cc  >> Jeff Kollath: Ladies  and gentlemen, welcome to  the Wisconsin Veterans Museum,  an educational activity  of the Wisconsin Department  of Veterans Affairs.  My name is Jeff Kollath,  I'm Curator of Programs  and Exhibitions  here at the museum.  I'm very excited to have  Warren Kozak here to talk  about General Curtis LeMay.  I'd be remiss if I did not thank  our sponsors for this event.  The University of Wisconsin  Department of History, Center  for World Affairs in the Global  Economy, the Grand Strategy  Program, and also the Wisconsin  Alumni Association.  This is our second  Dr. Richard H. Zeitlin  Distinguished Lecture Series  event for this year.  So we have two more of those  that you'll be able to find out  about on our website.  Like I said, Warren Kozak is  here, author of this wonderful  book, "LeMay: The Life and Wars  of General Curtis LeMay," which  is available in our bookstore  for the low price of $22.36.  So I invite you to pick one or  two or three of those up after  the talk, and I'm sure Warren  will be happy to sign those for  you after the event.  Warren Kozak was born and raised  in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is  proud of his solid Midwestern  roots. 

 His father was an independent  insurance agent, as was his  grandfather.  After a public school education,  Warren went on to graduate from  the University of Wisconsin in  1973 with a BA in political  science.  He then left for New York City  and his dream of working in a TV  network news room.  His first job at ABC news was as  researcher where he helped  compile the election fact book  for the Ford/Carter presidential  race in 1976.  He spent much of that year  traveling on the campaign, as he  did again in 1980, but this time  as a producer/reporter for  National Public Radio.  Later at NPR he reported on  everything from live Senate  hearings to the first space  shuttle mission in 1981.  In 1988 he turned his focus to  his life-long interest in World  War II when he cowrote the PBS  documentary on the 50th  anniversary of Kristallnacht  with CBS legend Eric Sevareid.  In 1993 Warren was the winner of  a prestigious Benton Fellowship  at the University of Chicago.  His op-eds have appeared in the  Wall Street Journal, the  Washington Post, the New York  Sun, and other newspapers and  magazines.  His first book, 2004's  "The Rabbi of 84th Street,"  was published by HarperCollins. 

 This biography of a legendary  rabbi, Haskel Besser, who was  born in Poland before World War  II, is a window into the rich  aesthetic world of that era that  was destroyed in the war.  His second book, and what he'll  be discussing this evening,  "LeMay: The Life and Wars of  General Curtis LeMay,"  was published by Regnery Press  in 2009.  His fascination with World War  II was first sparked by his  father's experiences in that  conflict.  He dedicated the book to his  father, who was a captain in the  US Army and served in the  European Theatre.  Warren now lives in New York  City with his wife and his  daughter.  Ladies and gentlemen,  Warren Kozak.  (applause)  >> Warren Kozak: Thank you.  Thank you, Jeff.  And it is such a pleasure to be  back here in Madison.  I see a lot of old friends in  the crowd. 

 And I also have to come this far  to experience three seasons in  12 hours.  (laughter)  Which is always exciting.  We don't get that in New York.  I want to start with just an  informal poll here.  How many of you in the audience,  with just a show of hands, knew  about Curtis LeMay before you  saw this program or the book?  Okay, that's very unusual.  Jeff told me that the crowd here  is unusually well-informed and  they ask very tough questions so  please ease off on the second  part later.  (laughter)  And I do want to leave  a lot of time for questions  because I always find that  to be the most interesting part  of the program.  Here's the other part  of my informal poll.  Of those of you who knew about  LeMay, how many of you had a  negative image of him?  Okay, now that's more like it.  Because most of the people that  I've come across since I wrote  this book, first of all, I'd say  at least 50% never heard of  LeMay. 

 And if they had, it was just  some vague recollection that  they couldn't quite articulate.  But almost everyone had a  negative view of him.  And I think that's why I wrote  this book.  And I'm going to tell you how I  came to this topic and what  relevance there might be to our  world today.  I have to tell you, for any of  the teachers out there, and I  know that there are a few, when  you throw something out, you  never know what's going to  stick, and this all came from a  throw-away line in a college  lecture many years ago.  The line was, "you might not  agree with his politics,  but if you have a son  serving in combat,  you want him serving  under someone like LeMay."  And that stayed with me because,  frankly, it was the first  positive thing I ever heard  about Curtis LeMay.  And it was revolving in my brain  for many, many years.  I was searching for a second  topic for a book after my first  book came out, and I came up  with one after another and  nothing really interested me  that much.  And one night in New York my  wife and I had, we got a  babysitter and we were supposed  to go to some event.  The event was oversold, we  couldn't get in. 

