04 August 2013

Music Sunday: Chuck Berry

"Let It Rock"

 


In the heat of the day down in Mobile, Alabama
Workin' on the railroad with a steel drivin' hammer
I gotta get some money buy some brand new shoes
Try to find somebody take away these blues
"She Don't Love Me" hear 'em singin' in the sun
Payday comin' when my work is all done

Well up in the evenin' when the sun is sinkin' low
All day I been waitin' for the whistle to blow
Sittin' in a teepee built right on the tracks
Rollin' them bones 'til the foreman come back
Pick up your belongings boys scatter about
We got an off-schedule train comin' two miles out

Everybody scramblin' and jumpin' around
Pickin' up the money tearin' the teepee down
Foreman was to panic 'bout to go insane
Tryin' to get the workers out the way of the train
Engineer blowin' the whistle long and long
Can't stop the train they have to let it roll on

 
 
==============================
"Bye Bye Johnny"


 
She drew out all her money at the Southern Trust
And put her little boy aboard a Greyhound Bus
Leavin' Louisiana for the Golden West
Down came the tears from her happiness
Her own little son name Johnny B. Goode
Was gonna make some motion pictures out in Hollywood

Bye, bye, bye, bye
Bye, bye, bye, bye
Bye-bye Johnny
Goodbye Johnny B. Goode

She remembered takin' money earned from gatherin' crop
And buyin' Johnny's guitar at a broker shop
As long as he would play it by the railroad side
And wouldn't get in trouble he was satisfied
But never thought there'd ever come a day like this
When she would have to give her son a goodbye kiss


Hollerin' bye, bye, bye, bye
Hollerin' bye, bye, bye, bye
Bye-bye Johnny
Bye-bye Johnny B. Goode


She finally got the letter she was dreamin' of
And Johnny wrote and told her he had fell in love
As soon as he was married he would bring her back
And build a mansion for her by the railroad track
So every time they heard the locomotive roar
They'd be a-standin' a-wavin' in the kitchen door


Hollerin' bye, bye, bye, bye
Hollerin' bye, bye, bye, bye
Bye-bye Johnny
Goodbye Johnny B. Goode

28 July 2013

Mullach Abú

Prior to 2001, my exposure to and interest in "conspiracy theory issues" was not significant. In late 2001, I bought a videotape of the movie "JFK," which I'd recalled having seen a few minutes of when it was on cable years before. Some years after this, I bought a first edition of the Warren Report I found at a local shop. In the Summer of 2005, after I got a computer the previous Christmas, I read through ajweberman's online version of Coup D'Etat in America until my head was spinning with names of Cubans and could go no further. (I regrettably donated $25 without knowing what an anti-Muslim bigot weberman would be, and wrote him a message of thanks, mentioning that I'd written a book; he responded in very large typeface, all caps and no punctuation, "WHATS YOUR BOOK ABOUT" )
 
In early 2006, I read an article by John Hunt on Robert F. Kennedy's head wounds and joined the JFK Lancer Forum at that time. Shortly afterward, I read Pat Speer's online presentation (then under construction) and we briefly corresponded by email. When I mentioned I had more of a history than "conspiracy" background, and that Lancer was constrictive in being overwhelmingly all-JFK, he suggested I check out The Education Forum as there was more variety and discussions went on with authors and participants in historical events. I found The Education Forum particularly attractive as it had a great many subject areas (outside of conspiracy issues) where I felt more at home.
 
About this same time (early in 2006), Larry Hancock posted at the Lancer Forum asking for help in research he was doing on Robert Kennedy's assassination. I transcribed and emailed him some brief excerpts from 2 books I owned (Curt Gentry's biography of J. Edgar Hoover and Jeff Shesol's Mutual Contempt, a study of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy's relationship). These were fairly insignificant (Hoover broke the news to RFK of President Kennedy's assassination with his first words being, "I have news for you"), but at the time it seemed like I may have been the only one to respond. The next thing I knew, I was heavily involved in researching the case, having access to the local library's copies of William Klaber and Phil Melanson's Shadow Play and Dan Moldea's The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy.
 
I visited the FBI's website and downloaded what was purported to be the FBI "Summary" report on the case. In describing it to Larry in an email, he wrote back asking if I had found what he called the long-lost Kranz Report. Since I had no idea what "the Kranz Report" was, much less that it was "long-lost," I was able to confirm that it was indeed an official report from the mid-1970s made by Thomas F. Kranz, serving as Special Counsel to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, and that apparently the FBI thought it suitable enough to be represented as "their" report on the case. Larry then sent me rough drafts of 6 chapters he'd written, which he later proposed to be intended as a monograph, and which eventually wound up as the 6 essays of "Incomplete Justice" posted at the Mary Ferrell website. My main contribution to these were the Kranz Report excerpts of what was then Chapter 4 (and became the Part 5 essay, "Mind Games") and some editing/proofreading/rewriting of that chapter and particularly Chapter 1.

One of Larry's original theses was to investigate and develop information posed in Carl Wernerhoff's article on the identity of "the girl in the polka dot dress." Wernerhoff proposed that the woman was Kathy Ainsworth, an Alabama schoolteacher by day whose real passion lay in her role as member of Sam Bowers' White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, a clandestine militantly violent organization formed in 1964. Ainsworth had died in a July 1968 shootout with police en route to a bombing mission with her partner, Thomas Tarrants III, who survived though seriously wounded himself. While disagreeing with Wernerhoff's arguments that this was part of a conspiracy involving the Anti-Defamation League, Larry considered it a possibility that Ainsworth could have been the girl in the polka dot dress because she fit the physical description of an attractive petite woman with a nice figure, and particularly because Tarrants himself had gone to California in early 1968 to meet with (and possibly obtain weaponry from) the Far Right group led by the Rev. Dr. Wesley Swift.
 
Larry eventually said he found information indicating that Ainsworth was not in California at the time of Robert Kennedy's murder, but in the meantime my interest had been piqued by the lack of information available on Wesley Swift. In looking at books at the local library, I found a few that mentioned him in the indexes, but in each case the references had the same basic minimal information. I found more in internet searches, and wound up spending a great deal of time reading and listening to Swift's sermons at a website dedicated to making his brand of inspiration available to the general public. In poring through these, I found an interesting coincidence in the chronology of his sermons, something which could theoretically be incriminating (depending on the development of more information), potentially pointing to a larger plan involving the elimination of Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as Robert Kennedy.
 
As a result, I became even more involved in researching the Far Right, and Larry evidently became more and more focused on investigating the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. At his suggestion, I read Jack Nelson's Terror in the Night, learning more of the background to what he'd been talking about regarding Tarrants and Ainsworth. I also read William Pepper's tome on Dr. King's murder and we agreed that there were any number of problems with it. Sometime after this, Larry suggested to Stuart Wexler, Pat Speer and me that although Gerald Posner's book on President Kennedy's assassination was terrible, Posner's book on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s murder should be considered required reading. (It followed, for instance, a chronological order in contrast to William Pepper's book.) So I read the incurious Posner's book and even began taking notes on it.
 
At this time I was unemployed and soon came to the realization that I was devoting far too much time to "conspiracy research" when I should be finding a job. So I advised Larry that I'd decided to drop out of further research and assistance. This decision was made easier by a couple of "internal matters" that had come up. After devoting so much time and energy investigating Robert Kennedy's murder, I was not thrilled about having to learn a whole new case even though what I'd found and even argued led naturally toward investigatin
g the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. I was just in no mood or position to learn a whole new cast of characters and details about a different case.
 
More importantly, I had become increasingly concerned by what seemed to me equivocal and puzzling responses in email discussions I was having with Larry. He had always been somewhat absent-minded and more or less a complete stranger to the spell-check phenomenon, which was certainly harmless and kind of quaint (routinely spelling Kranz as Krantz, for instance). But taking what was at that time the most significant example, I had transcribed some information on Ku Klux Klan activities in North Carolina from Michael and Judy Ann Newton's The Klan: An Encyclopedia and sent it to him, noting that (according to Jack Nelson) Tom Tarrants had stayed at a safehouse in Franklin, North Carolina when he went underground.
 
Larry responded by saying first that "we" had contacted Tarrants, and Tarrants would no longer talk about the life he had prior to his being saved by Jesus ("we" presumably being himself and Stuart Wexler, with whom I've never communicated). Larry then mused about how Tarrants, "from Florida and having moved to Mississippi would make contacts in NC or be 'introduced' to NC." In order to reply, it was necessary to quote his entire email with my comments and corrections in brackets; after "from Florida" I wrote, "[Tarrants was a native of Mobile, Alabama and probably got his young start in that milieu, through connections to those responsible for the 63 church bombing in Birmingham, many of whom were connected to Mobile]."
 
