Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [14]
In 1961, Eisenhower’s warning fell on deaf ears. Beguiled by Kennedy’s wit, vigor, and apparent sophistication, dazzled by the credentials of those who signed on to chart the New Frontier, Americans ignored Ike’s counsel, to their considerable misfortune. With the passage of time, that warning has only taken on increased urgency.
EMPIRE BUILDERS
The triad of global presence, power projection, and interventionism, fully enshrined by the time Ike bid the nation farewell, had many fathers, General and President Eisenhower not least among them. Still, the contributions of two figures stand out. If historical standing were a function of enduring legacy, then Allen Dulles and Curtis LeMay, both all but forgotten today, would each rate a memorial on the Mall in Washington. Were lasting impact the measure of merit, then Dulles and LeMay—semiwarriors par excellence—would certainly rank as more deserving of recognition than several recent presidents whose names adorn marble-sheathed libraries, museums, and public policy schools.
Dulles and LeMay were the antithesis of individualists. They were men who found personal fulfillment in the building of institutions. During the pivotal decade of the 1950s, they raised to prominence two organizations that helped define the maxims by which Washington came to operate and went a long way toward enforcing them as well: in Dulles’s case the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in LeMay’s, the Strategic Air Command (SAC). Important in their own right, these institutions wielded influence well beyond their formal mandate. The CIA and SAC promulgated a set of precepts that left a deep and lasting imprint on the entire National Security State, much as, say, the New York Times once imparted to the news business standards and expectations to which journalists elsewhere reflexively sought to adhere.
Dulles served as director of central intelligence from 1953 to 1961; no other DCI has matched his staying power. He stands in relation to the Agency as Bill Gates does to Microsoft. Like Gates, Dulles forged a juggernaut possessing enormous reach and inspiring a mix of fear and grudging respect. As with Gates, the empire that Dulles created expressed his own worldview, ambitions, and values. Just as Gates imparted to Microsoft a culture that proved a model for other tech-savvy entrepreneurs, so Dulles inculcated in the CIA a culture that became a model for the entire national security apparatus. The so-called Information Age was rich in opportunities to make money. In Silicon Valley, Microsoft provided a template for how to tap those opportunities. So, too, the age of the National Security State that dawned in the wake of World War II was rich in opportunities to amass and wield power. During the early years of the Cold War, Dulles’s CIA showed the rest of Washington how to capitalize on those opportunities.
LeMay, too, was an empire builder, his accomplishments, if anything, outstripping those of Dulles. From 1948 to 1957—in contemporary military practice, an unusually long tenure—the four-star air force general commanded Strategic Air Command, the principal U.S. nuclear strike force and chief instrument for waging World War III.
When LeMay assumed command, SAC’s ability to perform its core mission—to launch a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union—was questionable at best. Capabilities were limited, readiness poor. LeMay took it upon himself to change all that. Acquiring enormous fleets of aircraft that flew faster and farther and could carry heavier bomb loads, exploiting a rapidly growing U.S. capacity to produce nuclear weapons, and honing the skills needed to implement a war plan of ever broader scope and complexity, LeMay transformed SAC into a force held at instant readiness and capable of destroying not only the Soviet Union but the entire communist world many times over. Rightly remembered as the “Father of SAC,” LeMay was