01-06-2013, 08:31 PM
(This post was last modified: 13-06-2013, 03:49 PM by Tracy Riddle.)
Future Warren Commission member John McCloy was one of the key people behind the building of the Pentagon in the 1940s. (The Wise Men, Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas)
8/1949 US News & World Report editorialized, "War scare is having to be drummed up again to excite interest in a gift of arms to other nations. War talk is artificial, phony, but it is regarded as necessary to get Congress stirred up enough to produce a favorable vote."
9/1952 the Wall St. Journal commented that "the economy is adjusting itself to increasingly heavy infusions of military spending. 'It's like dope,' says one economist. 'It's a lot easier to start the habit than to break it.'"
4/16/1953 "Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.... We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat (by 1987, the price was twenty million bushels). We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." -- Dwight David Eisenhower's Cross of Iron speech
In 1958, Senator John Kennedy delivered a major speech attacking the Eisenhower administration for allowing a "missile gap" to open up between allegedly superior Soviet forces and those of the United States. Kennedy repeated the charge of a missile gap in his successful 1960 presidential campaign, developing it into an argument for increased military spending. When he became president, his science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, informed him in February 1961 that "the missile gap was a fiction " -to which Kennedy replied with a single expletive, "delivered," Wiesner said, "more in anger than in relief. " (Gregg Herken interview of Jerome Wiesner, February 9, 1982. Cited by Christopher A. Preble, "Who Ever Believed in the 'Missile Gap'? John F. Kennedy and the Politics of National Security, " Presidential Studies Quarterly 33 , no. 4 (December 2003 , p.816) The United States in fact held an overwhelming strategic advantage over the Soviets' missile force. Whether or not Kennedy already suspected the truth, he had taken a Cold War myth, had campaigned on it, and now partly on its basis, was engaged in a dangerous military buildup as president. Marcus Raskin, an early Kennedy administration analyst who left his access to power to become its critic, summarized the ominous direction in which the new president was headed: " The United States intended under Kennedy to develop a war-fighting capability on all levels of violence from thermonuclear war to counterinsurgency. " (Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 14. Marcus G. Raskin, Essays of a Citizen (Armonk, N.Y. : M. E. Sharpe, 1991), p. 52.
In the last few months of the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, the Air Force began to argue that it needed a successor to its F-105 tactical fighter. This became known as the TFX/F-111 project. In January, 1961, McNamara changed the TFX from an Air Force program to a joint Air Force-Navy under-taking. On 1st October, the two services sent the aircraft industry the request for proposals on the TFX and the accompanying work statement, with instructions to submit the bids by 1st December, 1961. Three of the bids were submitted by individual companies: the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, the North American Aviation Corporation and the Boeing Company. The other three bids represented team efforts: Republic Aviation & Chance Vought; General Dynamics Corporation & Grumman Aircraft; and McDonnell Aircraft & Douglas Aircraft. It soon became clear that Boeing was expected to get the contract. Its main competitor was the General Dynamics/Grumman bid. General Dynamics had been America's leading military contractors during the early stages of the Cold War. For example, in 1958 it obtained $2,239,000,000 worth of government business. This was a higher figure than those obtained by its competitors, such as Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell and North American. More than 80 percent of the firm's business came from the government. However, the company lost $27 million in 1960 and $143 million in 1961. According to an article by Richard Austin Smith in Fortune Magazine, General Dynamics was close to bankruptcy. Smith claimed that "unless it gets the contract for the joint Navy-Air Force fighter (TFX)… the company was down the road to receivership". General Dynamics had several factors in its favor. The president of the company was Frank Pace, the Secretary of the Army (April, 1950-January, 1953). The Deputy Secretary of Defense in 1962 was Roswell Gilpatric, who before he took up the post, was chief counsel for General Dynamics. The Secretary of the Navy was John Connally, a politician from Texas, the state where General Dynamics had its main plant.
