Air Force

LeMay

on

Vietnam

Edited by Kenneth H. Williams

Vietnam Fiftieth

Commemoration
Cover

Gen. Curtis E. LeMay (right) and President Lyndon B. Johnson (center) listen to 

the secretary of defense, Robert S. McNamara (left), during a meeting at Johnson’s 

Texas ranch on December 22, 1964. For the full image with all of the Joint Chiefs, 

see page 12 below. Photo by Yoichi Okamoto. Johnson Library.
Vietnam Fiftieth

Commemoration
LeMay

on

Vietnam

Kenneth H. Williams

Washington, D.C.

2017

Edited with an Introduction by
Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within 

do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Air Force, the Department 

of Defense, or the U.S. government. All documents quoted or cited have 

been declassified or originated as unclassified. Cleared for public release.
Contents

Introduction 1

Part I

 January 1965 19

 July 1965 22

 October 1966 24

 1967/1968 25

 June 1969 26

 March 1972 37

Part II

 June 1972 49

Epilogue

 June 1984 87

Notes 91
Gen. Curtis E. LeMay with President John F. Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden 

during a 1962 event for foreign air force officers. USAF.
1

Introduction

With his memoir comment that the United States should threaten to bomb 

North Vietnam “back into the Stone Age,” Gen. Curtis E. LeMay became 

forever linked with the Vietnam War.1 His observation has resonated so 

long across the decades that few remember that LeMay stepped down as 

Air Force chief of staff on February 1, 1965, a month before the first sorties of 

the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign. The general continued to argue 

his aggressive position after retirement in books, articles, interviews, and 

as the vice-presidential running mate with third-party candidate George C. 

Wallace in the 1968 presidential election.

Large-scale “strategic” bombing had no greater champion than Curtis 

Emerson LeMay (1906–90), opinions that made him a lightning rod in both 

the defense establishment and the general population.2 The Ohio native 

emerged from World War II as a well-known figure, the young general, 

only thirty-eight when the conflict ended, who had been the architect of the 

devastating aerial campaign that brought Japan to the brink of surrender. 

Whether the bombing, including the use of incendiary and nuclear devices,3

actually forced Japanese capitulation and whether the toll, particularly in 

civilian casualties, was justifiable are issues that scholars and military 

strategists have continued to debate since that time.4 In LeMay’s mind 

there was no equivocation, however; as he related in the interviews below 

and elsewhere, he firmly believed that air power had won the war, saved 

Allied and Axis lives that would have been lost in subsequent ground campaigns, and could prevail in future conflicts.

In the postwar period, General LeMay remained a public figure, first 

as the organizer of the Berlin Airlift, and subsequently as he built Strategic 

Air Command (SAC) into America’s Cold War bulwark. At SAC, LeMay 

demanded discipline and honed the precision of his force.5 The massive 

response capabilities that SAC and LeMay provided fit well with the 

“new look” defense policies of the Dwight D. Eisenhower presidential 

administration and the muscular anticommunist foreign policy pursued by 

Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.6
2

Gen. Thomas D. White, the Air Force chief of staff (1957–61), brought 

LeMay to the Pentagon as his vice chief in 1957 in large part because 

LeMay’s bomber command experience complemented the “massive 

retaliation” thinking of the Eisenhower administration. Although White 

later noted that he “never had occasion to regret the choice” of LeMay, 

he found that the general had “almost no social graces” and was “not a 

good conversationalist.” White, who had several attaché postings in his 

background, was one of the Air Force’s most polished officers, while 

LeMay was a brusque, hard-driving field commander. As Gen. David C. 

Jones later put it, LeMay had been a “superb military commander” but 

was a “lousy politician.” LeMay saw weakness in White’s willingness to 

strike deals, telling his biographer that White “thought politics was the art 

of compromise. He would go into battle ready to compromise.” LeMay 

stated that “I never believed in that. I thought if you believed in something, 

God damn it, you got in there and fought for it.” White, who was more 

experienced in the halls of power from his time as vice chief and as a 

congressional liaison, left LeMay in charge of overseeing much of the 

general operation of the Air Force as a military service, which by most 

accounts he did well, albeit with a heavy emphasis on strategic assets over 

tactical. As vice chief and subsequently as chief of staff, LeMay began 

moving his SAC-developed leaders into senior positions, to the point that 

three-fourths of the high-ranking Air Force officers at the Pentagon were 

SAC products by the time LeMay retired in 1965.7

The major direct confrontations with the Soviets or Chinese for which 

LeMay prepared and drilled SAC, and subsequently the entire Air Force, never 

materialized, however. Cold War engagement in the 1950s and into the 1960s 

devolved into insurgent confrontations in such out-of-the-way places as Laos 

and Vietnam. The U.S. military, including the Air Force with its LeMay-built 

fleet of heavy bombers, found itself ill-suited for counterguerrilla warfare. As 

military historian Earl H. Tilford Jr. put it, “The Air Force was prepared to fly 

into Vietnam against guerrilla forces on the wings of the same conventional 

strategy used in bombing Nazi Germany in 1944.”8

Into this evolving geopolitical situation stepped John F. Kennedy in 1961. 

The young president brought with him a business-experienced technocrat as the 

new secretary of defense in Robert S. McNamara; university-based scholars as 

his senior national security advisors in McGeorge Bundy and Walt W. Rostow; 

and a retired Army general as his personal military advisor in Maxwell D. 

Taylor. As LeMay noted in some of the interviews below, Taylor’s opinions 

had not been particularly popular with the military establishment when he 

had served as chief of staff of the Army (1955–59), and many at the Pentagon 

were concerned by Taylor’s close relationship with the incoming president.9
3

Kennedy’s first senior military appointment was for the position of Air 

Force chief of staff, as White retired in mid-1961. LeMay’s biographers 

have tried to sort through the conflicting accounts of why Kennedy 

decided on LeMay. Eugene M. Zuckert, Kennedy’s secretary of the Air 

Force, told biographer Thomas M. Coffey that of the available candidates, 

“I didn’t think there was anybody who could get the Air Force behind him 

the way LeMay could.” He believed the choice was “very simple” and 

made the recommendation to the secretary of defense. McNamara told 

biographer Warren Kozak that he and the president believed LeMay was 

a “fine commander” and that “we thought we could reason with him.” 

After the Senate confirmed LeMay, Kennedy brought the general to the 

General LeMay with Gen. Thomas D. White, his predecessor as Air Force chief of 

staff, at a function at Fort Myer after White had retired. White found when 

he brought LeMay to the Pentagon as vice chief in 1957 that the former SAC 

commander had “almost no social graces.” USAF.
4

White House for his swearing in as the new chief of staff on June 30, 1961. 

McNamara was conspicuous by his absence from the ceremony.10

It was a momentous time for General LeMay to be joining the Joint 

Chiefs Staff (JCS). The United States had spent the spring considering 

intervention in Laos before the warring parties there reached a tenuous 

cease-fire on May 3. The ill-conceived Bay of Pigs operation in April had 

publicly embarrassed the new administration and increased Kennedy’s 

skepticism of military and intelligence experts, leading him to tighten his 

inner circle and move away from the established National Security Council 

model (as LeMay discusses below).11 Kennedy had sent Vice President 

Lyndon B. Johnson to Vietnam in May to investigate the worsening situation there, and he dispatched Taylor and Rostow in October 1961 to 

consider troop deployment after Viet Cong activity increased. By that 

time, the communist government in East Germany was constructing the 

Berlin Wall, with Moscow’s backing.12

As chief of staff, the blunt, cigar-chomping LeMay clashed almost 

immediately with Secretary McNamara, most publicly over the B–70 

bomber platform, a program the Kennedy administration threatened and 

subsequently killed. LeMay suffered a heart attack in December 1961 during 

the midst of the B–70 debate and spent a month and a half hospitalized 

at Andrews Air Force Base. LeMay described McNamara as a “very 

impressive man” with a “tremendous memory” who would “overwhelm 

the audience”—including Kennedy, Johnson, and Congress—“with what 

he called facts and figures.” However, LeMay believed that McNamara 

had “absolutely no respect for the military at all,” had “little respect for 

anybody,” and was “completely ruthless and unprincipled.” LeMay did 

not think McNamara trusted Taylor “any more than the rest of us because 

he had the military background.”13

Taylor was already anathema to the Air Force before he resurfaced 

as a Kennedy advisor, having written in his post-retirement national 

security polemic, The Uncertain Trumpet, in 1959 that “the Army considers that the Air Force is depending too much and too long on manned 

aircraft, both bombers and interceptors.” He advocated that “this force 

needs to be modernized through a more rapid replacement of bombers 

by missiles.” Taylor convinced Kennedy and McNamara that the “flexible response” capabilities he championed were the way of the future 

for the military.14

Kennedy had told confidants that he liked having proven field 

commanders like LeMay on the Joint Chiefs in the uncertain times early 

in his administration,15 but the president increasingly listened more to 

McNamara and Taylor and less to the Joint Chiefs. Kennedy eventually 
5

formalized the advisory chain when he brought Taylor out of military 

retirement and appointed him chairman of the Joint Chiefs, with Taylor 

assuming that duty on October 1, 1962. In that position, Taylor saw his role 

more as a supporter of the president’s foreign policy than as an advocate of 

the opinions of the Joint Chiefs.16 

“‘LeMay, your airplanes are no good,’” LeMay recalled Taylor telling 

him many times. According to LeMay, Taylor “thought ground defense 

would make the airplane obsolete.” LeMay conceded that Taylor’s opinions 

“would drive me practically crazy” and later stated that “it took a lot of will 

power to keep from letting him have one.” LeMay said that he “seldom 

agreed with Taylor on most of the basic questions.” Protocol seated LeMay 

to the right of Taylor at the Joint Chiefs’ meetings, and LeMay made sure to 

keep his lit cigar to his left side, trailing smoke into Taylor’s face.17

President Kennedy presided at the installation of General LeMay 

as Air Force chief of staff at the White House on June 30, 1961. 

Eugene M. Zuckert, the secretary of the Air Force, administered 

the oath. Photo by Abbie Rowe. Kennedy Library.
6

In a recent work on Gen. Wallace M. Greene Jr. of the Marines, who 

became LeMay’s closest ally among the Joint Chiefs, historian Nicholas J. 

Schlosser observed that Taylor “regularly discouraged dissent, presented 

his own views as if they were shared by the entire Joint Chiefs, and often 

failed to provide the Chiefs with adequate information as they deliberated 

on military issues.” LeMay was far from the only service chief who was 

increasingly frustrated with their chairman.18

Of course LeMay did not go out of his way to foster better understanding with Pentagon colleagues like Taylor and McNamara, either. 

As LeMay explained in the June 1984 interview excerpted below, “The 

President Kennedy talking with General LeMay outside the West Wing 

on October 1, 1962. Kennedy respected LeMay as a military commander, 

but an administration official said conversations with LeMay left Kennedy 

“frantic” and in “sort of a fit.” Photo by Cecil Stoughton. Kennedy Library.
7

administration spouted new phrases and things of that sort, but as far as 

the Air Force was concerned, we had no radical change in thinking at all.” 

With little interest in different approaches, LeMay had a habit of turning 

up his hearing aid only when he was discussing his own ideas. As Roswell 

L. Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, recalled, with LeMay literally 

tuned out, “you couldn’t conduct a dialogue” with him. “He just had one 

position. He knew what it was going to be.” Gilpatric added that LeMay 

advocated his stances “very forcefully and effectively, and he had a big 

following in Congress and elsewhere.”19

LeMay’s relationships with McNamara, Taylor, and Presidents Kennedy 

and Johnson are important context for LeMay’s comments in this book. Taylor 

thought LeMay was politically naïve and believed that his appointment as 

Air Force chief of staff was a “big mistake.”20 Kennedy became equally 

frustrated, with Gilpatric remembering that when Kennedy met with the 

Air Force leader, “he ended up in a sort of fit.” The president would “just 

be frantic at the end of a session with LeMay.” The general wouldn’t listen 

and would make what Kennedy thought were “outrageous proposals that 

bore no relation to the state of affairs in the 1960s.”21 Kennedy’s successor 

President Kennedy meeting in the Oval Office on October 2, 1963, with Gen. Maxwell D. 

Taylor, whom Kennedy had brought out of retirement to appoint as chairman of the Joint 

Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Photo by Abbie Rowe. 

Kennedy Library.
8

had a similar reaction. After a meeting with LeMay in mid-1964, Johnson 

confided to an aide that “I get anxious and look for the fire exits when a 

general wants to get tough. LeMay scares the hell out of me.”22

Many in the overlapping Kennedy and Johnson administrations viewed 

LeMay as an anachronism, a belief reinforced in the public mind during 

LeMay’s Joint Chiefs tenure with the release in January 1964 of Stanley 

Kubrick’s dark comedy Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop 

Worrying and Love the Bomb. A number of observers likened LeMay to 

both Air Force generals featured in the film, the paranoid Jack D. Ripper and 

the war-giddy Buck Turgidson.23 These images continued to hound LeMay, 

particularly during the 1968 political campaign. At his introductory press 

conference with Wallace, LeMay joined the ticket with a rambling discourse 

on unrestrained warfare, including the potential use of nuclear weapons.24

* * *

Readers of the interviews and excerpts that follow may come away 

with the impression that the civilian higher-ups in the Department of 

Defense and the White House never gave a full hearing to General 

LeMay’s plans for a massive strategic bombing campaign against North 

Vietnam, and that few shared his frustrations with the national security 

apparatus in the first half of the 1960s. Neither was the case. LeMay got 

his hearings, even with presidents, although he later said that the service 

chiefs risked retribution from McNamara and Taylor if they went directly 

to Kennedy or Johnson. Kennedy began moving away from interaction 

with the Joint Chiefs, but Johnson engaged their proposals after he 

became president, particularly in 1964 as the United States considered 

various levels of escalation. In fact, Johnson apparently heard more than 

he wanted to hear. “Ken, have you any idea what Curtis LeMay would 

be doing if I weren’t here to stop him?” Johnson said to John Kenneth 

Galbraith during this period.25

These points stated, the Joints Chiefs clearly felt that their unvarnished 

views were not making it through the chain of command to Johnson. Maj. 

Gen. Chester V. “Ted” Clifton Jr., U.S. Army, who was Johnson’s senior 

military aide, noted in March 1964 that the service chiefs had begun 

referring to the McNamara-Taylor planning on Vietnam as the “Asian Bay 

of Pigs.” He observed that this time, “they are sure” that they “cannot be 

blamed, because each of the members is keeping careful record of what 

he has advocated to General Taylor and the Secretary of Defense.” Clifton 

added that the Joint Chiefs “feel that the things they are advocating have 

not been presented strongly to the President.”26
9

In the same memo, Clifton commented on another pending issue, the 

approaching end of LeMay’s term as chief of staff, which was to be up in 

June 1964. “His feelings run so deeply,” Clifton wrote, that “he will be 

tempted to speak out on this matter, especially when he feels that so much 

more should be done against the North Viet Nam sanctuary, and especially 

when he feels that this proposition hasn’t been reviewed thoroughly and 

that all the Chiefs haven’t had a chance to speak on the matter before the 

‘inadequate’ courses of action were announced.”27

Despite the president’s concerns about LeMay’s ideas, Johnson reappointed LeMay for another seven months as chief of staff, surprising 

most of his advisors. At the same time, the president named Gen. John P. 

McConnell as the vice chief, with widespread assumption that he would be 

LeMay’s successor as chief of staff. Johnson had spent a couple of weeks 

considering other options for LeMay, including an ambassadorship, but 

he decided to keep LeMay’s criticism in-house, at least through the 1964 

presidential election. LeMay reminded the president that “I don’t agree 

with what your secretary of defense is trying to do.” LeMay recounted that 

Johnson replied, “‘Yes, I understand that. Just go back over there [to the 

General LeMay with President Lyndon B. Johnson at Johnson’s ranch in Texas in 

December 1963. “I get anxious and look for fire exits when a general wants to get tough,” 

Johnson told an aide in mid-1964. “LeMay scares the hell out of me.” National Archives.
10

Pentagon] and do what you think is best for the country.’” The president let 

LeMay break the news of his reappointment to McNamara. The extension 

meant that LeMay was still a member of the Joint Chiefs in the summer 

and fall of 1964 as the situation in Vietnam worsened.28

LeMay had support on the Joint Chiefs for aggressive action during 

this time from General Greene, the commandant of the Marine Corps as 

of January 1964, whose recently published notes from this period echo 

LeMay’s frustration with McNamara, Taylor, and the civilian national 

security apparatus.29 Greene had responded to a McNamara proposal 

in March 1964 by declaring that “half-measures won’t win in South 

Vietnam.”30 For his part, McNamara was not only reluctant to move beyond 

a more limited response, but also skeptical about whether more drastic 

measures would have the desired effect. When LeMay sent forward a list 

of prospective targets in North Vietnam in August 1964—the plan that 

LeMay references often in the text that follows—McNamara wrote back: 

“If the destruction of the 94 targets were not to succeed in its objective of 

destroying the DRV [North Vietnamese] will and capability, what courses 

of action would you recommend?”31

LeMay had little use for even considering more limited measures. 

During the 1964 discussions, he declared that “we are swatting at flies 

when we should be going after the manure pile.”32 As the following 

Secretary McNamara at a press conference on April 26, 1965, giving a briefing about 

interdiction efforts along routes into South Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh trail. 

General LeMay described McNamara as “a very impressive man,” but one who was also 

“completely ruthless and unprincipled.” Photo by Marion Trikosko. Library of Congress.
11

interviews and writings show, LeMay remained convinced that a large-scale 

bombing campaign that directly attacked Hanoi, the port at Haiphong, 

and other major targets deep in North Vietnam would have significantly 

altered the war, particularly if the strikes had taken place early in the 

U.S. involvement in the conflict. As the war progressed, the North 

Vietnamese improved their antiaircraft capabilities, especially with 

surface-to-air missiles, and imported their MiG fleet. LeMay discusses 

his advocacy for the mining of Haiphong harbor, a step that President 

Richard M. Nixon finally approved just weeks before the June 1972 

interview with LeMay included here. The general did not mention the 

proposed bombing of the dikes in the Red River Delta near Hanoi, a 

long-debated step that was becoming a political issue at the time of this 

interview. The North Vietnamese alleged that some dikes had been hit 

in the spring 1972 bombing campaign that evolved into Linebacker I. 

Nixon and his advisors continued to contemplate dike targeting as part 

of the Linebacker II missions in December 1972.33

The Linebacker II operation, with B–52 strikes against military and 

industrial targets in and around Hanoi, approximated the type of campaign 

that LeMay had wanted to see in Vietnam from the beginning, as he and 

other general officers discussed in the June 1984 interview below that 

concludes the book. The perceived success of Linebacker II, according to 

military historian Mark Clodfelter, led post-Vietnam air commanders to 

LeMay-like conclusions and to advocate “no sweeping doctrinal changes. 

They parade[d] Linebacker II as proof that bombing will work in limited 

war.” Clodfelter also noted that the Air Force leaders “dismiss[ed] the 

notion that too much force could trigger nuclear devastation,” much as 

LeMay does in the following passages. He showed little concern about 

potential Chinese or Soviet intervention and a wider war.34

Air Force historian Brian D. Laslie has observed that “preconceived 

notions of how air warfare should be conducted and the way in which the 

U.S. Air Force prepared its pilots in the 1950s and 1960s were proven 

wrong during the war in Vietnam.”35 But, as Clodfelter noted, it took the 

Air Force time to acknowledge what he called the “limits of air power”—

the title of his book—that Vietnam exposed, as well as the deficiencies in 

tactics and training that Laslie examined in his work.

The significance of the LeMay observations that follow is that they 

explain in good detail the thinking behind why and how the Air Force had 

been developed the way it was, and why its leaders continued to believe 

what they did, even in light of Vietnam. There is more context and nuance 

beyond bombing “back into the Stone Age,” and also explanation from 

LeMay on how he thought the service could be flexible in counterguerrilla 
12

responses. Several times he mentioned the need for coordinated air and 

naval operations, but he was vague on the roles he envisioned for the 

Navy, other than blockading North Vietnamese ports.

It is important to note that the Air Force was not the only service illprepared for irregular warfare. Just as the Air Force had focused its 

training and weapons-system development on large-scale Cold War 

confrontations, so too had the Army and the Navy, despite Army leaders 

who had been early adherents to “flexible response.” The Marine Corps 

claimed more flexibility but struggled to adapt to jungle warfare nearly as 

much as the rest of the U.S. military did.

The LeMay statements that follow also add firsthand commentary to 

the literature on the disintegration of the national security apparatus during 

the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Whether one believes that the 

United States should or should not have directly intervened on a large 

scale in Vietnam, there can be little disagreement on the point that distrust 

in the halls of the Pentagon between the uniformed and civilian personnel 

did not help improve the decision-making process.

Readers hoping for more detail on the debates in 1963–65 that led 

to the expanded U.S. military role in Vietnam will be disappointed by 

the following interviews, however.36 LeMay gave no specifics and told an 

inconsistent and evolving story on timing. In the July 1965 excerpt below, 

he accurately stated that not until “two or three months” before he retired did 

President Johnson meeting with the Joint Chiefs at his ranch on December 22, 1964. 

Clockwise from the president are Secretary McNamara, Maj. Gen. Chester V. Clifton Jr. 

(Johnson’s military aide), General LeMay, Gen. Earle G. Wheeler (chairman of the Joint 

Chiefs), Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus R. Vance, Gen. Harold Johnson, Adm. David L. 

McDonald, and General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Photo by Yoichi Okamoto. Johnson Library.
13

all of the service chiefs recommend more aggressive action (late October 

1964), but even then, LeMay and Greene wanted more drastic measures than 

the others, and disagreement continued on whether to focus the resources 

on North or South Vietnam.37 By the 1969 and 1972 interviews, LeMay was 

insisting that the Joint Chiefs were more or less on the same page about 

striking the north by late 1963. This assertion ignores the acrimony among 

the chiefs during much of the 1964 debate. LeMay clashed in particular 

with Gen. Harold K. Johnson, the Army chief of staff, who insisted that 

the war had to be fought primarily in South Vietnam.38 In the interviews, 

LeMay also stated that Gen. David M. Shoup, commandant of the Marine 

Corps until the end of 1963, was his primary backer among the chiefs. 

LeMay did gain Shoup’s support in late 1963 for more aggressive action 

than the small-scale counterinsurgent missions outlined in Operation Plan 

(OPLAN) 34A, which LeMay labeled “pinprick” efforts. But Shoup had 

been skeptical of expanded involvement in Vietnam since he had visited 

there in 1962, particularly of the introduction of U.S. ground forces, and 

after retirement, he became a critic of the war—a point of consternation 

for LeMay in the 1969 interview.39

LeMay was right, however, in his observations that neither Johnson nor 

McNamara offered an overarching strategy to guide U.S. involvement in the 

spiraling conflict, a point on which historians have agreed. George C. Herring 

wrote in LBJ and Vietnam that “the most glaring deficiency is that in an 

extraordinarily complex war there was no real strategy.” Johnson and McNamara 

“provided no firm strategic guidance to those military and civilian advisors who 

were running programs in the field. They set no clearcut limits on what could 

be done, what resources might be employed, and what funds expended.”40

LeMay took his criticism public in 1968 in his book America is in Danger, writing that “I question whether an organization as unwieldy and 

amateurish as has been created by the Secretary of Defense could ever 

propagate a successful war. The dismal results in Vietnam attest to this 

doubt.” Much of the book was an attack on the civilian leadership in 

general and McNamara in particular, although he was rarely mentioned by 

name.41 Surprisingly, considering their disdain for each other, McNamara 

only referenced LeMay and his “stubbornness” a couple of times in passing 

when he finally wrote about Vietnam in his 1995 memoir.42

As for Johnson, according to Herring, “The president retained to the 

end a southern populist’s suspicion of the military, and especially on the 

bombing of North Vietnam.” Johnson “feared that acceptance of the 

Joint Chiefs’ proposals might lead to World War III.”43 As noted, no one 

advocated more for massive bombing of North Vietnam than Gen. Curtis 

LeMay—and no one scared Johnson more with his scenarios.
14

* * *

This project is built around an extensive interview with LeMay about 

Vietnam conducted by Air Force historians in June 1972, which is nearly 

half the material in the book. For context, however, it is instructive to see 

what LeMay had said over time. This collection is by no means exhaustive; 

it combines snapshots from a few published accounts with material from 

several previously unpublished oral histories, dating back to LeMay’s 

exit interview with an unnamed Air Force historian in January 1965 as he 

prepared to retire. The first section begins with excerpts from this dialogue. 

It is interesting to note that the only questions about Vietnam came at the 

very end of the conversation.

LeMay was such a prominent figure that a number of reporters sought 

him out for interviews during this same January 1965 time frame. He was 

more circumspect with the media than he was in the career interview excerpts 

published here. When asked by a United Press International reporter if 

there was a way out of Vietnam, LeMay replied that “the direction of the 

war comes from Hanoi, supplies come down from the north, and so forth.” 

He observed that “we try to fight all our battles in South Vietnam. It doesn’t 

appear that we can win this way. The only way to stop it is to make it too 

expensive for North Vietnam to conduct the war.”44

At the time LeMay left the Air Force in February 1965, he and coauthor MacKinlay Kantor (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book 

Andersonville) were already well underway with work on LeMay’s autobiography, for publication in November of that year. They added a short 

viewpoint on Vietnam, written in July 1965, that is included here. This 

passage contains LeMay’s most famous statement, that the United States 

should threaten to bomb North Vietnam “back into the Stone Age.” Although 

he never did so publicly, LeMay later privately denied actually referencing 

prehistory, writing a friend that the Stone Age comment had come from 

Kantor. LeMay protested that “I was just so damned bored going through 

the transcripts that I just let it get by.”45 However, the full passage below, 

and the information in it, ring true to LeMay’s thinking and clearly came 

from interviews with him.46 He made some statements very close to these 

in his 1969 and 1972 interviews. The memoir excerpt is included here as 

an example of the progression of his thinking, and of his public statements, 

with the strong caveat that these may not have been his exact words.

The same cautioning applies to the next two passages, from a 1966 article 

in U.S. News & World Report published under LeMay’s byline, and from 

LeMay’s 1968 book America is in Danger, coauthored with Maj. Gen. Dale 

O. Smith, USAF (Ret.). Some sections in the book are almost verbatim from 

the article, possibly indicating a common, uncredited ghostwriter. Included 
15

here are short excerpts from each publication. The flavor and thinking are 

clearly LeMay’s, perhaps with his prose polished a bit. America is in Danger

appears to have been written for the most part in 1967, as it focuses heavily 

on McNamara, who left the Department of Defense in February 1968, and 

it does not include mention of the Tet Offensive, which started at the end 

of January 1968. Although LeMay’s biographers have not documented the 

connection, the book brought renewed attention to LeMay’s calls for a more 

aggressive U.S. military and foreign policy and may have contributed to his 

selection as Wallace’s running mate.

The combative and at times defensive LeMay is on display in the interview of June 7, 1969, perhaps as a result of his experiences on the campaign 

trail the previous fall. The conversation was part of the oral history 

collection effort by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. In a curious 

twist of provenance, LeMay insisted that the interview not be on file at the 

Kennedy Library and instead had the tape and transcript transferred to the 

Air Force.47 While the interviewer asked LeMay his opinions of several 

people, including McNamara and Taylor, he did not ask about Kennedy, 

or about key interactions LeMay had with him, such as during the Cuban 

Missile Crisis. Most of the discussion of Vietnam came about because of 

LeMay’s interjection of the subject.

The fuller interview material published here is from two conversations 

with General LeMay in 1972, in a later time frame of the war. They came 

about as the Air Force History program moved toward publication of its 

first official history of Air Force involvement in Southeast Asia, even 

while the war was still proceeding. The history program asked LeMay to 

read a draft manuscript for the book, written by Robert F. Futrell. Since 

the material was still classified at the time, LeMay had to commute from 

his home in Bel Air, California, out to March Air Force Base for several 

reading sessions, more than a hundred miles roundtrip.

