The Cold War (38 page)

The Olympians revise the U.S. educational system. Old-fashioned patriotic messages are emphasized: “It's a wonderful thing to have the hackles of your neck come up when you see the Stars and the Stripes in front of you.” All highschoolers of a certain IQ are required by law to go to college or trade school. A national physical-fitness program will “make a potential Ranger out of every American boy and out of all American girls that are willing to go for it.” At the age of eighteen or nineteen, “this lad can be a Ranger just by putting on the uniform.” Then, say the Olympians, “we … give them their practice in using knives.”

DAFT III, the wildest of all, focuses directly on the man who is the commander in chief of all the military men in the Pentagon's Room 1D-957. In 1964 the Democratic Party,

President Kennedy is reelected in 1964, but his running mate is Nelson Rockefeller. Vice President Lyndon Johnson has resigned and is running as the presidential candidate for the newly organized Constitutional Democrats party; Johnson's running mate is Barry Goldwater.

In his second term, President Kennedy drives up the national debt and launches several apparently meaningless small-scale wars in which 34,407 U.S. servicemen are killed and 107,743 wounded. Robert McNamara continues as secretary of defense, but his Pentagon is caricatured as a building full of recordkeeping
machines and civilians concerned with motion studies and management analyses. Steve Canyon's beloved Strategic Air Command is put under civilian control.

In the 1968 election, Goldwater defeats Rockefeller, and subsequently, he meets Khrushchev at summit conferences in Moscow and Washington. The two leaders cease competitive aid to other nations, embargo military arms exports to China and Africa, and agree to negotiate a peace treaty. In November 1969, Goldwater and Khrushchev meet again in Moscow, along with leaders of Warsaw Pact and NATO nations.

At a grand ball in the Kremlin,

The Olympians react to this cliff-hanger by finishing the scene: President Goldwater—“his white hair gleaming, his black tortoise shell glasses shining”—takes from a briefcase a black box manufactured by Westinghouse (one of whose executives is an Olympian). On the box are rows of buttons, including four labeled
Homeland China, Albania, Hungary, Yugoslavia.
Other buttons are labeled
Total Destruction by Nuclear Devices, Partial Destruction by Conventional Means, Temporary Immobilization by Nerve Gas.
(An Olympian later explains that in playing out their game, they had Kennedy secretly approve the development of earth-orbiting satellites “containing nerve gases, permanent death-dealing chemicals, nuclear and conventional weapons.”)

Goldwater shows the black box, which controls the satellites, to Khrushchev and says, “Mr. Chairman, as you can see, the capabilities for stopping the reported actions lies [
sic
] between the choices you see before you, and I now offer you, as a gesture of good faith, the opportunity of choosing the method of ending the circumstances which have caused your gore [
sic
] to rise.”

The report does not say which button Khrushchev selects.

The gaming ended on the afternoon of December 7 with Paul Nitze, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, speaking to the Olympians. War games like this are important, he says. “We've done what you've just been doing: gone through several Berlin war games, several disarmament war games…. We're going to read with interest the results of the work you've done.”

Nitze was not just being polite. Politico-military simulations were considered so important for policy planners that the lengthy reports were sent directly to Nitze and other high-ranking officials. During the game, the Olympians heard from General Maxwell D. Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; General Earle G. Wheeler, army chief of staff; General Curtis E. LeMay, air force chief of staff; and Admiral C. V. Ricketts, vice chief of naval operations.

The chiefs' remarks are not recorded in the Olympiad report, but the words of a Pentagon general are. He tells the Olympians that this game “is the initial effort to get some fresh and uninhibited minds from the leading walks of American life in here to add fresh ideas to the Department of Defense in the effort to enhance our U.S. interests.”

We know that the Pentagon has continued to enter the Twilight Zone of imaginary futures on the march toward Vietnam, toward Star Wars, toward whatever still lies beyond. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and commanders of U.S. forces use computer-run games for contingency planning. These games, somewhat more tuned to reality than those played out by the Olympians, have included scenarios based on the potential fall of the Marcos regime in the Philippines and a possible U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. Grenada was gamed long before the actual invasion. But because of the secrecy shrouding the games, we do not know the identities of other “fresh and uninhibited minds” who may have been summoned to Room 1D-957 and asked to help construct the American future.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

For a figure of archetypical menace in the Cold War, it would be hard to beat General Curtis E. LeMay, his eternal cigar jutting pugnaciously from the right corner of his mouth. In its most dangerous years, he came to personify the merchant of death, the liberal nightmare of the American military. Part of his malign image was of his own making, and he probably could have cared less. “LeMay spoke too candidly and wrote too much,” Victor Davis Hanson notes in his striking reassessment of LeMay's career. He was almost too quotable. The man who turned the Strategic Air Command into a justifiably feared offensive instrument once said, “There are only two things in the world, SAC bases and SAC targets.” Another time he said that the only foolproof antisubmarine system was “to boil the ocean with nukes.” As for Cuba: “Fry it.” Or North Vietnam: Bomb it “back into the Stone Age.” Not surprisingly, LeMay became the object of antiwar sport, W. C. Fields brandishing a nuke. Indeed, Buck Turgidson and Jack D. Ripper, two characters in Stanley Kubrick's memorable send-up,
Dr. Strangelove,
seem almost a composite of the man. LeMay's reputation may never recover from those twin portrayals. But his detractors could never give him credit for what he was, a sure-handed tactician and unsentimental realist who happened to be one of the great captains of American history: a Ulysses S. Grant of the air, as it were.

