Night of Camp David

by Fletcher Knebel

  5.

  Cactus

  Lieutenant General John M. Trumbull flipped the folder to the center of the conference table. The folder was red-bordered and bore a stamped legend, TOP SECRET, in black letters. It slid on the polished wax and came to rest in front of the pudgy man from the Rand Corporation who wore his pipe straight down like a sagging goatee.

  “I’ve read the damn thing ten times,” boomed the general, “and it won’t march, as the French say.”

  The psychologist from Harvard, whose hairless scalp met his brow like the edge of a cliff, put his hands to his ears. “Not so loud, General,” he said. “It’s too early in the morning.”

  It was 10 A.M., Monday, in the Pentagon. General Trumbull spoke again, reminding his auditors of approaching thunder. “It’s spinach and to hell with it, as the kids say.”

  The man from the State Department fiddled with his lapel and looked vaguely bored. A Navy captain, the communications expert, squinted down his yellow pencil as though it were a gun barrel. Butch Andrate, Secretary of Defense Sidney Karper’s nonvoting “observer” on the committee, continued his doodling. He had just drawn General Trumbull with a head shaped like a genial megaphone.

  The secret five-man committee for Project CACTUS—in Pentagonese, “Command And Control, The Ultimate System”—was meeting again this Monday morning as it had every Monday for five months. Its mission was to refine and improve the method by which the United States government decided to fire a nuclear warhead at an enemy, reducing to absolute zero, if possible, the chances of firing one by mistake or miscalculation. Or, in the words of Secretary Karper’s directive, the committee was ordered to “study the command and control system and recommend improvements, with particular attention to insulation of human aberrations.”

  Ever since the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, incinerating the city with a fireball that generated 100 million degrees of heat at its core, command and control of the weapon and its monster progeny had occupied countless officers, committees and commissions.

  Over the years, the system had been perfected gradually. An elaborate but instantaneous communications network, complete with foolproof codes and authenticators, permitted swift response to a surprise enemy attack. It also reduced the chances of individual error to almost nothing, so that not once in a million times could a nuclear warhead be fired by mistake. But “almost” was not good enough for Sidney Karper. He wanted the chances squeezed down to zero.

  Under the law in existence since the late forties, only the President of the United States could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon, but under the system as it actually operated in recent years, responsibility was spread among three men—the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These three had been designated the National Command Authorities in 1962 when Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara established the National Military Command Center. This hub of instant communications and intelligence was located behind heavy oak doors in the restricted JCS area of the Pentagon along the ninth corridor of the second floor. Here four watch crews maintained a 24-hour vigil and here, in times of crisis, the five members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gathered about an egg-shaped table. Each officer had direct links to bases around the globe. Four loudspeakers brought instant word of critical developments from the Strategic Air Command in Omaha and the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs.

  While the President alone had the final authority to release atomic and hydrogen weapons, in practice the other two National Command Authorities had to advise him that a nuclear strike was justified. In the event of a surprise enemy attack, a communications labyrinth of incredible complexity—computers, codes, long lines, authenticators, buttons and gold telephones—permitted a command decision within minutes. If the President’s two subordinates, one military and one civilian, did not agree that nuclear warheads should be launched, the system called for another swift consultation with the two men and a presidential decision—within six minutes. In theory, the President could overrule anybody, but again in practice it was held highly unlikely that the President would reverse both men. In sum, academicians of the grisly subject foresaw that unless at least two of the three men involved gave the “Go” signal, no warheads would leave their berths.

  In all the years since Hiroshima, this overture to holocaust had remained, blessedly, a matter of theory among the nuclear powers. Yet it preyed on men’s minds through a dozen crises on all continents, and there had been many days, cloaked from the public, when the men involved in the final American atomic judgment rehearsed their parts in the split-second pageant of life and death, fearful that the next moment might transform the stage to reality. In these long, somber hours, the men of decision could see shattered, wasted cities, imagine the drifting pall of lethal radiation, and hear the whimper of a legless child in the rubble of a playground. In those hours the great became humble, and when the crisis passed, the mark remained on every man, seared on his heart as though with a branding iron until the day of his death.

  Sidney Karper, who veiled his compassion with rough humor and crisp talk of megatons, had lived through such a crisis as a minor Pentagon official in a prior administration. Although he had no role in the swift cycle of decision then, he had known what took place, and so the scar was upon his heart too. Thus his assistants were not surprised when Karper, soon after he took the oath as secretary of defense, began to worry about perfecting “C and C.” With his keen, roving mind, he pried into hundreds of crevices in the huge military establishment—in a manner unknown since McNamara—but always he came back to the harrying question, the nuclear decision.

  Karper created the committee in the utmost secrecy, picked the five members with care, financed the project with $250,000 from the Secretary’s contingency fund and imposed rigid security precautions on the committee and its inevitable task forces. President Hollenbach approved the project casually one afternoon and asked for a progress report every three months.

