Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [18]
Dulles was determined to refute the proposition that allowing powerful agencies to operate without effective oversight might be at odds with democratic practice. “It is not our intelligence organization which threatens our liberties,” he wrote. “The danger is rather that we will not be adequately informed of the perils which face us.” Therefore, “the last thing we can afford to do today is to put our intelligence in chains.”29 Keeping the CIA unchained implied allowing the Agency to decide how much information to dole out and what information to conceal. Protracted crisis required that the standard rules of accountability and a well-established American wariness of government bureaucracies be waived. Self-policing, based on the presumption of good intentions, was deemed sufficient.
By the end of the 1950s, Dulles’s CIA had established a presence just about everywhere, or at least everywhere that mattered to Washington. With its clandestine service the Agency had acquired the capacity to project American power into trouble spots around the world. And by undertaking operations from Latin America and the Middle East to Western Europe and Southeast Asia, the Agency had placed itself on the very front lines of the Cold War.30 Thus had the CIA become a favored instrument for making good the mandate of the Washington consensus.
OLD IRON ASS
No less than Allen Dulles, Curtis LeMay was a master of his calling.31 For Dulles, that calling emphasized guile and trickery. For LeMay, it centered on brute force: developing and holding in readiness the means to destroy entire societies through long-range aerial attack. In this regard, he possessed unequaled genius.
In style and personality, the two men differed markedly. Dulles was unreadable. LeMay was an open book. Whereas the pipe-smoking CIA director projected a captivating combination of cunning and refinement, LeMay, a cigar perpetually jammed in his mouth, cultivated a gruff, no-nonsense, coarse persona. No son of privilege, he entered the ranks of the military elite through the back door, working his way through Ohio State University, earning a commission in the army reserve, and then serving a long apprenticeship in the prewar army air corps. During World War II, LeMay came into his own. In England, he commanded first a bombardment group and then a division, playing a leading role in the Anglo-American Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany.
In July 1944, the War Department reassigned LeMay to the Pacific. There he assumed responsibility for strategic attacks against the Japanese home islands, presiding over the firebombing of Tokyo and other major Japanese cities and then directing the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ushered in the nuclear era. If obliteration bombing qualifies as an art, then LeMay, by war’s end an upwardly mobile thirty-nine-year-old major general, had established a well-earned reputation as the world’s foremost practitioner. When it came to “dehousing” civilian populations, the Luftwaffe’s Hermann Göring and the Royal Air Force’s “Bomber” Harris weren’t even in the same league. When it came to burning cities, William Tecumseh Sherman, who terrorized the citizens of the Confederacy during the Civil War, was a tyro.
In the immediate postwar period, LeMay was assigned to command U.S. air forces in Europe. During the Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949, he engineered the heroic airlift that kept that city alive and yielded the West’s first great victory in the Cold War.
The same qualities that had enabled LeMay to incinerate Tokyo explained his success in preserving Berlin: single-mindedness, tenacity, a ruthless demand for results, and a remarkable capacity for getting the utmost out of those who worked for him. In any outfit he commanded, LeMay made a point of establishing himself as the best pilot, the best navigator, and the best bombardier around. (By the time he left active duty in 1965, he had been checked out to fly