Aviators From The United States

"Tom Cruise, he’s a lot more famous than me."

"That's laughable to me. That stuff's laughable."

"But even when I started out with Risky Business and Top Gun came out, there was the paparazzi. You knew them, and I could go up to them and say, 'Give me a break tonight. I'll give you the shots tomorrow'."

"I believe in God. … There is no way you can be up here [in the Rocky Mountains] and think that there isn't a God."

"I want to know that I've done everything I could every day I think of all those people out there who are depending on us. I think about it. It does make me feel we need more work, more help. Get those spectators on the playing field, or out of the arena. Really, that is how I feel about it. I do what I can, and I do it the way I do everything … there's nothing part of the way for me."

"I have to tell you something. It really is, you know, it's rough and tumble. It's wild and woolly. It's a blast...it's a blast. It really is fun, because dammit, there's nothing better than to going out there and fighting the fight …"

"It's like, we're here to help. If you're a Scientologist, you see life, things, the way they are, in all its glory, in all of its perplexity, and the more you know as a Scientologist, you don't become overwhelmed by it."

"We are the authorities on getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind. We are the authorities on improving conditions. Criminon (sic). We can rehabilitate criminals. We can bring peace and unite cultures."

"Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, it's not like anyone else, it's, you drive past, you know you have to do something about it. You know you are the only one who can really help. That's what drives me."

"There was a time I went through [the Scientology doctrine], I said, you know what, when I read it, I just thought 'Whoa', this is it. This is exactly it."

"I think it's a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist and it's something you have to earn. And because a Scientologist does, he or she has the ability to create new and better realities, and improve conditions."

"Sex is about the connection. Great sex is a by-product, for me, of a great relationship, where you have communication and it's an extension of that. Where it's just free. And that's how it should be. It's spectacular."

"It was more than fun, and it was more than great... It was historic. What Oprah did by acknowledging those women... they've not only had an impact on women, and African-American women, but on men, and on the world. They really have changed the culture for the better. It's a great inspiration."

"I kept looking [at wife Katie Holmes] and thinking, 'This woman's amazing.' I'm happy that I'm with her. She's amazing, and I'd think the same of her even if she wasn't with me -- she's just amazing."

"To go somewhere and say: 'I have this really terrific movie, but I need some . . . money' - Good luck!"

"I hate the word homophobia. It's not a phobia. You are not scared. You are an asshole."

"The search for truth is never over and the survival of truth is never assured. We have to choose - do we stand with those who wish to suppress the truth or stand with those who seek it."

"We have 7 billion people on this planet. It’s not that there’s not enough room on this planet for 7 billion people, it’s that the energy needs for 7 billion people are 7 billion people’s worth of energy needs, as opposed to, say, 2 billion. Imagine how much pollution would be in the air and the oceans if there were only 2 billion people putting it in? So yeah, we’re already overpopulated."

"You're going to relegate my history to a month? I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history."

"I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man."

"Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen - that stillness becomes a radiance."

"Any Ivy League academy asshole can issue orders and take the credit. What matters is when you place your own ass on the line, and your men know that you are not some armchair commander asking them to risk death while you enjoy the good life. Morale is everything, and you do not build it by typing goddamned reports and having cocktail parties. Strange, LBJ, and that ilk were like that. Those motherfuckers were whores paid to screw the public. And you know what? They never lost one night's sleep over it. They never had their ass in danger, and they never waited for the knock on the door telling them that their son was killed, all because some asshole with an Ivy League degree and a champagne glass in his hand decided that their boy did not need the money or weapons or even the fucking political support to stay alive."

"Eventually the decision was reached to accept the armed chopper as an essential part of the air mobility concept but not to allow the Army to use the Mohawk as an attack aircraft, confining it to a reconnaissance role. Both were wise decisions. But prior to these decisions there were some hot and emotional sessions of the JCS. One concerned the armed Huey, which as then being used successfully in Vietnam to support ARVN operations, but which was considered by the Air Force as illegal poaching on their roles and missions. This was in the midsummer of 1964. General LeMay suddenly took his cigar out of his mouth and, gesticulating wildly, challenged General Johnson to an aerial duel. He screamed, "Johnson, you fly one of those damned Huey's and I'll fly an F-105, and we'll see who survives. I'll shoot you down and scatter your peashooter all over the goddamn ground." I was eager to defend my chief, both verbally and physically (LeMay would have made two Johnsons in body weight, if not in mental poundage) but Johnson motioned to me to keep quiet and responded quietly: "I'm not a flier, but I will be happy to get qualified and take you on- we can agree on a time and place later. But let's not waste the valuable time of our colleagues on such a trivial matter.""

