Realizing the Dream of Flight Early in 1963, LeMay gave another of his many appearances before Congress. This testimony was particularly close to his heart, since it argued in favor of maintaining the manned bomber even as the USAF became increasingly reliant on ballistic missiles. He was asking for some $300 million to be restored to a procurement law so that the USAF might accomplish the early stages of its program for a new reconnaissance strike aircraft, the RS-70 (formerly the B-70). LeMay had been at loggerheads with Secretary McNamara on this issue; opposing the administration view before Congress enabled him to use the power inherent in the constitutional system of checks and balances to appeal to the body in charge of the purse strings. In the end, LeMay won the day; Congress voted in favor of funding the RS-70. Though LeMay knew that the money might not, in the end, be spent as authorized, he felt good in his successful effort to put forward the case of the USAF and Joint Chiefs of Staff. He remarked, “Consciences of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in majority, are clear. And so will be the consciences of the Committee on Armed Services.”69 The debate over the RS-70 was only one of many issues that kept LeMay’s tenure as Chief of Air Staff a turbulent one. Though he learned the ways of Washington, he was no natural politician. The skills that had made him an excellent field commander—being able to fix on a problem and locate the single best solution—were the same skills that complicated his life at higher levels, where problems were rarely amenable to a single best solution. But LeMay served as his conscience dictated. He gave the advice he believed to be the best military advice—not the advice he felt the politicians would want to hear. He carried out his duties within the bounds established by the civil-military relationship defined in the Constitution—a relationship that LeMay respected and believed in.70 LeMay retired from service in February 1965. In his brief final speech he told the members of the Air Staff, “Make sure you are right before you move and then stick to your guns and keep fighting for what you want. It takes a long time here to get things done; however, water wears away the stone. Right prevails in the end in our form of government.”71
CONCLUSION Curtis LeMay lived for nearly 30 more years. American policy in Vietnam grieved him deeply, and, in 1968, he made an injudicious and unsuccessful entry into politics as the vice presidential candidate for Governor George Wallace’s third-party run for the U.S. presidency. Toward the end of his life he admitted that choice had been a mistake, but,
69 LeMay, Mission with LeMay, p. 12. 70 Ibid., pp. 553–554. 71 Coffey, Iron Eagle, pp. 437–438.
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