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Ted Shackley, a longtime Dulles protégé, made the point explicitly, describing clandestine warfare as “the stitch in time that eliminates bloodier and more costly alternatives.” As Shackley saw it, the CIA saved the world from SAC. Through its brave day-in, day-out campaign in the shadow world of espionage and covert action, the Agency kept the Russians off-balance and on the defensive, thereby averting the possibility of “a nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union, controlling much of the world, and an isolated, embattled United States, turning to its nuclear arsenal in convulsive desperation.”52

For his part, LeMay might well have claimed that SAC was insulating the United States from any backlash triggered by CIA mischief making. A massive nuclear arsenal was held at the ready, giving pause to anyone inclined to retaliate against Agency operations that not infrequently went awry or produced unintended consequences. As much or more than the Soviet Union itself, in other words, the CIA and SAC each provided a raison d’être on which the other drew. Together they left an indelible mark on our age.

By the end of the Eisenhower era, all the elements of the Washington rules were firmly in place. Principles and practices established by the CIA and SAC—by now the yin and yang of the new National Security State—had become sacrosanct. All that seemingly remained was for the rest of the national security apparatus to come into conformity with them.

One particular institution lagged notably behind: the U.S. Army. Accustomed to making sharp distinctions between peace and war, army officers struggled to accommodate their service to the requirements of semiwar, a struggle further complicated by the citizen-draftees filling its ranks. A reliance on short-service soldiers was at odds with the demands of long-term struggle. The army of the 1950s was simply not well suited for inconclusive, open-ended quasi-hostilities.

Outflanked on the one side by SAC and on the other by the CIA, the army by the dawn of the 1960s had become the unloved stepchild of the national security establishment. Soon thereafter, however, a makeover endowed the service with heightened allure. Offered a fresh chance to secure a niche within the Washington consensus, the army jumped at the opportunity, with disastrous implications for itself and the country.

2

ILLUSIONS OF FLEXIBILITY AND CONTROL

Within twenty-four hours of his election as president on November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy announced his intention to retain Allen Dulles as CIA director. When the new president took office on January 20, 1961, Curtis LeMay, no longer commanding SAC, was serving as the air force’s vice chief of staff, the number two uniformed position in that service. Soon thereafter, with the current chief of staff due to retire, Kennedy nominated LeMay as his replacement.

Through such appointments, Kennedy signaled his administration’s commitment to the prevailing national security paradigm and to the bipartisan consensus from which it derived its legitimacy. To those who questioned whether the young president possessed the requisite experience and toughness to take on the Soviets, keeping old hands like Dulles and LeMay on board (along with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover) provided a suitable response. Although the New Frontier, as the incoming administration branded its program, promised vigor and fresh thinking, those who had been at the forefront in waging the Cold War were keeping their seats at the table.

This reassuring picture with its emphasis on continuity concealed an intensifying behind-the-scenes struggle, simultaneously masked by, and captured in, the phrase flexible response. The national security policies devised during the Truman and Eisenhower eras had created winners and losers. Chief among the losers had been the U.S. Army. The heyday of massive retaliation and the golden age of covert operations rendered the army all but irrelevant.

Other than serving as a “tripwire”—plainly visible in West Germany and postarmistice South Korea to warn