"When LeMay scared the hell out of his people, he made something out of them that I don't think was their true nature. He made them cringe and hide the truth. He made them say, "Yes, sir, yes, sir," becoming chronic liars protecting their own skins. Whom were these guys going to promote? Whom were they going to favor in their OER (Officer Effectiveness Report) system? It wouldn't be somebody better, or even someone similar to them. A man like that has to have somebody working for him that he can dominate, and he is inevitably going to pick a lesser individual. After about twenty years of this system the incest destroys the force. I had a bunch of really great friends in SAC, but a big group of guys were developed into people who were afraid to think for themselves. They damn near destroyed the air force in the process."

"SAC had been established by belligerent old General Curt LeMay and General Tommy Power, both pronuclear nutcases. Under their rules, if a wing commander messed up even a little bit he was canned and gone forever, so SAC fostered attitudes about how tough they were. What they really did was made a bunch of liars out of many wing commanders, DMs, and DOs. Guys at wing level were scared people. They would lie, cheat, steal, and deny- anything to make themselves look good."

"LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

"Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay's command. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve."

"Kennedy was trying to keep us out of war. I was trying to help him keep us out of war. And General Curtis LeMay, whom I served under as a matter of fact in World War II, was saying "Let's go in, let's totally destroy Cuba.""

"In 1943, 40,000 died in the German city of Hamburg, many in the firestorm that swept the city as a result of Allied bombing, and in 1945 perhaps a further 35,000 in Dresden. (The figure for the latter, like the choice of the target itself, remains highly controversial.) The American bombing of Tokyo that same year with incendiary bombs (a weapon chosen deliberately because so many structures in the city were made of wood) destroyed sixteen square miles and left 80,000 to 100,000 dead and 1 million homeless. Major-General Curtis LeMay, whose responsibility the raid was, said the Japanese were ‘scorched and boiled and baked to death’. It was no oversight that mass bombings were not included in the Allied indictment of Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg trials."

"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."

"Precisely to compensate for an impression of inexperience after the events of the last few months, Kennedy just then named as chief of staff of the Air Force General Curtis LeMay, the man with the toughest militarist image in the armed services. This despite the fact that a number of observers, including Robert Kennedy, would report incidents when certain military men—LeMay above all—would give Kennedy the impression that they were essentially insane, madly reckless, or out of touch with reality. (These included, the next year, LeMay’s strongly worded advice on the Sunday morning in 1962 when Khrushchev announced he was dismantling his missiles in Cuba that the president should go ahead and attack Cuba anyway.) Yet it was Kennedy who had named LeMay as chief of staff of the Air Force on June 30, 1961, and kept him there."

"An excellent pilot and officer equally capable in both combat and staff, LeMay was typical of the bomber-minded generals who emerged from World War II to dominate the Air Force during the Cold War."

"I used to receive a hundred calls a year from people who wanted me to get into the Green Room at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, because that's where the Air Force stored all the material gathered on UFOs. I once asked Curtis LeMay if I could get in that room, and he just gave me holy hell. He said, 'Not only can't you get into it but don't you ever mention it to me again.'"

