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, the bitterness between the Navy and the Marine Corps versus the Air Force and the Army would fester and take many years to go away. Indeed, as late as the early 21st century, there remain many retired Navy and Marine Corps officers who resent the way their services were treated by the Army and the Air Force in the late 1940s, combined with Matthews' systemic failure to counter it, and it has remained a touchstone in the professional education of subsequent generations of officers in the Navy and Marine Corps, especially those in Naval Aviation, in the decades since. It is for this primary reason that Matthews' tenure as SECNAV is considered to be mediocre by some and an abject failure by others.