George Lee Butler: Second Chance I-The Decision
Note: This entry is one in a series that tells some of the story of General George Lee Butler. In the early 1990’s, Butler served as the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command, the Air Force command in charge of delivering our nuclear weapons. After retiring from the Air Force in 1994, Butler came eventually to lead efforts for their elimination. Quotations in this piece will be cited to the page numbers where the material appears in Volume II of George Lee Butler’s memoir, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention, Outskirts Press (2016).
There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. Brutus to Cassius in Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, Act IV, Scene III
Former Senator Alan Cranston, who had retired in 1993, had since been a strong opponent of nuclear weapons. In 1997, he was the head of the State of the World Forum supported by the Gorbachev Foundation. Cranston had observed the very enthusiastic receptions Butler’s speeches had received at the State of the World Forum in 1996, at the National Press Club in 1996, and at the Stimson Center in 1997. He’d heard about the equally enthusiastic reception of Butler’s Geiringer Oration in New Zealand in 1997. And he’d seen the undiminished enthusiasm Butler’s second speech at the National Press Club had received in February 1998.
In September 1998, Butler had gone to Europe and given an invited address to the European Parliament in Brussels. “The reception truly astounding,” Butler writes, “with this very eclectic audience on its feet, evincing a deep connection across a wide array of nationalities and political parties.” Cranston heard about that too, no doubt.
In the fall of 1998, Cranston called Butler and asked to bring a “small delegation” to Omaha to meet with Butler to “put a proposition to [him] about [his] future participation in the cause of nuclear abolition.”
Cranston brought a “very interesting group” to the meeting, Butler said. It included David Cortright, president of the Fourth Freedom Foundation; Jonathan Schell, author of the celebrated and alarming book The Fate of the Earth; the noted television journalist George Crile; Tom Graham, who until recently had been working in the Rockefeller Foundation, focused on the foundation’s activities to support reducing the nuclear threat; and by phone, George Perkovich, Program Director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation. 283
“Their pitch to me,” Butler wrote,
was well thought out and forcefully presented: enter the nuclear abolition arena full time, create an organization to support my activities, raise the money essential to become a leading player, and build a strategy to capitalize on the global impact of my speeches at the National Press Club, the Stimson Center and in Wellington. 283-4
Lee and Dorene Butler “spent several days thinking through the implications of such a dramatic change of direction”—Butler was still working as an executive in Kiewet Corporation in Omaha—and consulting family members. Finally they made the momentous decision
to take on the challenge of my becoming a professional nuclear activist: creating a public non-profit foundation, finding and equipping an office, hiring staff, designing a strategy, raising tens of millions of dollars, and committing to a life of relentless travel, speaking, debating, corresponding, engaging with the press, being castigated by critics, questioned by friends, and lauded by supporters, most of whom did not know me, made unwarranted assumptions about my motivations, and wanted to cast me in the role of leader of the Peace Movement.
As I look back on that fateful September 1998 meeting and try to capture the dizzying array of actions it set in motion, I can see clearly, even painfully, that it triggered the most physically-demanding, intellectually-challenging, and emotionally-stressful periods in my life. 284
Just a minute. This is a combat fighter pilot speaking, a man who had gone on to serve as Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command, had overseen the highly charged standing down of SAC and the unprecedented standing up of the new Strategic Command. And looking back, he sees his time as a “professional nuclear activist” as the “most physically-demanding, intellectually-challenging, and emotionally-stressful period” of his life?
We talk, rightly, about the “sacrifice” of the people who serve in our armed forces. We honor those who go against their natural inclinations and put themselves in harm’s way. We tend to assume that members of the armed forces do what they do out of love of country and a sense of duty and honor. They are considered “patriots.” Mercenaries and psychopaths are not honored in the same way, no matter how effective they are as fighters.
It seems we may also need to recognize that “sacrifice” can be entailed, possibly to an even greater extent, for those who, like George Lee Butler, set themselves (in the words of the subtitle to Butler’s memoir) “at odds with convention.”
The intensity of the enthusiastic worldwide response to Butler’s support for the elimination of nuclear weapons had to derive in part from people’s appreciation of the extent to which this went against his “natural inclinations” and the reputational risk he was taking as a military man in making these arguments.
Those who set themselves at odds with convention also may do so for love of country and out of a sense of duty and honor and in a way that goes against their natural inclinations, but they will probably not be called patriots. Parades will not be mounted in their honor.
In any case, at the end of 1998, after due deliberation, Lee and Doreen Butler established a foundation to lead and coordinate national and international efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. The foundation would need a name. The name settled on was the Second Chance Foundation. It was taken from something Butler had said in one of his speeches.
Mankind escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of diplomatic skill, blind luck and divine intervention, probably the latter in greatest proportion. If we now fail to step back from the nuclear abyss, if we persist in courting the apocalypse, we will have squandered our Creator’s gift of a ‘second chance.’
“Courting the apocalypse” is a provocative phrase, isn’t it? It suggests that something about “the apocalypse” is being desired. We can act in ways that make this seem so, can’t we? When it comes to nuclear weapons, is it possible that at some level we can be attracted by the fact that we have achieved the power to destroy life on earth in an afternoon? And would be gratified at some level if we were the ones who made it happen?
Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab comes to mind. Having at long last driven his harpoon into the flank of Moby Dick, he has become entangled in the line. He is now being dragged down into the dark deep. What was the expression on his face? Horrified recognition? Wait. Could that be a small smile?