I concluded this reply with two typically windy paragraphs setting out my perspective on things, with some frustration apparent. Since Larry had closed by also musing about Sam Bowers and potential connections to North Carolina being "mysterious," and had commented that Bowers seemed to be such a loner with his White Knights organization being in competition with older Klan organizations, I began by saying that I felt the Newtons' Klan Encyclopedia was essential for further research. "Having been exposed to much of this for awhile now, I see far more connections than questionable or mysterious disconnects." I said that Bowers was no loner except possibly in the sense of his private life, but rather a committed racist leader
 
"in touch with other more prominent or noticeable such leaders.... And if you see how many 'splits' and factions and name-changes, etc, etc, etc there were among these various groups, you might be kind of skeptical about the 'competition' among them. They all had identical ultimate and even immediate goals, and one way to throw inquiring minds off the trail was to give the appearance of competition and splits. Keith Gilbert was with Richard G. Butler at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho, but they had a split, so Gilbert set up his own group A FEW MILES DOWN THE ROAD.... It’s far more likely (to me, anyway) that Bowers' White Knights was and was understood as an effective clandestine real-action force that 'got things done' while the more public Klan served as a helpful smokescreen (the Klan as an agglomeration of redneck bigots who were not to be taken seriously). 
 
"As far as North Carolina is concerned, as suggested in the Klan encyclopedia entries I sent you..., there were all kinds of Klan groups and Klan fronts ('civic' associations, sportsmans clubs, etc, etc) all over North Carolina -- far too many to try and list every one of them separately. North Carolina would seem to have been the perfect place to go if you wanted to hide out. See the attached map for some idea of where there might have been a good spot to look, if you were using the entries I sent...as some guide.... So if there was a sustained 2-year bombing campaign centered in Salisbury from 65 to early 67 and broken up by the Feds, followed later that year by a big bombing campaign in Mississippi, that alongside the indications of financial backing from 'prominent Lenoir County businessmen' and the overt support of a prominent businessman like Woodrow Lynch hardly makes any of it all that mysterious at all. Unless, of course, we assume that the geographical distances (between North Carolina and Mississippi, for instance) make connections implausible. But I don’t know why anyone would do that.........."
 
In retrospect I recognize that I might have made more out of this type of thing than was warranted, and it's entirely possible that I was being humored at that point, in a kind sort of way, as I was still trying to be involved with Top Researchers who had the means and experience to do things like file FOIA requests, interview people, and so on, none of which I was ever in any financial position to do. But in any event I did at that time drop out of further active research assistance.
 
A few months later, Larry contacted me to advise that his RFK essays were being published online at the Mary Ferrell website and thought I might be interested in taking part in discussions on the case at the Lancer Forum. I did so, and we found that we were largely talking to each other (with the exception of a couple of people who were interested in the subject) and I mentioned we might as well have been continuing the private email discussions we'd been having for a couple of years. I was also disappointed to find that apart from sourcing of footnotes, Larry had done hardly any "polishing" of the essays as they were generally verbatim to the original drafts he had sent me, complete with misspellings, typos, awkward phrasing, and so on. And I recalled that the late Tim Carroll had expressed criticism of the first editions of Larry's Someone Would Have Talked over the same matters. I guess different people have different attitudes on this sort of thing, but I would think if someone wanted to put information presumed to be important "out in public" to be read and taken seriously, they might take more care in the actual writing of the thing.
 
About the only positive thing to come of all this was that I got to meet and fall in love with the one person who's brought some happiness into my life. But that was yet another thing that apparently was not meant to be. In the course of our relationship I traveled to her homeland to be with her and to walk and walk and walk and walk all over its capital city. (This was more to do with getting to the buses to go visit her in her part of town and to find things like a hammer and a toilet plunger than with any love of walking on my part.) In the course of this, at one point I got the opportunity to (as I thought) finally liberate myself from involvement in the Conspiracy Research Community when I found myself sitting in an internet cafe in Kavaklıdere and wrote a post in The Education Forum advising a well-known turd of a fellow that I intended to shit on his face if I ever saw it in real life.
 
That was in the Spring of 2010, but about a year before this I had been contacted by Larry Hancock who informed me that his and Stuart Wexler's book on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. was in the process of being published, at that time titled "Seeking Armageddon" (to the best of my recollection, maybe it was "Chasing Armageddon"). It was either then or maybe sometime in 2011 that Larry asked for the website address for the Wesley Swift sermons (for the book's sourcing). But in any event, it was in that Winter 2009 email that Larry informed me that he and "Stu" had developed information about a violent clandestine Far Right organization that appeared to be highly important in their investigation of the case. I had to start my email reply with, "I assume we're still talking about the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan?"
 
For two years I was pretty much completely free from involvement and even interest in what was going on in the Conspiracy Research Community. Then in the late Winter of 2012, Larry wrote me an email expressing the hope that I was still using that email address and advising me that his and Stuart Wexler's book on Martin Luther King, Jr. had been published and wondered if I was interested in taking part in forum discussions on the case. So I ventured back to The Education Forum, feeling fairly embarrassed about my last post in it. I found little seemed to have changed other than the fact that the writings of Larry Hancock as well as Bill Kelly now seemed much less beset by typos and spelling errors than previously, and that unfortunately Stephen Turner had dropped completely out of sight shortly after he'd had to edit out the vulgar bits of my last post.
 
As I began to enter into the Martin Luther King, Jr. discussions, an old friend dropped by, the same turd of a fellow who now had a new interest in a topic area he'd previously been completely absent from (despite years of ample opportunity). At some point I mentioned to him possible connections of the Far Right in Canada to James Earl Ray's activities, and before I got a chance to reply to his typical request for "proof," Larry Hancock replied to my post -- helpfully advising me of some sources where I might "start" if I were interested in learning about this Far Right business.
 
After a few months of being utterly discouraged and wondering what the hell I'd wasted so much of my time and life for, only to ultimately find that someone I'd had innumerable email exchanges with somehow didn't even recognize me although he himself had invited me to take part in the damned discussions, I came to a decision about what to do to try to make something out of what appeared to be not just nothing but an absurdity of nothing. I had edited and rewritten my study of John the Baptist and hoped at some point to have this published as a second edition, but in the Summer of 2012 I decided to give up on this and just put the damn thing on a blog. This seemed the best thing to do since, having written something, one's main hope is to have it read. And I would be turning 50 in another year and didn't seem to be getting younger, so I had started to think about what was "important" in terms of a "legacy" and being of some use to my fellow human beings. So once I'd made the decision about putting the book on a blog it also occurred to me that I could make all my research files publicly available as well.
 
The Education Forum seemed the best place to do this, for a number of reasons. The main one was that I had always admired what Andy Walker and John Simkin had done in making an educational and research resource available online. This seemed to me to be "what it's all about" in terms of what I had understood genuine Socialism to be; if the world and its people are ever going to make any progress away from the idolatry of grasping after money and the "collateral" exploitation of other humans in doing it, then there need to be concrete examples of how that might work. So my idea was to stop "hoarding" information in hopes of one day "profiting" from it and instead make it completely and transparently available to others, now and in the future. In certain formulations this is also "the Christian thing to do," as in "give without expecting anything in return."
 
Before I could get underway with this, I started a new job in the first week of August that required an hour's drive to get to work, and I stayed away from forum involvements as I concentrated on getting settled in to the job. When I returned a few months later, I found that there must have been some controversy as Greg Parker had removed his photo avatar and (seemingly) deleted all his posts at The Education Forum. Curious about this, I did some forum searching going back through a good many threads and posts made during my 2-year absence and found that it involved some serious disagreements some members had with David Lifton, author of Best Evidence, and particularly the alleged protection (from criticism) of Lifton on the part of certain (to me unknown) Education Forum moderators. In this search I also read Richard Sprague's article on Lifton that one of the members had provided a link for, after reading which I agreed that there were legitimate, serious questions to be considered regarding Lifton as any kind of reliable source for anything.
 
In any event, for the next few months I posted my research files at The Education Forum, beginning with those I had on John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. as these were in the small folders. I had finished with this and was trying to organize what order the Robert Kennedy files should be presented when I once again had to drop out briefly as I moved to a new place in April (in order to cut my drive-time to work in half). So I had no internet for about a month and a half; when I returned to The Education Forum this time, I found that now Lee Farley had removed his avatar photo and also seemingly removed his posts, and I also witnessed something I'd never before seen in the previous 7 years or even thought possible: Robert Charles-Dunne in an angry mood. A fellow named Paul Trejo was in the process of being sliced and diced and roasted over an open fire, having apparently made one too many of the typically thoughtless assertions that he thought helped make for sound argument. I wanted to tell him that while I could admire the bravery of the thing, I couldn't help but think that taking on Robert Charles-Dunne was almost certainly another example of poor judgment.
 