 I said, "Let's just go home."  And she said,  "We have the babysitter,  let's see what else we can do."  And we went to Lincoln Center,  she wanted to see if we could  get a ticket.  And we got a ticket to a  romantic musical set in Italy.  It had nothing to do with war,  nothing to do with bombers,  nothing to do with anything.  And I was obviously bored, and  my mind was going back and I  don't know where it went but it  kept going back to that line,  "you might not agree with his  politics."  And when I got home that night I  thought maybe I ought to look at  LeMay.  I started to do research that  night, and what I found was a  person that I had no idea had  done as much as he had done.  And then I couldn't figure out  why there weren't 10 books about  this man and a couple of movies.  As I did more research on him, I  began to find out why.  And part of this was his own  fault.  He was not a likeable person.  He was gruff, he was asocial in  some ways. 

 I have no degree or ever took  any classes in psychology so I  was not about to psychoanalyze  this man who I never met.  He died 15 years before I  started this project.  But I have read, and some would  probably not disagree with the  fact that there was something  almost self-destructive about  LeMay.  And I think that came across in  his run with George Wallace in  1968.  And you cannot talk about LeMay  without talking about that run,  and we'll get into that later.  But at the same time, there's no  single man who had a greater  impact on the United States Air  Force, on our victories in World  War II, both in Europe and in  the Pacific, and in winning the  Cold War than Curtis LeMay.  Now, any one of those  achievements would have been  just a tremendous feat in and of  itself.  Yet, at the same time, as I said  before, there's been no major  figure in the last half century  that's been more misunderstood  than LeMay.  I said earlier that some of this  was his own fault.  We live in an age where our  leaders, politicians,  celebrities pay vast sums of  money to professionals who tell  them how to speak, what to say  to reporters, what to wear,  LeMay didn't give a damn what  anyone else thought. 

 He was interested in solving  problems, in winning wars, in  saving as many of the lives of  his crews as he possibly could.  And after that he didn't care.  And, in fact, I think he went a  couple of degrees further.  He almost wanted to be disliked,  it seemed.  Besides those feats that I told  you about, which were pretty  phenomenal, here's something  else that a lot of people don't  even know.  He created the RAND Corporation  after World War II.  That's the research and  development arm of the Air  Force.  He was the head of Europe at the  start of the Berlin airlift.  And he was on the joint chiefs  during the Cuban Missile Crisis  and the start of the Vietnam  War.  There's almost no events in the  middle part of the 20th century  where LeMay was not involved. 

 So when I learned all of this, I  didn't understand why he had  been so vilified by the press  and in films, and all of us  probably remember  Dr. Strangelove and the Buck  Turgidson character which is a  classic character.  If you haven't seen that film go  and see it again or rent it.  It is as great, it gets better  with time.  But the Buck Turgidson character  was the character played by  George C. Scott  which was based on LeMay  where he saw this attack on the  Soviet Union as not a disaster  but as an opportunity.  There were reasons that I think  Hollywood turned on him.  There is no one in US history  that was involved with killing  more civilians than Curtis  LeMay.  It's a fact.  And it's nothing you can get  around.  It's estimated that upwards of  350,000 civilians were killed  because of this man's decisions.  Men, women, and children in  Japan. 

 At the same time, with the  strange mathematics of war, he  wound up saving at least a  million American casualties and  probably two million Japanese  lives.  Those are the estimates, I think  those numbers are low, actually.  Very few of us in this room, I  would hazard to say, would want  to make those kinds of  decisions.  It takes a very unusual person  to do that.  For some reason, I know I  wouldn't want to do that, LeMay  had it in him and he always  stepped up time and time again.  There was something about him.  So I think it's important to  look at his background.  He came from a dirt poor family  in Ohio.  His father was a complete  failure.  He could not hold down a job. 

