Tough and disciplined as a commander, LeMay was a supremely incompetent politician. At the press conference announcing his candidacy, he refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. The same implied threat that Eisenhower had made to end the Korean War sounded heartless and barbaric sixteen years later, as images of Vietnamese women and children burned by napalm appeared on the nightly news. LeMay had strongly opposed sending ground troops to Vietnam and disagreed with McNamara’s strategy for fighting a limited war there. “War is never ‘cost-effective,’” LeMay argued. “People are killed. To them the war is total.” At the press conference he stressed that the United States should always try to avoid armed conflict, “but when you get in it, get in it with both feet and get it over with as soon as you can.” The logic of his argument received less attention than the tone-deaf remark that preceded it: “We seem to have a phobia about nuclear weapons.”
On the campaign trail, the general who’d risked his life countless times fighting the Nazis was jeered by protesters yelling, “Sieg Heil.” He told reporters that the antiwar movement was “Communist-inspired,” lost his job as an aerospace executive for running with Wallace, and largely faded into obscurity after their defeat. LeMay and McNamara, polar opposites who’d battled over a wide range of national security issues, each convinced that the other was dangerously wrong, now found themselves in much the same place. They ended 1968 in humiliation and disgrace, their views repudiated by the American people.
On March 13, 1961, at about half past eleven in the morning, a B-52 took off from Mather Air Force Base in California, not far from Sacramento. The plane was on a Chrome Dome mission, carrying two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs. Twenty minutes after takeoff, the pilot, Major Raymond Clay, felt too much hot air coming from the vents in the cockpit. He and one of the copilots, First Lieutenant Robert Bigham, tried to turn off the heat. The vents wouldn’t close, and it became uncomfortably warm in the cockpit. Almost seven hours into the flight, the control tower at Mather instructed Clay to “continue mission as long as you can… if it gets intolerable, of course, bring it home.” Before the second refueling, Clay guided the plane to a low altitude and depressurized the cabin to cool it. But it heated up again, as the bomber climbed to thirty thousand feet. Fourteen hours into the flight, the temperature in the cockpit had reached 160 degrees Fahrenheit — so hot that one of the pilot’s windows shattered.
Clay descended to twelve thousand feet again and requested permission to end the mission. In addition to the broken window, a couple of the crew members were feeling sick. The cockpit had become so hot that Clay and his two copilots took turns flying the plane, going back and forth to the cabin below, where the temperature was a little cooler. Passing through overcast skies, the bomber flew off course, fell behind schedule by about half an hour, and lost another seven or eight minutes avoiding bad weather. Twenty-two hours into the flight, First Lieutenant Bigham realized that a gauge for one of the main fuel tanks was broken. The reading hadn’t changed for at least ninety minutes — but nobody had noticed, amid the heat and the hassle of coming and going from the cockpit. Bigham asked the control tower to send a tanker; they were running low on fuel. Forty minutes later, while approaching the tanker, the B-52 ran out of gas. All eight engines flamed out at once.
At an altitude of seven thousand feet, the crew started to bail out. Major Clay stayed in the cockpit and banked the plane away from Yuba City, California, just forty miles short of their base. Confident that the bomber wouldn’t hit the town, Clay ejected at an altitude of four thousand feet. The B-52 made a full 360-degree turn and then crashed nose first into a barley field. The high explosives of both hydrogen bombs shattered on impact and didn’t burn or detonate. The weapons harmlessly broke into pieces. All eight members of the crew survived the crash. But an Air Force fireman, rushing to the scene, was killed when his truck overturned.