1/17/1961 In his farewell address to the nation, Ike said, "We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration...Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction." But then he issued a surprising warning: "Our military establishment today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime...we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions...We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economical, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every State House, every office of the Federal government...we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex...We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes...Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together...The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded...we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite...you and I, and our government--must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow."
In Kennedy's short presidency, the military-industrial complex actually increased its profits and power. JFK's initial call to develop a military response to the Soviet Union and its allies that would be "more flexible" than the Eisenhower policy of mutual assured destruction expanded the Pentagon's contracts with U.S. corporations. Yet in the summer of 1963, the leaders of the military-industrial complex could see storm clouds on their horizon. After JFK's American University address and his quick signing of the Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev, corporate power holders saw the distinct prospect in the not distant future of a settlement in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev were prepared to shift their war of conflicting ideologies to more peaceful fronts. Kennedy wanted a complete ban on the testing of nuclear weapons, then mutual steps in nuclear disarmament. He saw a willing partner in Khrushchev, who wanted to ease the huge burden of arms expenditures on the Soviet economy. In that direction of U. S .-Soviet disarmament lay the diminished power of a corporate military system that for years had controlled the United States government. In his turn toward peace, Kennedy was beginning to undermine the dominant power structure that Eisenhower had finally identified and warned against so strongly as he left the White House. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable)
1/21/1961 Robert McNamara becomes Secretary of Defense, head of an organization that has 2.5 million military personnel and 1.5 million civilians. He pulled enormous power into his office and away from the Service Secretaries, who bitterly resented what they considered an unlawful usurpation of power by the Defense Secretary. In January, Eisenhower had submitted a proposed Defense Dept budget for FY 1962 of $41.8 billion. Within two months, Kennedy and McNamara had added nearly $2 billion to the requests to provide more money for Polaris-armed subs, increase research in non-nuclear weapons and boost Army personnel. McNamara also wanted to cut funding for the B-70. (Mollenhoff, The Pentagon)
2/6/1961 NY Times reported, "Kennedy Defense Study Finds No Evidence of a 'Missile Gap'." The source for this was a background interview McNamara gave the night before; he had told the reporters that if there was a gap, it was in favor of the US. JFK sent out Salinger to deny the stories about the missile gap: "These stories are incorrect. Absolutely wrong. No studies have been completed and no such finding has been made..."
2/8/1961 JFK said in a press conference that "it would be premature to reach a judgment as to whether there is a gap or not a gap." Then he wrote a memo to Bundy: "Could you let me know what progress has been made on the history of the missile gap controversy...I would like to know its genesis...how we came to the judgment that there was a missile gap." (Profile of Power 59)
3/28/1961 JFK told Congress, "Our arms must be subject to ultimate civilian control and command at all times...The primary purpose of our arms is peace, not war...to deter all wars...to insure the adequacy of our bargaining power for an end to the arms race. The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution. Neither our strategy nor our psychology as a nation - and certainly not our economy - must become dependent upon the permanent maintenance of a large military establishment...Our arms will never be used to strike the first blow in any attack." JFK told Congress that he had ordered McNamara to "reappraise our entire defense strategy, capacity, commitments and needs in the light of present and future dangers." Initially, the basic policies outlined by President Kennedy in a message to Congress on March 28, 1961, guided McNamara in the reorientation of the defense program. Kennedy rejected the concept of first-strike attack and emphasized the need for adequate strategic arms and defense to deter nuclear attack on the United States and its allies. U.S. arms, he maintained, must constantly be under civilian command and control, and the nation's defense posture had to be "designed to reduce the danger of irrational or unpremeditated general war". The primary mission of U.S. overseas forces, in cooperation with allies, was "to prevent the steady erosion of the Free World through limited wars". Kennedy and McNamara rejected massive retaliation for a posture of flexible response. The U.S. wanted choices in an emergency other than "inglorious retreat or unlimited retaliation", as the president put it.