After LeMay had reviewed most of the manuscript, which he found 

“comparatively dull reading,” Thomas G. Belden of the history program 

interviewed him on March 29, 1972, at March Air Force Base. Belden 

asked general questions about material covered in the book, but after a 

few minutes of conversation, LeMay suggested that it might be better 

for him to meet with the author the next time he was in Washington so 

Futrell could ask about more specific details. Excerpts of the March 1972 

interview are included below, mostly with LeMay discussing material that 

he did not address in the follow-up session. Points he covered in more 

detail in the later conversation have been omitted.

As promised, LeMay alerted the history program of his next visit to 

Washington and sat for a conversation at the Pentagon on June 8, 1972. The 
16

interviewers were Belden, Futrell, and Jacob Van Staaveren. The Air Force 

later published a revised and expanded version of the Futrell manuscript 

LeMay had reviewed as The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia: 

The Advisory Years to 1965, while Van Staaveren wrote Gradual Failure: 

The Air War over North Vietnam, 1965–1966.

48

The knowledge that Futrell, Van Staaveren, and Belden brought to the 

discussion, both from their long association with the Air Force and from 

research in the documents, informed and shaped the interview. The primary 

point of it was to fill in holes in Futrell’s research, so the discussion did 

cover some minor points and some smaller deployments. One of these was 

the Farm Gate operation, which was a largely LeMay-generated effort for 

the Air Force to develop counterinsurgency capability within the constraints 

that the Kennedy administration recognized. The trio of historians asked 

some broader questions, leading to a wider discussion of the Air Force 

role in Vietnam. LeMay responded with candor, as he usually did, but the 

discussion was more focused than it was in his public interviews or in his 

books. This interview was LeMay’s fullest statement on Vietnam.

This collection of LeMay’s Vietnam observations concludes with excerpts of his comments from a panel discussion at the Air Force’s Senior 

Statesmen Conference on June 15, 1984. Richard H. Kohn of the Air Force 

History office led a session on strategic air warfare with LeMay and 

fellow retired generals Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal, and Jack J. 

Catton. This section is particularly instructive because it includes LeMay’s 

thoughts on how much the Linebacker II campaign resembled the type of 

operation he had wanted to see against North Vietnam in 1964–65. His 

belief that strategic bombing could have won the war never wavered.

* * *

As one reads the following material, one is struck by an irony that 

completely eluded General LeMay: he won the argument for the massive 

use of manned air power in Vietnam. Even McNamara and Taylor became proponents.49 While LeMay believed that Rolling Thunder was a 

bastardization of strategic bombing, it was still air power, a large-scale 

employment of it, that became the first hammer of U.S. escalation to fall. 

A Viet Cong attack on the U.S. Marine barracks at Pleiku on the night of 

February 6–7, 1965—just days after LeMay had left the Pentagon—killed 

eight Americans and wounded 126.50 As the Joint Chiefs and Secretary 

McNamara huddled to formulate a response to what they and the South 

Vietnamese saw as an intensified level of provocation, the specter of 

LeMay’s forceful arguments over the previous two years permeated the 
17

atmosphere like the cloud of blue smoke that usually trailed him. General 

Greene recorded in his notes that as the Joint Chiefs put the finishing touches 

on the planning for the early rounds of the sustained bombing campaign 

a few weeks later, the chairman, Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, turned to his 

service-chief colleagues and said, “in a half-joking fashion, ‘The secretary 

of defense is sounding like General LeMay. All he needs is a cigar.’”51

* * *

Editorial methodology: Four of the pieces that follow have been previously published, while the other four have not. The excerpts from published 

works record the text verbatim, with ellipses and breaks indicating omitted material.

Text from the four unpublished LeMay interviews has been transcribed 

from typescripts. All have some very light editing for readability, such 

as the silent omission of a few transitional words at the beginnings of 

sentences like “but,” “and,” and “well,” as well as a handful of falsestart statements and repeated phrases. Punctuation and paragraphing have 

been added when needed. Only one of the interviews, from June 1972, is 

presented at close to full length. For that one, references in the discussion 

to the change of tapes have been omitted, as have introductory and concluding chatter.

Some redundancy across the LeMay statements is unavoidable. In 

some cases duplicated discussion has been left in intentionally to show 

consistency in LeMay’s thinking, or changes in his arguments. The focus 

is on Vietnam, and on the broader national security apparatus of the period. 

Several digressions about World War II, Korea, and SAC have been 

truncated or omitted.

Full names, the spelling out of acronyms, and dates have been added 

in brackets where necessary. Annotation is included in a few places for 

clarification or elaboration. For more details on many of the issues discussed, readers are encouraged to consult works cited in the introduction 

and its endnotes, particularly Futrell’s book.
General LeMay piloting his last flight as an Air Force officer, flying a C–135 out of Andrews 

Air Force Base in February 1965. USAF.
19

Part I

January 1965–March 1972

Career Interview, Air Force History, January 1965:52

Question [unidentified interviewer]: What are your views on the role of 

the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff]?

Gen. Curtis E. LeMay: I don’t know its future. None of us is happy 

about its present role. Too many decisions are made without a military input 

by the JCS. We used to have the National Security Council and its staff. 

Decisions were made slowly, but they were made deliberately. Everyone 

was heard. We had a national security policy, but now we do not. Some think 

this is good because policy can be a handicap. I’m not so sure this is so. For 

some people it is a handicap, but men with drive will change regulations.

We don’t have a National Security Council per se, but a group of committees. 

The chairman [Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, U.S. Army] says military advice gets 

through. I’m not sure full consideration is given to it. Maybe the reason I 

think so is because all our resolutions are ruled against. All the chiefs feel 

that they don’t have much influence on policy. Perhaps the military view 

should be ruled against, but when we are fighting, the military should have 

its say, I think. And we are fighting in Vietnam.53

_____

Question: Did the JCS default by not making decisions?

LeMay: I admit that there were arguments and differences of opinion. 

This is all right, provided that we have a boss who makes a decision. But 

he doesn’t appear to take our advice. In many cases, I think he has his 

mind made up prior to getting our advice, and he will not change his 

preconceived decision as a result of receiving that advice.54

_____

Question: What are the proper Army and Air Force roles in counterinsurgency?

LeMay: We develop tactics and techniques to help our friends fight 
20

communism. This is the proper role for the military. If we concentrate too 

much on this, however, that is the wrong way.

One trouble is that we set up rules that favor the enemy, not us. 

According to the rules of international law, we can take actions against 

an open aggression. But they send in guerrillas, and we can’t take action 

against covert infiltration. Cuba did this in Venezuela. There should be 

changes in the law.

Both the Army and the Air Force have roles in counterinsurgency. They 

should cooperate in a team play. The experience in Vietnam bears this out.55

_____

Question: What can we do to improve the Vietnam situation?

LeMay: We can’t get out of Southeast Asia. I don’t believe we should 

get out of South Vietnam. The political problems don’t permit us to get 

out. The Vietnamese are unhappy and dissatisfied. I’d be discontented, too, 

if I lived there, through war, for a long, long time and saw no end of it. 

If any government in South Vietnam showed the people that it had some 

chance of winning the war, the people would get behind it.

To me, winning the war means going north and stopping the aggression 

coming out of there. It’s so late now that even this may not do it. But it should be 

done. There is a good chance that if we did this, we could stop the aggression.

I don’t understand how we can go on as we have been going on. If it 

goes on, we will jeopardize the lives of our people in Vietnam. We received 

a message from CINCPAC [Adm. Ulysses S. G. Sharp Jr., commander in 

chief, Pacific Command] recommending taking out U.S. dependents 

because CINCPAC believes they are in danger. MACV [Military 

Assistance Command, Vietnam] doesn’t agree because he [Gen. William 

C. Westmoreland, MACV commander] thinks this would have serious 

defeatist implications.

For a long time, I’ve said we should go north. Our present strategies 

aren’t working. The coups are getting worse. Dissatisfaction with the 

government in South Vietnam is growing. The military is the only 

viable and cohesive force. It offers the only stability in the country. 

It is possible to do things with them. But these things smolder. Who 

knows when rioting will spread to the army. Everything else would 

then go up. We would lose our people who are dispersed and not able 

to get to an airfield.

Question: How would you go about attacking North Vietnam?

LeMay: By air. I would use conventional air power to take care of 

North Vietnam. I would bomb more than the supply lines. I would go right 

up to the source of the aggression.
21

Question: Would the Chinese react?

LeMay: Maybe, maybe not. I don’t worry particularly about that. We 

have to be prepared to take care of them, by air also. This would be a sizable 

chore with conventional tonnages. It would probably be more efficient in 

a big war with the Chinese communists to use a few nuclear weapons in 

carefully selected places to do the job.

At the end of the Korean War, we made it clear we wouldn’t fight 

another war of that kind. We’d fight a war of our own choosing if it flared 

up again. I don’t see any difference between a flare-up north or south.

Maybe it would be a good thing if the Chinese came to the support of 

North Vietnam. We could set back the Chinese nuclear program, or knock 

it out for good. We could then review history and see what kind of world 

we would have had if we had knocked out the Russian nuclear setup when 

they first got the atomic bomb.56

* * *

President Johnson hosted the farewell ceremony for General LeMay at the White House 

on February 1, 1965. LeMay’s wife, Helen, is seated next to Vice President Hubert H. 

Humphrey, with their daughter, Jane, to the right of her. Photo by Abbie Rowe. USAF.
22

Mission with LeMay, July 1965:57

We may be engaged in an all-out war by the time this book is published. 

I don’t think we will be. But it could happen.

All along I have said that if we were going to get anywhere in Viet 

Nam, we’d have to attack in the north. I advocated that policy for about 

three years in the Joint Chiefs, and I was all by myself. Then the Marines 

came around to agreeing with me, and we were together in the opinion. 

Then, two or three months before I retired, the Army and the Navy began 

to see what we were talking about. Finally the entire JCS recommended 

the northern approach.58

Political and religious winds of Viet Nam blow in every direction. 

Those people have been fighting for a long time; they are extremely weary 

of fighting, but they can’t see any end in sight. They don’t especially wish 

to become Communists. Many rustics up in the backwoods probably don’t 

know the difference between Communism and Capitalism. They just want 

to be left alone, in peace.

But the people who do know the difference are still tired of the war, 

and they’ve been looking to their government to try to do something about 

ending the carnage. It is essential to show them a ray of light somewhere 

along the line, and make them know that they have a chance of winning, 

and getting the war over with. If any government would show them that 

ray of light, assuredly they would support it.59

But voices have been saying repeatedly, “No, we must recognize a stable 

government, down there in the south, before we dare carry the war to the north.”

I don’t believe that. If you carry the war to the north, and really carry

it there, you’ll get your stable government.

The United States finally began attacking the north last February 

[1965]. This was assuredly a step in the right direction. I have not met 

anyone conversant with the true situation in Southeast Asia who is not 

behind the Administration’s resolve to stay in Viet Nam.

The Russians now say that they will permit “volunteers” to go in 

there. Chinese Communists are already installing the latest defensive 

devices which they possess. I fear they will use them, maybe even before 

these words get into print. You allow the North Vietnamese to build up 

an adequate protection, and it becomes harder and harder to perform the 

military task which we need to perform. And it costs more lives.60

The military task confronting us is to make it so expensive for the 

North Vietnamese that they will stop their aggression against South Viet 

Nam and Laos. If we make it too expensive for them, they will stop. They 

don’t want to lose everything they have.
23

There came a time when the Nazis threw the towel into the ring. Same 

way with the Japanese. We didn’t bring that day about by sparring with 

sixteen-ounce gloves.

My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they’ve 

got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to 

bomb them back into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into 

the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.

You could tell them this. But they might not be convinced that you 

really meant business. What you must do with those characters is convince 

them that if they continue their aggression, they will have to pay an 

economic penalty which they cannot afford.

We must throw a punch that really hurts.

For example, we could knock out all their oil. They don’t have oil of 

their own; it has to come into the country; so there are rich targets, in storage 

areas sprinkled around.61

Knock them all out. This immediately brings a lot of things to a halt: 

transportation and power particularly. It would be the simplest possible 

application of strategic bombardment, and you could do the job with 

conventional weapons. You wouldn’t have to get into a nuclear fracas.

. . . Or you could bottle up the harbor at Haiphong.62 That’s their main 

port, fifty-odd miles east and a little south of Hanoi, the capital. One way 

to do it would be to knock out the dredges which keep the channel open. 

They have to keep dredging, or that particular channel will close up within 

a very short period of time, and ships can’t get in or out. Take advantage of 

a local phenomenon: kill off the dredges. No dredges, no ships.

Or knock out the dock areas, the port itself. Or mine the harbor, the 

way we mined waters around Japan with our B–29s.63

So, choke off all supply by water routes. Or hit the few industries they 

have. Or knock out all their transportation.

Successful prosecution of this war would not necessarily require the 

introduction of nuclear weapons. But you won’t get anywhere until you 

do go in there and really swat the Communists. This could be done with 

conventional weapons.

Maxim: Apply whatever force it is necessary to employ, to stop things 

quickly. The main thing is stop it. The quicker you stop it, the more lives you save.

Once you are in a position where you are compelled to use military 

force, or in a position where you decide that military force is the only 

solution to the problem, then you resort to military force. The quicker you 

complete that military action, the better for all concerned.

* * *
24

“General LeMay Tells How to Win the War in Vietnam,” 

October 1966:64

Through one fateful strategic decision after another, we have backed 

into a nasty and confusing kind of war in Vietnam. The fact that we have 

become entangled in this struggle, however, is water over the dam. What 

we must realize is that, stated or not, we are now fully committed to halt 

aggressive Communism in South Vietnam.

What can be done to accomplish this mission? . . .65

First, war in any proportion is dangerous for all of us and should not 

be undertaken lightly or haphazardly. Now that we are fully involved in a 

hot war, however, we have no choice but to go through with it. To back out 

now would be a great defeat for the cause of freedom. But we should never 

pretend it to be a sort of business-as-usual sideshow.

Second, once we have taken the fateful step into war, we should wage 

it in such a way as to end it as quickly as possible. This means, as I have 

often recommended, that we should use naval and air power against the 

most valuable targets. Destruction of oil storage is a beginning, but the 

thumb screws will need much more tightening before “uncle” is called. 

This does not mean the bombing of populations, but rather of important 

industrial, transportation and agricultural objectives.

Third, we must not try to fight a benign war against an enemy who 

utilizes terror as a basic tactic. If we take up arms against an enemy, we 

should hit him hard. This means that we should destroy his economy and 

his will to wage war. Again, let me say, as I have often said, this does not 

mean mass slaughter.

Fourth, we must be prepared to risk and fight a large war if necessary. 

We must not let ourselves be subdued by Red China’s threats and blusters. 

If we are not prepared to escalate, that is, apply more power, then we are 

not prepared to win and we should get out. . . .66

You don’t save a dog any pain by cutting off his tail an inch at a time. 

I’m not satisfied that “we are no longer losing the war.” The longer we 

drag out the conflict, the better chance there is of the political base in 

South Vietnam crumbling under our feet.

Suppose we are invited to depart? What then of our 4,919 dead? To 

them and their families it will have been total war, and futile.

This is just one more reason why we must wage this war in such a 

way as to win it as quickly as possible. We have started doing this by 

bombing POL [petroleum, oil, lubricants], but it means much more. It 

means employing the weapons and strategies available to us. It means 
25

warning the North Vietnamese of our intentions and then letting them feel 

the strength of our muscles. It means attacking every valuable target.

We need only go after the economic jugular vein instead of yapping at 

the logistical legs.67

* * *

America is in Danger, 1967/1968:68

Regardless of how we have backed into this war, we must now recognize, unequivocally, that we are in it, and our only exit with honor and 

world respect is to win it. How can we do this?

The first step is to reverse our objective. Instead of the negotiating 

table, we must aspire to decisive victory. We must make war so costly to 

North Vietnam that it will sue for peace. The Communists started this war. 

Let them wish they never had. Let the Communists end it.

Second, we must fight the war from our position of strength, not theirs. We 

must fight it at the lowest possible cost to ourselves and at the greatest cost to 

the enemy. We must change the currency in this contest, from men to materials.

America’s greatest strength in this military situation is air and naval 

power. We must use it strategically. We must use it decisively. And we 

must use it now.

It is important that we tell the world about this change in objective so 

that the world can correctly interpret our motives and evaluate our results. 

And we must also tell the Communists.

We must tell them that we are going to bomb increasingly costly 

targets in North Vietnam. They can decide how much they want to pay for 

the privilege of invading their neighbor. First, we must destroy the ability 

of the North Vietnamese to wage war and then, if necessary, their entire 

productive capacity.

We can pinpoint the targets we will hit and warn the civilians in advance to evacuate. In modern warfare, with modern warning devices, there 

is little surprise in bombing raids. Hanoi, for example, is ringed with far 

more and far better anti-aircraft devices than were ever in Berlin during 

World War II.

You will recall that North Vietnam is a rather recent arrival to twentiethcentury technology and industry. Her resources, by our standards, are 

meager and hard earned. They are more valuable to her, in many respects, 

than human life. And North Vietnam must be made to pay for this war with 

her dearest coins.
26

To do this, we must return to the strategic bombing doctrine which was 

tried and proved in World War II. We must attack the sources of supply and 

the sources of power. We must not waste our bombs, our multi-milliondollar aircraft, and our precious fighter pilots on bridges, trucks, barracks, 

and oil drums when major factories, supply dumps, power plants, port 

facilities, and merchant ships go unscathed.

We hear dissenters say today that the bombing of North Vietnam is 

ineffective and, in relation to the great effort we are expending, they are 

right. Probably the weirdest aspect of this Alice-in-Wonderland war is that 

we have dropped more explosives on Vietnam than we did on Germany in 

World War II. Our strikes against Germany devastated one of the world’s 

most powerful and industrially advanced nations, yet an even greater 

destructive force seems to have hardly dented the military capacity of a 

backward, third-rate power. How can this be? It is not air power which is 

wanting. It is the wrong employment of air power.

* * *

Interview by John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, June

7, 1969:69

Dennis J. O’Brien: In the [1960 presidential] election, did you sense 

that the candidates, both President [Richard M.] Nixon and President 

[John F.] Kennedy, did you sense that they, from their political speeches 

and things like this, did you sense that they really had a grasp of national 

defense issues?

Gen. Curtis E. LeMay: No, I don’t think they did. National defense is 

something that you don’t get in a short period of time. It’s a profession, 

it’s a lifetime work. My main complaint about the Kennedy administration 

is you never could get the experience and judgment of a lifetime spent in 

defense of the country ground into the solution of any of the problems. 

Never. Now it’s true that Mr. [Robert S.] McNamara always told the Congress that he consulted the Joint Chiefs on every military question, and 

this was literally true, but many times we would get papers asking our 

comments on some question or other when we knew that the decision had 

been made two days before, the order issued. That sort of stuff. No one 

paid too much attention to our judgment on anything. They thought that 

the standard Harvard Business School method of solving problems would 

solve any problem. In defense, it will not do it. When you’re dealing with 

people that have had experience and judgment rather than a complete 

computer solution, that sometimes prevails over the computer solution.70
27

_____

O’Brien: Let’s talk about some of the people that you dealt with while 

you were chief of staff. When was the first time you met Mr. McNamara?

LeMay: Well, I met him before he actually took office. He was over some 

with briefings, and I think I met him then. If I didn’t, it was early in the game.

O’Brien: Did you meet him during World War II?

LeMay: He served in my command during World War II out in India as 

a captain, and I think when I moved to Guam, he came over to Guam with 

some of the plans people that I had moved over there. . . . I don’t remember 

meeting him during that time. . . .

O’Brien: What were your impressions of him at that point [at the 

beginning of the administration], of his appointment as secretary of defense?

LeMay: Well, rather neutral. [He was] a new secretary of defense, 

hoping that he would turn out all right, but he never did according to my 

opinion. As a matter of fact, I think he was a disaster for the country. Not 

that he didn’t do some things that all the military agreed with; he did. He 

accomplished some things that had to be accomplished and were good.

I think one of the main shortcomings of practically all the secretaries 

of defense that we had before then is that there comes a time when somebody has to make a decision. It’s not surprising that in a complicated 

matter like the defense of the country that you find different opinions and 

different solutions to problems. I used to find them in all of my commands. 

President Kennedy visited the Pentagon for a series of briefings on May 29, 1962. He is 

shown talking with Secretary McNamara. Photo by Robert Knudsen. Kennedy Library.
28

Sometimes you could lock up your staff and let them fight it out, and they’d 

finally arrive at a solution that everybody agreed on. But many times you 

couldn’t, so you’d listen to the proponents of each solution, and their pros 

and cons, and their arguments, and come time you had to make a decision 

and say, “OK, we’re going to do it this way.” Make a decision. This is 

true in the Department of Defense that you’ll find different solutions for 

problems amongst the Army and the Navy and the Air Force and even the 

Marines. So there comes a time when somebody has to make the decision. 

That’s the secretary of defense. Most of them before [McNamara] had 

been a little reluctant to make a decision when it was called for because 

they didn’t feel that they really had the adequate background to make it, 

I suppose. So they’d appoint a committee or something to study it a little 

bit more, to try to get a little more help on it since there was a diversion of 

opinion amongst the services.

Mr. McNamara never did this. Matter of fact, he made the decisions 

without even listening to the arguments in a lot of cases. There was no 

reluctance on his part to make decisions. Unfortunately, most of them 

General LeMay was seated next to Letitia Baldrige, Jacqueline Kennedy’s social secretary, 

at a July 1961 dinner at Mount Vernon in honor of Mohammad Ayub Khan, president of 

Pakistan. LeMay shared the table with Senator W. Stuart Symington Jr. (far right), who had 

served as the first secretary of the Air Force, and Senator Michael J. “Mike” Mansfield (far 

left), a Kennedy confidant on Vietnam. Photo by Cecil Stoughton. Kennedy Library.
29

that he made were wrong. I think most people are beginning to realize 

this now.71

_____

O’Brien: How about Mr. [Roswell L.] Gilpatric [the deputy secretary 

of defense]? When was the first time you came into contact with Mr. 

Gilpatric?

LeMay: Well, very early in the game, too. Mr. Gilpatric, I think, was 

a more reasonable individual than some of them in the team that came in, 

but he couldn’t have stayed there, of course, without playing on the team.72

_____

O’Brien: Senator [W. Stuart] Symington [Jr., D-Mo.], of course, has 

always been quite concerned with the Air Force. Did you ever, in your 

meetings with him, . . . express any apprehension about the attitudes and 

the policies of the Kennedy administration?

LeMay: No. I never had any contact with Congress except when I went 

over to testify before committees. I always felt that this was kind of going 

behind the boss’s back to do something. I told my views to the secretary 

of defense, and in several cases I told them to the president, as was my 

duty to do. But also when I appeared before congressional committees, I 

gave them my honest opinion, which in many cases differed from what the 

administration was presenting. . . . I think they felt that I was honest in my 

opinion and was really presenting what I thought, but I never did it unless 

I was asked a direct question.73

_____

O’Brien: Give your impressions of the new, incoming administration 

in 1961 at the time of the inauguration. Were you apprehensive about what 

the new administration was going to do?

LeMay: Not initially. I think that everyone welcomes a new administration with an open mind. But it didn’t take very long for most military 

people to feel that they were in a complete state of frustration, that you 

could never gain anything. About all you could accomplish was to cut 

your losses.74

_____

LeMay: The B–70 was to be the follow-on manned system to the B–52, 

and it was a pretty good airplane. However, I think Mr. McNamara was 

heading towards no airplanes at all. I think his first goal was to get down to 

about a thousand missiles, and that would be a sufficient deterrent force. 
30

We never believed this in the Air Force, and none of the other services ever 

believed this, either. But I think that was his goal, so we couldn’t make any 

headway on the B–70.75

_____

O’Brien: In regard to your relations, particularly on the B–70, would 

people like General [Maxwell] Taylor, was he a person that was kind of 

amenable to persuasion? Did you ever get him out to SAC [Strategic Air 

Command], or did you ever get him in a kind of situation in which you 

could explain the real value of the B–70?

LeMay: Oh, we had an opportunity to explain to Taylor many, many 

times. I personally have offered to explain to him many times, but he was 

just too wooden to understand. He just wouldn’t understand.

I give him the main responsibility for getting that half a million troops 

we’ve got bogged down in Vietnam into a position that we should never 

have gotten them in. Every soldier has always recommended against getting 

embroiled in a land war in Asia because of the unlimited manpower that can be 

poured against you in a land war. We should have used the weapons that we’re 

strong in and they’re weak in, our air and naval power. I give Maxwell Taylor 

credit for that stupidity. We shouldn’t have those troops in there.

O’Brien: Was he susceptible to civilian pressure?

LeMay: I think he was, yes. Now, if you ask me to prove it, I can’t. 

But I think he was.

He was brought back by the civilians, you know. During the time that he 

was chief of staff of the Army, General [Nathan F.] Twining was chairman 

of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I think Arleigh [A.] Burke was chief of naval 

operations, and they used to have arguments with Maxwell Taylor. They’d 

just march him over to the president [Dwight D. Eisenhower] and get a 

decision, and the president would decide against Maxwell Taylor, during 

the time he was on active duty. Then the Kennedys brought him back, 

mainly because I think his ideas fit the Kennedys’ ideas. They thought they 

had a soldier that would take orders.

O’Brien: Well, was this a part of the, what might be called the KennedyRobert S. McNamara strategy . . . I guess the appropriate term is “flexible 

response”. . .

LeMay: Well, I think it was part of the idealistic view that nuclear war 

is too horrible to contemplate; therefore, we ought to do anything to avoid 

it. So they wanted anything but nuclear war, and they didn’t want us to look 

like we even threatened to use nuclear weapons, so they did everything 

in their power to make it look like we wouldn’t use nuclear weapons. Of 

course this further weakened our position in the world.
31

We’re weakened to the point now that even Vietnam will not negotiate 

with us because they think they’re beating us. They don’t think that we 

have the will to fight and win, the courage to fight and win, and with good 

reason they believe that. So they’re not going to negotiate with us, ever, 

unless we give in to what they want.76 I’m afraid that this is exactly what’s 

going to happen, that we’ll sell our friends in Asia down the river. But 

we’re not only selling the Vietnamese down the river when we sell them 

down the river, we sell all of Asia down the river, so it’s really building up 

real trouble for us in the future.

Whereas very easily we could win that war over there. I think if we 

really convinced those people we were going to use whatever strength is 

necessary to win it, that very quickly we would have negotiations that were 

meaningful. This is the history of the past. You don’t have to be very smart 

to figure this out. It’s not a matter of reading the future or anything of that 

sort. Take a look at past performance and then see what the odds are.

This is the same thing that happened in Korea. We talked for two years 

over there without making any headway because they’re willing to expend 

lives and they know that we’re not willing to expend lives in warfare unless 

we really have to. But General Eisenhower finally got irritated at the delay 

and said, “Figure out a method of winning the war in the shortest possible 

President Kennedy with Maxwell Taylor on June 28, 1961. Taylor had consulted with 

the Kennedy campaign and had been a part-time advisor in the early months of the 

administration while also continuing to serve as president of the Lincoln Center for 

the Performing Arts in New York. In mid-1961, Kennedy brought him to Washington 

full time as his senior military advisor. Photo by Abbie Rowe. Kennedy Library.
32

time. Use nuclear weapons if you have to.” This was done and leaked to 

the Indians, and the Indians, of course, told Peking. In ten days, we had an 

armistice over there; not a peace, but we had an armistice.77

I think we can get the same thing with the Vietnamese, but you’ve 

got to convince them that you mean business. We’ve been wishy-washy for 

so long that we’re going to have to go up there and kick them around a little 

bit before they’re convinced that you mean business. Now, I don’t mean 

bomb their cities, and kill all the civilians, and be a barbarian—as I’m 

credited as being—at all. I think you can close that port [at Haiphong], as 

a matter of first priority, and there are many ways of doing it without 

destroying it. Close it. Then I think you should hit the military targets, 

wherever they’re found. If they happen to be in Hanoi or in a village 

or something, as they’ve deliberately put them [in] because we’ve 

told them we wouldn’t hit them there, hit them there anyway, after warning the people to get away from them. This works because I did this 

up in Japan.