I believe the foregoing is sufficient background for my experience(s) in the Conspiracy Research Community without going into any rehash of what happened at The Education Forum about a month ago. Some of us decided to do what we believed was the right thing to do, and some of us paid a price for it. If others can in good conscience go on with business as usual, that's on them. I'm only going to resume what I'd been trying to do for the past year (somewhat out of order now and with the occasional diversion of music or whatever else I feel like presenting), and let others make their own decisions about things.

06 July 2013

Music Saturday: Steppenwolf I

"Children Of The Night" Steppenwolf
 
 
==============
 
Some of us are
rock and roll stars
Chasin' the flash and travel
Most of us wear
The right length of hair
But that's all that is left
Of the dream
 
Oh the dream
It was born
in the summer of love
And it died with the Woodstock nation
But what has it left
For the carpenter's son
And the new coming generation?
Oh we all believed
we knew the way
But fate did not agree
Now we're tired of asking
who we are
And what we ought to be
 
(Children of night)
Children of the night
(Children of night)
Howlin' at the gate
(Children of night)
Here to claim forgotten dreams
Too late,
too late,
too late
 
(Children of night)
Orphans of the darkness
(Children of night)
Waiting to belong
(Children of night)
Been listening to
the same old story
Too long
to care,
too long
 
 
Barely thirteen,
hard and they're mean
Hunting in packs like jackals
They prey on the meek
The old and the weak
Like a scourge on the face of the earth
All around our town
They're fighting with guns
And building their homemade bazookas
And ten year old Jimmy
Got arrested in school
They found a tank in his locker
Oh we all believed
we held the key
To peaceful harmony
But the times have changed
The way we feel
And we fear our destiny
 
(Children of night)
Children of the night
(Children of night)
Howlin' at the gate
(Children of night)
Here to claim forgotten dreams
Too late,
too late,
too late
 
 
Sure must be fun
To watch a president run
Just ask the man who owns one
Why up on the hill
They're killing the bill
That would pay for his capitol crime
But cardinal sin
He blessed him and said
I know that you're rotten
Down to the core
But nobody else
can do it so well
That's why I'm behind you
For three years more
Oh they all believed
They found the one
Who'd lead them to the light
But the tides will turn
Against the fool
Who'd believe that wrong is right
 
(Children of night)
Children of the night
(Children of night)
Howlin' at the gate
(Children of night)
Here to claim forgotten dreams
Too late,
too late,
too late
 
(Children of night)
Orphans of the darkness
(Children of night)
Waiting to belong
(Children of night)
Been listening to
the same old story
Too long
to care,
too long.

"Promise and Power," Deborah Shapley, part 4

From Chapter 10, "Untying the Knot"
[pp. 193-195]
 
 
...McNamara's second Draft Presidential Memorandum on strategic forces, dated November 21, 1962, announced that the purpose of U.S. nuclear forces was "first, to provide the United States with a secure, protected retaliatory force able to survive any attack within enemy capabilities and capable of striking back and destroying Soviet urban society, if necessary, in a controlled and deliberate way." Its secondary purpose was "limiting damage," that is, " to deny the enemy the prospect of achieving a military victory by attacking our forces."
 
McNamara's post-Cuba concern with deterring nuclear war was also evident: "The forces I am recommending give any rational Soviet decisionmaker the strongest possible incentives to avoid nuclear attack on ourselves or our allies."[17]
 
[Alain] Enthoven proceeded to get to work defining the new first goal, deterrence.[18] If the strategic forces' role was that of "striking back and destroying Soviet urban society...in a controlled and deliberate way," how much force was enough?
 
Enthoven and staffer Frank Trinkl designed a computer program enacting a retaliatory attack that dropped one-megaton warheads on Soviet cities and burst aboveground to destroy buildings and people. Only those killed and wounded immediately were counted as casualties; long-term casualties due to fallout were not included. Their computer calculated the damage achieved by different levels of attack. Thus the number of delivered megatons could be correlated with the percent of Soviet population and industrial floorspace destroyed.
 
Enthoven knew that in reality, with SIOP-63, the new operational war plan, the vast majority of U.S. nuclear weapons were targeted on Soviet military forces, with only 18 percent aimed at cities and industry. But he decided that this model was valid anyway. As McNamara said in his 1963 Draft Presidential Memorandum, "The calculations [of attacks on Soviet cities and industry] are our best estimates of the results of possible Soviet calculations of what we could do to them in retaliation if they were to attack us."[19]
 
Enthoven's computer program generated two curves. One showed the percentage of industrial floorspace destroyed, and the other the percentage of population harmed. Both were computed as a function of how many megatons were delivered on these two kinds of targets.[20]
 
Both curves rose sharply as the number of megatons increased. Both then bent and became nearly horizontal, meaning that above certain levels of megatonnage, relatively fewer additional people or industrial targets would be destroyed. The bends, or "knees," in the curves fell at roughly 400 megatons; if 800 megatons were delivered, only 10 percent more people and 3 percent more industry would be destroyed, for example.
 
But the bends in the curves were approximate. They could have picked 150 megatons as a yardstick of sufficiency because 150 megatons would destroy 60 percent of industry and 15 percent of population. Or they could have picked 500 megatons, which would eliminate 70 percent of industry and 35 percent of population. At 400 delivered megatons, one third of the Soviet population and half of Soviet industry would be wiped out.
 
Enthoven and Trinkl presumed, of course, that their adversary would be rational, although history does not necessarily bear out this assumption. Many a national leader has launched into war deluding himself that the fatalities on his own side will be low and that the war will be short. On the other hand, since no leader has yet started a nuclear war, perhaps calculations of impending deaths do deter.
 
....Four hundred delivered megatons became the yardstick for the amount of damage that should deter the other side from starting a nuclear war.[21] But McNamara and Kennedy were buying 656 Polaris missiles and 1,200 land-based ICBMs and already had thousands of megatons that could be delivered by bombers.
 
McNamara and Enthoven then tripled the yardstick. They adopted a conservative assumption: that any of the three "legs" of the force -- bombers, land-based missiles, and sea-based missiles -- should be capable of the Assured Destruction mission alone. In this way they rationalized their larger force.
 
Analysis had given them a chance to cut the size of the programmed force by two thirds, but they never seriously considered doing so. The implications of the overwhelming U.S. superiority for a possible reduction of U.S. forces were simply not considered closely. McNamara had pushed the enormous buildup in his first year in office; he was wedded to it. In 1963 he was not yet a revolutionary advocate of deep nuclear force cuts.
 
***************************************************

[17] DPM, November 21, 1962.
[18] Kaplan, Wizards, 316ff.
[19] RSM, "Draft Memorandum for the President," December 6, 1963, p. I-5.
[20] The chart is sketched at Kaplan, Wizards, 318.
[21] The yardstick of 400 megatons was not original with Enthoven in 1963. Before the ICBM was even built, one of its developers computed the likely future "sufficient" force. C. W. Sherwin, chief scientist of the Air Force, picked up an analysis by Warren Amster of Convair Corporation, an Air Force contractor on the ICBM program, that 300 to 400 missiles could deter. Sherwin publicized this prescient conclusion in "Securing Peace Through Military Technology," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 12, no. 5 (May 1956): 159-165. Amster's view was published in the same issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "Design for Deterrence," 164, 165. Discussed at Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 191, 192. The WSEG-50 study, on which RSM was briefed in 1961, proposed that 200 to 300 survivable Polaris missiles would be sufficient. Therefore, Enthoven's conclusion that 400 delivered megatons, or 200 survivable missiles, was enough reflected a consensus.

"Promise and Power," Deborah Shapley, part 3

Excerpted from Deborah Shapley's Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1993.


From Chapter 10, "Untying the Knot"
[pp. 187-192]

[After the Cuban Missile Crisis, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara gave an interview to Stewart Alsop which appeared in a December 1, 1962 Saturday Evening Post article.]

The article purported to explain the counterforce-no cities nuclear policy McNamara had announced publicly at Ann Arbor in June, which Alsop dubbed the "Doctrine of Controlled Response." In point of fact, McNamara had been backing off the policy practically since he first articulated it, having encountered nothing but problems. They started with London's and Paris's outrage that through it, Washington was trying to nix their independent control of their respective nuclear forces.
 
The main problem with counterforce-no cities was that it made McNamara sound as though he were really planning a preemptive first strike, despite official disclaimers. The Kremlin and other critics astutely asked why Washington would wait for the Soviets to attack before it launched its countermilitary attack to disarm Soviet forces. According to military logic, Washington should try to disarm Soviet forces preemptively, before they could begin a strike against the United States.[2]
 
A second problem was the defense budget for fiscal 1964, then in preparation... The Air Force asked for added Minuteman missiles and for the B-70 bomber and RS-70 reconnaissance version. The generals also wanted to continue the Skybolt nuclear missile, to be launched from U.S. and British bombers against Soviet ground targets, although McNamara had doubts Skybolt would work. In short, the military was using McNamara's counterforce strategy to justify increases in U.S. offensive forces and even a first-strike strategy, just when McNamara realized that his strategic buildup had to stop.[3] Strategic forces were costing $15 billion, one third of the $45 billion defense budget and one sixth of the federal budget.
 
