Butler VII: Another Hard Thing Butler Did as CINCSAC--Bring the News
Note: 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).
Did you know that in 1953, at the beginning of President Eisenhower’s first term in office, we’d had about 800 atomic bombs and at the end his second term, we’d had 18,000, many the immensely more powerful thermonuclear bombs?
We’d also acquired the giant B-52 jet bomber and the tankers that could re-fuel it in the air. We’d deployed Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles and were about to deploy Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. We’d improved guidance systems for those missiles. We’d built massive warning systems to let us know about impending nuclear attacks. We’d built massive underground shelters for our civilian and military leaders.
Our Lockheed company had developed a spy plane, the U-2, that could fly so high over their country the Soviets couldn’t shoot it down, at least not at first. For a while in the late 50’s, we’d flown U-2s over the Soviet Union to spy in on them. At the end of Eisenhower’s administration, just before a summit that President Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev had scheduled to talk about how to reduce nuclear dangers, the Soviets, using a new missile they’d developed, shot down one of the U-2s that President Eisenhower had authorized our Central Intelligence Agency to fly illegally over their country. When President Eisenhower wouldn’t apologize for flying it over their country without their permission, Nikita Khrushchev canceled the summit meeting.
Growing up in Tucson, Arizona, I’d seen some of this spectacular stuff—including the B-36 and later the U-2—flying out of Davis-Monthan, the Strategic Air Command base in my home town. It was stuff that made you go “Gee whiz!” And feel funny sometimes.
In 1961, the year after I left Tucson for Amherst College in Massachusets, President Eisenhower gave, at the end of his two terms in office, a “Farewell Address.” It turned out to be a warning against what he called the “military-industrial complex.” He said we’d had no choice but to develop the huge military establishment that had developed during his administration. In any case, he hadn’t been able to see another way. And now, he told us, we had in place this “military-industrial complex” that had acquired what he said was “unwarranted influence.” The only protection against it, he said, would be provided by an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”
Just a minute. If the President himself couldn’t protect against what had happened, how was the citizenry supposed to? Especially if our leaders weren’t going to help us become “knowledgeable.” Which they weren’t, obviously.
In President Eisenhower’s first year in office, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had led the Scientific Division of the Manhattan Project, had proposed that our leaders embark on something called Operation Candor. It would be an initiative by our leaders to educate the American public about our actual circumstances now when it came to nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race. At first, President Eisenhower seemed taken by the idea. But he seems to have changed his mind. Before year was out, Oppenheimer’s security clearance had been revoked. The watchword now wasn’t “knowledge.” It was “secrecy.” Said to be necessary for “national security.” We would just have to trust them on that.
In January 1991, as General Butler drove up the last mile of the approach to the North Gate of Offutt Air Force Base, where the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command were located, to assume his post as Commander in Chief of SAC, he’d noticed an “array of shiny new office buildings. . . all emblazoned with the names of the defense-industry firms feeding at the strategic nuclear mission trough.”
“I had been introduced to the United States military-industrial complex early in my career,” Butler writes, “through the auspices of the Air Force Association.” (p.124) The AFA was a non-profit professional military organization that had been founded in 1946, the year SAC itself was founded, to support veterans and promote air-power. Oh, and also, their mission statement said, to “educate” the public. Lobby the public, maybe?
The other armed services would, before long, establish organizations similar to the Air Force Association.
The AFA’s first president had been the famous General Jimmy Doolittle, who had led the one-way bomber attack on Japan early in the war in the Pacific. A founding member of the AFA was the Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan. During the War he had been in the Army Air Forces in public relations. Making movies and such.
Every September, Butler writes, the AFA and its industrial allies would have a big convention in Washington, D.C. Thousands of attendees would “troop through the exhibit hall . . ., gawking at the gee-whiz displays and collecting souvenirs from the exhibitors.”
“Over the years,” Butler goes on, “my experience with and understanding of the AFA annual convention deepened. I became much more aware of the revolving door of senior military officers moving out of uniform and into the corridors of key defense industries and the reverse migration of top industry executives coming into high-level positions in the Department of Defense and elsewhere in the government.” (p. 125)
“This two-way flow,” continues Butler, “is by no means illegal, nor need it be unethical, but it is fraught with opportunity for mutual nest-feathering, sweetheart deals, inflated requirements, and massive contracts.”
