An aircraft carrier is one of America’s greatest symbols of freedom and power. It’s a strategic asset in our national defense arsenal. It’s our greatest projection of combat power. It’s a city at sea. And for RADM (ret) John “Mac” McLaughlin it was a challenge he never expected.
For our milestone Episode 100 of The Jedburgh Podcast, Fran Racioppi took over the Hanger Deck of the USS Midway Museum for a conversation with Mac on the history of the American aircraft carrier, the importance of the US Navy, what it was like to fly anti-submarine helicopters, and what’s next in the battle for naval supremacy.
Mac also shares the story of the USS Midway; for decades America’s flagship carrier and host of many American Navy firsts. He explains his vision for the museum and how he led the team that built it from an empty ship towed into San Diego Harbor to one of the most visited tourist destinations in the United States.
The USS Midway was built primarily by women in 1942 and later led the coalition in over 3000 sorties in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Today the ship is tribute to all who serve America; especially those at sea.
Special thanks to the San Diego Military Advisory Council for their support in producing this episode. Learn more about the USS Midway and theUSS Midway Museum at midway.org and on social media at @ussmidwaymuseum. Subscribe to us and follow @jedburghpodcast on all social media. Watch the full video version on YouTube.
—
Admiral Mac McLaughlin, welcome to the Jedburgh Podcast.
Thank you very much, Fran. Welcome to the Midway.
Thanks for hosting us. This is one of the most impressive places I have ever been to in my life.
It is quite a view, especially if you have never been on board one before. It is amazing.
As we are set up here on the hangar deck with the aircraft, I want to give a special shout-out to your team for working on setting this up to Dave Koontz, who is instrumental in getting us out here. It is important to preface this whole conversation that we are sitting on this aircraft carrier. When you walk up to this ship and on deck, you smile.
I start thinking to myself, “Why am I smiling?” I smile every time I tell anybody, “I’m going to the Midway. I’m going to an aircraft carrier.” You think about freedom and this idea of what America is. The fact that America, at its heart, is the idea of freedom. An aircraft carrier is the forward projection of freedom anywhere in the world. How can you help but not smile when you come aboard this ship?
When you think about the founding of our country, we never had a country until our freedoms were threatened. At that point, those young colonists got together. The minority of inhabitants of America in those days said, “We came here to build a country based on a government by the people, not run by the king. Our freedoms are being threatened by the king. We are going to fight to maintain our freedom.” It is the founding issue of this entire country. We are proud as can be to be able to display it here on the Midway.
I want to thank you for sharing an important aspect of the Jedburgh Podcast history because this is going to be Episode 100 of our long-form series. Several years ago, I embarked on this journey to tell these stories that had changed society with leaders who have changed the world and are out there doing what I call to lead from the front in all aspects of their life. I thought it was fitting when the opportunity came up that this would be Episode 100 to commemorate the history of this ship, your career, and your tenure here, and also celebrate 100 episodes long form of the Jedburgh Podcast.
It is meant to be. We finished the 100-year celebration of aircraft carriers in America last 2022. To have you here for your 100th episode is serendipity.
Let’s start with the ship itself. USS Midway is the longest-serving aircraft carrier of the 20th century, named after the Battle of Midway in June 1942. It was built in only seventeen months. You walk around, and you think about how long it takes to build structures all around. People don’t build houses sometimes for seventeen months. This is an aircraft carrier built in the ‘40s that way. It is the first of the three-ship class of large carriers that featured an armored flight deck and over 120 airplanes. What is different about this ship and this carrier itself than the ones that came before it?
You mentioned the timeframe it was built in. We had a lot of motivated men and women, and this ship was built primarily by women because most of the men of America were deployed, and the women were working in the shipyards. The Midway was built by the women of America. They were motivated because it was 1942 and 1943. Pearl Harbor was in our rear-view window. We were trying to fight a war on two fronts. That goes a little bit to the expeditious nature with which it was built.
It was also built and named after the defining battle of World War II that changed the course of history in the Pacific and represented the first time in the history of America that a battle was fought at sea and won by American forces that didn’t involve battleships. It was the first time two major fleets fought each other and never saw each other. The entire battle was done with airplanes. In a way, the Midway represents the transformation of the United States Navy from a battleship-centric Navy to an aircraft-centric Navy, which it remains now. It is historic in many different ways.
