Ships
- USS Missouri (BB-63) Captain, 20 June 1986 – 6 July 1988
James A. Carney was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, on 6 September 1939 and grew up in Hot Springs. He went by Al. An economics graduate of Hendrix College, he entered the Navy through Officer Candidate School in 1961 and served for nearly thirty years.
A combat cruise in the Vietnam War brought him the Bronze Star. He later commanded the destroyer Leftwich. Between sea tours he served at the Pentagon in the staff work behind President Ronald Reagan’s drive to build the fleet up toward six hundred ships.
On 20 June 1986 he became captain of the battleship Missouri. She had returned to commission at San Francisco on 10 May that year, and he was her twenty-first commanding officer. The ship already held a central place in the Pacific War. William M. Callaghan had been her first captain in 1944. On 2 September 1945, with Stuart S. Murray in command, Japan signed the surrender on her decks in Tokyo Bay. Chester William Nimitz signed for the United States, and William Frederick Halsey, Jr. was among the senior officers present.
Carney’s opening voyage was a shakedown that took the reactivated Missouri around the world and put her in allied harbors under heavy public notice. At Naples in November 1986 he answered reporters with Vice Admiral Robert F. Schoultz, deputy commander in chief of U.S. naval forces in Europe, and with Vice Admiral Kendall E. Moranville, commander of the Sixth Fleet. The cruise worked up a crew still learning a battleship that had just come out of a long reserve layup.
While he remained in command, Missouri joined Operation Earnest Will, the escort of reflagged tankers through the Persian Gulf as the Iran-Iraq War threatened merchant shipping. A hull built for Pacific fleet actions spent that duty on the narrow work of protecting tankers. He stayed her captain through 6 July 1988.
After the Navy he returned to Arkansas, opened a consulting practice, and worked for Lockheed Martin. In Hot Springs he chaired the Housing Authority board and the Muses Creative Artistry Project. Golf, First Presbyterian Church, and the Arkansas Razorbacks occupied the rest of his civilian years.
In 2013 he brought his family aboard Missouri at Pearl Harbor, where the ship was by then a memorial, and that visit remained one of the days he treasured. Carney died on 7 June 2026. His wife, Betty Kate Brown, their sons Allen and Logan, and his grandchildren survived him.