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, 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.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "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, 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." in the context of "Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions from a Nuclear War Planner (2017)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.