Power was a brutal, easily angered man who struck Air Staff officers outside SAC as dim-witted and insensitive to the dilemmas that the bomb raised. Once, when Herman Kahn was briefing Power on the long-term genetic effects of nuclear weapons, Power suddenly chuckled, leaned forward in his chair and said, “You know, it’s not yet been proved to me that two heads aren’t better than one.” Even Kahn was outraged, and sternly lectured Power that he should not discuss human life so cavalierly.
At Tommy White’s repeated urgings, General Power finally agreed to hear Kaufmann’s counterforce briefing. It took place at SAC Headquarters in Omaha on December 12, 1960. Not two minutes into the lecture, Power interrupted with a long, angry tirade against everything that Kaufmann was saying.
“Why do you want us to restrain ourselves?” Power bellowed. “Restraint! Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards!” After several minutes of this, he finally said, “Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!”
Kaufmann—his patience exhausted—snapped back, “Well, you’d better make sure that they’re a man and a woman.” At that point, Power stalked out of the room. The briefing was over.
Several weeks later, Power cabled White to make sure that the Kaufmann briefing did not represent the Air Force position on strategy or targeting. White cabled an appeasing note back to Power, assuring him that in a briefing to President Eisenhower in February 1960, “I endorsed the ‘optimum-mix’ concept… a target system consisting of a mix of vital military and important urban-industrial targets, including all vital strategic elements of the enemy’s known nuclear offensive capability.” White gave only conditional endorsement of Kaufmann’s briefing as presenting the case for an improvement “to provide a wider range of options in the future, while continuing to deny a potential aggressor any comfort regarding the possible magnitude or objectives of our response.”
It was a tepid response, not scornful but not terribly supportive. White viewed the job of Chief of Staff as a unifier of the Air Force Commands, especially in these tough times of a joint Army-Navy offensive. SAC was the most powerful of the commands, and White could not afford to jump into a big fray with Tommy Power. In a crunch, Tommy White backed away.
But that was not the end of the counterforce/no-cities strategy. There were still higher authorities to consult and advise, and after the 1960 election, with a new Administration in office, a new Secretary of Defense controlling the Pentagon, the Kaufmann briefing and the RAND version of counterforce would achieve their crowning glories.
16
THE WHIZ KIDS
BY THE TIME of the 1960 Presidential campaign, defense intellectuals were riding high. The missile gap was very much on everyone’s mind, as well as an image of a sagging defense posture and eight years of a complacent Republican Administration. The marketplace was filled with books and articles on how to solve the problems of national security in order to meet the crises that lay ahead.[3]
Onto this stage stepped John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Vigor, youth, the “New Frontier,” “getting the country moving again“—these were the themes of Kennedy’s Presidential campaign, and not least on the subject of national security. As much as anyone, Kennedy had milked the missile-gap phenomenon for political capital. From his days as a congressman in the early 1950s, Kennedy had hooked himself to the advocates of Air Power. As early as February 1956, he was warning that “the United States might well be behind the Soviet Union” in missilery. A year later, he stated that if present trends were not reversed by 1960, “this nation will have lost its superiority in strategic air power.”
His most dramatic missile-gap speech was delivered on the Senate floor August 14, 1958. Its impact was so potent that Republican Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana threatened to clear the galleries on grounds that Kennedy was disclosing information harmful to the national security.
“We are rapidly approaching that dangerous period which General [James] Gavin and others have called the ‘gap’ or the ‘missile-lag’ period,” Kennedy proclaimed. Sometime between 1960 and 1964, “the deterrent ratio might well shift to the Soviets so heavily… as to open to them a new shortcut to world domination.” The Soviets’ “missile power will be the shield from behind which they will slowly but surely advance—through Sputnik diplomacy, limited brushfire wars, indirect non-overt aggression, intimidation and subversion, internal revolution, increased prestige or influence, and the vicious blackmail of our allies. The periphery of the Free World will slowly be nibbled away. The balance of power will gradually shift against us.”
In a speech delivered in April 1959, Kennedy pinpointed the main problem in our defense posture as “the problem of protecting our striking power, making it more secure against enemy attack.” He emphasized that “even if the missile gap were somehow ended and our supply of ICBMs equaled that of the Soviets, we would still be on the short end of the deterrent ratio….” Taking a page from Wohlstetter’s “Delicate Balance of Terror,” the candidate noted that “there is no security in merely matching… the ‘first-strike’ forces of the Soviets…. The real question is how large will [our] force be after the first Russian strike? How secure is it against destruction?” Taking another page from the RAND studies (and the Gaither Report, which they influenced), Kennedy urged the hardening of SAC bases (including putting bombers and missiles in “underground hangars covered by very thick, reinforced concrete roofs”), dispersing the bases and making some weapons mobile.
Surreptitiously, a small team of RAND analysts was aiding the Kennedy campaign. The connection was made by Daniel Ellsberg, who, while taking a leave of absence at Harvard to finish his Ph.D., met Dierdre Henderson, coordinator of an “Academic Advisory Group” for the Kennedy campaign. The group was composed mainly of Harvard and MIT professors—among them Henry Kissinger, Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Samuelson, Archibald Cox, Carl Kaysen, Barton Leach, Jerry Wiesner—as well as such outsiders as Paul Nitze and General James Gavin. The purpose of the group was to provide Kennedy with advice, but, much more than that, to lend him the prestige of association with the nation’s intellectual heavyweights. Ellsberg stayed in touch with Henderson and convinced a segment of the strategic community back at RAND to enlist in the cause.
John Kennedy was RAND’s nearly ideal candidate—energetic, urbane, active and genuinely interested in bolstering national security. From his articles and speeches, he seemed familiar with the issues, and like the men of RAND, he opposed massive retaliation, favored the buildup of “limited-war” forces, recognized the dangers of SAC vulnerability and the accompanying missile gap—or “deterrent gap.”
Beginning late in 1959, on the firm condition that their involvement not be revealed to anyone outside the campaign, some of the RAND strategists—Ellsberg, Albert Wohlstetter, Alain Enthoven, Harry Rowen, Andrew Marshall, Fred Hoffman—regularly passed along ideas and helped draft speeches for the Kennedy brigade. Their ideas caught on with some leaders of the Academic Advisory Group, passages from their drafts found their way into some of the candidate’s speeches. But throughout the campaign, the RAND strategists were players on the remote sidelines. They had no direct contact with Kennedy himself.
After the election, however, the leading RAND strategists moved to the forefront and found themselves with the opportunity to translate their theories directly into policy. Their agent to power, the man who would be at once their liberator and captive, was John Kennedy’s choice for Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.
3
There were Albert Wohlstetter’s “Delicate Balance of Terror” article in