[Discussion of dropping leaflets before bombing in Japan in 1945.]

So this works. The people react to it, and you can do these things with 

a minimum of civilian casualties. Although I wouldn’t say so out loud, 

me personally, I could care less about enemy casualties. I worry about our 

friendly casualties, our people and the South Vietnamese. Nobody seems 

The Joints Chiefs and the president on July 10, 1962: General LeMay, Gen. Lyman L. 

Lemnitzer (the chairman), President Kennedy, Gen. George H. Decker, Adm. George W. 

Anderson Jr., and Gen. David M. Shoup. Photo by Robert Knudsen. Kennedy Library.
33

to worry about them at all. I see near 265,000 casualties over in Vietnam 

so far, to say nothing of the South Vietnamese that have been killed off at a 

rapid rate—nobody even bothers to keep count of them—and by the worst 

kind of terrorist attacks.78 Nobody says anything about this at all, and are 

only worried about killing more Vietnamese civilians. I say avoid doing 

it if you can, but there again, I’m not particularly worried about them. I’d 

warn them to get away; if they did, good.

I think if you hit a few military targets up there—and there are plenty 

of them; my last trip over Vietnam, the reconnaissance boys are doing 

a tremendous job over there. I looked at hundreds of pictures up there, 

and you could see every pier in the harbor occupied by ships unloading 

war supplies, [with] the surplus anchored out in the harbor, with lighters 

bringing stuff ashore. [They had] supplies piled all around the port there 

because [we] won’t hit them. All the damage that we’ve done while we 

did bomb up there—the railroad yards, the bridges that were out, and so 

forth—have been rebuilt and bypassed around them, a couple of pontoon 

bridges and roads down to the pontoon bridges around each one of them. If 

you knock the bridge out again, they can use the pontoon bridges, so you’ve 

got three bridges to knock out instead of one. All of the choke points [have] 

bypasses around them, practically all the damage repaired that we had done 

while we were bombing up there, and stuff moves in by the thousands, into 

the south at an even greater rate.

The stuff that President [Lyndon B.] Johnson put out at the time of the 

[1968 presidential] campaign was just an out-and-out damn lie. There was 

no indication that they were looking for peace at all. Quite the opposite, by 

all of the intelligence information.79

It was, hell, the boys were even going down and taking pictures inside 

of a boxcar, flying along the side and taking a picture in the open door, and 

you see what’s inside the boxcar that was going south.

O’Brien: They really refined the art of photo intelligence.

LeMay: Oh, they do a remarkable job, and they’ve got some remarkable 

cameras now, too. So they know a lot about what’s going on in the logistics 

picture up there, and stockpiles of drums and supplies in the villages, way 

higher than the village shacks because we won’t hit them in the village. 

Even while we were bombing up north, we had orders not to hit a target 

that was in the village. [They had] trucks lined up bumper to bumper in 

the villages during the daytime waiting for night to continue the journey 

because we wouldn’t hit them in the village.

O’Brien: Getting back to some of the other people in the Joint Chiefs, 

did you find General [Lyman L.] Lemnitzer a little more easily influenced?

LeMay: Lem was a pretty good soldier, and while we didn’t always 
34

agree, that’s perfectly normal and natural to find out we wouldn’t, but I 

have a very high regard for Lem. I think everybody else does, too.

O’Brien: General [David M.] Shoup supported you on the B–70 issue, 

didn’t he?

LeMay: Yes, and General Shoup supported us in our view on Vietnam. 

As a matter of fact, I advocated going north long before anybody else did. 

I think [that is] the best way to end the war over there. After a couple of 

months, Shoup climbed on board with me, and we fought the battle for a 

long time. It wasn’t until the [Ngo Dinh] Diem fiasco [in November 1963] 

that the others climbed on board. I think that the thing it pointed out was 

that, look, your main argument against going north has been, look, we’ve 

got to get a stable government in the south before we can go north. My 

argument is that unless you can show these people a ray of light someplace 

over there, you’re not going to have a stable government. They’re going 

to be against anybody that’s just continuing the war on and on for years. 

They can’t remember anything else, and they’re tired of it. They’ve got 

to have a ray of light that they are going to have peace eventually before 

they’re going to support a government. They’re not going to support any 

government that doesn’t show them some chance of peace in the offing, 

without communism. So far, in all these overthrows, the military has 

remained loyal to the government in power, whoever it happened to be. 

They may not always. Suppose they get sick and tired of it. You can’t even 

evacuate the ground soldiers you’ve got in there now. You can’t get them 

out. [When I presented that case], that scared the hell out of them [the other 

service chiefs], and so they came over [to my way of thinking] then.

I don’t know what’s happened to Shoup lately. He’s been against the 

Vietnamese war, and I don’t know whether he’s had a blood clot on the 

brain, or what’s happened to him. I haven’t seen him since he retired [at 

the end of 1963]. And I really don’t know what he’s said. I doubt if he’s 

said everything the newspapers say he said, because I’ve had experience 

with them, too. They’re pretty well leftist oriented. So I doubt if he’s been 

properly quoted. But what I got out of the left-wing newspapers that we 

have out in California is that he’s been against the Vietnamese war. Well, 

I’m against it, too. But I’m for ending it and ending it properly, and it can 

be ended and ended properly. And I think probably Shoup is for that, too, 

but they just conveniently left that out.80

O’Brien: Did you ever see any real disagreement between the Army 

and the Air Force in regard to strategy in Vietnam?

LeMay: As far as strategy?

O’Brien: Yes, in the kind of military effort.

LeMay: Yes, we’ve had plenty of disagreements on both questions, and 
35

this is perfectly normal. We argue about them, and sometimes we come up 

with an agreed position, where everybody agrees. Sometimes we don’t. This 

is where you need a good civilian chief [secretary of defense]. If he just has 

the guts to pitch a nickel and say, “OK, this one,” it’d probably be all right 

because in any complicated problem there are many solutions to it, and who 

knows beforehand which is best. Some people, based on their experience 

in the past, may latch onto one and fight to the death on that one. But that 

doesn’t mean it’s the right one because other people will do likewise. But all 

of them, coming up through the services, have the experience that the people 

have had in like problems in fighting, and their [solutions] all [are] bound to 

be pretty good. But when somebody without the experience comes up with 

the solution to the problem, it’s likely to be bad.

O’Brien: Did the question of pacification efforts ever come up in regard to the discussions that you were involved in?

LeMay: Well, I think everybody agreed with the so-called pacification 

program because one of the things that bothers them over in Vietnam is that 

it’s not only a backward country, but when you get back in the boondocks, 

you’re really back in the boondocks: no roads, no communications with 

any place. The Viet Cong come in there, and they levy the taxes and create 

the terror, murder the village chief if he objects, and the government is 

not around to protect them. If you get the government out there, and the 

government starts doing something for them—gets them some medical 

President Kennedy with Gen. David M. Shoup, commandant of the Marine Corps, 

on July 12, 1962, in front of the Home of the Commandants at the Marine Barracks 

in Washington (8th & I). Photo by Abbie Rowe. Kennedy Library.
36

help, gets them some sanitation aid, gets them some farming aid, and so 

forth, gets them some protection—then that’s something else again. This 

is all the pacification program was, to get the government represented out 

at these places. This had to be done.

Now, granted, many of these people were no damn good. I get awful 

frustrated at some of these left-wing columnists and left-wing congressmen 

and senators who object to us being there because the Vietnamese are 

corrupt, and they don’t have a proper democratic government over there, 

and they don’t like that. Well, I’ll be the first to admit that that’s so. But 

you’ve got to remember that the French, when they were there, treated 

these people as a colonial people, and they didn’t try to train any of them 

except for the most menial jobs. They ran all of the government, all of the 

defense, and everything. When they left, there was no leadership in the 

country. So the people that took over had no experience, and everyone 

knows that there’s corruption all over the place in all of the Asiatic 

countries. It’s, I guess, a common practice, if any money goes through 

your hands, if you take more than 10 percent, you’re a crook; if you take 

less than 10 percent, you’re a fool. That sort of thing.

So it takes time to get these people transferred over to our standards. 

I think they’ve done remarkably well myself, particularly in the military. 

They’ve done remarkably well in the short period of time that we’ve had 

to develop leaders. Gosh, when you can change people from driving a 

buffalo to driving a jet airplane, and driving at night, when they formerly 

believed that night is full of dragons that are going to get them—quite 

an accomplishment. We’ve been able to do that. So I think that the 

Vietnamese people are a fine people, and that they’ve done remarkably 

well. But I don’t expect perfection out of them, and I don’t expect all of 

the corruption to be out of them. We haven’t even got it out of our own 

government yet.

O’Brien: Did Vietnam come into your thinking, and Laos, too, as well, 

when, I understand that you were a rather enthusiastic supporter of the Air 

Force counterinsurgency effort, Jungle Jim [4400th Combat Crew Training 

Squadron], back in 1961. Were you thinking of places like Vietnam and 

Laos when you . . .

LeMay: Well, the Air Force was practically the only force that was 

doing anything much in Laos during that period. In fact, I had the pleasure 

of decorating a major and a first lieutenant for their efforts in helping out 

the so-called Laos air force, which didn’t consist of much, some AT–

6s.81 They were over there advising them on how to use them, and they 

really used them properly and were very successful in helping defend the 

country. Of course the communists were in there, too, and there’s some 
37

fighting in there now, but they’ll probably take Laos over by internal subversion because they had a coalition-type government, like they had a 

coalition-type government in Cambodia, and it’s communist. A coalition 

government means it’s communist very shortly.

O’Brien: In 1961, when the Laotian problem was beginning to boil up 

—well, it had been boiling up for a year—were there some suggestions 

that the Air Force supply some tactical air to certain key points in Laos to 

interdict some of the supplies that were coming in from the Russians?

LeMay: We pointed out that the Air Force could do something over there at 

the time. The answer was no, that they didn’t want the United States embroiled.

O’Brien: You got some support from Mr. Rostow on that, though, 

didn’t you?

LeMay: Hmm?

O’Brien: Mr. Rostow, Walt Rostow, in the White House, wasn’t he, in 

a sense, in support of tactical air?

LeMay: I don’t remember that he was in any particular sense.82

* * *

Interview by Air Force History, March 29, 1972:83

Gen. Curtis E. LeMay: We couldn’t put first-class equipment in there 

[Southeast Asia] because it was violating the Geneva Accords. It didn’t 

make any difference if the Reds were violating it right and left; we had to 

set up our own arbitrary rules to handicap ourselves, and it was a fight to 

get the tools you needed. [We had] to throw in the old stuff. This was a 

war in which, if [Soviet leader Nikita S.] Khrushchev had been running it, 

he couldn’t have done any better as far as handicapping us [by] what we 

did to ourselves all through the thing from start to finish. We didn’t miss 

a trick. Any handicap that could have been dreamed up, we had thrown 

at us. Every one. They didn’t miss one. At least I don’t know of any they 

missed. Every roadblock possible was there.

And what followed was the tools that were used in the fighting down 

there were dictated not by the military but by, mostly, the State Department 

and the executive branch of government. I think you covered very well [in 

the Futrell book manuscript] the interservice battle. Normally we have an 

interservice fight going on on budgets and all that sort of stuff all the time, 

but this was a little more than that. I think it was basically brought on by 

the fact that, back in those days, we didn’t have any real clear-cut directive 

I ever saw from the administration as to exactly what the aims were down 

there, what we were going to do. We just kind of drifted along.
38

We were going to help them a little bit, but not much, so it didn’t look 

too important. So it was more of an interservice fight about who was going 

to do the little bit that we did get to do. It got pretty bad before long. You 

covered very well the fact that it was generally thought that this was an 

Army mission down there—guerrilla warfare, ground warfare—and the 

air had no place there. This was just the same old story of the fight that air 

power has had to wage all through the time that I was in the service. We 

thought air power had a contribution it could make to the country, and they 

had [to fight] tooth and nail for the privilege of doing it.

This was the same story all over again. The whole staff, practically 

the whole [MACV] staff in Vietnam, for instance, was Army, and there 

was never any proper planning for the use of air, never any proper communication set up so you could use the characteristics of air power, which 

are mobility, and speed of getting into action, and so forth. None of this 

was done; never any understanding of it. And most of all, it wasn’t passed 

on in the early days to the Vietnamese [who] were doing the fighting, 

and they didn’t know much about fighting anyway because the French had 

never really trained the Vietnamese to operate a military force. They had 

no leadership, so it was really starting from scratch. The fact that they did 

as well as they did is something of a miracle.

So we find all sorts of mistakes in not using air power at all, or using 

it improperly, what little bit was available down there. Then, as part of 

Vice President Johnson, Secretary Zuckert, President Kennedy, and General LeMay 

watch a manned weapons firepower demonstration at the Air Proving Ground Center, 

Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, on May 4, 1962. Photo by Cecil Stoughton. Kennedy Library.
39

this battle, the Army came up with this Howze report, which was part of 

an attempt [by] the Army to build their own tactical air force.84 They had 

these airborne units with a lot of helicopters and fixed-wing airplanes to 

fight from the air, move by air, and so forth. We soon found out that, even 

under the situation down in Vietnam—where there was no opposing air, 

which would have cut them to pieces in no time at all—they didn’t even 

have automatic-weapon ground fire against them. Even so, they found out 

that they could either supply themselves, or they could do a little fighting, 

but they couldn’t do both. The Air Force wound up supplying these people 

so that they could do what little fighting they did.

Now, I don’t think it’s brought out clearly enough the fact that, sure, a 

helicopter is a real handy tool to get around with, providing nobody shoots at 

you much. And they did do a lot of very good jobs down there. But as soon 

as they [the enemy] got automatic weapons in the hands of better-trained 

troops, they began to be shot down like flies, and history will never record 

just how bad it was. The system they used [was that] if they recovered a 

name plate, it wasn’t “lost.” In the last operation over in Laos that they went 

on, [there] was a real mess, and I think you ought to try to get the facts of 

this down in our Air Force history because it’s never going to be written 

anyplace else.85

Some place we’ve got to get into writing our side of the Air Force battle. 

I’m talking about the battle for missions—who was going to do what. We 

can’t afford any more Air Force this end of the country, that’s for sure.

I don’t think it’s brought out clearly enough how the decisions were 

arrived at on what we were going to do in South Vietnam. What you have 

there shows very clearly all the people that were in the act and making 

decisions in areas where they weren’t competent to make decisions—the 

committee action that took place, the vetoes, the stalling. All through, it 

was too little too late all the way through.

But it wasn’t clear enough to show that once the decision to use military force was made, then military force wasn’t used. They stood off or 

back in the old diplomatic exchange and things of that sort, whereas going 

to war is a very serious business, and once you make the decision that 

you’re going to do that, then you ought to be prepared to do just that, and 

to go ahead and use the principles of war, which means using the force 

that’s necessary. By my definition of the force that’s necessary, you put in 

more than is actually necessary to do the job, because you can’t actually 

determine that you need 152,506 and one-half men. You just define it like 

that so you put more in than is necessary in order to hit with overwhelming 

weight—no doubt about it—and you crush things right then. That’s the 

only way to do it. If you don’t do that, then you stretch things out over a 
40

period of time. You lose a lot of your own people, and your own resources, 

and your own treasury, to say nothing of the enemy’s too.

This is the big mistake that we’ve made down there. They didn’t decide to go to war and then go to war. Supposedly, the military were 

in the chain of command, or in the chain of things to try to help make these 

decisions. But having sat up there, this just wasn’t so. We argued about a 

lot of things; we sent papers in on certain subjects; we disagreed among 

ourselves on certain things, which is normal. Maybe we disagreed about 

more things than were normal because no one, in the early days, really 

believed that this was anything except some diplomats fiddling around 

with a little more aid program. No one ever believed that they were really 

going to make a stand. At least I didn’t. And there was never any policy to 

tell us who could have done it. I don’t think they had one. I don’t think the 

administration knew.

So that’s the kind of situation we were in. Then the decisions that were 

made were made up topside by the president or his cabinet on what was 

going to be done and how it was going to be done—usually too late—even 

to the point of saying, “All right, we’re going to attack this target, but 

you can only use X number of airplanes, and you’ll have this kind of a 

weapons system on the airplane, and only this number of them.” That sort 

of thing, things that are the responsibility and business of the commander 

in the field, of what’s necessary to destroy the target, and that sort of stuff.

I’m sure you can argue that, well, this is a delicate situation, and I don’t 

want the stupid military getting us into any diplomatic boxes that we 

can’t get out of. The argument against that is, all right, tell us what you 

don’t [want to] get into, and let the commander in the field protect the 

lives of his men, and protect the property of the United States, in carrying 

out his mission. This was never done. Of course later on in the war, they 

relaxed them a little bit, but never did the commander in the field have the 

real responsibility of a military commander in the field.

Thomas G. Belden: You are speaking up to what date?

LeMay: I’m speaking up to the day I left the service, which is 6 February 1965.

It [the Futrell manuscript] wasn’t very clear about how a recommendation to go north—bomb North Vietnam—came about. Once we got 

down the road far enough to find out that there was no doubt about North 

Vietnamese regular troops being in South Vietnam, and clear enough 

identification of chains of command through radio networks that were 

finally plotted and so forth, there was no doubt that the war was being run 

by North Vietnam as well as supplied and administered. Once that was 

determined, and by that time we knew what the volume of stuff coming 
41

down there was, and things of that sort, then it became apparent that trying 

to get each individual guerrilla, with his little hoard of supplies that he 

had in the jungle in South Vietnam, wasn’t the way to do it. Interdiction 

wasn’t the way to do it, either. We’d learned this through long and bitter 

experience in the past, that you can interdict, yes, but in this sort of a 

situation, you can’t stop a trickle of supplies that somebody can throw on 

their back, or a bicycle, and wiggle through a jungle.

Belden: Like Korea?

LeMay: Yes, and Italy; you couldn’t do it in Italy. I think if we committed enough that we could defeat them eventually, but you couldn’t stop 

it completely.

You have to go back farther than that, to the strategic bombing of the 

sources of supplies. I think we finally got enough information out of the 

Strategic Bombing Survey [after World War II] to ask if strategic bombing 

would have ended the war if they hadn’t made the invasion by such-andsuch a time. I know this is so in Japan.

But it was apparent, to me at least, that we had to go north [in Vietnam] 

to do the job. This was where my expression of “we’re swatting flies 

instead of cleaning up the manure pile” arose. I couldn’t get much support 

out of the other services because this became then [it would be] an air job, 

of course, and they took a damned dim view of that, although I wasn’t 

specifying air power particularly in getting this job done. The Navy could 

have been in the act. I followed the principle all along that we should 

do our fighting with our air and sea power, where we were predominant, 

instead of with the dough feet, where they were predominant.

Well, the first one that climbed on the bandwagon was [General] Dave 

Shoup, Marines. He finally agreed with me that we had to go north if we’re 

going to get anything done. It was the cheapest and most efficient way of 

doing it; I meant to close the ports and really do a job of strategic bombing 

to stop the importation of supplies before they even got started south by 

land. That’s where you should stop them. Once you stopped the supplies, 

this dried up the line down below, and the South Vietnamese could have 

had the capability of cleaning out what amounted to a bunch of bandits 

then. Never got anywhere.

The first time we finally got some place was after the [Ngo Dinh] Diem 

coup, when he was overthrown [on November 1–2, 1963]. You haven’t 

said too much about it, and I don’t know where you’ll ever find anything 

or not, but it looks to me like from what little I know about it—I didn’t 

know about it at the time—we engineered that thing. It looks to me like we 

did it. I can’t prove it; I can’t even offer you a very good set of facts. It’s 

just a feeling that I have. But I have a feeling that some of the idealists in 
42

our State Department got the CIA and engineered this thing because they 

didn’t like the way Diem was running the government.86 This is another 

thing that’s strange to me because, based on the actual facts, actually I 

think he was doing a pretty good job, compared to the Philippines, for 

instance. We told them that we were going to give them freedom in forty 

years, or something like that, and meanwhile, we would teach them how 

to govern themselves and protect themselves and so forth, and after two 

generations of schooling and training and letting them get into these jobs 

themselves so when they turned loose, they’d be a going concern. Even 

after all that, they had their problems. They’ve still got their problems. It 

looks like they’re going to make, it but there are problems there. Compare 

that with the hopeless situation that the Vietnamese were in without any 

of that background.

Belden: The French never allowed it.

LeMay: Never allowed it, so they had nothing. So considering the start, 

Diem, I thought, was doing pretty well. But he went down the drain. Then 

after that, remember the couple or three-year flaps of sorts, and all this 

time, Shoup and I were saying, “Look, we gotta go north and stop this flow 

of supplies down there.” And the answer from [Maxwell] Taylor and the 

rest of the people was: “Look, you can’t do anything like this ’til you 

get a stable government in South Vietnam.” I didn’t see what that had to 

do with it. As a matter of fact, I didn’t think that they’d ever get a stable 

government until they could point out to the people at least a ray of light 

way out in the future here that they might win this war.

So it was the “chicken or the egg” thing. They maintained you couldn’t 

go [north] until you had a stable government. I didn’t think we’d ever 

get a stable government. Finally one day I pointed out after another one 

of these little crises, I said, “Look, all of this governmental trouble the 

Vietnamese have been having, the only stable portion of it has been the 

military. They’ve been loyal to the country, or to what looked like the 

legal government of the country, in each and every case. Things are getting 

pretty bad now, and this may not happen. You may lose the war, or at 

least have a wholesale diversion of some sort, or at least enough bickering 

among themselves that you’ll have chaos. You may wind up where you’re 

going to have to fight to get your ground forces out of there, what’s in there 

out, unless you do something to show the people a ray of light.”

This finally shook them enough that we went on the record then as 

saying, “Look, we’ve got to go north and start the bombing there.” It was 

some time before we got this sold, however.

When we finally did go, it was again too little too late. You can’t really 

do a first-class job if you can hit this little target, this little target, and finally 
43

got a list of ninety-four targets on our guidance that might be desirable to 

hit, but they hit them piecemeal. We only got the oil, for instance, after 

they’d been convinced that we were going to do more bombing up there 

and they’d got it dispersed. You never could close the port on all of these 

things. So here again is piecemealing your effort, too little too late, all 

the way through.87

The effort we put into bombs was fantastic, the tonnage of bombs that 

went down on to worthless targets made the cost of stopping a round of 

rifle ammunition getting to South Vietnam astronomical, when hitting the 

proper target could have done it very cheaply. We delayed it so late, gave 

them so much warning, while we could have done all this without any 

antiaircraft defense around the targets. It was delayed to the point where 

the defenses around the targets were stronger than ever existed during 

World War II. These are the things that are not brought out that I think 

should be brought out in such a history. . . .

Belden: I was going to ask one other question. Do you think he [Futrell] 

had enough on the fall of Diem, or too much? Do you think he went into it 

too much, or not enough?

LeMay: No, I didn’t get that impression that there was too much or not 

enough. It just never entered my mind. It shows very clearly the problems 

that we had with the government of Vietnam. It probably didn’t show 

clearly enough the reasons back of it. Somebody ten or twenty years from 

now, reading this thing, will be just like some of our radicals now. They’re 

always saying it: “South Vietnam is not worth helping because they’re a 

corrupt, no-good government.”

The answer is, “Yes, they’re corrupt, no doubt about it. Certainly they’re 

inept and unskilled, because they never had any training.” No one ever 

takes the trouble to point out what they had to start, and the progress 

that they’ve made in that regard. And the same way in the fighting 

ability of the troops, the South Vietnamese troops. Certainly it [the South 

Vietnamese military] had deficiencies in all echelons. But from what they 

had to start with, they did remarkably well. The Vietnamese Air Force, 

particularly, did remarkably well, taking the resources that they allocated 

to the air force. Here again, it was a battle to get anything allocated to 

start with because the Vietnamese didn’t know [what they were doing]. 

Then when they got advisors, they were Army advisors, mostly, and they 

weren’t about to allocate any resources to the air force, so you had that 

handicap all along. But what resources went into the Vietnamese Air 

Force, they did very well. When we finally got them flying at night, with 

fairly sophisticated equipment, and doing things; when we started with 

them, they didn’t even go out of their huts at night because the dragons 
44

were out there. So starting from that, what we ended with did pretty well, 

and did it in a pretty short length of time. . . .88

Belden: Another problem they had that added to their political problem 

was the religious problem.89 This seemed to affect that early period as 

well. Is it possible that Diem couldn’t have held out anyway, or was the 

threat not specific enough?

LeMay: I don’t know. I don’t feel that I got enough information or 

enough feel to answer that question properly. As I remember, at least I 

personally didn’t feel that Diem was doing such a bad job that he ought to 

be overthrown. I only met him once.90 No, I didn’t have the feeling that he 

was doing a bad job under the circumstances.

Here again, we went into this thing supposedly to help them, with the 

idea of saying, “Look, this is your war. You’ve got to fight it. We’ll help you 

and advise you,” when they weren’t really capable of doing this chore for 

themselves. They weren’t really capable of doing a good chore. We ought 

to have done a little better than that, I think. We advised them. They’re a 

proud people. I would think that they could have set up some sort of an 

arrangement—of course, this is Monday-morning quarterbacking—some 

sort of an arrangement to make sure that the advice we did give them was 

accepted a little more than it was. How this could come about, I don’t know, 

but there should be some way of setting it up so there would be facesaving on the part of the people concerned that they weren’t a stooge of the 

United States. Maybe it was impossible to do this. I don’t know.

Belden: Of course this was one of the, we’d given them all this advice just before the fall, I guess getting pretty desperate that it wasn’t 

being followed.91

LeMay: Well, a lot of it wasn’t. But they were getting a lot of advice 

from everybody, and they weren’t getting very good advice, either. So you 

can’t blame them for not doing exactly right.

Belden: Of course, when we finally did go north, it did seem to bolster 

the government for a while.

LeMay: Yes, and I maintained that it would. From being in a position 

where you’re being kicked around every place and not doing anything on 

the offensive side at all to going on the offensive is bound to pick up your 

troops. This is just ordinary common sense. I suppose you could pick out 

some big words about [the] psychology of being on the offensive and so 

forth, but this to me is just common ordinary sense of the way people act. . . .

Belden: If we had done more earlier—that is, in terms of bombing 

the north—was there a considerable amount of argument that the Chinese 

might escalate—like Korea—and so forth? Was this part of the argument 

in, say, the Joint Staff?
45

LeMay: This was part of the argument. You could always say, “Well, if 

we do this, then the Russians and the Chinese will come in.” Well, I point 

back to Cuba, Lebanon, and the things that we did. We did what we wanted, 

and they didn’t come in. Matter of fact, all through history, every time 

we stood up like a man, they backed off. It was only when we vacillated 

and weaseled around did they keep on pushing. I don’t think there was a 

chance of the Chinese coming in if we stood up and warned them not to.

But all of our action, throughout all of this thing, all of our action indicated a fear to do anything: indecision; not knowing what we were going to 

do; afraid to move; too little too late. What were we going to do? All through 

here. And as this went on, they [the communists] became firmly convinced 

that they were going to win the war in Washington. They couldn’t win it 

in the field. . . .

[Discussion turned to U.S. Army management of the war.]

The Army’s still moving at twelve miles an hour in trucks, and that’s 

it. You don’t need very fast communications for that. I cried right from 

the start, saying: “Look, the big trouble the French had over here is they 

Senior South Vietnamese and U.S. military officials met General LeMay when he 

arrived at Tan Son Nhut air base near Saigon on April 19, 1962. During his inspection 

tour in Vietnam, LeMay had a brief meeting with President Ngo Dinh Diem. USAF.
46

lacked mobility.” All they could do is put these outposts out, all over the 

place, which meant they had to supply them. They dispersed what strength 

they had, and they just sat there and waited until the guerrillas picked 

out one of them, assembled the necessary force, and then overran it and 

faded back into the jungle. Now, if we can give communications at these 

places, with mobile teams—and we’ve got the air power to do it—and just 

saturate it when one of them gets hot, let’s drop all the paratroopers we 

can get in airplanes out there and make sure none of them get away. And 

we could do it real quick. All you have to do is have them on the alert. [It] 

takes a lot of troops to do it, but we can do it that way. Let’s try it. That 

means you have to have a radio set at each one of these outposts—hamlets 

and villages and so forth—and somebody to operate it. They couldn’t even 

get the radio sets.

