* * *
A few days after my briefing to Bundy, Harry Rowen told me that he and Bundy had agreed that the question of delegation was an important subject to investigate. Bundy could see nothing in the files available to him that supported what I had described, but he already knew that was not conclusive, since Eisenhower had taken most of his White House files with him. At an NSC staff meeting, Bundy announced that a joint White House–DOD committee of one—namely, Daniel Ellsberg—was being formed to investigate the problem of presidential authorization of the use of nuclear weapons. My task, Rowen told me, was to find out whether the letters I had heard about actually existed. I would have full authority, which would be confirmed by the White House, to “go anywhere, ask anything, see anything” bearing on this effort.
My first visit was to Commander Tazewell Shepard Jr., President Kennedy’s naval aide in charge of the nuclear alert procedures and the one who carried the nuclear “football.” I told him what I had heard in the Pacific. He said it was news to him and seemed genuinely convinced that it was baseless. He confirmed that, as the president’s liaison with the nuclear command and control system, he was the one who ought to know if such letters existed. He swore that he had never heard of them. Moreover, he said, he had no knowledge of any authorization having been given in any form to any of the unified or specified commanders for executing their war plans in the absence of an express presidential order. He felt that if such an authorization existed, he would have known about it.
By that time I was experienced enough to know that an officer in his position could and would lie convincingly about such matters in the interests of secrecy. But my best judgment in this circumstance was that he was trying to be helpful, and that he was being honest with me. He knew that my authority to ask questions and get straight answers came from Bundy, and it didn’t make sense that he would want to deceive the president’s assistant.
Shepard undertook to ask others working at the presidential command post in the White House about the issues I raised. Everyone he asked denied knowledge of any of these issues. He then arranged for me to visit the underground command posts involved in disseminating nuclear directives in the event of nuclear war. One of these was the Alternate Joint Communication Center, which served as an alternate command center for the JCS inside Raven Rock mountain,60 forty miles from Washington. Others were High Point under another mountain, supposed to house the civilian leaders of the government during a nuclear emergency, and Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.
Shepard asked me to let him know whatever I found out. But the officers in those centers claimed to be just as ignorant as he was of any such delegation. Nor did they seem to be aware of the widespread assumption in the Pacific that such an authorization existed.
In addition, I talked to officers in charge at the White House Situation Room. They all felt that they ought to know if someone other than the president was authorized to start a nuclear war—they felt sure that they would know if that were the case—but they said they didn’t know. Again, none of them was aware that this was widely believed in the Pacific. Meanwhile Shepard reported back to me that his own further investigation had failed to disclose any evidence of pre-delegation.
I concluded, tentatively, that the belief in the Pacific was based on a myth, a myth that was clearly important to dispel. Of course, I couldn’t be definitive about such a negative finding. It was a matter of my judgment that Shepard and the other officers were not deceiving me, and that such an authorization, still less actual letters, probably could not have been passed to the commanders before Shepard’s arrival without Shepard being able to find any hint of it and without any of the others knowing about it.
I reported this to McGeorge Bundy’s new deputy, Carl Kaysen. (Kaysen, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former junior fellow himself, had read my honors thesis at Harvard and recommended me for the Society of Fellows.) I explained my puzzlement at the situation. I had failed to find anyone in the Washington area, where the supposed delegation had been made and where highest-level command was exercised, who had even heard that anyone anywhere believed that someone outside Washington was authorized to launch nuclear attacks on his own. Yet there seemed no reason to doubt either that officers in the Pacific believed that such a delegation had been made, or that lower-level sub-delegation had actually occurred.
There were several possibilities to explain this discrepancy. I told Kaysen that my best judgment was that the officers in the Pacific were misled. The supposed letters from Eisenhower probably did not exist. But I felt quite sure that the belief in the letters was real and that it had real consequences, dangerous ones, which needed correcting. It provided a false precedent for the lower-level delegations that CINCPAC and perhaps others were reported to have made, which I was quite sure did exist. (If the Eisenhower letters did exist, after all, the precedent was not false, but just as dangerous in its effects.) Either way, a dangerous situation remained that Kennedy needed to address.
About a month later, in late June or early July 1961, I was in Kaysen’s office in the Executive Office Building when he mentioned to me, “By the way, we found your black notebook.”
“What notebook?” I hadn’t heard of a notebook, and I hadn’t mentioned one to him.
“The one with the letters from Eisenhower.” He pointed to a loose-leaf notebook on a table by his window. He told me there were copies in it of letters signed by Eisenhower to each of the theater commanders along with SAC and NORAD who controlled nuclear weapons, specifying circumstances under which they were authorized to use nuclear weapons without immediate presidential authorization.
He said the circumstances included the need, in their judgment, for fast action at a time when communications were out with Washington. But they weren’t limited entirely to that. They also provided for situations when the president was physically incapacitated, as during Eisenhower’s stroke. (That didn’t seem to allow for command to be reserved for the secretary of defense, who was second in the chain of command by the National Security Act of 1958. But these letters were originally sent in 1957.)