 There were times when his family  didn't have enough to eat.  At the age of 10, LeMay is in  Montana, and I was reading up on  this, his experience in Montana,  so he was born in 1906, this is  around 1915-1916, was not unlike  anyone living in Montana in  1848.  They were living as pioneers.  It was at the age of 10 that he  figured out ways to feed his  family when his father couldn't.  This was an incredibly,  unusually responsible young boy  who became a very responsible  adult.  And he shifted that  responsibility, he was the  eldest of six, his daughter told  me, she said, "My sense was  Grandma LeMay  was always pregnant."  And so all these kids were  coming after him.  He figured out ways to watch out  over his siblings.  Later, he transferred that to  his country.  Something happened when he was  four years old that had a huge  impact on his life and on the  history of our country I think.  He was in the backyard of his  home in Columbus, Ohio. 

 He was chopping wood for his  mother, he was chopping wood for  the stove, and that meant  keeping the house warm and being  able to cook, and he heard    something and he looked up and,  unbelievably, he saw something  that made no sense to him.  There was a man looking back  down at him with goggles on, and  it was one of the Wright brother  planes from nearby Dayton.  And this four-year-old took off  after the plane wanting to catch  it.  And he wrote about this in his  autobiography.  And he ran and ran and ran.  He had no idea how far he had  gone.  All he knew is that he couldn't  catch the plane.  He came home in tears and it  took him hours to get back home.  But this Wright brother plane  becomes a metaphor for the rest  of his life.  And it's something that he was  always chasing, trying to grasp. 

 It propelled him through Ohio    State University.  How did this young man from a  dirt poor background get through  college in the 1920s?  Well, he got a job in a foundry,  and he worked in this foundry  six days a week from about 3:00  in the afternoon until about  midnight.  And he also took a full course  load.  He also was in ROTC.  And he did this because he knew  the only chance that he could  get to fly would be if he got  into the Army Air Corps.  And he knew that the only way to  get into the Army Air Corps was  to have a college degree.  That's why he went to college.  He got a degree in engineering,  and he turned out to be an  absolutely brilliant engineer.  In order to get into the Army  Air Corps in 1928, this is a  year after the Lindbergh flight,  all of the sudden everyone else  catches up with LeMay and  everybody is fascinated with  aviation.  There were 3,000 applicants to  get into the Air Corps program,  into the cadet school that year. 

 Of those 3,000 they would take  100.  Of those 100, 25 would pass, 75  would wash out.  LeMay, at this young age, shows  an ability that comes up again  and again, and it is a way to  work, manipulate, basically, a  bureaucracy.  And for those of you who have  been in the military, you know  that in order to get anything  done, you have to figure out  ways to work around the  bureaucracy at times in order to  get something accomplished.  There's nobody that would have  taught him how to do this, it  was something that was innate.  Years later, when I was working  on the book, I talked to so many  officers who served under him  and some of them also went to  the very top.  They were the heads of the joint  chiefs.  And they said they never saw  anyone use psychology more  brilliantly than LeMay to  achieve what he wanted, and he  also had the ability to choose  the best people, he always had  the best people.  And God forbid if you showed the  two cardinal sins which he hated  most, which was stupidity or  laziness, and you were just out.  He showed no mercy whatsoever. 

 He gets into cadet school in  1928.  He is then stuck in that army  between the wars.  He becomes a lieutenant and he  stays a lieutenant from 1928 to  1940.  No advancement.  Nothing whatsoever.  He is thinking, in the mid-'30s,  the best he can hope for is  perhaps getting up to colonel  some day and then retiring.  There is an offer as a  commercial pilot with the Ford  Motor Company.  The Ford Motor Company was  making the Ford Tri-Motor in the  mid-'30s, and they had this deal  where they sold the plane to an  airline along with a pilot.  And LeMay was exactly the kind  of guy they wanted.  In the middle of the Depression  they offered him $1,200 a month. 

 He was, at the time, earning  $200 a month.  And he thought about it, and  then he thought, no, I think I'm  going to stick to it.  And I was fascinated by that  decision.  I think a lot of it had to do  with this strong belief in this  country.  And he wanted to protect it.  In 1935, yes, there were some  problems in Europe, but they  didn't seem that big and they  seemed pretty far away.  And in the Pacific there were  problems but they were also  remote.  LeMay may have seen what was  coming, I don't know, I'm not  sure about that.  I also think that because of his  father's failures, later on he  never showed any personal fear  whatsoever.  And I'll explain some of the  situations he put himself in. 