  Only to Butch Andrate, his confidential special assistant, did Karper reveal the fears that inspired Project CACTUS. The plump Andrate, tie loosened and horn-rim glasses pushed up on his pompadour like a freakish owl, came into Karper’s office near the Pentagon’s River Entrance for final instructions before the first meeting of the CACTUS committee. Karper sat at his clean desk, flanked by the Secretary’s flag and that of the United States. Through the window, Andrate could see white bristles on the Potomac and the spin of traffic on the approaches to the Pentagon.

  Andrate tapped the CACTUS directive. “I get everything except this thing about ‘insulation of human aberrations,’ ” he said. “Whatcha got in mind, boss?”

  “Forrestal,” replied Karper.

  He was a huge man, hard muscles under blue pin-stripe suit, and with the bronze tint of his skin and the imposing hooked beak, he looked more American Indian than Jewish. Karper lived as a man of style, in dress, in speech, in posture, and only one habit gave a hint of his tough boyhood days on Chicago’s near South Side. At work, he frequently had a quill toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth and occasionally he blew through it, as he did now, making a noise not unlike a peanut whistle.

  “Forrestal?” asked Andrate.

  Karper nodded his great head. “Jim Forrestal was off his rocker long before that night in 1949 when he started to copy Sophocles’s ‘Chorus from Ajax,’ and then jumped out of a sixteenth-story window at Bethesda Naval Hospital.”

  “I didn’t know he was copying a poem,” said Andrate.

  “Our first secretary of defense,” said Karper, “looked solid as a rock, with that bulldog chin and the boxer’s broken nose. Gentiles can deceive you. Now me, if I cracked up, it would show in every pore. But Forrestal was breaking up for weeks before anybody guessed.”

  “And we don’t want that to happen to anybody involved in C and C today?” Andrate jiggled his glas
ses on the top of his head.

  “We can’t prevent a man from going nuts,” said Karper, “but if he does, we’ve got to find a way to isolate him from the big decision. It’s that simple. That’s what I want the CACTUS committee to come up with.”

  “Boss, you don’t look goofy to me.” Andrate liked to keep it light.

  Karper blew through his toothpick, a whining whistle. He rolled his big body in the swivel chair. “Anybody can smash up,” he said. “There are three of us involved in the ‘Go’ decision now, and who knows what goes on inside any of us? If any one of the three blows his top, we’ve got a right and a duty to know it as soon as possible. Then we’ve got to insulate him from the decision. That man has no business being in a spot where he can…how did Lyndon Johnson say it? Oh, yes, mash the button….The last time a madman mashed the button, we got the Second World War and six million Jews were cremated. The next time the button is mashed, we could cremate the human race.”

  Andrate said nothing and for minutes the only sound in the room was the muffled click of a typewriter from the other office.

  “Okay, I got the message, boss,” said Andrate at last. “But it’s a large order. It won’t fly by itself.”

  “No, it won’t be easy.” Karper grinned and got up, his six-foot-four body looming over his chubby aide. “As far as the President alone is concerned, Congress did its best on the disability question, although there’s no real machinery to spot mental instability. Here, on this side of the river, we’ve got a special responsibility. We’ve got to make sure, somehow, that when the three National Command Authorities confer on the decision of life and death, all of them are thinking as normal men. So just tell the CACTUS bunch that I want that button kept away from the loony bin. How they do it is their job.”

  Under Karper’s directive, the CACTUS “bunch” worked harder than any Pentagon group before it. Lieutenant General John Trumbull, called back from Air Force retirement, might bray at his colleagues, but he was astute, a canny leader, and he had long personal experience with the command and control system. At the first session in the pale-green conference room on the executive E ring of the Pentagon—big John Trumbull complained the room made him so seasick he should have joined the Navy—Butch Andrate made it plain that it was the last clause of the directive, “insulation of human aberrations,” which concerned the Secretary. The committee got down to work. First it considered and discarded a Rand proposal, outgrowth of a continuing study under Air Force contract. Then the Harvard professor put a joint Harvard-M.I.T. task force to work for two months, but the committee rejected that plan also, as it did a proposal by a group of communications officers headed by the Navy captain.

  After five months of labor, the CACTUS group had not been able to do the job. They had tried—and discarded—almost every conceivable idea: a panel of psychiatrists making quarterly examinations of the Big Three—JCS Chairman, SECDEF, and the President; regular examinations by a psychiatrist of the official’s choice; granting authority to the surgeon general to give the National Command Authorities a clean bill of mental health after investigation; entrusting the job to a computer with periodic questionnaires to be filled out by the principals; a special committee of Congress authorized to conduct mental tests under its own rules; a law, or perhaps a constitutional amendment, creating the office of psychiatrist general who would have broad powers to delve into the mental status of all top government officials.

  And now, this Monday morning, the committee was down to what all knew was the last proposal, a formula concocted by the Harvard psychologist and the Rand man. It was complicated and cumbersome, but in essence it provided that if one of the Big Three had reason to doubt the “mental normality” of either of the others, he could notify the surgeon general who would then convoke a panel of psychiatrists. The psychiatrists would examine the supposedly faulty mind under prescribed methods and then make a recommendation to the surgeon general. If the examinee, in the surgeon general’s opinion, was mentally unbalanced, the surgeon general would report to a joint committee of the Congress. This committee, in turn, could either refuse to act or it could demand the resignation of the official. Should the official refuse to resign, the committee would institute impeachment proceedings through regular channels in the House of Representatives.