3/30/1961 The first announcement of 73 base closings by Defense Secretary McNamara. He claimed it would result in the saving of $220 million a year. (The Pentagon, Mollenhoff)
Retired Admiral Chester Ward said in the spring of 1961, "Some of the advisers now surrounding the President have philosophies regarding foreign affairs which would chill the average American."
"The SAC [Strategic Air Command] people never seemed to be satisfied that to kill once was enough. They want to kill, overkill, overkill, because all of this has built up the prestige of SAC, it created the need for more forces, for a larger budget. …. [T]hat's the way their thinking went." - Admiral Roy L. Johnson, USN (ret'd), Deputy Director of Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (1961-1963) 6 December 1980
4/7/1961 Time magazine had a report from General Electric challenging the president's decision to cancel development of a nuclear-powered aircraft; they claimed they could build a nuclear engine for a test flight by 1963 "for less than one-fifth of the additional billion dollars mentioned by Kennedy."
4/14/1961 Wire services and newspapers throughout the world carried a story quoting the independent Overseas Weekly to the effect that Gen. Walker had been indoctrinating his troops in West Germany with John Birch Society literature since last fall. The Weekly also reported that Walker had called Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt and Dean Acheson "definitely pink." Walker denied the charges.
4/16/1961 This night, General Edwin Walker leaves his command in West Germany -- he is in disfavor with the administration for indoctrinating his troops with right-wing propaganda. Says Walker: "My career has been destroyed. I must find another means of serving my country in time of her great need. To do this I must be free from the power of the little men who, in the name of my country, punish loyal service to it."
4/17/1961 On the night of 16-17 April 1961, when the relatively young President needed the advice of the armed forces as the Bay of Pigs invasion was turning into an unmitigated fiasco, the tension between President Kennedy and Admiral Burke was palpable. As told by Admiral Burke's biographer, the late E.B. Potter, in the early-morning hours of 17 April, President Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in white tie and tails, along with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer and Admiral Burke, in dress uniforms with medals, left the East Room, where the annual Congressional Reception had just concluded, headed for the Oval Office. There, Richard M. Bissell of the CIA informed President Kennedy that although the situation was bad, it "could still take a favorable turn if the President would authorize sending in aircraft from the carrier." "Burke concurred," wrote Potter. "Let me take two jets and shoot down the enemy aircraft," he urged. But President Kennedy said "No," and reminded them that he had said "over and over again" that he would not commit U.S. forces to combat. Apparently, he did not want the world to find out what it already knew, that the whole expedition had been conceived, planned, and armed by the United States. According to Potter, "Burke suggested sending in a destroyer. Whereupon Kennedy explodes. Burke.' He snapped, I don't want the United States involved in this.' All in all, Mr. President,' Burke snapped back, but we are involved."'
Summer 1961: There are approximately 1,250 generals and admirals on active duty in all branches of the US military. "In the summer of 1961, irritation arose over irresponsible and unreasonable censorship of public speeches. High-ranking military officers expressed concern over changes made by the censors that did not seem to make sense, and for which they had received no explanation." By the fall of 1961 Sen. Strom Thurmond demanded an investigation. (The Pentagon, Clark Mollenhoff, 1967)
6/4/1961 A full-page ad in the Los Angeles Mirror-News ran, "The summit meeting has failed. What does that mean for you? A fantastic electronics boom. Billions of dollars, a healthy industry in Southern California employing 110,000 people."
6/12/1961 Gen. Walker was reprimanded by the Army for "taking injudicious actions and for making derogatory public statements about prominent Americans while in command of the 24th Infantry Division in Germany." His planned assignment to command of VIII Corps in Texas is changed to assistant chief of staff for training and operations in Hawaii.
6/18/1961 NY Times reported, "The Pentagon is having its troubles with rightwingers in uniform. A number of officers of high and middle rank are indoctrinating their commands and the civilian population near their bases with political theories resembling those of the John Birch Society. They are also holding up to criticism and ridicule some official policies of the US Government. The most conspicuous example of some of these officers is Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker..."
