01-06-2013, 08:34 PM
(This post was last modified: 13-06-2013, 03:50 PM by Tracy Riddle.)
7/7/1961 The U.S. was far ahead in the arms race. Yet the military continued to press for a rapid build-up of strategic missiles. Curtis LeMay had asked for at least 2,400 Minutemen; Gen. Thomas Power of the Strategic Air Command had asked for 10,000. All were to be unleashed in a single paroxysm of mass annihilation, known as SIOP, the Single Integrated Operational Plan. SIOP was a recipe for blowing up the world, whether in a first or a second strike. As McGeorge Bundy wrote to the President on July 7, 1961:
"...All agree that the current strategic war plan is dangerously rigid and, if continued without amendment, may leave you with very little choice as to how you face the moment of thermonuclear truth. We believe that you may want to raise this question with Bob McNamara in order to have a prompt review and new orders if necessary. In essence, the current plan calls for shooting off everything we have in one shot, and is so constructed as to make any more flexible course very difficult." (quoted in Kaplan, 297) During that summer of 1961, the Defense Secretary ordered an overhaul of SIOP carried out by RAND analysts (including Daniel Ellsberg) and quickly approved by the JCS. (Bobbitt, 48) Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara eventually imposed a limit of 1,000 Minuteman missiles, angering the Chiefs. Kennedy also launched efforts to gain operational control of the nuclear force, then far from being securely concentrated in the President's hands.
7/19/1961 "At a Georgetown dinner party recently, the wife of a leading senator sat next to Gen. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the Air Force. He told her a nuclear war was inevitable. It would begin in December and be all over by the first of the year. In that interval, every major American city -- Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles -- would be reduced to rubble. Similarly, the principal cities of the Soviet Union would be destroyed. The lady, as she tells it, asked if there were any place where she could take her children and grandchildren to safety; the general would, of course, at the first alert be inside the top-secret underground hideout near Washington from which the retaliatory strike would be directed. He told her that certain unpopulated areas in the far west would be safest." --Marquis Childs, nationally syndicated columnist, Washington Post, 19 July 1961
A 1994 article (PDF) about Curtis Le May:
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg ...tem 13.pdf
Did Gen. Curtis E. Le May, chief of the Strategic Air Command in the 1950s and the model for one nuke-crazed general in the film "Dr. Strangelove," have a real-life secret agenda of trying to provoke nuclear war with the Soviet Union?
That's the question raised by the recent disclosure of unauthorized U.S. Air Force spy flights over the U.S.S.R. in 1954, 1957 and 1958. These overflights were revealed in a BBC documentary in May in which U.S. airmen talked about how Le May ordered provocative flights over the Soviet Union, apparently without the permission of President Eisenhower.
...
It was at this meeting that the question arises about Le May's motives. Hal Austin recalls what happened next: "Then Gen. Le May said, 'Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.'
...
Nonetheless, six months later, Le May authorized more flights. In December 1956, he sent three RB-47 aircraft over Vladivostock. This time, the Soviets went public. Still-classified minutes of a White House meeting shows that Eisenhower was furious and rebuked the Air Force. The Air Force, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, says it cannot find the records of these flights.
...
Another clue comes from Hal Austin. He crossed paths with Le May again in the late
'80s, at Air Force Village West, a retirement community in Riverside, California. "I brought up the subject of the mission we had flown," Austin recalled. "And he apparently remembered it like it was yesterday. We chatted about it a little bit. His comment again was 'Well; we'd have been a hell of a lot better off if we'd got World War III started in those days.' Well, who knows? We'll never know because history didn't go that way."
7/1961 This month, Sen. Fulbright, "noting the activities of General Edwin Walker, called for an investigation of the Institute for American Strategy, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all for subversive activity. Fulbright compared the mentality of some US military men to that of the OAS (Secret Army Organization) in Algeria…" (Webster Tarpley, Synthetic Terror)
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2002/29...right.html
The Fulbright Memorandum was drafted in July 1961 as a personal communication between the Senate and the Secretary of Defense, who was Robert McNamara.[2] Entitled "Propaganda Activities of Military Personnel Directed at the Public," the memorandum began by noting that a 1958 National Security Council directive had made it the policy of the United States "to make use of military personnel and facilities to arouse the public to the menace of the Cold War." Fulbright reported that private organizations were preparing material that was then distributed by the military, material which was contrary to the President's policies. He noted that the actual programs being carried out under the 1958 directive "made use of extremely radical right-wing speakers and/or materials, with the probable net result of condemning foreign and domestic policies of the administration in the public mind."
Fulbright's allusion to a military coup, came as follows: "Perhaps it is farfetched to call forth the revolt of the French generals as an example of the ultimate danger. Nevertheless, military officers, French or American, have some common characteristics arising from their profession and there are numerous military 'fingers on the trigger' throughout the world. While this danger may appear very remote, contrary to American tradition, and even American military tradition, so also is the 'long twilight struggle' [referring to President Kennedy's characterization of the Cold War as a conflict which may not be solved 'in our lifetime'], and so also is the very existence of an American military program for educating the public."[3]
Fulbright called for a review of the mission and operation of the National War Collegeas to whether it should operate under the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)and also urged that the relationships among FPRI, IAS, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College, and the JCS, be reexamined "from the standpoint of whether these relationships do not amount to official support for a viewpoint at variance with that of the administration."
Fulbright cited 11 examples of questionable educational and propaganda activities involving military personnel; these included:
* A "Strategy for Survival" conference held at Fort Smith and Little Rock, Arkansas, dominated by George S. Benson and other speakers from Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas. (Benson, one of the leaders of the Church of God which produced "Get Clinton" operative, independent counsel Kenneth Starr, among others, was a British-linked intelligence operative and evangelist.) Harding College produced a widely circulated film, "Communism on the Map," which blamed the advance of Communism on Franklin Roosevelt (for recognizing the Soviet Union) and on Gen. George Marshall (for allowing the Communist takeover of China).
* A "Fourth Dimensional Warfare Seminar" in Pittsburgh, including a prominent speaker from the IAS who said that U.S. foreign policy since World War II had played into Soviet hands, and that some of Kennedy's advisers "have philosophies regarding foreign affairs that would chill the average American."
* Other meetings and seminars which promoted the pro-House Un-American Activities Committee film "Operation Abolition," and which featured Dr. Fred C. Schwartz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, Herbert Philbrick, Frank Barnett of the Richardson Foundation and IASall of whom warned of Communist subversion and infiltration and attacked the policies of the Kennedy Administration.