"After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the "sense of utter irresponsibility" shown by the demonstrators. He had nothing to say then, nor has he since, about the "sense of utter irresponsibility" shown by Senator Mansfield and others who stand by quietly and vote appropriations as the cities and villages of North Vietnam are demolished, as millions of refugees in the South are driven from their homes by American bombardment. He has nothing to say about the moral standards or the respect for international law of those who have permitted this tragedy. I speak of Senator Mansfield precisely because he is not a breast-beating superpatriot who wants America to rule the world, but is rather an American intellectual in the best sense, a scholarly and reasonable man -- the kind of man who is the terror of our age. Perhaps this is merely a personal reaction, but when I look at what is happening to our country, what I find most terrifying is not Curtis LeMay, with his cheerful suggestion that we bomb everybody back into the stone age, but rather the calm disquisitions of the political scientists on just how much force will be necessary to achieve our ends, or just what form of government will be acceptable to us in Vietnam. What I find terrifying is the detachment and equanimity with which we view and discuss an unbearable tragedy. We all know that if Russia or China were guilty of what we have done in Vietnam, we would be exploding with moral indignation at these monstrous crimes."

"The practical effects of the policies are less interesting to policy makers in Washington than the spirit in which they’re intended. When you’re pulling the trigger, the spirit is always pure. Liberals believed that Curtis LeMay dropped bombs because he was a crazed warmonger who took pleasure in hurting people. Liberals believe they bomb countries for the same reason they once opposed bombing countries, because they want to make the world a better place."

"Lemay's style was to have his best crews set the highest standards, then provide more than adequate training and flying time for other crews to reach those standards of proficiency. He also insisted on scrupulously accurate records and very demanding evaluation procedures, knowing that he had inherited an air force that had reflexively gone from the rigors of war to the pleasures of a really well equipped flying club, one that paid you for belonging. It was a long process, for SAC was expanding rapidly. When the author joined the Strategic Air Command in January 1953, as a green second lieutenant freshly graduated from flying school, he was puzzled by the flying club atmosphere. Flying the big Boeing B-50s was done as a sport, radar bombing, navigation, and gunnery scores were fudged, and the principle occupation seemed to be playing hearts in the briefing room. Then one bright day Lemay's inspection team came in. Heads rolled, rigorous standards were introduced and enforced, and reporting became squeaky clean. Oddly enough, everyone still retaining his head was happier with the new system."

"When LeMay arrived to take over command, he was disappointed but not surprised at what he found- senior Air Force officers were aware that the Strategic Air Command in 1948 was woefully lacking in proficiency, discipline, and professionalism. He went to work immediately to correct things, using on-the-spot leadership to do so."

"If his politics offended some, there could be no censure of his military record. No one, friend or foe, doubted for a moment that he made SAC into an elite force, capable of strategic operations on a scale never before conceived and conducted at a level of proficiency that became the standard for the USAF. Inevitably the USAF became the benchmark to which the Army and the Navy, not to mention many foreign armed forces around the world, would aspire... LeMay was a genius at organization, and the Management Control System (MCS) he installed at SAC Headquarters (and which was replicated at lower levels of command) is but one example of his style. The MCS gave LeMay the capability to spot every breakdown or potential breakdown within the SAC system, and because lower-echelon commanders were aware of his system and used it themselves, potential breakdowns were usually detected and corrected before they occurred. LeMay also had the capacity for choosing good subordinates, delegating authority to them and letting them do their job. Not all of his choices were popular. His deputy and later successor at SAC, General Thomas S. Power, had a reputation for cold-hearted efficiency that many considered bordering on sadism. LeMay knew that Power was tough- but he also knew that he got his job done, and that was what counted."

"After his retirement in 1965, LeMay ran as a Vice Presidential candidate in George Wallace's 1968 third-party bid, a move that tarnished his reputation in the eyes of many. One time, later in his life, he was in the company of several other retired four-star generals, including his former aide David C. Jones, himself a former Chief of Staff of the Air Force and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The evening had been mellowed with some drinks, and the conversation took a daring turn- for retired or not, LeMay was still LeMay- to the question of why the general had supported Wallace. Jones recalls LeMay saying that he had not run because of political ambition- he had none, and knew that Wallace could only lose- but because he feared the direction the country would take if the Democratic candidate won. LeMay told the little group of intimates, friends for many long years, "Don't tell me about George Wallace. I know all about George Wallace. I knew he had no chance of winning. But I ran with him anyway because I thought he could take enough votes away from Humphrey. Humphrey would have been a disaster for this country as President." Always the strategist, LeMay wanted to add enough strength to Wallace's ticket to split the Democratic vote and thus defeat Humphrey. In essence, LeMay was making a last great sacrifice, his political reputation, to serve his country's cause as he saw it."