The ship went on to play these crucial roles in many of the conflicts throughout the 20th century in which America has involved anything about the Cold War, in Vietnam, and it was the lead aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf War. Can you talk about that history and evolution after its commissioning, and now it goes into service, and we enter these other conflicts?
One of the reasons why it ended up being the Midway that was the longest serving carrier in the 20th century and why it survived World War II and went into Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War was the flagship as recent as Desert Storm. As you can imagine, that spanned a long period of history. The reason why the Navy did that, while other ships that were even younger than Midway was being decommissioned and sent off to scrap, is the magic of this ship and the name Midway. This battle of Midway, which we were named after, is historic for the country as well as for naval aviation.
The aircraft carrier became the first aircraft carrier that was deployed to a foreign country. All of our aircraft carriers are home-ported here in the United States of America. The USS Midway was the first one. It spent nineteen years in Yokosuka, Japan. When you are over in Yokosuka, Japan, the whole air wing goes with you.
The whole air wing is resonant in Yokosuka, Japan. The whole engineering department, navigation department, or the whole ship company is in Japan. You get a bonding and an ability to operate together far more effectively than your average aircraft carrier that takes a squadron from Norfolk, one from Whidbey, and some come in from San Diego. You ship in a lot of people, and they deploy with a trained crew once they are worked up.
This Midway crew, for nineteen years over in Yokosuka, lived, trained, drank beer together, families had picnics together, and it became the most operationally effective aircraft carrier in the Western Pacific despite the fact it was old. That is because of the people that were bonded at the hip that operated this carrier for all those years.
I was in the Army. I don’t know much about living on a ship. It does become a community. You get close when you operate in these quarters. This is a massive ship, but the majority of this ship is the hangar, the flight deck, and the quarters. That is where everyone is living. Can you talk a bit about what it is like to live on the ship?
You get to know everybody in this small city at sea. You might not know their names, but you know what they look like. You bump into them on a daily basis, and it does become a family. The more effective the family can work together, the more effective the operational capability of the ship is. That is why the Midway was effective. It was a family affair over there in Yokosuka.
[bctt tweet=”The more effective the family can work together, the more effective the operational capability of the ship is.” username=”talentwargroup”]
We are big on first on the show. This ship has had a lot of firsts. You mentioned a couple of them. I will list some here, and you can add to it, or we can talk about them. It was the first American carrier to operate in the mid-winter in the Subarctic. It is the only ship to launch a captured German V2 rocket, which was the dawn of naval missile warfare. First successful landing, using a hands-off autopilot technology. First carrier launch of an airplane capable of delivering nuclear weapons. First air kill of the Vietnam War. The first American carrier home-ported abroad in Japan. We talked about Operation Desert Storm, where not a first, but it was the lead carrier in the Persian Gulf War, launching over 3,000 combat missions with no losses. Why are these first important, not only to the Midway but to America?
I don’t think it is so much of firsts about the Midway, and we have never wanted the story. When people come on board here to be about the Midway, we want it to be about America. All those firsts are emblematic of many other firsts, other ships, many Army units, and Marine Corps units. It is a delivery of an idea, vision, and reality that most Americans are not aware of.
When they come on this ship, they come because they are curious. They have never been on an aircraft carrier. Once they get on board, it becomes more of a story of the young me
n and women that served on this aircraft carrier and in other areas of the world that protect the freedoms that our visitors are probably taking for granted. By the time they leave the ship, we hope they understand that the service and sacrifice of these young Americans are important for the long-term future of America.
[bctt tweet=”By the time the marine military leave the ship, we hope they understand that the service and sacrifice of these young Americans are important for the long-term future of America.” username=”talentwargroup”]
Let’s talk about your service. In 1972, you graduated from the US Naval Academy. Why enter the Navy?
I entered the Navy because my dad was a sailor, and it is what I have always wanted to do. I was scheduled to go to the University of Notre Dame on a full scholarship and got accepted at the Naval Academy.
It is not a bad choice between those two schools.