Attached to the Fulbright Memorandum were a number of documents, including an article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists which focused on the book American Strategy for the Nuclear Age, which was described as outlining the master curriculum for the military-related seminars. The book was written by Frank Barnett, then the research director for both the IAS and the Richardson Foundation, and it contained contributions from FPRI director Robert Strausz-Hupé (see Profile, in this section), and Col. William Kintner (then assigned to FPRI).
The article accurately described the IAS as having grown out of a 1955 symposium in Chicago called the "National Military-Industrial Conference"; the IAS was established and financed by the H. Smith Richardson Foundation to carry forward the work of the Conference. In 1959, the IAS began a series of "National Strategy Seminars," which were authorized by the JCS to take over the education of reserve officers. IAS and Strausz-Hupé worked closely with the National War College in this period. (Among the speakers at these seminars were Harvard's William Yandell Elliott and Henry Kissinger.)
The Fulbright Memorandum, as could be expected, set off a huge controversy, with articles and editorialsand not a little behind-the-scenes activity as well.
For example, FPRI and its Director Strausz-Hupé went on a mobilization to deny that they were organizing a military coup. FPRI circulated a private letter to its "Associates, friends and supporters" on Oct. 18, 1961, containing an attack on Fulbright and a lengthy defense of its own actions. Among other things, it stated: "The Foreign Policy Research Institute takes a certain pride in being linked to the four organizations mentioned in the Fulbright memorandum. However, an investigation of our relationships with them will be a disappointment to our critics. There is no sinister plot underfoot at the Foreign Policy Research Institute to inspire United States military personnel to launch a coup d'état along the lines of the abortive French affair in Algeria."
Shortly after this, Strausz-Hupé drafted a letter to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and sent a copy to William Yandell Elliott, with a "Dear Bill" cover letter. Elliott had been a speaker at some of the seminars in question, including one at the National War College in July 1960, and another in Chicago in April 1961.
7/20/1961 At a National Security Council Meeting, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Gen. Lemnitzer and CIA director Allen Dulles present a plan for a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union "in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions." President Kennedy walks out of the meeting, saying to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "And we call ourselves the human race." (Brothers, Talbott)
Arthur Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times gives this account:
"...Kennedy received the Net Evaluation, an annual doomsday briefing analyzing the chances of nuclear war. An Air Force General presented it, said Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, "as though it were for a kindergarten class.. Finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it. We never had another one." (p. 483)
McGeorge Bundy evidently refers to the same meeting in this passage:
"In the summer of 1961 [Kennedy] went through a formal briefing on the net assessment of a general nuclear war between the two superpowers, and he expressed his own reaction to Dean Rusk as they walked from the cabinet room to the Oval Office for a private meeting on other subjects: "And we call ourselves the human race." (p. 354)
Dean Rusk describes the meeting as an "awesome experience" in his memoirs, As I Saw It, published in 1990.
"President Kennedy clearly understood what nuclear war meant and was appalled by it. In our many talks together, he never worried about the threat of assassination, but he occasionally brooded over whether it would be his fate to push the nuclear button... If any of us had doubts, that 1961 briefing convinced us that a nuclear war must never be fought. Consequently, throughout the Kennedy and Johnson years we worked to establish a stable deterrent..." (p. 246-7)
Numerous other apparent accounts of the meeting exist, though they do not refer to it by name or date. All agree on Kennedy's reaction. But none reveal what was actually discussed. Theodore Sorenson's Kennedy, published only four years later, presents an understandably benign version:
"That briefing confirmed, however, the harsh facts [Kennedy] already knew: (1) that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States could 'win' a nuclear war in any rational sense of the word; (2) that, except to deter an all-out Soviet attack, our threat of 'massive retaliation' to every Communist move was no longer credible, now that it invited our own destruction; and (3) that a policy of 'pre-emptive first strike' or 'preventive war' was no longer open to either side, inasmuch as even a surprise missile attack would trigger, before those missiles reached their targets, a devastating retaliation that neither country could risk or accept." (p. 513)
Unfortunately, the critical third point was not yet true. As UnderSecretary of State Roger Hilsman wrote in 1967:
"As the intelligence community looked at their estimates in 1958, 1959, and 1960, and even through the first half of 1961, they saw a missile gap developing that would come to a peak about 1963." (p. 162)
What Hilsman does not say explicitly is that the estimated missile gap was in America's favor. The Soviets had virtually no operational ICBMs in 1961, a fact known to American intelligence at least by the end of 1960. And it appears the Russians did not solve their fundamental technical problem, namely building a hydrogen bomb small enough to be carried by a missile of manageable size, until years later. (Sorenson, 524; Bobbitt, 61).
The memorandum reproduced here was written for Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who did not attend the meeting, by Colonel Howard Burris, his military aide.
TOP SECRET EYES ONLY (Declassified: June, 1993)
Notes on National Security Council Meeting July 20, 1961
General Hickey, Chairman of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee, presented the annual report of his group. General Lemnitzer stated that the assumption of this year's study was a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.
After the presentation by General Hickey and by the various members of the Subcommittee, the President asked if there had ever been made an assessment of damage results to the U.S.S.R which would be incurred by a preemptive attack. General Lemnitzer stated that such studies had been made and that he would bring them over and discuss them personally with the President. In recalling General Hickey's opening statement that these studies have been made since 1957, the President asked for an appraisal of the trend in the effectiveness of the attack. General Lemnitzer replied that he would also discuss this with the President.
Since the basic assumption of this year's presentation was an attack in late 1963, the President asked about probable effects in the winter of 1962. Mr. Dulles observed that the attack would be much less effective since there would be considerably fewer missiles involved. General Lemnitzer added a word of caution about accepting the precise findings of the Committee since these findings were based upon certain assumptions which themselves might not be valid.
The President posed the question as to the period of time necessary for citizens to remain in shelters following an attack. A member of the Subcommittee replied that no specific period of time could be cited due to the variables involved, but generally speaking, a period of two weeks should be expected.
The President directed that no member in attendance at the meeting disclose even the subject of the meeting.
7/21/1961 UPI story by David Burnham reported "Study Asserts Military Rightists Raise Obstacles to Kennedy Program."