But the overarching problem with the doctrine was psychological. The Berlin crisis and Kennedy's promotion of civil defense on television and in the pages of Life awakened in the public a gut-level awareness of how horrible nuclear war would be.... Berlin and Cuba caused a shift in perceptions of the new age.[4]
 
In this climate it was politically unwise for the U.S. secretary of defense to adopt the language of "megadeath" and "controlled and deliberate response." McNamara had been saying publicly that if each side followed a limited counterforce strategy and avoided hitting the other's cities, 25 million Americans would die instead of 75 million in an all-out attack, and that the figure of 25 million was "preferable" to the 75 million. He did not insert the word "only" in front of the reference to 25 million dead Americans, but it could be read there by implication... McNamara's larger figures for Western European deaths played no better on the other side of the Atlantic, where a similar shift of mood was under way. Europeans were often schizophrenic: They called loudly for U.S. displays of nuclear willpower (some German leaders were blaming Kennedy for not having gone to war over Berlin and letting the wall stand) while being privately terrified at the prospect of nuclear war.[5]
 
McNamara sensed the inappropriateness of his fine-tuned strategy even as he tossed around its cold-blooded terms with Alsop. Thus McNamara was parting company with the formal strategists at the very moment he was most publicly identified with them.
 
The crosscurrents were ironic. McNamara decided privately during the Cuban crisis that one Soviet warhead from Cuba on one American city was unacceptable just when Herman Kahn, the most controversial of the formal strategists, attained his greatest notoriety.[6] Even among the earliest group of superbright Rand mathematicians and economists, Kahn stood out as a crazy genius. He started work on the mathematical problems of the hydrogen bomb but was soon fascinated with analyzing nuclear war.
 
The combination of Kahn's provocative personality and deadly subject matter resulted in a series of books that discussed nuclear war scenarios with weird abandon. For example, Kahn conceived of a Doomsday Machine, which he claimed was technologically feasible. It would be a giant computer wired to thousands of H-bombs. When the Soviets committed some unacceptable act, the machine would go to war and fire thousands of bombs, covering the earth with fallout and killing everybody. The Doomsday Machine sounded absurd, but it was only a slight exaggeration of military reality, the top-secret Sunday Punch nuclear war plan that SAC improved throughout the 1950s.
 
Kahn's deeper point was that the Doomsday Machine was a terrible idea. As the alternative, he worked up scenarios for limited nuclear war. His master plan, which drew the most attention, had the combatants starting small, with a few nuclear bombs, and working their way up forty-four "rungs" of a "ladder of escalation," while the two sides bargained to call the whole thing off.
 
Kahn lectured widely. On Thermonuclear War was published in 1960 and sold thirty thousand copies in hardcover. In 1962 he issued another ghoulish and hypnotic tome. Thinking About the Unthinkable became a new buzz phrase for what Alsop had called the "oddly fascinating reality" of nuclear strategy. Kahn's writing inspired the 1964 movie hit Dr. Strangelove...
 
But Kahn's braggadocio, his linguistic abandon and effervescent personality, pushed him beyond the bounds of respectability as the public mood changed. He and his fellow Rand strategists were being responsible in trying to alleviate humanity's greatest threat. But Kahn seemed too detached from the terrible acts he described to a public for whom nuclear war was suddenly real.
 
McNamara shared Kahn's and his colleagues' ability to keep the emotional horror of nuclear war at arm's length by intellectualizing it. Their formalism and detached language were partly a crutch to control the fears the cataclysm aroused.
 
The containment of emotion was the precise appeal to McNamara of the Rand strategists as staff advisers and of counterforce-no cities as doctrine. McNamara needed both to prepare himself to act rationally and control his own intense emotions, if war ever came.
 
Kahn's third book, On Escalation, happened to be published in 1965, at the start of the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, an air campaign that McNamara and others designed on Kahn-like principles of escalation control and bargaining that seemed to work in the missile crisis. What McNamara's fascination with nuclear bargaining scenarios in 1961-62 had in common with his belief in a limited air campaign against North Vietnam in 1965 was that it offered him a way to keep the emotions of war under control.
 
"War always deeply involves the emotions," wrote the sage Bernard Brodie in 1959 in Strategy in the Missile Age. "The collapse of inhibitions in the transition from peace to war does not argue well for the containment of the succeeding violence."[7] It was this "collapse of inhibitions" that McNamara, in his adoption of both limited nuclear war theories and the strategy of controlled bombing of North Vietnam, was trying to check.
 
Yet by 1962 Kahn was coming to symbolize the irresponsible side of such strategems. Kahn was deeply stung when a Scientific American review of On Thermonuclear War called it "a moral tract on mass murder: how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it." Significantly, the managing editor of the journal, Dennis Flanagan, declined to print a rebuttal, telling Kahn, "Surely it is much more profitable to think about the thinkable."[8] Although McNamara never went as far as Kahn in his public language, he went far enough to be criticized for his Marquis of Queensberry rules for nuclear war. McNamara was finding that such talk was not proper for a political leader.
 
 
By the fall of 1962, U.S. strategic policy was in confusion. SIOP-63, the revised top-secret operational plan for how U.S. forces were to conduct nuclear war, was now operational and based on counterforce, as McNamara had ordered in February 1961. When he unveiled counterforce-no cities publicly at Ann Arbor, McNamara told the Kremlin that the United States would execute only a limited attack on Soviet forces in the event of nuclear war. But Kennedy, in his television address of October 22, had announced that if any of the missiles in Cuba were launched, the United States would carry out "a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union," a massive attack. Now talking to Alsop, McNamara confused matters worse. Of counterforce, he said, "I would want to be certain we had other options."[9]
 
Midway through his interview with McNamara, Alsop told him he possessed leaked information that the Soviets were "hardening" their missile sites to allow some of their ICBMs to survive a U.S. counterforce attack. If part of the Soviet force was sure to survive so it could hit the United States in return, were not the days of a U.S. counterforce strategy numbered? McNamara tossed a bombshell back at Alsop.
 
"His answer [to a Soviet second-strike capability] was in effect, 'the sooner the better,'" Alsop wrote. McNamara replied that the United States already had a secure second-strike capability. Once the Soviets also had forces able to survive a U.S. attack and hit back, "then you might have a more stable 'balance of terror,'" he said.
 
McNamara's "the sooner the better" view caused a sensation when Alsop published it. The right was aghast. Here was the secretary of defense of the United States, the man responsible for defending the entire free world, who had been eyeball to eyeball with Khrushchev when Soviet deceits brought the world to the brink of holocaust. How could such a man want the enemy to survive the decisive blow on its forces for which the Strategic Air Command and others had spent billions of dollars and more than a decade to be able to carry out? How could he want the enemy to be able to fire back? And "the sooner the better"![10]
 
McNamara's remark was not as bizarre as it sounded. Early the previous summer the president had ordered an intelligence review of Soviet nuclear forces.[11] The results, presented to Kennedy at a briefing on July 9, concluded that earlier estimates of Soviet ICBM strength, on the basis of which Kennedy and McNamara launched their strategic buildup, were grossly inflated.
 
The review also confirmed that the Soviets would make some of the ICBM sites "hard," that is, able to survive if a nuclear warhead hit nearby. It stated that the Soviets might build more ballistic missile submarines, which could be difficult for the United States to find and attack all at once. Finally, it said the American people could not really be protected by civil defense, which was still being actively promoted by the administration. A Soviet nuclear attack directed at U.S. cities could kill 88 million Americans, even with civil defense. Thus, both sides were moving toward "parity" in their second-strike ability, which diminished "the prospect of real victors emerging from any major nuclear war."
 