“After a lifetime in the business,” he added, “I would see it all, the best and the worst: inventive genius and unbridled greed, superlative technology and shoddy manufacturing, brilliant foresight and head-in-the-sand denial of new realities.”
In 1991, his first year as CINCSAC, General Butler invited three dozen defense industry leaders to SAC Headquarters “for a conclave on the future of their businesses in the strategic nuclear arena.” From the four corners of the country came the leaders of such companies as Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, Rockwell, General Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas, Raytheon, many others. Many would have been on the list of the top 100 recipients of government contracts at the time. Northrup was the company that was building the new B-2 “Spirit” bomber that was going to cost $400 million a copy, maybe more, in fact almost certainly more. It was “stealthy,” meaning very nearly invisible to radar, but still. $400 million a copy? Congress had authorized 128 B-2s during the Reagan administration but getting that many didn’t seem possible now. Butler wanted to cut the number to the 20 already delivered.
At the meeting, General Butler spent six hours walking the defense industry leaders through the likely impact on their companies of the changes that were coming. He underscored that the picture he was painting was not his alone, but a composite view of the senior leadership of Department of Defense and the President of the United States. The process was not speculative or long-range, he told them. It was happening now. He was telling them this, he said, as a “professional favor to facilitate the sorting-out process in the defense-industrial sector that would inevitably follow this sweeping change in the nation’s security environment.” (p. 126)
“I was fascinated by their reactions," he writes. “Some shook their heads in disbelief and denial, others looked like they had taken a bullet to the chest,” but “one got the picture perfectly.” He asked if he could walk General Butler to his office and there asked one question. “You are serious about all this, aren’t you, General?”
“Serious as I can possibly be,” Butler replied.
“With that,” Butler writes, “he thanked me, returned to his corporate headquarters, restructured his company, and substantially spared it from what was to come.”
We should expect also, I think, that some of these defense industry leaders went back to the office and got in touch with their lobbyists and representatives in Congress, especially if their representatives were on the Armed Services or Appropriations Committees. Some might also have begun to reconsider their strategies in making campaign contributions.
It wasn’t just the President and the military leadership who had a say in what our “national security environment” would be. It was also the members of Congress. And those of us who elected them possibly. If we spoke up. Enough of us.
General Butler knew that the shake-out would be painful not just for many company executives, also for workers. And, in the places that hosted SAC bases, for the people whose business depended economically on the bases that might suffer cutbacks or even closure. It would also be painful, that is, for “communities.”
In the good old days, SAC had, writes Butler,
a well-established program of building ties to local political elites and opinion leaders by hosting them on visits to SAC headquarters. At least monthly, depending on my availability, groups of some two dozen citizens would be transported to Offutt aboard a KC-135 tanker, observing an air-to-air refueling en route, be accommodated in first-rate guest facilities, watch a spectacular multi-media presentation on the Strategic Air Command, spend an hour with me to get my take on world affairs, and then join Dorene and me at the officers’ club for a superb meal and concert by members of the SAC band. (p. 130)
Butler planned to visit every one of SAC’s three dozen bases, not just as part of his commitment to meet personally with every one of SAC’s personnel but to meet with leaders in the communities for whom the base sometimes “comprised the lifeblood of their local economies.” (p. 131)
Every visit included an evening function so we [Dorene and General Butler] could commune with the leading local citizens and spend time at the podium conveying our appreciation for their support and addressing their questions and concerns about the future of the base.
General Butler and Dorene would also evaluate the level and quality of that community support. Were they making sure, for example, that the military children were getting the proper attention in the schools? What was the quality of care at the local hospital?
“All,” writes Butler, “lived in genuine fear of having their local facilities announced as candidates for closure or realignment. For some communities, that would be a death knell.” (p. 132)
The spending of American tax receipts in the military-industrial complex or in local communities was never talked about as such but, whatever else it was, it was a major government jobs and economic stimulus project.
By this time, we’d begun to hear talk of a “peace dividend” that would follow upon end of the Cold War. That was not quite how it would be seen in the armed forces or among the defense contractors. Or by many in the communities around the bases.
Was this one of the dangers President Eisenhower had meant to warn us about?