I always loved the Fighting Irish, but I wanted to be a naval officer. Don’t ask me why. I grew up the son of a sailor. That is what I wanted to be. I came out here to San Diego and got to spend a marvelous career in naval aviation, flying helicopters. When I retired, serendipity once again came out here to San Diego about the time they were looking for somebody to bring the Midway to San Diego and open up as a museum. I raised my hand. Nobody else did. I got selected.
I want to ask you about helicopters in the Navy because you did spend the preponderance of your career as a naval aviator. When we think about naval aviation, we think about Tom Cruise, Maverick, Goose, and Top Gun. We look at the planes here in this hangar, but almost 50% of the pilots in the Navy fly helicopters and rotary wing aircraft. Why are rotary-wing aircraft important to the Navy?
Rotary aircraft, if you look at the history of naval aviation, was late to the story. Helicopters weren’t invented and developed until the late ‘50s. We have been flying airplanes off ships for decades. It came in as an interesting curiosity that was there to rescue aircraft pilots when they punched out or had to ditch at sea and search and rescue missions. Over time, as the mission of the Navy has become more equipment-centric, there has been so much capability that has been put into our jet aircraft flying off here and props. The helicopters are becoming more of a factor in the operations of the Navy.
On an aircraft carrier, when I was operating there, there would be one squadron. These days, no carrier deploys without two helicopter squadrons there. They deploy out to the smaller ships in the task group from there. It has grown from an interesting sidelight curiosity that is built there to support the tactical aviators and their safety into an integrated mission now with the jets, the props, and the helicopters all working together as one force doing various issues of the mission to prosecute the enemy.
One of the specialties that you had as a pilot was what they called the LAMPS Squadrons or the Light Airborne Multi-Purpose System. I had the opportunity to have General Clay Hutmacher on. He was the Commander of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, all the helicopters that fly Special Operations Forces all over the world. We talked a lot about the different capabilities that various different platforms bring. You were one of the first ones in these units. Can you talk about the capability of that unit and how it changed what we were doing?
The LAMPS Squadrons were the ones that flew off the back ends of the smaller ships that supported the carrier group. The carrier is the mother load. Everything is built around protecting that carrier because, without the carrier and the tactical aircraft that fly off the carrier, you lose the heart and the envelope of your entire mission. I would fly the smaller helicopters out there on the frigates, out on the disorders, out there on the screen, protecting the carrier. We would do anti-submarine and anti-ship warfare to make sure that nobody snuck up from beneath or on the surface got anywhere near our carrier, which is the main target for the enemy.
I’m a strong advocate of studying history because we can only experience many things in our life, but if we study history, it augments a lot of our learning and helps us to forge better decisions. The greatest civilizations in the world all had powerful navies. You think about the Greeks, the British, the Japanese, and the Scandinavians. Before the word Navy, there was a word Navy, and certainly the American Navy since the World War era.
I had the chance to sit down with the sitting Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, Troy Black. We talked about how important the Navy is to the Marines and how they are the enabler of what the Marines do. You think about something like the Persian Gulf War, all these different conflicts that we talked about, and how critical the Navy was. You led a major component of America’s naval forces as the commander of the Naval Reserve Forces. You also commanded a naval air station in New Orleans. Can you talk about the Navy in general and why it is important to our national defense and the strategic defense initiatives of America?
If you look back at history and you understand the beginnings of this country, it was mostly inside the continent and expanding out to the West and building the state structure that we have now. In the 20th century, things started happening on an international scale. Once that started happening, the history of sea power in this nation began in the 19th century. Once you understand, we truly are an island nation. If you go out to the moon and take a snapshot of America, it is all water around us all the time.
If you are going to project power and defend other nations that are in power, you can’t do it with just an Army, Marine Corps, or Air Force. You need naval structure to deploy those Marine Forces to bring the Army Special Forces into where they need to be, which oftentimes is along the coast. You mentioned the Navy deploying with the Marines. You have to remember the word Marine itself, the acronym MARINE stands for My Ass Rides In Navy Equipment.
It goes without saying that in addition to the raw power that our Navy projects with its cruise missiles, tactical aircraft, ballistic missile, submarines, and the whole spectrum of our warfare, it is also taking the people who have to go inland such as ground forces and special operation forces, deploying them and getting them where they need to go. As long as America has the responsibility of maintaining its supremacy as an international power, we will need to continue investing in a strong Navy.