"No other U.S. military force commander so imprinted his personality and ideals upon his organization as did LeMay. SAC became LeMay personified- but only after tremendous effort on his part. There were no criticisms of his intellect or industry, nor any suggestion of patronage, but the hard, and often seemingly cold, manner in which he drove SAC gave rise to many stories about him, most of them apocryphal. In 1951, at the age of forty-six, he was confirmed as a full four-star general, the youngest since Ulysses S. Grant. LeMay was "the Iron Eagle" to his admirers, and simply "Iron Ass" to detractors who feared him. Some of his seemingly tough demeanor probably stemmed from a deadened nerve that left his face immobile and unsmiling. In practice, LeMay took better care of his troops than anyone else in the Air Force, and his tenure at SAC was filled with achievements such as improved housing, pay, recreation, promotion, medical care, and other vital personnel requirements. The most important assessment of LeMay was defined by the loyalty and the high morale of the people he commanded."

"You know the difference between a politician and a statesman? Here is the LeMay definition: a politician is a high-profile hooker looking for money to fund a campaign so that he can be in position to be owned by a political party, doing their bidding like a slave. Johnson fit that category. A statesman is a politician whose allegiance is only to their nation, and who, despite the feelings of others, does what he believes in his gut is in the best interest of his country, politics be damned. That even means doing something that may cost him his career, but he takes the moral high ground as he sees it, to do what must be done. That was Churchill. That's the difference. Ronald Reagan is a statesman, and make a note of it- we may not have any more in the future. They are a damned dying breed. That also applies to military commanders. You can have a charismatic, friendly, and amiable type of leader, but that is a difficult position to hold when you have to maintain discipline. It can be done, but it is hard. Then there is the hard-ass, no-holds-barred, get-it-fucking-done leader who pushes his men and expects ever-better results afterward. The easygoing leader may be liked more by his men, but the hard-ass will sure as shit have their attention, and if she shares the dangers with them, he will have their respect. Respect is everything."

"We’re at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?"

"China has The Bomb. [...] Sometime in the future--25, 50, 75 years hence--what will the situation be like then? By that time the Chinese will have the capability of delivery too. That's the reason some schools of thinking don't rule out a destruction of the Chinese military potential before the situation grows worse than it is today. It's bad enough now."

"...Native annalists may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn't. Or when the Russians had acquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb - and yet still didn't have any stockpile of the weapons. That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it."

"I'd like to see a more aggressive attitude on the part of the United States. That doesn't mean launching an immediate preventive war..."

"Today we hear much discussion about "overkill." The people who are talking "overkill" knowingly or unknowingly support the adoption of a minimum-deterrence strategy. In advocating that strategy, they are addressing the wrong problem. Instead of belaboring our ability to destroy the population of an aggressor nation, they should consider what we require to save American lives and property by preventing war, or by gaining a decision as quickly as possible if war occurs. That is the proper and traditional task of the United States armed forces. The counterforce strategy which we are pursuing and analyzing today provides our best prospect for success in that task."

"My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese Communists] frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces."

"Point is, the person in public life is bound to receive a lot of half-witted criticism. He's a natural-born target for it. It is unnecessary to go to any extraordinary lengths to maintain a picture of lily-white purity and innocence. If you let things like that worry you, very soon you run out of worrying time. There are too many real problems up there on the board. Whatever you do, somebody's going to criticize you. Forget criticism."

"The German people themselves were historically responsible for the Nazi hierarchy and the Nazi war machine. No little band of hand-picked zealots alone could have wrought such a fantastic massacre. It had to be done with people. It was done with and by the German people. We can look back and salute a comparative handful of clear-minded and courageous Teutonic humans who were tortured out of existence by the Schutzstaffel or who decayed in concentration camps. But they were a distinct minority. The bulk of the German population was behind Hitler, or pretended to be. The bulk of the population applauded him, sustained him, or (in the less evil instances) stood idly by, or turned their backs on the whole thing."

"Actually, I think it's more immoral to use less force than necessary, than it is to use more. if you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run, because you are merely protracting the struggle."