This review helps explain why McNamara said, when presented with the news of Soviet missiles in Cuba, "I believed, by the time of the Cuban missile crisis, that both sides had parity in their nuclear forces."[12]
 
The stability of the "balance of terror" was an idea as old as the nuclear age itself. Bernard Brodie had outlined it in Absolute Weapon, his earliest work on nuclear deterrence: Once both sides had secure, second-strike forces, each would be restrained from attacking the other first, creating stability. In addition, once such forces were in place, neither side would have an incentive to build more nuclear weapons. Rand's Albert Wohlstetter developed the definitive conditions for stability and popularized them in a Foreign Affairs article in 1959. But Winston Churchill expressed the concept best during Britain's parliamentary debate over whether to build an H-bomb, in 1955: "Then it may well be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation."[13]
 
**********************************************

[2] Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 213. Enthoven lists some problems with the doctrine in "1963 Nuclear Strategy Revisited," in Ford and Winters, Ethics and Nuclear Strategy, 75, 76. One reason he gives is that "the goal of destroying enough of the Soviet strategic forces to make an appreciable difference in the number of Americans surviving a Soviet retaliatory attack generated an open-ended requirement for more strategic weapons" (75, 81).
[3] The right came out of the missile crisis convinced that U.S. nuclear superiority was the reason Khrushchev backed down, and therefore it renewed the fight for more missiles and bombers. See Claude Witze, "Farewell to Counterforce," Air Force, February 1963, pp. 27-29. Air Force "requirements" are shown in RSM, "Memorandum for the President...DRAFT," November 21, 1962 (hereafter cited as DPM, November 21, 1962). The "first strike" report quoted in Kaplan, Wizards, 315, is dated October 1962, National Security Archive, Nuclear History Collection.
[4] David Halberstam explains the public's change well: "The age was changing, and McNamara sensed the shifts," The Best and the Brightest, 245, 296. Alsop's December 1 Saturday Evening Post article shows the growing public doubts about nuclear war fighting. He quotes a "critic" of RSM's saying, "How can you rely on a weapon as your chief instrument of power when you know that using it will cost you at least twenty million dead?"
[5] Of a large literature, the best description is still Kelleher, Germany and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons. European military attitudes are explored in Steinbrunner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision, and Schwartz, NATO's Nuclear Dilemmas.
[6] Kahn profile --- Kaplan, Wizards, 220-231.
[7] Brodie was a teacher of the Rand nuclear theorists, but unlike most of them, he had started with the study of real wars. Brodie's work is reflective and detached, which sets it apart from much other Rand literature. The quote is from Weigley, The American Way of War, 434, 435, and appeared in Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age, 307.
[8] Kaplan, Wizards, 228; interview, Dennis Flanagan. The review appeared in Scientific American, March 1961.
[9] Stewart Alsop, "Our New Strategy: Alternatives to Total War," Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962; interview, RSM. RSM relates that Alsop said he got the information from the CIA. See RSM, Blundering into Disaster, 46, 47.
[10] Washington News, November 27, 1962; WP, November 26, 1962; Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1963; War/Peace Report, January 1963.
[11] This review was declassified, published, and analyzed in Garthoff, Intelligence Assessment and Policymaking. He notes that hardly anyone considered reducing the planned size of the U.S. strategic forces, despite ever-lower estimates of the present and likely Soviet force in this period --- "the fact of such superiority...was of little relevance at the time," Garthoff writes at 24. See also 1-5.
[12] RSM, Blundering into Disaster, 52-57.
[13] Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age; Kaplan, Wizards, 235; Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror." Churchill is quoted in Schwartz, Nuclear Dilemmas, 47, and taken from Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th ser., vol. 537 (1955), cols. 1893-2012.

02 July 2013

"Promise and Power," Deborah Shapley, part 2

Excerpted from Deborah Shapley's Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1993.
 
 

From Chapter 7, "Cold Warrior Stepping Up"

[pp. 128-130]

Few events showed McNamara's growing confidence and power around town that year [1961] more than the affair of General Walker.... From his new post as a spokesman for the Western world, McNamara found it alarming how many senior officers gave speeches with political content, often violently anti-Communist in tone....

Conflict was drawn right away when, in early 1961, a speech to be given by the famous World War II admiral Arleigh Burke was hacked away by a reviewer, infuriating Burke. The speech had had so much political content that Arthur Sylvester, McNamara's press aide, had scrawled at the top of it, "This is a speech that should be made only by the secretary of state." In response Burke called Sylvester a "son-of-a-bitch."[44]

The issue flared up again in April, when Overseas Weekly, a tabloid published for troops in Germany, carried a long article about the activities of Major General Edwin Walker, who had been giving "political seminars" modeled on the Birchites' program [the program of the John Birch Society]. Walker saw the broad mass of Americans as dangerously pro-Communist.... He also accused McNamara's special assistant, Adam Yarmolinsky, of being a Communist dupe.[45]

Kennedy called McNamara and told him to investigate what Walker was doing. When, three days later, McNamara had no answer, Kennedy was "on McNamara's back for his failure to produce," says Sylvester. McNamara ordered Sylvester to find Walker in Germany, however he could. Walker's defense of his statements to Sylvester showed him to be on the fringe --- although clearly many people shared his beliefs.

There followed a highly publicized crackdown. McNamara, with typical zeal, had many officers' speeches reviewed by an internal committee. The allies of General Walker, the irate Admiral Burke, and Strom Thurmond in the Senate screamed that McNamara was "muzzling" the military. Then Senator John Stennis of Mississippi opened an investigation. The senators demanded all copies of speeches submitted and each edited version. The pile consisted of thousands of documents, which McNamara decided to give to the committee within twenty-four hours of the senators' request. His assistant for legislative affairs rode the Pentagon corridors on a bicycle to get them together in time.

Next the senators wanted to know the names of the reviewers, as well as which reviewer had edited which speech. McNamara was adamant that only he was responsible; he yielded the reviewers' names but would go no further. Kennedy backed McNamara: The principle of civilian control was at stake, along with the president's desire to control his own foreign policy.

At a highly orchestrated confrontation, Stennis demanded the information, and McNamara drew from his pocket a signed order from Kennedy invoking executive privilege. Stennis, a former judge, briefly traced the separation of powers under the Constitution and sustained the executive plea.[46]

*********************************

[44] Arthur Sylvester, Oral History, JFKL, August 2, 1977, pp. 26, 27.
[45] Trewhitt, McNamara, 90-92.
[46] Ibid. The confrontation took place on February 8, 1962.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Chapter 8, "Statistician Against Communism"
[pp. 139-141]
 
In his first, formative weeks in office, McNamara agreed to be briefed by William Weed Kaufmann, a respected young man, who in 1956 followed Bernard Brodie, the godfather of the nuclear strategists, to Rand.... [The first such briefing was] on February 10, 1961.[2]

Five days earlier, McNamara had been briefed by the generals at Strategic Air Command headquarters outside Omaha on SIOP, the operational nuclear war plan. His alarm bells were going off about what would happen if he ever had to exercise his responsibility, as number two in the chain of command... and press the nuclear button....

Kaufmann showed McNamara a detailed strategy for limited nuclear war. He argued that if the Soviets launched a big conventional attack on Europe or a nuclear attack on the United States, the U.S. military could hit back not with the entire nuclear force, as SAC planned, but only with nuclear strikes against Soviet military forces, airstrips, and missile sites away from cities. The United States would announce it was withholding part of its nuclear force to use against Soviet cities if the Soviets did not let up after the first round. The plan, called counterforce-no cities, clearly derived from the theories of bargaining and escalation, which economists and mathematicians at Rand and elsewhere had developed in the previous decade. For in Kaufmann's scenario, it was not the actual destruction of Soviet forces, which he assumed Moscow would understand to be only a limited attack, so much as the threat of imminent destruction of Moscow and Leningrad and the prospect of many more millions of citizens dead that should make Soviet leaders yield.

The plan could lower the destructiveness of nuclear war and proposed a way to end such a war.[3] And, if U.S. leaders announced they were adopting a counterforce strategy and pointed out how many Soviet lives would be spared by initially declaring cities out-of-bounds, the Kremlin might just be induced to adopt a similar strategy.

Thus the first exchange of nuclear weapons could be limited by the mutual interest of both parties in avoiding their own destruction. A further advantage was that once the United States announced this relatively more feasible way of waging a nuclear war, then its threat to use nuclear weapons would be more credible than it was under the massive retaliation doctrine the Kennedy administration had inherited from Eisenhower and [John Foster] Dulles.

Kaufmann had been working on the idea since about 1958 at Rand and had vetted it in front of "murder boards" of fellow analysts. Rand's sponsor, the [US] Air Force, got wind of the concept. Certain Air Force generals were appalled by massive retaliation and liked Kaufmann's alternative.[4] A longstanding doctrine of air power said that bombing should be selective and aim at annihilating the enemy's military forces and not civilians; U.S. air generals had fought their British colleagues on this point when the Royal Air Force set out to bomb Dresden and Hamburg in World War II. SAC's all-out nuclear Sunday Punch ran contrary to this humane tradition.