 But he did have a fear and that  great fear that he had was  failure.  So I think that he was sure that  if he stayed in the military he  would have a secure job with the  airlines.  With Ford, he just wasn't sure.  I had always heard, I heard this  from my dad when I was young and  then I read about it, how  unprepared we were for World War  II on December 7, 1941.  I didn't quite understand it  until I saw the movements of  Curtis LeMay right after the  attack on Pearl Harbor.  Basically, we did not have an  air force, we did not have an  army and we didn't have a navy.  The navy that we had, a good  portion of it was at the bottom  of Pearl Harbor.  What we did have were two large  oceans, and at that time it gave  us the two years we needed to  build the army and the navy and  the air force that was necessary  to fight.  In Washington, they made a very  calculated decision, and they  decided that they were going to  send B-17 crews to England to  start to whittle down the  Luftwaffe, which was, at the  time, the best air force in the  world.  Best trained, by far. 

 Most hours, by far.  Most experience, by far.  They had already started bombing  in the Spanish Civil War,  Poland, England.  When LeMay takes his first bomb  group to England in 1942, and  this is just about eight months  after Pearl Harbor, he is not  even sure that they're going to  get across the ocean in one  piece, and he is amazed when  they all get there.  And he finds somebody who has  flown just a few missions  already, and he said,  what can you tell me?  LeMay has never been in combat,  although he's been in the Air  Corps since 1928.  He's not even sure how he will  personally deal with it.  He's not sure if he'll be able  to stand up to it.  And, you know what, I'm going to  take an aside here.  Over and over again with LeMay,  there is no arrogance to this  man.  He is never sure that anything  he proposes is going to work,  and he's always surprised when  it does work. 

 We're used to seeing someone  like Patton who just strides  into a room and just assumes  he's going to be victorious.  LeMay is never sure about any of  this.  So he gets a hold of someone  that he knew who has flown a  couple of missions, and he says,  what can you tell me?  And the guy says, all I can tell  you is the flack is so terrible  that if you fly straight for 10  seconds, they're going to  destroy you.  And he thinks, my God, if you're  going to weave into a target, if  you're going to zigzag in,  you're not going to hit the  target.  These guys aren't going to hit  the target.  They're so inexperienced.  And he says, what is the sense  of doing this?  What's the sense of training  these crews and building the  bombers and putting gas in the  tank and bombs in there if  you're not even going to hit the  target?  So he first comes up with a plan  to put every plane in a  different box formation to  protect each other because they  didn't have fighter escort all  the way in.  And the B-17s with the guns out  of every side he thought would  have a field of fire that could  protect them.  He then, being the engineer that  he is, calculates how many times  he thinks one of the German  batteries is going to fire, will  have to fire, in order to hit  the plane.  For the very first mission he  gets up and he says, we're going  to fly straight in, nobody is  going to deviate, whoever  deviates can spend the rest of  the war in the brig. 

 And there's a man I know, and  this is an amazing story I'll  tell you later, who was in the  room, he was in that original  group.  He's 90 years old now,  phenomenal guy.  And he said a moan went up  through the room.  And one of the guys finally  says, we're going to be  slaughtered.  And LeMay looks at him and he  says, no, I think we can take  it.  And here he shows the most  brilliant form of military  leadership.  He says, to prove it, I'm going  to fly the lead plane in the  formation.  The lead plane in the formation  is the first plane the Germans  will target.  But he knows that in order to  get these guys up, in order to  have them fly straight in, they  will follow him.  And all of them think, if he  thinks there's enough to it that  he's willing to do this, maybe  there is something to it. 

 That first mission, they fly in,  and for the first time they  actually come close to hitting a  target.  I told you there was a  calculated decision.  This was a brutal war of  attrition.  And they just decided, in  Washington, that we could  produce bombers faster than the  Germans.  We could train crews faster.  And they were going to whittle  down the Luftwaffe.  Of the 35 original crews, I know  a man who is a phenomenal man,  Ralph Nutter, he's in the book  quite a bit.  He is a Harvard law graduate,  and he was LeMay's chief  navigator.  Of the 35 original navigators,  he is one of two who survived.  The men of the 8th Air Force,  which was an umbrella  organization, had a higher  casualty rate than the Marines  in the Pacific. 