8/1949 US News & World Report editorialized, "War scare is having to be drummed up again to excite interest in a gift of arms to other nations. War talk is artificial, phony, but it is regarded as necessary to get Congress stirred up enough to produce a favorable vote."
9/1952 the Wall St. Journal commented that "the economy is adjusting itself to increasingly heavy infusions of military spending. 'It's like dope,' says one economist. 'It's a lot easier to start the habit than to break it.'"
4/16/1953 "Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.... We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat (by 1987, the price was twenty million bushels). We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." -- Dwight David Eisenhower's Cross of Iron speech
In 1958, Senator John Kennedy delivered a major speech attacking the Eisenhower administration for allowing a "missile gap" to open up between allegedly superior Soviet forces and those of the United States. Kennedy repeated the charge of a missile gap in his successful 1960 presidential campaign, developing it into an argument for increased military spending. When he became president, his science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, informed him in February 1961 that "the missile gap was a fiction " -to which Kennedy replied with a single expletive, "delivered," Wiesner said, "more in anger than in relief. " (Gregg Herken interview of Jerome Wiesner, February 9, 1982. Cited by Christopher A. Preble, "Who Ever Believed in the 'Missile Gap'? John F. Kennedy and the Politics of National Security, " Presidential Studies Quarterly 33 , no. 4 (December 2003 , p.816) The United States in fact held an overwhelming strategic advantage over the Soviets' missile force. Whether or not Kennedy already suspected the truth, he had taken a Cold War myth, had campaigned on it, and now partly on its basis, was engaged in a dangerous military buildup as president. Marcus Raskin, an early Kennedy administration analyst who left his access to power to become its critic, summarized the ominous direction in which the new president was headed: " The United States intended under Kennedy to develop a war-fighting capability on all levels of violence from thermonuclear war to counterinsurgency. " (Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 14. Marcus G. Raskin, Essays of a Citizen (Armonk, N.Y. : M. E. Sharpe, 1991), p. 52.
In the last few months of the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, the Air Force began to argue that it needed a successor to its F-105 tactical fighter. This became known as the TFX/F-111 project. In January, 1961, McNamara changed the TFX from an Air Force program to a joint Air Force-Navy under-taking. On 1st October, the two services sent the aircraft industry the request for proposals on the TFX and the accompanying work statement, with instructions to submit the bids by 1st December, 1961. Three of the bids were submitted by individual companies: the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, the North American Aviation Corporation and the Boeing Company. The other three bids represented team efforts: Republic Aviation & Chance Vought; General Dynamics Corporation & Grumman Aircraft; and McDonnell Aircraft & Douglas Aircraft. It soon became clear that Boeing was expected to get the contract. Its main competitor was the General Dynamics/Grumman bid. General Dynamics had been America's leading military contractors during the early stages of the Cold War. For example, in 1958 it obtained $2,239,000,000 worth of government business. This was a higher figure than those obtained by its competitors, such as Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell and North American. More than 80 percent of the firm's business came from the government. However, the company lost $27 million in 1960 and $143 million in 1961. According to an article by Richard Austin Smith in Fortune Magazine, General Dynamics was close to bankruptcy. Smith claimed that "unless it gets the contract for the joint Navy-Air Force fighter (TFX)… the company was down the road to receivership". General Dynamics had several factors in its favor. The president of the company was Frank Pace, the Secretary of the Army (April, 1950-January, 1953). The Deputy Secretary of Defense in 1962 was Roswell Gilpatric, who before he took up the post, was chief counsel for General Dynamics. The Secretary of the Navy was John Connally, a politician from Texas, the state where General Dynamics had its main plant.
1/17/1961 In his farewell address to the nation, Ike said, "We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration...Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction." But then he issued a surprising warning: "Our military establishment today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime...we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions...We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economical, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every State House, every office of the Federal government...we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex...We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes...Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together...The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded...we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite...you and I, and our government--must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow."