...Counterforce-no cities became the basis for the changes in SIOP, the operational war plan for U.S. strategic forces, that McNamara ordered Alain Enthoven to begin working on in the wake of the terrible briefing near Omaha.[6] It also become the basis for the first five-year plan for nuclear forces, issued in late February. McNamara's first Draft Presidential Memorandum on strategic nuclear forces, written as guidance for the next budget and dated September 23, 1961, said:

[I]n the event of a Soviet nuclear attack, [U.S.] strategic forces would first...
strike back against Soviet bomber bases, missile sites, and other installations
with long-range nuclear forces, in order to reduce Soviet power and limit the
damage that can be done to us by vulnerable Soviet follow-on forces, while,
second, holding in protected reserve forces capable of destroying the Soviet
urban society, if necessary, in a controlled and deliberate way.[7]
 
***********************

[2] Interview, William Kaufmann; profile of Kaufmann is at Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 191-203.
[3] Many retrospective accounts of the war gamers of Rand during the 1950s stress the analysts' flip treatment of nuclear war fighting. However, some of those analysts, such as Kaufmann and Alain Enthoven, believed they were making the world safer by finding ways to lower the destruction in the next war, which they, like most people at the time, thought would be nuclear. The Rand men knew, at least generally, of SAC's plans to fight this war with an all-out, probably preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and China. They were devising rationales to move away from this dangerous scenario. From a vast literature, see Weigley, The American Way of War, chap. 17, and Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, chap. 14.
[4] Interviews: William Kaufmann, Frank Trinkl; Kaplan, Wizards, 260-262.
[6] The changes are described in Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill," 64-69. The details of the Sunday Punch war plans and their successor are still not public. See Kaplan, Wizards, 276-279.
[7] RSM, "Draft: Recommended Long Range Delivery Forces, 1963-1967," September 23, 1961, p. 4. 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Chapter 9, "Battling Chaos"
[pp. 176-178]

[On Wednesday, 24 October 1962, the naval "quarantine" of Cuba during the missile crisis took effect.] That evening in the Building, [McNamara] decided he was not being well informed. [Roswell] Gilpatric...says he and McNamara weren't being "told anything. We were just being assured that this overall type of action was being implemented, and the Navy would take care of everything." This fit with the demeanor of Admiral George W. Anderson, the tall, blue-eyed, imposing chief of naval operations, who, when Kennedy ordered the quarantine, had said, "Mr. President, the Navy won't let you down." But when the operation began, says Gilpatric, "we just weren't sure they were operating on the basis of the very latest information. They'd run off a position at 1800 hours [6 PM] and operate on that for the next six or eight or twelve hours rather than constantly...adjusting.[25]

So at ten o'clock Wednesday night, McNamara took Gilpatric and marched up to Flag Plot, the Navy's command center.[26] This was a secure room under constant Marine guard. The walls were covered with huge charts of the seven seas, with markers showing the whereabouts of each ship. About thirty men were in the room.

The two civilians began questioning the duty officer. Admiral Anderson entered.

McNamara spotted a marker that showed a U.S. ship off in the ocean by itself, far from the quarantine line. "What's it doing there?" he asked. Anderson later said he did not reply because too many people within earshot were not cleared for this information. Anderson suggested they talk in an adjoining office, which was more secure. There he explained that the ship was tracking a Soviet submarine.

McNamara began interrogating Anderson. What was the Navy's plan for the first interception [of a Soviet vessel]? Anderson replied that there was no need to discuss it. This was the Navy's operation.

We must discuss it, McNamara retorted. He began lecturing Anderson that the object was not to shoot anybody but to communicate a political message to Khrushchev. The operation must be run to avoid humiliating the Russians, if at all possible, otherwise Khrushchev might start a war.

What were the captains going to do if a ship started through the line? Shoot across its bow? What if it kept going? Shoot at the rudder? What then? What were Anderson's orders to his captains? McNamara demanded. Did each ship have a Russian-speaking officer on board?

Never before had a secretary of defense so cross-examined a member of the Joint Chiefs. Both men were under strain. McNamara was getting emotional. Anderson was red-faced and determined not to lose self-control. Some accounts say Andersons accused McNamara of "undue interference" in naval matters.

Anderson picked up a copy of the Navy regulations manual and waved it at McNamara. "It's all in there," he said.

McNamara answered, "I don't give a damn what John Paul Jones would have done. I want to know what you are going to do, now."

Anderson said, "Now, Mr. Secretary, if you and your deputy will go back to your offices, the Navy will run the blockade."

It was a critical moment in the growing strain and mistrust between McNamara and his senior commanders. Anderson and other Navy men were already convinced that McNamara was a "liar" in his dealings with them, and not the sterling figure he was portrayed as by admirers in the press. Now the civilian had physically intruded on the sanctum of Flag Plot and cross-examined Anderson. Years later, however, the admiral insisted that their exchange had been polite and McNamara's questions legitimate. He had not accused McNamara of "undue interference," he said.[27]

McNamara's invasion of Flag Plot became part of the lore of the [Pentagon] Building, a landmark in the annals of civilian control. Even without the later civilian micromanagement of Vietnam, the Flag Plot episode would mark McNamara as the most heavy-handed civilian boss in the military's long and unforgiving memory since Truman fired Douglas MacArthur.

The real issue was whether McNamara's confrontation had been necessary to prevent a shooting war in the Caribbean, where American subs were now chasing Soviet subs, and Soviet and American surface ships maneuvered dangerously close to one another. Gilpatric says that half an hour after they returned to McNamara's office that night, an emissary from Anderson appeared. The officer asked for a list of McNamara's questions and concerns in detail. "From that point on they were submitting, asking approvals," Gilpatric says.

Gilpatric also recalls that as they marched back from Flag Plot through the long corridors, McNamara muttered: "That's the end of Anderson...he won't be reappointed, and we've got to find a replacement for him. As far as I'm concerned, he's lost my confidence."[28]

********************************************

[25] Roswell Gilpatric, Oral History, JFKL, May 27, 1960 [sic], pp. 59ff.
[26] Abel, Missile Crisis, 154-156; interviews: George Anderson, Roswell Gilpatric, RSM.
[27] Interviews: George Anderson and senior naval officers.
[28] Roswell Gilpatric, Oral History, JFKL, May 27, 1960, p. 61.
  
---------------------------------------------------------------
[pp. 182-183]
 
...After the [Cuban Missile] crisis [JFK] held a pro forma meeting to congratulate [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] on their performance. Partway through the meeting, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay spoke up and said, Mr. President, we failed.[39]

Kennedy was startled. Failed? How?

Castro's still in power. We should have gotten rid of Castro and we failed to do that, said LeMay, in dead earnest.

Kennedy decided he could not work with some of the chiefs. The use of force for limited political ends was just not understood in certain military quarters.

Kennedy and McNamara apparently both wanted to get rid of LeMay and Anderson when their terms expired in 1963. But they couldn't do so without serious political repercussions. They reappointed LeMay for a second term, through January 1965, and decided not to reappoint Anderson. Gilpatric and Navy Secretary Fred Korth were sent to Anderson's grand office to inform him. Kennedy offered to make him ambassador to Portugal. Anderson first was furious, then accepted. Gilpatric notes that Anderson did a very good job in Portugal.

The rumor in the Navy, however, was that it was McNamara who insisted on the ambassadorship, because he couldn't stand to have Anderson anywhere in North America.[40]

*************************

[39] Background interview.
[40] Interview, Frank Gard Jamieson.

01 July 2013

"Promise and Power," Deborah Shapley, part 1

Excerpts from Deborah Shapley's Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1993.



From Chapter 6, "Power in the Pentagon":

[pp. 88-89; citing reasons for Robert McNamara's agreeing to leave Ford and serve as Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy Administration:]

....Massive retaliation, Eisenhower's stated policy of readiness to fire off American nuclear rockets at almost any Communist affront, was highly dangerous. Influenced by former Army chief of staff General Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy argued that the United States should build up its conventional forces to have the option of large-scale non-nuclear war, or what Taylor called flexible response. Then there was the need to guard against encroaching communism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Meanwhile, Kennedy promised to revive stalled talks with the Soviets aimed at a comprehensive ban on nuclear tests. Kennedy was going to stand for strength "second to none" and arms control, too, the sword and the olive branch both.

The call to greatness and preparedness to fight required personal activism.... National leaders should not be mired in old political disputes but find solutions in a new era of consensus; [JFK] would be a president for all the people.[30]

It was this promise --- of more power doing greater good --- that drew McNamara to Kennedy like a moth to a flame. In fact, Kennedy was arousing what Henry Fairlee, the sardonic British columnist, called the politics of expectation. By making Americans expect heroic deeds on a broad scale by a president who would be more virtuous and more surrounded with excellence than normal politicians, Kennedy excited the hope and idealism forever to be associated with his name. Equally, he set the stage for overreaching, disillusion, and tragedy.
***************************
[30] The idea of an objective consensus described in Fairlee, Kennedy Promise, runs through the sociological and political literature of the time. Examples are Bell, The End of Ideology, and Neustadt, Presidential Power.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[p. 99]
....At first, McNamara turned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff --- the heads of each of the three services and their chairman, [Lyman] Lemnitzer. He asked them what changes needed to be made in the budget Eisenhower had left them.