Belden: There’s one thing—a very remarkable thing—about this war 

from the technical point of view that always intrigued me, and that’s the 

way the B–52 turned out to be used. You know, when the B–52 was first 

built, nobody would ever think of dropping an iron bomb out of it.

LeMay: That’s not exactly the story.

Belden: How did that come about?

LeMay: We had enough bomb racks to put iron-type bombs in one 

wing of a B–52.

Belden: From the early times?

LeMay: From the early times. No one ever expected to use these damn 

things, but it just seemed to be worth the effort for insurance policy. We 

might want to do it some time. We had it.

No one ever expected we’d go into the type of operation that we went 

into, and there’s still some question in my mind whether the results 

warranted the effort or not. It certainly wasn’t the way I would do it. But 

under the ground rules that were made and decided by the president of the 

United States, we did it. That’s what he wanted; we did it, which meant 

building some more bomb racks and getting more airplanes fixed up to do 

this sort of a job.

Belden: What about the issue that later developed, that you could see 

the beginnings of it in this period, and that’s the close air support issue—in 

terms of the fast movers versus the low-and-slow types.

LeMay: Well, there again, you get all of the so-called experts who say 

they know how to do it instead of the people who’ve done it. And you 

find ground people standing up as an “expert” on close air support and 

saying, “You can’t hit that target on the ground because you’re moving 

too fast.” This is not the case. You find that the experience was that they 

discarded the slow-moving airplanes, the AT–6 and the T–28 and stuff like 
47

that. They got rid of them. They were too slow. They got shot down. The 

helicopter is slow-flying. They fly so slow that they get shot down. They’re 

too vulnerable.

Belden: What about the gunships?

LeMay: Gunships the same way. It’s not a very good platform, and you 

can’t carry the load. You don’t have the range, staying capacity, or anything 

else. They’re too vulnerable, both on the ground and in the air. . . .

Belden: I’d like to ask just one more question. This is the problem that 

comes out in the Vietnamese situation, where you are beginning to use more 

sophisticated weapons, and you want to turn it over to the local forces. 

This takes more training and more maintenance on their part, and so on. 

How do we overcome a problem like this? You were starting to experience 

it in Vietnam even in this early period, I believe.

LeMay: You can’t overcome it. You can’t overcome it in our own forces.

Belden: It’s only magnified.

LeMay: It’s magnified over there. For instance, we’re taking some 

F–111s. By no stretch of the imagination is this a strategic weapons system. 

But it’s the only thing we can get, so we take them. I would be willing to 

equip some strategic squadrons with C–47s to hold the skill and knowledge 

that we’ve built up in the last twenty-five years in our strategic units 

together until we can give them a proper weapons system. Because if you 

have to start from scratch, if we have to start from scratch in this country, 

it’s quite a job to build up an outfit. I say it takes four years in this country 

to build a good bomb wing.

Belden: Even with a given aircraft.

LeMay: Yes, after you’ve got the aircraft, to get the people in there, to 

get them working, to know their equipment, to know their job, to learn the 

things they have to do. [It] takes four years. Now, maybe you can do it a 

little quicker in wartime, where you get out there, and you really have to 

do it every day, day after day, and you learn it or die, and a lot of people 

die, you can do it a little quicker. But in peacetime, it takes four years.

Belden: So it’s going to have to take longer over there.

LeMay: And longer over there.
An official portrait of General LeMay while he was chief of staff of the Air Force. USAF.
49

Part II

June 1972

Interview by Air Force History, June 8, 1972:92

Robert F. Futrell: This first question that we’ve got here really is an 

attempt to get a trend toward the recognition that we were not going to be 

allowed to use nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia. I think this is important 

concerning the planning stage of it. Could you trace through and tell us 

when you began to know, or to feel, that we were not going to be allowed 

to use nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia?

Gen. Curtis E. LeMay: Oh, I think that was generally known right 

from the start. I don’t think there was ever any recommendation from the 

military that nuclear weapons be used, certainly not from the Air Force. 

Not while I was around in there was there ever any thought of using 

nuclear weapons in this kind of an operation. So I think it was known right 

from the start. . . .

Thomas G. Belden: Was there any feeling in SAC about the diversion 

of B–52s for Southeast Asia in the conventional role? That is, taking them 

off of their nuclear role?

LeMay: Not too much. This is not really the proper use of the airplane, 

of course, of a weapons system. But there are plenty of times when you 

have to use, in a military situation, weapons systems on jobs on which 

they’re not designed. And this is all right. They will help out the situation.

But the main quarrel at the time was that the administration wouldn’t 

do the things that were necessary to do once they got into war. They 

wouldn’t hit the target systems that should have been hit, like closing 

the harbor at Haiphong. That was the main quarrel, not to be just usually 

diverted to help out people on the ground.

Futrell: Could we elaborate there just a little bit more? In your interview earlier with Dr. Belden, you said that “there’s still some question in 

my mind whether the results of the B–52 employment warranted the effort 

or not, and I certainly wouldn’t have done it that way.” Of course, this has 

whetted our curiosity greatly.
50

LeMay: Well, what I meant was that we have dropped an awful lot of 

bombs on South Vietnam, far more than we ever dropped on Germany and 

Japan during World War II.93 And the results that we’ve gotten haven’t 

added up to winning the war, as it did in Germany and Japan—particularly 

in Japan, because I think the air effort in Japan was more evident for the 

contribution it made to ending the war when it did than it was in Germany, 

although the Strategic Bombing Survey definitely stated that the air effort 

would have ended the war in Germany without an invasion. And certainly 

it did in Japan, because we planned it that way.

General [Henry H. “Hap”] Arnold came over. . . . He visited every place 

in the Far East, and he stopped by Guam to visit us. He was asking everyone the question: “When is the war going to be over?” Well, we hadn’t 

been giving it much thought as to when the war was going to end. We were 

too busy with daily operations. He said, “Well, let’s see if we can figure 

it out here.” We looked at the target list, what we had left to do, and we 

couldn’t find any targets that were going to be in existence much after 

about the first of September. We would have been on purely transportation 

after that, so we couldn’t see much of a war going on after that time.

Belden: But in the Southeast Asia case, there were still plenty of targets left, because of the constraints on the targets.

LeMay: Because we never hit the proper targets to start with. For instance, the most important target over there has always been Haiphong, 

and the other minor ports. In other words, if you stop the supplies from 

coming in, there can’t be too much of a war going on. That’s always been 

the primary target.

Then there are power plants, and transportation, and the supply dumps, 

and so forth. Look, there’s all sorts of examples of reconnaissance photographs of supply dumps in villages, because we wouldn’t hit populated 

areas, and they knew it. So you’d see a village with supply dumps piled 

in amongst the village shacks far higher than the shacks themselves. We 

couldn’t hit them. That sort of thing. We were forbidden to hit the 

proper targets.

Futrell: Could we go back to this nuclear question just one more 

time? In [19]61, [Roger] Hilsman [Jr.] and [Arthur M.] Schlesinger [Jr.] 

have said that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were determined not to go back 

into Southeast Asia unless we went all-out, including the use of nuclear 

weapons. Would you comment on this?94

LeMay: I don’t remember anything of this sort. I do know, or do remember, that the Joint Chiefs were always rather frustrated with the nowin policy down there. In spite of the arguments we’ve had in the 

Joint Chiefs, everyone was of the opinion that once you choose military 
51

action as a solution to your problem, then you ought to get in with both 

feet and get the chore over with, and do the things that are necessary 

to be done. We never did that. As a matter of fact, every principle of 

war was violated down there, doing everything wrong. So this was 

rather frustrating.

We always wanted to go back in, full strength, to get it over with. But I 

don’t think anybody ever thought that nuclear weapons would be necessary. 

Maybe what they’re talking about is that I think everybody objected to the 

government making statements [like], “Oh, we won’t use nuclear weapons, 

ever.” We all thought this was bad. Here we’ve taken a large segment of 

the resources of the country to put into the nuclear program for weapons 

systems. If we tell our enemies that we have a policy of never using them, 

we’ve wasted the taxpayers’ resources.

Whether you intend to use them or not, you should never say what 

your intentions are. But these idealistic people in the government at the 

time threw up their hands in horror at the thought of using nuclear weapons 

and would want to say, “We would never do anything so nasty as to drop 

a nuclear weapon.” Once you convince the enemy that that’s not going to 

As the Air Force’s senior bomber commander, General LeMay had been integrally 

involved in the development of the B–52. He is shown here piloting a YB–52 on a test 

flight in May 1952 during a visit to Boeing’s Seattle plant. Boeing/USAF.
52

happen, this relieves his mind and allows him to do a lot of things that he 

wouldn’t otherwise do.

What you’re talking about is that they [the Joint Chiefs] wanted to say 

they might use them, whether they intended to use them or not. But the 

situation never got to the point where we thought it was necessary out in 

Southeast Asia.

Futrell: That is one of the items of information that I have not fully 

understood, and I will cover in this fashion. In fact, you realize the things that 

I’m trying to do are to fill in chinks that I’ve got. Sometimes things didn’t 

happen, and they’re thus really not coverable in documents because they 

never happened, but they are more significant than the things that did happen.

LeMay: Well, no one ever planned on using the nuclear weapons there, 

although funny things get out. I definitely remember one thing that I got 

awfully mad about. We were talking about some problem in Southeast 

Asia at the Joint Chiefs, and after the meeting was over, [Adm. Arleigh A.] 

Burke said to me, in a joking manner, “LeMay, don’t you think maybe we 

ought to drop an atomic bomb on Hanoi just to solve the problem?”

I said, “Yes, it might be a good idea.”

This came out in the newspaper the next day. Where it came from, I 

don’t know. “LeMay advocates dropping a nuclear weapon on Hanoi.” No 

one, including LeMay, ever advocated using atomic weapons.

Futrell: In 1958, though, Gen. Frederic [H.] Smith [Jr.] did send you 

this study about the use of nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia for what 

he called “situation control.” He told me sometime ago that that study, he 

thought, went up like a lead balloon, that the only person that ever asked 

him about it was an Iron Curtain military attaché that asked him was he 

really serious.95

LeMay: I don’t remember. I’m not surprised. Everybody was making 

plans all the time, encouraged to, as a matter of fact—new ideas coming 

up, old ideas coming up again, using everything, which was very well. 

Once, somebody suggested using nuclear weapons to defoliate the jungle 

over there, that sort of stuff; using nuclear weapons to contaminate the 

Ho Chi Minh Trail, all of this sort of stuff coming up all the time. But I’m 

talking about a serious plan that the Joint Chiefs [had] that we might use 

nuclear weapons over there. It never was found.96

Futrell: How did the Army sell the doctrine that counterinsurgency 

was an Army mission? This I simply can’t understand.

LeMay: Well, there was certainly a big battle down there in the Joint 

Chiefs on this. We never thought it was fully an Army mission. We thought 

air power should play a big role in this sort of thing. As a matter of fact, 

mobility is one of the most important factors, looking at the history of 
53

the campaign down on the Malay Peninsula that the British were on, and 

learning lessons from that, and learning the lesson of the French in Vietnam. 

It took at least ten to twenty times as many people on the defensive side 

against the guerrillas as the guerrillas had to try to just defend against 

[them] because the guerrillas could pick the place of attack, and they’d 

always pick a place where they’d have temporary superiority.

You can’t be strong every place, so it’s a matter of transportation, mobility, and getting to where they attack. Air power can play a tremendous 

role in this, and it still never has been exploited properly. I tried for several 

years to get a mobile parachute force so that when an attack came, they 

could really dump large segments of paratroopers in the area there and cut 

off these people, and cut them up before they could withdraw. We never 

got around to doing this.

Jacob Van Staaveren: Was this because the Army opposed it?

LeMay: Yes, not directly, but we just never got it done. They always 

wanted to use the air power for something else. We talked about poor 

communications and all around the big problems that we had, but it could 

have been done. It still can be done.

I think this is one of the tools that air power will give you to fight 

counterinsurgency action. The main thing is to find these people. Where 

are they? When they get a group together big enough to attack an outpost 

This image shows General LeMay meeting with the Joints Chiefs on May 27, 

1961, after he had been selected as Air Force chief of staff but before he had been 

confirmed. Left from LeMay are Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer (chairman), Gen. George 

Decker, President Kennedy, Adm. Arleigh A. Burke, and Gen. David Shoup. Photo 

by Robert Knudsen. Kennedy Library.
54

or something of that sort, and when you find them, within a very short 

period of time, you can dump a bunch of people in there. If you tried to get 

them over a road or through the jungle, they might stay ahead of you and 

get away. But if you dumped them in there by air right quick, then that’s 

something else again.

Belden: This requires a good deal of tactical intelligence to let you know 

where they are.

LeMay: Well, no. You know when the attack starts. If you have a lot of 

these people on alert—just standing on the alert, ready to go, full packs 

ready to go right then—you could certainly get off in fifteen minutes. Then 

you’ve got the flying time to this place, so within an hour, you’re going to 

be there. The attack’s probably not going to be over by that time, and you 

could dump a bunch of people in there, so you’ve got a lot of people in the 

area. In other words, instead of the enemy then having superior numbers, 

you can dump superior numbers on top of them.

Futrell: Would you comment on air firepower? This is air mobility that 

you’ve just mentioned.

LeMay: Well, our air firepower has always been handicapped, until the 

later years of the war, by the type of equipment we could put in there. 

Remember, at the start of the fracas, they didn’t want it known that we 

were even over there helping them. They didn’t even want it known that 

General LeMay and President Kennedy watch a manned weapons firepower demonstration at the Air Proving Ground Center, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, on May 4, 

1962. Photo by Cecil Stoughton. Kennedy Library.
55

we were giving them any supplies. Anything we sent over there had to be 

capable of being pulled off the junk heap of World War II equipment that 

was supposedly lying around the world, readily available. So we had to 

use all that stuff. For instance, the first gunship was a C–47 with a Gatling 

gun in the door that we came up with because there wasn’t anything else 

to use. You had to use all of this old stuff, B–26s and things of that sort.

Futrell: You did mention, though, in your interview with Dr. Belden, 

that you still had some reservations about gunships.

LeMay: I don’t know what I was thinking about. They’ve done a remarkably good job over there. All of them, even the C–47s, did some good 

work. I think probably what I meant was that once we got into a shooting 

war, we should have gone in there with the best equipment we had to 

get it over with as soon as possible, rather than dragging along with junk 

equipment and a halfhearted effort.

Belden: I think this gunship thing came up when we were talking 

about fast-movers versus slow-movers, in the tactical situation, and you were 

a little bit on the side of using fast-moving aircraft, you know, as close air 

support rather than . . .

LeMay: Well, yes. Once you get into an area that is defended, then 

these gunships are pretty vulnerable, and I think finally we did lose a couple 

of them over there when we ran into some antiaircraft stuff. Whereas a 

fast-moving tactical airplane, F–111 for instance, has got the capability of 

hitting moving targets on the road at night, or in bad weather, the same as 

the gunship. And that airplane is more likely to survive in a defended area 

than the unarmed, slow-moving gunship.

Van Staaveren: General LeMay, when did you first recommend bombing North Vietnam? What stage of the war? Aside from any formal memo 

that may have gone up.

LeMay: Oh, very early in the game, when it became apparent that this 

was not a group of guerrillas, insurgents inside of South Vietnam operating; 

that it was being controlled from Hanoi, and it was an attack from outcountry.

Van Staaveren: Before the overthrow of President Diem on 1 November 1963?

LeMay: Oh yes, definitely.97

Van Staaveren: You mentioned in your interview with Dr. Belden that 

General [David] Shoup joined you initially as another member of the Joint 

Chiefs in recommending bombing the North. Do you recall when General 

Shoup took that position? Was he with you almost from the beginning?

LeMay: He was with me almost from the beginning. But it wasn’t, I 

think, until the overthrow of Diem that the other chiefs came along full 
56

scale on it. The argument that I used that I think brought them over was 

one of, look, in all of the political instability that we’ve had in the country 

down there, the military has always remained loyal to the government 

in power. This may not always be the case, and we may wind up with a 

situation where we’re hard put to get our people out of the country; in 

other words, complete chaos. This is a possibility. This was seen for the 

first time, I think, after the overthrow of Diem.

The argument [before that time] was, look, we can’t go north until we 

get some stability in the south. I never understood this argument, but that 

was the one that was advanced. My point was that we’re never going to have 

any stability in the south unless you went north and tried to sell the people in 

South Vietnam, who were just as tired of the war—they were more tired, as 

a matter of fact—and they couldn’t see the end in sight, any place. You had 

to give them a ray of light to get some stability down there. Once they had 

a government, it looked like they were going to have a chance of winning 

and cleaning up the war, there had been more cohesion in the south. The 

overthrow of Diem, I think, finally brought the rest of the Chiefs on board, 

and then we were all together from then on about going north.

Van Staaveren: I was going to ask how you would characterize the 

Navy position. Just looking at the formal documents, it seems that the 

Marine Corps was with you at an earlier date than the Navy.

LeMay: That’s correct.

Van Staaveren: What was the Navy position? How would you characterize the Navy position at this time?

LeMay: The Navy was against anything over there in which they felt 

they couldn’t really participate and take the leadership in. (Same way with 

the Army.) That was their main drawback. To me, they never did have any 

real valid arguments for not closing the ports and stopping the supplies that 

were coming in there. It was very apparent back in the early days where 

their supplies were coming from. The bulk of the stuff was coming from 

outside the country because it couldn’t be manufactured in North Vietnam. 

That’s the first principle that should have been taken care of, stopping that.

Van Staaveren: The statement has also been made, and I’ve seen this 

from several sources, that the Joint Chiefs never really got together rather 

solidly until the attack on Bien Hoa on 1 November 1964; that up until that 

time, the Joint Chiefs differed on the timing and the severity of an air strike 

on the North.98

LeMay: No, I don’t think that’s so. That’s pretty late in the game. We 

were together much before that. When did Diem go down?

Van Staaveren: Diem went down on 1 November 1963, and Bien Hoa 

was attacked on 1 November 1964.
57

LeMay: They were together a year before that, or more. It was about 

the time that Diem went under that they really got together.

Van Staaveren: The first memo that I’ve seen where the Joint Chiefs 

do get together is dated 22 January 1964. But they seem to be talking a 

great deal about smaller-scale action, [with OPLAN] 34A.

LeMay: Well, starting at the time that President Kennedy came in, 

shortly after that, General [Maxwell] Taylor became chairman of the Joint 

Chiefs.99 He had this idea of “flexible response,” of not going in with a 

full, all-out effort, but just still enough strength out there to say, “Look 

boys, you can’t do anything against us, be sensible and negotiate.”

I never was for that solution to the problem. I could foresee many things 

happening that could have happened, but we’d get tired of that stuff and pull 

out like the French did. I never could condone spending lives, particularly 

the lives of our people, on such an operation over a long period of time 

without a policy of winning because I never could foresee a defensive 

action—and this is defensive action—winning anything. Never in history 

has a defensive action been the solution to military operations to settle your 

problems. You have to go on the offense if you’re going to win. This was 

essentially a defensive operation, an idealistic approach, that never has 

worked throughout history. So I never was for it.

This came in with Taylor. Now he controlled, of course, the chief of 

staff of the Army, and the Navy to some extent went along with them. In 

Secretary McNamara, General Taylor, and President Kennedy talk in the Cabinet 

Room of the White House after a meeting of the executive committee of the National 

Security Council on January 25, 1963. Photo by Robert Knudsen. Kennedy Library.
58

other words, they wouldn’t stand up on their hind legs as I did to start 

with, and as Shoup did later on when he saw what was going on. Later on, 

when some of these things came to pass, the other chiefs got together that 

we should be following the principles of war and not some of these ivory 

tower principles in this sort of an operation.

Futrell: Do you feel that the chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in this 

period reflected the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

LeMay: I don’t think so, no.

Van Staaveren: I would like to follow up on this. How would you 

characterize the role of Taylor throughout your association in this period? 

Would you consider him one of the principle architects of the strategy, or 

one among many?

LeMay: I think he had a great deal of influence on President Kennedy, yes.

I know from talking to General [Nathan] Twining, who was chairman 

of the Joint Chiefs when Taylor was chief of staff in the Army,100 that Taylor 

was advocating some of these same principles at that time, and the remainder 

of the Joint Chiefs did not agree with him. As a matter of fact, I’ve heard 

General Twining several times say that they’d have to button up and take 

Taylor over to see General Eisenhower and get him back on the track. 

Taylor then retired. And I think after retirement, he presented some of his 

ideas to Kennedy, who was a presidential candidate, and sold him on them. 

[Taylor] came back first as a military advisor in the executive department of 

the government when Kennedy was elected president, and a little later on 

[October 1962] was . . . brought from retirement and made chairman of the 

Joint Chiefs. I think he had a great deal of influence on the president.

During this time, the administration didn’t seem to have much confidence 

in the military. It was sort of a waste of time to try to present any arguments, 

although we all tried from time to time, individually as well as collectively. 

But remember, President Kennedy practically abolished the National Security 

Council. We met with him as a group hardly ever. Most of the time, we were 

represented by Taylor, and we gave him our views. But I have my doubts as 

to whether they were fully presented before the president or not.

I do know that in many cases we would get papers from the secretary 

[of defense, Robert McNamara] requesting our views on certain problems 

when we would know that the decision had been made and the order 

issued a couple of days before we ever got the paper asking our advice on 

the question. So I don’t think that Secretary McNamara ever paid much 

attention to the Joint Chiefs. He used to come down and meet with us, and 

he was always saying over before the Congress that he always consulted 

the Joint Chiefs on basic military questions. But I have the feeling that he 

never paid any attention to anything we said.101
59

Futrell: I am leading into a summarization of the diffusion of the 

decision-making process from the beginning of the Kennedy administration, and I’m leading in with this downgrading of the National Security 

Council, and the use of these task forces that President Kennedy seemed to 

favor. Do you think these task forces and task groups that were established 

downgraded the province of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

LeMay: Yes, I do. The proper military thinking never got in to 

him. Let me give you an example of this Bay of Pigs operation.102 I don’t 

know myself the full story of the Bay of Pigs. All I can tell you is what 

I know of personally. I went down to a Joint Chiefs meeting once while I 

was vice chief when General [Thomas] White was gone on a trip. He was 

in Europe, I think, on an inspection trip, or at least out of the country and 

gone, so I represented the Air Force at the regular Joint Chiefs meeting. 

I went in there, and there was a flap on because there was an item on the 

agenda that I wasn’t cleared to receive. They finally got me cleared to 

listen to this, and it was the CIA man who gave a briefing about a choice 

between a couple or three beaches for a landing in Cuba.

I only said, “Well, I’m fresh on this, and I can’t render any sort of 

judgment on this without knowing a little bit more. How many people 

General Taylor and General LeMay led the Joint Chiefs and other senior military personnel from the White House as part of the Kennedy funeral procession to St. 

Matthew’s Cathedral on November 25, 1963. Photo by Abbie Rowe. Kennedy Library.
60

are involved here, who are they?” It turned out that there were about 700 

Cubans that were going to do this job. So I said, “Well, I know that way 

back in history, Henry Morgan took Panama [in 1671] with 700 people, but 

that was a little different situation. I see no chance of 700 being successful 

here unless there’s a general uprising in the country at the same time, and 

I presume you have this arranged so it’s going to happen.”

The CIA man was very blunt about it. He said, “This doesn’t concern 

you. Just answer our question as to which beach is best.” Then I found out 

that the Joint Chiefs had been asked before to pick out the best beach for 

landing among the choice of about three, which they had done. Later on, 

[the CIA] decided maybe that they ought to have an airstrip at the beach. 

Well, they picked out a couple more that had an airstrip in the vicinity, or a 

place where they could land their airplanes without preparing one. Which 

one of those was the best? I think we came up with an answer on that. But 

that was all the Joint Chiefs were asked.

So that happened. Then the day the actual invasion took place, General 

White was gone again, and I was down at the [Joint Chiefs] meeting, and 

we found out that the invasion was going to take place tomorrow morning 

[April 17, 1961]. We were going to have a meeting at eight o’clock in the 

morning to look at the progress with the secretary of defense. I went down 

there at a quarter ’til eight, got there a little ahead of time, and I found out 

The national security principals in Palm Beach, Florida, with the president on January 

3, 1962: Vice President Johnson, President Kennedy, Secretary McNamara, Maxwell 

Taylor, and Roswell L. Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense. Photo by Cecil 

Stoughton. Kennedy Library.
61

when I got down there that the air cover had been canceled over the beach. 

I remember the plan was to use some B–26s, I guess, of which Cuba had 

some, with Cuban markings on them, to land at Key West to indicate there 

had been an uprising amongst the Cubans, and the Cuban air forces had 

taken off and bombed their own airfields and then defected to Florida. 

Meantime, the rest of the air force that they’d assembled from Guatemala 

had come up and hit.

Well, they didn’t do a good job of knocking out the Cuban air force. 

They didn’t do it properly; they didn’t knock it out. But they were going 

ahead with the invasion anyway, but they were supposed to have air cover 

from Guatemala over the beaches at daylight when the landings occurred. 

They had to take off about midnight to be up there by daylight, and about 

ten or eleven o’clock, it was scrubbed. I didn’t find this out until the next 

morning, and to me, this marked the end of the invasion effort right then 

with the Cuban air force not knocked out and no air cover over the beach.103

McNamara didn’t come to the briefing. Mr. [Roswell] Gilpatric [the 

deputy secretary] came down. I met him at the door and said, “Look, you’ve 

just cut the throat of everybody on the beach down there by canceling the 

air cover last night.” We went on and got the briefing, and sure enough, 

[Fidel] Castro’s air force sank the supply ships before they could get them 

unloaded. When they ran out of ammunition, that was all there was. There 

wasn’t any uprising, either, in the country.

Well, here’s an operation that was planned outside the military, operated outside of the military, but the military got blamed for it being a bad 

operation—that is, from where I saw it. Now, there might have been more 

information that I didn’t know anything about and never was cleared for, 

but from where I sat, it was an operation planned outside of the military, 

operated outside the military, that actually failed where with full military 

participation, it might have succeeded.

Belden: Was this a pattern that was repeated in the Vietnam planning?

LeMay: Yes, generally speaking, the war was run from outside the 

military in the early days, to the extent of the targets being picked by the 

civilian element of the administration. We sent in target lists, but they would 

pick the target. They’d pick the time of attack, the number of airplanes that 

could hit it, and the munitions that would be carried by the airplanes, right 

down to that extent.

Futrell: I want to go into this business of Air Force expertise on the 

MACV staff.104 I simply cannot understand why we didn’t have a properly 

balanced joint staff in MACV.

LeMay: We tried and tried and tried to get air representation down there, 

without success. And even gone right to McNamara on it.105
62

Futrell: What were his reasons?

LeMay: He never gave any.

Futrell: Just turned it off?

LeMay: Never gave any. He accepted Taylor’s recommendation, and 

[Gen. William C.] Westmoreland’s recommendation, and we never could 

get the proper representation for air power.

Futrell: Another thing that we would like to know, it’s not really essential, is how Gen. [Paul D.] Harkins got selected for the job as COMUSMACV 

[commander, U.S. MACV].

LeMay: Well, the recommendation is beyond me, and McNamara made 

the decision. The Joint Chiefs never did any more than give tacit approval 

for those sorts of things. . . .106

Futrell: Could we continue with this Air Force expertise matter on the 

MACV staff for just a minute, looking at the potentiality of what might 

have been the case had there been Air Force expertise on the MACV 

staff? We know that there was an insufficient amount there.