7/25/1961 JFK, in a major television speech on the crisis in Berlin, calls for additional $3.5 billion for defense and additional reserve troops, increasing draft calls, and recommending the construction of fallout shelters. "We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force" Yet Kennedy also stressed the dangers: "miscommunication could rain down more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history" He asked for increased military appropriations and called out 150,000 reserve personnel. But he did not engage the Soviets. The wall was allowed to remain intact when constructed in August of 1961, a symbolic column of soldiers was sent through to West Berlin, and a fallout shelter program was undertaken in the United States. With the Burris memorandum, the reasoning behind the fallout shelter program now begins to fall into place. As a civil defense measure against a Soviet nuclear attack, the flimsy cinderblock shelters Americans were told to build were absurd. But they could indeed protect those in them, for a couple of weeks, from radiation drifting thousands of miles after a U.S. pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union. It is known that Kennedy later regretted this program.
7/26/1961 Sen. Strom Thurmond defended the anti-Communist views of the military in a speech before the Senate: "The military officers...are charged with defending our country from all enemies, foreign and domestic...the military leader must know the enemy in order to defend our country against him....There can be no truthful denial that our country and its leaders have, on many occasions in the past, accepted the most thinly-veiled Communist fronts for whatever they purported themselves to be."
7/29/1961 Sen. Barry Goldwater, in a speech to the American Legion, criticized "the repeated and growing attacks being made on our military leaders, and to the strenuous efforts being made to muzzle them and prevent them from telling their troops and the American people some of the facts which they should know...This is no pink tea we are engaged in - it is a grim battle to the death."
8/1/1961 St Petersburg Times (Florida) reported that MacDill AFB had received word that it would remain open until at least June 1963. "This is a definite extension of more than a year, since plans had been to phase out the Strategic Air Command (SAC) base in April and May of 1962. Col. Wayne Connors, MacDill base commander, said the extension means that some major repairs to air strip surfaces will be made." Wikipedia: In 1962, MacDill AFB was transferred to Tactical Air Command (TAC). Bomber aircraft would remain at MacDill until the 306th Bombardment Wing's transfer to McCoy AFB, and SAC would continue to maintain a tenant presence at MacDill through the 1980s, utilizing their Alert Facility as a dispersal location for B-52 and KC-135 aircraft. But for all practical purposes, the 1960s marked MacDill's transition to a fighter-centric TAC installation. Under TAC, MacDill remained a fighter base for almost 30 years, but other changes went on in the background.
8/30/1961 The Soviet Union resumes atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons, exploding a hydrogen bomb over Siberia. British PM Harold Macmillan recalled in his memoirs (At the End of the Day, 1961-1963) that he "knew the strong pressure being brought upon him [JFK] by the Pentagon and the atomic scientists to resume [aboveground nuclear] tests immediately...At the same time I knew that Kennedy was desperately anxious to postpone the day of resuming tests, which he regarded as a confession of failure in the diplomatic field." In 1961 the US had 450 nuclear missiles, the Kennedy administration was asking for 950, but the JCS wanted 3000. When JFK discovered that 450 was adequate for the military's needs, he asked McNamara why they were pushing for 950; McNamara replied, "that's the smallest number we can take up on the Hill without getting murdered." (The Best and the Brightest p91) "The alliance between the military and the right disturbed the Kennedys. This was why the President backed McNamara so vigorously in the effort to stop warmongering speeches by generals and admirals." (RFK and his Times p484) McNamara told Robert Scheer in 1982 that during JFK's presidency, the JCS was always pushing for a nuclear first-strike capability, which Kennedy and McNamara rejected. (With Enough Shovels p10) O'Brien recalled him complaining about the military: "They always give you their pitch about their instant reaction and their split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it's so hard to win a war." (No Final Victories p142)
9/25/1961 JFK's speech at the United Nations: "Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. " . . . It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race-to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved."
Late September 1961: State Dept issued a document entitled 'Freedom from War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World,' which would ban nuclear weapons, keep space free of armed conflict, and "no state (including the U.S.) would have the military power to challenge the progressively strengthened UN Peace Force." (Gary Allen, None Dare Call it Treason p81) This was based on Kennedy's recent speech.
10/1/1961 The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was created by Robert McNamara. It was designed to coordinate all US military intelligence; the CIA saw this as a threat. Its first director was Lt. Gen. Joseph F. Carroll, former inspector general of the Air Force. He had been with the FBI and was a leading aide to J Edgar Hoover. He moved to Air Force in 1947 to set up its first investigation and counter-intelligence section. His two main subordinates, Maj. Gen. William W. Quinn and Rear Adm. Samuel B. Frankel, were former CIA men and had worked closely with Allen Dulles. Quinn left the DIA to become commander of the 7th Army in 11/1963. By 1964 the DIA had supplanted the services' intelligence groups and was competing with the CIA for overall intelligence coordination. (The Invisible Government, Wise p211-16) The DIA is made up of both civilians and military personnel. It is said to have 7000 employees. (The Intelligence War p27)
In October 1961, the president's newly appointed personal representative in West Berlin, retired General Lucius Clay, tried to escalate the Berlin crisis to a point where the president would be forced to choose victory. In August, Khrushchev had ordered the building of the Berlin Wall, thereby ending a mass exodus of East Germans to the capitalist side of the city. In September, General Clay began secret preparations to tear down the wall. He ordered Major General Albert Watson, the U.S. military commandant in West Berlin, to have army engineers build a duplicate section of the Berlin Wall in a forest. U.S. tanks with bulldozer attachments then experimented with assaults on the substitute wall. General Bruce Clarke, who commanded U.S. forces in Europe, learned of Clay's exercise and put a stop to it. (Raymond L. Garthoff, " Berlin 1961: The Record Corrected, " Foreign Policy no. 84 (Fall 1991) , p.147)
When he told Clay to end the wall-bashing rehearsals, Clarke looked at Clay's red telephone to the White House and said, "If you don't like that, call the President and see what he says." (Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, p. 249.) Clay chose not to. Nor did either man ever inform the president of what had gone on at the secret wall in the forest. While Kennedy remained unaware of Clay's provocative planning, Khrushchev was much better informed. Soviet spies had watched the forest maneuvers, had taken pictures of them, and had relayed their reports and pictures to Moscow. Khrushchev then assembled a group of close advisers to plot out step by step their counter scenario to a U.S. assault on the Berlin Wall. (Garthoff, " Berlin 1961, " pp. 147-48 , 152) However, Nikita Khrushchev doubted that John Kennedy had authorized any such attack. He and the president had already begun their secret communications and had in fact even made private progress in the previous month on the question of Berlin. Khrushchev strongly suspected that Kennedy was being undermined. (Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation o f a Superpower (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University, 2000), p. 464.)