The chiefs' answer proved only a rehash of requests they had submitted to [former Defense Secretary Thomas] Gates and Eisenhower and not received. McNamara said, "Do they think I'm a fool? Don't they have ideas?" [Member of the Pentagon controller's office Henry] Glass says he suggested that McNamara ask to increase the number of Polaris submarines to be produced. "What number should we ask for?" said McNamara. "Seven," said Glass. "Why seven?" McNamara asked. "That's the number [George] Mahon wants," said Glass, referring to the House Appropriations Committee's venerable chairman. The way the Pentagon had been run, Mahon's wishes were often the starting point for the Building's [Pentagon's] requests....

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[pp. 102-104]
After several appearances [by McNamara], Congress voted three times in 1961 --- and again in the next years --- to increase the defense budget. McNamara was helped by the fact that Congress was controlled by a few Democratic barons, almost all of them southerners, who believed that foreign policy and national defense should be bipartisan, lest America show weakness to the enemies of freedom in its hour of danger. So from 1961 to 1964 Kennedy and McNamara carried out the largest peacetime buildup in U.S. history and raised the budget from $41 billion to $49 billion; each year's budget was more than the combined national budgets of Great Britain, France, West Germany, and Italy at the time.[20]

....McNamara issued in March [1961] a list of questions that came to be known as the Trombones, because there were seventy-six of them. Among them were "Why does the Navy need a new class of aircraft carriers?" and "What is the basic security policy of the United States?" The chiefs and others were to make studies and provide answers to him within weeks....

It took a person of supreme drive and self-confidence to force the pace of business in the Pentagon. However well led U.S. forces had been in World War II, leadership by 1961 was starting to pass to men who had made careers advancing service interests in the internecine wars over roles and missions in the 1950s....

The dumbfounded, defensive responses of many senior military leaders only fired [McNamara] more.... By the fall of 1961, when different military factions had appealed his decisions in all 620 subcategories of the new program budget, McNamara made a point of deciding all 620 in a single day....

However, there was something about these cocky young civilians and their impatient boss that troubled many in the Building. McNamara responded to reports of dissent by publicly claiming there was no split between civilians and the military. The chiefs have been consulted more than ever before, he said. His statements were true in the narrow sense: His regular meetings in the Tank with the brass were frequent indeed. And military officers were among the Whiz Kids. But he knew, better than any of them, that he was asserting the broad legal powers of the civilian secretary vis-a-vis the armed services more forcefully than ever before. It was an early sign of his pattern of using literally true statements to mislead his audience on the real state of affairs.
********************
[20] Newsweek, March 12, 1962.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[pp. 104-111]
As they took office, Kennedy and McNamara looked for ways to quickly repair the supposed missile gap. The immediate threat to U.S. forces, they knew, based on definitive work by Rand, was that American bombers -- which composed the majority of the force -- were vulnerable to surprise Soviet attack. The fastest way to fix the missile gap and deter a preemptive Soviet attack was to speed up production of the Navy's Polaris missile.

Polaris was the first twelve-hundred-mile submarine-launched ballistic missile. Sixteen of them could be carried on the new Polaris nuclear submarine, which could stay submerged for weeks in the world's oceans yet knock out Soviet cities on command from Washington. The Polaris missile program was one of the best-run and most technically successful weapons programs in the Building's history. Six Polaris submarines were on duty when John Kennedy took office. On January 30 [1961], Kennedy ordered one speedup; in a March 28 special defense message, a second acceleration, to 29 boats [sic] and 464 missiles, was announced. Later, McNamara would further increase the force to 41 submarines carrying 656 missiles....

Now a fleet of big submarines roaming the world's oceans, but staying within striking range of the Soviet Union, was physically impossible for the Soviets to find and disable in a preemptive strike. Polaris could therefore ride out a nuclear war and survive to fire back; it was invulnerable and therefore a "second strike" force. In his first weeks, McNamara heard a briefing, based on a Navy study called WSEG-50, which argued that such seagoing missiles were all the United States needed in the way of nuclear forces.[32] The WSEG-50 study computed that only 200 Polaris missiles would deter a Soviet attack for good and assure the destruction of Soviet cities and industry if war ever came.

But McNamara was also listening to men from Rand. On their advice, he agreed that the United States needed more nuclear weapons than a minimum deterrent force; it should have some long-range bombers, which, although they took twelve hours to fly to the Soviet heartland, could then hit Soviet command centers and missile sites with much greater accuracy. He also agreed that they needed some number of land-based missiles, of ICBMs, which were more accurate than submarine-launched missiles and therefore could hit small military targets Polaris could not.[33] The Air Force had been critical of Polaris; the Navy's entry into the prestigious business of fighting nuclear war threatened its monopoly. Since Kennedy had criticized massive retaliation --- the doctrine of his predecessor --- McNamara favored some ICBMs and bombers to have a flexible across-the-board force that gave more options if war came.

...Right away, McNamara and Kennedy decided to retire most of the 1,292 old B-47 bombers and the 19 old B-58s, leaving "only" 500 B-52s, to the surprise and anger of the Air Force.[34] To make the remaining bombers less vulnerable, they ordered them on permanent alert. Some were to be in the air at all times, with others able to take off on fifteen minutes' warning. McNamara often boasted of the United States' trimmer and more alert bomber force; it was a symbol of Kennedy's promise to make America strong, invulnerable, and ready to fight if the cold war turned hot. And the more the Kremlin knew about the young new administration's readiness to fight, the more likely it was to be deterred. That these steps might provoke Soviet leaders, and humiliate them by revealing the inferiority of their forces, seems not to have occurred to these whip-smart young men.

Also on Rand's recommendation, McNamara sped up production of land-based missiles, particularly the small, more accurate Minuteman. Right away, in January, McNamara doubled production of Minuteman missiles from 30 to 60 per month, the most the contractors could build. Their first budget revisions raised the small force Eisenhower planned to 600 Minutemen; by September, McNamara projected an eventual force of 1,200 Minutemen. One Air Force general told Kennedy he needed 10,000; formally the service requested 3,000.[35] McNamara's fight with the Air Force over the ultimate size of the Minuteman force became long and bitter as he moved to make missiles instead of bombers the centerpiece of the strategic forces.

Nothing told Washington faster that McNamara planned to use his legal powers as secretary to the fullest than his fight to hold the Air Force's new bomber, the B-70, in development only.[36] The B-70 was the darling of the Strategic Air Command. It was to fly at three times the speed of sound and use a new material, a titanium compound. McNamara's case against producing the B-70 was, this time at least, based on systematic analysis. A fleet of B-70s would cost $20 billion over ten years, far more than the Minuteman force, and do much of the Minuteman's mission. McNamara and Kennedy proposed limiting the B-70 to two prototypes and no production.

Powerful friends of the Air Force in Congress appropriated more for the B-70 and its reconnaissance version, the RS-70. McNamara proceeded to exercise a little-known but important power he had under the 1958 changes to the National Security Act: He refused to spend the added appropriated funds.[37]

"Uncle" Carl Vinson, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, felt Congress's prerogatives had been snubbed. He started to make a constitutional issue of the matter. But the president backed McNamara. In March 1962, Kennedy and Vinson took a walk in the White House Rose Garden and worked out a compromise that still gave McNamara his way....

The B-70 fights spanned two years and revealed McNamara's authoritarian side. He seemed disdainful of Congress and the generals who maneuvered to save their pet plane....

Thus by the summer of 1961, the senior Air Force generals were worried by McNamara; he seemed serious about invading and making decisions about what had long been their preserve. They accused him of planning to phase out bombers altogether.[38] They stirred a publicized and emotional debate over bombers versus missiles that the Air Force and McNamara would fight for the rest of his term....

The Kennedy-McNamara missile buildup was huge. At the time it was criticized mainly for being too slight.... That August [1961], Khruschev broke a long-standing moratorium on nuclear tests.[39] McNamara and Kennedy could now counter that they were strengthening America's nuclear forces, not only by slipping Polarises into the sea and adding Minutemen on land, but by reducing the vulnerability of the bomber force to Soviet attack.

In fact, much of the Kennedy-McNamara nuclear force buildup was illogical, by national lights; it was an early sign of the dangers of McNamara's instinctive preference for action over inaction. Eisenhower had left plans for a force of about 40 Atlas missiles and six Polarises at sea; in less than a year Kennedy and McNamara planned 1,900 missiles, consisting primarily of the 1,200 Minutemen and 656 Polarises. Counting the bombers, the United States would have 3,455 warheads ready to fire on the Soviet Union by 1967, according to McNamara's secret Draft Presidential Memorandum on strategic forces of September.[40]

Yet in early 1961, new SAMOS photographs and information from Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet defector, suggested that the Soviets had only 50 to 100 missiles at most. Another then-classified estimate put the real number at four.[41] By June, the Army, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the CIA were lowering current and future predictions of the Soviet force. Although Air Force intelligence continued to hold out for a likely high of 1,450 Soviet missiles by 1966, by the fall the consensus of other agencies was that an eventual Soviet ICBM force would be 850 and, more likely, 450 or fewer.