LeMay: Ever since I’ve been in the Air Force, there has been a constant 

battle on the part of the Air Force people who thought they had a capability 

of rendering service to the country to render that service. We’ve never been 

able to do it properly. Up-to-date air power has not been used properly 

by this country. This is just a continuation of the battle down in South 

Vietnam. This is part of the interservice battle carried to the extreme. The 

Army had been trying to build back a tactical air force of their own—as 

you well know, having seen the documents—over the past several years. 

This is part of the battle.

Futrell: Why does the Air Force have to sell itself in every war?

LeMay: I don’t know. It’s always been that way since I’ve been in the 

Air Force. We’ve never been able to use air power properly.

During the period of the Eisenhower administration—well, starting 

from about the time of the Berlin Airlift, where this shook the country up, 

pretty much—we started to build our defenses back from the dismantling 

that had happened, in a very disastrous fashion, at the end of World War 

II. We started to build back again. For the next decade or so, I think the 

proper planning was done in air power, and we built up the Strategic Air 

Command, and did a pretty good job of it I think. Most people give it 

credit for keeping the peace in the world, and Winston Churchill did so 

openly. There was a lot of opposition to this, but we got it done anyway.

But there have always been battles against the airplane and the Air 

Force. Always.

Futrell: We get the counterargument that it wouldn’t have made much 

difference had there been more Air Force expertise on the MACV staff 
63

because of the rather prevailing belief that counterinsurgency was an 

Army mission, and air power couldn’t contribute substantially. Could you 

respond to this?

LeMay: Well, maybe they wouldn’t have been able to help much, but 

I’m sure if we’d had more people there that we could have gotten air power 

into the picture more. Maybe not enough, but we probably could have 

gotten it in a little better.

I think now that if you talk to [MACV commander] General [Creighton 

W.] Abrams [Jr.], he’s been over there long enough and been fighting 

long enough that he fully understands air power. As a matter of fact, 

he told me personally the last time I was over there about air power. 

Air power was his reserve. He no longer maintained a reserve. It was 

air power. And he personally was assigning the targets for the B–52s. 

There are so many sorties a day, and so many requests for them, that he 

personally did it.

So he understands the use of air power, but he’s got the Army to battle 

for the proper use of it. Certainly he understands it now, and understands 

very well that without air power, Vietnam would have gone under in this 

last offensive [the Easter Offensive]. It would have gone under in the Tet 

Offensive of a couple of years ago [1968]. He understands that.107

Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. Military Assistance Command, 

Vietnam (MACV), greeted President Johnson upon Johnson’s arrival in South 

Vietnam on December 22, 1967. According to General LeMay, Westmoreland 

showed “no signs of really understanding what air power was doing.” Photo by 

Yoichi Okamoto. National Archives.
64

Belden: Was Khe Sanh a turning point in General Westmoreland’s 

assessment of air power, where he really praised it?108

LeMay: I doubt if General Westmoreland was ever convinced of anything. He showed no signs of it. In my opinion, he showed no signs of really 

understanding what air power was doing.

Van Staaveren: General Westmoreland insisted on controlling all of 

the B–52 strikes, did he not?

LeMay: Well, the Army insisted on controlling everything over there, 

and we had a great deal of difficulty in keeping air power under [the Air 

Force] so it would be properly used.

But this battle has been going on all along. For instance, General Arnold 

worked a miracle, I think, in getting the B–29s under a separate command 

outside the theaters in the Pacific during the war [World War II]. They had 

always been assigned to the theater commander. . . .

[More discussion of the command structure during World War II for 

the Army Air Force.]

Belden: Could similar command arrangements have been made in the 

Vietnam case as were made in the B–29 case?

LeMay: Yes. I don’t think we had any objection to the air power coming 

under the theater commander out there in this case. It was a tactical situation 

rather than a strategic one. But we wanted it all together. We wanted to operate 

President Johnson and Secretary McNamara are shown agonizing over Vietnam 

on February 7, 1968, in the midst of the Tet Offensive. McNamara left the administration at the end of the month and became president of the World Bank. Photo 

by Yoichi Okamoto. National Archives.
65

it properly, like it was operated under [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur in the 

campaign there, where the air power was under one head, all of the air power 

under one head, instead of being piecemealed out to the units in the field.

Belden: Did that include the Navy and Marine air, too?

LeMay: It would have been better if we could have gotten it that way, 

but we never got it that way until late, late in the game. We finally just 

got the Army [air] transports, for instance, put under one head, so all the 

transports in the theater could be operated as one and get some efficiency 

out of them. Finally got the Marine combat units operating along with the 

Air Force combat units. Never got the Navy into the act.

Futrell: But General LeMay, it seems to me the Defense Unification 

Act, this thing in 1958, fractionated air power more than it unified any air 

power. Is this a valid judgment?

LeMay: Well, it turned out that way. Of course, we made a mistake of 

not getting the Navy air power into the Air Force at that time—Navy and 

Marines. And the Army then, of course, tried to build back its own air force 

in spite of the fact that we had a separate Air Force in the country, and 

they’ve continued to do that. They’ve done pretty well at it, too. They’ve 

got more airplanes than the Air Force has.

Futrell: But it seems to me that this results in little penny packages of 

aviation being employed rather than air power being employed. In other 

words, we’ve got Army RDF [rapid deployment force], Air Force RDF.

LeMay: That’s right.

Futrell: What’s the solution for that?

LeMay: I can’t explain the reason for it. It doesn’t make any sense 

to me, and I don’t think it should make any sense to anybody. They 

ought to have air power under one head. But it’s the same old human 

trait, I guess, coming to the front, that everybody wants everything 

they can get their hands on to do their job well. And certainly, the 

airplane is a handy tool for anyone to have if they’re going to have to 

fight and get around.

Futrell: I’ve got another problem on interservice rivalry. It seems to 

me that Secretary McNamara, in effecting his cost-effectiveness judgments 

and his program-package budgeting, invited the services to bid against 

each other for the accomplishment of missions.

LeMay: They did play the services one against the other. Many times he’d 

go to one service and say, “Look, if you’ll give up this, we’ll give you 

this.” So you try to cooperate to get things improved a little bit and say, 

“All right, I’ll do that.” Well, then you’d give up what he asked for, but 

you never got what he was supposed to [give] in return. That sort of thing 

happened all the time.
66

Futrell: Was this the sub-central theme of the interservice rivalry that 

took place in Vietnam, that if one service didn’t do it, the other service 

would pick up the role?

LeMay: To some extent, yes. Not all together. Everybody wanted to 

make what contribution they could, of course, to solving the problem over 

there. If anyone had any capability, it was offered to solve the problem.

But the Army had always been trying to build back their tactical air 

force. They were trying to make a case that the Air Force wasn’t properly 

carrying out the tactical role; it wasn’t giving them the support that they 

needed, that all of our budget was going to the strategic forces.

Well, this is not exactly the case. First of all, the Air Force didn’t 

make the final decision on where the money was going to be spent. This 

is a civilian prerogative, of making the final decision of where our money 

was going to be spent. Even during the big-spending years of building up the 

President Kennedy on the White House lawn with the Joint Chiefs on January 15, 1963: 

Gen. David Shoup, Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, General LeMay, President Kennedy, Gen. 

Maxwell Taylor (chairman), and Adm. George Anderson. Kennedy Library.
67

Strategic Air Command, and the submarine program, missiles, the maximum of the national budget that was ever spent on the strategic forces, I 

think, was about 17 percent. All the rest of it went to tactical forces. But 

the Army was just looking for excuses as to why the Air Force couldn’t 

support them properly with tactical air power, even though we had a pretty 

good team going at the end of World War II, operating properly.

I think one of the mistakes that we made, and I blame the Air Force 

to some extent for this, is that when the war was over, instead of living 

together and working together as we did during the war, we had come 

home, and the Air Force goes to its airfields and air bases, and the Army 

goes to their posts, camps, and stations, and about the only time we get 

together is when we have a maneuver. Well, I’ve tried to change that by 

sending forward air controllers and air liaison officers, and so forth, back 

to the Army units, so they had their people that they know, and worked 

with daily, and had some confidence in. I think this was helpful. But here 

again, the Army wasn’t looking for help; they were looking for reasons 

why they had to have their own tactical air force.

Belden: In the JCS discussions, how much were the international 

political problems discussed as a constraint on the use of air power, that 

is, possibly the intervention of the Chinese, etc., as happened in Korea?

LeMay: We used to have a meeting every once in a while with the 

State Department, and we’d ask them questions, and they’d tell us a few 

things. President Kennedy always said that he wanted political advice as 

well as military advice from the Joint Chiefs, but what I think he really 

meant was he didn’t want any advice at all. At least, I always had the 

feeling that I was spinning my wheels, and anything that I said was not 

really falling on receptive ears. I think the other chiefs felt more or less 

like that, too.

But we did discuss some of these things, and tried to be helpful, and 

offer advice where we thought our experience would give us a capability 

of rendering advice that might be helpful. First, we discussed a lot of 

these things amongst ourselves, many, many times, in trying to arrive at 

conclusions. As I have been talking here, I might have given the impression 

that all we did in the Joint Chiefs was fight interservice battles and things 

of that sort. There were these sort of squabbles, but most of the time, I 

think we were pretty much in agreement on the basic military problems, 

of what should be done.

It’s more than emphasizing our disagreements, of which there were 

many, of course, and I hope there always will be. I don’t want to give the 

impression that I frown on interservice rivalry. I do not. I think it’s a good 

thing. I used to think if maybe we all had the same uniform, and everybody 
68

in the same service, it might cut out some of the disagreements, and things 

might run a little smoother. Well, maybe they would run a little smoother, 

but I don’t think it would produce the type of thinking we should have in 

the military forces. They’re bringing new weapons systems out, and new 

methods of fighting, and things of that sort that we get by some of this 

interservice rivalry. I think we need it, and I think it’s helpful.

It, of course, like everything else, can be carried too far. Under the 

system we have now, what we need is a strong secretary of defense. When 

the time comes, [he] will make the decisions when there’s disagreement 

among the Joint Chiefs. We had that under Mr. McNamara, except he made 

the decisions without paying any attention, much, to the Joint Chiefs, which 

meant that he was making military decisions without the background to do 

Secretary McNamara speaks at a press conference on June 16, 1965, while standing 

in front of a map of Southeast Asia. Photo by Warren K. Leffler. Library of Congress.
69

it. I think a great number of them were basically wrong decisions, and a lot 

of the chickens are coming home to roost now, in later years, on some of the 

things that he did without the benefit of military advice.109

Belden: Did the Chinese intervention in Korea have much of an influence on the early decisions about Vietnam?

LeMay: I would say that it did. One of the reasons that the administration 

wouldn’t allow us to hit the proper targets is that they were afraid that the 

war would expand by the Chinese coming in. I never thought that this 

would happen down there. It could have happened, yes. But this is one 

of the things you have to think about when you make the basic decision 

to use military force in solving your problem. You can’t get a little bit 

pregnant. Once you get into this, you’re into it. If you haven’t the guts to 

see it through at the end, you shouldn’t get into it to start with.

Van Staaveren: I would like to follow up on Dr. Belden’s question. 

In his book, President Johnson refers to the possible intervention of the 

Chinese or the Soviets—one or the other—and yet when we did begin to 

bomb North Vietnam, the Flaming Dart strike of 7 February 1965, he states 

that his military analysts assured him that the Chinese now were unlikely to 

intervene unless we invaded North Vietnam or unless we toppled Hanoi.110

Did you discern a change in the assessments of what the Chinese might do 

from late 1964 and early 1965, that the Chinese might intervene, or that they 

might not intervene? Was there any change in those?

LeMay: Well, I don’t think the situation has changed much. You’re 

talking about President Nixon’s decision now to do some of these things?

Belden: No, he was speaking of the earlier decisions in 1964 and 1965 

when they made the first air strikes in North Vietnam.

LeMay: No, I don’t think the situation changed there on the thinking 

on the Chinese. I don’t think the Chinese would have come into the Korean 

fracas if we hadn’t had the leak that notified them that we weren’t going to 

bomb north of the Yalu [River]. I think that information got there. I can’t 

prove it, but there’s no doubt in my mind but that it did get there. I’ve seen 

articles around about that convinced me that this was so. The leak probably 

occurred through the State Department. Once they were convinced that this 

was going to happen, they came in. If it hadn’t been [for] that leak, they 

wouldn’t have come in.

So, to answer the question, there was no such change in thinking, that I 

know of, in the Joint Chiefs as to the attitude of the Chinese before or after 

the decision was made to actually go north.111

Van Staaveren: I’d like ask another question, to go back to one we 

discussed briefly, about these special committees set up by the White House. 

On February 14, 1964, President Johnson appointed a Vietnam coordinating 
70

committee chaired by William Sullivan, who later became ambassador 

to Laos. The purpose of this committee was to manage U.S. policy and operations in South Vietnam; Maj. Gen. [Rollen H.] Anthis of SACSA [special 

assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities] was a member of this 

committee. Then later that year, 1 November 1964, as a result of the attack 

on Bien Hoa, the president established an NSC working group to prepare 

military and political options against North Vietnam, and Adm. [Lloyd 

M.] Mustin was the JCS representative [as J–3, director of operations].112

How important were these committees? There’s quite a bit of literature on 

it. From the documents, one gets the impression they were really making 

the policy and providing the options for the White House. Were you aware 

of what they were doing, and do you have a recollection of how important 

their work was?

LeMay: I don’t have any recollection of much of it, or all of it, so there 

couldn’t have been much going on in the Joint Chiefs on the subject. They 

General LeMay spoke with Maj. Milton E. Nelson, the pilot, after an orientation 

flight in the new F–104B in March 1958 while LeMay was vice chief of staff of the 

Air Force. LeMay was frustrated that the United States would not deploy the 

newest technology, like the F–104, to Southeast Asia. When it “finally got through 

my thick skull that this is the way we’re going to have to operate,” he oversaw the 

development of an Air Force unit that was prepared to fly “junked airplanes,” the 

4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron, commonly known as Jungle Jim. USAF.
71

probably had representation over there, but how influential they were in 

coming up with the report, I don’t know. Of course, how important the 

report was in making up the administration’s mind, I don’t know, either.113

Futrell: Tying in with this, you are familiar both with General 

Eisenhower’s use of the National Security Council and President Kennedy’s, 

and President Johnson’s use of the National Security Council. Which would 

you prefer?

LeMay: I would prefer the proper use of the National Security Council 

as it was set up by the National Security Act, which gives the president 

really a planning operation for the security of the country which takes into 

account not only the military portion of the country’s planning, but the 

State Department and the other departments of the government that are 

really involved. With this sort of an operation going on, I think you get the 

field properly covered. And you do get proper advice into the president. 

Of course it’s not unanimous in every case; it shouldn’t be. But at least 

everyone had a chance to get their two cents’ worth into the act.

I think all anyone can expect is to get an audience with the boss, so 

that the boss understands his position. And if you can’t sell your position 

to him, why, OK, you’ve lost the battle, but at least you’ve been listened 

to. But when you have a feeling that the boss has no confidence in your 

advice or really [doesn’t] want it, then it’s a sorry state of affairs, and we 

were in that position during a portion of this time we’re talking about.

Futrell: Could I develop the case of Farm Gate just a little bit, you know, 

the air commando Jungle Jim troop [4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron] that was sent to Vietnam in November 1961? I want to be sure that I 

correctly understood your talk with Dr. Belden. You led into the subject of 

Jungle Jim by saying that you would have preferred to have gone first class.114

LeMay: Well, [when] this operation came about, during the early days 

[in Southeast Asia], there were plenty of cases where a small number of 

airplanes, properly used, would have prevented things from happening 

that had long-range, detrimental effects on our policy and the things we 

were trying to get done.

For instance, I remember a case where an attack came on the Plaine 

des Jarres [the Plain of Jars in Laos], and a few airplanes would have really 

turned it back. They didn’t have them. The Laotians didn’t have them, and 

we didn’t have them to give them because we couldn’t give them anything 

except the old junked airplanes and so forth, but they probably couldn’t 

operate them anyway.

If they ran into shiny airplanes with U.S. markings on them, why, we 

would have to face the world; and we’ve done this. For a little aside, I 

think in many cases we ought to stand up and be counted on these things 
72

and stop worrying about it. Later on, we were able to fix up some of these 

junked airplanes and give them to some of these people, but it took time to 

do this, and there again, it was too little too late again.115

When it finally got through my thick skull that this is the way we’re 

going to have to operate, I suggested to the Joint Chiefs that we get ready for 

this sort of stuff by having the Air Force form an outfit that was equipped 

with these junked airplanes. [They] would be pulled off of every junk heap 

in the world, unmarked, with Air Force crews on board that could be sent, 

if necessary, as Air Force people, or people who would be willing to resign 

from the Air Force and operate as mercenaries in case they wanted to do it 

that way. This was accepted by the Joint Chiefs, so they started the Jungle 

Jim outfit.

We got some of this old equipment overhauled so it was mechanically 

in operating shape.116 We started a particularly oriented training program 

for these people to train them in the use of them in guerrilla operations, 

the type of warfare that they’d probably be used in, and we did this down 

at Eglin [Air Force Base, Florida]. They never were used in any of these 

undercover operations except the start of the Vietnamese program was 

undercover to the extent that we gave them this old equipment, and they 

were supposed to be flying it, and we were supposed to be advising them. 

Well, actually, we were flying it, or told to fly it, except they didn’t want it 

to be known. So the cover plan was that we were training the Vietnamese.

Well, it got to the point where we didn’t have the Vietnamese to train, 

but they still needed the firepower of these airplanes over there, so our 

people flew them, with a Vietnamese warm body on board; whether he 

was being trained or not was questionable. But that’s the way it was done.

But these people [the air commandos] rendered very great service in 

the early days because they were the only ones that we could get in there. 

We couldn’t, at that time, send any of our greater Air Force units in there.

Futrell: But, is it fair to begin by saying that you would have preferred 

to stand up and be counted, as opposed to the clandestine approach, such 

as Jungle Jim was?

LeMay: Oh, definitely. Here we are deciding to use military force in the 

solution of our problem, but not going about it in a first-class manner, asking 

our people to go out and risk getting killed, but they only can have junk to fight 

with. To me, this is a pretty tough thing to ask of our people, but they did it.

Futrell: There’s another problem that I’d like to bring in on Farm 

Gate. The Farm Gate pilots, including [4400th CCTS commander] Col. 

Ben King, apparently believed that they were sent over for clandestine 

operations, where the American crews get in there and do some good. Yet as 

the mission [evolved], they got this training mission, which was admittedly 
73

a cover mission, but nevertheless was one of the rather substantial limiting 

actions on the Farm Gate force. Were they given some sort of indication, 

initially, that they would go over and do this combat job?

LeMay: Yes, definitely.

Futrell: In other words, Col. Ben King says that you gave him some 

verbal instructions.

LeMay: They went over there to fight, right from the start. We knew it, 

[but] nobody ever said that, though.117

Van Staaveren: Did all the JCS members know it?

LeMay: Certainly. They knew it.

Van Staaveren: And McNamara, everyone?

Futrell: Then why did this 26 December [1961] JCS directive from 

[Joint Chiefs chairman] General [Lyman] Lemnitzer say they would operate 

only when VNAF [Vietnam Air Force] didn’t have the capability, that they 

would always have a Vietnamese aboard, and these other restrictions that 

were put on the 26th of December come from?118

LeMay: Well, this was back in the days where a policy was that we 

would have some advisors over there and give them supplies, but we 

weren’t participating to any great extent. They certainly didn’t want to 

come out with the announcement that this outfit was going over to go into 

combat, but this is exactly what they were doing, and what they were sent 

over there for.

Belden: Is it your feeling that if they had gone in as you advocate, you 

know, directly, once you got involved in the pre-1964 situation, if that had 

been done properly, do you think American ground intervention would 

have been necessary in 1965?

LeMay: I don’t believe so, no, if we’d gone in there, once we decided 

to use military force, we’d have gone in full blast. The shock effect would 

have accomplished what they wanted to do. There was a time when there 

was absolutely no defense in North Vietnam, for instance. We could 

have stopped all those supplies coming in very easily at any time and 

completely destroyed North Vietnam if we’d wanted to, with no cost of 

doing those offensives.

Belden: Do you think this action might have broadened the war with 

regard to China?

LeMay: I don’t think so.

Van Staaveren: I would like to follow up on Dr. Belden’s question. 

You may recall on the 1st of February 1964 we began our covert mission 

against North Vietnam. It was called 34A. The JCS was clearly on record, 

shortly afterward, that it would not have a decisive effect, although it 

continued. What was the rationale for continuing these very small-scale 
74

or covert operations against North Vietnam during 1964 if they were not 

going to be [decisive]?119

LeMay: What was whose rationale for this?

Van Staaveren: Well, I’m inquiring what the rationale was for continuing them.

Belden: Rationale from the JCS, you mean?

Van Staaveren: Yes. If there was substantial agreement within the JCS 

that these operations were not going to have a significant or a decisive 

effect, why did they continue with them?

LeMay: We’re doing what we’re told. Remember, the decisions that are 

being made of what we will or will not do in Vietnam are not being made 

by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They’re being made by somebody else. In 

many cases, the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not even participate. Maybe the 

chairman did, but the Joint Chiefs didn’t. We’re doing what we’re told.

Futrell: Well, could I go back now to ’61–’62, that winter? What were 

the objections to putting a strong—the Joint Chiefs recommended this 

also—a rather strong American show of force into South Vietnam rather 

than going into . . .120

LeMay: You’re asking the wrong people to answer to this question. 

We were never given any explanation for any of the decisions.

Futrell: Well, we’re developing a fact that’s good right there, to know 

this. It does puzzle me, though, that we so easily intervened and sent the 

task force into Thailand in 1962, and that Taiwan show of force. The 

Lebanon show of force [in 1958] had worked extremely well, and yet all 

of the requirements for a show of force existed, it seems to me, in South 

Vietnam in 1961, and yet it was not shown.

LeMay: Well, show of force and things of that sort are fine. I think, 

for the Joint Chiefs, . . . they’re suggesting a lot of things that might be 

helpful and so forth, and maybe some of them were actually accepted by 

the administration, but usually a little late, if they were [accepted], and 

after so many other things had been suggested that you probably forgot 

about wanting to suggest the fact weeks before.

Every time we stood up to the Russians, they backed off. I’m talking 

about communists. This is the only thing they understood. Back in this time 

period, where we had no doubt about strategic superiority, we never took 

advantage of it and used it except in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

If we’d really used it, we’d have accomplished a lot more. We never did.

We have always bent over backwards to try to cultivate world opinion. 

And, not being the aggressor, it hasn’t done us any good, in my opinion. 

People are still talking about the United States as being an imperialistic 

nation and a selfish nation. Even though we’ve wrecked the economy of 
75

the country, practically, by our gifts to the rest of the world, we’re still 

an imperialistic nation seeking world domination. So it hasn’t done us 

any good.

We might as well have gone ahead and used the power we had. I think 

if we had, in many cases, we’d probably brought about a better world, 

and a better place for all the people to live in, if we’d corrected some of 

these evils that had been going on. We could have corrected them, can 

still correct them, although we’ve now fallen into second place, definitely. 

There’s no doubt about that. So we’ve got to be a little careful how we 

throw our weight around now, because we haven’t got the weight to throw 

around. But I don’t think that we’ve sunk to such a low point that we can’t 

stand up to be counted. Once we fail to do that, then we really go down the 

drain awfully fast.

Futrell: When you came back from your trip to Vietnam in the middle 

of 1962, you made a statement for the Joint Chiefs of Staff that air power 

was depreciated rather than appreciated. I think this was a pretty good theme 

for the whole experience, but did you get any repercussion from this?

LeMay: No, I didn’t get any repercussion. It was a fact, and I think it was 

generally known by the other people, and that’s it. It wasn’t corrected, but 

no repercussions. No action, either.

Futrell: I teach some classes at the Air War College from time to time, 

and somewhat with my tongue in my cheek, I suggest that air power was 

never used in Southeast Asia, that air vehicles were used to do things, up 

until now I would say.

LeMay: Well, you’re about right. I don’t know even now where it’s 

really 100 percent properly used or not. I don’t know whether they’re hitting 

all the targets they should because I don’t know what targets are left, or 

what have been hit, and so forth. About the only thing I get from the few 

conversations I’ve had with [Air Force chief of staff] General [John D.] 

Ryan is that he’s happier than he has been in the past. But I don’t get the 

information from him that every target that should be hit is being hit. I don’t 

know whether they have any restrictions on the targets as of now. I gather 

that they’re certainly better than they were. They have more freedom in 

hitting supplies wherever they’re found now than they ever had before.121

Belden: When did the issue of mining Haiphong [harbor] first come 

up in the JCS? Very early, I presume.

LeMay: Yes. I don’t think the Joint Chiefs ever advocated any particular method of closing the harbor of Haiphong. There are any number 

of ways that it could be closed. You could bomb the ships in the harbor. 

You could destroy the warehousing and the port facilities, and so forth, 

by bombing. You could mine the place, or you could even knock out the 
76

dredging operations that are going on and let the harbor fill up with silt 

so they couldn’t get ships in there and have to lighter everything in, that 

sort of stuff. Or you could blockade and so forth. It’s just a matter of 

stopping the flow of supplies through there. Mining is one way of doing it, 

of course. That’s what they chose this time, plus a blockade.122 I can assure 

[you] that they’re not going to lighter anything to shore.

Van Staaveren: I’ve got another question on the bombing of North 

Vietnam. You’ve made the point that concern about Chinese intervention 

was one of the factors. Did the civilian authorities ever raise the argument 

that bombing North Vietnam might have the opposite effect intended, that 

it would unite the North Vietnamese rather than weaken their morale, and 

weaken their will to resist? Did that argument ever surface in the period 

that you were there?123

LeMay: Oh, it probably did. Every argument against doing something 

always comes up. My answer to that was to warn the civilian population 

of North Vietnam that you’re going to hit the military targets wherever 

they’re found and advise them to get away from them.

In other words, you made your case to the people that you’re not probably doing these indiscriminate attacks that you’re getting credit for. 

Every time you go up north, you always bomb the hospital, or a school, or 

an orphan asylum, or someplace like this. You never hit a military target; 

you always hit something like this. Undoubtedly, some of them were hit by 

stray bombs. Some of them were hit by antiaircraft missiles and so forth 

and so on that are applied by the North Vietnamese. That sort of thing.124

But there’s no way of fighting the war without killing somebody, and 

I don’t know any way of fighting the war without killing some innocent 

people once in a while. This is a deplorable situation, and you minimize 

that, I think, by going in and doing the job properly to start with. . . .

To carry on this part we had going about killing a few innocent people 

in warfare, as I said before, war is a mean, nasty business, and you always 

kill a lot of people. There’s no way of getting around it. I think that any 

moral commander tries to minimize this to the extent possible, and to me, 

the best way of minimizing it is getting the war over as quick as possible.

But too many of our leaders find this pretty hard to stomach. They find 

it very difficult to say, “All right, we’re going to do this, and we’re going 

to kill some innocent people in doing it.” If they do do it, it will shorten 

the war and probably save overall life in the long run, many fold. But they 

can’t stomach going on and deliberately killing some people all at once 

and getting it over with. If they continue the fighting, and many more 

times those people are killed over a period of years, this seems to be more 

palatable to them. Well, it isn’t to me.
77

For instance, at the start of the Korean War, the only reason the Korean 

War started is that we convinced the Chinese that we weren’t going to 

defend Korea. But remember, at this time, we’ve got overwhelming 

superiority in atomic weapons and so forth, and an all-out war against a 

free world is not possible on the part of the communists. So they start these 

wars of national liberation, little ones that we won’t consider important 

enough to launch an atomic offensive against, and get away with it.

But we convince them that we’re not going to defend Korea. And here’s 

another leak, I think. They pretty well infiltrated our State Department 

during this period. All of this is forgotten about and swept under the rug, at 

least in these days. But there it was. So they attack in Korea. And President 

[Harry S.] Truman has the courage to say, “No, we’ll defend.”