 This is something I didn't even  realize.  Every time LeMay sent these guys  up on the most dangerous  missions, he insisted on flying  the lead plane.  The only thing he changed,  however, was, after that first  mission he decided not to be in  the pilot seat, he went into the  copilot seat.  And as soon as they got up he  knew that if he was in the back  watching the other planes, he  could figure out new strategies.  So here is a guy who is putting  his own life on the line and he  is trying to create a new  science called strategic bombing  with machines that have never  been used before.  General Grant and General Lee  each fought 17 battles in their  entire careers.  LeMay is fighting a battle  almost every single night, I'm  sorry, every single day.  Nighttime, that's in the  Pacific.  And his battlefield is 25,000  feet above the earth.  But he has this ability to  understand how every single part  fits together. 

 He understands how everything  fits in the plane, he knows more  about the mechanics of that  plane, the B-17, then any of the  top mechanics.  And he tells them how to fix  things.  He's always tinkering with  everything.  He's tinkering with the guns,  he's tinkering with the  bombardier, he's tinkering with  the navigation, and he's one of  the great navigators, one of the  original navigators.  He's always working things out.  So by the time of 1944, and  there's no reason why this man  should have survived.  There are planes around him that  are exploding, and he gets home  every time.  By 1944, Washington is correct  and these guys, at a tremendous  cost, whittle down the Luftwaffe  to the point where the allies  control the skies on D-Day.  And that was what the purpose  was.  So here's LeMay who understands  this B-17, who understands the  war in Europe, and he gets a  call to go back to Washington,  and he's told he's got a new  challenge, a new job, he's got  to take over the B-29 program. 

 He's never flown a B-29.  He doesn't know anything about  the B-29.  And all he knows about the  Pacific are the didn't reports  he's had time to read, and he  hasn't had that much time  because, let's face it, he's  been pretty busy in Europe.  So he says to Hap Arnold who's  the head of the air force, and  by the way it was the US Army  Air Force, there wasn't a  separate air force in World War  II, that comes after the war, he  says, look, if I'm going to fly,  by the way Arnold says, I want  you to go.  He comes back to Washington.  He said, want you to go, like,  now.  And LeMay said, if I'm going to  take over this program I ought  to know how to fly it.  And Arnold thinks maybe the guy  has a point.  So he sets up a training program  in Grand Island, Nebraska.  And LeMay picks up his wife and  his daughter, who is then about  three or four years old, and  takes them with him and learns  how to fly the plane. 

 The B-29, here's the problem  with the B-29.  It is this marvelous new bomber.  Three times the size of the  B-17.  Unlike the B-17, it is  pressurized.  It's not unlike the planes you  fly when you go anywhere these  days.  It's comfortable, it's not  50-degrees below zero like the  B-17 was when it was up in the  sky.  But there were more mechanical  failures.  More men were killed during the  war due to mechanical failures  than due to enemy fire with the  B-29.  There's something else.  The idea of the B-29, it could  fly these vast distances so it  could finally hit Japan. 

 The idea was that the Marines  would take these islands at  tremendous cost, and then,  something else I didn't really  understand, this is something  only America could have done.  They came in and within four to  six months built a midlevel  American city on these islands  that had nothing been huts and  palm trees.  They built the busiest airports  in the world.  They built roads.  They had to build everything,  the infrastructure.  And all of this had to be  shipped from the United States.  You didn't have cement on these  islands.  So the B-29 gets there and on  the first mission, this is  before LeMay takes over, they  run into something over Japan  that all of you know, it's  called the jet stream.  But no plane had every flown  that high over Japan before.  So they run these winds, these  ferocious winds about 200 miles  and hour. 

 And the bombs go this was and  they go this way.  They're going every way but on  the target.  And once again here comes LeMay  with this insolvable problem  that no one else can figure out.  And when he's given this job,  he's also told, again, this  great fear of failure, the  commander says, if you don't  figure this out, you're fired  and we're going to get someone  else in here that can.  So what does LeMay do after his  first try and again bombs go  every where because of the jet  stream?  He comes up with a whole new  plan.  And he sends his bombers out,  it's March 9, 1945.  This is late in the war.  America cannot figure out, most  Americans cannot figure out why  we haven't bombed Tokyo.  Yes, Jimmy Doolittle bombed  Tokyo right after Pearl Harbor,  but that was, as brave as it  was, and it was very brave, but  it was a PR stunt and it did  very little damage, it did no  damage, frankly.  And here we are, 1945, we'd been  hitting Germany for three years  and nobody could hit Japan. 