America has been fortunate over the last several years of declared conflict where we have not faced an adversary who has a naval force. We are now entering what we are openly referring to as peer-to-peer competition. When we think about China and Russia and their capabilities, although less than what we face with China, they have capable naval forces.
The idea that has always sat in the back of our heads is that we have supremacy, and that supremacy is assumed whether we talk about air capability, naval capability, or information capability. We are putting it at the front of our minds that we can no longer operate under that assumption. When you think about the next 3, 5, 10, and 15 years, how will the Navy continue and need to continue to remain a critical focal point of our national defense strategy?
It all starts with the quality of the young people we bring in. That is the base. You mentioned the Soviets. If you look at the evolution of their Navy, when you get into a superpower v superpower confrontation of forces, the battle is decided by who resources their forces are the best and who invests the most in their people and equipment.
The truth is that the Soviet Union could not stay up with America technologically. They are no longer a threat at sea. Yes, they certainly have nuclear capability, and that is enough to scare anybody. As far as their forces that at one time were reaching parity with the American forces, we out-resourced them, we invested more, we invented more, and we grew stronger. They quit. They became the weak sea power that they are now.
The conversation is underway. What the future will hold depend on what America decides to invest in the power of its forces. Many people who are unknowing think, “We need to stop investing in the military so we can have peace.” The opposite is true. The day you stop investing in your military resources is the day you can ensure that your country is in jeopardy.
It is a sad thing to say that, but the reality of history bears it out. As long as America maintains its investment, its Armed Forces, not the Navy, but all of the services, we will maintain our supremacy, and other countries will not want to challenge us. There may be discourse, intellectual debate, and conversation about that issue, but in reality, nobody will challenge us.
You tie that back to the conversation about this ship, aircraft carriers, our strategic objectives, and what is the first thing we do as a country when we face crisis and threat. We deploy Air Force bombers, and we move a carrier group.
You can even go back to Pearl Harbor, where most of our investment was going into our battleship force. Thank God, a few decades before, we started this new experiment of investing in aircraft carriers. Can you imagine where America would have been in the Western Pacific if we had a battleship-centric Navy, had no aircraft carriers, and had Pearl Harbor occurred? We would have been right where Japan wanted us at that point, on our knees, defensive without any capability to do anything about the world order.
Let’s talk about the museum. You are the only CEO of the museum. On April 11th, 1992, the Midways decommissioned in San Diego. It went up into storage until 2003. It was brought down here to the San Diego Aircraft Carrier Museum Organization. It was directed that there was an opportunity to create the USS Midway Museum, which opened in 2004. You came in that window when they were looking for someone to lead this initiative. What was the opportunity that you saw here? What made you, as you transitioned out of the Navy, to say, “I got to go do that?” It is a live environment. What is going on behind us?
Every half hour, we have to sound the bells and make one MC announcement so all the sailors know what is going on in the ship. When I went back to retiring in August of 2003, and I got hired for this in December of 2003, and the ship got here the next month in January of 2004, I was clueless. If I had been aware of the daunting challenges ahead, I would have never signed up for the job. That is why the competition wasn’t too keen on the job.
I don’t believe you.
That is a fact. The people who had been here in San Diego had watched the several years of turmoil to get the ship here. I was on active duty while all that was going on. I’m clueless and have shown up. They asked me if I like to interview amongst 2 or 3 other people interviewed. I was fortunate enough to get the job. I am in the process of retiring now at the end of March 2023. When we announced the job here several years later, because of the success of the museum, we had over 500 national applicants. All I will say is if I had to compete against the group that we are competing with now, I wouldn’t be sitting here interviewing with you. That is all I can say.
What was your vision? You got into the job, and you realized what it was. A lot of it was a bit of a blank canvas to figure out what to do.
It was a blank canvas when we started. We had nothing. If you see anything on this ship, it wasn’t here when we started. We had no electricity, water, or exhibits. We had four airplanes. We didn’t even have a way to get on and off the ship. We borrowed a brow from the Navy. We started slowly. We were $8 million in debt. We had no sources of revenue. We had no staff, but other than that, things were looking up. It is like the colonists when they look across the water at the strongest Navy and the strongest Army in the history of the world. They don’t have an Army or a Navy. They say, “Let’s give it a try.” That was my attitude.
