as ALNAV 49-447, which mandated, "...equal opportunity for all personnel in the Navy/Marine Corps without regard of race, color, religion or national origin," and his 1950 policy statement prohibiting, "...discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in enlistment, appointment, promotion, or assignment..." of Navy and Marine Corps personnel. But these few successes pale when compared to Matthews' lack of advocacy for both the Navy and Marine Corps in terms of roles and missions that he had sworn an oath as SECNAV to support, and it is this failure that has driven the vast majority of derision to his legacy. To be sure, Matthews was in many respects following orders from SECDEF Louis A. Johnson, with the SECDEF himself following orders from President Truman to cut the defense budget in the years following the end of World War II and prior to the start of Korean War, the latter marking the true rise of the Cold War in earnest. As former reserve component Army officers (e.g., Army Reserve for Johnson and Army National Guard for Truman) who were mobilized to active duty and served in Europe during World War I, both Truman and Johnson were endemically predisposed to support of the Army and, to a lesser extent, an Army supported by an Air Force that had evolved from it. The Air Force's, specifically the Strategic Air Command's, argument that it could provide relatively inexpensive (from a postwar budgetary perspective) national security via deterrence of a potential adversary, e.g., the Soviet Union, solely with nuclear weapons delivered by heavy bomber aircraft such as the B-36 Peacemaker was particularly persuasive. The notion of any conflict involving the United States below the nuclear threshold had not yet entered strategic thinking or the defense planning lexicon, while the Army and the Air Force basically saw threats to their postwar defense budget share from the Marine Corps and Navy, respectively. Inserted into this was Matthews, having had no prior military experience, let alone naval experience, and viewed with disdain as an unqualified and unsupportive Johnson sycophant by most senior Navy and Marine Corps officers of the time. Matthews never made any attempt to bridge this gap, a gap that would later be exacerbated by his politically-motivated termination of a serving Chief of Naval Operations and glaringly noted by both the Congress and the news media of the day. Due to Matthews' actions and inactions,