An official portrait of General LeMay from August 28, 1962. Photo by Ronald 

Hall. USAF.
78

I was out in SAC at the time and, of course, no one ever asked advice 

down that far from Washington. Well, we slipped a little idea under the door 

up there in the Pentagon that maybe if we turned SAC loose, not with atomic 

weapons, but with some incendiaries against four or five towns in North 

Korea, that this will convince them we mean business and maybe it’ll stop it.

Well, the answer was, “No, you can’t do this.” It comes back under the 

rug route, too. “You’ll kill too many noncombatants.” Well, no one worried 

about noncombatants [during World War II]; I’m referring now to Tokyo, 

Osaka, Nagoya, and the rest of the places.

So we go on, and we don’t do it, and [we] let the war go on over a 

period of three and a half or four years. We did burn down every town 

in North Korea and every town in South Korea, including Pusan—that 

was an accident, but we burned it down anyway—and what, killed off 20 

percent of the Korean population, either [from] direct effects of the war 

or disease and exposure and so forth, from the side effects of war over a 

period of years.

All of those deaths were palatable. The people would say, “No, you can’t 

stop it to start with because you might kill a few noncombatants.” Well, what 

I’m trying to say is once you make a decision to use military force to solve 

your problem, then you ought to use it, and use an overwhelming military 

force; use too much, and deliberately use too much, so that you don’t make an 

error on the other side and not quite have enough. You roll over everything to 

start with, and you close it down just like that. You save resources, you save 

lives, not only your own, but the enemy’s too. And the recovery is quicker, 

and everybody’s back to peaceful existence, hopefully in a shorter period of 

time. It’s a more humane and efficient way of doing it, I think. But this is 

something that seems to be impossible to accomplish these days.

[More discussion of Korea.]

Van Staaveren: I would like to ask one quick question about the planning for the bombing [in Vietnam], especially in the latter part of 1964. It 

has been said that some of President Johnson’s advisors, among them 

[National Security Advisor] McGeorge Bundy, were convinced that even a 

low-scale bombing program against the north would probably cause Hanoi 

to cease and desist within a period of about three months. Did this type of 

reasoning ever reach your desk?

LeMay: Well, this type of reasoning never seems to be successful in 

war. You always underestimate the resistance of the enemy. It’s a natural 

tendency to do this. This has been particularly true of these intellectual type 

people who just can’t understand that reasonable men can’t sit down and 

talk out their differences. They’ve been doing it so long in the academic 

hall that they can’t understand everybody not being able to do this.
79

The communists have always used this as a weapon against us. They 

want to get us talking so we’ll stop fighting and stop taking the action 

that really hurts them. I notice the Viet Cong are down on their knees 

just begging to get started to talk back in Paris again. Meantime, we stop 

fighting. They continue on, regroup, rebuild, and get going again. This 

always happens.

Not that I have any objection to talking—fine, talk—but providing 

you realize that in talking with the communists, you’re never going to get 

anyplace. [You’re] never going to get anyplace by talking unless you follow 

up or precede it by military action. When you’ve got them on their knees, 

strength they pay some attention to. Then, if they have to, you’ve got them 

over a barrel, you can get an agreement from them that is a reasonable 

agreement. They’ll never carry it out unless you force them to carry it out.

This is history in the past. Every time we got an agreement with them, 

it was usually because it was overwhelming and in their favor to agree. 

Even so, they never carried it out later on anyway. Every agreement we 

made with them I think has been broken, and the agreement was only made 

if the advantage of making the agreement was on their side.

[Discussion of interdiction in the Pacific Theater during World War II.]

Futrell: Let me continue with interdiction. It never seemed to work in 

Southeast Asia. This Barrel Roll thing, the beginning of it . . .125

LeMay: Well, interdiction is just simply stopping the flow of supplies to 

the battlefield; in other words, of isolating a battlefield. Now, how will you 

do it? Well, the easiest way of stopping the flow of supplies to the battlefield 

is to bomb the plant where they’re being manufactured, and destroy the 

plant where they’re being manufactured. You get the biggest result for the 

expenditure of ammunition and supplies. That’s the best way of doing it.

Now, the farther forward you come to the front where they’re being 

expended against you, the more difficult it is to stop it, and you never 

can stop it completely. You can slow it down, but you never can stop it 

completely. They never stopped it completely in Italy [in 1943], and that 

was an easier job than in most places. They never completely got it done 

because they’d always get enough off the railroads onto the trucks down 

south. They were fighting a retreating action anyway.

Of course, interdiction has to be used in conjunction with pressure to 

use up supplies. You can interdict till hell freezes over, and if they’re not 

using any supplies, nothing happens. So you interdict, and you can bring 

these forward supplies to almost a complete halt. But if they’re not using 

any down there, you still accomplish nothing.126

Take the case of Vietnam now. I think it’s generally agreed that no 

supplies are getting into Vietnam now because none have come in over the 
80

beaches or through the ports. The rail lines are cut, and I think they’ll keep 

them cut if we’re allowed to do it. Some will get in over the roads. It’s 

harder to keep roads out than it is to keep railroads out. But they’re going to 

have to keep knocking those bridges down. They’ll put them up. I’ve seen 

pictures where they had repaired the bridge that had been knocked out, but 

in addition to that, bypassed it on the east side with pontoon bridges and 

so forth, so interdicting those is more difficult.127

What I’m trying to say is that it’s very difficult to stop the flow of 

supplies completely, very difficult. But you can certainly restrict them. Now, 

the thing to do is to restrict the supplies where they’re using more at the 

front than they could possibly get down there. Then you get results from 

your interdiction program. If you allow them to get more supplies down than 

they’re using, then you accomplish nothing with your interdiction program.

What must be done in Vietnam now is to put enough pressure on the 

North Vietnamese in South Vietnam so that they’d have to use up more 

supplies than they can get down there. Then you can break the big units up 

into one-ring bands that should be taken care of fairly easily.

Futrell: I wonder, though, in Southeast Asia if we magnified the difficulties that interdiction operations would pose to such an extent that we 

didn’t try to capitalize and develop the capabilities that would have 

made us do as good a job as we could have done. In other words, night air 

operations, intelligence, all of those things, at an early date.

LeMay: Well, I don’t know that that is exactly true. Monday-morning 

quarterbacking is always easier than Saturday quarterbacking, much 

easier. Undoubtedly, we could have done a better job. But with all the 

restrictions that we’ve had, I think we’ve done a reasonably good job of 

what we were allowed to do. Of course, it hasn’t been a good one when 

you think of the tonnage of bombs that have been dropped over there, 

what’s been accomplished. Everybody in this country should hang their 

heads in shame.

Van Staaveren: I have a question on reconnaissance, a rather specific 

one, pertaining especially to Laos in 1964 when we began our limited 

operations there—Yankee Team and so on.128 The civilian control was very 

tight. I fail to understand what was behind the reasoning that they even 

dictated whether planes should fly at low altitude or medium altitude. Do 

you recall what the explanation was? Why airplanes could not fly certain 

altitudes over Laos? This is for reconnaissance, not interdiction.

LeMay: I think you’re talking about reconnaissance airplanes and our 

reconnaissance airplanes with our markings on them. I don’t think they 

wanted it known that we had any military aircraft over there at all. If they flew 

at low altitude, they could be identified as belonging to the United States.
81

Van Staaveren: I wondered whether that was the explanation. I simply 

have not seen the one that you have just offered. Otherwise, I simply failed 

to understand what the purpose of this was.

Futrell: Could we broaden this one just a little bit into intelligence? Did 

the intelligence that you got from Southeast Asia meet your requirements?

LeMay: No, never. Your intelligence never meets your requirements, 

but it was particularly bad there, and it’s still particularly bad. The only 

really good intelligence you can get is to have agents and help on the 

ground, and we found this particularly hard to do against the communists.

The reconnaissance people have done some phenomenal work, photographic-wise. But here again, the weather over there is not particularly good 

for this type of reconnaissance. It was particularly sorry as a matter of fact, 

because you can’t get it in a timely fashion. It’s usually a little late, but 

they have gotten some good stuff. I’ve seen pictures where they’ve gone 

down and taken pictures of the inside of a boxcar. You can look in and see 

what was in there. They’ve done remarkable work.

Futrell: We thought, though, maybe intelligence was set up more to 

meet Army requirements than Air Force requirements.

LeMay: I wouldn’t say that’s exactly true. I think that we’ve gotten a 

lot of stuff for our benefit.

Van Staaveren: To follow up on the intelligence subject, during the period 

1961 to 1965, was there considerable conflicting intelligence, especially 

assessments, on what the internal situation was within South Vietnam and 

North Vietnam? I’m speaking now of the various agencies, CIA and State 

Department as against DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency]/MACV. Was 

there always a severe conflict, or not particularly severe at that time?

LeMay: Well, I wouldn’t use the word “conflict” exactly, but it was 

certainly inadequate. In the first place, we’re babes in the woods at intelligence collection. In fact, I’d go so far as to say we had nothing, absolutely 

nothing, before World War II. Absolutely nothing. We tried to build 

something after the war, but we really had to start from scratch, and it 

takes several generations to get a good intelligence system going. And it 

takes the will to do this. This sort of thing has always been repugnant to 

the American people. We haven’t got a good one yet.

On top of that, we really didn’t understand the Asiatic mind and what 

was going on. So our capability of making an assessment even of what’s 

going on in South Vietnam has been rather limited. So we’ve always 

operated with inadequate intelligence here.

Belden: Would you say that the intelligence that we do get is sufficiently 

collated and brought together and, you know, focused so that conclusions 

[can be drawn], or is it too dispersed even to this time?
82

LeMay: Well, certainly we have the capability of putting it together. 

Things are pretty well centralized now. Whether we draw the right conclusions 

or not, even where we get the dissenting opinions or not, is something else 

again. I firmly believe that a lot of people have to look at the whole picture.

For instance, let’s take a soldier who has spent all of his life with 

ground forces, and a sailor who has spent all of his life at sea, and an airman 

who has spent all of his life in airplanes, and a diplomat that spent all of his 

life balancing teacups, and you’re shown some intelligence information. 

Every one of them will look at it with the eyes of the experience that he 

has had, and it’ll mean a little something different to each one of them. 

All of this has to be correlated by someone who has had a little experience 

overall, particularly had long experience in the intelligence field, to try to 

come up with the proper answer to these facts that all of these different 

eyes have looked at. This is one drawback to consolidating everything in 

the DIA and the CIA. At the present time, I doubt whether everything is 

looked at by all the experience that could be brought to bear upon it.

Belden: Some of these dissenting views might be missed.

LeMay: Might be missed, yes.

Belden: In fact, they might not even get filtered up to the top.

LeMay: No, they might not even be brought to birth in the first place.

Van Staaveren: I have another question. This is about Seacoord [Southeast Asia Coordinating Committee]. Do you remember about the Seacoord 

organization established by General Taylor in 1964 when he went to 

Saigon as ambassador? He established a coordinating group made up of 

the ambassadors of Laos, Thailand, and South Vietnam, and he and the 

ambassadors or their deputies met monthly. Their meetings began about 

August 1964 and continued on a monthly basis. Do you recall if this 

became a rather significant organization getting over-involved in military 

planning at that time?

LeMay: I can’t quote you any instances, but the answer is yes.129 The 

ambassadors did get too much in the military line, and still are for that 

matter. I had a talk with a recent commander of U-Tapao [Royal Thai 

Navy Airfield]. They had a couple of sappers come in a while back. They 

got both of them. They damaged one B–52 I think. But as a result of 

this, of the sappers getting in before they were discovered, so that once 

the attack started, there could have been a lot of damage done by poor 

discipline on the part of the defenders and indiscriminate shooting, and 

shooting up our own airplanes and our own people and so forth—there 

wasn’t any of this, but this bothered the commander considerably. It might 

come about in case of a larger attack. So he wanted a proportion of his 

people at certain positions in the defenses to have shotguns with buckshot 
83

so that they wouldn’t have the range that the M–16 has of hitting airplanes 

or his own people someplace else. The ambassador, I understand, got into 

the act over there and objected to this, of using this inhuman weapon in 

defending yourself.

Futrell: Along these same lines, how important was Ambassador 

Taylor’s letter from President Johnson that allowed him to take command 

of the military forces in Vietnam if he decided to do so? That seems to be 

going rather far.130

LeMay: Well, I think it was going pretty far, too. There again you find a 

special situation where you’ve got a soldier over there who has just retired, 

and he can’t quite turn loose of one suit and put on another one. I don’t 

think this would ever have come to pass, but it might have.

Van Staaveren: I’ve got another one on the background on striking 

North Vietnam. There seemed to be three basic reasons why the decision 

was finally made to bomb North Vietnam in 1965. One was the weakness 

of the Saigon government and the military forces. I should rephrase my 

question. There were three basic reasons why we were afraid to bomb North 

Vietnam. One was the weakness of the Saigon government and its military 

forces; secondly, fear of Chinese or Soviet intervention or diversionary 

action; and three, the domestic/political situation with President Johnson 

running against Senator [Barry M.] Goldwater [in the 1964 presidential 

race]. Which of these reasons do you think is perhaps the most important?

LeMay: Well, this is fairly hard for us to assess because the Joint Chiefs 

of Staff were never given any reasons why they shouldn’t do this. There 

were sound military reasons right from the start why it should have been 

done, and the decision was made against it. But you wouldn’t expect 

the administration to come out and say, well, we’re not going to do this 

because we’re afraid Russia might come in, or we’re afraid of this or afraid 

of that. They never would stand up and admit what their fears were, or why 

they didn’t make the proper decision. My guess is that they were probably 

afraid of having another confrontation with Russia.

Van Staaveren: That’s perhaps the number-one reason?

LeMay: That’s my guess, but it was never explained why.

[Discussion of forward air control and single-side band use in military 

communications, during World War II and later at SAC.]

Futrell: Could I have one last question that really troubles me? I came 

up with General Arnold. I know the services are supposed to function 

together cooperatively, each one magnifying its intrinsic capabilities in 

support of each other. Yet here in Vietnam, we get Secretary McNamara 

telling Congress that one of the services has to be dominant. What happened 

to this concept, this doctrine of coequality and cooperation between them?
84

LeMay: Well, I think that the farther away from Washington you get, 

the more cooperation you find. You get out in the field, you find the people 

cooperated pretty well. Up here [in Washington], they’re battling for projects, mission assignments, and things of that sort. So you find more 

difference of opinion and battling here than anyplace else. Once you get 

out in the field, I think you find that they are cooperating.

Of course, the battle of the Marines being off by themselves, with their 

air power, to start with over there, wasn’t their fault in the field. It was 

the orders they were getting from Washington back then. They are always 

maintaining that they had the best tactical support that’s possible to achieve, 

although I don’t think it was any better than what the Air Force had, for that 

matter. But here again is [an example of] piecemealing the resources you 

have instead of centralizing, where you could do more with what you had. 

We finally got it corrected, but it took long, hard battles to do it.

Van Staaveren: This is more of an Army problem than an Air Force 

problem. It concerns the leadership of the South Vietnamese army. There’s 

a great deal of agonizing about this problem, from the early ’60s on, about 

improving the leadership of the South Vietnamese army. Is there anything 

more that we could have done that wasn’t done?131

LeMay: Well, I suppose you could have always done a better job. But 

leadership is something you can’t make quickly, and you can’t store it on 

the shelf and leave it there until you need it.

We started out with not much in the way of leadership in any capacity 

in Vietnam because the French governed the country with Frenchmen, and 

they defended the country, particularly the top echelon, with Frenchmen. 

I think they had some officers—native officers—in the military forces 

down there, but they were of low rank, and no one ever got very high in 

the business in any segment of the government or the armed forces or in 

any capacity down there. It was all French. In other words, it was a real 

colonial empire, with the natives held down and in the background.

I can remember, I think it was [Lt. Gen. Earle E.] “Pat” Partridge making 

a trip down there right after the war [in 1954] and finding that the French 

were there in force, and they had some Vietnamese officers that were 

fighting the communists at that time, but the French wouldn’t even allow 

them in the officer’s club—that sort of thing. So what I’m saying is that 

the French did not do anything to develop any leadership or any capability 

of the Vietnamese to govern themselves, or to defend themselves, so that 

when they left, they left a complete vacuum there. There just wasn’t any 

leadership, and it takes time to build this.

Directly the opposite extreme, when we took over the Philippines 

at the turn of the [twentieth] century, we told the Filipinos that we were 
85

going to give them their freedom just as soon as they were capable of 

governing themselves. We took two generations to train them. It wasn’t 

until after World War II that we got around to turning the government over 

to them. But we made an effort for two generations there to train the people 

to govern themselves, to defend themselves. They had their problems, 

difficult problems. They still have some, [but] it looks like they’re going to 

make it all right.

Now compare the Philippines and the problems that they had with the 

Vietnamese situation starting out right from scratch. I think they’ve done 

remarkably well in both the armed services and in the government. But this 

is something you just can’t correct overnight.

Futrell: I can find that no one plays this thought that you’ve just presented into the equation in South Vietnam back in 1961. We’re going to 

accomplish things by three-year programs, and building up ARVN [Army 

of the Republic of Vietnam], and building up the Vietnamese Air Force. 

So my thought is, maybe from the very beginning, we just couldn’t get 

there from where we were, here from where we were, in terms of this 

gradualistic approach.

LeMay: Well, perhaps not. But we did the best we could in training these 

people, like sending them to school. We brought all of their pilots, for instance, in their air force—practically all of them—back here for training, 

tried to give them leadership training by example. But we spend years 

giving our own people in the Air Force leadership training so that they 

are capable of taking over positions of higher responsibility as they come 

along. If we were forced with our type of people, who are living in a 

modern world, to jump from a second lieutenant to being the deputy for 

operations on the Air Staff, he wouldn’t do a very good job. Now, take 

somebody from a rice paddy and throw him into that position, and he 

doesn’t do a very good job, either. You can’t cram that space of experience 

and education into a couple of years and do very well.
General LeMay during an interview in February 1990. Department of Defense.
87

Epilogue

June 1984

Strategic Air Warfare, June 15, 1984:132

Gen. Curtis E. LeMay: To go back to your question, “Was there any 

drastic change when the Kennedy administration came in?” The administration spouted new phrases and things of that sort, but as far as the 

Air Force was concerned, we had no radical change in thinking at all. 

We were all on the same track. However, the Kennedy administration 

thought that being as strong as we were was provocative to the Russians 

and likely to start a war. We in the Air Force, and I personally, believed the 

exact opposite. While we had all this superiority, we invaded no one; we 

didn’t launch any conquest for loot or territory. We just sat there with the 

strength. As a matter of fact, we lost because we didn’t threaten to use it 

when it might have brought advantages to the country.133

_____

Gen. Jack J. Catton: General LeMay, did you have to fight those guys 

all the time to get them to give us some authority and some capability to 

use air [power] over there [in Vietnam]?

LeMay: Constantly, constantly. To start off with on this flexible response business, I think that phrase is an outgrowth to counter the 

“immorality” of the massive retaliation that everybody thought meant 

we would dump all the atomic weapons we had automatically on a poor, 

helpless foe. That was immoral. Flexible response was, “No, we don’t 

have to do that. We are just going to use what force is necessary to do the 

job.” Of course, this violates the principles of war, and over the centuries 

we have found that it doesn’t work. But we couldn’t convince anybody in 

the Pentagon at the time that it wouldn’t work.134

_____

LeMay: To get back to your question, “Was there any planning for 

the use of air power in Vietnam?” There was some after we got fully 
88

embroiled over there. As a matter of fact, we got ground forces involved in 

there before I knew anything about it, but I don’t remember any discussion 

where we would use our ground forces in Asia until it was right there, 

happening. The decision was made, and there we were, involved. The Joint 

Chiefs finally came up with a target list of ninety [sic, ninety-four] targets 

in North Vietnam, targets that would badly reduce the North Vietnamese 

capability of supporting the war in the South. But it was never approved, 

and we were never given authority to get them.135

_____

Gen. David A. Burchinal: Curt, was there ever a time during Vietnam 

when the recommendation was made that we go up and burn down North 

Vietnam?

LeMay: Yes, when we finally got that target list through the Joint 

Chiefs.

Burchinal: Because that would have ended the war real quick, just 

like it did in Japan.

LeMay: We could have ended it in any ten-day period you wanted to, 

but they never would bomb the target list we had.

Burchinal: We could have dropped circulars like we did in Japan and 

said, “Get out because this town won’t be here tomorrow.”

Richard H. Kohn: Do you all think that what we did in the Southeast 

Asia war was at all a strategic air campaign, as you learned to wage 

strategic air war in your military careers?

LeMay: Definitely not. It wasn’t until the last two weeks of the war [in 

the Linebacker II operation] that we even approached it. When we turned 

the B–52s loose up north—that started what would have been a strategic 

campaign, and it would have been completely over in a few more days if 

we had just continued it. A few more days’ work and we would have been 

completely free without any casualties because all of the SAMs [surfaceto-air missiles] were gone by that time. Their bases and warehouses 

supplying the SAM sites were gone, too. So it would have been a pretty 

free ride from then on, and we would have completely won the war.136

Up until that time, even when we were using the B–52s, we were bombing jungle because there was a rumor there might be some Viet Cong in that 

jungle. So they would give us a point in the jungle, and we would go hit it.137

_____

Catton: General LeMay, how would you characterize the similarity 

between Linebacker II and the plan that we took to the government, took 

to the secretary of defense and the White House back in 1964–65?
89

LeMay: The first plan we had was ninety strategic targets, and I don’t 

know what the target objective was in Linebacker II.138

Catton: The targets, of course, would be a little bit different in detail, but 

the philosophy, the concept of the operation, to my mind was very similar.

LeMay: In that we stopped bombing jungles and started getting more 

important targets.

Catton: It has always been my thought, General LeMay, that if we 

had been able to go get those 90 targets—and we certainly would have 

succeeded—we would have saved tens of thousands of lives and many, 

many years, and billions of dollars in that effort. I think we could have 

made the point way back in 1964–65 by taking on those ninety targets and 

destroying them.

LeMay: Well, I spent a lot of time trying to bring out the point that in 

any two-week period or so, we could have, with the proper application of 

air and naval power, won the war over there.

Catton: That’s the point I was hoping you would make.

Burchinal: We should have gone incendiary, like we did in Japan, 

warned them to get out of the way, and then destroyed their means to exist. 

It wouldn’t have cost anything in the way of casualties, really.

LeMay: I want to point out that if you look at the tonnage figures, at the 

tonnage of bombs that we dropped in the Vietnamese affair, and compare 

it with what we dropped on Japan and what we dropped on Germany 

[during World War II], you will find that we dropped more on Vietnam 

than we did on Germany and Japan combined.139 Look what happened to 

Germany, and above all, look at what happened to Japan. There was no 

invasion necessary there. The only conclusion you can draw is that we 

were bombing the wrong things in Vietnam.

Kohn: Perhaps you are saying that in the end, the ultimate target is 

the will of the enemy. It is something [Giulio] Douhet raised back in the 

1920s: that you destroy enough or so much that your enemy simply ceases 

to make war against you.

Buchinal: Destroy the will and capability; separate the two.

Catton: You have got the right words, Dave.

LeMay: If you destroy their capability to win war, then the will to 

wage war disappears also.140
Kennedy Library
91

Notes

Introduction

1. The “Stone Age” quote is from Curtis E. LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission 

with LeMay: My Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 565. As noted later in the 

introduction, LeMay insisted that Kantor wrote the “Stone Age” statement. See note 45 below.

2. LeMay remains in need of a scholarly biography. Two detailed, somewhat sympathetic works are Thomas M. Coffey, Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis 

LeMay (New York: Crown, 1986); and Warren Kozak, LeMay: The Life and Wars of 

General Curtis LeMay (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2009). For a more critical look at 

LeMay’s central role in the Air Force in the 1950s and first half of the 1960s, see Mike 

Worden, Rise of the Fighter Generals: The Problem of Air Force Leadership, 1945–1982

(Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1998).

3. LeMay, who was not a part of the decision-making process on the use of nuclear 

weapons in 1945, stated in a 1984 interview that “the war would have been over in time 

without dropping the atomic bombs, but every day it went on we were suffering casualties, 

the Japanese were suffering casualties, and the war bill was going up.” He also understood 

the concern in Washington about having to move forward with the invasion of the Japanese 

home islands if conventional bombing did not end the war by a certain time frame. 

Richard H. Kohn and Joseph P. Harahan, eds., Strategic Air Warfare: An Interview with 

Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal, and Jack J. Catton

(Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1988), 69–70, http://media.defense.

gov/2010/Sep/29/2001329790/-1/-1/0/AFD-100929-052.pdf.

4. For an overview of LeMay’s role, see Herman S. Wolk, Catacylsm: General Hap 

Arnold and the Defeat of Japan (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2010), 103–34. 

For a detailed, critical assessment of the bombing of Japan and LeMay’s central part in it, 

see Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New 

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 256–316. For the broader ethical implications, 

see Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: 

Oxford University Press, 1985), 107–76; Mark Selden, “A Forgotten Holocaust: U.S. 

Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities, and the American Way of War from 

the Pacific War to Iraq,” in Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History, ed. Yuki 

Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young (New York: New Press, 2009), 77–96.

5. One of LeMay’s greatest sparring partners, Robert S. McNamara, later called SAC 

“perhaps the most highly disciplined element of the military force. General LeMay did 

a fantastic job in shaping that command to a standard of perfection that was unequaled 

elsewhere in the military.” Robert S. McNamara, interview by WGBH for War and Peace 

in the Nuclear Age, March 28, 1986, http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_823171902
92

44B46168DFDFB0314E8E7B8. For the SAC/LeMay ascendancy during this period, see 

Worden, Rise of the Fighter Generals, 55–101. As Worden put it (p. 62), “The peerless 

LeMay was the absolute ruler of SAC, and he ruled absolutely.” For LeMay’s thoughts on 

his time and accomplishments with SAC, see Curtis E. LeMay, interview by SAC History 

Office (John T. Bohn), March 9, 1971, transcript, IRIS no. 01001829, Air Force Historical 

Research Agency (AFHRA), Maxwell Air Force Base, AL.

6. According to historian John Lewis Gaddis, the goal of the Eisenhower/Dulles 

“new look” national defense strategy was “to achieve the maximum possible deterrence of 

communism at the minimum possible cost.” The approach involved an overall reduction 

of U.S. forces after the Korean War and an increasing reliance on the threat of the use 

of nuclear weapons, what came to be called “massive retaliation.” John Lewis Gaddis, 

Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security 

Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 127–97 (quote, 164).

7. Coffey, Iron Eagle, 345–52 (White and LeMay quotes, 345–46); David C. 

Jones, interview by WGBH for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, June 28, 1986, http://

openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_4C9DD9F57A6041ACB0695FC332B548F8 (hereafter Jones 

interview); Worden, Rise of the Fighter Generals, 65–66, 80–89; Mark Clodfelter, The 

Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 

1989), 29. For further commentary on LeMay’s struggles with the way Washington 

worked, see comments by Generals White, Delmar E. Wilson, and Theodore R. Milton in 

Coffey, Iron Eagle, 438–39. 

8. Earl H. Tilford Jr., Crosswinds: The Air Force’s Setup in Vietnam (College Station: 

Texas A&M University Press, 1993), 3. Later in the book (p. 64), Tilford observed that “the 

Air Force of 1965 was, in many ways, the Air Force of 1947—only bigger and faster.” 

He added that “faith in technology, wedded to the doctrine that strategic bombardment 

would be decisive in any conflict, provided an underlying certainty that air power could 

accomplish virtually anything asked of it.”

9. H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint 

Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 9–17. 

Bundy was national security advisor, succeeded by Rostow in 1966. Rostow was deputy 

national security advisor during 1961 and subsequently became director of policy planning 

for the State Department, although he was still integrally involved in White House decisionmaking. Taylor consulted with Kennedy during the campaign and in the early weeks of the 

administration but did not go to work full time as a military advisor until July 1961. He 

remained in this unofficial position until Kennedy named him chairman of the Joint Chiefs 

of Staff, duty he assumed on October 1, 1962.