In Kennedy's short presidency, the military-industrial complex actually increased its profits and power. JFK's initial call to develop a military response to the Soviet Union and its allies that would be "more flexible" than the Eisenhower policy of mutual assured destruction expanded the Pentagon's contracts with U.S. corporations. Yet in the summer of 1963, the leaders of the military-industrial complex could see storm clouds on their horizon. After JFK's American University address and his quick signing of the Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev, corporate power holders saw the distinct prospect in the not distant future of a settlement in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev were prepared to shift their war of conflicting ideologies to more peaceful fronts. Kennedy wanted a complete ban on the testing of nuclear weapons, then mutual steps in nuclear disarmament. He saw a willing partner in Khrushchev, who wanted to ease the huge burden of arms expenditures on the Soviet economy. In that direction of U. S .-Soviet disarmament lay the diminished power of a corporate military system that for years had controlled the United States government. In his turn toward peace, Kennedy was beginning to undermine the dominant power structure that Eisenhower had finally identified and warned against so strongly as he left the White House. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable)
1/21/1961 Robert McNamara becomes Secretary of Defense, head of an organization that has 2.5 million military personnel and 1.5 million civilians. He pulled enormous power into his office and away from the Service Secretaries, who bitterly resented what they considered an unlawful usurpation of power by the Defense Secretary. In January, Eisenhower had submitted a proposed Defense Dept budget for FY 1962 of $41.8 billion. Within two months, Kennedy and McNamara had added nearly $2 billion to the requests to provide more money for Polaris-armed subs, increase research in non-nuclear weapons and boost Army personnel. McNamara also wanted to cut funding for the B-70. (Mollenhoff, The Pentagon)
2/6/1961 NY Times reported, "Kennedy Defense Study Finds No Evidence of a 'Missile Gap'." The source for this was a background interview McNamara gave the night before; he had told the reporters that if there was a gap, it was in favor of the US. JFK sent out Salinger to deny the stories about the missile gap: "These stories are incorrect. Absolutely wrong. No studies have been completed and no such finding has been made..."
2/8/1961 JFK said in a press conference that "it would be premature to reach a judgment as to whether there is a gap or not a gap." Then he wrote a memo to Bundy: "Could you let me know what progress has been made on the history of the missile gap controversy...I would like to know its genesis...how we came to the judgment that there was a missile gap." (Profile of Power 59)
3/28/1961 JFK told Congress, "Our arms must be subject to ultimate civilian control and command at all times...The primary purpose of our arms is peace, not war...to deter all wars...to insure the adequacy of our bargaining power for an end to the arms race. The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution. Neither our strategy nor our psychology as a nation - and certainly not our economy - must become dependent upon the permanent maintenance of a large military establishment...Our arms will never be used to strike the first blow in any attack." JFK told Congress that he had ordered McNamara to "reappraise our entire defense strategy, capacity, commitments and needs in the light of present and future dangers." Initially, the basic policies outlined by President Kennedy in a message to Congress on March 28, 1961, guided McNamara in the reorientation of the defense program. Kennedy rejected the concept of first-strike attack and emphasized the need for adequate strategic arms and defense to deter nuclear attack on the United States and its allies. U.S. arms, he maintained, must constantly be under civilian command and control, and the nation's defense posture had to be "designed to reduce the danger of irrational or unpremeditated general war". The primary mission of U.S. overseas forces, in cooperation with allies, was "to prevent the steady erosion of the Free World through limited wars". Kennedy and McNamara rejected massive retaliation for a posture of flexible response. The U.S. wanted choices in an emergency other than "inglorious retreat or unlimited retaliation", as the president put it.