  The Harvard-Rand paper had been submitted to the full committee the previous Monday—and now big John Trumbull had given his answer by flipping the document down the table. The little Rand man, sucking his pipe like a straw in a soda, slowly patted the spilled papers back into the folder.

  “It’s no criticism of you fellows to say your plan won’t go,” said Trumbull. He cleared his throat like a dredge at work. “But it’s still the old fourth man theme.”

  The “fourth man theme” had become the group’s nickname for any proposal which would stipulate another person or group to inquire into the mental stability of the Big Three involved in the nuclear decision.

  “The old fourth man theme,” repeated Trumbull, his voice rolling through the room like a boulder. “Only this time we’ve got about thirty people as the fourth man. This hydra-headed fourth man is supposed to winnow the sane from the insane. We have to assume that he’s omniscient—or they are—with the wisdom of Solomon and the righteous wrath of Jehovah. Gentlemen, you don’t hardly find that kind no more…”

  “As the comedians say,” finished the Harvard professor tartly. The psychologist privately tagged big John a “negativist.” He’d had a hunch from the start that the general believed they were wasting time. The Harvard man felt deeply that they should make a beginning—anything reasonable. Frustration chipped at his nerves.

  “With all due respect to our friends from Harvard and Rand,” said the State Department man, politely aloof, “their plan is web-footed. It might take a year to work through that maze of procedure.”

  “Meanwhile,” added the Navy captain, “the troubled mind, if such be the case, would be getting no more normal.”

  “Or the world might be gone.” The State Department man said it without emphasis, as though the globe could encounter worse fates.

  “But we’ve tried every other approach,” complained the Rand man. He was deflated and his pipe hung down over his chin. “At least our plan is politically feasible. It ties in Congress with the executive branch.”

  General Trumbull thumped the heel of his hand on the table. “I’ve had five tours in this rabbit warren, and I think I know something about how the town works, inside the Pentagon, on the Hill, and over on Pennsylvania Avenue. Christ on a raft, gentlemen, this place leaks like a sieve. How could you keep the whole thing secret, with thirty people cut into the show? Why, it would be all over the front pages within a week that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or the Secretary of Defense was suspected of not having all his marbles. And if that wouldn’t make Peiping trigger-happy, I don’t know what would.”

  “And suppose the man is really as sane as we are, after all?” asked the Navy captain. “Even if he got cleared eventually by a committee of Congress, his career would be wrecked. I agree with John. In any plan involving this fourth man theme, you’ve got to have God as the fourth man. Unfortunately, you don’t ask God to fill a billet. He asks you.”

  “I’ll admit our proposal isn’t simple,” pleaded the Harvard man, “but it will work. If it’s time that’s bothering you, we could recommend a time limit on each step. For instance, the panel of psychiatrists could be required to report back to the surgeon general within two weeks.”

  “Great God,” exclaimed Trumbull, “it takes one of those head shrinkers two weeks just to find out whether his man was trained to the potty as a kid.”

  “The major flaw, it seems to me,” said the State Department man, “is that this procedure would require an act of Congress to set it up. That means endless debate in the country before the system could go into operation. Even assuming you could get an enabling bill
through both houses, it wouldn’t bear the faintest resemblance to this Harvard-Rand proposal.”

  “Of course,” said Trumbull. “Any fourth man idea requires Congressional sanction before it could be put into operation. By the time the debate ended, the country would think that everybody and his brother in Washington were crazy.”

  “But,” protested the Rand man, “we agreed long ago that any plan in which the National Command Authorities were the judges of their own—uh—well, relative sanity would be impossible.”

  “So we did,” agreed Trumbull. “And now, it appears to me, we’ve also exhausted the fourth man theme.”

  “I refuse to believe that the five brains around this table can’t come up with a single recommendation for the Secretary,” said the Harvard psychologist.

  “Thanks for conceding I’ve got a brain, professor.” Trumbull grinned and shook his hands aloft like a boxer in the ring.

  “Vote!” said the Navy captain.

  General Trumbull shot a look of gratitude at his military colleague, as though his suggestion was the best of the morning. He banged the heel of his hand on the table again.

  “All in favor of recommending the Harvard-Rand plan to the Secretary will raise their right hands.”

  Harvard and the little Rand man crooked their right elbows. The two hands waved weakly, like men overboard who see the lifeboat pulling away from them.

  “All opposed, raise their hands.”

  Trumbull, the Navy captain, and the State Department officer shot their right hands high.

  “By vote of three to two,” said Trumbull, “the committee declines to recommend the plan to the Secretary.”

  Butch Andrate, still doodling with his head lowered, wrote on his yellow pad: “Long-hairs 2, short-hairs 3.”

  “I move,” said the Navy captain, “that this committee do now adjourn and that the chairman report to Secretary Karper that we have been unable to agree on a feasible plan.”