General Curtis LeMay - Demented Cold Warrior

Noel Twyman in Bloody Treason wrote of General LeMay's sour relationship with President Kennedy:

John Kennedy and his key people were determined to seize control of the military -- a feat no president had accomplished since World War II. The chiefs resented the Kennedys and their whiz kids who had little or no experience in military command; the chiefs were accustomed to presidents who let them do their thing without meddlesome interference from politicians.

Perhaps the two most dangerous of all the generals were Curtis LeMay and his head of the Strategic Air Command, General Thomas Power. General LeMay is legendary for his mania to start World War III by goading the Soviet Union with unauthorized reconnaissance flights that penetrated their forbidden boundaries.

LeMay was [an] extremely crude character.... Dino Brugioni in Eyeball to Eyeball wrote of LeMay's excesses:

Meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were alluded to by some as a three-ring circus. General Curtis E. LeMay, Air Force chief of staff, was characterized by one observer as always injecting himself into situations "like a rogue elephant barging out of a forest." There are many stories of LeMay's crudeness in dealing with his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He found the meetings dull, tiring, and unproductive. Petulant and often childish when he didn't get his way, LeMay would light a cigar and blow smoke in the direction of anyone challenging his position. To show utter disgust, he would walk into the private Joint Chiefs of Staff toilet, leave the door open, urinate of break wind loudly, and flush the commode a number of aggravating times. He would then saunter calmly back into the meeting pretending that nothing had happened. When angry with individual staff members, he would resort to sarcasm; if that failed, he would direct his wrath to the entire staff.

LeMay was in policy conflicts with the Joint Chiefs. He battled with Admiral Arleigh Burke over the control of the nuclear Polaris submarines. LeMay wanted them under his command and actually achieved some control in the Pacific theater. But Burke successfully fought the Air Force every way he knew -- in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Congress, and in the press -- any way to prevent LeMay's power grab.

LeMay apparently had grown immune to the horror of killing. He had directed the gasoline-jelled fire bombing of Japan -- estimated to have killed "more persons in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man." He said of war: "You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting." He once said, "We killed off -- what -- twenty percent of the population of North Korea." More than two million civilians died in LeMay's campaign from napalm bombing and destruction of massive dams to flood waterways.

LeMay was a ringleader in the Joint Chiefs of Staff insofar as urging Kennedy to go to war in the Bay of Pigs and later in the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy wisely resisted the Joint Chiefs' recommendations. LeMay was the foremost proponent of the nuclear first strike, saying that we should give the Russians the "Sunday punch" before they did it to us.

In the 1950's, under Eisenhower, LeMay had the authority to order a nuclear strike without presidential authorization if the president could not be contacted. That option was extended down to General Thomas Power, head of SAC, whom LeMay himself described as "not stable" and a "sadist." LeMay's proposal for a nuclear first strike and massive destruction of the Soviets was thwarted by Eisenhower, whom LeMay came to consider as indecisive. He was even more disgusted with Kennedy, whom LeMay believed to be a coward. LeMay talked openly about a preemptive attack in which one hundred million people would be killed.

If ever there were a mad, rogue general who would lead a coup, it would appear to have been General Curtis LeMay.

After LeMay retired from the Air Force, he teamed with segregationist governor George Wallace in an unsuccessful candidacy for the vice presidency. In the years following LeMay's failed political race, he became somewhat of a recluse, seldom leaving his home. LeMay died in 1990.