 The Japanese even thought that  they were immune to any attacks  by the Americans because of the  divine lineage of the emperor.  LeMay comes up with this new  plan and he says, okay, this is  what we're going to do.  We're not going to fly in at  35,000 feet, we're going to come  in at 5,000 feet.  We're not going to go in  formation, which is all they've  been training for.  We're going to go in long single  files.  We're not going to go in the  daytime, we're going go at  night.  And we're not going to use  bombs, we're going to use  incendiaries.  On March 9, 1945, he sends 346  bombers to Tokyo.  He kills more people in that  12-hour period than any time  before or since and that  includes Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Here is the attitude back in the  states. 

 He gets a green light from  Washington and they just  congratulate him and they say  just go at it.  And he takes a world almanac and  he goes down a list of Japanese  cities by population.  Now by today's standards, and a  lot of people believe this, they  say this is a war crime.  You are specifically targeting  civilians.  And there is no doubt about  that, that's what he was doing.  But here was LeMay's rationale,  and this is where it gets so  complex, and, again, would you  want to make these decisions,  think about it.  Unlike Germany and America and  England, the manufacturing base  in Japan was not  factory-centered, it was  dispersed throughout the entire  city.  So instead of having a big plant  in Cleveland or Detroit building  these bombers, you had a mom and  a pop in the backyard with a  lathe making a nut or a screw  for the Mitsubishi plane that  would then be collected.  So how do you keep the Japanese  from pursuing their war?  LeMay figured that area bombing  was the only answer.  And he does this from March 9,  1945, until August 15, that's  the last mission, it's actually  after the two atom bombs, he's  still sending them out. 

 Here's something else I think  you need to understand, and I  didn't understand this myself.  I was talking to one of the vets  who was on Tinian, and he said,  well, we were there, he happened  to be working on a special unit  that put the second bomb in the  plane, the atomic bomb on the  boxcar plane, and he said, there  were so many construction guys  over at the other end of the  island who had better rations so  we would trade with them.  And I said, what were they  building?  And he said, they were building  hospitals.  And I said, for the crews?  And he said, no, no, no, they  were building it for the  invasion.  We were getting set to invade  Japan.  There was going to be the first  wave of the invasion was set for  November 1945 with the second  wave in March of 1946.  Unlike Germany, which started to  collapse after the Battle of the  Bulge, and you had tens of  thousands of German soldiers who  were surrendering, the Japanese  fought harder as we got closer  to the mainland.  We saw this on Saipan, we saw it  on Iwo Jima, and then we saw  something on Guam that horrified  even these battle-hardened  Marines.  Upwards of 98% of the Japanese  soldiers were dying, but on  Okinawa they started to see  civilians killing themselves  rather than being captured.  And what they were preparing  themselves for on the mainland  was an all out war that would  involve civilians and the idea  was that you were going to die  anyway, you might as well take  two Americans with you. 

 And they were training the  entire population to do this.  Men, women, and children.  LeMay had a doctrine that comes  up later and I think it's very  important and it's crucial to  how this might relate to what we  are dealing with today.  And the LeMay doctrine goes like  this.  Any country should think  long and hard before it makes  the fateful decision to go to  war, but if all else has failed,  if all diplomatic measures have  failed, and a country has to  go to war, and in the United  States it has to be decided by  Congress, then that country  should use every weapon in its  arsenal to end the war as fast  as possible because LeMay  thought the worst thing were  prolonged wars.  He thought you end it just as  fast as possible and you get on  with peaceful relations.  And he saw this with Japan after  the war.  But here's the kicker to this  LeMay doctrine.  He said if is country isn't  willing to do that then it  shouldn't go to war in the first  place.  Now think about that for a  second. 

 Think about how the wars we have  fought since World War II would  have been fought differently or  not at all.  Once again, I go back to this  very complex problem that many  of us wouldn't want to have  to deal with, yet he dealt  with it over and over again.  There's something else that I  saw that I think is relevant.  In the campaign two years ago, I  heard that John McCain's  grandfather, who was second  under Nimitz, came home.  He was supposed to be on the  Missouri for the surrender  ceremony.  And he decided he didn't want to  do that, he wanted to just go  home.  He goes home and there's a party  for McCain and then he dies.  He dies either that night or the  next morning.  And I understood that because  these guys worked themselves to  death.  John McCain's grandfather was a  lot older. 