Khrushchev's son, Sergei, in his memoir, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, has described from the Soviet standpoint how the two Cold War leaders had begun to conspire toward coexistence. His account has been corroborated at key points by Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger. At their Vienna meeting in June, Kennedy had proposed to Khrushchev that they establish "a private and unofficial channel of communications that would bypass all formalities." Khrushchev agreed. In September the Soviet premier made a first use of the back channel.
10/12/1961 JFK attacks the far-right in a speech at the University of North Carolina, saying that "we shall be neither Red nor dead, but alive and free..." (Wash. Post 10/13)
Mid-Oct 1961 Kennedy was so resistant to the military's demand for troops that he took a step he knew would further alienate them. He subverted his military leaders ' recommendations by planting a story that they were against sending combat units. In mid-October the New York Times reported erroneously: "Military leaders at the Pentagon, no less than General Taylor himself, are understood to be reluctant to send organized U.S. combat units into Southeast Asia. " The opposite was the truth. As we have seen, the Pentagon leaders and General Taylor were in fact beating their war drums as loudly as they could in the president's ears. They wanted combat troops. Kennedy fought back with a public lie. As the Pentagon Papers noted, " It is just about inconceivable that this story could have been given out except at the direction of the president, or by him personally. " The president was undermining his military leaders by dispensing the false information that they were against the very step they most wanted him to take. The ploy worked . As the Pentagon Papers observed, "The Times story had the apparently desired effect. Speculation about combat troops almost disappeared from news stories . . . " However, besides misleading the public, Kennedy was playing a dangerous game with the Pentagon's leaders. His misrepresentation of their push for combat troops would prove to be one more piece of evidence in their mounting case against the president.
But Kennedy would do anything he could to keep from sending combat troops to Vietnam. He told Arthur Schlesinger, " They want a force of American troops. They say it's necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. But it will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another. "
10/21/1961 In a major speech cleared by Rusk, Bundy and JFK, Roswell Gilpatric publicly deflates the "missile gap" theory, telling his audience in Hot Springs, Virginia, that the United States actually possessed a substantially larger nuclear arsenal than the USSR.
10/27/1961 Ten American M-4 8 tanks, with bulldozers mounted on the lead tanks, ground their way up to Checkpoint Charlie at the center of the Berlin Wall. They were confronted by ten Soviet tanks, which had been waiting for them quietly on the side streets of East Berlin. A well-briefed Nikita Khrushchev and his advisers had set their counterplan in motion. Twenty more Soviet tanks arrived soon after as reinforcements, and twenty more U.S. tanks moved up from the allied side. The American and Russian tanks faced off, with their long-nosed guns trained on one another, ready to fire. Throughout the night and for a total of sixteen hours, the confrontation continued. Soviet foreign affairs adviser Valentin Falin was beside Khrushchev throughout the crisis. Falin said later that if the U.S. tanks and bulldozers had advanced farther, the Soviet tanks would have fired on them, bringing the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. "closer to the third world war than ever . . . Had the tank duel started then in Berlin-and everything was running toward it-the events most probably would have gone beyond any possibility of control. " (Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev ( New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991) , p.335) An alarmed President Kennedy phoned Lucius Clay. Although Kennedy left no record of the conversation, Clay claims the president said, "I know you people over there haven't lost your nerve." Clay said his bold reply was: "Mr. President, we're not worried about our nerves. We're worrying about those of you people in Washington." At that point the president sent an urgent message to Khrushchev via the back channel. Robert Kennedy contacted Soviet press attache Georgi Bolshakov. RFK said that if Khrushchev would withdraw his tanks within twenty-four hours, JFK would do the same within thirty minutes later. (Robert Kennedy in His Own Words, edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (New York: Bantam Books, 1988) , pp. 259-60. See also Garthoff, " Berlin 1961, " p. 150, and S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 466.) The president then ordered Lucius Clay to be ready to carry out the U.S. side of such a withdrawal.
11/13/1961 Two and a half weeks after the tanks confrontation that threatened a nuclear holocaust, its instigator, Lucius Clay, sent a telegram to Secretary of State Dean Rusk in which he stated: "Today, we have the nuclear strength to assure victory at awful cost. It no longer suffices to consider our strength as a deterrent only and to plan to use it only in retaliation. No ground probes on the highway which would use force should or could be undertaken unless we are prepared instantly to follow them with a nuclear strike. It is certain that within two or more years retaliatory power will be useless as whoever strikes first will strike last. " (Clay-Rusk telegram, November 13, 1961 ; in FR US, 1961-1963, Volume XIV: Berlin Crisis, 1961-1962 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994) , p. 586)
11/21/1961 Memo from McNamara to JFK informing him that the Air Force wanted to focus on developing a nuclear "first-strike capability" against the USSR. (Scheer, With Enough Shovels p216)
11/24/1961 New York Times: Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower last night [in a TV interview] urged officers of the armed services to shun partisan politics. Speaking as a General of the Army, he declared it was "bad practice -- very bad" for an officer, even when testifying under oath before a committee of Congress, to express opinions "on political matters or economic matters that are contrary to the President's." ...The former President was blunt in discussing the recent "rise of extremists" in the country. "I don't think the United States needs super-patriots," he declared. "We need patriotism, honestly practiced by all of us, and we don't need these people that are more patriotic than you or anybody else." His definition of extremists embraced those who would "go back to eliminating the income tax from our laws and the rights of people to unionize... [and those] advocating some form of dictatorship." It also included those who "make radical statements [and] attack people of good repute who are proved patriots." At that point, Walter Cronkite of the C.B.S. news staff, who conducted the interview, asked about the "military man's role in our modern political life." He did not cite, but obviously referred to, the case of Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, who stirred up a controversy that led to his "admonishment" for the political nature of the indoctrination of his troops. General Walker later resigned from the Army. "I believe the Army officer, Navy officer, Air officer," General Eisenhower said, "should not be talking about political matters, particularly domestically, and never in the international field, unless he is asked to do so because of some particular position he might hold." ...The general declared there was hope for disarmament and better East-West relations. As the Russian standard of living improves, the Russian people will begin to understand that there is another way of life, he said...