10. Coffey, Iron Eagle, 357–59; Kozak, LeMay, 334–35. Roswell L. Gilpatric, the 

deputy secretary of defense, recalled that as the Kennedy administration considered new 

members for the Joint Chiefs, “some choices were pretty obvious. LeMay was obviously 

destined to be the successor to White. And in light of hindsight, it probably was a mistake, 

but I don’t know what we could have done about it. I mean, we would have had a major 

revolt on our hands if we hadn’t promoted LeMay.” Roswell L. Gilpatric, interview by 

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (Dennis J. O’Brien), June 30, 1970, transcript, 69, 

https://archive1.jfklibrary.org/JFKOH/Gilpatric,%20Roswell%20L/JFKOH-RLG-03/

JFKOH-RLG-03-TR.pdf.

11. For Kennedy’s curious decision to fault the military for the Bay of Pigs disaster, 

a CIA-directed operation with very little U.S. military input, see McMaster, Dereliction 

of Duty, 6–7. LeMay commented in an interview that blaming the military for the Bay 

of Pigs “is just a bunch of hogwash because it was not a military operation.” Curtis E. 
93

LeMay, interview by Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library (Joe B. Frantz), June 28, 

1971, typescript, 7, http://web1.millercenter.org/poh/transcripts/lemay_curtis_1971_0628.

pdf (hereafter LeMay interview [1971]). As LeMay noted in the text that follows, from 

what he could see, the Joint Chiefs had very little involvement in the arrangements. 

McNamara stated in an oral history that the operation was “planned by the CIA and 

implemented and directed by the CIA,” but that “we in Defense had an opportunity to 

present our recommendations with respect to it to the president.” McNamara indicated 

that he “recommended in favor of it.” Robert S. McNamara, interview by Lyndon B. 

Johnson Presidential Library (Walt W. Rostow), January 8, 1975, transcript, 24, http://

www.lbjlibrary.net/assets/documents/archives/oral_histories/mcnamara_r/McNamara1.

PDF (hereafter McNamara interview [1975]).

12. The historical work most focused on the Joint Chiefs and Vietnam decisionmaking is McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, which has a background chapter on the Kennedy 

administration. Official histories include Jack Shulimson and Graham A. Cosmas, The 

Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, 1960–1968, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: 

Office of Joint History, 2009–12), http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/doctrine/history/

jcsvietnam_pt1.pdf (v. 1), http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/doctrine/history/jcsvietnam_pt2.

pdf (v. 2); and Lawrence S. Kaplan, Ronald D. Landa, and Edward J. Drea, History 

of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vol. 5: The McNamara Ascendancy, 

1961–1965 (Washington, DC: Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2006), 

http://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/secretaryofdefense/OSDSeries_Vol5.

pdf?ver=2014-05-28-133758-613. Works on the civil-military decision-making include 

George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (Austin: University of 

Texas Press, 1994); David M. Barrett, Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His 

Vietnam Advisers (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Robert Buzzanco, 

Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (New York: Cambridge 

University Press, 1996).

13. LeMay interview (1971), 12–13 (quotes 1–3), 29 (quotes 4–7), 41; Coffey, Iron 

Eagle, 365–80. For extensive commentary by LeMay on the B–70 debate, see Curtis E. 

LeMay, interview by John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (Dennis J. O’Brien), June 

7, 1969, transcript, Air Force Historical Research Division, Washington, DC (hereafter 

LeMay interview [1969]). See also LeMay interview (1971), 9–10.

14. Maxwell D. Taylor, The Uncertain Trumpet (New York: Harper & Brothers, 

1959), 99 (quotes); McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, 10–11. For “flexible response” and 

its implementation as a national security policy, see Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 

198–273. For the initial Air Force response to Taylor’s recommendations, see Warren A. 

Trest, Air Force Roles and Missions: A History (Washington, DC: Air Force History and 

Museums Program, 1998), 180–83, http://media.defense.gov/2010/Sep/22/2001330059/-

1/-1/0/AFD-100922-020.pdf. As Trest noted, while Taylor had been Army chief of staff, he 

had also begun rebuilding organic air mobility capabilities for the Army, to the consternation 

of many Air Force leaders, including LeMay. 

15. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House

(Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 912. Schlesinger stated that “people sometimes 

wondered why Kennedy kept on Chiefs who occasionally seemed so much out of sympathy 

with his policy. The reason was that, in his view, their job was not policy but soldiering, and 

he admired them as soldiers.”

16. Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares (New York: Norton, 1972), 252; 

LeMay interview (1971), 24. When he assumed the chairmanship, Taylor was already aware 

that McNamara had been suppressing JCS advice. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, 21.
94

17. Coffey, Iron Eagle, 423 (quotes 1–4); LeMay interview (1971), 25 (quote 5); 

McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, 43.

18. Nicholas J. Schlosser, ed., The Greene Papers: General Wallace M. Greene Jr. 

and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, January 1964–March 1965 (Quantico, VA: 

History Division, U.S. Marine Corps, 2015), 7, https://www.usmcu.edu/sites/default/files/HD/

Publications/GreenePapers.pdf. Curiously, in his 1972 memoir, Taylor recounted that when 

he had been Army chief of staff, he had “always resented efforts by the Chairman to impose 

uniformity or to obtain it by compromise.” Taylor wrote that as he became chairman in 

October 1962, he told McNamara that “I respected the individual views of the Chiefs 

and felt that any dissent should be reported to the Secretary [of Defense] or even to the 

President without trying to circumvent the issue by noncommittal or ambiguous statements. 

McNamara said that he felt exactly the same way.” Taylor, Swords and Plowshares, 253.

19. Kohn and Harahan, Strategic Air Warfare, 112 (LeMay quote); Roswell L. 

Gilpatric, interview by WGBH for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, March 3, 1986, 

http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_811D901070AC4D8795327AC6431ABB1D. 

Gilpatric added that Kennedy “knew that he couldn’t fire LeMay,” pointing out that 

doing so “would have caused a great crease with the Congress, as well [as] with the 

military. He just had to rely on Taylor and the chiefs as a corporate body to temper the 

kind of military advice that LeMay is, by nature, prone to give.” Gilpatric stated in 

another interview that at some meetings, LeMay did not even wear his hearing aid, which 

Gilpatric believed significantly limited what LeMay was able to understand. Roswell 

L. Gilpatric, interview by Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library (Ted Gittinger), 

November 2, 1982, transcript, 9–10, http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/

oralhistory.hom/Gilpatric-R/GilpatricR.PDF (hereafter Gilpatric interview [1982]).

20. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, 43.

21. Roswell L. Gilpatric, interview by John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (Dennis 

J. O’Brien), August 12, 1970, transcript, 116, https://archive2.jfklibrary.org/JFKOH/

Gilpatric,%20Roswell%20L/JFKOH-RLG-04/JFKOH-RLG-04-TR.pdf (hereafter Gilpatric 

interview [August 1970]).

22. Jack Valenti, A Very Human President (New York: Norton, 1975), 138.

23. Kozak, LeMay, x, 311–13; Eric Schlosser, “Almost Everything in ‘Dr. Strangelove 

was True,” New Yorker, January 17, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/

almost-everything-in-dr-strangelove-was-true. Gen. David C. Jones, who served as Air Force 

chief of staff and subsequently chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1970s, had a comment in a 

1986 interview that directly addressed any actual Dr. Strangelove tendencies by LeMay: “I 

think the allegation that somehow General LeMay would have used military force or nuclear 

force without presidential permission is absolutely wrong. There was a mystique about 

LeMay, there was an image of what you expected from LeMay. Some people who questioned 

the buildup of strategic forces expected LeMay to be the type that would go off on his own 

and do something. And I have known him for a long time, and I was his aide for years in the 

’50s, and we’ve been close associates. I have never seen any indication at all, in any time, 

back in the ’50s when [he was with] the Strategic Air Command or subsequently when he 

was chief of staff of the Air Force, any inclination to do anything but to fully respect civilian 

authority. Now, he would tell civilian authority what he believed, in unmistakable terms, and 

tell them when he thought they were wrong, and give them a capability they may have even 

thought they didn’t need with regard to capability with strategic forces. But [he was] certainly 

a strong advocate for civilian control and to follow presidential orders.” Jones interview.

24. Kozak, LeMay, 374–75; LeMay, Iron Eagle, 445–47. LeMay explained why he 

got “into this political racket” in more detail in a 1971 interview: “Coming up to the 1968 
95

election, I firmly believed that if we didn’t get a conservative government in power in 1968 

that we probably would never have another chance.” He thought that “we were just that 

close to socialism or communism.” LeMay supported Richard Nixon but became impatient 

when the former vice president tacked toward the political center after the nominating 

conventions. LeMay rejected several offers from the Wallace campaign but finally became 

convinced that he could “move some people over to the right a little bit by getting out 

some truths on war and things I was qualified to talk about.” LeMay “expected to get cut 

up pretty badly” by the media, adding that “I did get cut up, but not as bad as I expected 

to be.” He encountered a “completely hostile press,” though. He also insisted that Wallace 

was “not the racist that the newspapers had made out.” LeMay interview (1971), 36–39.

25. John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs (Boston, MA: Houghton 

Mifflin, 1981), 479 (quote); LeMay interview (1971), 8–9, 24. LeMay stated (p. 8) that 

despite the obstacles in talking with Kennedy, “I’m sure he understood my feelings.” After 

making his comments that Kennedy had fits when he met with LeMay, Roswell Gilpatric 

added that “we just resigned ourselves to living with him, and the president avoided, 

whenever he could, having to deal with the individual Chiefs rather than with General 

Taylor.” Gilpatric interview (August 1970), 117. LeMay’s successor as chief of staff, Gen. 

John P. McConnell, said that he had “very frequent” interaction with Johnson and developed 

“a very harmonious, shall I say, official relationship” with the president. He also said that 

“I could see him at any time,” whether through channels or by request for a direct meeting. 

John P. McConnell, interview by Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library (Dorothy Pierce 

McSweeny), August 28, 1969, transcript, 6–7 (quotes), 9–12, http://web1.millercenter.org/

poh/transcripts/mcconnell_john_1969_0814.pdf (hereafter McConnell interview).

26. Schlosser, Greene Papers, 61. Arthur Schlesinger had noted that such a trend was 

evident even right after the Bay of Pigs in April 1961: “It soon began to look to the White 

House as if they [the Joint Chiefs] were taking care to build a record which would permit 

them to say that, whatever the President did, he acted against their advice.” Schlesinger, A 

Thousand Days, 338.

27. Schlosser, Greene Papers, 63.

28. LeMay interview (1971), 20–22 (quotes); Jack Raymonds, “President Names 

Vice Chief for Air; J. P. McConnell also seen as Likely Successor to LeMay,” New York 

Times, May 2, 1964, 8; Coffey, Iron Eagle, 432–35. Kennedy had also given LeMay a 

one-year extension in 1963, for much the same reason. Roswell Gilpatric stated that while 

many in the Kennedy administration had found LeMay “unreconstructable,” the president 

made “a policy decision that it would be rougher with him out than with him in. So he was 

given an extension of one year.” Gilpatric interview (August 1970), 112. When Johnson 

interviewed McConnell in the spring of 1964 before selecting him, the president told him 

that he was considering him as either vice chief or chief. McConnell interview, 5–6. LeMay 

had not wanted to make any recommendations of a potential successor for fear that he 

might “give them a kiss of death.” LeMay interview (1971), 20.

29. Schlosser, Greene Papers. This volume contains numerous mentions by Greene 

of LeMay and his positions. For an example of Greene’s support for LeMay’s call for a 

sustained bombing campaign in early September 1964, before the other service chiefs were 

on board, see also Edwin E. Moïse, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 246–47.

30. Kaplan, Landa, and Drea, McNamara Ascendancy, 509.

31. McNamara to LeMay, August 31, 1964, The Pentagon Papers: The Defense 

Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam (Gravel ed.), 5 vols. 

(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971–72), 3:555–56. The target list had been under devel-
96

opment for months, with the concept originating in March 1964, long before the Gulf of 

Tonkin activity in August. On May 30, the Joint Chiefs had submitted a list of ninety-one 

potential targets to McNamara. The number had grown to ninety-four by August, which 

included eighty-two fixed sites and twelve transportation lines, to be knocked out over 

sixteen days of bombardment. Cosmas, Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, 2:36–

38, 45–49, 125–28; Mark Clodfelter, “Solidifying the Foundation: Vietnam’s Impact on 

the Basic Doctrine of the U.S. Air Force,” in Air Power History: Turning Points from Kitty 

Hawk to Kosovo, ed. Sebastian Cox and Peter Gray (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002), 305; 

Clodfelter, Limits of Air Power, 51. In a war-gaming exercise at the Pentagon in 1964, 

LeMay’s team simulated strategic bombing of North Vietnam and was unable to achieve its 

objectives, leaving LeMay furious. Tilford, Crosswinds, 64–65.

32. Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dell, 1964), 526–27. LeMay repeated this statement 

in the March 1972 interview published here. See page 41.

33. W. Hays Parks, “Linebacker and the Law of War,” Air University Review 34 

(January–February 1983): 4–15, http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/

aureview/1983/jan-feb/parks.html. For Linebacker I, see also Wayne Thompson, To 

Hanoi and Back: The USAF and North Vietnam, 1966–1973 (Washington, DC: Air 

Force History and Museums Program, 2000), 219–54, http://media.defense.gov/2010/

Oct/01/2001329749/-1/-1/0/AFD-101001-049.pdf; Clodfelter, Limits of Air Power, 158–

76; Tilford, Crosswinds, 145–60. In a 1966 article under his byline, LeMay did mention 

“irrigation systems” among the list of potential targets that could be hit, which could be 

interpreted as a reference to the dikes. Curtis E. LeMay, “General LeMay Tells How to 

Win the War in Vietnam,” U.S. News & World Report, October 10, 1966, 38. As General 

McConnell explained in a 1969 interview, he never supported bombing the dikes during 

his time as Air Force chief of staff: “I never agreed to bombing the dikes. That’s a very 

unprofitable business, too difficult to do for the damage that they would have done. 

A lot of people thought that if you bombed the dikes, you could just flood the whole 

countryside. But bombing a dike, as people who have been in this business know, is, with 

conventional weapons, a pretty fruitless operation.” McConnell interview, 21.

34. Clodfelter, Limits of Air Power, 209–10. See note 111 below for the threat of 

Chinese intervention. For Clodfelter’s examination of the Linebacker II campaign, see Limits 

of Air Power, 177–202. For another critical look at Linebacker II written by a pilot who flew 

several of the missions, see Marshall L. Michel III, The 11 Days of Christmas: America’s Last 

Vietnam Battle (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2002). See also Tilford, Crosswinds, 

163–70, 190–91; Thompson, To Hanoi and Back, 255–80. Clodfelter made a crucial point 

in a later essay: “the type of conflict that the communist armies fought during the Rolling 

Thunder era was not the same as that waged during the Linebacker campaigns.” Clodfelter, 

“Solidifying the Foundation,” 306–7. For further elaboration, see notes 126 and 127 below. 

In response to the question of whether an earlier, massive use of strategic air power could 

have ended the conflict, Michel pointed out that “throughout the war, while most senior 

military officers believed that a heavy bombing campaign would dramatically shorten the 

war and cut American causalities, none thought it was critical to winning. The U.S. military 

believed that the U.S. was already winning the war, albeit slowly. The thought that the United 

States might eventually lose the war was ludicrous” (italics in original). He also observed 

how the North Vietnamese came to celebrate Linebacker II as a great victory, which they 

described as “Dien Bien Phu in the skies.” Michel, 11 Days of Christmas, 232–34.

35. Brian D. Laslie, The Air Force Way of War: U.S. Tactics and Training after 

Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 1.
97

36. For more detail on the debates of the Joint Chiefs during this period, see Cosmas, 

Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, vol. 2; McMaster, Dereliction of Duty; Schlosser, 

Greene Papers; Buzzanco, Masters of War. Literature on the broader intervention/escalation 

debates is voluminous. Key works include Fredrick Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost 

Chance for Peace and Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California 

Press, 1999); David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the 

Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000); Brian VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire: 

Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 

1991); Herring, LBJ and Vietnam; Barrett, Uncertain Warriors; Larry Berman, Planning a 

Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: Norton, 1982); George 

McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 

1986); Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New 

York: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Dallek, “Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam: The 

Making of a Tragedy,” Diplomatic History 20 (Spring 1996): 147–62, in which the Johnson 

and Kennedy biographer presented what became known as his inevitability thesis, arguing 

that based on what Johnson and his advisors knew at the time, “it is difficult to imagine 

them doing anything else” (p. 149). Logevall countered in Choosing War by detailing the 

options other than war that Johnson did have. When asked about the debate, George Herring 

stated that while Logevall made a “solid case that there were options there,” whether Johnson 

“ever saw that there were options is another issue entirely. I just don’t think that he ever saw 

himself as having that sort of availability of options.” Kenneth H. Williams, ed., “‘The Issues 

Raised by Vietnam Go to the Very Heart of Who We Think We Are’: An Interview with the 

University of Kentucky’s George C. Herring,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

102 (Summer 2004): 330–31.

37. Cosmas, Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, 2:136–41, 146.

38. Ibid., 2:126–28. Cosmas wrote (p. 128) that “the Johnson-LeMay exchange was 

significant for two reasons. First, it was an example of the inter-Service disagreements 

that often weakened the Joint Chiefs of Staff in their dealings with Secretary McNamara. 

Second, it brought into focus two quite different strategic approaches to Vietnam.” These 

were the Army’s ground-based belief that the key to victory was securing South Vietnam, 

juxtaposed against the Air Force’s insistence that the enemy’s resources could be destroyed 

and will broken by intensive bombing of North Vietnam. “These conflicting approaches 

would persist throughout the planning and execution of United States military intervention 

in Southeast Asia. Never choosing definitively between them, a succession of presidential 

administrations and Joint Chiefs of Staffs would apply both in varying combinations, never 

with complete success.”

39. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, 59 (quote); Robert Buzzanco, “The American 

Military’s Rationale against the Vietnam War,” Political Science Quarterly 101 (Winter 1986): 

559–76. Shoup had a much better relationship with McNamara than did LeMay, and a much 

more positive view of him as well. See David M. Shoup, interview by John F. Kennedy 

Presidential Library (Joseph E. O’Connor), April 7, 1967, transcript, 2–7, https://archive1.

jfklibrary.org/JFKOH/Shoup,%20David%20M/JFKOH-DMS-01/JFKOH-DMS-01-TR.

pdf. It is also possible that LeMay misunderstood Shoup’s positions on some points. 

Gilpatric stated that “for a while, nobody in OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] 

could figure out just where Shoup stood. He could be very cryptic and sort of Delphic in his 

utterances.” Gilpatric interview (August 1970), 112.

40. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam, 178–79.

41. Curtis E. LeMay with Dale O. Smith, America is in Danger (New York: Funk & 

Wagnalls, 1968), 17. 
98

42. Robert S. McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons 

of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995), 114–15, 121 (quote). Taylor made even less 

mention of LeMay in his 1972 book, Swords and Plowshares, and only in reference to the 

Cuban Missile Crisis.

43. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam, 11. 

44. Quoted in Coffey, Iron Eagle, 437.

45. Kozak, LeMay, 341 (quote); Coffey, Iron Eagle, 442. According to Coffey, who 

had direct interaction with LeMay, the general “never said it,” but the Stone Age remark 

“did more damage to LeMay’s public image than anything he ever did say. And it made him 

shy about saying anything publicly.”

46. For LeMay’s discussion of how Kantor constructed the book from a series of interviews, see Curtis E. LeMay, interview by Air Force History (Edgar F. Puryear Jr.), November 

17, 1976, transcript, ISIS no. 01053318, AFHRA (hereafter LeMay interview [1976]).

47. The interview does not appear among the oral histories listed on the Kennedy 

Library website or at AFHRA, so the typescript cited here may be the only extant copy. 

LeMay did allow an interview conducted for the Johnson Library to be deposited there, but 

he restricted its use until after his death. He wrote in a cover note that “I have never thought 

much of oral interviews for historical programs because in my case at least I have never 

been sure that my statement would be interpreted by the interviewer the way I intended it.” 

LeMay interview (1971), cover letter.

48. Robert F. Futrell, The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia: The Advisory 

Years to 1965 (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1981), http://media.defense.

gov/2010/May/25/2001330284/-1/-1/0/AFD-100525-052.pdf; Jacob Van Staaveren, Gradual 

Failure: The Air War over North Vietnam, 1965–1966 (Washington, DC: Air Force History 

and Museums Programs, 2002), http://media.defense.gov/2010/May/26/2001330292/-1/-

1/0/AFD-100526-034.pdf.

49. For McNamara’s initial enthusiasm in 1965, see Edward J. Drea, McNamara, 

Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 1965–1969 (Washington, DC: Historical Office 

of the Secretary of Defense, 2011), 51–67, http://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/

Documents/secretaryofdefense/OSDSeries_Vol6.pdf?ver=2014-05-28-134006-577. 

Curiously, in his own Vietnam memoir, McNamara discussed the positions of President 

Johnson and other advisors on the Rolling Thunder decision, but not his own. McNamara, 

In Retrospect, 167–77. After Taylor became U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam in July 

1964, he came to believe that bombing was the best way to strike against the Vietnamese communists, particularly bombing North Vietnam. Taylor stated in a 1981 

interview that before the February 1965 attack at Pleiku, “It had been like pulling teeth 

to get the president [Johnson] to agree to the use of air power, but strangely enough, 

he was more inclined to use forces on the ground. The former seemed to me a much 

less difficult decision to make, although both were hard.” Taylor then proceeded to lay 

out the reasoning for a sustained bombing campaign, using arguments similar to those 

LeMay made in the interviews that follow. “We could have flattened everything in and 

around Hanoi,” Taylor said. “That doesn’t mean it would stop the war, but it would 

certainly have made it extremely difficult to continue it effectively.” He added that 

“no one ever asked me the question, but of course our strategy was always militarily 

unsound. We should never have been fighting the war in the south; we should have 

been fighting it in the north to begin with.” Maxwell D. Taylor, interview by Lyndon 

B. Johnson Presidential Library (Ted Gittinger), September 14, 1981, transcript, 4–9, 

http://web1.millercenter.org/poh/transcripts/taylor_maxwell_1981_0914.pdf (hereafter 

Taylor interview [September 1981]).
99

50. Robert D. Schluzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 171–72. Former North Vietnamese officials 

confirmed in the 1990s that the local Viet Cong commander at Pleiku launched the attack 

on his own, not under orders from Hanoi. In fact, the incident and its aftermath distressed 

the North Vietnamese senior leadership, which had anticipated a longer period to fight the 

South Vietnamese military without more direct U.S. involvement. Chester L. Cooper, In 

the Shadows of History: Fifty Years Behind the Scenes of Cold War Diplomacy (Amherst, 

NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), 288; Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 

1954–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 206.

51. Schlosser, Greene Papers, 349. For the Joints Chiefs and consideration of options 

after the Pleiku attack, see Cosmas, Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, 2:213–35; 

for the Pentagon civilians, see Drea, McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 

51–63. Gen. John McConnell, LeMay’s successor as Air Force chief of staff, put forward 

the ninety-four-target list, to be destroyed in a twenty-eight-day bombing campaign. The 

Joint Chiefs eventually settled on a plan that would hit many of the proposed targets, but 

over a three-month period. Earl Tilford observed that as Rolling Thunder began in March 

1965, “No one—not the civilians in the Defense Department or the State Department, not 

the president, and certainly not the generals—believed North Vietnam could endure the 

bombing for more than six months.” Tilford, Crosswinds, 62–71 (quote, 69).

Part I: January 1965–March 1972

January 1965

52. Curtis E. LeMay, interview by Air Force History, January 12, 26, 27, 1965, transcript, AFHRA, ISIS no. 00904841. The interviewer was not identified. Page numbers in the 

transcript are given at the end of each excerpt. The interview was originally marked secet 

and declassified in 1973.

53. Ibid., 3–4.

54. Ibid., 4. LeMay’s reference to the “boss” was apparently to Secretary McNamara.

55. Ibid., 6–7.

56. Ibid., 15–16. For the debate over whether the Chinese would have intervened, 

see note 111 below.

July 1965

57. LeMay, Mission with LeMay, 564–65. Although this book contained LeMay’s 

most-remembered comment on Vietnam, the brief passage reprinted here is the sum of his 

discussion of Vietnam in the book. It should be remembered that at this time, LeMay was 

very limited in what he could say in an unclassified publication.

58. LeMay’s recounting of the time line of support here is essentially correct. See the 

introduction for discussion of how his story on the Joint Chiefs’ progression on Vietnam 

began to vary, as well as secondary sources cited there for further information.

59. Maxwell Taylor, as ambassador to South Vietnam, also came to argue that bombing 

the north would “raise the morale in South Vietnam.” Taylor interview (September 1981), 7.

60. For North Vietnam’s improvement of its air defenses, see Clodfelter, Limits of 

Air Power, 131–33.
100

61. For the debate over whether to strike the North Vietnamese oil storage facilities, 

see ibid., 92–102. The first mission against oil tanks in Hanoi and Haiphong did not take 

place until June 24, 1966.

62. Ellipsis in original. LeMay, Mission With LeMay, 565.

63. The postwar Strategic Bombing Survey found that LeMay’s mining of Japanese 

sea lanes had proven quite successful. Sherry, Rise of American Air Power, 309. The U.S. 

Army Air Force laid aerial mines in Haiphong harbor as well, in October 1943. The U.S. 

Navy led an effort that removed five of the devices in October 1945—when Ho Chi Minh’s 

government was already establishing itself in Hanoi—but these apparently were not all of 

the mines. Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II. 7 

vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1948–58), 4:531, http://media.defense.

gov/2010/Nov/05/2001329889/-1/-1/0/AFD-101105-010.pdf; Edwin B. Hooper, Dean C. 

Allard, and Oscar P. Fitzgerald, The United States Navy and the Vietnam Conflict. Vol. 1: 

The Setting of the Stage to 1959 (Washington, DC: Naval History Division, 1976), 108–9; 

David G. Marr, Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945–1946) (Berkeley: University of 

California Press, 2013), 286–87. For the U.S. decision in 1972 to mine Haiphong harbor, 

see note 122 below.

October 1966

64. LeMay, “General LeMay Tells How to Win the War in Vietnam,” 36–38, 43.

65. Ibid., 36.

66. Ibid., 37–38.

67. Ibid., 43.

1967/1968

68. LeMay, America is in Danger, 257–59. LeMay devoted a full chapter (pp. 

222–63) to his thoughts on the development of the Vietnam War and what he saw as 

the maldeployment of U.S. resources in the counterinsurgency effort. As noted in the 

introduction, even though this book was published in 1968, subject matter seems to indicate 

that it was written in 1967.

June 1969

69. LeMay interview (1969). As noted in the introduction, this interview was conducted as part of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library oral history program, but 

General LeMay did not allow the tape to be deposited at that institution. The interview 

was conducted as unclassified. Page numbers in the transcript are given at the end of 

each excerpt.

70. Ibid., 4–5.

71. Ibid., 11–14.

72. Ibid., 25.

73. Ibid., 27–28. LeMay stated in a later interview that he did not even vote until the 

period when he was chief of staff as he considered “national defense to be a nonpolitical 

question. . . . But when I saw what was happening starting with the Kennedy administration, 

then I became convinced that the military ought to vote, like any other citizen, and then I 

did.” LeMay interview (1976).

74. LeMay interview (1969), 29.
101

75. Ibid., 35–36. For more elaboration by LeMay on what he thought was McNamara’s 

interest in reducing the missile stockpile to 1,000, see LeMay interview (1971), 31–34.

76. For the long and complicated peace negotiation process, see Pierre Asselin, A 

Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

77. Eisenhower suggested the same approach in Vietnam. McNamara recorded that at a 

meeting with Johnson and his senior leadership on February 17, 1965, Eisenhower stated that “if 

the Chinese or Soviets threatened to intervene, he said, ‘We should pass the word back to them 

to take care lest dire results [i.e., nuclear strikes] occur to them.’” McNamara, In Retrospect, 173.

