in the previous years, a leaky valve combined with arteriosclerosis, but he had stubbornly refused
heart surgery. In August, he finally went in to Dewitt Army Community Hospital at Fort Belvoir for tests and treatment. The evening before his surgery, on October 10, a Thursday, he gathered his children and then four grandchildren, “held court and told us all he loved us, ending with the conclusion that, since the odds were then, seven out of ten in his favor, we'd likely be laughing about the tears the next day.” “Pacu,” the nickname granddaughter Kelly gave Kowalski, went in for open heart surgery, a new procedure at the time, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on October 11, 1974. During surgery, he had an infarction and died while on the operating table.

He was survived by his wife, who grieved “enormously” and “depended on [her son] for emotional and other support.” Helene, who continued to live in the house they bought in 1958, eventually passed away at the age of seventy-nine of two heart attacks on August 13, 1989. She had been hospitalized for symptoms of heart failure. “She was tired and perhaps ready to die,” her son remembers. Barry's oldest daughter, Kelly, with whom Helene was very close, returned from Africa, where she had been teaching and doing documentary filming. The two had a great talk, and “as if [her grandmom] had been had been waiting for Kelly to return, she died of heart failure that night. Again, a chance for the desired goodbyes.”

Barry, who after serving in the Marine Corps in Vietnam went on to a distinguished career in the U.S. Department of Justice, was a seasoned and experienced trial lawyer with the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division when his mother died. Fortunately, she had been able to make it to the Great Hall of the Department of Justice to see her son awarded the John Marshall Award for Excellence in Trial Advocacy in 1985 for the conviction of the white supremacists who had assassinated controversial radio host Alan Berg.

Carol, who had earned her master's degree in counseling psychology, taught high school English literature and served as a high school guidance counselor in Fairfax, Virginia, and later, after retirement, was a volunteer counseling abused women in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Kowalski would have certainly been proud of the family he helped raise, and probably of the military he helped create in Japan. It was neither attacked by an outside force nor used to attack another country.

After consulting with his sister, Barry donated his father's papers to the Library of Congress in 1990, and they were processed in 1992 and are open to
researchers. It is in these papers that a very important story of an American's—and indeed America's—involvement with postwar Japan is found.

In ending this brief biography of Kowalski, I would like to dedicate this book to another fine, sincere, honest, and hardworking officer, Colonel Stephen J. Gabri, United States Marine Corps, who has been a mentor and friend, and whom I believe Kowalski would think very highly of had they been able to meet and work together. By chance, Steve's own family also came from the central part of Europe and had a successful life in the United States. In Okinawa, Japan, first on the staff of III Marine Expeditionary Force as the G-4 and now as the chief of staff of the Marine Logistics Group, he has worked hard to develop the Marine Corps' relationship with the Ground Self-Defense Force and with the militaries of other allies and friends in the region, all to maintain readiness to bring about a more peaceful and stable world.

CHAPTER ONE

GRACE OF HEAVEN

It is reported that when Shigeru Yoshida, the doughty prime minister of Japan, was informed on June 25, 1950, that the communists had struck across the 38th parallel into South Korea, he bowed to his ancestors and whispered, “It's the grace of heaven.” History has since clearly recorded that on that day the sun goddess, Amaterasu, smiled upon her people as Japan once again began to resume her destined role as a great Asian nation.

Better than anyone else, Yoshida knew how thoroughly and completely Japan had lost the war. Shorn of her empire, deprived of her vast merchant fleet, denied access to the customary sources of raw materials and food, her island economy in shambles, Japan at the end of the war lay prostrate, her heroic people exhausted and her government in abject submission. As one of the resurrected leaders in those critical days, Yoshida bowed to the power of the conquerors as bamboo bows before a storm. Struggling valiantly against overwhelming odds, Yoshida sparked the titanic task of digging a nation out of the rubble of war, of reconstructing a government, of maintaining law and order, and of breathing into the soul of his people an uncompromising belief in the dignity of Japan. Only those who lived through those terrible days can know the total horror of a nation in defeat.