In December 1961, McNamara established the United States Strike Command (STRICOM). Authorized to draw forces when needed from the Strategic Army Corps (STRAC), the Tactical Air Command, and the airlift units of the Military Air Transport Service and the military services, Strike Command had the mission "to respond swiftly and with whatever force necessary to threats against the peace in any part of the world, reinforcing unified commands or… carrying out separate contingency operations."
"...All agree that the current strategic war plan is dangerously rigid and, if continued without amendment, may leave you with very little choice as to how you face the moment of thermonuclear truth. We believe that you may want to raise this question with Bob McNamara in order to have a prompt review and new orders if necessary. In essence, the current plan calls for shooting off everything we have in one shot, and is so constructed as to make any more flexible course very difficult." (quoted in Kaplan, 297) During that summer of 1961, the Defense Secretary ordered an overhaul of SIOP carried out by RAND analysts (including Daniel Ellsberg) and quickly approved by the JCS. (Bobbitt, 48) Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara eventually imposed a limit of 1,000 Minuteman missiles, angering the Chiefs. Kennedy also launched efforts to gain operational control of the nuclear force, then far from being securely concentrated in the President's hands.
7/19/1961 "At a Georgetown dinner party recently, the wife of a leading senator sat next to Gen. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the Air Force. He told her a nuclear war was inevitable. It would begin in December and be all over by the first of the year. In that interval, every major American city -- Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles -- would be reduced to rubble. Similarly, the principal cities of the Soviet Union would be destroyed. The lady, as she tells it, asked if there were any place where she could take her children and grandchildren to safety; the general would, of course, at the first alert be inside the top-secret underground hideout near Washington from which the retaliatory strike would be directed. He told her that certain unpopulated areas in the far west would be safest." --Marquis Childs, nationally syndicated columnist, Washington Post, 19 July 1961
A 1994 article (PDF) about Curtis Le May:
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg ...tem 13.pdf
Did Gen. Curtis E. Le May, chief of the Strategic Air Command in the 1950s and the model for one nuke-crazed general in the film "Dr. Strangelove," have a real-life secret agenda of trying to provoke nuclear war with the Soviet Union?
That's the question raised by the recent disclosure of unauthorized U.S. Air Force spy flights over the U.S.S.R. in 1954, 1957 and 1958. These overflights were revealed in a BBC documentary in May in which U.S. airmen talked about how Le May ordered provocative flights over the Soviet Union, apparently without the permission of President Eisenhower.
...
It was at this meeting that the question arises about Le May's motives. Hal Austin recalls what happened next: "Then Gen. Le May said, 'Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.'
...
Nonetheless, six months later, Le May authorized more flights. In December 1956, he sent three RB-47 aircraft over Vladivostock. This time, the Soviets went public. Still-classified minutes of a White House meeting shows that Eisenhower was furious and rebuked the Air Force. The Air Force, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, says it cannot find the records of these flights.
...
Another clue comes from Hal Austin. He crossed paths with Le May again in the late
'80s, at Air Force Village West, a retirement community in Riverside, California. "I brought up the subject of the mission we had flown," Austin recalled. "And he apparently remembered it like it was yesterday. We chatted about it a little bit. His comment again was 'Well; we'd have been a hell of a lot better off if we'd got World War III started in those days.' Well, who knows? We'll never know because history didn't go that way."
7/1961 This month, Sen. Fulbright, "noting the activities of General Edwin Walker, called for an investigation of the Institute for American Strategy, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all for subversive activity. Fulbright compared the mentality of some US military men to that of the OAS (Secret Army Organization) in Algeria…" (Webster Tarpley, Synthetic Terror)
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2002/29...right.html
The Fulbright Memorandum was drafted in July 1961 as a personal communication between the Senate and the Secretary of Defense, who was Robert McNamara.[2] Entitled "Propaganda Activities of Military Personnel Directed at the Public," the memorandum began by noting that a 1958 National Security Council directive had made it the policy of the United States "to make use of military personnel and facilities to arouse the public to the menace of the Cold War." Fulbright reported that private organizations were preparing material that was then distributed by the military, material which was contrary to the President's policies. He noted that the actual programs being carried out under the 1958 directive "made use of extremely radical right-wing speakers and/or materials, with the probable net result of condemning foreign and domestic policies of the administration in the public mind."
Fulbright's allusion to a military coup, came as follows: "Perhaps it is farfetched to call forth the revolt of the French generals as an example of the ultimate danger. Nevertheless, military officers, French or American, have some common characteristics arising from their profession and there are numerous military 'fingers on the trigger' throughout the world. While this danger may appear very remote, contrary to American tradition, and even American military tradition, so also is the 'long twilight struggle' [referring to President Kennedy's characterization of the Cold War as a conflict which may not be solved 'in our lifetime'], and so also is the very existence of an American military program for educating the public."[3]
Fulbright called for a review of the mission and operation of the National War Collegeas to whether it should operate under the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)and also urged that the relationships among FPRI, IAS, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College, and the JCS, be reexamined "from the standpoint of whether these relationships do not amount to official support for a viewpoint at variance with that of the administration."
Fulbright cited 11 examples of questionable educational and propaganda activities involving military personnel; these included:
* A "Strategy for Survival" conference held at Fort Smith and Little Rock, Arkansas, dominated by George S. Benson and other speakers from Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas. (Benson, one of the leaders of the Church of God which produced "Get Clinton" operative, independent counsel Kenneth Starr, among others, was a British-linked intelligence operative and evangelist.) Harding College produced a widely circulated film, "Communism on the Map," which blamed the advance of Communism on Franklin Roosevelt (for recognizing the Soviet Union) and on Gen. George Marshall (for allowing the Communist takeover of China).
* A "Fourth Dimensional Warfare Seminar" in Pittsburgh, including a prominent speaker from the IAS who said that U.S. foreign policy since World War II had played into Soviet hands, and that some of Kennedy's advisers "have philosophies regarding foreign affairs that would chill the average American."
* Other meetings and seminars which promoted the pro-House Un-American Activities Committee film "Operation Abolition," and which featured Dr. Fred C. Schwartz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, Herbert Philbrick, Frank Barnett of the Richardson Foundation and IASall of whom warned of Communist subversion and infiltration and attacked the policies of the Kennedy Administration.
Attached to the Fulbright Memorandum were a number of documents, including an article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists which focused on the book American Strategy for the Nuclear Age, which was described as outlining the master curriculum for the military-related seminars. The book was written by Frank Barnett, then the research director for both the IAS and the Richardson Foundation, and it contained contributions from FPRI director Robert Strausz-Hupé (see Profile, in this section), and Col. William Kintner (then assigned to FPRI).