My marketing manager and I were standing on the pier on the first day, looking up at this giant gray ship that was now in our little pristine port, saying, “What the hell are we going to do now?” Our vision was that we could not build this as an icon to my career and the career of many of my buddies and my friends into a Navy icon that would appeal to Navy and Marine Corps people, but the rest of the public would not get it.
We have focused on building this into something that the average family with no military background or experience will come aboard and have an enjoyable visit in addition to the purest veterans. We can’t insult the people this carrier was built for. We have to acknowledge that when that veteran is driving back to Los Angeles with his wife and two kids, the people that decide whether or not they had fun on the Midway are not driving that car. It is the family that has no military experience.
We tried to create a balanced museum that was modern yet still displayed the traditional iconic and authentic views of what it must have been like to be on an aircraft carrier while at the same time entertaining our guests and allowing them to have a fun visit, not just look at planks and touch airplanes. We have done that in large part with our volunteers.
Our volunteers are the key to our success. Most of them are retired military. Many of them are not, but they have come to the Midway and told personal stories. When people come on board the ship, it is not just about the ship and the airplane. It is about human interest stories. It is about imagining what these kids go through, gone from home seven months a year, sitting on an old rickety aircraft carrier, launching and recovering jets 24/7. It is about letting them appreciate what has always been essential for the greatness of our country. That is the service and sacrifice of our veterans.
I want to ask about some of the exhibits because you started laying some out here and how they are appealing to many different groups of folks. You got the hangar deck, the flight deck, the low deck, and the aircraft gallery. Can you talk about each one of these and why they are unique to this ship?
If you opened up an aircraft carrier and you were opening it up for just pilots, you open up the flight deck, you put the planes up there, and all the pilots were standing around in their flight jackets, looking cool with their sunglasses, asking our guests, “What else do you need? This is what it is all about.” We are not developing a museum just for pilots. You open up the other parts of the museum. You mentioned the decks below the hangar deck. That is the city at sea down there.
That is telling the story. You fly jets off. You see those all the time on CNN, but who does the laundry? We let them see the laundry. Before we had the information system, how did these kids get paid? Where do they eat? We show them where they eat. Where do they work? Where do they sleep? We let the guests get in their bunks and see what it feels like to have three bunks on top of three bunks on top of three bunks. Try to imagine yourself out there for months on end like that.
The city at sea, in addition to the straight tactical operational environment, is interesting to people. We call ourselves the partying ship in the Navy. We have a drinking problem after hours because groups come on board the ship all the time to about 275 a year after hours, rent the ship, have their cocktail parties, and use it instead of going to a hotel ballroom. We do everything from little bar mitzvah parties for 100 to celebrations for 3,000 people up on the flight deck and everything in between. It has become a special events venue.
This hangar deck you mentioned is supposed to be filled with airplanes, but we can’t do that because we have many special events that we set up down there. You are getting a feel of the balance that is required in a successful aircraft carrier museum, which the Midway is the most successful aircraft carrier museum because of our location here in San Diego at Navy Pier in the middle of a twelve-month-a-year destination area here in San Diego that it has become.
You can go up on the flight deck, look across the bay and see active aircraft carriers.
You can see them coming in and out of the bay and the other ships and airplanes. You can look across the bay at the field where aircraft aviation was invented, the Navy’s first naval air station over there, where the first naval aviator was trained, and where the first Navy’s four aircraft carriers back when we first started in the 1920s was birthed here in San Diego. This was America’s aircraft carrier home port.
You can look across the bay and see the big tower where the commander of all the aircraft carriers across the world still resides. They are all commanded here out of San Diego. San Diego is an aircraft carrier-centric town. It is the place where it all began and continues to be commanded and led by. We happen to be the lucky carrier that represents all that here on the pier.
I want to ask about the foundation. The USS Midway Foundation was established in 2016. The mission of the foundation is to help fund education programs, organizations, and initiatives that support America’s core values of service and sacrifice in the name of freedom. Can you talk about the importance of the foundation and the work that they are doing with youth and teacher programs?
