The number of nuclear weapons in the American arsenal had increased by more than 50 percent since the Eisenhower administration. The United States now had about thirty thousand of them, and each one could potentially be lost, stolen, sabotaged, or involved in an accident. Tactical weapons hadn’t been removed from Europe. On the contrary, the number of tactical weapons had more than doubled, and they were no longer safely tucked away in igloos. Putting locks in NATO’s weapons allowed them to be widely dispersed to units in the field — where they could be more easily stolen. And the question of how to keep the president alive and in command still didn’t have a satisfactory answer. The plans for a Deep Underground Command Center were scrapped after Kennedy’s death. The bunker had a good chance of surviving multiple hits from Soviet warheads. But its survival would prove meaningless. After an attack the president and his aides would most likely find themselves trapped two thirds of a mile beneath the rubble of the Pentagon, unable to communicate with the rest of the world or even get out of their bunker. The facility would serve primarily as a multimillion-dollar tomb.
Although McNamara’s efforts to avoid a nuclear war were tireless and sincere, he left office as one of the most despised men in the United States. Half a million American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam, the war seemed unwinnable, and most Americans blamed the number-crunching secretary of defense and his Ivy League advisers for the fiasco. A centralized command-and-control system — so essential for managing a nuclear war — had proven disastrous when applied to a civil war in Southeast Asia. Distrusting the Joint Chiefs of Staff and convinced that victories on the battlefield could be gained through cost-benefit analysis, the secretary of defense micromanaged the Vietnam War. McNamara personally chose targets to be bombed and supervised air strikes from his office at the Pentagon. “I don’t object to its being called McNamara’s war,” he said in 1964. “In fact I’m proud to be identified with it.”
Four years later hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians had been killed, tens of thousands of American servicemen had been killed or wounded, antiwar protests were spreading throughout the United States, and the Pentagon had become a symbol of bureaucratic malevolence and pointless slaughter. Known for his cool, detached manner, McNamara was now prone to bouts of sobbing in his office. While receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the day before his retirement, he apologized for being unable to speak. President Lyndon Johnson put a hand on McNamara’s shoulder, ended the ceremony, and guided him from the room.
Curtis LeMay withdrew from public life the same year, having left the Air Force in 1965. Once the darling of Hollywood and the media, he was now widely mocked and ridiculed. His well-publicized disputes with the Kennedy administration had given him a reputation for being a right-wing Neanderthal. When a fictionalized version of General LeMay appeared in film, the character was no longer a heroic defender of freedom. He was a buffoon, like General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove, willing to sacrifice twenty million American lives for the sake of defeating the Soviet Union. Or he was a crypto-fascist, like General James Mattoon Scott in Seven Days in May, preferring a coup d’état in the United States to a disarmament treaty with the Soviets.
LeMay seemed to confirm those stereotypes in October 1968, when he agreed to serve as the vice presidential candidate for the American Independent Party. George C. Wallace, an outspoken racist and segregationist, was the presidential candidate. LeMay had played a leading role in integrating the Air Force, and his support for equal rights, labor unions, birth control, and abortion seemed out of place in the Wallace campaign. But LeMay’s anger at how the Vietnam War was being fought — and his belief that both the Democratic and Republican candidates, Hubert H. Humphrey and Richard M. Nixon, were willing to appease the Communists — persuaded him to run. It was perhaps the worst decision of his life.