The article accurately described the IAS as having grown out of a 1955 symposium in Chicago called the "National Military-Industrial Conference"; the IAS was established and financed by the H. Smith Richardson Foundation to carry forward the work of the Conference. In 1959, the IAS began a series of "National Strategy Seminars," which were authorized by the JCS to take over the education of reserve officers. IAS and Strausz-Hupé worked closely with the National War College in this period. (Among the speakers at these seminars were Harvard's William Yandell Elliott and Henry Kissinger.)
The Fulbright Memorandum, as could be expected, set off a huge controversy, with articles and editorialsand not a little behind-the-scenes activity as well.
For example, FPRI and its Director Strausz-Hupé went on a mobilization to deny that they were organizing a military coup. FPRI circulated a private letter to its "Associates, friends and supporters" on Oct. 18, 1961, containing an attack on Fulbright and a lengthy defense of its own actions. Among other things, it stated: "The Foreign Policy Research Institute takes a certain pride in being linked to the four organizations mentioned in the Fulbright memorandum. However, an investigation of our relationships with them will be a disappointment to our critics. There is no sinister plot underfoot at the Foreign Policy Research Institute to inspire United States military personnel to launch a coup d'état along the lines of the abortive French affair in Algeria."
Shortly after this, Strausz-Hupé drafted a letter to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and sent a copy to William Yandell Elliott, with a "Dear Bill" cover letter. Elliott had been a speaker at some of the seminars in question, including one at the National War College in July 1960, and another in Chicago in April 1961.
7/20/1961 At a National Security Council Meeting, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Gen. Lemnitzer and CIA director Allen Dulles present a plan for a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union "in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions." President Kennedy walks out of the meeting, saying to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "And we call ourselves the human race." (Brothers, Talbott)
Arthur Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times gives this account:
"...Kennedy received the Net Evaluation, an annual doomsday briefing analyzing the chances of nuclear war. An Air Force General presented it, said Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, "as though it were for a kindergarten class.. Finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it. We never had another one." (p. 483)
McGeorge Bundy evidently refers to the same meeting in this passage:
"In the summer of 1961 [Kennedy] went through a formal briefing on the net assessment of a general nuclear war between the two superpowers, and he expressed his own reaction to Dean Rusk as they walked from the cabinet room to the Oval Office for a private meeting on other subjects: "And we call ourselves the human race." (p. 354)
Dean Rusk describes the meeting as an "awesome experience" in his memoirs, As I Saw It, published in 1990.
"President Kennedy clearly understood what nuclear war meant and was appalled by it. In our many talks together, he never worried about the threat of assassination, but he occasionally brooded over whether it would be his fate to push the nuclear button... If any of us had doubts, that 1961 briefing convinced us that a nuclear war must never be fought. Consequently, throughout the Kennedy and Johnson years we worked to establish a stable deterrent..." (p. 246-7)
Numerous other apparent accounts of the meeting exist, though they do not refer to it by name or date. All agree on Kennedy's reaction. But none reveal what was actually discussed. Theodore Sorenson's Kennedy, published only four years later, presents an understandably benign version:
"That briefing confirmed, however, the harsh facts [Kennedy] already knew: (1) that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States could 'win' a nuclear war in any rational sense of the word; (2) that, except to deter an all-out Soviet attack, our threat of 'massive retaliation' to every Communist move was no longer credible, now that it invited our own destruction; and (3) that a policy of 'pre-emptive first strike' or 'preventive war' was no longer open to either side, inasmuch as even a surprise missile attack would trigger, before those missiles reached their targets, a devastating retaliation that neither country could risk or accept." (p. 513)
Unfortunately, the critical third point was not yet true. As UnderSecretary of State Roger Hilsman wrote in 1967:
"As the intelligence community looked at their estimates in 1958, 1959, and 1960, and even through the first half of 1961, they saw a missile gap developing that would come to a peak about 1963." (p. 162)
What Hilsman does not say explicitly is that the estimated missile gap was in America's favor. The Soviets had virtually no operational ICBMs in 1961, a fact known to American intelligence at least by the end of 1960. And it appears the Russians did not solve their fundamental technical problem, namely building a hydrogen bomb small enough to be carried by a missile of manageable size, until years later. (Sorenson, 524; Bobbitt, 61).
The memorandum reproduced here was written for Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who did not attend the meeting, by Colonel Howard Burris, his military aide.
TOP SECRET EYES ONLY (Declassified: June, 1993)
Notes on National Security Council Meeting July 20, 1961
General Hickey, Chairman of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee, presented the annual report of his group. General Lemnitzer stated that the assumption of this year's study was a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.
After the presentation by General Hickey and by the various members of the Subcommittee, the President asked if there had ever been made an assessment of damage results to the U.S.S.R which would be incurred by a preemptive attack. General Lemnitzer stated that such studies had been made and that he would bring them over and discuss them personally with the President. In recalling General Hickey's opening statement that these studies have been made since 1957, the President asked for an appraisal of the trend in the effectiveness of the attack. General Lemnitzer replied that he would also discuss this with the President.
Since the basic assumption of this year's presentation was an attack in late 1963, the President asked about probable effects in the winter of 1962. Mr. Dulles observed that the attack would be much less effective since there would be considerably fewer missiles involved. General Lemnitzer added a word of caution about accepting the precise findings of the Committee since these findings were based upon certain assumptions which themselves might not be valid.
The President posed the question as to the period of time necessary for citizens to remain in shelters following an attack. A member of the Subcommittee replied that no specific period of time could be cited due to the variables involved, but generally speaking, a period of two weeks should be expected.
The President directed that no member in attendance at the meeting disclose even the subject of the meeting.
7/21/1961 UPI story by David Burnham reported "Study Asserts Military Rightists Raise Obstacles to Kennedy Program."
7/25/1961 JFK, in a major television speech on the crisis in Berlin, calls for additional $3.5 billion for defense and additional reserve troops, increasing draft calls, and recommending the construction of fallout shelters. "We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force" Yet Kennedy also stressed the dangers: "miscommunication could rain down more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history" He asked for increased military appropriations and called out 150,000 reserve personnel. But he did not engage the Soviets. The wall was allowed to remain intact when constructed in August of 1961, a symbolic column of soldiers was sent through to West Berlin, and a fallout shelter program was undertaken in the United States. With the Burris memorandum, the reasoning behind the fallout shelter program now begins to fall into place. As a civil defense measure against a Soviet nuclear attack, the flimsy cinderblock shelters Americans were told to build were absurd. But they could indeed protect those in them, for a couple of weeks, from radiation drifting thousands of miles after a U.S. pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union. It is known that Kennedy later regretted this program.