LeMay's reputation could rest on his World War II record alone. In Europe in 1943, he developed new formations and tactics that dramatically increased the potency of the Allies' strategic bombing campaign and reduced its losses. In the Pacific in 1945, heading the XXI Bomber Command and, later, the Twentieth Air Force, he soon recognized that
high-altitude bombing of Japan was not working. He stripped down his B-29s and sent them in low, making them in effect giant dive-bombers. He dumped incendiary bombs on Japan's major cities, which were built largely of wood. The two atomic bombs dropped in August were merely the strategic offensive taken to an extreme—and they worked. As the Japanese emperor Hirohito said, he did not want his nation “reduced to ashes.” LeMay's campaign against Japan is the single instance in which a sustained air offensive ended a war. (Curiously, at the time, he objected to the dropping of the bombs, maintaining that incendiary raids would have done the job as well—a position that was noteworthy in view of his later advocacy of nuclear weapons.)

“I suppose if I had lost the war,” LeMay once confessed, as if no one else mattered, “I would have been tried as a war criminal.” And then he added, “All war is immoral, and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.” The cost in lives was terrible, but LeMay's air campaign ultimately saved lives, Allied and Japanese. We had to use the bomb. Time was running out. The projected American-led invasion would have been unimaginably bloody, despite what revisionist historians say. But the abrupt end of the Pacific War would have enormous, if not often considered, ramifications for the Cold War. It kept the Soviets out of the Japanese home islands. They were cobbling together an invasion of the northernmost island, Hokkaido, two months before we were ready to launch Operation Olympic, our invasion of the south island, Kyushu. If the Soviets had succeeded in making a landing, they would have had legitimate claim to the island, a significant (and no doubt troublemaking) role in the formal surrender preparations, and a zone of a partitioned Tokyo. Just think of the Cold War twists of a Berlin in the Pacific. To what extent would a Soviet presence have slowed the reconstruction of Japan? Or influenced our decision in 1950 to intervene in Korea, using Japan as a base? We have Curtis LeMay to thank for ending the war when it did end.

He was just thirty-nine in 1945, and he would play, if anything, an even greater role in influencing the direction the Cold War took. In 1948 he was the principal designer of the Berlin Airlift, originally nicknamed “LeMay's Coal and Feed Company.” He was soon transferred home to head SAC, which he turned into a strategic deterrent all its own, and one that the Soviets were unable to match until the coming of the ICBM. His
B-29s turned much of North Korea into a moonscape, but he chafed at Washington's refusal to allow him to extend the bombing to China, where the real targets lay. (Loose cannon that he was, he did not order overflights of China and Russia, as some historians have maintained: Only the president could do that.)

He never hid his feelings: We should have taken out the U.S.S.R. while we had the chance, which was in the 1950s. “There was, definitely, a time when we could have destroyed all Russia (I mean by that, all of Rus-sia's capability to wage war) without losing a man to their defenses,” he said in his memoirs. He was that confident of SAC. His words could take on an eerie eloquence, as they did in a speech he delivered at the Naval War College in 1956: “Between sunset tonight and sunrise tomorrow morning the Soviet Union would likely cease to be a major military power or even a major nation…. Dawn might break over a nation in-finitely poorer than China—less populated than the United States, and condemned to an agrarian existence perhaps for generations to come.”

LeMay was eventually made chief of staff of the air force, the position he held during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Privately, he believed that JFK behaved like a coward, that we should have exercised a first-strike option. The Sunday morning after the two Ks cemented their deal, the president summoned his military chiefs to the Cabinet Room to inform them. LeMay pounded the table, his cigar no doubt clenched in his teeth. “It's the greatest defeat in our history, Mr. President…. We should invade today!” For the rest of his life, he remained convinced that we had “lost” the Cuban Missile Crisis—and, indeed, the entire Cold War.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON retired last year as a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has written on subjects ranging from Greek military and rural history to the history of warfare and contemporary agriculture. His books include
The Western Way of War, Fields Without Dreams, Carnage and Culture, The Soul of Battle, Ripples of Battle,
and a history of the Peloponnesian War,
A War Like No Other
. He writes a weekly column for the
Chicago Tribune
and is writing a novel set in ancient Greece about the freeing of the Helots. He still lives on the farm outside Fresno where he grew up.

I
N
DR. STRANGELOVE
,
Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black satire about a nuclear Armageddon, George C. Scott portrays the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gum-chewing, jingoistic, right-wing nut General Buck Turgidson. Along with his wing commander, General Jack D. Ripper (the cigar-chomping Sterling Hayden), Turgidson welcomes the chance to unleash the nuclear firepower of America's bombers in the final showdown against the “Russkies.” Both Turgidson and Ripper, of course, bear some uncanny resemblances to General Curtis E. LeMay, who at the time was serving on the Joint Chiefs in his role as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force.

LeMay had clashed continually with Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, over the so-called missile gap and limitations on the use of American strategic power during the Cold War—especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis and early in the Vietnam War (1961–65). The unpredictable LeMay was supposedly quoted at one Pentagon strategy session on Cuba as saying, “Now we've got him [the Russian Bear] in a trap, let's take his leg off right up to his testicles. On second thought, let's take off his testicles too.” Buck Turgidson likewise brags about catching “the Commies with their pants down” in a war that General Ripper says is “too important to be left to the politicians.”