Stuart Symington: Air Force Secretary Who Defended Annie Lee Moss

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Stuart Symington was born in Massachusetts in 1901 and raised in Baltimore. He enlisted as a private at 17 in World War I and became one of the Army's youngest second lieutenants, though the war ended before he went overseas. After Yale and a string of manufacturing jobs he married Evelyn Wadsworth, and in 1938 he took over Emerson Electric in St. Louis, turning it into the world's largest maker of airplane gun turrets and racially integrating its workforce. Harry Truman brought him into government, and in 1947 he became the first Secretary of the newly independent Air Force, backing the Air Force Academy and overseeing the Berlin Airlift.

He resigned in 1950 when the administration refused the defense increases he sought after the Soviet atomic test, then won Truman's old Missouri Senate seat in 1952. He publicly defended accused clerk Annie Lee Moss against Joseph McCarthy and helped lead the censure effort. His 1960 presidential run, backed by Truman, failed as he skipped primaries and refused to address segregated audiences. He served on Kennedy's ExComm, refused to sign the Southern Manifesto and backed the major civil rights laws. He resigned a week early in 1976 to give John Danforth a seniority edge, and died in 1988.

• He had the Pentagon look into a hollow Earth story after a constituent mistook a science fiction book for fact.
• Jack Northrop testified that Symington pressed him to merge with Convair, and the YB-49 flying wing prototypes were cut up for scrap.
• McCarthy nicknamed him Sanctimonious Stu.
• His threat to Major League Baseball's antitrust exemption won Kansas City the Royals starting in 1969, and the rushed Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee after one season.
• He was briefed on the CIA's war in Laos in 1966 and later chaired hearings expressing outrage over it.