7/26/1961 Sen. Strom Thurmond defended the anti-Communist views of the military in a speech before the Senate: "The military officers...are charged with defending our country from all enemies, foreign and domestic...the military leader must know the enemy in order to defend our country against him....There can be no truthful denial that our country and its leaders have, on many occasions in the past, accepted the most thinly-veiled Communist fronts for whatever they purported themselves to be."
7/29/1961 Sen. Barry Goldwater, in a speech to the American Legion, criticized "the repeated and growing attacks being made on our military leaders, and to the strenuous efforts being made to muzzle them and prevent them from telling their troops and the American people some of the facts which they should know...This is no pink tea we are engaged in - it is a grim battle to the death."
8/1/1961 St Petersburg Times (Florida) reported that MacDill AFB had received word that it would remain open until at least June 1963. "This is a definite extension of more than a year, since plans had been to phase out the Strategic Air Command (SAC) base in April and May of 1962. Col. Wayne Connors, MacDill base commander, said the extension means that some major repairs to air strip surfaces will be made." Wikipedia: In 1962, MacDill AFB was transferred to Tactical Air Command (TAC). Bomber aircraft would remain at MacDill until the 306th Bombardment Wing's transfer to McCoy AFB, and SAC would continue to maintain a tenant presence at MacDill through the 1980s, utilizing their Alert Facility as a dispersal location for B-52 and KC-135 aircraft. But for all practical purposes, the 1960s marked MacDill's transition to a fighter-centric TAC installation. Under TAC, MacDill remained a fighter base for almost 30 years, but other changes went on in the background.
8/30/1961 The Soviet Union resumes atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons, exploding a hydrogen bomb over Siberia. British PM Harold Macmillan recalled in his memoirs (At the End of the Day, 1961-1963) that he "knew the strong pressure being brought upon him [JFK] by the Pentagon and the atomic scientists to resume [aboveground nuclear] tests immediately...At the same time I knew that Kennedy was desperately anxious to postpone the day of resuming tests, which he regarded as a confession of failure in the diplomatic field." In 1961 the US had 450 nuclear missiles, the Kennedy administration was asking for 950, but the JCS wanted 3000. When JFK discovered that 450 was adequate for the military's needs, he asked McNamara why they were pushing for 950; McNamara replied, "that's the smallest number we can take up on the Hill without getting murdered." (The Best and the Brightest p91) "The alliance between the military and the right disturbed the Kennedys. This was why the President backed McNamara so vigorously in the effort to stop warmongering speeches by generals and admirals." (RFK and his Times p484) McNamara told Robert Scheer in 1982 that during JFK's presidency, the JCS was always pushing for a nuclear first-strike capability, which Kennedy and McNamara rejected. (With Enough Shovels p10) O'Brien recalled him complaining about the military: "They always give you their pitch about their instant reaction and their split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it's so hard to win a war." (No Final Victories p142)
9/25/1961 JFK's speech at the United Nations: "Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. " . . . It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race-to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved."
Late September 1961: State Dept issued a document entitled 'Freedom from War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World,' which would ban nuclear weapons, keep space free of armed conflict, and "no state (including the U.S.) would have the military power to challenge the progressively strengthened UN Peace Force." (Gary Allen, None Dare Call it Treason p81) This was based on Kennedy's recent speech.
10/1/1961 The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was created by Robert McNamara. It was designed to coordinate all US military intelligence; the CIA saw this as a threat. Its first director was Lt. Gen. Joseph F. Carroll, former inspector general of the Air Force. He had been with the FBI and was a leading aide to J Edgar Hoover. He moved to Air Force in 1947 to set up its first investigation and counter-intelligence section. His two main subordinates, Maj. Gen. William W. Quinn and Rear Adm. Samuel B. Frankel, were former CIA men and had worked closely with Allen Dulles. Quinn left the DIA to become commander of the 7th Army in 11/1963. By 1964 the DIA had supplanted the services' intelligence groups and was competing with the CIA for overall intelligence coordination. (The Invisible Government, Wise p211-16) The DIA is made up of both civilians and military personnel. It is said to have 7000 employees. (The Intelligence War p27)
In October 1961, the president's newly appointed personal representative in West Berlin, retired General Lucius Clay, tried to escalate the Berlin crisis to a point where the president would be forced to choose victory. In August, Khrushchev had ordered the building of the Berlin Wall, thereby ending a mass exodus of East Germans to the capitalist side of the city. In September, General Clay began secret preparations to tear down the wall. He ordered Major General Albert Watson, the U.S. military commandant in West Berlin, to have army engineers build a duplicate section of the Berlin Wall in a forest. U.S. tanks with bulldozer attachments then experimented with assaults on the substitute wall. General Bruce Clarke, who commanded U.S. forces in Europe, learned of Clay's exercise and put a stop to it. (Raymond L. Garthoff, " Berlin 1961: The Record Corrected, " Foreign Policy no. 84 (Fall 1991) , p.147)
When he told Clay to end the wall-bashing rehearsals, Clarke looked at Clay's red telephone to the White House and said, "If you don't like that, call the President and see what he says." (Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, p. 249.) Clay chose not to. Nor did either man ever inform the president of what had gone on at the secret wall in the forest. While Kennedy remained unaware of Clay's provocative planning, Khrushchev was much better informed. Soviet spies had watched the forest maneuvers, had taken pictures of them, and had relayed their reports and pictures to Moscow. Khrushchev then assembled a group of close advisers to plot out step by step their counter scenario to a U.S. assault on the Berlin Wall. (Garthoff, " Berlin 1961, " pp. 147-48 , 152) However, Nikita Khrushchev doubted that John Kennedy had authorized any such attack. He and the president had already begun their secret communications and had in fact even made private progress in the previous month on the question of Berlin. Khrushchev strongly suspected that Kennedy was being undermined. (Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation o f a Superpower (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University, 2000), p. 464.)