I should have asked to read the actual letters, but I didn’t. Nor did I press for details when I asked him how he had found them. He just told me he hadn’t been entirely satisfied by my conclusions and had kept probing, and the notebook had finally turned up. I asked, “What has the president decided to do?”
“Nothing. He’s not doing anything. He’s letting them stand.”
This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I asked, “Why is he doing that?”
Kaysen said, “This is not the time for Lieutenant Kennedy to reverse the decision of the Great General.”
“Lieutenant” was Kennedy’s naval rank in World War II. In all his campaigns he had run as a war hero, but that status had been earned after he had allowed his PT boat to be cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. Kennedy might now be commander in chief, but he had never been supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, and it wasn’t the time, Kaysen was saying, for him to be disagreeing with the prior judgment of the general who had been.
It was “not the time” for it. I could understand the politics of this, both bureaucratic and diplomatic—it was just after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs and reports of JFK’s weak performance at the Vienna Summit with Khrushchev—but it still jarred me. It meant that Kennedy and the NSC were not going to look into or do anything about the problem that seemed to me the greatest danger, the sub-delegations and the general looseness of control below the level of the four-star admiral or general. If I’d been asked, I would have urged Kaysen and Bundy to make sure that this time the letters ruled out—or, at the least, limited—further delegation.
But that would have meant a confrontation with the military over the issue of sub-delegation just as sharp as the one to be expected if Kennedy had tried to withdraw Ike’s delegation to CINCPAC, CINCSAC, and the other unified and specified commanders. General Lauris Norstad at NATO and other
s would have leaked to Republicans in Congress to raise in closed hearings—which would in turn have leaked to the public—that Kennedy was not only contradicting their own judgment of the requirements of national security, but was also reversing the decision of the Great General.
Precisely to compensate for an impression of inexperience after the events of the last few months, Kennedy just then named as chief of staff of the Air Force General Curtis LeMay, the man with the toughest militarist image in the armed services. This despite the fact that a number of observers, including Robert Kennedy, would report incidents when certain military men—LeMay above all—would give Kennedy the impression that they were essentially insane, madly reckless, or out of touch with reality. (These included, the next year, LeMay’s strongly worded advice on the Sunday morning in 1962 when Khrushchev announced he was dismantling his missiles in Cuba that the president should go ahead and attack Cuba anyway.) Yet it was Kennedy who had named LeMay as chief of staff of the Air Force on June 30, 1961, and kept him there.
In the fall of 1961, as part of my work for General Earle E. Partridge’s Working Group on Presidential Command and Control, I made an appointment to interview the Air Force chief of staff. I had mentioned the upcoming interview to Kaysen and he asked if he might accompany me, having never met the legendary LeMay.
In the course of our talk, I asked LeMay how concerned he had been, as commander of SAC, about the possibility of a surprise attack by a Soviet submarine on Washington. He said calmly that he had “felt satisfied” with his authority as CINCSAC to carry out his plans in that event, which was clearly a reference to the Eisenhower delegation that I had reported on at the start of the year and which Kaysen had confirmed.
But before I could pursue that—the first face-to-face reference to delegated authority from a military officer I had heard outside the Pacific Command—LeMay took the discussion into territory I had never explored before. Suppose that Washington had not been hit, he said, when warning of an enemy attack came in. Should the president be part of the decision process at all, he asked us, even if he were alive and in communication?
Neither Kaysen nor I had ever heard that question raised before. We waited for him to continue, which he seemed to have expected. He rolled his cigar at the corner of his mouth in a way I’d seen imitated by some of his staff officers. (His ever-present half-smoked cigar gave him a tough look, befitting his reputation. I learned later that he used it to disguise a touch of Bell’s palsy.) Speaking gruffly, he asked rhetorically, “After all, who is more qualified to make that decision [of whether to go to nuclear war on the basis of warning]: some politician who may have been in office for only a couple of months … or a man who has been preparing all his adult life to make it?” Both his lips and his voice curled contemptuously around the words “some politician.” The “p” was an explosive puff. And the personal reference seemed pointed. This was the first year of the current politician’s presidential term, in which “Lieutenant Kennedy” had held back air support from his beleaguered invasion force at the Bay of Pigs. (And, as I learned later, the year he had refrained from knocking down the new Berlin Wall and then refused to send combat troops to Vietnam,61 having earlier rejected sending them to Laos.) The general making the comment, for years the commander of the Strategic Air Command, was the man who had planned and directed the immolation of a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9–10, 1945, and five months after that had commanded the atomic-bomb strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.a
I never found out why I had been unable to confirm the existence of the letters myself earlier. When I raised the issue much later with Tazewell Shepard—by then a Navy captain—after Kaysen had turned up the notebook, he assured me convincingly that he hadn’t been kidding me; he really hadn’t known of their existence when I asked. If I hadn’t run across the issue in the Pacific and raised it with Bundy when I did, it’s possible that no one in the White House would have known of it for a long time.
