Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [20]
Like the CIA, SAC became its own self-contained world. LeMay was an unsparing taskmaster, who drove his subordinates (and himself) hard. Duty in SAC was intense and demanding, with eighty-hour workweeks not uncommon. To maintain this complex organization at hair-trigger alert, it was not enough to view war as a distant theoretical possibility. LeMay inculcated into SAC a single conviction, “We are at war now,” a sentiment that could just as easily been etched above the entrance to the new CIA headquarters erected in 1962 at Langley, Virginia.37
Although the prospect of delivering the ultimate weapon in what would be history’s ultimate war did not prove conducive to introspection, the gravity of that responsibility did foster an inflated sense of self-importance. SAC’s bomber crews and Dulles’s covert agents presented opposite faces of the same coin: They went about their tasks certain that they were inhabiting the very center of the universe and doing the nation’s most vital work.
LeMay’s achievements garnered considerable public acclaim. His assertion that SAC was all that stood between the American people and Armageddon met with widespread acceptance. In an “exclusive,” “first account ever published” of life on the SAC flight line, Reader’s Digest declared in 1953 that “the free world may well stand hat in hand before our superbly trained atom-bomber crews.” The writer Francis V. Drake continued:
They stand guard for all of us 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, ready to obey a flash message from the White House that might order them to retaliate against an aggressor before the United States could be destroyed.
According to Drake, SAC was “the one force that has prevented the outbreak of World War III.”38 The New York Times agreed: “The SAC crew in a SAC plane is the West’s Number One deterrent to the Kremlin.”39
Harper’s magazine went even further. SAC’s bomber crews “have personally assumed the burden of America’s international commitments. While living in the midst of a largely indifferent, peaceful society, they are daily fighting and refighting a deadly mock war.” Although overworked and underpaid, SAC airmen derived satisfaction from “the pride of belonging to an elite” and from “the awesome responsibility they have accepted—if the worst should occur—to obliterate a city at one blow.”
For this mission everything human and therefore fallible must be dispensed with, must be trained out of them. Systematically the Strategic Air Command seeks to perfect its men, in the hope of honing out human error, doubt, and frailty.40
U.S. News & World Report concurred. SAC was “the bastion of the West” and “the only force in the world that restrains the Kremlin from nuclear conquest.” With “more than 2,000 bombing planes and nearly 230,000 men deployed about the world,” and with a highly classified number of armed bombers always on airborne alert, the magazine assured its readers, “SAC’s purpose is peace.”41
LeMay became a sort of rough-and-ready, straight-talking folk hero in the tradition of generals Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant. The press gushed as much over him as his command. Newspaper and magazines articles inevitably featured a photograph of LeMay scowling as he chewed on or wielded his thick cigar. To Time, he was “the indispensable man in the Air Force’s top field command.”42 Life magazine dubbed him the “toughest cop in the Western world.” During World War II, Life continued, LeMay knew that when he committed his bombers against Japanese cities “a lot of innocent and helpless