The museum is the museum. We focus on what happens when you get here until when you leave. The foundation is the long-term future-looking visionary group. We have been forced to expand because of our success. If it occurs off the ship, whether it is an education program that wants to come on the ship or an education program off the ship, the building of our Veterans Freedom Park that is going to surround the USS Midway. It is going to be the largest Veterans Park on the West Coast of America.
The foundation is leading that effort. The foundation gives away millions of dollars a year to other not-for-profits that serve veterans and first responders groups. That is unprecedented for a not-for-profit organization like the USS Midway Museum through its foundation to give millions a year to other not-for-profit foundations.
Normally, it is to keep it for yourself.
No, that is not our job to keep it for ourselves. Our job is to keep America strong and propagate that message throughout the civilian population.
What about the Pillars of Freedom? I did want to talk about that because that was specific to veterans and active duty first responders. How is that playing?
The Pillars of Freedom is an annual grant program. In 2022, we gave close to $700,000. It will be going up over $1 million in future years to other not-for-profit organizations. That is our grant-giving opportunity through the foundation. They grant annually. They invite organizations on board. We have a big breakfast meeting. The mayor comes in. We give free money with no strings attached to organizations that are doing the deck plate work with the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and the kids that are doing the job out there. Any financial assistance that we can give to them, we are going to do.
You mentioned you got a little time left before retirement. When you look back on your many years here and you think about how far this museum and the foundation have come, one of the legacies you are working on is to leave an endowment here so it can self-fund itself moving forward. What is the biggest success? How do you look back on this journey?
The biggest success is the fact that we have established this as a real community asset that opened up this waterfront down here in San Diego to an unprecedented level. This area of San Diego, when I was in the Navy here, was not visited by the general public. This was Navy land. This was where the sailors came to get their tattoos and maybe stop off at a bar. Nobody came down here after hours.
Since the Midways got here, this whole area has developed. This whole area is now the most visited pedestrian area in the whole of San Diego Bay. It is going to get better as we move to the future. With the arrival of Midway, I joke that, since the Midway has started protecting San Diego Bay, we have started to blossom in this area. We are going to create an area where, in future generations, they are going to be able to come to Veterans Park and Midway. They are going to get to experience the founding story of our nation.
What is next in retirement?
A lot of golf, a little bit more relaxation, zero responsibility other than my children, my wife, and my golf game. I’m going to start off simple, and we will see what happens after that.
It will be an exciting next chapter, having impacted a tremendous amount of people both through your Navy career and what you have done here over the last many years at the museum. As we close out, the Jedburghs in World War II had to do three things every day as core foundations or habits. They had to be able to shoot, move and communicate. If they did these three things with the utmost precision, they could focus their attention and efforts on more complex challenges that came their way. What are the three things that you do every day in your life to set the conditions for success?
I’m a simple guy. Simplicity is the key to my success, whatever success that has been. I have always had four principles. If you are in America and you follow these four precepts, you are going to do fine as an American. 1) Show up. You don’t muster, but you show up. 2) Pay attention once you show up. You listen. You watch who is successful and who is not successful. Figure out what the right answer is. 3) Work hard. When I say work hard, work harder than everybody around you. 4) Do those first three and never give up. You keep going back to those four principles. I don’t care what aspect of life you are in here in America. You will have a successful life in America.
[bctt tweet=”If you follow these four precepts, you are going to do fine as an American. 1) Show up. 2) Pay attention once you show up. 3) Work hard. 4) Do those first three and never give up. ” username=”talentwargroup”]
That is command philosophy.
Nice and simple.
Show up, pay attention, work hard, and never give up. As I look around here and look at all the people who are walking by, they stop and watch here for a few minutes about how impressive it is. It is easy to look at all this and say this is what you have done here since the first day you came in and had that first interview. It manifests itself here every minute of every day.
I spend the joy of my life. I’m a lucky man.
Thank you for welcoming us onto this ship. Thank you for sharing the 100th episode of the Jedburgh Podcast with you in this amazing space. We are going to take a tour. I’m going to look around and see some stuff. You can show me your favorite spots. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