* * *
Meanwhile, my new access to the White House made it possible to tie up another loose end. In April 1961 I told Harry Rowen about the situation in Iwakuni. His boss, Paul Nitze, was in charge of military liaison with foreign countries, including base rights. He had the civilian authority, under Secretary McNamara, for dealing with our relations with Japan and the question of possible treaty violation at Iwakuni that I’d been told about. Harry asked me to describe the problem in writing for Nitze and to do the typing myself for special security within the office. Thus, I typed out a memo and stamped it “Top Secret—Eyes Only for Paul Nitze.”
“Eyes Only” was not a classification but a handling designation indicating that this was not for routine distribution within an agency or office and was not to be copied or shown to anyone other than the specific addressees listed in the heading. It was “for their eyes only.” The need for special handling within the office was that ISA was staffed largely with active-duty military officers from various services. In theory, their immediate current loyalty was to ISA and its boss, but in practice, their careers depended on their relations with past and future superiors in their home service. They tended to keep those channels open and inform their service headquarters privately of anything that might concern them. In this case, where the Navy or Marines might take strong objection to a decision by Nitze to change their practices, it was important to delay their finding out what might be coming from the assistant secretary.
I wrote in detail all that I knew about the nuclear weapons on the USS San Joaquin County and how I had come to know it. I also provided an exhaustive analysis of the pros and cons, since anyone first hearing of such an anomaly would tend to assume there must be some highly technical reason justifying it. I reported that, to the officers aware of it in the theater, there was evidently no strategic or technical rationale at all for the arrangement, no tangible military advantage counterbalancing what they saw as obvious diplomatic risks.
The reason the Marine planes on Iwakuni were provided such ready access to nuclear weapons was simply that their landing strip was near the beach, the Marines were part of the Navy and practiced in amphibious operations, and the Navy was able and willing to provide them secretly with a nearby LST (landing ship, tank). Presumably the Air Force wasn’t tempted to do something similar for its own planes, because it wasn’t practical to keep, say, a KC-97 tanker loaded with nuclear weapons flying continuously above an Air Force base in Japan. It wasn’t even as though a large number of Navy bases were benefited by this arrangement. This violation of the treaty affected only a handful of weapons at one base. Yet the political risk was virtually the same as if it had been a lot of bases.
Nitze had my memo “staffed out.” He assigned his assistant Timothy Stanley to investigate the problem, and Stanley had me rewrite my report for other staffers. Eventually I was shown various reports that came out of this. All the facts that I had presented were confirmed. The foreign affairs specialists within ISA also corroborated that the situation was a clear-cut violation of both the letter and the spirit of our security treaty with Japan.
In these responses, Iwakuni was contrasted with marginal cases like the carrier visits and even the possibility of our emergency alert plans being executed. The San Joaquin County was a permanent arrangement. It couldn’t even be said to be “in the waters, not on the territory,” since the ship was so close to shore that it would be regarded by every legal test as being on the territory of Japan. The answers also corroborated the extreme diplomatic risks this situation involved and concluded that it was highly urgent to correct this situation immediately.
But a new piece of information came in as well. One of the staffers reported that, on first investigating the situation, he went to the special assistant to the secretary of defense for atomic weapons and atomic energy, Gerald W. Johnson, who was responsible for knowing the current whereabouts of every individual nuclear weapon in the world, including test devices and weapons under produc
tion. The special assistant possessed an enormous loose-leaf notebook that contained the reported current location of every operational weapon in the world. No weapons were listed in Japan. No ship carrying weapons was listed as stationed there. In fact, the book contained no indication that a situation such as I described existed.
When Nitze’s investigator pressed the point, Johnson, whose job as a direct representative of the secretary of defense afforded him very high status, picked up the phone and called his Navy counterpart to check on it. He was told that there was no such situation, that my story had no basis.
However, in pursuing the name I had supplied for the LST, Nitze’s man soon discovered that the San Joaquin County was listed in Navy records as homeported in Okinawa. By further interviews, he discovered that it was being carried that way in Navy reporting precisely as a cover to deceive the special assistant and his boss about the fact that it was permanently based in Iwakuni, except for a few months every three years when it was in Okinawa for repairs and overhaul. By coincidence, at the very time of this investigation it was back in Okinawa undergoing its triennial refitting, which would take another month or so.
Deceiving the secretary of defense on the whereabouts of a nuclear weapon was the highest imaginable offense within the bureaucracy. No one reading this report could miss that point. It was not within the rules of the bureaucratic game, in the remotest sense. But there was an obvious bureaucratic solution. All that had to be done was to keep the LST home in Okinawa. Nitze’s staff recommended that he take this up immediately with McNamara. A directive was drafted for him to give to McNamara, ordering the ship not to return to Japan. McNamara signed and sent it to the chief of naval operations (CNO, the Navy chief of staff), Admiral Arleigh Burke.
The Doomsday Machine Page 14