3/30/1961 The first announcement of 73 base closings by Defense Secretary McNamara. He claimed it would result in the saving of $220 million a year. (The Pentagon, Mollenhoff)
Retired Admiral Chester Ward said in the spring of 1961, "Some of the advisers now surrounding the President have philosophies regarding foreign affairs which would chill the average American."
"The SAC [Strategic Air Command] people never seemed to be satisfied that to kill once was enough. They want to kill, overkill, overkill, because all of this has built up the prestige of SAC, it created the need for more forces, for a larger budget. …. [T]hat's the way their thinking went." - Admiral Roy L. Johnson, USN (ret'd), Deputy Director of Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (1961-1963) 6 December 1980
4/7/1961 Time magazine had a report from General Electric challenging the president's decision to cancel development of a nuclear-powered aircraft; they claimed they could build a nuclear engine for a test flight by 1963 "for less than one-fifth of the additional billion dollars mentioned by Kennedy."
4/14/1961 Wire services and newspapers throughout the world carried a story quoting the independent Overseas Weekly to the effect that Gen. Walker had been indoctrinating his troops in West Germany with John Birch Society literature since last fall. The Weekly also reported that Walker had called Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt and Dean Acheson "definitely pink." Walker denied the charges.
4/16/1961 This night, General Edwin Walker leaves his command in West Germany -- he is in disfavor with the administration for indoctrinating his troops with right-wing propaganda. Says Walker: "My career has been destroyed. I must find another means of serving my country in time of her great need. To do this I must be free from the power of the little men who, in the name of my country, punish loyal service to it."
4/17/1961 On the night of 16-17 April 1961, when the relatively young President needed the advice of the armed forces as the Bay of Pigs invasion was turning into an unmitigated fiasco, the tension between President Kennedy and Admiral Burke was palpable. As told by Admiral Burke's biographer, the late E.B. Potter, in the early-morning hours of 17 April, President Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in white tie and tails, along with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer and Admiral Burke, in dress uniforms with medals, left the East Room, where the annual Congressional Reception had just concluded, headed for the Oval Office. There, Richard M. Bissell of the CIA informed President Kennedy that although the situation was bad, it "could still take a favorable turn if the President would authorize sending in aircraft from the carrier." "Burke concurred," wrote Potter. "Let me take two jets and shoot down the enemy aircraft," he urged. But President Kennedy said "No," and reminded them that he had said "over and over again" that he would not commit U.S. forces to combat. Apparently, he did not want the world to find out what it already knew, that the whole expedition had been conceived, planned, and armed by the United States. According to Potter, "Burke suggested sending in a destroyer. Whereupon Kennedy explodes. Burke.' He snapped, I don't want the United States involved in this.' All in all, Mr. President,' Burke snapped back, but we are involved."'
Summer 1961: There are approximately 1,250 generals and admirals on active duty in all branches of the US military. "In the summer of 1961, irritation arose over irresponsible and unreasonable censorship of public speeches. High-ranking military officers expressed concern over changes made by the censors that did not seem to make sense, and for which they had received no explanation." By the fall of 1961 Sen. Strom Thurmond demanded an investigation. (The Pentagon, Clark Mollenhoff, 1967)
6/4/1961 A full-page ad in the Los Angeles Mirror-News ran, "The summit meeting has failed. What does that mean for you? A fantastic electronics boom. Billions of dollars, a healthy industry in Southern California employing 110,000 people."
6/12/1961 Gen. Walker was reprimanded by the Army for "taking injudicious actions and for making derogatory public statements about prominent Americans while in command of the 24th Infantry Division in Germany." His planned assignment to command of VIII Corps in Texas is changed to assistant chief of staff for training and operations in Hawaii.
6/18/1961 NY Times reported, "The Pentagon is having its troubles with rightwingers in uniform. A number of officers of high and middle rank are indoctrinating their commands and the civilian population near their bases with political theories resembling those of the John Birch Society. They are also holding up to criticism and ridicule some official policies of the US Government. The most conspicuous example of some of these officers is Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker..."