The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force was never prouder of his people than in moments of dire adversity. He half-turned and patted the younger man’s arm.
“That’s the way I feel about it too, son!” He bawled back, flashing a fearlessly bellicose smile.
In the grey light of the early morning the smoke lay like a dank autumn mist across large areas of the city as the Sea King raced north-east towards the White House, swooping down, flaring out at the last moment, hitting the soft, rain soaked ground hard and rolling several yards before coming to a jarring halt. The door was flung open and Curtis Lemay and his entourage jumped down onto the muddy, churned grass of the West Lawn.
Everybody crouched down and looked around; everybody except the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force. Douglas MacArthur had rehearsed his famous return to the Philippines; made damned sure the cameramen were standing in the right place before he stepped off that landing craft and got his feet wet. There were no cameramen waiting for Curtis LeMay’s return to Washington DC but the Big Cigar had no doubt which return was going to have the greater impact on American history. History wasn’t about the last war or the one before, it was about the here and he knew that his country needed him a goddam sight more than the poor goddammed Filipinos had needed that arsehole MacArthur back in 1944.
Curtis LeMay stood tall; his back ramrod straight while everybody around him hunkered down as low as they could without falling over. Curtis LeMay didn’t need a film crew to make him do his duty! He had never hidden from anything in his whole life and he didn’t intend to start at the age of fifty-seven. If some no-good, cowardly, traitorous bastard ‘insurgent’ wanted to take a pot shot at him he didn’t give a goddam flying fuck about it. The whole goddam Luftwaffe had tried to kill him a dozen times over Germany in the forty-five war; what chance did some useless waste of space, unpatriotic, un-American disgrace to the human race have of shooting him now? He stood tall, shot his cuffs and flicked dust of his jacket. When an officer reported to his Commander-in-Chief — even when he knew that the aforementioned President loathed him — it was that officer’s sacred duty to honour him. The chain of command was there for a good reason; he might not like the orders he’d been given by this President, or by this Administration, but if the Chief of Staff of the Air Force didn’t obey orders what right did he have to expect his people to obey his orders? Moreover, whatever his disagreements with the Kennedy Administration, Curtis Emerson LeMay was nothing if not a diehard patriot who was perfectly willing to sacrifice his life in the defence of his country.
A bullet whined past and kicked up dust on the West Wing veranda.
The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force watched other rounds clipping splinters off the stonework around the already holed and cracked windows.
The cowardly bastards couldn’t even shoot straight!
He marched unhurriedly up to the White House, stiffly erect while practically every other member of his entourage; part staff, part bodyguard squatted low and eyed the chaos around the home of the President of the United States of America with suspicion and no little outrage.
Curtis LeMay’s own personal outrage had been fulminating ever since he’d received the first reports of the Malta ‘incident’ in Arizona, where he was racing his prized Allard J2, former Le Mans car. Racing fast cars had become his release from the pressure-cooker stresses of building up and maintaining Strategic Air Command at the highest levels of operational efficiency throughout the 1950s. The brutal denouement of the October War bore staggering testimony to the success of LeMay’s regime in those years, although few would have guessed that ‘Bombs Away LeMay’ didn’t take anywhere near as much satisfaction from the performance of his boys as most Americans imagined. Like many larger than life characters LeMay was a more complex man than he liked people to think; his joy at renting out and taking part in events held at former US Air Bases under the auspices of the Sports Car Club of America, ought to have suggested to his critics and detractors that the damnation of his nation’s foes was not the sole preoccupation of his long and distinguished military career. There was perhaps, no finer leader of men in the service of his Commander-in-Chief than Curtis LeMay and the situation called for a man cast from exactly his template.
“Who is in charge here?” Demanded the man who in real life made John Wayne look and sound like a nervy, ten-stone weakling.
A hulking Secret Service man advanced.
Before he could speak the Chief of Staff of the Air Force cracked a ruggedly grim smile. Bullets were pinging off the building in the background. The ‘pinging’ was punctuated by the barking detonations of grenades in the middle distance.
“Take me to the President, son. We’ve got a battle to fight and my President needs to know his Air Force is waiting to unleash Hell on our enemies!”
Nobody was going to stop Curtis LeMay presenting himself in the Situation Room but the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force wasn’t prepared for the crowd of panicky, ashen-faced men — and a handful of women — milling dispiritedly in the corridors outside the heart of the bunker complex. His scowl deepened as he was briefly baulked at the doors to the Situation Room. Inside, he was immediately struck by the stillness and the oddly confident stoicism of his President. All around John Fitzgerald Kennedy flunkies and Cabinet members, worried staffers and political hangers-on danced attendance on their master, or sat shocked, despondent and exhausted around the long oval central table.
The President was deep in conversation with Robert McNamara; the latter looked around, startled by the commotion of LeMay’s entrance. The airman ignored his immediate political chief and strode up to his Commander-in-Chief, drew himself to his full height, stuck out his formidable chest and saluted crisply.
“General LeMay reporting, sir!” He announced, knowing that it was the drama of moments such as these that mattered most in times of crisis. “What are your orders, sir?”
Jack Kennedy didn’t get up from his chair.
There were men in his Cabinet who’d wanted the ‘maverick’ former commander of SAC arrested months ago; or if not arrested, removed from his post. That had not been a realistic option before, or since, the October War and the President had never seriously entertained it. The wisest of his predecessors in the White House had always contrived to find a way to accommodate prima donna Generals and Admirals like LeMay — Generals MacArthur and Patton, and Admiral King came to mind from recent history — because when the going got rough men like them were the rocks upon which victory or defeat turned. Curtis LeMay had won the October War; without him, it might have been the United States that was laid waste by the thermonuclear fires.
“It is good to see you, General LeMay,” Jack Kennedy drawled, his calm seeming too implausible to be real in the febrile atmosphere of the Situation Room. “Bob,” he said quietly, speaking to his Secretary of Defence, “call Bobby and get the Secret Service to clear the room please.”
Having given the order the President rose to his feet and beckoned Curtis LeMay to walk with him to the head of the room where there was a lectern and a pull down movie projector screen. The Chief of Staff of the US Air Force had waved away his own senior staffers. Suddenly, the older man found himself locked in his President’s gaze.