78. Accountings of South Vietnamese casualties vary widely. According to one, for 

the years 1960 through 1974, the South Vietnamese military suffered 254,256 killed in 

action and 783,602 wounded. The numbers of killed and wounded increased exponentially 

in the years after LeMay made this statement. Jeffrey J. Clarke, United States Army in 

Vietnam: Advice and Support: The Final Years, 1965–1973 (Washington, DC: Center 

of Military History, 1988), 275, http://www.history.army.mil/banner_images/focus/dr_

clarke_ret_comm/the_final_years.pdf.

79. President Johnson halted Rolling Thunder at the end of October 1968 in an effort 

to stimulate peace talks with the North Vietnamese. There was political motivation behind 

the move, as Johnson was seeking to bolster Hubert H. Humphrey’s presidential campaign. 

Any hope for progress evaporated, however, when South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van 

Thieu refused to have his country participate in the peace negotiations. Information that 

came to light nearly fifty years later confirmed the long-rumored story that intermediaries 

of then-candidate Richard Nixon convinced Thieu to stall. Thompson, To Hanoi and Back, 

149–50; John A. Farrell, “Tricky Dick’s Vietnam Treachery,” New York Times, January 

1, 2017, SR9, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/opinion/sunday/nixons-vietnamtreachery.html; Peter Baker, “Nixon Looked for ‘Monkey Wrench’ in Vietnam Talks to Help 

Win Race,” New York Times, January 3, 2017, A11, http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/

us/politics/nixon-tried-to-spoil-johnsons-vietnam-peace-talks-in-68-notes-show.html. See 

also Robert S. McNamara, interview by Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library (Robert 

Dallek), March 26, 1993, transcript, 8–9, http://www.lbjlibrary.net/assets/documents/

archives/oral_histories/mcnamara_r/McNamara-SP1.PDF.

80. For Shoup’s statements against the war, see Buzzanco, “American Military’s 

Rationale against the Vietnam War.”

81. For the largely clandestine U.S. Air Force efforts in Laos during the early 1960s, 

see Victor B. Anthony and Richard R. Sexton, The War in Northern Laos, 1954–1973

(Washington, DC: Center for Air Force History, 1993), http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/

GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA512223. The PDF is of the declassified version cited in this work.

82. LeMay interview (1969), 47–62. For the Kennedy administration debates on 

Laos, see William J. Rust, So Much to Lose: John F. Kennedy and American Policy in Laos

(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

March 1972

83. Curtis E. LeMay, interview by Air Force History (Thomas G. Belden), March 29, 

1972, transcript, AFHRA, IRIS no. 00904611. The interview was originally marked secret 

and later declassified.

84. For the Army’s Howze Board in 1962, see John J. Tolson, Airmobility, 1961–

1971 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1973), 10–24, http://www.history.army.
102

mil/html/books/090/90-4/CMH_Pub_90-4-B.pdf; for the Air Force’s response, see Trest, 

Air Force Roles and Missions, 193–96.

85. The clandestine operation in Laos that LeMay referenced is unclear. The Army’s 

loss of rotary-wing aircraft in Vietnam was staggering. According to one accounting compiled by the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots’ Association, the Army lost 5,086 of the approximately 12,000 helicopters in service in Vietnam. Gary Roush, “Helicopter Losses during 

the Vietnam War,” http://www.vhpa.org/heliloss.pdf.

86. A coup led by Gen. Duong Van Minh overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem 

on November 1–2, 1963. The United States did not “engineer” the change in government, 

but an August 24 cable from State Department official Roger Hilsman contributed to the 

spiraling circumstances. As the planning progressed, U.S. officials had some communication 

with the plotters via a CIA operative and did not attempt to stop them. CIA director John A. 

McCone opposed an overthrow, as did Secretary of State D. Dean Rusk, and Maxwell Taylor 

and Robert F. Kennedy both expressed reservations. In Vietnam, the commander of MACV, 

Gen. Paul D. Harkins, did not support the plotting, but the new ambassador, Henry Cabot 

Lodge Jr., did. President Kennedy was more favorably disposed to the idea of a change of 

government than many of his advisors, and he instructed the State Department and Lodge not 

to interfere with the coup planning. There had been so much plotting over prior months with 

nothing happening, however, that the actual coup caught the Americans by surprise. Kennedy 

was horrified when Diem was assassinated during the overthrow. John Prados, Vietnam: The 

History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 

77–81; Logevall, Choosing War, 62–64; Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, 

the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 

Press, 2013), 315–24; McNamara, In Retrospect, 51–85; Taylor interview (September 

1981), 11; Maxwell D. Taylor, interview by Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library (Ted 

Gittinger), June 1, 1981, transcript, 22, http://web1.millercenter.org/poh/transcripts/taylor_

maxwell_1981_0601.pdf (hereafter Taylor interview [June 1981]).

87. For the ninety-four targets, see note 31 above; for the debate over whether to strike 

oil storage and refineries, see note 61. For the dispersing of the oil, including into villages 

and along dikes the North Vietnamese believed would not be bombed, see Clodfelter, 

Limits of Air Power, 132.

88. See Robert C. Mikesh, Flying Dragons: The South Vietnamese Air Force (Atglen, 

PA: Schiffer Military History, 2005).

89. For the “Buddhist crisis” in South Vietnam in 1963 and Diem’s suppression of the 

Buddhist opposition to his government, see Miller, Misalliance, 260–78.

90. LeMay met Diem when he visited Vietnam in April 1962. Coffey, Iron Eagle, 383.

91. U.S. frustration with Diem’s unwillingness to follow advice or reform his government had been a long-standing issue even before the fighting in South Vietnam 

intensified in the early 1960s. See Michael R. Adamson, “Ambassadorial Roles and 

Foreign Policy: Elbridge Durbrow, Frederick Nolting, and the U.S. Commitment to 

Diem’s Vietnam, 1957–61,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 32 (June 2002): 229–55. Miller, 

Misalliance, offers much explanation for the courses that Diem often charted that ran 

counter to U.S. advice.

Part II: June 1972

92. Curtis E. LeMay, interview by Air Force History (Robert F. Futrell, Jacob Van 

Staaveren, and Thomas G. Belden), June 8, 1972, transcript, AFHRA, IRIS no. 00904608. 

The interview was originally marked secret and declassified in 1980.
103

93. During World War II, the United States dropped approximately 2,700,000 tons 

of bombs in the European Theater and 650,000 tons in the Pacific Theater. The figures for 

the war in Southeast Asia are approximately 4 million tons used against Viet Cong/North 

Vietnamese targets in South Vietnam, 1 million tons dropped on North Vietnam, 3 million 

tons on interdiction efforts in Laos, and 500,000 tons on Cambodia. Kohn and Harahan, 

Strategic Air Warfare, 129 n. 152; Earl H. Tilford Jr., “Bombing Our Way Back Home: The 

Commando Hunt and Menu Campaigns of 1969–1973,” in Looking Back on the Vietnam 

War: A 1990s Perspective on the Decisions, Combat and Legacies, ed. William P. Head and 

Lawrence E. Grinter (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), 123.

94. Senior state department official Roger Hilsman wrote that “by 1961 it was a shibboleth among the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States ought never again to fight a 

limited war on the ground in Asia or perhaps ought never again to fight any kind of war on 

the ground in Asia [after the experience in Korea]. So often was the view expressed, in fact, 

that people in Washington began to speak of the “Never Again” Club. . . . Not all of the Joint 

Chiefs fully subscribed to the “Never Again” view, but it seemed to the White House that they 

were at least determined to build a record that would protect their position and put the blame 

entirely on the President no matter what happened. The general thrust of their memoranda 

seemed to imply that they were demanding an advance commitment from the President that, 

if they agreed to the use of American force and there were any fighting at all, then there 

would be no holds barred whatsoever—including the use of nuclear weapons.” Hilsman, To 

Move a Nation, 129. It should be noted that the specific period Hilsman was discussing in 

this section was the March 1961 debate over whether to intervene in Laos, which was before 

LeMay became chief of staff of the Air Force. He certainly would have been aware of such 

talk, however, and the broadness of Hilsman’s statement indicated that the military thinking 

carried over to the Vietnam debates. See also LeMay’s comments on page 21 above.

95. Smith titled the memorandum “Atomic Weapons in Limited Wars in Southeast 

Asia,” submitted by the Fifth Air Force on July 22, 1958. Smith later published an 

unclassified article on the subject, “Nuclear Weapons and Limited War,” Air University 

Quarterly Review 12 (Spring 1960): 3–27. For the substance of Smith’s argument, see 

Futrell, Advisory Years, 46.

96. The plan that probably made it to the highest level of consideration was one 

Gen. Thomas White submitted on September 8, 1959, for consideration by the Joint 

Chiefs titled “Preparation for Decisive Termination of Hostilities in Laos.” LeMay 

likely was involved in the formulation of the concept since it called for a SAC B–47 

squadron to be moved to Clark Air Base in the Philippines in preparation for potential 

strikes along the then-developing Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and against targets in North 

Vietnam. The memorandum suggested a preattack warning for the North Vietnamese 

and the use of either conventional or nuclear weapons. Anthony and Sexton, War 

Against Northern Laos, 25.

97. Issues of the level and the timing of direct North Vietnamese government and 

troop involvement in the conflict in South Vietnam remain complicated. For recent works 

that draw heavily on documents in Vietnamese archives, see Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the 

Vietnam War; Lein-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War 

for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Communist 

military engagement with South Vietnamese forces increased in September–October 1961, 

leading Diem to claim from that time forward that Hanoi was directly behind the effort. 

Futrell, Advisory Years, 72–74.

98. For the response of the Joint Chiefs to the attack at Bien Hoa, see Cosmas, Joint 

Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, 2:149–56. Interestingly, support for an air strike in 
104

retaliation for Bien Hoa came from Maxwell Taylor, who by that time was ambassador to 

South Vietnam. Taylor interview (September 1981), 2–3.

99. Taylor served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 1, 1962, until 

July 1, 1964. From July 1964 to July 1965, he was U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam.

100. Twining was chairman of the Joint Chiefs from August 15, 1957, until September 

30, 1960. Taylor was chief of staff of the Army from June 30, 1955, until June 30, 1959.

101. H. R. McMaster noted that when Taylor became chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he 

“discovered that McNamara often suppressed JCS advice in favor of the views of his civilian 

analysts. On several defense issues McNamara either failed to consult the JCS or did not 

forward their views to the White House. Taylor’s staff reported that, in addition to McNamara’s 

strict control over the JCS, greater centralization in the Kennedy White House prevented 

military advice from reaching the president. The president had increased his reliance on ad hoc 

gatherings of ‘principals’ that usually included [McGeorge] Bundy and McNamara. Informal 

committees with responsibility for particular issues conducted closed deliberations and often 

sent papers directly to the president.” McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, 21.

102. For the operation, see Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). For another LeMay retelling of this story, in quite a similar manner, 

see LeMay interview (1971), 4–7.

103. Kennedy made the decision to scrub the air cover himself, with little or no 

consultation with the military or the CIA. He also cancelled a CIA mission with sanitized 

U.S. Air Force aircraft and personnel over Laos that was scheduled for the same time. For 

an overview that includes the most recently declassified material, see Timothy N. Castle, 

“From the Bay of Pigs to Laos: Operation Millpond, the Beginning of a Distant Covert 

War,” Studies in Intelligence 59 (June 2015): 1–17, https://www.cia.gov/library/centerfor-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol-59-no-2/pdfs/CastleMILLPOND-June-2015.pdf.

104. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) was activated on February 

8, 1962. Its first commander was Gen. Paul D. Harkins. Graham A. Cosmas, MACV: The 

Joint Command in the Years of Escalation, 1962–1967 (Washington, DC: Center of Military 

History, 2006), 3, 27, http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/091/91-6/CMH_Pub_91-6.pdf.

105. LeMay visited Vietnam on April 16–21, 1962, and met with Harkins while 

there. Despite LeMay’s reputation for being direct and blunt, he was much more passiveaggressive with the MACV commander. Harkins recalled that all LeMay requested of him 

directly was money for a barracks at Pleiku. In his diary, however, LeMay railed about the 

lack of understanding of how air support should be used. He wrote that MACV should have 

an Air Force deputy commander of lieutenant general rank. Back in Washington, LeMay 

wrote blistering memos to McNamara and the Joint Chiefs about Harkins, but they brought 

about no changes. Coffey, Iron Eagle, 383–84.

106. Maxwell Taylor had insisted on Harkins and apparently conveyed to McNamara 

and Kennedy that the Joint Chiefs had agreed on him. According to Roswell Gilpatric, 

McNamara was skeptical about Harkins. Gilpatric interview (1982), 8. For Taylor’s background with Harkins, see Taylor interview (June 1981), 12.

107. For Air Force operations during the latter part of the war, see Bernard C. Nalty, 

Air War over South Vietnam, 1968–1975 (Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums 

Program, 2000), http://media.defense.gov/2010/Sep/24/2001330077/-1/-1/0/AFD-100924-

004.pdf; Thompson, To Hanoi and Back.

108. See Bernard C. Nalty, Air Power and the Fight for Khe Sanh (Washington, DC: 

Office of Air Force History, 1986), http://media.defense.gov/2010/May/26/2001330289/-

1/-1/0/AFD-100526-029.pdf.
105

109. According to historian George Herring, McNamara used disagreement among 

the Joint Chiefs to circumvent them: “Using the age-old technique of divide and conquer, 

he took advantage of the differences among the Joint Chiefs of Staff to dominate them. He 

contained them politically by restricting their ability to testify before Congress and speak 

with the press. When they were able to secure congressional funding for items he opposed, 

he refused to spend the money. Eventually, he got rid of the recalcitrants,” including LeMay. 

Herring, LBJ and Vietnam, 29.

110. For Flaming Dart, see Van Staaveren, Gradual Failure, 9–22. In his memoir, 

Johnson wrote that “our intelligence analysts believed Red China would not enter the war 

unless there was an invasion in the northern part of North Vietnam or unless the Hanoi regime 

was in danger of being toppled.” Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives 

of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 125.

111. See also LeMay interview (1971), 28–29. The question of what the Chinese in 

particular, and the Soviets to a lesser extent, might have done if the United States had 

moved more aggressively against North Vietnam earlier in its direct involvement in the war 

has remained a point of contention. On one side are some military strategists and scholars 

of the so-called revisionist school; on the other are diplomatic historians who have spent 

time examining Chinese and Vietnamese records. Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., U.S. Army, 

expressed the thinking of the former group when he wrote in 1982 that the United States 

learned the wrong lessons from Korea that “allowed us to be bluffed by China throughout 

most of the [Vietnam] war.” Harry G. Summers Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the 

Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1982), 25, 59–61, 69, 88, 99, 178 (quote, 59). For a 

more document-based development of this concept, see Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: 

The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 321–25. 

In rebuttal, Qiang Zhai quoted several Summers statements and concluded, based on his 

work in Chinese archives, that “if the actions recommended by Summers had been taken 

by Washington in Vietnam, there would have been a real danger of a Sino-American war 

with dire consequences for the world. In retrospect, it appears that Johnson had drawn the 

correct lesson from the Korean War and had been prudent in his approach to the Vietnam 

conflict.” Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University 

of North Carolina Press, 2000), 155–56. See also George C. Herring, “Fighting Without 

Allies: The International Dimensions of America’s Failure in Vietnam,” in Why the North 

Won the Vietnam War, ed. Mark J. Gilbert (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 84. Maxwell Taylor 

stated after the war that he had “supported the gradualism at the start,” but after “only a 

month or two of a slow advance,” he came to believe that the Chinese and Soviets were not 

that concerned and began pressing for “increasing the magnitude of the attacks.” Taylor 

interview (September 1981), 8. McNamara said that the gradual approach was “solely a 

result of a desire to minimize the risk of confrontation.” He believed that “in one very 

important respect, our policy in respect to Vietnam succeeded. We avoided a military 

confrontation with either the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China. This was a 

major objective of the president [Johnson] from the beginning. It was certainly a major 

objective of mine.” McNamara interview (1975), 27–28.

112. For the committee and the working group, see Cosmas, Joint Chiefs of Staff and 

the War in Vietnam, 2:15, 156; McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, 180–84.

113. McGeorge Bundy, McNamara, and Rusk had already briefed Johnson on the 

November 1964 working group’s analysis before General Wheeler, chairman of the Joint 

Chiefs, received a coordinating draft from the working group. McMaster, Dereliction of 

Duty, 181–82.

114. For the origins of Farm Gate, see Futrell, Advisory Years, 79–84.
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115. The United States gave the Royal Lao Air Force ten T–6 aircraft in January 

1961, funneled to the Laotians by way of the Royal Thai Air Force, which provided cursory 

training for the Lao pilots. The Laotians did begin flying combat missions in these planes, 

with negligible results. Anthony and Sexton, War in Northern Laos, 35–39. LeMay’s reference to activities in Laos in the previous paragraph is unclear but likely occurred in 

1959–60, when LeMay was vice chief of staff of the Air Force.

116. The aircraft with which the 4400th deployed were T–28s, C–47s, and B–26s. The 

first two types of planes were extensively modified. The T–28s were outfitted with armor 

plating and carried around 1,500 pounds of bombs and rockets as well as two .50-caliber 

machine guns with 350 rounds per gun. The C–47s were augmented with tanks to carry twice 

the fuel load of the stock aircraft. They were also fitted with stronger landing gear to facilitate 

use on dirt air strips as well as jet-assisted takeoff (JATO) racks for operations from short 

runways. The modified C–47s were redesignated as SC–47s. Futrell, Advisory Years, 79.

117. Col. Benjamin H. King, the first commander of the 4400h CCTS, had an hourlong predeployment briefing with General LeMay in October 1961. King came away from 

the discussion convinced that his unit was being sent for offense operations—which had 

been the primary focus of its training—and that LeMay “wanted us to go in there and 

counteract some of the inroads into the Air Force’s mission that were being made by the 

Army, to counteract some of the favorable publicity that the Green Berets were getting, 

that the Special Forces were getting.” According to King, LeMay also told him that he and 

the unit were to report directly to LeMay, verbal orders that created a significant chain-ofcommand issue when the 4400th arrived in Vietnam and came under MACV’s predecessor 

organization, Military Assistance Advisory Group, Vietnam (MAAG), and the commander 

of the 2d Air Division, Brig. Gen. Rollen Anthis. Benjamin H. King, interview by Corona 

Harvest (Maj. Samuel J. Riddlebarger and Lt. Col. Valentino Castellina), September 4, 1969, 

transcript, AFHRA, IRIS no. 00904092, 29–39 (quote, 38); Futrell, Advisory Years, 82–84.

118. This directive from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs on December 26, 1961, 

effectively ended the prospect of an independent U.S. Air Force air combat role in Vietnam 

during this period. Futrell, Advisory Years, 83–84.

119. For the origins of Operations Plan [OPLAN] 34A, which outlined limited covert 

operations in Vietnam, see Cosmas, Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, 2:13–14, 

187–88; McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, 59–60, 86, 95, 119–24, 130.

120. For the JCS debate in the fall of 1961 and the Taylor-Rostow mission to survey the 

situation in Vietnam, see Schulimson, Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, 1:109–40.

121. For restrictions during the Operation Linebacker campaign (Linebacker I) that 

was underway at the time LeMay spoke, and comparison of allowable targets during the 

Rolling Thunder years, see Parks, “Linebacker and the Art of War”; Thompson, To Hanoi 

and Back, 250–53.

122. The Nixon administration’s decision to mine Haiphong harbor was not as 

straightforward as LeMay made it sound. There were a number of issues of international 

law, diplomacy, and politics involved in the consideration, as Nixon was running for 

reelection that year and also trying to arrange a nuclear summit with the Soviet Union. 

On May 9, 1972, a carrier-launched Marine medium attack squadron laid thirty-six mines 

across the narrow single channel that led into Haiphong as President Nixon announced the 

action during a televised address. Prados, Vietnam, 473–75.

123. A senior Air Force officer who raised this concern was one who had an intimate 

knowledge of Vietnam, Brig. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale. He stated in a 1971 interview that “I 

was initially quite opposed to the bombing since it broke almost every rule that I know of for 

success in a political war. . . . I expressed myself rather plainly on this at that time to some of 
107

our top U.S. officials in the administration by pointing out the advantages—politically—that 

it gave an enemy who had been having trouble with the people up to that point. As with the 

Luftwaffe attacks in Britain [in 1940], it permitted Ho Chi Minh and some other smart political 

leaders in Hanoi to do a Winston Churchill and prove that an enemy was attacking them and 

therefore the people must hold together and unify and defy this enemy. So in effect, we were 

doing something that would look good from our rules of warfare, but in terms of the actual 

war that was being conducted in Vietnam, we were letting the aggressors and our enemies 

take full political and psychological advantage of something. We gave them a very priceless 

way of maintaining and strengthening their leadership at the very time when we wanted it 

weakened.” Edward G. Lansdale, interview by U.S. Air Force Academy Oral History Program 

(Maj. Kenneth J. Alnwick), April 25, 1971, transcript, AFHRA, IRIS no. 01000329, 80–81. 

See also Clodfelter, Limits of Air Power, 136–39. For the North Vietnamese view of U.S. air 

power, see Douglas Pike, “North Vietnamese Air Defenses during the Vietnam War,” in Head 

and Grinter, Looking Back on the Vietnam War, 161–72.

124. Although the subject of “collateral damage” is often mentioned in relation to U.S. 

bombing in Vietnam, very little has been written on the topic. Two theses on collateral damage 

that include discussion of Vietnam are Patrick M. Shaw, “Collateral Damage and the United 

States Air Force” (master’s thesis, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University, 

1997), http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA391809; Calvin M. Campbell Jr., “The Strategic 

and Political Impacts of Collateral Damage from Strike Warfare” (master’s thesis, Naval 

Postgraduate School, 2015), http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA620602. 

For the broader ethical implications, see Marilyn B. Young, “Bombing Civilians from 

the Twentieth to the Twenty-first Centuries,” in Tanaka and Young, Bombing Civilians, 

154–74. For the targeting restrictions during various phases of the conflict, see Parks, 

“Linebacker and the Law of War”; W. Hays Parks, “Rolling Thunder and the Law of War,” 

Air University Review 33 (January-February 1982), 2–21, http://www.airpower.maxwell.

af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1982/jan-feb/parks.html. It is also important to note that the 

intelligence staff with the Seventh Air Force was perpetually undermanned, leading to issues 

with both targeting and poststrike assessment. Clodfelter, Limits of Air Power, 130–31.

125. Operation Barrel Roll consisted of a series of very restricted strikes against 

communist supply and communications lines in Laos. The missions began in December 

1964, while LeMay was still chief of staff. Anthony and Sexton, War in Northern Laos, 

144–63; Futrell, Advisory Years, 256.

126. Mark Clodfelter used a similar argument to support why he believed a massive 

strategic bombing campaign would not have worked early in the war: “The main enemy 

in the South from 1964 to the 1968 Tet Offensive was not the North Vietnamese but the 

Viet Cong, which totaled roughly 245,000 men in a 300,000-man enemy force five months 

before Tet (the remaining 55,000 troops were from the North Vietnamese Army). The 

entire force waged an infrequent guerrilla war and fought an average of one day in 30. 

Thus, its supply needs from sources outside of South Vietnam were minimal—only 34 

tons a day, which equated to seven two-and-a-half-ton truckloads of supplies.” With so 

few supplies, there were few supply sources to strike in North Vietnam, as well as only a 

trickle of resources to attempt to interdict. Clodfelter, “Solidifying the Foundation,” 306. 

Political scientist Robert A. Pape laid out an argument along similar lines that went even 

further, writing that “I believe that North Vietnam during the Johnson years was essentially 

immune to coercion with air power.” Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in 

War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 176–95 (quote, 176).

127. Clodfelter continued by explaining how much had evolved by the time LeMay 

was speaking in June 1972: “The situation had changed dramatically in 1972. By then, 
108

the 1968 Tet Offensive had decimated the leadership cadres of the Viet Cong, and the 

12-division force that attacked South Vietnam in the Easter Offensive consisted almost 

exclusively of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops. Large numbers of T–54 tanks and 

130mm artillery backed that advance. The fast-paced, conventional offensive demanded 

enormous quantities of fuel and ammunition to sustain it, and made air power’s attacks 

on lines of transportation and oil-storage areas enormously successful; mining Haiphong 

harbour also significantly damaged the North Vietnamese logistical effort. . . . In sum, 

Vietnam consisted of two very different types of conflicts fought at different times by 

different enemies, and air power’s ability to achieve success varied in direct relation to 

the type of war being waged and who was doing the bulk of the fighting.” Clodfelter, 

“Solidifying the Foundation,” 306–7. See also Pape, Bombing to Win, 197–210.

128. The Yankee Team operations that began in the summer of 1964 sought to 

document Pathet Lao/North Vietnamese violations of Laos’s neutrality under the 1962 

Geneva agreement as well as provide reconnaissance of activities along the Ho Chi Minh 

Trail. Anthony and Sexton, War in Northern Laos, 107–20.

129. The Joint Chiefs and CINCPAC expressed concern very early in Seacoord’s 

existence that it might interfere with the military chain of command. Cosmas, MACV, 

163–64.

130. Taylor was also uncomfortable with Johnson’s directive, and with being named 

ambassador, a position he had not sought and did not want. He did note however, that 

the directive “gave me a feeling of confidence to alight in Saigon with such a paper in 

my pocket.” Taylor, Swords and Plowshares, 313–14, 316 (quote); Taylor interview (June 

1981), 34–40.

131. For the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, see Robert K. Brigham, ARVN: Life 

and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).

Epilogue: June 1984

132. Kohn and Harahan, Strategic Air Warfare. Page numbers are indicated at the 

end of each excerpt.

133. Ibid., 112.

134. Ibid., 121–22.

135. Ibid., 123. For the target list, see note 31 above. For its use as the basis of discussion for the campaign that became Rolling Thunder, see note 51.

136. Marshall Michel, who flew Linebacker II missions, was not as enthusiastic about 

the results: “It is important to acknowledge that the United States came close to suffering a 

major defeat in Linebacker II. SAC’s planning failures, leading to the losses of the third and 

fourth nights, and the failure of nerve in Omaha that shifted the bombing away from Hanoi 

when the North Vietnamese were out of missiles gave their leadership the confidence they 

needed to hold out long enough for Congress [to] cut off funds for the war. Had SAC—

prodded by [Alexander M.] Haig [Jr.], [Gen. Glenn R.] Sullivan, and [Adm. Thomas H.] 

Moorer—not acknowledged its mistakes and turned most of the mission planning over to 

Eighth Air Force, or had the U.S. suffered a large number of B–52 losses the night of 

December 26, it is difficult to see how B–52 attacks on Hanoi could have continued. There 

seems to be little doubt that the United States Congress would have cut off all funding for 

the war at that point.” Michel, 11 Days of Christmas, 236.

137. Kohn and Harahan, Strategic Air Warfare, 125–26.

138. President Nixon sought “psychological as well as physical results” from Linebacker II. He ordered the Joint Chiefs to not “allow military considerations such as long term 
109

interdiction, etc., to dominate the targeting philosophy. Attacks . . . must be massive and 

brutal in character. No other criteria is acceptable and no other conceptual approach will be 

countenanced.” As a result, many of the targets were more political than strategic, such as the 

small, difficult-to-strike building that housed the Hanoi International radio station. The Joint 

Chiefs ceded targeting decisions to SAC headquarters in Omaha, much to the consternation 

of the commands of the Eighth and Seventh Air Forces that were flying the missions. Michel, 

11 Days of Christmas, 51–70 (quote, 51); Clodfelter, Limits of Air Power, 184–90.

139. See note 93 above.

140. Kohn and Harahan, Strategic Air Warfare, 128–30.
Kenneth H. Williams is senior editor and writer with the Air 

Force Historical Support Division in Washington, D.C. He is 

the editor, coeditor, or coauthor of ten books on history and 

international relations.

Vietnam Fiftieth

Commemoration