Khrushchev's son, Sergei, in his memoir, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, has described from the Soviet standpoint how the two Cold War leaders had begun to conspire toward coexistence. His account has been corroborated at key points by Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger. At their Vienna meeting in June, Kennedy had proposed to Khrushchev that they establish "a private and unofficial channel of communications that would bypass all formalities." Khrushchev agreed. In September the Soviet premier made a first use of the back channel.
10/12/1961 JFK attacks the far-right in a speech at the University of North Carolina, saying that "we shall be neither Red nor dead, but alive and free..." (Wash. Post 10/13)
Mid-Oct 1961 Kennedy was so resistant to the military's demand for troops that he took a step he knew would further alienate them. He subverted his military leaders ' recommendations by planting a story that they were against sending combat units. In mid-October the New York Times reported erroneously: "Military leaders at the Pentagon, no less than General Taylor himself, are understood to be reluctant to send organized U.S. combat units into Southeast Asia. " The opposite was the truth. As we have seen, the Pentagon leaders and General Taylor were in fact beating their war drums as loudly as they could in the president's ears. They wanted combat troops. Kennedy fought back with a public lie. As the Pentagon Papers noted, " It is just about inconceivable that this story could have been given out except at the direction of the president, or by him personally. " The president was undermining his military leaders by dispensing the false information that they were against the very step they most wanted him to take. The ploy worked . As the Pentagon Papers observed, "The Times story had the apparently desired effect. Speculation about combat troops almost disappeared from news stories . . . " However, besides misleading the public, Kennedy was playing a dangerous game with the Pentagon's leaders. His misrepresentation of their push for combat troops would prove to be one more piece of evidence in their mounting case against the president.
But Kennedy would do anything he could to keep from sending combat troops to Vietnam. He told Arthur Schlesinger, " They want a force of American troops. They say it's necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale. But it will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another. "
10/21/1961 In a major speech cleared by Rusk, Bundy and JFK, Roswell Gilpatric publicly deflates the "missile gap" theory, telling his audience in Hot Springs, Virginia, that the United States actually possessed a substantially larger nuclear arsenal than the USSR.
10/27/1961 Ten American M-4 8 tanks, with bulldozers mounted on the lead tanks, ground their way up to Checkpoint Charlie at the center of the Berlin Wall. They were confronted by ten Soviet tanks, which had been waiting for them quietly on the side streets of East Berlin. A well-briefed Nikita Khrushchev and his advisers had set their counterplan in motion. Twenty more Soviet tanks arrived soon after as reinforcements, and twenty more U.S. tanks moved up from the allied side. The American and Russian tanks faced off, with their long-nosed guns trained on one another, ready to fire. Throughout the night and for a total of sixteen hours, the confrontation continued. Soviet foreign affairs adviser Valentin Falin was beside Khrushchev throughout the crisis. Falin said later that if the U.S. tanks and bulldozers had advanced farther, the Soviet tanks would have fired on them, bringing the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. "closer to the third world war than ever . . . Had the tank duel started then in Berlin-and everything was running toward it-the events most probably would have gone beyond any possibility of control. " (Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev ( New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991) , p.335) An alarmed President Kennedy phoned Lucius Clay. Although Kennedy left no record of the conversation, Clay claims the president said, "I know you people over there haven't lost your nerve." Clay said his bold reply was: "Mr. President, we're not worried about our nerves. We're worrying about those of you people in Washington." At that point the president sent an urgent message to Khrushchev via the back channel. Robert Kennedy contacted Soviet press attache Georgi Bolshakov. RFK said that if Khrushchev would withdraw his tanks within twenty-four hours, JFK would do the same within thirty minutes later. (Robert Kennedy in His Own Words, edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (New York: Bantam Books, 1988) , pp. 259-60. See also Garthoff, " Berlin 1961, " p. 150, and S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 466.) The president then ordered Lucius Clay to be ready to carry out the U.S. side of such a withdrawal.
11/13/1961 Two and a half weeks after the tanks confrontation that threatened a nuclear holocaust, its instigator, Lucius Clay, sent a telegram to Secretary of State Dean Rusk in which he stated: "Today, we have the nuclear strength to assure victory at awful cost. It no longer suffices to consider our strength as a deterrent only and to plan to use it only in retaliation. No ground probes on the highway which would use force should or could be undertaken unless we are prepared instantly to follow them with a nuclear strike. It is certain that within two or more years retaliatory power will be useless as whoever strikes first will strike last. " (Clay-Rusk telegram, November 13, 1961 ; in FR US, 1961-1963, Volume XIV: Berlin Crisis, 1961-1962 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994) , p. 586)
11/21/1961 Memo from McNamara to JFK informing him that the Air Force wanted to focus on developing a nuclear "first-strike capability" against the USSR. (Scheer, With Enough Shovels p216)
11/24/1961 New York Times: Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower last night [in a TV interview] urged officers of the armed services to shun partisan politics. Speaking as a General of the Army, he declared it was "bad practice -- very bad" for an officer, even when testifying under oath before a committee of Congress, to express opinions "on political matters or economic matters that are contrary to the President's." ...The former President was blunt in discussing the recent "rise of extremists" in the country. "I don't think the United States needs super-patriots," he declared. "We need patriotism, honestly practiced by all of us, and we don't need these people that are more patriotic than you or anybody else." His definition of extremists embraced those who would "go back to eliminating the income tax from our laws and the rights of people to unionize... [and those] advocating some form of dictatorship." It also included those who "make radical statements [and] attack people of good repute who are proved patriots." At that point, Walter Cronkite of the C.B.S. news staff, who conducted the interview, asked about the "military man's role in our modern political life." He did not cite, but obviously referred to, the case of Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, who stirred up a controversy that led to his "admonishment" for the political nature of the indoctrination of his troops. General Walker later resigned from the Army. "I believe the Army officer, Navy officer, Air officer," General Eisenhower said, "should not be talking about political matters, particularly domestically, and never in the international field, unless he is asked to do so because of some particular position he might hold." ...The general declared there was hope for disarmament and better East-West relations. As the Russian standard of living improves, the Russian people will begin to understand that there is another way of life, he said...
In December 1961, McNamara established the United States Strike Command (STRICOM). Authorized to draw forces when needed from the Strategic Army Corps (STRAC), the Tactical Air Command, and the airlift units of the Military Air Transport Service and the military services, Strike Command had the mission "to respond swiftly and with whatever force necessary to threats against the peace in any part of the world, reinforcing unified commands or… carrying out separate contingency operations."