 LeMay was the youngest general  in modern US history.  He was 36 when he became a  general.  He was working 20 to 23 hours a  day.  He sometimes would take one hour  of sleep.  And he was young enough to  survive that kind of really  brutal existence.  A lot of the generals, I  noticed, were dead within a  couple years of the war.  Stilwell was dead in '46.  Hap Arnold had had four heart  attacks.  He was dead in 1950.  These guys really worked  themselves to death. 

 I want to quickly, I want to  leave time for, where are we, I  want to leave time for  questions, but there are two  other quick stories I want to  tell you about.  One is when, after the war, he  takes over the Strategic Air  Command in 1948, that's SAC.  And once again they give him an  impossible problem.  SAC is supposed to be our  nuclear strike force that's  supposed to hold the Soviets at  bay.  In 1948 it's a disaster.  And LeMay comes in, he looks at  it, he knows how bad it is, and  he comes up with a strategy.  And he walks in one morning, and  this thing was called the Dayton  exercise, and it was actually  hidden for many, many years, for  obvious reasons, nobody wanted  anybody to know about this.  He came into his office and he  told his aid, have them all bomb  Dayton.  Send the whole lot of them out.  What did that mean?  It means electronically every  airplane in the Strategic Air  Command should bomb  Wright-Patterson Air Force Base  in Dayton, Ohio. 

 Half the planes don't get off  the ground because of mechanical  failure.  Half the planes can't even fly.  These planes don't have to go  over an ocean.  They don't have to go to Russia.  They're going to Dayton, Ohio.  It's an air force base they all  know well.  Not one plane hits the target,  not one plane.  So LeMay says, okay, now you  know how bad you are, now we're  going to fix it.  And he rolls up his sleeves, he  gets rid of a lot of the dead  wood, and he also creates a  spirit decor that, by the time  he retires in 1957, he has  created the deadliest force in  the history of man.  And I always think that the SAC  bombers, these B-52s that were  flying around the Soviet Union  24 hours a day, seven days a  week, that held the Soviets at  bay throughout the '50s and  throughout the '60s and  throughout the '70s, I think in  the beginning they never thought  of doing anything, trying  anything because, not only did  they know that the B-52s had  this deadly force, but they knew  the man behind it was Curtis  LeMay and he wouldn't hesitate  for a second to use them if he  had to. 

 They saw what he had done  before.  So where does that leave us?  I think, I guess I'd like to say  what did I learn from four years  of working on this book?  And I guess my biggest lesson  was I always assumed that World  War II was just some vast  breathing mass that took over  the whole globe and it swayed  this way and it swayed that way.  And if were lucky you survived,  if you were not lucky  you were killed or someone you  loved was killed or your friends  were killed.  What I didn't realize was that  one person could actually make a  difference.  And this came to me when I  suddenly realized one day, my  God, what if LeMay had been on  the other side?  And I thought about that and I  thought that would have been a  disaster for us.  And I realized that actually one  person can make a difference.  And I thought about it even in  modern times.  I thought about United 93 on  September 11th.  That was the plane that crashed  in Pennsylvania when the  passengers understood what they  were doing.  I am convinced that there was  one person that got up first and  gave everyone else the courage  to do what needed to be done. 

 I saw LeMay do this over and  over again.  I think we were very lucky to  have this man at the time that  we had him.  Controversial?  Absolutely.  Complex, this man redefines the  word complex.  And I think in the question and  answer period we should talk  about the Wallace run because I  think that's important.  But in the end, I would say I  came to admire this man because  he did things that I couldn't  do.  And I think he did things that  most people couldn't do.  We were lucky to have him.  I think that it is a country  like ours that allows somebody  to come from the abject poverty  that he came from, no lineage  whatsoever, and it allows him to  rise to the very top of his  profession.  And I think as long as our  country holds on to those values  and holds on to our Constitution  and holds on to our system of  government, I think, I'm  optimistic. 

 I think that we have a good  chance of surviving and even  doing better in spite of  whatever comes our way.  So thank you, very much, for  listening, and I'm happy to  answer any questions.  (applause)