In the face of intelligence disagreement, McNamara picked a high estimate of 500 to 1,000 Soviet missiles and used it to justify the larger force he and Kennedy had planned.[42] White House advisors Jerome Wiesner and Carl Kaysen tried to convince Kennedy that with the missile gap vanishing, the U.S. force could be as low as 400 missiles or fewer. But McNamara said revealingly at a White House meeting on the matter that autumn that "a thousand Minutemen is the lowest I can go and still get it past Congress." The justification for the Minuteman buildup seems unrelated to the size of the actual threat.

...At the time, [McNamara's] planned Minuteman force stood at 1,200; the Air Force was arguing for 1,800 or more, plus the B-70 and other things. McNamara would engage in this debate from every angle until three years later, when he would lower the size of the force to just this number [i.e., 1,000 Minutemen] he planned back in 1961.......

In the excitement of the first year, there was an initial, terrible moment. On February 4 and 5, McNamara and an official party flew to the Strategic Air Command's headquarters, outside Omaha, to be briefed on the Single Integrated Operating Plan. SIOP was the operational plan the generals would execute if Kennedy --- and McNamara as second in the chain of command --- ever pushed the nuclear button. SIOP itself descended from the original SAC plan of 1951, when SAC bombers were the American strategic force and the Soviets had no striking power of their own. It was known affectionately in Omaha as the Sunday Punch.[45]

The chief of SAC was General Thomas Power, a bomber enthusiast. The plan Power showed McNamara was the one Eisenhower had approved the previous winter. It took account of Air Force intelligence's "discovery" of supposed huge numbers of Soviet missile sites the year before. These added hundreds of new targets to the list. The plan would fire as many as four weapons, sometimes more, at each target.

SIOP was also massive in its retaliation. The bomb that leveled Hiroshima in 1945 and caused its citizens ghastly destruction was a mere 20-kiloton atomic bomb. A similarly sized Russian city in the new SIOP had four bombs aimed at it: a 4.5-megaton giant and three 1.1-megaton ones in case the big bomb was a dud.

More important than the overkill, from McNamara's standpoint, was that Plan 1-A of the four presidential options called for the United States to fire a preemptive first strike at the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Sent across the Arctic on missiles and on bombers would be 3,423 nuclear weapons carrying 7,847 megatons. An estimated 285 million Russians and Chinese would be killed, and millions more in Eastern Europe. The other so-called options in the plan were no better.

...McNamara interrupted the SIOP briefer to announce that firing four weapons on a single target was wasteful; the fallout produced by such an attack would be "fantastic." Worse, citizens in the entire Communist world would become victims in such an attack, even if Eastern Europe had not lifted a finger against the United States or if China stayed uninvolved.

Among the important targets was a big Soviet air defense radar installation in Albania. General Thomas Power, trying to humor his guest, said, "Well, Mr. Secretary, I hope you don't have any friends or relations in Albania because we're just going to have to wipe it out."

McNamara glared at him. The secretary of defense was a very literal man. Firing the nuclear force was the gravest imaginable action he might have to take, and the generals who supposedly worked for him were giving him no options. It also did not comfort him to recall that Soviet doctrine called for its own massive retaliation on the United States. The Kremlin must have its version of SIOP-62 ready to fire at us, he thought.

After leaving, he gave orders to Alain Enthoven to start the arduous, strife-ridden process of forcing SAC to change SIOP so he could order something less than all-out war. It took one and a half years to draw up guidance, to reprogram weapons and communications. The revised SIOP was ready in June 1962.
***************************
[32] WSEG-50 study contents are described by Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 258-260, and Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration, 34-38.
[33] Rand's arguments for the cost-ineffectiveness of bombers are summarized in Kaufmann, McNamara Strategy, 216, 217, 228, and Enthoven and Smith, How Much Is Enough?, 166-168.
[34] The 900 B-47s did not have intercontintental range; SAC had them based mainly overseas to be in striking range of the Soviet Union. But Rand's studies had shown definitively that they were highly vulnerable to Soviet preemptive attack, as were bombers stationed on the ground within the United States. Rand had also shown that missiles would be much more cost-effective to maintain than a large bomber force. Details on the bomber force cutbacks can be found, among other places, at Desmond Ball, Politics, 114, 118, 137.
[35] An Air Force proposal dated July 3, 1961, asked for 3,190 long-range missiles in addition to the 126 Atlas missiles already programmed, for a total of 3,316, not counting the Skybolt air-launched missile, which Kennedy had continued. The Air Force reduced its plans to a "more realistic" figure of between 1,700 and 1,900 Minutemen by the time it bargained with RSM [McNamara] in the fall. During a 1962 trip to Vanderberg Air Force Base, General Thomas Power, chief of SAC, told Kennedy and RSM that the Air Force planned to have 10,000 missiles eventually. RSM recalls that Kennedy was startled by this demand. See Desmond Ball, Politics, 244, 245. Interview, RSM.
[36] See Desmond Ball, Politics, 215-217. Kennedy was also told by science adviser Jerome B. Wiesner, Herbert York, and David Bell, director of the Bureau of the Budget, to cut back the B-70 program.
[37] Desmond Ball, Politics, 217-221.
[38] Sorensen, Kennedy, 347, 348. A discussion of the Whiz Kids' point of view is in Kaufmann, McNamara Strategy, 220-228.
[39] Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban, 77, 78, 85. An M.I.T. study in 1966 concluded that the main military reason for the Soviet resumption of tests was that the United States was producing far more nuclear delivery systems than the Soviet Union --- i.e., the Kennedy-McNamara missile buildup ordered over the previous eight months. Ibid., 84.
[40] See RSM, "Draft: Recommended Long Range Nuclear Delivery Forces, 1963-1967," September 23, 1961. This is the first of the top-secret draft presidential memoranda that RSM would send each fall to the president to justify his proposed decisions in the forthcoming budget for nuclear forces. This document summarizes the proposed bomber cutbacks and Polaris and Minuteman increases, as well as other decisions: the continuation of the Skybolt air-launched missile and the cut of the Nike-Zeus ABM, which he and Kennedy had made in eight months.
[41] See note 8 above. Interview, Raymond Garthoff.
[[dwd - Note 8 reads as follows: "In January and February 1961, the first SAMOS reconnaissance photographs were just being examined. Analysts looked for rail sidings, which were the only means for transporting Soviet missiles to launch sites. The first photos showed some tracks but so few missile sites that, in Kaplan's account, analysts were certain of only four operational Soviet ICBMs. Most classified estimates at the time pegged the number of operational Soviet ICBMs at 35, compared with the 12 Atlas and Titan missiles then in the U.S. forces. The expected Soviet advantage, or 'missile gap,' leaving America far behind was based on warnings of a crash Soviet program to build and deploy a force of 200 to 700 ICBMs by mid-1963. The Air Force was predicting the Soviets would have 1,200 by mid-1965. But in early 1961 U.S. analysts were having difficulty finding hard evidence of a crash program.

"According to Ball's reconstruction, RSM told reporters at the briefing that the evidence was inconclusive [for a missile gap] and they were still looking. This statement was entirely accurate. Conclusive evidence of the unlikelihood of a missile gap only came after April [1961], when Soviet double agent Colonel Oleg Penkovsky told the CIA that there was no crash program, that the Soviets had at most 50 to 100 missiles, and that the SS-6, the principal Soviet ICBM, was in such trouble that they were abandoning it. A good explanation is Garthoff, Intelligence Assessment and Policymaking. See also Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 295, and Desmond Ball, Politics, 90, 91."]]
[42] See RSM, "Draft: Recommended Long Range Nuclear Delivery Forces, 1963-1967," September 23, 1961. Here RSM chose to project "median" and "high" estimates of Soviet ICBMs by mid-1965 of 750 and 1,100, to justify a planned U.S. deployment of 1,200 Minutemen while retaining only a few old Atlas and Titan missiles. By September, the intelligence community, baffled by its inability to find evidence of a Soviet crash program but with some members arguing one could be under way, failed to agree on projections for the future Soviet force. See Garthoff, Intelligence Assessment and Policymaking, 16, 17, and Desmond Ball, Politics, 156-181.
[45] Interviews: RSM, Alain Enthoven, Herbert York. History and details of this SIOP, formally termed SIOP-62, are at Kaplan, Wizards, 263-272, and Martin, Strategic Thought in the Nuclear Age, 133, 139-141.

Translate